The Scrying Pool: Bloomin' Mordrem

In this week's Scrying Pool, we talk about last weekend's Mordrem Invasion event.

Before getting into the rewards that the event did give, I wanted to talk a bit about rewards that it didn’t give: Achievements. I am someone who is fairly interested in gaining achievements as one might guess by looking at my account’s 22,000+ achievement score. While I am interested in gaining new achievements whenever they are released, I’m glad that this event didn’t come with any. None of the achievements would have been anything worthwhile and would have included things such as complete one of each type of event and complete X number of events during the weekend. These types of achievements are never very interesting and even more so during a limited time event where they will either be made so easy to not really be something you achieve or require so many that they become annoying. Even some more interesting ones like build/use a catapult or throw an explosive seed can easily become an annoyance to complete during the limited time rather than something cool to strive for.

The rewards that the weekend event did give came in the form of a new currency called Mordrem Blooms. These would be awarded at the end of a single map based on the number of completed events that you participated with Gold, Silver and Bronze levels of participation giving 15, 10, and 5 blooms respectively. On top of this, you would get a bonus 20 blooms—and a free RNG box that was available from the bloom merchant—the first time you completed each of the three maps each day.

There has been a lot of players saying this is an absolutely terrible event—something that I completely disagree with—and it seems that the reason for their hatred of the event lies with the rewards. Within this there are two sides to this reward hate with some players not liking the method for getting credit and others with the rewards themselves.

Jumping into the first argument is that the entirely personal crediting system leaves players needing to be selfish to get the best rewards. Instead of staying around an individual event to help complete it, it is much more efficient to “tag” an event and leave so that you get credit once other players complete the event. Doing this you would jump around the map ramping up your own personal event counter—and therefore the reward level and amount of blooms you receive—but not actually helping the events on the map complete.

The biggest suggestion I have seen to this is to make credit be the exact opposite. Instead of relying on the individual players’ event tally it would be based off of the map’s event tally. In this way there wouldn’t be all the event tagging and more focus on completing events. The problem with this is that ArenaNet already did this once with the Scarlet Invasion events during the Living World Season 1 and it was a worse system. Instead of selfishly tagging events and running to the next, players would be selfishly AFKing in the map, filling up spots on the map that could have been otherwise filled by players that would participate.

Even worse is that because of the map based reward system there was a lot of aggression caused in map chat. You didn’t get enough credit during the Mordrem Invasion to get the maximum rewards? It was more on you not getting to enough events to get credit. Your map didn’t complete enough events fast enough during the Scarlet Invasion? It was everyone else’s fault and a cause to enter into the map wide chat to unleash your frustration on all of the worthless players on the map that couldn’t do a simple event. I don’t know about you, but I definitely would rather have the first over the latter.

The solution I would like to see tested is a combination of the two, something that I think would work best with the smaller player cap on a map that mentioned earlier in this article. Instead of an individual player needing to get X amount of events or the map as a whole needing Y amount, I would like to see the reward be based on the accumulation of both.

As an example, maybe to get the gold level reward during an invasion you would need to get credit for 50 events. From my experience a map during the last weekend would get between 35-45 events done in the 30 minute map event. To get the gold reward, you personally would need to get between five events (if the map completes 45) and 15 events (if the map completes 35). Now there is a bit of leeway to both sides of the problem. Only ended up with 49 events credited to you? Maybe it isn’t the map’s fault but your own for not going and getting credit for that last event. Likewise, being too selfish isn’t going to be too helpful either as players will need the help of the map credit as well.

Even with this system it wouldn’t entirely fix the “selfish” problem. Some players had no problem getting up to 30 events credited, which would be more than enough to get them over whatever the gold tier reward would be. The only solution to this might be putting a cap on the number of events an individual can get credited for, but this only gets back to the raging at the map chat if the capped player ends up one event short of the max rewards. Other solutions either hurt everyone, start to get complicated enough to avoid or make the event so casual that everyone gets the maximum rewards with minimal effort.

The Rewards -->

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