Share your Feedback on an Upcoming One-month Event!

The event would be a pair of leagues (one Standard, one Hardcore) with special rules and prizes.

Event Type
We were planning to run a Warbands/Tempest Hybrid event, but noticed that the Flashback Event that we ran earlier this year was also extremely popular. We thought we'd ask the community for feedback on which event type they'd prefer.

To explain the two options in more detail:

• A Warbands/Tempest Hybrid Event: Both Warbands and Tempest would be active on the league at the same time. This would ramp up the difficulty and reward - you'd be able to find the special items from Warbands while also taking advantage of some of the rarer Tempests that affect item drops.
• A Flashback Event: This type of event has multiple mods from previous challenge leagues active at any time, and they change periodically. Here's the schedule of the one that we ran earlier this year. There are many ways of structuring the mods - you can have them start out light and scale up, or occasionally spike the difficulty by having most of the mods active at once. Certain mod combinations are more challenging than others, and certain mods like Ambush have large economic effects on the leagues. Warbands and Tempest can also be added to the mod pool for this type of event. Players often request that the mod combinations are as crazy as possible, but we've found benefits with having lighter periods where more progress can be made.

While there are plenty of other good ideas for one-month events, we'd like to try to use previous game content because this event isn't a new challenge league. It's a bridge between challenge leagues.

The event has to be fun for both new and experienced players, as well as for solo, party and guild players. While we're okay with it being challenging, we don't want to run a rippy instakill league for an entire month (they're better for one-week races or for spikes in difficulty inside this one-month league if we're doing the Flashback model).

Player Goals
We've previously run events with three types of goals:

• Reaching the top of the ladder. Players at higher positions get rewards.
• Reaching certain level thresholds.
• Completing challenges. These challenges are generally easier than the ones in the real challenge leagues.

In our opinion, it's okay to provide some prizes for the top of the ladder (as that encourages intense competition among elite players, with the community encouraging their favourites), but the bulk of the prizes should be given out at level thresholds or for completing challenges. How do you guys feel about this? Do you prefer challenges or level thresholds?

Prizes
We've structured prizes in a lot of different ways in the past. Some were intentionally more generous than others, so we have a lot of data on what types of prizes motivate players and the lasting effect that they have.

Many of our previous events awarded prizes via a random drawing to people who achieved certain thresholds. This helped incentivise people to keep hitting the next threshold, but didn't really provide certainty about what prize you'd receive.

A previous hybrid event awarded special armour sets for completing challenges. This was a popular prize, and was won by many thousands of players. If you guys are keen, there's a Golden Seraph Set that we could potentially use as a prize in a similar way.

We have occasionally given out prizes supplied by hardware sponsors, and will certainly try to get some more for this event. No promises though :)

There's also the possibility of interesting physical prizes like signed art prints, skype chats, etc.

What are your preferences out of these prize options? Are there any other special prizes that you can think of?

Feedback
We're really interested in hearing what kind of event you'd like us to run. Do you see any pros or cons of the above approaches that we may have missed? Which do you prefer out of the Hybrid or Flashback event options? Is there some cool twist on the above event types or prizing that you'd like to suggest? Thanks for the feedback and suggestions!

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SaunaChum wrote:

How about two discrete events, having both Flashback AND Warbands/Tempest, both lasting a week or so?

We considered this but really want to run a single event for a month. Then it feels less like a race and more like a new economy. It's possible to create Warbands/Tempest portions of the Flashback event, though!

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kellogz87 wrote:

Will this be a HC race? Never really done races, but i'm interested in this one month thing...

A hardcore and a standard event running simultaneously.

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Samkiud wrote:

My feedback is that you should pay more attention to the community complaints about the neglected guild system, being this a paid feature, instead of putting effort in little events like these.

The intention of running an event like this that re-uses old content (rather than creating something new) is that we can keep working on areas that need improvement (and new content for later).

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Flashback league and MTX prizes, also not everyone can spend 20 hours a day on the game to race to the top, and a lot of people have the Seraph sets so please do something more interesting, bring back the Atziri helmet MTX NOW THAT WOULD BE AWESOME.

We promised the Atziri helmet as an exclusive prize in the past so we can't give that one out again, sorry!

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T0KTHX wrote:

ps: this Golden Seraph...can you guy make it black? i mean black with red detail :P

There is also a black version somewhere. Hmm... maybe that'd make a good prize for the Hardcore version of the league.

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Jerle wrote:

Does this one-month event have an impact on the timeline of the current challenge leagues?

We will definitely announce the end of those leagues once a date is known, but if we run a one-month event, those leagues will end at that point. If that's early October, then they will have lasted three months. If it's later, they'll approach four months in length. Sorry for the vagueness, but I do want to clarify that this special event would not be run contemporaneously with existing challenge leagues.

Thanks for the feedback so far, guys! I have to go get dinner so I'll stop replying for a bit. Will keep reading it over the weekend.

It's going to be an awesome event, especially with some of the cool ideas (and support of the ones we suggested) so far.