I feel like I should speak up at this point, because I feel like what is happening is only spiralling downwards, to new depths I didn’t know were possible. I am going to speak here openly about my opinion on Potterworld’s 2 most recent events: the house pride weeks and the spring festival.
Before I start, I would like to point out that it is merely my opinion, though I have spoken to quite a few people about this who have roughly the same opinion. Feel free to disagree though, I’d love to hear why you think I’m painfully wrong.
In the past, I felt like events were a time period in which fun, temporary gameplay was added to the game. This could include a very hard challenge and often included interesting collectables including heads, banners and scarves. In recent years, an event has often also come with the release of a new 3D model, which would serve as one of the bigger rewards of the event. In particular, every player who would play at the event would have an equal opportunity to gain all of the events rewards; players who were not at the event, could buy event items from other players at a later time for a good amount of gold. My event scarf collection does not contain a lot of pre-2018 scarves I got personally; before 2018, I didn’t often buy scarves at events, but I was later able to buy those scarves off other people. To summarise, there are 3 (I’d say vital) components to an event that makes it a good PW event for me: fun temporary gameplay, perhaps an additional difficult challenge and equal opportunity to get all of the event items (or collectables).
It is at this point in time that I find myself playing through PW events that have strayed far off those 3 components. I’ll start by analysing the house pride weeks. This did not add any fun temporary gameplay or a difficult challenge at all. Instead, all it did was give us, the players, a decorated courtyard with reward NPCs and a house point contest; nothing more. Furthermore, nobody would be able to get all of the rewards without purchasing at least 3 resort tokens. For a moment there, it seemed like the intention of those weeks was to get as many players as possible to buy a bunch of resort tokens, rather than offer interesting new activities for players to commit to during those weeks. I found it rather worrying to see everything I enjoy about an event missing during those weeks.
Next up, there’s the ongoing spring festival. Although I didn’t have very high hopes for this event, I still expected to see some of the vital components to make this an enjoying event for me. To understand my disappointment, I will once again go through them.
I’ll start with the rewards. While it was somewhat of an improvement that the rewards were no longer used as a means to encourage players to buy store items, I still found that players do not have equal opportunities to get all of the rewards. Instead, those who wish to get all of the rewards are required to buy them off other players. And then there’s the final reward, which will mean that a third of the playerbase will be able to earn a lot of money over the backs of the other 66.67% of the players, simply because they were lucky enough to be put into the winning company.
And then there’s the gameplay itself, that this festival offers for the upcoming 3 weeks. While it is interesting to get a sort of sneak peek to what professions will be like after the Ravioli update (sorry, I couldn’t resist), I don’t consider this challenging or fun.
Don’t get me wrong, the new profession system looks promising and this festival has made me look forward to working with this new system after the update, but I don’t see it very fitting as an event activity. I would have preferred something totally different; a difficult challenge like earlier, even, or something similar as last year, where players were simply given 22 event riddles to solve. And even if that weren’t possible, I still would have liked this event to be more like the “fill the barrel” challenge during the butterbrew week of last year’s anniversary event, where players just had to make a certain amount of profession items and it didn’t matter what company you were in or how many profession items your company has made thus far.
Furthermore, I would like to comment on the egg hunt part of the event. As some might know about me, I usually tend to enjoy elements of gameplay that seem to encourage exploration. However, I feel like the egg hunt would have been much more effective when its reward was something new, instead of the egg basket experienced players (like myself) will already have obtained from last year’s event. A way this would’ve been possible, is simply by switching the egg basket for one of the company’s rewards (like, for instance, the candymaker’s scarf).
Right, so far I’ve looked at how I saw events of the past, and I’ve discussed the events of the present, so now it’s time to look at the events of the future. I should at this point comment that I fully realise that events are bound to be limited in this pre-Ravioli era, as almost every staff’s attention goes out to that update, but I still find it worth speaking up about seeing as previous “limited” events proved to still be able to give a sort of enjoyable bit of gameplay, while still not featuring a lot of new things.
So, let’s see what events will (probably) happen before the Ravioli update. The current spring festival is planned to end on May 2nd, which leaves only 2 months until the update. In those 2 months, there are 2 events I think are inevitable: the star wars event and the anniversary event. Last year saw a huge amount of feedback given on both those events. The star wars event seemed rather unbalanced, and seemed to only depend on a mere 2 minigames. The feedback given in those time was to look at the minigames and think of a good way to make them balanced, and to see if there was a way to add activities beyond those 2 minigames, to give players who suffered a huge amount of lag throughout the minigames also a chance to earn themselves some star tokens.
And while I personally may have experienced some of the anniversary’s challenges as interesting, many people found that they were simply too hard for an event. I must say that I was disappointed by the fact that the event was aimed to give only a small portion of players the grand reward, and so I hope that this year’s anniversary event will prove to be an improvement from what it was last year. I sincerely hope that it will do its best to actually celebrate 6 years of PW, rather than put players through the most difficult challenges of those 6 years.
In any case, I hope the events of PW will be seriously reconsidered before they are released into the server. But, well, hoping is everything I can do at this point.
Thank you for coming this far with me. If you have a strong opinion on the matter, please leave a comment as I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.
Before I start, I would like to point out that it is merely my opinion, though I have spoken to quite a few people about this who have roughly the same opinion. Feel free to disagree though, I’d love to hear why you think I’m painfully wrong.
In the past, I felt like events were a time period in which fun, temporary gameplay was added to the game. This could include a very hard challenge and often included interesting collectables including heads, banners and scarves. In recent years, an event has often also come with the release of a new 3D model, which would serve as one of the bigger rewards of the event. In particular, every player who would play at the event would have an equal opportunity to gain all of the events rewards; players who were not at the event, could buy event items from other players at a later time for a good amount of gold. My event scarf collection does not contain a lot of pre-2018 scarves I got personally; before 2018, I didn’t often buy scarves at events, but I was later able to buy those scarves off other people. To summarise, there are 3 (I’d say vital) components to an event that makes it a good PW event for me: fun temporary gameplay, perhaps an additional difficult challenge and equal opportunity to get all of the event items (or collectables).
It is at this point in time that I find myself playing through PW events that have strayed far off those 3 components. I’ll start by analysing the house pride weeks. This did not add any fun temporary gameplay or a difficult challenge at all. Instead, all it did was give us, the players, a decorated courtyard with reward NPCs and a house point contest; nothing more. Furthermore, nobody would be able to get all of the rewards without purchasing at least 3 resort tokens. For a moment there, it seemed like the intention of those weeks was to get as many players as possible to buy a bunch of resort tokens, rather than offer interesting new activities for players to commit to during those weeks. I found it rather worrying to see everything I enjoy about an event missing during those weeks.
Next up, there’s the ongoing spring festival. Although I didn’t have very high hopes for this event, I still expected to see some of the vital components to make this an enjoying event for me. To understand my disappointment, I will once again go through them.
I’ll start with the rewards. While it was somewhat of an improvement that the rewards were no longer used as a means to encourage players to buy store items, I still found that players do not have equal opportunities to get all of the rewards. Instead, those who wish to get all of the rewards are required to buy them off other players. And then there’s the final reward, which will mean that a third of the playerbase will be able to earn a lot of money over the backs of the other 66.67% of the players, simply because they were lucky enough to be put into the winning company.
And then there’s the gameplay itself, that this festival offers for the upcoming 3 weeks. While it is interesting to get a sort of sneak peek to what professions will be like after the Ravioli update (sorry, I couldn’t resist), I don’t consider this challenging or fun.
Don’t get me wrong, the new profession system looks promising and this festival has made me look forward to working with this new system after the update, but I don’t see it very fitting as an event activity. I would have preferred something totally different; a difficult challenge like earlier, even, or something similar as last year, where players were simply given 22 event riddles to solve. And even if that weren’t possible, I still would have liked this event to be more like the “fill the barrel” challenge during the butterbrew week of last year’s anniversary event, where players just had to make a certain amount of profession items and it didn’t matter what company you were in or how many profession items your company has made thus far.
Furthermore, I would like to comment on the egg hunt part of the event. As some might know about me, I usually tend to enjoy elements of gameplay that seem to encourage exploration. However, I feel like the egg hunt would have been much more effective when its reward was something new, instead of the egg basket experienced players (like myself) will already have obtained from last year’s event. A way this would’ve been possible, is simply by switching the egg basket for one of the company’s rewards (like, for instance, the candymaker’s scarf).
Right, so far I’ve looked at how I saw events of the past, and I’ve discussed the events of the present, so now it’s time to look at the events of the future. I should at this point comment that I fully realise that events are bound to be limited in this pre-Ravioli era, as almost every staff’s attention goes out to that update, but I still find it worth speaking up about seeing as previous “limited” events proved to still be able to give a sort of enjoyable bit of gameplay, while still not featuring a lot of new things.
So, let’s see what events will (probably) happen before the Ravioli update. The current spring festival is planned to end on May 2nd, which leaves only 2 months until the update. In those 2 months, there are 2 events I think are inevitable: the star wars event and the anniversary event. Last year saw a huge amount of feedback given on both those events. The star wars event seemed rather unbalanced, and seemed to only depend on a mere 2 minigames. The feedback given in those time was to look at the minigames and think of a good way to make them balanced, and to see if there was a way to add activities beyond those 2 minigames, to give players who suffered a huge amount of lag throughout the minigames also a chance to earn themselves some star tokens.
And while I personally may have experienced some of the anniversary’s challenges as interesting, many people found that they were simply too hard for an event. I must say that I was disappointed by the fact that the event was aimed to give only a small portion of players the grand reward, and so I hope that this year’s anniversary event will prove to be an improvement from what it was last year. I sincerely hope that it will do its best to actually celebrate 6 years of PW, rather than put players through the most difficult challenges of those 6 years.
In any case, I hope the events of PW will be seriously reconsidered before they are released into the server. But, well, hoping is everything I can do at this point.
Thank you for coming this far with me. If you have a strong opinion on the matter, please leave a comment as I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.
