How would you have setup the Writhing Wall Event?

msetten

I have read many posts about why people don't like the Writhing Wall event, and I get it. But I'd like to know if you could have made the Writhing Wall event, how would you have set it up?. And I ask you to make it concrete, so not "better rewards", but list the actual rewards you would have put in the event. So: what activities, what rewards, how would you have measured progress, how would you have made the accompanying golden pursuit (if you would have done that)?

I think that would give ZOS better insight into what we as the players expected the event to be and what we want from events like this.

Syldras

I rather look at it the other way round: Without the hyping ("World-changing event!", "Make history!"), and ensuring reasonable drop rates for the fetch quests and rewards from boxes, it would be an okay zone event. Even a nicer zone event than the usual ones, since it includes a new world event, later also a new boss (in phase 2) and a new dungeon (in phase 3). That's more than the usual zone events where you'd only do the old dailies and might have a drop chance for boxes from bosses and nodes. Or the old ones that were only about exploring places of interest. The problem is that the marketing led to bigger expectations that couldn't be met with what we got.

RebornV3x

I would have had it where you fight increasingly harder enemies and waves the longer the event goes on and the closer you get to 100%. Half of Solstice would be invaded with worm cult mobs instead.

More variety of activities instead of just a reskin incursion. Some sort of King of the Hill,Control, Defense battles where you fight increasing waves of enemies around a zone and the longer you hold the zone or objective you would get more points or something. Something like the Anka Ra's sites in Craglorn but longer and harder eh eh...

I would keep most of the dailies as is but obliviously better rewards as there is no reason to repeat any of the quests after you get the golden boxes and certainly not after the first 2 or 3 days.

msetten

RebornV3x wrote: »

I would keep most of the dailies as is but obliviously better rewards as there is no reason to repeat any of the quests after you get the golden boxes and certainly not after the first 2 or 3 days.

What rewards would you have included?

The rewards I think would have been better would include a couple of new useful gear sets. Maybe transmute crystal or even better seals of endeavor (say a chance that 1 to 3 seals would drop from blue boxes and 5-10 from gold boxes). And make the crafting rewards boxes actually increase your supplies (or at least keep them the same) instead of decreasing them (as you have to put in more materials to create some of the required items than you receive back).

And add increasingly better rewards with every 25% of the progress the server makes.

colossalvoids

Not knowing their engine through and through there's nothing much people could speculate on despite what we already seen implemented in-game.

But even minor fixes would make a difference, like event prologue quest being prerequisite for the each daily quest appearing gradually after you're bringing lumber, fur etc. 3 souls or whatever it was before seeing repeatable daily quests, instead of being in a middle of quest storm cluttering whole mini-map UI with no indication of what is what exactly.

Bosses having mechanics and preferably telegraphed ones and not just appearing from the thin air and going back to Oblivion after 3-4 seconds from tens of beams.

Quests not making people compete but work together. Dead mobs either having always corresponding loot, have buffed health not not be one shotteed or leaving some chest, sack etc. which can be looted by everyone around so people do work together clearing some area and not competing for that one light attack in the midst of beams and walls of colorful fire. Or having alternatives like bringing fat OR lumber from gathering. Souls OR husks which are common etc.

All those things are easily possible and would be considered if anyone internally have play tested the event.

But sure let's try just "design" a main course having a 5 minutes coffee break...
Let's have a spawn point just behind the wall's "fog of war", having some heavily buffed xivkin and other daedra going through once in a <insert appropriate time frame depending on your player's data>, like a marching small army that can be mowed down buy a first day blob of players still but eventually would overpower in off-times or having enough health and good attacks to give a fight to the crowd, maybe a "heavier" mob wall once a hour or some other time frame.
All waves should be accompanied by a boss or two, way over ones that spawn currently and pose no challenge even for a small groups. Baron Zaldrus copy from one of the Deadlands public dungeons comes to mind as a pretty good humanoid model that can have decent moveset as most attacks are probably made for humanoid rigs.
Let those "occupy" camps by turning them into an open world daedric mini trials to be cleared, meanwhile wall won't spawn more of the waves until the trial is complete.
So you would have waves to chew on, waves to clear the crowd and create those trials essentially, but all waves should have alternatives in difficulty not just for variation but to observe how it affects the players, are they able to clear or struggling too much, or not creating any trials because waves are a push over, so GM's (lol) could adjust the spawn rates and difficulty they're spawning with to tweak the experience giving more chance or less so depending on circumstances.

That's a bare minimum for an event that could potentially be considered fun, personally. But lets not kid ourselves and just stick with fixing bugs that were reported week one of the PTS at least.
Also a little reminder about fan favourite events like winter's festival or anniversary crafting zones floods - if you can't design something good, you could always bribe at least portion of playerbase by good and easily obtainable rewards. 100 gold treasures, 20 stack of lumber or a blue rubedite sword aren't that, I'm sorry to report. Hyping it up before hand doesn't help either, especially when it's the same old. Just cut it out with excessive marketing, it hurts the game more than you think it does.

kevkj

I agree with Syldras somewhat that it's mostly a case of ZOS managing expectations poorly.

The first phase of the event should have been the busywork dailies on Stirk along with the "invaded delves and dungeons" and all base game dolmens (cyrodiil included) getting juiced. Also introduce some additional spawns or juiced enemies in Imperial City. Released with less fanfare and no progress meter, just to introduce the upcoming siege in-universe and to all players. Probably lasting at least a full week before Phase 2. Many people would still find it boring and complain, but simply as an extra rewards system and in-universe story telling mechanic I think it might be better received.

Phase 2 just automatically starts at the same time for everyone and similar to what we have now, it's an escalation that only takes place on Solstice. For non pass owners, it's still busywork on Stirk and all the extra spawns in base game. Rather than 5 different camps in Solstice, I would limit it to 2 or 3. I'm not sure if this next part is technically feasible. Every minute for example, a new wave of soldiers will start rallying at the camp and depending on how many busywork quests that have been turned in at that camp they go to battle without weapons or armour if the players did not sufficiently supply them. I would still keep their battle contribution mostly negligible, mostly serving as a distraction to enemies at most. If the dynamic npc spawns aren't feasible, heck just make it random for some flavour.

As for the attacking waves, I would model them more like Vet Trial trash packs. Just all the trash packs from Vet Ossein Cage at each camp. Elite Coldharbour enemies need to come out and flatten John Skyrim and his Rubedite Battle-Axe. Rather than the dolmen format, I would use the Craglorn 'world boss' format. The players are defending a mcguffin or npc and if the enemies are not killed quickly enough, it fails. I would also change how the progress bar works. Rather than some grindfest supposedly based on quest completion, it would be a steady increase for all servers that gets slowed for every failed defence of a camp. To make a failed defence meaningful, maybe it takes a whole half hour to an hour for a camp to be rebuilt. I know there's some issues with this suggestion, since ESO instancing is dynamic but I think they could still tally failed defences rather than quest completions.

The world boss guy needs to be way more juiced, and it would be cool if he spawns at the wall and walks to his current location. He could be damage-able along the way or shielded, it doesn't really matter. What's important is that he ignores any attacks and keeps walking to the arena (where he attempts to destroy our lens mcguffin). At our hq where the mcguffin is, that's where friendly mages are able to remove his shield and that's how we're able to kill him. Again, he needs to be Vet Trial boss level not taken out by 4 arcanists and their companions. Again, every failure to stop this boss gets tallied and slows server progress.

This way, Phase 2 is timed to end exactly as the next update is released provided there are 0 failed defense of camps or our lens mcguffin. Players are incentized to prevent the delay of the wall coming down, rather than working to unlock something they already paid for. I know on a certain level they mean exactly the same thing, but I think messaging is important to player reception. The winning server should be rewarded with a week long double drops and harvesting for Solstice zone (including Ossein Cage). If there's a tie, then so be it! Every 'winning' server gets the rewards. I have no idea what rewards we are actually going to get currently, I suppose the double drops should be on-top of that not instead of.

What happens after the event is over and 5 years from now someone needs to do the daily? Just retune the camps down to Craglorn world boss level. If that's too much work for the devs, I don't know what to say. Ultimately my core suggestions regarding the camps themselves are: make them more difficult and let players fail. Obviously the victory of the Stirk Fellowship is inevitable, but it would be so easy to introduce a possibility that players will lose their battle so that a successful defense feels just a little bit more satisfying and plays into the kayfabe of "helping the siege".

I have no suggestions for Phase 3 since I don't fully understand it, and I've tried to stay ignorant because I'm still hoping it's good.

Brumme

I'm pretty happy with the rewards available in that event.
What I'm unhappy with is handing in 30-40 quests without ONE single reward:
Of all the blue chests I've gotten from quests, there's been one piece of gear and nothing else.
Then you lose a bit of the motivation to continue

and
The bosses and mobs should scale better according to how many people there are.
And their health should be at least 3 times more than now
Because they die WAY too fast, way too fast

it can all be done in the same area, which is just good
And it's quick and easy to do, which is also good.
So I can do it quick and easy, so I can keep fishing haha ​​:)
Then I don't think I would have done anything differently

flizomica

Honestly, I think the previous versions of this event (current chapter zone celebration + progress bar) were simply better.

Minimally I think double drops for the year's content should have been included (dungeons/trial/overland). The reward coffers should also be MUCH better and reward furnishings (not sure if this is currently the case since the drop rates are so bad), more furnishing plans, solstice treasure maps, etc, in addition to the currently included collectibles.

The big worm cult house should also have been a reward from the event (or some other thematically appropriate house), instead of a chance for an existing house - like was done with the Necrom event.

I would also have expected the incursions to be more on the scale of Harrowstorms given how much they were hyped up. They feel barely ahead of the random little incursions in the base game.

The writhing fortress should also be/have been a permanent addition. It baffles me that it only going to appear for a few weeks and then disappear.. is that not a massive waste of resources? It doesn't make it feel cool or exclusive, just kinda depressing.

IMO the boring fetch quests should only be a thing for people who didnt buy the content. People who do own the season pass should additionally have more interesting quests - Id foresee something like the writhing fortress being a permanent addition + accompanying daily, similar to bastion nymic.

I also don't really understand breaking the event out into waves, especially if the content for the first wave is so boring. Just feels like unnecessarily stretching it out.

I likewise don't understand the invaded overland content. Like its a neat idea, but is there some reason Id want to kill those bosses beyond ticking off boxes for the golden pursuit...? And the fact that they mess with base game quests/drops feels so strange.

Idk, the whole thing just feels so half-baked and like it was purely created to waste my time.

manukartofanu

colossalvoids wrote: »

All those things are easily possible and would be considered if anyone internally have play tested the event.

All the problems of this event can be predicted in a minute by an experienced player, even without any playtesting.
But let’s go further — let’s imagine we’re not just criticizing and pointing out mistakes, but also coming up with quests for this event. What could be done in this game to actually bring players together?

MISTFORMBZZZ

manukartofanu wrote: »

colossalvoids wrote: »

All those things are easily possible and would be considered if anyone internally have play tested the event.

What could be done in this game to actually bring players together?

Crossplay

manukartofanu

MISTFORMBZZZ wrote: »

manukartofanu wrote: »

colossalvoids wrote: »

All those things are easily possible and would be considered if anyone internally have play tested the event.

What could be done in this game to actually bring players together?

Crossplay

Not realistic

Fischblut

I am also disappointed by the implementation of this event The best moments in it are roleplay, such as Molag Bal waits for his servants to figure out where to go next



Molag Bal is supervising the failure of his servants to take over the siege camp:



I would change lot of stuff in this event.

1. Make the daedra appear from the Wall itself and start marching towards a siege camp.



There should also be siege weapons in camps which can be operated by players to halt/weaken those daedra on their way, while other players engage in close-combat with them.

Also, camps should be populated by either friendly NPCs or daedra, depending on the state (captured or not).

So far the only way to tell if the camp is fallen to the enemy forces is just the color of the bonfire? Normal bonfire for friendly camp, blue bonfire for taken...



2. If camp is fallen and not recaptured within 5 minutes, some daedra start spreading further into the land. Mini-bosses could wander the main road.

3. There should be supply caravan escorts to all siege camps every 10 minutes, while enemies spawn from portals and try to destroy them. So players need to protect caravans in order to deliver supplies.

4. Each successful supply delivery adds a siege weapon to the camp, which can be used to aid in repelling daedra attacks later.

And all events should be scaled to number of players. If those dailies stay after the event is over and player participation becomes low, I don't want to fight bosses with million health alone/with few newbies
I fought a dragon for 7 minutes in Southern Elsweyr yesterday while 3 other players kept dying around me, it was not fun and not rewarding at all.

As for Golden Pursuits rewards, I would put this cool model as Polymorph and exclusive target dummy as rewards:



Not returning again, so people have good reason to complete the Pursuit and get Solstice.

The pet and mount could stay as additional rewards, but they are not really interesting for me this time. The more rewards, the better

Each reward box from daily quest should contain part of Haj Mota/Caltrops style, motif page, new furniture recipe, high-value treasure. When this box contains just a set item from Solstice and 100 gold treasure, it kills my wish to repeat any more dailies Also, this event should not punish master crafters - I'm not dragging my characters through crafting dailies depleting my max rank materials for such weak rewards.

I would also add a combat pet (Harvester or Daedroth, or both) as reward for completing 30 Solstice-exclusive dailies. I dream of having more combat pets which are cool and are not tied to any class And such cool reward would 100% make me buy Solstice if I didn't before.

agelonestar

Event is billed as “game changing”.

Event is actually just a fairly dull dolmen copy/paste with some running around old content sites for some mcguffin or another.

It’s badly organised, the lag is unreal, and the rewards are crap (another pet that no one will ever use).

And what awaits when we’re done? The smallest part of an already small map, supposedly the replacement for a Chapter.

Very poor indeed.

duagloth

For starters, add another wayshrine and move them closer too the camps.place a merchant in the camp for repairs

LunaFlora

i would not make it a completely one-time thing. i really want the Writhing Fortress to stay as a location after the event.

and the drop rates for rewards would be massively increased.

besides that i mostly like it how it is.

moderatelyfatman

A whole month for a single event where a lot of the players probably won't be logged on is not a good thing.

Other MMOs have overland events which happen a few times over the day.

Why not have the wall event run every four hours where players have to gather across the map and do smaller events in different locations at the same time that advance the plot, culminating everyone coming together in one location to battle a super boss (or a series of them) and bring down the wall.

They could actually have a special chest drop once per day with some seriously good items inside. Players could also get a special achievement the first time, the 20th, 50th and 100th time they bring down the wall.

The advantage of this method is that all players can potentially get to see the wall go down instead of just those who happen to be online at the time. Much more inclusive compared to just manually scheduling it to drop during US primetime and excluding people who are in different timezones or otherwise busy that night.

Syldras

moderatelyfatman wrote: »

The advantage of this method is that all players can potentially get to see the wall go down instead of just those who happen to be online at the time. Much more inclusive compared to just manually scheduling it to drop during US primetime and excluding people who are in different timezones or otherwise busy that night.

The Wall won't fall from the event itself anyway, but the effect will be visible for each player individually. You need to interact with the Meridian Lens for it to fall - once all conditions have been met by the event - so it doesn't matter if you do that directly when 100% of Phase 3 are completed, or one month or 3 years later.

Jaimeh

I thought of a set-up that could work within the game's design constraints, and the three phases would go like this:

Phase 1: There would be a separate special map for the wall during the event, which would work like Cyrodiil, and you would would get live updates when a part of the wall was 'thin', or when it was being sieged, or when it was breached, and so on. If an alert for an area of the wall being thin popped up, players could go and use sieges on it. The more sieging, the faster that spot on the wall would break down, and elite mobs would come out aggro'ing on both the players and the sieges, so that you would have to fight them and also defend the siege spots. All types of players would have something to do: DDs could attack, tanks could defend, healers could heal the siegers.

Phase 2: In phase 2, a different type of mob would come out of the wall, and this could be the new WB, and if you wanted to keep sieging in that area, you would have to beat the WB, and siege before it spawned again. If the battle was successful, that part of the wall would be sufficiently thin to eventually be pierced by the Meridia lens, and players would be able to go through the breach. Going through the wall breach would work like Blackwood Oblivion portals or like Apocrypha Bastion Nymics, where players would travel to a in-between plane, and would have to fight their way to stop the machinery that powers the wall up. At the end of this portal, you would strike a decisive blow to the machinery, and the wall would collapse, so that you could proceed to Eastern Solstice.

Phase 3: In that part of the map there would be an incursion event that would play the role of the Worm Cult's 'defenses' on the other side. It would be like magical anomalies in Craglorn where enemies come out in waves and you have to both defend your position at the portal's exit, and beat them in order to proceed to the map. After the event they could be triggered on a timer, like incursions, so the content could remain, and lore-wide they could just be remnants of Coldharbour's plane meld attempt in Solstice and the remainder of the Worm Cult fighting on.

Danikat

I'd keep the part of the event for people without the content pass pretty much the same, even though that includes me. The point of the event is to sell the pass, so they'd want to keep the real fun restricted to the island. But also as a free event it's not that different to previous community events - there's a selection of simple dailies to complete which give you a bonus reward box that may or may not (probably not) contain rare and valuable loot.

But I'd make the event on the island more like phase 3, right from the start. As well as defending siege camps and fighting the boss that appears at them there would be a daily quest where your allies do briefly break through the wall and you're part of the push to fight the worm cult on the other side.

Functionally I imagine it as a dungeon, but maybe it could scale to the number of players in there so people who want to can do it solo, where they're sent in with an NPC squad. But the important thing is it's an instanced area with multiple rooms and bosses to fight. Since players will ideally complete it multiple times during the event there could be different paths to choose from, leading to different challenges and bosses depending on which way you go.

During Phase 1 you're only able to break through briefly, maybe you get into a courtyard or something and catch a glipse of the final boss, before fighting a lesser boss and then have to retreat before the wall closes again. (It's not timed, this is just a story justification for unlocking it gradually - whenever you defeat the boss someone yells that they can't hold the wall open any longer and you have to pull back, but the attack still disrupted the worm cult, making it harder for them to maintain the wall.)

In Phase 2 you're able to push further in - you start clearing some of the inside rooms and defeat more bosses. Then in Phase 3 you're able to get all the way through to the final boss and permanently weaken the wall (either killing them weakens it, or once they're dead you destroy one of the things powering it, whatever works best for the lore).

Each of the sub-bosses within the fortress could have their own unique drop/s (I'm not sure what, to be honest I don't pay much attention to loot, but maybe each one drops a specific piece of a unique item set or something, so you need to kill all of them to get the full set).

Importantly I'd also make each phase the same length and announce the schedule in advance rather than all this messing around with progress bars. If people believe it's real it just adds unnecessary uncertainty and stress with worrying about missing phase 3, if they don't think it's real then it actually removes an incentive to participate beyond the bare mimimum for personal rewards.

Finally after the event is over the fortress would remain available but as a solo story quest which you only need to complete once as part of the zone story, and without the unique drops from the bosses.

katanagirl1

I don’t know how the next stages are supposed to work, I don’t like spoilers so I haven’t read about it.

I’d like to see the wall area like the AvA zone of Cyrodiil, so you can earn the ability to purchase siege equipment and attack enemies as they come down from the wall. Ideally, there would be melee battles nearest the wall and siege behind the lines. Siege would be placeable by the player and not static. Perhaps you earn the ability to purchase siege after killing X number of enemies. Other players could help repair the siege by earning repair kits from killing enemies also. These items could be bought from a siege merchant at the wall.

Things like being able to fire volleys of arrows at certain times would be cool too. Maybe the player gives the orders to attack to a group of npcs. Groups of mages could coordinate attacks and use negates and such to weaken enemies. Instead of players just burning down enemies as fast as possible, like it is now, it would be everyone working together at scripted times, perhaps in waves.

The number of enemies coming down from the wall would have to scale with the number of players currently in the area for this to work best.

I don’t have a lot of details worked out myself, but that is what I would envision the battle to be.

AvalonRanger

Instead of stupid chore...
I took robot canon from Frost Vault dungeon. And I let factotum crank out clone of it in the Clockwork city.
And put it in front of disgusting wall a lot.

Necrotech_Master

LunaFlora wrote: »

i would not make it a completely one-time thing. i really want the Writhing Fortress to stay as a location after the event.

and the drop rates for rewards would be massively increased.

besides that i mostly like it how it is.

i think some of the parts will be permanent additions, like the siege camps in solstice i believe are going to be permanent additions

not sure if there is anything else planned to be permanent

StackonClown

tldr - 'beat a wall' is a lazy boring idea

whitecrow

I just wish it felt less like busywork.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO

Firstly I would not have advertised / marketed the event so heavily and wouldn't have previewed any of it on PTR.
I'd have made it start slowly, mob spawns appearing in places they weren't meant to, portions of zones being taken over by the cult. Warning town crier announcements in major cities around all the zones calling for all reinforcements available to travel to the allied armies camps etc.

Then players would realise something was happening by travelling there you'd find the npcs and armies with a new quests available and the golden pursuit would unlock.
For the quests I would have introduced multiple ways of contributing to a 'readiness meter' for example 'Combat training' could be one way which would be participation in PVP, Crafting could be involved to stockpile armour and weapons for the army. Clearing out encampments which have pushed onto our side of the island next. This random chance to grind random mobs would not be a main quest objective.

during this time i'd have only then put out some articles about it (let the players generate the hype through suprise is always better)

The other stages I can't say yet as I didn't check anything on PTS and haven't participated in this event because just watching someone do it was enough to know i'm not interested.

xencthlu

I just made this list for my discord server for my friends, but maybe some of you will appreciate it, too. The thing is: Zenimax *has* nailed down what makes for a successful event before. But they still don't seem to understand what makes the difference between success and failure.

So I started by sorting out my personal subjective assessment of what I consider successful events and what I don't. I'm only including events I've personally played, because I don't have the experience to speak to other events.


EVENTS EVAULATION
Events I like/have a good ratio of juice to squeeze:
Fallen Leaves of West Weald
Legacy of the Bretons
Pan-Tamriel
Undaunted Celebration
Whitestrike's Mayhem
Witches Festival
Anniversary Jubilee (Probably errs on the side of being too rewarding, but that's a better problem than the opposite.)

Events that I despise/are too stingy:
Crime Wave (I don't think Zenimax realises when they're pitting player against player in PVE settings to get rewards. It's one of the worst parts of the game, and could be fixed if we all had individual chests/safeboxes/gathering nodes.)
Jester's Festival (First time I bailed on an event)
New Life Festival (Borderline, because the sheer number of tickets we get redeems the rest of it.)
Zeal of Zenithar (If you're cheesing it by grinding dolmens, it's okayish. But it's clearly balanced around dolmen farming. The other ways of getting boxes are x5 the work, and the boxes suck. You only get materials from them. The real meat of this event is the discount on gold houses, which is not an event.)
Writhing Wall (Obviously.)

Events that aren't events:
Gilded Glory (DID YOU KNOW THIS BOOST DOESN'T APPLY TO IA)
Battlegrounds weekends (getting locked into one gamemode is a nightmare, and all the tryhards flood the casual queues to dunk on us mediocre players.)
Golden Pursuits (All the events lists include GPs, but they're not events. They're trumped up endeavours.)

So what's the difference between them?
1) Events that fall into the first category have a variety of ways to acquire coffers that require a commensurate amount of work. They don't try to claim that 1 dolmen = 1 entire Tho'at kill = 1 entire run in an arena.

2) But, there are often built-in incentives to do a variety of content in a day, by biasing certain rewards to certain types of content. (IE, different kinds of coffers for doing a trial vs a delve boss.) This means that players are rotating around different types of content and not pooling in one area doing the easiest possible grind.

3) The incentivised content is varied in group sizes as well as type of task. This means I can play the event with my friends, in a big group, or on my own, and not feel like I'm missing out either way.

4) Events that fall into the first category have a wide variety of desirable rewards. The anniversary jubilee can get you one of any crafting motif in the game, which is a huge pool. It might tank the short term pricing of motifs, but that just makes it easier to share them with friends without feeling like you should have sold them. Plus, savvy marketers will hold onto them to sell later. Three groups satisfied by that very simple generosity. The jubilee also drops a number of furnishing plans, of which there are over 3k in the game. Most players won't have all of those. Witches Festival drops a large pool of niche furnishings that largely can't be acquired in other ways in quantities that allow a player to stockpile, and the furnishings are nice to have, but not critical to any builds. Also drops the best food/drink recipes in the game, slightly more contentious, but you can't say that's not rewarding.

5) The drop rates for desirable rewards during the good events aren't balanced around a lunatic with 20 max level alts grinding every alt to their fullest every day. I represent a detestable minority in the game and the rest of the population shouldn't be punished because I happen to exist. Doing the jubilee on one or two characters will still net you a good variety of valuable and desirable motifs. Going across the list of coffer rewarding content on one character during the Witches Festival gets you every reward in a day.

6) Any event that doubles the resources gotten from gathering nodes and/or gives you boxes from gathering nodes is automatically a good event, sorry. I and my friends are decorators. We need that heartwood. (If they tried this with just W Solstice, it would be terrible, because W Solstice is too tiny for it.)

7) An event is better the fewer times it requires you to use a wayshrine to complete tasks and get rewards. No one loves doing the wayshrine jog. When we're enjoying the game, we're enjoying the gameplay, we're enjoying exploring the world, we're enjoying playing with friends. We are not enjoying travel time. Jester's Festival and New Life would be 90% better if their silly quests were in one area. (Or, if they had a separate set of repeatable quests that were focused on one area.)

With that in mind, how would I "fix" Writhing Wall?

1) I wouldn't *** with the community progress meter. Whether it's a display error or the devs putting a finger on the scales, I'd respect what the players see is their progress. So I would have finished work on U48 so I could actually be ready to deploy if PCUS finished in three days. U48 is, unfortunately, the promised "reward" for this event, and players need to know how much work they need to put in to receive their "reward," or they clock out or stop trying or get very, very angry.

2) I would add serverwide rewards besides an update drop we all know needs to happen either way. I'd probably borrow from the WW event - everyone gets, say, a few free crafting tables, a mount, a pet, a furnishing that unlocks as a collectible, and a set of style pages of some kind. I would not make these things contingent on everyone completing a GP. I'm afraid it's just simple psychology; even if most people would be doing the amount of work the GP requires anyway, the brain processes it as an additional imposition and therefore not an event reward. And, I mean, give these rewards to everyone on the server when we complete the event. Stinginess only sours player response.

3) I would borrow the way quests are set up in the Scribing Storyline. You can Kill One Solstice World Boss OR Twenty Normal Daedra OR Destroy Two Soul Reapers OR Two Invading Delve Bosses. That way we aren't funneling a huge amount of players (potentially, an increasing number, as people see the event is fun and buy the season pass) into a handful of small areas, both frustrating them as they have to fight others to get looting credit, and stressing the servers to the point that they start dumping players.

4) I would put every Daedra, Altmer, and Argonian-related crafting motif, furnishing plan, and furnishing into the coffer drop pools and boost the chances of every drop. I would also add the relevant style materials to the drop pool like Culanda Lacquer, and furnishing materials in general. Yeah, this will tank the prices of some of the rarer motifs such as the Ancient Daedra set, but again, stinginess is the death knell of any event. It's better to be too generous than too stingy. Actually, why not add treasure maps to the loot table, too? For Solstice, Summerset, Murkmire, Apocrypha, the Deadlands, and Blackwood. Every DLC zone that could conceivably relate to Altmer, Argonians, and Daedra.

5) I would get rid of all but one of the siege camps, so players don't have to run around and potentially miss an activation with travel time. That one camp, I would put on a four minute timer. Every four minutes after completion, it activates again. What about bots, you say? Ban them. You need to be banning them anyway. But, I will concede that we can do a little design to make it harder to bot this already short term event anyway. Open with the big giant monster trial-tier fight. Give it one of the mechanics that places hugely damaging pools of bad on the ground. Bots aren't good at avoiding those. That will kill them right away, while the real players can go through the trash waves, and then have a second big giant monster trial-tier fight at the end. Short of that, I would reduce the number of camps to three, and make them all within sprinting distance of each other.

6) Instead of having just having separate crafting dailies at the Fellowship camps, I'd also make the first normal crafting daily done on any character count towards the event. That way the average casual will see "Oh, I got a box, what's that about?" And with generous rewards, they'll go "Holy ***, I got a crafting motif for free!" Which will get them interested in the larger event and in the season pass, all without needing them to deviate from their normal play routine or check out the forums or the news feed.

Is it more of the same? Just a reskin of previous events? Yeah. But so is the current event, except somewhat worse for being stingy and pitting players against each other for monster drops. And I don't think the Writhing Wall needed to be revolutionary in gameplay terms to make about 60% of players happy with it. The average casual would have been delighted to have a second Jubilee-quality event in a year. Myself included.

Avran_Sylt

Phase 1 should have released with the fanfare of its title: Supply and Defense, so very little fanfare. There is no major battle, it's just setup and repelling minor incursions (that should be happening anyway, why didn't the Worm cult traverse the wall prior?).

Phase 2 would see ramping up the assaults from the worm cult as they get wise to the fellowships plans (server reaching 100% unlocks this early for their server). Increasing mob count and boss incursions on western Solstice (post event these siege camps would wind down to phase 1 levels).

It would also introduce timed player incursions into parts of the writhing fortress as mages have prepared some forms of magical defenses to nullify the corrupting aura inside the Writhing Fortress, but need further study from samples within to foolproof this.

These timed incursions will see groups of players facing Hel-Ra citadel levels of trash mobs, with bosses interspersed. Death is expected, upon death, running out the timer, you're whisked back to western solstice via some kind of magical tether (which can also be manually activated at certain spots even in combat, should groups be broken up, or maximum samples collected), Every assist/kill collects you a sample, each sample reduces your maximum HP, and can even reduce it to zero, but you can only carry a certain maximum amount. However, while you can repeat these incursions, you can only provide a maximum amount of samplers per day per account (not character). Each sample is a progression point for your server. Acquiring any progression points in a given incursion gives you a reward coffer, and this incursion is a unique instance of acquiring another Gold Coffer.

Only some sections of the Writhing Fortress would be accessible. (preventing total completion).

Phase three would see players entering the writhing fortress with no time limit, no hp degradation on kill, to fully complete the area.


I also would have made sure to sync these events. And actually made sure that these phases are unlocked naturally, even if phase three is reached in 1 day (excluding exploits, and having a high bar initially, possibly lowered based on participation numbers)

SilverBride

whitecrow wrote: »

I just wish it felt less like busywork.

This is my biggest complaint about it, too.

I find it very tedious to have to go gather some stuff, run back and turn it in... then go defend some siege camps, run back and turn it in... then go gather some different stuff, run back and turn it in... then make some armor, turn it in... x6 each... per character.

I don't finish all of these because it is just not enjoyable.

scrappy1342

maybe they could have had us kill X amount of <insert mob here> instead of collecting souls. you'd still be fighting players for tagging mobs, but at least you would only have to do it X amount of times instead of some of these poor souls who say they only get one soul per 20 mobs or so.

not sure if the wayshrine was intended to not work or what, but that would have been handy. i guess it's just as handy to port out to someone or a house. normally an event like this, i'd be able to port back to stirk by 50 other guild mates being there already. but that does not seem to be happening now. when i check my guild roster, i'm lucky if i have -one- guild mate there in the 5 guilds that i am in. part of this is because so many ppl have left the game. i think part is also because everyone is off fighting other players to try to get these drops for the quests. there's not much reason to stick around stirk longer than to pick up the next quest and leave. if they want us to run back, pick up the quest again and run back out to collect souls/sap/fat/etc, maybe they could have given us some sort of portal stone in the initial quest to get back. would only work during the event.

i've seen others mention that the reward drops are so sparse because we are meant to be doing this for so long and by the end, we'll have everything.... just no... if that's the case, spread the rewards out. change them up every week and a half or 2 weeks or whatever. up the drop rates to make sure ppl can get them inside that time frame. or take the rewards out of it and replace it with some sort of currency. stick everything on a vendor. ppl can just get what they want then and everyone would have to do the same amount of work for it. also vendors would have been nice. i didn't think about it because i have my own that lives in my pocket, but not everybody has that option.

shadyjane62

SilverBride wrote: »

whitecrow wrote: »

I just wish it felt less like busywork.

This is my biggest complaint about it, too.

I find it very tedious to have to go gather some stuff, run back and turn it in... then go defend some siege camps, run back and turn it in... then go gather some different stuff, run back and turn it in... then make some armor, turn it in... x6 each... per character.

I don't finish all of these because it is just not enjoyable.

For me it's worse than not enjoyable. My husband thinks I'm sick because I am taking so many naps.

I told him these quests put me to sleep.

Grega

I would have set it up where we actually used siege (like in cyro) to actually siege the wall. I actually thought thats what this was going to look like.

And rewards (instead of turn in 28 quests daily for 28 boxes) - you just get boxes mailed to you depending on time spent sieging. Or could have been set up where its sending you boxes depending on amount of siege damage ( similar to rewards of the worthy boxes ap generation).

Basically - thinking outside the box rather than do the same copy paste dolmen design that existed for a decade.

Oh well. Fetch quests. Dolmens. Assets reused from existing content. No wonder solstice is filled with disappointed souls.