Vassago Rain, on 28 February 2015 - 08:13 PM, said:
At my current rate of playing, there's not enough time to get 80 points. I don't want to know what an actual casual player is going through.
I'm very new (been only seriously playing for less than a month), and while I play frequently, I could be described as casual. So far, I've totally fallen in love with this game and intend to keep playing it, regardless of any potential changes to events or other current hot-button issues with the game. My rose-colored glasses are still on, as it were. My only intent here is to share my experience as a new player over the last couple weeks, primarily with events. If I mention anything that's sort of a joke or is a faux pas on these forums, know that I'm not trying to open another cans of worms or be a troll or anything. If there is a more appropriate place for me to post this, please let me know.
Apparently, there was an event a couple weekends ago before the Raven one. My only observation about this is that I didn't even realize it existed at the time. In hindsight, there was probably a notification in the news tracker on the right side of the launcher, but the only thing I've seen in the main notification area is promotions for the resistance/wave 3 packages. If the first image of the rotating promotions was about the current event, I would have researched it and likely would've participated in it.
I first started looking at the forums before the Raven event, so I knew that was happening. I rushed home from work Friday afternoon and started grinding. I played most of Friday evening, all Saturday, and most of Sunday. Of course, in the process I angered my GF (apparently making the wife mad is a joke on these forums but not my intent) and completely blew off all my chores/errands. It was really hard. I kept getting a kill and an assist but no win, or like 9 assists and 600 dmg (with a few "most damage dealts"), but no KBs, so no points. It sure felt like I deserved a point in some of those matches, but I understand that as a new player this stuff isn't going to come easy right away. In the end, I got my Raven (barely) and was pretty happy, albeit exhausted.
This last weekend, I was slow to realize there was already another event again. I guess I'm just not used to looking for it, but this is another time some in-your-face notification would have helped me as a new player. By the time I noticed it, it was late Friday night. I called my buddy who I'm trying to get to play and told him, "hey they made the event a little easier, you don't need the win! Come get some premium time and lets kill some mechs together!" He logged in, we grouped up and started queueing up. 4 hours later at 230am, I had one point between the two of us, and my friend was really frustrated and pretty much really to throw in the towel permanantly. I saw that we were getting put into matches with large groups of seasoned players and pretty much getting instantly annihilated, and went to see what people were saying about it on the forums and saw that it was a contentious issue. While my purpose with this post isn't to discuss the details of the group queue, the point is that we spent hours trying to work on the event together for almost nothing, when the only chance we had was to play solo.
On Saturday my friend works (so his chance at getting far in the event was already very unlikely), so I played solo all day. I racked up a bulk of my points that day, but frequently still had matches where I felt I did really good in (lots of assists or tons of damage), but didn't earn the point. I think I ended the day with like 22 points or so.
Yesterday, I had to do real life for about 5-6 hours but played the rest of the day. Things were going pretty good and I was telling myself that I was going to stay up late if I got close enough to finish, but then I hit a wall- only got a 2 points over 3 hours. I know, I suck... but then the TKing started- some guy named Bootyman or something (he seems to be another contentious issue on these forums) seemed to keep getting the same heavy/assault lance as me and would kill me instantly. Between him, a couple other TKs, and getting caught in the crossfire of people killing the TKs, I didn't get any more points in my last couple hours of play, maybe 1.
I went to bed pretty bummed out that I didn't get the Adder, my primary goal of the event (would have really liked the color too since I don't have any). I appreciate the free premium time, though... I made a lot of c-bills in general. I also like the consumables I got, but it seemed like I put in a ton of time for not much (mostly because I no good yet, probably). In all, I think I ended with 37 points.
That's been my experience with events. While I have a ton of fun with this game, they've certainly been taxing. I don't know this game well enough to offer any meaningful solutions, but I'll try.
Maybe with the events, hitting a point threshold (say 25-30 points under the current model) could extend the event for someone by a day or two. Perhaps hitting this threshold would start a timer identical to the premium one, adding 24 or 48 hours to the end of the event timer. This way, a player would still have to make a significant up-front investment to commit to the event, but then be able to finish it up more at their own pace, in a more reasonable time frame. Perhaps extending events to Tuesday instead of Monday would accomplish this more simply.
If you read this, thanks. If I'm noobing it up too much, I apologize... just wanted to share my experience these last few weeks.
Edited by Abel Enders, 02 March 2015 - 07:35 AM.