Losing the Lost Shores

This weekend we learnt that any developer is only one bad event away from derision. The Lost Shores event in Guild Wars 2 was supposed to be important. It was the first major event, it had new areas and new sorts of quests – this was a first for a popular game. Unfortunately, thanks to the way it was organized and implemented, I think many people also wanted it to be a last. Where did it all go wrong? Although we touched on it In our tenth Guild Wars 2 diary, I thought it’d be a good idea to look at how things went wrong so quickly and what it means for the future of events in Guild Wars 2.

Losing The Lost Shores

Announced at the beginning of November, The Lost Shores was a massive event that would add a large amount of content to Guild Wars 2. Including a new PvP map, new stories, a new dungeon and new gear, there was a lot on offer and a lot to see. There’s no doubt why this was such an exciting prospect for core Guild Wars 2 players, and all Guild Wars 2 players could invite three friends along for the weekend as well. Not only were more people logging in than usual in order to see the event, but they were bringing up to three people with them. If that didn’t hammer the servers, there’s no telling what would.

Things would have been interesting no matter what, in terms of server activity and occasional lag, but things were escalated by far too many bugs. Characters wouldn’t do what they were supposed to, quests went either unfinished or unrewarded and the closer players got to the epicentre of a timed event, the lower their frame rate became.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. There was a bigger issue at hand. ArenaNet had decided that these would be one-time events. Only people who were around at the time the event ran would ever get to see them. This caused two distinct problems. The first is that the events were ran on American time, meaning a good amount of people would need to either skip work or stay up into the middle of the night if they wanted to play. This caused something of a big stir for non-Americans, who, naturally, felt they were being ignored.

The second problem with Lost Shores was that those who did manage to get into the game were met with so many bugs, glitches and so much lag that the events were basically unplayable anyway. This led to the rather annoying problem of hardly anybody actually managing to play through the events. If the lag wasn’t a problem (and it was – players could hardly move, skills didn’t work and, when they did, there was no chance of actually hitting an enemy), there were bugs in the NPC characters that meant they’d either repeat the same thing over and over again, not appear where the quest said they would or just refuse to talk.

ArenaNet suggested a quick fix: leave the map and come back again. This caused a group of angry, lagged-down users to leave Lion’s Arch and return, to be put into the overflow. So many people did this that the overflow started lagging as well. I’m sure it seemed like a great idea at the time.
Things got better as the weekend went on – at least in terms of the amount of lag and drop in frame rates that people were experiencing – but there were still quite a few bugs. The finale event was marred by people not being able to claim their rewards for participating and by some players being rewarded with items that are worth a huge amount of gold and others… well, not being rewarded with items worth a huge amount of gold. This in turn ended with major complaints on the forum and mods/users are still battling things out amongst themselves.

Saving The Lost Shores

So here’s the question: how do you stop this from happening again? Well, the main solution would be to take advantage of the fantastic instancing that Guild Wars 2 has. Sure, you’d lose the massive crowds and giant battles, but you’d also have clean play and that’s slightly more important. What’s the point in giant battles if you’re only chugging along at two or three frames per second? This isn’t an ideal solution – on a game-wide event, you want it to be game-wide – but it’s definitely THE solution if the developers can’t get things to run smoothly from the get go.

The second biggest problem, as far as I can see, is that most of the world didn’t get to take part, especially if you live in the east. The easiest solution would be to stagger the event based on location, but that might not be possible (depending how the servers work). A slightly less realistic, but equally doable solution would be to just repeat an event multiple times in mass instances, allowing each character in only once. Again, it might lose the “everybody in” feel of the one-time event as it was, but it’ll also mean people will be able to take part that aren’t able to live on American time for the sake of a video game.

I know that the event was repeated later in the overflow, but it still wasn’t enough to allow people outside of America to play. It seems like an odd thing to do and very few (American) critics are mentioning this problem. I hope ArenaNet realize that this is a fairly big issue and work out some way of having the damn thing work.

The final problem, and probably the biggest, is that many of the quests didn’t actually work anyway. This is inexcusable. It was fixed fairly quickly (and things that weren’t fixed were just flat out cancelled), but by that point many people had already given up. It’s always difficult to know how code will work when it’s made live and accessed by thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people, but it’s still a big issue and it caused more frustration than perhaps the lag and the time zone issues put together.

Conclusion

"The Lost Shores could have been something special but ended up being a poor first impression for Guild Wars 2 one-time events."

Those that have been rewarded for participating have been rewarded well, but that leaves the question as to why others couldn’t participate, either due to time zones or because the server kicked them before the end. It’s been an important show of how these events can so easily go wrong, even in an AAA title, and the developers will have learnt a lot. Have they learnt enough to get things going properly in future events?
That’s a question that won’t be answered until next time.