Praetorian Surge - An Appeal to the Devs

The roleplayer community, at least on Union anyway, was REALLY looking forward to this event. The initial posting of this gave the impression that it would last for most of the month of May, and we were making plans for that; including a large "Council or War" type RP meetup and lots and lots of war related fiction, much in the same way that we did when the 2nd Rikti War started.

Now we find out that it's not lasting most of May, it's not even lasting a full day. In fact, it's only lasting for THREE HOURS on any one server. For us, on Union, that's next Wednesday 6pm to 9pm UK time; when most of us probably won't even get a chance to log on anyway (I'll be able to log in for about 30 minutes at the MOST!).

Please please PLEASE resonsider this. We get that the main reason for this if for you guys to stress test some things, and possibly to promote the global server access thing, but we RPers have a home. We're not gonna transfer our chars to other servers (at huge cost!) and we're not going to make wussy level 1 versions of our powerful chars for it either. We want to use this fun storyline you have for us with our powerful characters, and we want it to be as involving as the Rikti war was.

I'm sure the non-RPer community were looking forward to a few weeks of intense invasion fun as well, so we can't be the ONLY ones dissappointed by the reality of your plans, given the impression from the initial announcement...

We're not asking for a month, but really... Three hours? That's pretty much unusable AT ALL! Please reconsider this and at LEAST keep the event running on the servers for a week? Please? Pretty please?

I was disappointed when I read that it would be only happening for 3 hours on my server. What gives? Are these being manually run by developers and GMs?

Where can information of this event be found? I checked the original announcement, but didn't see any update.

Cant believe they were going to award an account wide badge only to a NA server for a couple of hours.
Its seems like they going to change it... I cant get whats wrong lately in this game, between bugs, crashes, lag, unexpected downtime... Now this

I don't really care about the silly badge. It's the whole event looking a complete lame duck that I'm annoyed about!

Wow, it's like they go out of their way to make sure that people with jobs can't attend these events. Oh well, I'll just add this to the list of events I haven't been able to participate in due to poor timing.

I work two jobs so chances are I will miss this event if it's a certain time of the day, especially in the evening on a weekday.

I'll reserve my whining until I know for sure.

I didn't even see the original version of this posted. All I can say is that I can't believe someone thought this was a good idea. Or even a passable idea.

Don't get me wrong. I like the idea that they wanted to do something that involved "direct" interaction. There are a lot of ways that could be really cool. How that apparently translated into practice within real resource limits? I think when they figured that out, they should have changed plans.

As mentioned elsewhere.

3 hours is not a War, it's a skirmish at best. The buildup was so unwarranted for this if that was all it was going to be, as Soundwave would say "all talk, no shock".

It makes Praetoria into a joke 'ooh look at the big threat Cole, he can only afford to send a three hour strike team, Imma shakin in me boots'. Compared to the now 'past threat' of the Rikti who just recently proceeded to bomb the crap out of Primal for an entire three day period and that was a small skirmish in a longer second Rikti War.

Seriously the two facts of it was only three hours and the badge was only available on Freedom is just a 'wha?' moment.

Very silly choice devs, very silly.

Just try living on the west coast. They always do these events during their office hours. You know, the hours when pretty much everybody is at work and can't possibly attend.

The Devs could just say this whole thing is not worth it and give up entirely. Let's hope you guys don't push them towards that option. The developers have lives too, you know. They also have goals they need to accomplish at work. 4pm to 7pm is the time they set aside for this, and that to me says they are extending their time at work to accomplish a goal. They needed as many people to show up in one place as possible, so they offered incentives to try to make this happen. For some people, that incentive is a badge. Some people don't care about badges. For other people, the incentive is to do a limited time event. But these incentives are there to for the developers to accomplish a goal, and that goal is to get as many people as possible into one server at one time as they can, and are able to observe the results. If they spread out the time of the event, they are defeating the purpose of their goal. If they have the event across multiple servers, then they are defeating the purpose of their testing. They chose a time and place that would allow them to get the most people they could to get their jobs done and then let them move on with their own lives. Sometimes, not everyone can be happy. I think we all need to accept that and move on with our lives.

How do I say this a politely as I can?

This is a group event. It will not be heavy. Have any of you not participated in these events before? You get a "sighting" and you run to zone x and another one and then zone z. I've done these twice and I experienced nothing but lag and I have not participated in them again.

They planned it this way for a reason because it's not a big deal. They planned it this way so the event doesn't crash the servers during the "Peak" times around the week/weekend.

Freedom gets it on a friday at the end of the month just before a holiday weekend and it's early in the night. Come on!

3 hours and you'll want the sightings to go away...trust me on this one.

This post brought it to my attention.....and I would also like to express extreme disappointment on the insanely small window for this. Missing out on this because of last minute work related or real life situations despite any planning is just plain wrong.

I don't think celebrating 7 years of success by running an event so small that many of your most loyal players *may* have a chance of missing is just plain baffling. Never mind all those who might want to play a few alts during it.

Very Disappointed,
Lach