Guild Wars 2 just finished its run of a unique new bonus event donned Dismount Rush, providing players with bonus rewards if they complete content in core and HoT zones without mounting up inbetween. This event seemed to intend to call back to the "good old days" before mounts trivialized certain activities, giving veteran players a hint of nostalgia and newer ones a fighting chance at a few particular achievements that were basically impossible in a world of mounts and modern powercreep. It's a novel idea, but one I feel failed to meet its maximum potential; let's dive into why.
Surprise! It's a bonus Wednesday article. This'll be a bit of a shorter one, but it's something I thought seemed interesting enough to talk about. Your usual programming will resume on Saturday; for now, enjoy the read.
Issue 1: Rewards
A week of enforced zero mount usage would suck, so in order to convince players to voluntarily give up their mounts, this bonus event enticed us with additional rewards. Unfortunately, I don't think those rewards were significant enough to actually get players to commit to the gimmick.
With how the event is structured, you start with one stack of Dismount Boost when you load into any compatible zone. Completing an event gives you another stack, up to three. Each stack of this buff grants you +20% EXP gain and magic find. That seems fine on paper, but consider... what are these bonuses actually meant to accomplish?
Let's start with the EXP boost. The idea is simple—you'll do mountless events to farm up three stacks, then run around core/HoT maps to farm EXP for a while. Except... well, this isn't actually a very good strategy at all. Core Tyria doesn't have much in the way of particularly good EXP farms to begin with, and while HoT has decent options in the form of the VB meta and the two varieties of bauble farm (decent EXP by nature of having lots of events), those aren't go-to farms either, and their efficiency is significantly hampered by not being able to mount. Point is, if I really wanted to farm EXP at any point in this week, I probably would've just done my usual farms and ignored the boost altogether.
Magic find faces a similar issue. In what situation would I actually take full advantage of the +60% magic find while just running around in core maps? Am I meant to just farm random events and gamble on rare drops from enemies? Magic find is a deceptively low-value stat to begin with, and the arbitrary limitation on where it can be taken advantage of in this event makes it even harder to use well. I suppose if I had a large stock of containers affected by magic find, I'd want to take advantage of Dismount Boost by running a bit of mountless Silverwastes to cap out the stat, but... in that case, we already had ways of hitting the hardcap, too; this just makes it a little easier.
My overall point is that these boosts just aren't particularly useful or enticing. I can't really see players going out of their way to acquire this buff; instead, it's something that you just sort of benefit from incidentally while you work towards the actual rewards of this event, the Mystic Coins. There are three daily achievements associated with the event, each awarding a coin: complete a core event, a HoT event, and the Dragon's Stand meta at three stacks each.
Dragon's Stand's inclusion here is nice, and it actually resulted in a huge influx of activity on that map. I also saw some anecdotes of people being able to get some of the achievements thanks to the decrease in mount usage. For the most part, though, the way this event's rewards are structured resulted in a simple pattern for most players: log in, do four events for one achievement, hop over to the other region for one more event and the second achievement, optionally do Dragon's Stand if you're up for it, then forget about the event while you continue playing. The boost buff is so irrelevant that there really isn't much point in continuing to go mountless after you get your easy coins. Furthermore, you didn't even need to actually do mountless events to get your coins, thanks to:
Issue 2: Cheese
This Skyscale is made of cheese. That's why it's yellow.That's right, you could actually progress Dismount Rush while mounted the entire time! The core of this issue is that being on a mount doesn't take away your stacks or prevent you from earning them, only the action of mounting up. This means that you can use a mount with combat capabilities—Skyscale, Warclaw, or Siege Turtle—to complete events and get your Mystic Coin without ever dismounting. Apparently, hopping onto a turtle's gunner seat doesn't strip stacks, either, allowing for even more cheese.
This is obviously a huge problem. The entire point of the event is to encourage players to complete events without using mounts, but now you've accomplished the opposite—players are actually incentivized to never get off of their mounts, and in the case of more difficult events like Dragon's Stand, to leech off of other players using their mount's low-damage skills.
Potential Solutions
I quite like the idea of Dismount Rush, but the execution here left a lot to be desired. What do we need to change to make future repeats of this event better?
First of all, let's eliminate that cheese. Make it so players can't earn stacks while on their mounts, forcing them to actually dismount and engage with the event properly. This also removes the issue of players being incentivized to leech.
Second of all, we need to overhaul the rewards system. The current issue is that the once-daily rewards of coins are the only worthwhile part, while the reward for maintaining stacks isn't particularly helpful. I'd like to propose two possible solutions here; ideally, I think both could be implemented.
The first idea is to improve the stacking buff. The 60% EXP boost isn't particularly relevant because it isn't enough to make mountless core tyria events worth more than alternative EXP farms, so why don't we change that? Increase the cap on stacks, allowing players to accrue even more of a boost until the potential EXP of farming mountless events is actually good enough to be worth doing over everything else. This could potentially even turn Dismount Rush into something players specifically look forward to as an ideal time to farm EXP, similar to what Halloween is for gold or Wintersday is for Karma.
The second idea is to make the material reward for completing events repeatable, rather than a single daily item. Change the achievements for events in core and HoT to be tiered. The first tier, achieved upon completing an event at three (or more, if we implement the prior suggestion) stacks, still grants you your Mystic Coin like usual. For each additional event after that, you progress into additional tiers of the achievement with their own rewards. If you want to really make players work for it, you could move the Mystic Coin to be at the final tier; if you really wanna go ham, you could also make these achievements repeatable, allowing players to farm more and more rewards from mountless events. If the team went that route, it'd probably be smart to have the Mystic Coin be a separate once-daily achievement from the repeatable grind.
Improved rewards like these would change the choice to go mountless from an annoying restriction to a worthy tradeoff. One issue with mounts is that the players who choose to still use them will arrive at events sooner, making it harder for participants to get credit; the better the mountless rewards are, the more people will engage with the event, and the better the experience will become for everyone.
That sums up my thoughts. What did you think of Dismount Rush? Did you participate? Would you like to see it come around again, and if so, would you want to see changes like what I suggested above? In any case, thanks for reading!
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