Thanks for adding stuff like this. Overall, I really enjoyed the event. Here's a breakdown of my thoughts of the event (though I'm sure I'm missing something)...

 

Things I liked:

• I especially liked how there was suddenly an alert announcement, and various "news" terminals around to talk more about the event's happenings.
   
  
• Dailies didn't take too much effort to get through. Sometimes dailies can end up getting to the point that they are a second job, and quickly become time consuming and no longer enjoyable. The event's dailies, while were not done in five minutes, didn't really take too much effort to complete. This meant I would still have time to go back to PvP, or other aspects of the game that I enjoy.
   
  
• Immersion into the environment. I liked how the plague was able to be spread from player to player, just like an actual outbreak. I know that the community has mixed feelings on this, but I personally thought it was a nice touch. I like events that tie everything together and affect the world(s) around the players a lot.
   
  
• I liked the addition of world boss kills into the event. A lot of times, world bosses only get attention from "higher end" or "motivated" guilds and the causal player has a harder time taking part in world boss kills. With events like this, even casual people are more likely to be welcomed to take part in such things.
   
  
• The rewards were pretty good. I won't say dazzling, but I think they were worth taking part in the event for.
  

 

 

Things I did not like:

 

• I think that there could have been a little bit more direction into where to go to start the dailies for the event. Sure there is a blanket statement of "Don't go to Tatooine" but that place is kinda big. For the duration of the event, general chat would almost always have someone asking where to go to start the dailies. While I don't think we need an X,Y exact location, I think that it might have been helpful to give out a little bit more information. Example, In addition to the Fleet warning messages, when people actually get to Tatooine, have a message that warns people to stay away from the Northern Dune Sea as containment officers are currently trying to control the situation." That small addition would have helped a lot of people out.
   
  
• While I was not directly affected, I know others were not happy about the daily unlock of quests that would offer the orange gear as rewards, particularly those who didn't start the event until the weekend. The idea that they were unlocked from the day you started a particular part came a couple days too late for a few people. This didn't really bother me, as I personally wasn't interested in the social gear, but had this been items that I was interested in, I would have been upset.
   
  
• The companion customization reward really needed to be based on the faction of the person making the purchase. I seriously don't know what I'm going to do with a Kira customization when I am Sith and have no plans to make a Jedi anytime soon. I somewhat understand the random part, but I think it should have been random for your faction, at the least. Random based on current character (or characters that you have in your legacy) would have been much better.
  

 

Overall, I really enjoyed the event. I hope to see more stuff like this in the future! /Salute

I loved it but I forgot there was a way to give in your DNA to get stuff. So i would love for there to be a vendor on the fleets or somewhere who can take the leftovers for the items. Please!!!

 

I collected a LOT of DNA samples (mostly from being infected by Imperials and then dying over and over...), but there was no way I was going to hop all the way to the vendor, then back to turn in dailies or whatever else, then realize I had even more samples and go back out....

 

I ended up just giving all of mine away because I didn't want to have to go through so many loading screens while queuing up for WZs.

 

Other than that, I really really enjoyed it. I actually liked the surprise of it when I logged in and was happily minding my own business when someone ran up to me and exploded. Then it just spiraled out of control from there...

I loved the event and I think the best part was the no notice. It made it feel like an actual emergency.

I do like scheduled "holiday" type world events as well.

I thought the Rakghoul plague was pretty cool, I was nice to be able to get those black-green crystals, however it did feel quite easy in the end, and it seemed like people were cheating the system with the explode and get 5 DNA samples part.

 

It would have probably made more sense that you gave the DNA samples to a droid as apposed to a jawa, seeing as jawas deal more with spare parts and junk than science stuff.

 

I would love to see more stuff like this in the future however, having a crystal as a reward is cool, it would be cool to have some mounts maybe as rewards.

 

As for Events in the future here are some ideas

 

-special batch of droids has gone rouge, lead by an AI

 

-Something to do with the revanites maybe

 

-A mysterious organisation in hutt space causing trouble

 

just some ideas, would be really cool to see some new light saber colours, but its nice when they are harder to get, makes them more rewarding

 

or even better, rewarded with better schematics for things, lvl 24 things, feel like crafting gets a bit pointless after you get to 50, unless you are making stuff for your alts

I didn't get a chance to appreciate it. I was in the final stretch getting to level 50 when the event was released and was concentrating on that, especially with a tangible reward of 30 days free gameplay for hitting 50 before the 22nd. That and that I got attacked by vicious players spreading the plague every time I hit the fleet made the event both unenjoyable and poorly timed. I would love the chance to partake in events but this event just didn't work well at all.

I thought the event was great. A few of the things that impressed me.

 

You did not have to be near level cap to enjoy the event, there was something for everyone.

You could do as much or as little as you wanted.

 

The few things I could see as improvements.

 

The event could have done a better job of being "Galaxy Wide". The announcement that was in the fleets should have been at all space ports. I can see people missing out because they don't go to the fleet that often. But you travel through ports all the time.

Closure. There really wasn't a closure to the event, it just disappeared. I would have liked to see some follow-up news casts/reports that told of the plague being contained.

 

For a first time event, with no PTS testing I think it was brilliant.

Job well done.

I really liked the lack of notice. Just logged on and got the announcements about the outbreak. After hearing about it I went off to tat to see what was going on. Although I did check out an on line guide of where to get things it did not ruin the experience of the event at all. I also liked how it was progressive with new things popping in every day although i can understand some peoples frustration with this it was a nice reward for playing through all the content and succeeded in allowing the event to extend over a longer period of time.

 

Liked to see:

• The plague, or event, spanning several worlds.
  
• The fleet military should have attacked anyone who had the plague. To some extend this was present if you were infected and went to the hanger bay but I would have liked to see the immersion increased to anywhere on the fleet or anytime you were scanned by the military in an area.
  
• The rewards for companions should not have been chosen and not random. The randomness was the main reason i did not waste any dna on them. Who wants to spend the hard earned dna and get the same thing several times.
  
• The vaccine lasting through death
  
• Some players were very vocal about not liking the plague idea and not wanting to participate in it. So perhaps something that would allow the person to opt out of the event. Something similar to a PVP tag on PVE servers. If you want to do it you have to make the choice to join in. The choice could be activating the tag or participating in the missions.
  

Mildly interesting (only mildly) until I found out I wouldn't be able to finish due to the event's short length. You know, many people have real life responsibilities that trump gaming; family, work, school, etc. Look to other MMO's (WoW, LOTRO, etc.) for event durations. Weeks minimum. One week tells me that there is a definite lack of concern for players of my playstyle and available gaming time. That by itself killed it for me.

 

In addition, having an event on a mid-level planet where it was necessary to kill cap-level bosses just isn't fun in my opinion. Never could get into a group. Adverts were always "level 50 please!" and I'm not 50 yet.

 

The rakghoul event only left me with a feeling of frustration and disappointment. Lesson learned. If this is the way Bioware will be running their events, then I won't even bother to participate from now on.

Random boxes seemed ok to me: i got the one I wanted first time out.

 

My main thing is to make sure the planet codex is all achievable if youre going to send people to scan wreckage all over the planet. It makes a fine time to get entries/datacrons, but I'm disappointed by the nagging unfinished entries.

To echo many of the sentiments here:

 

1. The day chaining was difficult for those who could not get on every day or were on vacation. Event would have been better if it had gone a full 2 weeks or so. No more than 15 days, to keep it new and fresh, with the chained quests only through the first week (to give second-week jumpers a fair shake.)

 

2. Persist the vendor another 3-5 days, for those who may have missed the end. Sure, it sounds strange, but there are STILL people on our server trading DNA. Give the player commerce network some additional time to play out.

 

3. Lock the random box rewards to unique, so the loot table ignores ones you already have. OR, make the random box rewards tradeable like everything else. Someone on our server had FIVE QUINN SKINS, and no Warrior (much less the intent for five.) I would have loved to buy one from him if possible.

 

4. As far as environment went, spot on. It was sudden, random, and completely like an outbreak would work. The news reel was a great touch, as was the Fleet announcements. Maybe... space the ambient announcements a bit more, just to give it less "in your face" on the fleet; let those who enjoy cognitive dissonance the ability to ignore the happenings in the rest of the universe.

 

5. I agree with a previous poster's sentiment: the announcements could have been galaxy-wide. I should have heard about it on Corellia, or Voss, or Korriban. Every time you hit a spaceport or station, they scanned you; it would have been great to hear a news burst ambient in that area, or a viewscreen to get the newsreel.

 

Overall, I loved it. Despite some of the nay-saying, it did not impact my normal questing/RPing/gaming at all, and I was able to indulge the event to my level of enjoyment. Another day or two, and I would have had some alts get the title, but I got it on the one that mattered. It was well-handled and thought out for the first random world-event for this game.

Ever since I first set foot on Taris I hated Rakghouls, they were irritating and stupid, and were no challenge whatsoever. The latter part of that did not change with the event, however what set it apart from the Taris were that the Event in itself was quite fun, and the rewards superb (if only they'd scale with armor profeciency and get an augment slot, but I heard you'll get to that later). However the random Companion Customization boxes were idiotic, ended up with like 4 Elara dorne and 3 Adronikus for instance. Too many DNAs wasted on worthless rewards. So if you plan to do this again in the future, make each individual customization purchasable with whatever the event currency might be, as a tradeoff, make it more expensive. In retrospect 60-80 DNAs for a customization should be adequate, atleast from my own personal findings.

I did however assume that, in light of the new Legacy Update, which this event came quite soon after its release. There would be more Legacy bound items to be procured. I half expected the Armor to be bind to legacy in fact, which is a point I'd like to take up with you. I'd Love to have parts of that armor on my now currently lvl 17 Shadow, which I waited with creating till 1.2 for the new races. However, due to him beeing too low level I was unable to get this armor set for him.(I level him in a group with 2 other people, which we were unable to do during the event) So Bind the stuff to legacy.. Not to mention you could hoard quite abit of armor by doing the daily quests every day, which as it stands, leaves you with several useless pieces of gear taking up bank space.

The do the daily one day, unlock the a new one the next day system was actually quite nice, always had me come back for more, What new stuff do they have planed for us today? I always said. And some of these quests were quite entertaining.

 

All in all, I'd call the event a success, altough some people were upset with the blowing up thing, it was a fun addition with no loss other than 5 seconds of your time in the event you blew up, and since the DNAs you got were sellable, you could potentially make alot of credits for doing pretty much nothing.

 

In short: Awesome! Keep doing it! I want more, and I want it yesterday!

 

EDIT: One further addendum, don't put PvE event stuff in a PvP zone ever again. On servers where one side greatly outwieghts the other in numbers, this just turns to borderline harrassment.

 

 

Now onto what I want in the future. Something to do with Czerka would be great. Something to do with Mandalorians, would be great. A way for Republic people to get an "iconic" set of Mandalorian Armor would be downright AWESOME.

I trust you guys to come up with more awesome stuff which will keep me occupied for hours on end. Just don't fall into the temptation of making it a "grind".

Edited April 25, 2012 by MystiQ

Personally I found the event awesome!

 

Both the questline(s) and rewards, with the side benefit that it's also been a great boost to open world PvP (I play on a PvP server) as there has been actual resources to fight over.

 

The fact that it is/was an on-off event also makes me quite happy to have been playing the game right now and means the rewards will have a special appeal.

 

I'd love more of the same but if there are any things to add to that I'd consider the following:

 

• Both recurring/seasonal and on-off events would be nice.
  
• I don't agree with the complaints about the event being poorly communicated, though adding more obvious information in the launcher is probably a good idea going forward.
  

I really enjoyed the event, especially the fact that it came unannounced. But, there are a couple of things that I think should be changed for such events in the future.

 

1) I was disappointed that the mod-able gear rewards were light armor and therefore impractical for my Trooper, please have have future mod-able event gear come in light, medium and heavy variants so that they can be used by all classes.

 

2) The event was too short. I liked how new quest phases opened every day but with the event only being about a week long there wasn't enough time for us casual players who don't play multiple hours every day to see everything. This would have been merely annoying but on the heels of "casual players aren't 'valued,' loyal' or 'supportive' no matter how long they have been subscribing" it was quite aggravating.

the things I liked:

 

- That both factions had to go to the same areas to complete the quests. This lead to impromptu world PvP at some points, and silent truces at other times

 

- That there was no warning or instruction when it occurred. This lead to a lot of discovery, exploring and sharing amongst the community

 

- The humour. from the news casts to the plague's mechanism for transmission, the containment officers rappelling in from the ceiling... lots of fun

 

- The planning and forethought. It was a nice tie-in with the new flashpoint, there were lots of 'little' things, like the announcements, the droids in the hangars, that made it feel like more like an event and less like "Go here, do that, kill mobs."

 

Things I didn't like:

 

- The 'daily' quests. Some were ok, but doing them repeatedly resulted in a break in the immersion. In my opinion, daily quests should make sense to be done repeatedly. For example, a quest to kill certain amount of rakghouls or infected players a day would make sense. Doing the same research every day and killing the same ship captain does not.

 

- The location - I love Tatooine, but most of the places I went were places I had already seen while leveling. Send us to the little used areas of Alderaan or Hoth

 

- The rewards - This was a bit of a let down. Two colours of the same pet, a cool customization that isn't tradeable and only has a 1/8 chance of being for one of your companions, and colour crystals which are only really relevant to the force-using classes (because non-force users barely ever even notice the colour of their blaster shots). These all felt a little underwhelming. The rewards were easy to get, and so shouldn't be anything too crazy. Simply making the companion customizations relevant to your character would have made a big difference.

 

Overall, I thought it was a lot of fun and I look forward to more events like this.

I thought it was mostly great! I liked that there was no advance notice and we discovered things as we came across them, yet the event lasted long enough to make sure everyone would have a chance to get everything they needed without lasting so long people got sick of it. I also liked that there was a new mission every day so the dailies wouldn't get boring.

 

The only things I didn't like: The achievement bug, the vaccine to the plague not lasting through death and the random companion boxes (I'd have liked to be able to choose the customizations for myself).

 

Other than that it was about as good an event as one could hope for.

I want to hear your thoughts on why you thought the Rakghoul plague was fun. Also, what kind of stuff would you like to see in the future?"

 

RAKGHOUL FUN:

-I liked that I could participate while on the fleet station while queuing for PvP (and technically in PvP as well).

-Warnings & news terminals were cool additions.

 

 

FUTURE:

-Something like the "War Effort" donations in Vanilla WoW (think it was related to a stage of AQ gates opening) would be neat. The aspect I liked was everyone "donating" stuff to the vendors to help the faction/server.

Edited April 25, 2012 by jdi_knght

I want my PVP events. I WANT MY ILUM BACK. What I want is you to speak with your sister company Mythic and come up with a plan to make Dynamic Open PVP events. For example, In DaoC you had keeps to defend and take. Come up with a Star wars theme and implment. ALSO! GET AWAY FROM GEAR based PVP. I want to have fun in PVP not thinking I'm on a Gear run. One more final bit, Give us hints on what future classes SWTOR will have. I am having a hard time figuring out what you could expand on as far as classes.

 

Thank you!

I really had no love or hate for the Plague outbreak, because it's been done before, and quite heavily in another MMO (World of Warcraft) so it wasn't "new" nor was it "exciting" because I had done it before. Many times before actually.

 

The very first day, I was a bit "scared" if you will, that the plague would bug out and become the next "Corrupted Blood" incident, but after the first death, and resurecting plague free, I lost any notion of that, and it became about as interesting as every Scourge invasion I ever went through in WoW.

 

I'd just like to say Zombies are overdone. They are nothing but a fad, and it saddens me that even a game based in the rich Star Wars universe, felt the need to latch on to zombies, even when it's not Halloween.

 

What would I like to see in the future in terms of events? How about events that fit canonically in the SW universe? Perhaps some random Sith attacks on Tython, and random Jedi assaults on Korriban? They could be done level appropriate, so as to not grief the newbies, with perhaps an "alternate" Tython / Korriban setup for high level players to get in on the action?

 

Or maybe the Imperial Fleet drops out of hyperspace and attacks the Republic fleet? An hour to couple hour event once in a while that has enviroment damage, rumbling, troops boarding, etc...with a new space mission that lets you head out in your ship to help fend off the attack? Space mission only available during the attack of course.

 

There are tons of opportunities to make some impromptu fun in a Star Wars setting. Let's leave the zombies, vampires, werewolves, and other pop culture cliches to WoW and other games.

it was nice but i was wondering why the end of the event was so bland. I was expecting to see malgus or shak ti come to the wreckage site and end the event or some sort of "story" ending to it? I thought bioware's big deal was story either way it was decent event something "positive" for once lol

Loved the event because:

 

1) short to little/no notice, really rewards active subscribers

2) level independent quests, almost anyone can participate

3) event length was just right, not too long

4) single rewards vendor in a pvp zone made it so that cashing in your plague tokens became an event itself (King of the Hill)

 

Suggestions for future events:

1) make quests more difficult or requires more than one person to do so that grouping is required/encouraged

2) make the event have a direct (harmless) debuff on the opposite faction unless the opposite faction contends for the objective. make it so that the debuff resets daily/hourly.

This created some spectacular world PvP on my server. We formed a group to kill the three world bosses and found an Imperial group doing the same! Fighting for an hour for the right to fight the world bosses was almost more fun than the bosses themselves. Very, very fun.

I absolutely loved the event:

 

1. it transformed and brought the world alive in a completely new immersive way, with Containment Troops lining people (NPCs) up to be questioned, the droid that scans you as you try to enter your ship (and the Troops that attack you if you're infected), etc. Very thoroughly conceived as an overall idea and equally well implemented.

2. I thought the rewards were awesome (the limited-time armor, title, crystals, pet), but the ones of a known quantity were much more appealing (re: companion customization boxes) as your time and effort were never wasted.

3. The news broadcasts were a great touch, another level of immersion.

 

Some suggestions:

 

1. An actual interactive finale to the event would have been awesome. Rather than a post on the forums stating "the containment is almost under wraps!", some sort of epic conclusion or battle to wrap everything up would have been the icing on the cake.

2. I know this would be tricky with so many servers, but perhaps having someone on the Events team at Bioware actually log in with a story-based character and interact with players would have been incredibly cool and immersive. I'm not sure which character exactly, but riffing on that idea, if someone eventually logged in with, say, Malgus (*cough*) or someone of that magnitude in the lore, would absolutely rock.

I was just following the Trooper storyline through Tatooine and trying to ignore the whole “rakghoul plague” thing (my character solved that back on Taris, right up to including generating a new rakghoul serum, so if the story had stayed consistent, she would’ve walked up to the first med droid on Tatooine and had them take a blood sample and fixed the mess), but it was rather difficult what with all these infected sandpeople ready to bring out a bunch of their buddies hidden under the sand as soon as a companion accidentally tagged one in the middle of a combat with regular sandpeople.

 

The plague status really needed a countdown to let you know how soon your character was going to expire, so you didn’t leave other group members in the lurch in the middle of combat. The first time, I had no idea what this annoyance was— on Taris, the infection status subsided fairly quickly, and using First Aid wouldn’t make it go away, and I wasn’t going to fork over 2000 credits for what I thought would just be an instant fix for the status effect. If it had billed itself as "Rakghoul Plague Vaccine — 6 hours”, I might have figured it out from the name, and if it survived the character getting killed by other things, it would have been worth the steep price. (Remember that a lot of players with Final Fantasy backgrounds are going to assume that “Vaccine” is the name of the item that removes a “Diseased” status, not the item that gives you “Immune” status for a duration, so plot item names accordingly.)

 

I went through the available quests once and got infected a few times and wound up with 26 DNA samples, which wasn’t enough to buy anything interesting (a new crystal for my assault cannon might have been good); grinding for them by getting repeatedly infected or playing through the same story on a different day was a completely uninteresting prospect for me, so I just sold them, which did make me enough credits to buy another line of inventory. (At one point, a quest prize offered me light-armor boots, which are useless to a Trooper, even for their companions. I took DNA samples as a prize instead.)

 

I did enjoy being able to cure infected sandpeople, but was disappointed that all it did was cure 5 guys until they respawned and that was it. It felt like there should be a bigger denoument, or at least a little update droid giving me quest updates: “Cure 5 infected sandpeople!” “Cure 20 infected guard animals and banthas!” “Cure the chieftain!” where every time you cure an infected sandperson, all the other sandpeople within 20 meters also go to yellow status and will let you walk past, but you might have to do a bit of sneaking to get to infected sandpeople. The dark side equivalent, of course, would be “cull” instead of “cure”...

 

For the future, I would recommend:

• Remember that some players are in this game to play through the stories, and have no interest in repeating the same adventure every day.
  
• The “DNA for death” mechanic created an incentive to go get your character infected, go away from keyboard and wait for them to explode, repeat. Incentives should be for play, not for waiting.
  
• Put events like these into areas that won’t interfere with regular questing.
  
• Set a flag on the newscaster terminals on Carrick Station to indicate if there’s new news for you to watch; normally, the game unhighlights things once you’ve completed them, but the newscaster looked like it had something new to show me when it just had the same video I saw the first time.
  
• Have some way to make it clear that this is a gamewide special event. The Rakghoul Plague thing started up at exactly the same time as I first made my way to Tatooine, and I thought it was just part of the storyline that I had unlocked; at first, I was surprised that other players of wildly different class and level could hear the public address announcements at Carrick Station.
  

This really was some of the best content that you guys have put in the game so far, it literally brought life back to my server... sparking up conversation, conflict and a general desire to play in loads of people all trying to find out more about what was going on on tatooine!

 

I think putting one of the bosses inside the outlaws den area was a master stroke of genius.. the sheer amount of interest and fun going on with everyone trying to get that Bantha was great, I did it with my main character a few times and helped others alts.. every time there was fighting going on out there which made it all the more fun

 

I really hope there is more in store for us along the same sort of lines as this, be it on different planets or in space somewhere.. it breathed life into the world we are all playing in.

 

The one thing I wish not to see is a repeat of this event.. I don't want to see it become an annual thing or a monthly thing.. it progresses the story and should be a one time event in my opinion.

I really enjoyed the "surprise" nature of the event, and how the understanding of what was going on unfolded gradually.

 

One reason that worked well, though, was the fact that from very early on we had clear communication on how long the event would last. MUCH more fun to go exploring and seeking new experiences if one isn't feeling rushed. As a corollary, I observed that early on in the event, it was great fun for the community, but in the last day or so there was much more complaints from people missing out due to starting late.

 

Which leads to...try to avoid having the sort of daily chains where things unlock only a day after the PLAYER has done them. Having new stuff unlock on the servers for everyone would seem to accomplish the same goal of getting people to come back multiple times to the event. And you could still have it be a chain, in the sense of having to complete each quest in order. Not sure what advantage was supposed to be had from the way it was implemented.

 

Minor complaint, though. On the balance this seemed to be great fun for most everyone involved.