Uglesett

If you look at the picture posted by @Jethro_Grey earlier in this thread, if you buy all three doubloon boosters you "just" need to complete the first three directives to get the PR. You don't even need the Gorizia, but the first three objectives without it are still something of a pain in the arse. Or just save your money. Neither Gorizia nor Puerto Rico are particularly good ships.

Eeeh. As @MrFingers has shown, the Gorizia grind is worse than the Duke of York and Prinz Eitel Friedrich grinds from previous years, and those were a bit much. The only not-quite-so-gloomy spot is that you have a bit more leeway in regards to finishing the last directive (of the Gorizia grind, just to be clear), since it's released earlier than previous years.

Jingles already threw out a video on it before the weekend, and now he spends most of Mingles with Jingles today talking about it as well. And a certain pointy haired Scot gets into the party as well:

How to react? Ignore the event entirely. Ideally, they'll make less from it than it cost them to develop, and they'll realize they did a dumb.

While I do think that the game would have been better and easier for WG to balance if CVs had never been introduced in the first place (take note with regards to submarines, WG), I think they're going to cheese off too many people if they just get rid of them. But reintroducing a functional way for CVs to counter each other would help a fair bit.

Oh man. It's like he saw Sub_Octavian's posts on reddit and thought "Hold my vodka" And meanwhile, the people with actual public relations experience are probably pulling their hair out and screaming internally "STOP POURING NITROGLYCERINE ON THE DUMPSTER FIRE YOU'VE CREATED!"

Yeah, this is basically my take on it as well. WG have designed an event that's so far out of reach that there's no reason for me to spend neither time nor money on it. I'll be chilling with Civ 6 in my gaming time this Christmas instead.

Expert level trolling

Good question, I've been wondering a bit about this myself. I mean, I'm one of those semi-enthusiastic players with a fairly decent disposable income (as my LEGO habit probably reveals), and I'd have been quite willing to throw a few thousand doubloons and then play something that's similar in scale to the DoY/PEF grinds to get her. Heck, I might even (shock, horror) have considered buying the Gorizia. But then I saw the cost for the boosters and the directives and went: I genuinely wonder, will the handful of whales who throw 50k doubloons at WG to get the PR make up for the lost income from the (presumably larger group of) more ordinary players who would have spent a more moderate sum but then realized that the event will, effectively, give them nothing? Heck, I can't see how WG can even expect to recoup their development cost. It's simply so expensive to participate in this event if you're going to have any chance of getting even half decent rewards that, basically, all the work that's gone into this event seems completely wasted. The vast majority of players are never going to get anything except frustration out of this event.

To quote myself from another thread in the Gameplay forum:

The problem is that now they're in "ed if you do, ed if you don't" territory. If they don't do anything, people are going to be pissed at them for making a NY event that basically only serves the purpose of pissing people off, because nobody's going to be left with a positive feeling from it. If they actually change the directives to be manageable, then they're going to piss off the whales who already spent a metric arseton of cash.

"It is clear that our communication was poor". Yeah. That's the issue. The problem is far deeper than that. The communication is just the icing sugar on top of the turd. The directives are so insanely unrealistic that even the "low tier" reward, the Gorizia is practically unobtainable. It's worse than the Duke of York and Prinz Eitel Friedrich grinds. Nothing in this event outside of the snowflake rewards is functionally available to most of the players who do not shell out an absolutely stupid amount of cash. You might as well have saved yourself the development time and not run the directives and the shipbuilding event at all, because practically nobody is going to get any enjoyment out of your effort.

It will be removed before you have a chance to finish it. That is guaranteed. The building process only runs from 16th December to 13th January. There is no way in Hell you're going to finish it just by grinding the missions by that time.

If that's the case then... what's the point? I mean, why spend all this developer time and effort on making a "community event" that's really only for 1% of the community? I can't see how he expects to recoup the cost of doing the event if they only expect a tiny percentage of the community to even bother with it. To put it in words that the WG bean-counters are going to understand, they're pricing themselves out of the market with this. All except the most hardcore of whales are surely going to balk at the 50k+ doubloon cost of getting this boat. Even with the boosters and buying the Gorizia outright you're going to struggle to complete the build event.

Rise and Fall is 50% off, Gathering Storm 40%. If you don't have the game at all, the Platinum edition looks like a steal.

I mean, I'm sure it's possible. You just need a ton of adult diapers, a trained health care professional who can hook you up with an IV, and a lot of amphetamine.

Errr. If I somehow happen to get her then... ok, I guess? Considering how stupidly insane the directives are, I'm not going to actively bother with them. And with the sale on the Civ 6 DLCs this weekend....

Welp. I just blew my entire "treat myself this holiday season" budget and then some (which includes what I would otherwise have spent on WoWS) on a LEGO Ultimate Collector's Series Star Destroyer in Billund airport so.... yeah.

I dunno, I think this is the most family friendly new year's event so far (at least since I started). I mean, none of the rewards are actually possible to get, so you might as well just ditch the game and spend time with your family and friends instead.

Welp. If the purpose of this event was to get people to spend time with their family and friends over the holidays, then... ...I guess. I'll probably knock snowflakes off in coop and then... see you some time in January, maybe? A few tips: 1) The tasks in these directives would have been perfectly fine in a permanently available campaign. And the PR wouldn't make a bad campaign reward. It's an ok-ish T10 CA, nothing special. 2) Somebody tell Sub_Octavian that just because WG increases the "value" of the rewards offered, this does not actually break the space-time continuum and increase the number of hours in a day. 3) The PEF grind was about on the limit for what's a reasonable amount of effort to put in during the holiday season. If you don't want to hand out a T10 ship as reward for the same amount of effort, then you might as well not bother to offer T10s as reward. I feel a bit sorry for the programmers and designers whose effort has basically been wasted, because I don't really see many players getting anything out of all the work that's been put into the PR and the shipyard-event.

To put it simply: The PEF event was on the limit for what's practically feasible to do in a month. If WG don't want to issue a T10 ship for that amount of effort, then they needn't bother issuing high tier ships as rewards. As I said earlier, increasing the "value" of rewards doesn't increase the number of hours in a day.