You keep commenting on how much greater the participation was, as if that should count against the players. Like the milestones were only realistic if the players did nothing different to achieve them.
I don't believe I have to say this out loud, but that completely misses the point of the event.
That is in response to you suggesting that a completely outlier performance over 2 years of BG, makes the original target reasonable. Realm events are not likely to be once in 2 year occurrence, right? Your discourse over the last two weeks has been that the milestones are reasonable and anything lower would have been trivial. They were not, just because we came close to hitting it doesn't make it reasonable. If this is the level of engagement expected, say every 3 months, I don't think the outcomes will be great. And I don't think you, with all your access, advocating for that is good for the game.
I did not say anything lower would be trivial. I said 800 million would be trivial because in reality we scored over 900 million, which makes 800 million obviously trivial in retrospect.
Also, saying the event performance was an outlier is precisely the point. We know, or at least Kabam knows, what participation actually looks like (I know they track it carefully). They know how participation rises and falls with differing season rewards and incentives. They can make reasonable predictions on how much higher participation is likely to go.
Yes, this was a blockbuster season in many respects, but not in all respects. As mentioned in my original post, while scoring was much higher, actual overall participation numbers in terms of total numbers of players participating, was not much higher than other high participation seasons. The highest previous season was probably around 300k-ish, and this season had 314500 players participating. So the *number* of players participating was predictable, insofar as it did not wildly exceed the envelope of BG player participation.
Scoring went up quite a bit per player, but a huge chunk of that were players shooting for 5k, and in concert GC. That was farr higher than in previous seasons, but that was the intent: to draw in a lot more activity from a lot larger pool of players that ordinarily don't push as hard. The rewards were not just juicy for players who normally reach GC, they were absolutely astounding for lower progress players less likely to push.
If you're saying Kabam should not have counted on all that extra play, then you're saying Kabam should incentivize a lot more play and then presume they are going to fail completely at actually generating more play.
And again, I'm just going to keep repeating this: we could argue if Kabam's guesses were right before the season started, but we have the data now: in retrospect, their guess was dead on. You can say they got lucky, but that's irrelevant. You can say they influenced the game play with Stark donations, and I concede that is a potential and ultimately unknowable effect. But what you can't say is that the goal was not a credible goal to expect the players to achieve, because they actually achieved it. *How* they were incentivized to achieve it is immaterial. They did it, and because they did it, no one can argue it was not doable, period.
Your definition of reasonable appears to be: if I want to try to push someone to do better, the reasonable expectation is they won't. Kabam assumed the realm event would cause players to do a lot more than normal and they were right. We will never know what would have happened if they hadn't added the Stark donations. We will never know what would have happened if they hadn't changed the design a week before launch. But what we do know, for certain, as an irrefutable fact, is that the players *could* have reached one billion points, because they all but did. They were incentivized to do it, they were psychologically encouraged to do it with the Stark donations, but they still did it.
They did it, so the goal of doing it was both achievable and reasonable.
You can argue that even if we did it, it wasn't reasonable to assume we were guaranteed to do it. But no one is saying that, because "reasonable" does not mean "guaranteed to do it." You yourself said no one is asking for it to be obvious, but that's what guaranteed means: that it is obvious. A reasonable goal is not one where it is obvious we are going to make it. It is simply a goal that we know is achievable if the players want it enough, and does a level of effort that is within their ability to do within reason. I don't think anyone would say that the effort put in by the players overall was completely unreasonable. It was just very good effort.
Now that we know that the players *could* have reached one billion points, does the next realm event have to be set at 1.5B points, since anything below a billion would now be considered trivial by your definition? That's the only thing that matters, what is done is done but how will this impact next set of events. You are suggesting that we should keep going down this path and if the players cannot hit the milestones, it is just because they didn't try hard enough.
The effort put in by players this season was exceptional. We will not immediately know if it was completely unreasonable or not and what the repercussions of pushing so hard this season will be (given CW and banquet). Sometimes, people reach ridiculous highs but that is not always sustainable or predictable. I do say they got lucky this time and I hope the devs see that this event could have ended very differently if they hadn't stepped in. I also hope that this informs how they design the next set of events (so that they don't have to step in, the Stark donations set a bad precedent).
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The effort put in by players this season was exceptional. We will not immediately know if it was completely unreasonable or not and what the repercussions of pushing so hard this season will be (given CW and banquet). Sometimes, people reach ridiculous highs but that is not always sustainable or predictable. I do say they got lucky this time and I hope the devs see that this event could have ended very differently if they hadn't stepped in. I also hope that this informs how they design the next set of events (so that they don't have to step in, the Stark donations set a bad precedent).