Rakghoul Event: The End

So, the rakghoul event is officially over. I say "officially" because in practice I still got the plague about four times today, and people continued to puke and explode all over the station. I mostly seemed to get infected in warzones, which shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone - I don't even want to contemplate where some of those Imps must have been...

I expect that the sickness will slowly dissipate over the next couple of days, though I find it amusing to think that OMG the plague can't be stopped. Bioware, what have you unleashed?! /dramatically shakes her fists at the sky.

I feel quite satisfied with the way things have gone for me during this event. Initially I was a bit worried about missing out on some of the social gear, since Bioware insisted on gating some of the event quests on a personal level, and if you didn't log on for a day there was no way of catching up. Fortunately they did leave some "margin for error", so even though I missed a couple of days I still got all my pieces in the end, and then some.

I wasn't sure whether I was going to be able to unlock all the event codices either, as the world bosses initially appeared to be camped to oblivion. When my guild tried to kill Infected Trapjaw on Friday night, there were already a whole bunch of people spawn-camping the skull by the time we got there. By some stroke of luck (or very intense focus from certain guild members) we managed to get the tag, but activity levels around the other bosses were even worse and we had no luck with them whatsoever.

I had already given up on the idea of getting to kill them, when I came to Tatooine on Saturday afternoon and saw a pug raid forming in chat - or rather, a group of eight people said that the boss in Outlaw's Den was up and that they had tried to kill him, but they had failed due to Imperial interference and were now looking to boost their numbers before trying again. We ended up with over twenty people in the end (somewhat to my surprise - I didn't expect to be able to expand an ops group beyond sixteen, which is the largest group size for which there is currently content in the game), and it turned out that the other boss I was still missing was available too, so we scooted over to him right afterwards and I ended up completing my codex entries after all.

It had been ages since I was last in a pug raid out in the open world, but I really enjoyed it. There were a lot of familiar faces around, and everyone was very friendly, not to say kind - even though some people bimbled around for ages and took forever to make it over (some didn't even know where the Outlaw's Den was!), we waited for everyone and nobody made a fuss. It made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Now, unlocking all the available event codices should have granted me the Containment Officer title, but it bugged out and didn't work (surprise). However, in Bioware's defence I have to say that after I submitted a ticket about this, I got a response from a customer service representative only a few minutes later, and another CSR managed to correctly grant me the title on the same day. Apparently they are getting better at this whole customer service thing.

In summary, I really enjoyed this event. It had:

- voiced story content
- story quests limited to the duration of the event
- a well-hidden scavenger hunt
- pets and other unique cosmetic goodies to acquire
- world bosses
- world PvP
- and last but not least, people doing crazy stuff all over the place!

I think they managed to cover a whole lot of ground there, especially for something that was only going to be a one-off thing. (Daniel Erickson confirmed in a recent interview that they are not going to repeat this event, as they want to give the game a sense of history, and for that some things simply need to be in the past - another decision I approve of.) I do hope that we'll see more events like this in the future, though for now I could do with some quiet time to recover and actually focus on the main 1.2 content properly. Also, as much as I enjoyed the rakghoul plague outbreak as it was, I do hope that future events won't all follow the same formula (i.e. I hated how WoW turned every single one of its holidays into a tedious token grind plus event boss). I'm not asking for dramatic innovation here, just some variety. For now however: simply keep up the good work, Bioware.