It’s more a matter of them not understanding how to build a proper flow to guide players through their events and a proper overarching reward structure to keep player ever wanting to run that gameplay loop.
Why does people still run 8-years old metas event in Guild Wars 2? There’s 4 major reasons:
For new players:
- It’s a big source of EXP, which is used to level up Masteries, the horizontal progression systems that award things like Dragonriding’s talents. It’s generally the very first hook, but it’s not the reason why people keep coming back.
For Experienced players (and this is what Blizz missed out):
- They’re a great source of Gear and Gear awarded by those events is recycled into Crafting Materials.
Comments: Crafting Material is the goal of EVERY engame players since they’re central to crafting Legendaries and high level gear and central to Craft 70% of the cosmetic stuff in the game, which are the Endgoals of most players (Being stronk and look good).
- The Crafting Mats are worth so high that doing an event (around 10-15 min) award the equivalent in Wow of 3500-10000 gold (Depending on the event and your luck) worth of Crafting Materials that player sell on the Auction house.
For everyone:
- Some are just Epic and Grandiose in scale and feel good to play again and again just for the experience and the spectacle they’re achieving.
But really, if there’s something to keep up in those reasons is that there’s a hook, but really the reason why players do Public Events is to participate in the overarching Crafting system, either to get Mats for their own craft or to make a ton of gold selling their mats. And since crafting in Guild Wars is taking a ton of mats to do stuff and has a ton of recipes for Cosmetic Stuff, Crafting is an everlasting system that constantly feeds into those events.
In comparison, Wow created rewards for each events for about 1 month worth of doing it on a semi-regular basis, which means that after that, player retention in those events tend to get lower and lower and those events that are made to be played by a bunch of players suddenly can’t reach their maximum participation reward cause there’s only a few people doing them before they die completely when all players get what interested them for that event.
Furthermore, Blizz did not design the overall structure of their timer’s (when the event comes out), which makes event to appear at the same time, competing for player attention, instead of naturally guiding them from an event to another.
If they manage to better design those two things (Timers and reward Structure) Events could become so good they become a pillar of the game and an activity someone could do each time he’s connected. But those two points are so weak that they make those Event to fall down after a couple of weeks after they launched.
This just demonstrate a lack of experience designing for those kind of events more than anything else. Those events feel like how the first iteration of those events felt like when GW2 launched in 2012. It took to ArenaNet about 2 years to find the proper formula for the timers and 5 years to figure out the reward system loop. Now that ArenaNet have done it, it should not need as much time to Wow to figure out their way to solve those two issues.
And they need to think about how spectacular and epic they can make those events and make them fallible, else there’s no stakes and people will do the same they did in Warfronts, which means… nothing or the strict minimum.