@Waqui
I actually liked the fact, that I had to put a bit of fear and upgrade the skills of my farmboy Luke before completing the event.
Yep, I also think that there should be entrance requirements. My complaint, if you read it, was that once you've qualified there's not much strategy required. It's about simply adding more levels, more gear and more ability mats to your toons, then going and doing the same exact thing again, but with more power.
I'd like it better if it was structured in such a way that once you qualified, even gear11 toons wouldn't be enough if you played badly, and even gear8 (or whatever is the minimum gear) would be enough if you paid attention to your environment and learned how to use it, paid attention to your enemy and learned how to counter them.
The best example, and maybe I should make a separate thread praising EA/CG for this in retrospect, is the Phoenix release event.
In that event, the Imperial Explosives Crate was actually key. When you set off the crate and sometimes even with which character (you might want to save Hera's expose to use on a toon, for example) made all the difference in completing that event. You go in, you fail, but you probably were able to blow up an Explosives Crate in the first encounter. If you didn't blow it up until the end of the battle, you could still see the animation where the crate explodes. You talk to people or you read the forums, or you just get lucky and hit the crate while some p1 enemies are still alive. Lo and behold! You find out that if the crate is detonated before all the enemy toons are dead, they take damage - a lot of it - while you take none. You go back through the event looking for crates with the word "explosives" in their name and you make a run where you hit those first ... but not with an AoE, because if they're set off at once, they only do damage one time. All this takes experimentation, investigation, thinking.
That makes for interesting and engaging (and fun!) gameplay.
I'm not saying that everyone should qualify for every event. I'm also not saying the events should be easy. What I'm saying is that if you qualify for the event, you should have a reasonable chance of succeeding at the event. If you barely qualified for CLS, there's only so far you could be expected to gear your last toon before the end of the event. But you qualified. So there should be some reasonable chance of success, even with r2 at g6 or g7.
Now the way to make that happen is to make sure that winning the last tier is not based solely on "Smash Hard! Smash Harder!" strategy. (If you can call it strategy.) Sure the tier can and should be hard enough that you will inevitably lose if you don't give your characters whatever gear you can in the time from the event announcement to event conclusion. Imagine if all the toons were opened on the day of the announcement b/c you didn't like them but did have their shards. You could still get all 5 to g7 and at least 3 up to g8 and at least 1 up to g9. But there are gear bottlenecks and opening all 5 characters on announcement day wouldn't allow you to have all 5 toons at g8 because of those bottlenecks (esp but not only Mk3 Holos). So now you have a minimum threshold of squad power for completing the event. 5 x gear11 is the maximum.
How do you challenge everyone in that range? Well, the Phoenix events used event toons and an unobtrusive background feature (the supply crates, some of which were useless so you had to pay attention to the ones that said they were "Imperial
Explosive Supply Crate"s.
If you want this event to reward long-time players who took the time to invest in movie-important characters who haven't been particularly game-important (i.e. the players who are most likely to be die-hard StarWars fans), it makes sense to let people use their own toons which will make it easier for those with a gear 11 squad than my hypothetical minimum squad. But you don't want to simply give away CLS to them either. You want every single person with a CLS to feel like they've earned it. And you want every single person to enjoy the game play and the challenge. You can't have exactly the same difficulty for everyone if you want people to bring in their own toons, but a game designer **can** create problems that aren't solved by gear pieces.
In particular, you have two toons that aren't available as player characters yet. Nobody has them. Nobody has geared them. If they become event toons, they can play unique roles that allow for interesting challenges you can't solve by smashing harder.
On top of the potential to add an "Event C-3P0" or an "Event Rebel Chewbacca" that can even out the difficulty and permit g8 teams to have a chance to win while g11 teams aren't just handed a win automatically, you have two incredibly important characters that can still play a role: Old Ben and Vader.
Now, Old Ben is dead, right? But this is his big, "If you strike me down" moment - why not give "If You Strike Me Down" buffs to Farmboy, or to the whole escaping squad? For the purposes of the event, the buffs can even function slightly differently from how they work outside of the event. Imagine if instead of giving a % speed bonus, the SpeedUP buff gave a flat +40 to speed. That helps anyone, but it helps someone with +70 speed from mods less than it helps someone with +0 from mods, while a % bonus helps the person with the +70 mods **even more** than it helps the people with +0, despite the fact that the +0 folks need the help more.
Old Ben's death grants the perfect opportunity to even out the difficulty even more. Now, I'm not saying it should be this extreme, but as the speed buff goes higher, the original speed matters less. If Old Ben granted everyone +1000 speed, then whether you started with 120 or started with 220 matters relatively little. The same is true for flat buffs to offense and whatever else Ben buffs.
Couple this with the actual movie scene: remember that Ben isn't helping Luke (or anyone else) immediately after dying. There's a pause there are shots exchanged, then Ben's ghostly voice echoes: Run, Luke! Run!
So if you qualify for a Tier6 finish the first and second encounters, you still don't have to be buffed by If You Strike Me Down. Instead, imagine your squad entering that final, final battle of the final stage. There you see an endless swarm of Stormtroopers, you think, "I'm hosed." You fight for the first turn and take damage. Things look bad. But then the 2nd time your Farmboy take a turn in this ultimate fight, you hear Alec Guinesses' voice issuing from your iPad, saying "Run, Luke! Run!" Then, before you take your turn, everyone in your squad gets the IYSMD buffs, including the party heal.
In the middle of this mass of Stormtroopers is one commander coordinating the action. You kill him, and all the Stormtroopers lose 100% TM and are slowed for 1 turn. An extra ability button that was crossed out (as if by ability block) becomes available. It provides 100% chance of escape. If you don't use it, you could maybe still fight your way through all the stormtroopers...but you're going to die unless you're gear 11. No, your best chance to get away on the Falcon is to use that Escape function for each of your characters while the stormtroopers are slowed and can't take actions because their TM was zero'd out.
But even gear11 people have a real chance of failure, because Vader is forcing his way through the blast doors with his light saber. If you haven't won the fight or escaped before a countdown timer finishes, he bursts through the blast doors, AoEs everyone, then throws Culling Blade on Luke. Boom. You lose.
Now you have Chewie playing an important role. Now the best moment of the event - Ben's sacrifice - actually matters in Tier 6, it's not just over and done, but it's still affecting the plot and your chances of success.
Unless you read the forums where other people have figured it out, you won't know that killing one particular toon unlocks the escape function. You also won't know what the escape function does - just like you didn't know what the Sacrifice ability did in Tier5 until you used it.
Now you actually have to pay attention. Now the gamers can throw a fight at you that is challenging for g11 toons but allows g8 toons playing an optimal strategy to win. Now when you play the fight multiple times, it's not just because you're waiting for the best RNG. Now you're playing the fight multiple times to try and figure out how the heck you're supposed to win and what that countdown timer does. Maybe one time you just let the countdown timer hit zero by doing nothing with you toons when it's your turn, just because you want to see what the countdown timer does. Then you get this awesome animation of Vader stomping everyone - you lose, but you're rewarded, and you can still try again.
In this scenario, being a better player matters. It's not all about having a better character. Not only that, it's just more interesting and more fun, and it relies only on things the developers have already done - including event abilities which happens in raids and on Tier5 of CLS, including timers which we see everyday in the Arena, including an event toon alongside your own characters which has been done in at least one flash event, as well as in some other events, IIRC. It includes two different victory conditions (all toons escape or all toons survive the fight and all stormtroopers are defeated) that reward two different styles of gameplay (if you want to call "Hulk Smash!" a style of gameplay), and instead of merely using earlier tiers as hurdles that you jump over but then never consider again, it uses that great moment of Ben's sacrifice to grant you a completely unexpected, delayed bonus when you need it most, magnifying the emotional impact of an already great piece of gameplay from Tier5.
These are the kinds of things that can be done in a game that can make sure that everyone who gets CLS has actually earned CLS while also making sure that the event is fun, that players feel challenged, that the story is used to its maximum potential, that you cannot qualify for the event without having some reasonable chance of succeeding at the event, and that the event rewards those who have heavily invested in the qualifying toons from Episode4 by making things easier (even if it doesn't make them automatic).
Now THAT would be a great event.
========================================================================
*As an example, consider trying to get Luke if you opened r2 on the last day of the r2 event and then got him to 7* in the last few minutes of that event - I pick r2 because it takes a couple weeks from opening Ben to getting his 7th* which gives more time to gear
