Turbine, the DDO community has reported fundamental issues with the design of the Mabar event, and now its clear that those issues were not resolved in the Crystal Cove event. Below is a concise summary of the flaws.

1. Party Loot
It was revealed in Mabar, and still remains in Crystal Cove, that loot from kills (bone parts in Mabar, doubloons in Crystal Cove) does not distribute evenly to party members, and in fact, seems to CLEARLY be biased to DPS classes over support classes.

Extensive, detailed testing (results are reproducible) quickly reveals that the more actual damage you do will "weight" or "skew" the loot distribution to you, even when grouped in a Party. We formed a balanced group (3 melee, 1 rogue, 1 sorc, 1 cleric), and did rigorous tests, and it was blatently obvious that the more points of damage you dealt, the more doubloons you got, with the Sorc getting the most (used Cone of Cold, Meteor Swarm, etc.), the melees and rouge generally on par, and the cleric dramatically, and I do mean dramatically in last place. The average for 1 hour of play distributed loot as follows: (copper, silver, gold)
Sorc: ~2500, ~1200, ~600
DPS: ~1600, ~800, ~400
Cleric: ~200, ~80, ~15

As you can see, the difference in the Clerics loot is enormous. This cleric rarely, if ever, did any DPS, and mostly just healed and buffed. There were times when he did cast offensively or melee, but we wanted to test, so we made sure he kept DPS to a minimum.

This needs to be fixed. You can program loot to be distributed based on DPS to non-grouped members, that's fine (prevents kill stealing), but DPS should 100% be ignored between group members. Please fix this asap. Saying "you should just solo" is not an acceptable answer for an event in an MMORPG. (MM stands for Massively Multiplayer).

2. The "Old MacDonald" Factor
While I understand that the Epic game mechanic in DDO, while sorely lacking in its own right, requires farming, non-epic items should not require a similar amount of farming. There is nothing "casual" about this event (or Mabar for that matter). It requires hardcore, dedicated, nose-to-the-grindstone farming to obtain items, to then run the quest portion, to then get the rare items, to then buy the unique items. This does not mean it should be EASY. It just should not be so GRINDY. A "Special Event" should be enjoyable, unique, entertaining. Not grindy. I think you're missing the boat (pun intended) with the Mabar/Cove mechanics of flagging, loot grinding, and item purchasing. If you simply gave us the quest (the actual Cove, with torches and kobolds), let us run it as much as we want, and provide all of the doubloons, crystals, etc. in the quest, then we could run it once, or 100 times, at our discretion, and at least make the Event as casual or grindy as we want. The entire mechanic of grinding to open the quest, then doing it to get some ingredients, then re-grinding to open it, and then re-questing to get more ingredients, etc. is mindless and poor design.

3. Limited Event
The limited amount of days the Event is open seems to make sense given the fact that you're calling it "an event", and not "a new quest". But rather than "turning the Event on" and then "turning it off" and confining players to enjoy it only in that narrow timeframe, it would be a far better design to allow players to initiate the Event on their own time, and come up with some other way to limit the total length, such as but not limited to: a timer per character, a timer per account, limited number of runs (maybe sell more "passes" thru the DDO store), etc.


These are the three fundamental flaws that I see with the overall design of these special events. I realize that you want them to feel "special" and you want to tie them to certain times of the year to celebrate certain "real-world" events (halloween, 5th anniversary of DDO, etc.) and you want to be careful not to introduce too much "good loot" or make it too easy to get. I'm all for having it be a challenge, for sure. But people love the Shroud (for example) and its not a time-limited offer (available 365 days/year, subject to raid timer of course), its not nearly as "grindy" (has a "flagging" mechanic, so once you "flag", you can re-run it), and loot is fair (chest-based loot, your loot is your loot, any class gets just as much as the next). I'm not saying these need to work like Shroud, I'm saying you need to do some work to make them feel more like an Event (which one would "attend") and less like we just took a temp job.