The “Event cycle” as i call it, is a yearly update cycle of halloween, thanksgiving, christmas and easter events. They bring many players back into the game, but it isn’t a flawless update system, as it causes high inflation for the event base items, forcing certain players out of fun and exciting weapons/equipment. But what do you think?
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I agree that there is definitely some friction as it relates to event items for new players. Mythic items in particular are and always have been a pretty significant sticking point for the Christmas event. I do think that the reliance on events to drive player counts has gone down in recent time though. The recent update cycle focuses less on events and more and long-term content and changes, although whether or not it does enough to keep players engaged and whether the right things are being focused on is definitely a matter open for discussion.
I think that the Stranger selling the events items to help put some sort of cap on the market does help, and I do hope that the more recent event items (such as from Thanksgiving or the most recent Christmas event) are also added to the Stranger pool to help with this. Some of the prices of old items definitely need to be adjusted as well, the prices for the Frozen weapons (and in particular, Frozen Forg Dagger) are probably too high.
It also helps that most event items are at this point not the only viable options for each class. To my knowledge, essentially no class has a particular event item that is considered the sole “meta” for the class. Of course, some of it comes down to power creep, and so it is very possible that future event items could become the new meta for certain classes, or if there are buffs to any existing event items, it could bring them back into the meta, but at the moment I think many event items are in a fairly good spot.
Overall, while I think that the event cycle is definitely something that could limit the build variety of new players, a lot of the times there are other viable alternatives they can use first which would allow them to grind towards the event weapons that they are most interested in, and in most cases their accessibility is helped by the Stranger, although it would be nice to see more event items in that pool.