Yesterday ArenaNet did a Q&A webcast, in which Costume Brawling was described as a really fun activity to participate in.  After jumping into brawling today for 5 minutes, I was left wondering when the fun part is coming.  After a good while longer, it still never came.

The costumes are cute and all, but you just stand around and spam all the action keys for that costume type, keeping everything on cooldown.  There is no real skill involved, no strategy, no penalties.  You don't take damage and you can't be killed (just knocked out for 5 seconds if you take enough hits).  You just stand around, hit others, spam buttons, and see the Batman captions etc.  BAM WHAM POW.

There are achievements for the number of people you temporarily knock out, but it seems more of a pointless test to see how much someone can suffer through.  It is not really very fun or challenging.  Getting into costume and watching yourself /dance for 2 hours seems more entertaining.  Is there something I'm missing?

No, you didn't miss anything. 

Costume brawl is boring and week.

When I did costume brawl, I thought it was pretty dumb.  But maybe that was because Lion's Arch was so crowded that I couldn't even see the other players due to constant pop-in.  I dunno, I'll give it another shot later, but so far, stupid.

I would much rather they just add regular dueling to the game.

Originally posted by cronius77
no offense to the fan boys and girls of this game but can you see why people give this game such a bad rep now after release? There is glaring issues with the game since release especially in world vs world and people spend dev time making stupid crap like this. I understand that different departments do different things but they could easily be focused on content updates and revamping the issues with world vs world instead of releasing stuff that majority of the players do not even like to begin with. I used to hate Rift and Trion big time to the point of bad mouthing them, same with funcom but honestly after keeping up with Guild Wars2 i have a new respect for both those studios actually wanting to fix their games based off player feedback and working with the community.

A.Net said they are fixing things but Halloween was a big thing in GW1 and they wanted to also have it in GW2. The other issues are getting fixed with care. I am happy they are not taking out the "Trion' nerf bat. Give them the time they need to do it right rather than quick. What I mean by this is Trion actually killed whole builds rather than doing judicious tweaking. Careful tweaking takes time.

People are so impatient these days.

Originally posted by cronius77
no offense to the fan boys and girls of this game but can you see why people give this game such a bad rep now after release? There is glaring issues with the game since release especially in world vs world and people spend dev time making stupid crap like this. I understand that different departments do different things but they could easily be focused on content updates and revamping the issues with world vs world instead of releasing stuff that majority of the players do not even like to begin with. I used to hate Rift and Trion big time to the point of bad mouthing them, same with funcom but honestly after keeping up with Guild Wars2 i have a new respect for both those studios actually wanting to fix their games based off player feedback and working with the community.

That's what happens in a F2P cash shop game, developers follow the cash shop loot when allocating resource.

The Halloween patch actually came with a ton of fixes, especially for elementalists.   The elementalist downed state is actually GOOD now, as opposed to the most useless downed state in the game by far.  Karma rewards were basically added to everything as well as new DE's across the world.

There were quite a few WvWvW fixes as well as one that was supposed to fix crashing due to # of players being rendered.   Unfortunately, that fix kind of backfired as it introduced a new bug that makes WvWvW currently unplayable.   

Their response time for issues has been fairly stellar, definitely faster and better thatn many other subscription based MMOs that have recently come out.  

Yes, the patch is great overall. Not only did it introduce a ton of new content both for Halloween and normal gameplay, but it also fixed numerous bugs and balance issues. However, the Costume Brawl is a bit disappointing, especially because I expected it to be GW1-like. Here's hoping they don't do the same thing to snowball fights.

The "F2P cash shop game" nonsense is and has always been just that, nonsense.

Originally posted by rygard49
Does anybody else feel like holiday events in MMOs are totally immersion breaking? It's like when your favorite serious TV show does a spooooky Halloween episode and takes the characters totally outside of their normal bounds. It's pandering.

Not if it's actually lore-friendly like this one is. You don't just plop Christmas trees and pumpkins into your SF game without a good reason, for example. Arena Net has had a tight grip on their lore so far.

Originally posted by Yamota
They are spending resources on this? How about fixing WvW to make it worth your while instead of stupid stuff like this.

 What glaring problems in WvW? If anyone mentions one they get their post deleted or banned so I have no idea what you're talking about.

When the event went live last night, spontaneous costume brawling broke out and it was quite fun. Nobody knew which costumes had which skills, so everybody was changing form constantly.

But hey, you can please some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time...

Just read this forum and decided to try it in Lions arch, damn, that is awful, get in a costume immediately knocked down, dazed, feared, knocked down...hmm...start hitting people and all I see are the same "BAMs" I get with my boxing gloves, except the gloves are cooler and don't get me stunned, feared, and knockeddown.

Very underwhelming and pointless IMO.

I didn't mind the knockdowns/knockouts but I wasn't impressed with it. Moreover I am somewhat insulted with the 'this is fun, come and do it!' in the hopes that I will be inclined to agree and have fun just because someone told me it would be.

There's no reason other than a 2-3 min stint  to say 'yeah..okay...move back to the game'.

Happy with the fixes but the event is very dull.

For the real annoyance is the candy corn. They made them mining nodes. Why? Or if they had to, why not make them pumpkin faces or little candy corn icons. I use the mini-map to target nodes but I rarely mouse over them to see what they are. A Node is a node. Now I run over and once I get in sight..oh..candy corn...yay....

edited for typo