CommentStreams:D9603a1b681c8b4bebdc3bdb9f4a9c68

What we should keep in mind is that there are two facets of every event: 1) Competing against other players for marathon placement and 2) Competing against game mechanics/math to five star everything.

Before the revamp, it was actually #2 that was the hardest: the two cards released in week 2 were pretty much impossible to five star without a ridiculous amount of silver farming, and of course marathon reward places were drastically expanded.

Everything has changed now with Marathon paying out far fewer prizes, and silver rewards stepped up for players strong enough to clear most event stages. This means that most players fixate on the fight for a decent marathon placement, something that's in many respects self-regulating.

A few whales will be able to go 100% on every event indefinitely. That's just reality, and those places are lost unless those guys simply feel like skipping an event. For the other top places, resources suddenly matter. As Wanderer points out, if you're going all out and we're getting one event every 5-6 weeks, you're losing more resources to attrition than you can farm from normal play. Contrast this with previous events, where Marathon was basically a race for how quickly folks could cycle gold into Magical Apparatus pulls for marathon points.

The meta for Marathon is shifting: Eventually free players indiscriminately running 100% on every event will burn off their stashes from the gold ol' days. Most (non-paying) winners will be players who are more selective, saving up by limiting event participation to specific, low-cost objectives or even skipping a few entirely. Players will have to think about their goals. If you want a full, five star event deck (or two), you'll need to plan out what you need to pull every card you need during a typical event, then save up all of that PLUS a buffer just in case there's a serious fight for top 100 in marathon. If you simply want to take top 100, or top 250, for the gold/gems reward, you'll have to have an idea of how much is worth investing in that goal, and also when you need to cut bait. If you simply want as much fodder for Guild Wars as you can, then again you have to do the math and decide whether having a bunch of mostly four star sets is more or less useful than having a smaller number of mostly five star sets.