I've just read through Yoshi's interview with gamescom and something really stood out regarding Pagos spawns.
"Yoshida: The most efficient way of increasing EL still hasn't been found. This time, the trick is to make efficient use of mutations and adaptations while chaining, but maybe it was a bit too hard to figure out".
I'm one of the ones that no-lifed to 35 in about 4 days when Pagos went live and was part of a few groups working on trying to figure out spawn conditions. Thinking about S-Ranks, there was a vague riddle from the hunter than helped the community figure out spawn conditions, right? You had something to go off. You could try one thing and if it didn't work, try another.
Pagos is a massive, massive time commitment. For Cassie, we spent hours and hours trying to figure out why it was spawning sometimes and not others. I still think that no one really knows, still. Eventually, the time spent and zero spawns happening beat us down and we gave up. Which is fine right? We failed. Others might not. But, I'm not trying it again.
For the Rising - People are being expected to check in every 10 hours because to do this event the NPC is "random".
I am all for letting the community figure it out, and not hand holding anyone through content. However.
There is nothing fun about thinking an event is broken for the first 12 hours it's live, because, in 5 years there has never been a randomly spawning NPC for the Rising before. There is nothing fun about waiting 10 hours for a random event spawn.
There is nothing fun about spending hours and hours of time in Pagos trying to figure out conditions, no hints, no clues, and having literally nothing to tell us if we're wrong or right. That quote from Yoshida suggests that we still, after all these weeks, have not figured Pagos out.
Maybe with this content that requires a time commitment... just throw us a bone here. Have an NPC like the GATE NPCs, "the next Rising instance will be open at x time". The Rising is meant to be fun, casual, a nostalgic look back at where we've come from. Not a time grind.
Have a S-Rank like hunter riddle we can work off in Eureka. Or something just to make it a little less unforgiving.
I'm tired waiting for this Rising event to spawn and I'm more than a little annoyed. Interested to hear peoples thoughts.
Just to make it clear: I believe that there is content that should be 100% left up to the community, like raids, instances in general.. I wouldn't want the devs to feel like they need to drop any hints for anything else. But the Rising event? Why? Why did it have to be so hard?