The Walking Dead Event

[+Nyx]

That's right, folks, this year +V and I finally figured out how to bring one of our favorite shows to un-life on the shard. We'd been wanting to do this event for years now, but hadn't been able to find a good way to make it work with the tools at our disposal. Thanks to many of the additions +C has made for Touria and Elysium, we now have functionality that we never had before - which has made this event possible in a way it wasn't previously.

The event will be open from today until December 1st.

How it works:

Players wishing to participate in the event may enter in Britain graveyard (Trammel). Inside the square building you will see a golden stone that links to this forum post, and in front of it a sparkle. When you approach the sparkle you will be prompted to sign off on having read these rules. Once you have agreed, you will be moved into a room to receive your quest book, then moved to the entrance gate.

The quest book you receive will track the number of walkers you slay as well as the number of times you die in the event space. It stays with you for the duration of the event. You may only receive one, so do not delete it!

Once you enter the event gate, you will be moved to the event island. Your items will be removed and placed into your bank for safekeeping. You will be dressed in an event robe that equalizes the stats of everyone who joins. Brand-new players will have the same stats (and for the most part, the same skills) as the most powerful veteran. You will also be given a starter weapon that will help you along your way.

Your primary goal in the event is to survive as long as possible and to kill as many walkers as you can. There are walkers all over the island, and they are even more densely packed in the city. All around the island you may find some items here and there that will help you survive better or kill faster. There are 5 total weapon types available in the event space. There is the baseball bat, which you all begin the event with. There's also: a metal pipe, a bow, Daryl's Crossbow, and Michonne's Katana. The metal pipe and bow are the 'midrange' weapons, while the crossbow and katana are extremely good. All of the weapons are heavy, and all are temporary. They also have low durability and may break. It's also good to note that there are only a handful of arrow spawns on the island, and they are not located with the bows. You will have to find them yourself.

The crossbow and the sword each have 2 spawn locations which don't change; however they are on much longer respawn timers than the other weapons and their areas are more heavily infested with walkers. All other weapons have 3 spawn locations each, and each will move to a different location every so often. What you find in one spot on your first visit won't necessarily be there the next time you enter the event. The crossbow will always spawn with a sizable stack of bolts.

There is no healing via spells or bandages in this event - what damage you take, you must either slowly regen, or find one of the 5 heal-potion spawns. Similarly to the weapons, the heal potion spawns will move. Each will spawn 4 heal potions. The potions last for only 45 minutes per.

There are 2 locations that will spawn a number of crates, which you may use to block walkers' paths or for other creative survival uses. The boxes only last 1 hour, and they are heavy.

We strove to make this event as "realistic" as possible within the Walking Dead theme. Thus, if at any point your character becomes too hurt, you will have been bitten and your character will die. You will then be moved to the exit. There is no delay on returning to the event after death. You may choose to immediately reenter, or to try again another time. To help expedite the entrance process, when you return to the event entrance sparkle while in possession of a questbook, you will agree to the terms and then be moved directly to the entrance gate (rather than visiting the questbook NPC again).




Rules & Important Information:

- There is a logout delay for this event. If you logout inside the event area for any reason, your character will stay active and visible for 1 hour. This means your character may be killed and removed from the event.

- All shard rules apply to this event, particularly for AFK'ing, language, harassment, etc.

- While I have added crates for the purpose of blocking yourself into a safe area for a short period of time, there are certain circumstances in which this could be construed as exploiting. Examples: If you manage to block yourself into an area that you cannot be harmed and are AFK fighting the walkers with a ranged weapon, if you place the crates to block other players from obtaining survival items (weapons, potions, arrows, etc), or if you place the crates at locations you have determined will be guaranteed to spawn walkers for the purpose of farming them without harm to yourself. Anything along these lines will be considered exploiting and you will be banned from the event, with no participation reward, and (particularly in cases of AFK'ing) possibly jailed.

- If there are issues with the event mechanics and you do not report them, this will be considered exploiting and you will be banned from the event with no reward. Examples: Not being moved out of the event when below 75% health, finding a survival-item spawner on a short timer and farming the items, managing to glitch onto a table/into an area the walkers cannot harm you but you can harm them, managing to take event items outside of the event area (this does not include your quest book, fret not!), and so on.

- If you delete your quest book, you will not be given another and will not be able to enter the event again, nor will you be rewarded for participating in the event. The only way to lose your book is to attempt to drop it on the ground, then select "yes" you want to delete it and click "OK". It's not hard to avoid - so no exceptions will be made and no 2nd books will be given.

- We don't mind if you work together, but obviously dual clienting or other abuses of the system and/or codex will be punished.

- Don't be a jerk. If you're behaving badly, harassing, insulting, trolling or otherwise being a poor sportsman in the event, V or I will ban you from it. We are extremely sick of dealing with it and warnings do no good, it seems. If you want the continued privilege of participating in the event we worked hard to make, you will do so with the proper attitude and behavior. We aren't looking to revoke anyone's privileges, but won't hesitate to do so rather than deal with the drama.



At the end of the event, we will put out a reward station/NPC where you will turn in your books. You will be handsomely rewarded based on which overall progress bracket you fall into. Since there aren't any rewards for each kill, we plan to make the final rewards generous. The player(s) who have the most kills with the least deaths will be given a special trophy reflecting their status.

Enjoy, shardlings!

+N

[Aryck]

YES YES YES YES YES


now ill read this :p

[tiggerjlk]

My first big run-in

[Aryck]

This event was AWESOME when it first started I was having a lot of fun.

Now, the katana has been nerfed and its horrible.
The pipe has been nerfed, still better than the katana, but still not as good as before.
Can't loot your corpse when you die anymore so if you die you lose your weapon, I don't see how that is realistic to the show on the show anyone would be able to take it.

Only other gripe I have is the spawn rates are too low on the weapons, and there should be more walkers by the entrance area like when it first started. Now you can run through and easily make it to the city with no worries whatsoever of getting bit.

You make an awesome event, then nerf it.

WHY?

[+Nyx]

This event was AWESOME when it first started I was having a lot of fun.

Now, the katana has been nerfed and its horrible.
The pipe has been nerfed, still better than the katana, but still not as good as before.
Can't loot your corpse when you die anymore so if you die you lose your weapon, I don't see how that is realistic to the show on the show anyone would be able to take it.

Only other gripe I have is the spawn rates are too low on the weapons, and there should be more walkers by the entrance area like when it first started. Now you can run through and easily make it to the city with no worries whatsoever of getting bit.

You make an awesome event, then nerf it.

WHY?

The walkers were not changed. They spawn randomly over the entire island. Sometimes that'll mean there are many near the entrance, sometimes not. Particularly if there are players entering the event on a regular basis, the walkers near the entrance will be killed or drawn away.

The weapons were never meant to guarantee survival in relatively large groups of walkers, and they were doing so.

Corpses were never meant to be looted - there was a problem with the region controller that was allowing all sorts of things that weren't intended. It was then fixed.

Spawn rates on the stationary weapons is supposed to be slow. Otherwise players are just going to sit there and farm them, and nobody else will really have a chance at them.

As with all large-scale events, the first week or so the event is being tweaked and updated to perform the way it's intended to. We test these things rigorously before opening them, but testing with 1-3 people is very different than what happens when suddenly there are 20+ players in there. Lots of things end up needing tweaking as the first days go on.

Since there are still tweaks that need to be done, helpful input and insight is welcome and appreciated. Griping for the sake of griping is not. I didn't ask for your gripes, and your delivery of "input" is abrasive and without any real thought to why the changes were made.

[Agony]

WOW... just.. WOW!

[+Nyx]

Event updates for today:

- There is now an exit on the island, where the moongate location would normally be. In light of this change, all existing progress books have had their death count reset to 0.

- Walkers will decay every 60 minutes, to prevent them piling up in unreachable locations (inside the water, etc).

- Large groups of walkers have been added along several of the most traveled pathways

- The spawn rates on the moving spawns (regular bow, pipe, bat, heal potions) have been increased. They will also move locations faster than they did previously.

- The "special" weapons are still a work-in-progress. They've been updated again today, and we'll keep monitoring their usefulness (or overpowered-ness, as the case may be) and make adjustments accordingly.

- All bows now spawn with a small stack of arrows. The bows in boxes have a slightly larger number of arrows with them. The large stack of bolts that comes with Daryl's crossbow is unchanged.

[+Nyx]

Further updates today:

- The entrance building has red-orange doors. If you're not at the building with the colored doors...you're at the wrong building.

- The entrance building now operates on a teleporter system to prevent mobs from piling up in the entrance/exit area.

- Steps have been taken to prevent players from exploiting the ability to enter with vampiric embrace on.

- There is now a world teleporter in the building that houses the main entrance gate to the island, to allow players to exit before entering if needed.

- Mark/Recall/etc have been disabled in the entrance buildings.

[Unbeliever]

Friendly feedback :)

As a whole, the event is so much fun I can't even explain it. It's just completely different from the standard events, new and refreshing, and the goal isn't gold or rare spawns which is nice for a change.

I feel like the spread of walker spawns is good. There are all kinds of areas - empty, light, moderate, and insane. That basically covers everything you would want. People need places to rest, to fight, and to get crazy. :)

The item spawns seem good to me too: spread out nicely and on decent timers. You really have to look around quite a bit to find everything and run through some very dense and dangerous spawn to get to most important items.

The weapons/fighting seems a little off to me. I got a bow and shot 10 arrows at a single zombiw without kiiing it. This with 120 Archery and 110 Tactics. It feels like if arrow spawns are going to be as sparse as they are then the bow should be doing a little better than that. With the Metal Pipe and 130 Mace Fighting/110 Tactics, it's not uncommon for me to whiff on 2 out of 3 swings. With the metal pipe, fighting 2 zombies I'm bound to get taken down 10-12% in health and have to rest right away or risk dying. The Katana was the only weapon I found that allowed me to drop zombies before they took a fair chunk of my health, and it is SO much better than all the other weapons that it feels uneven. Like either it should be weaker, or a lot harder to get to, or there should be a closer second "midrange" choice.

Thank you for this enjoyable event :)

[Annachie]

Have to say I kinda agree.

The metal pipe should be better than the baseball club and it's not, unless you want to try and stay that step away and use the range, which becomes hard with 2 walkers, let alone more.

I found the bow to be a great disapointment. People were either dropping it or giving it away.
As for the x-bow, I never found bolts for it.

I do like that you can leave now.

[+Nyx]

Hmm, perhaps the weapons need a bit of hit chance increase, then. Possibly some added arrow spawns with the bows as well. I'll look at that stuff sometime today.

[+Nyx]

Updates so far today:

- All bows/crossbows now spawn with a significantly larger number of projectiles (from 10-20 to 150-200).

- Increased number of spawners for projectiles across the island, changed them to spawn both bolts and arrows at the same time, and increased the number they will spawn (from 10-15 to 100-200).

- Drastically increased the respawn rate of all weapons that are not on stationary spawners. In turn, also drastically decreased the amount of time between location changes. These weapons will spawn every 20-30 minutes, but the spawner will move every 15-20 minutes.

- Added measures to prevent players entering already in angel form or other types of polymorph.

- All weapons (except the starter weapon) have had 40+ hit chance increase added to their stats.

- Greater heal potions are now available on the island.

- The exit gate has been changed. You will now approach the orange sparkles and say 'exit' to be moved out. There will be a 10 second delay before you are moved. This is to prevent players exploiting by fighting mobs near the gate then jumping through when their health is reaching the bite threshold to avoid getting a death count.

Hopefully these changes will allow for better fighting experiences in the event. Please test and reply with any findings


NOTE:
There is currently some sort of system error/bug that is causing some players' backpacks not to be restored as they exit. +V and I suspect this may be due to the various changes and additions made to the shard recently. We've notified +C of the matter and he'll get that fixed as soon as possible. In the mean time, if this happens to you, stay calm and send us a page. We 'have' your items, we just have to manually move them to you as it happens. We felt this was a better solution than simply closing the event until +C can fix the bug. If this happened to you before about 15:30 shard time today, your items may need to be manually recovered from a save by +C after the bug is fixed. Please send a page letting us know, so I can make a list for him.

[Pariah]

These tweaks might drive me back in! Agree with Un, in that once you've had Michonne's katana, Daryl's X-bow (and all other weps) seem pointless. As an example, I took down 700 walkers with the katana (often in 2 hits) before I died from the Time Warner Connection monster (the real killer in any apocalypse). At most I managed to amass about 65 x-bow bolts with Daryl's x-bow and I think I took down maybe ten walkers with that (took me a minute to realize not to use specials for more damage). Just a thought I had for next time, perhaps when you kill a walker, you get a bit of a rage boost a la Rick or Tyreese and these things could stack up to a cap for a very short period. Overall, this event is top notch though. Bravo for the creativity and the execution. I find myself going back in lieu of making my gold pile larger, which says a lot as I'm a gold farmer at heart. Amazing job!

[Ishamael]

Personally, I like the katana as it is, it is a rare wep to get, and you have to be crafty to get it. I noticed the Katana's crushing blow got tweaked to bleed attack, though the spell icon does not reflect this. This was a good move, because I was dropping walkers with 2 hits. Bleed makes it a slower takedown, and when they run they might just drop from bleed damage. I really want the crates to work though. It would be awesome if they blocked the walkers, but could be attacked and destroyed slowly by them. I don't think the game mechanics support that sort of thing though. Overall, I love the event, which is ironic because I am not a fan of the show. Personally, I think the whole "zombie apocalypse" scenario has been way overplayed in the last decade or so.

[GilliamQ]

This is a great idea but but i've had 3 kills and died twice instantly from the Bites! kinda annoying when at full health