Winter Event 2013

[Unbeliever]

[quote="+Nyx"]Things to keep in mind with the quest system:
- Pets are disabled in all of these quest areas.[/quote]

There are definitely some mounts that can go into the easy quest area at any rate. I saw a few people riding through and got jelly, figured I'd hop on a mule, got denied entrance. So not all can go in, just a few.

[ahorton12]

what you probly saw was ethereal. not able to be used to fight.

[Gaara]

[quote="+Nyx"]I have added a wall between the res area and the santa quest area that will prevent the monsters from crossing into the safe zone. However, to prevent exploiting, there is a 10 second delay to leave the Santa area and enter the safe zone.[/quote]

Some of the monsters seem to spawn on the safe area and the teleport system on the wall isn't working sometimes: i teleport and get ported straight back in (sometimes even a few steps away from the wall), today i had to use the help request to get out...

Otherwise great job :)

[Yoda]

I love the subtile tweaking to make a great system even better

[Yoda]

and back to the reindeer hopefully to get my personalized stocking (great item btw)

[Alex]

Here is my second round of opinion and I think it would be good for others to comment:

With the increased spawn it seems the area is too overwhelming for a "mid-level player" quest. I am afraid that it was intended for many more players to enjoy than the few with sufficient relayers to handle the massive amount of mobs. I would like to see more players enjoy the very creative deco items created for this quest, and not just a few which is currently the case. I am having trouble with 600hp and 17 relayers handling the mobs since almost everywhere I am surrounded by over 10+ mobs. If I didnt have enough hp, I'd go down in a flash. You will also need a near end-game whirlwind weapon (preferably with life leech). I dont know the exact number but I am sure over 50% of the shard has 5 or less relayers.

I did notice increased drop rate from the bears, thank you for this.

I wanted to suggest possible tweaks to level the playing field and stimulate others to do the quest, which is the spirit of the quest.

- Would it be possible to seperate mobs slightly better, for example have all 4 spawn in different areas or have the first set spawn in first half of the quest map and the second set in the latter half of the map. Right now with every mob everywhere, it might get frustrating when looking for brutes and yetis and you find yourself surrounded by golems and polar bears
- I would reduce the spawn somewhat and possibly increase the partial or full respawn to ensure sufficient mobs are in the event area.
- Would it be possible to change the collection items from 20 to 10, but include like in the other quest, kill a minimum of 20 or 30 of each?
- EDIT: Also killed about 30 yetis and just 1 drop. Dont know what the drop rate for those are.
- EDIT: with diminished healing having mobs constantly poison you is challenging. You are poisoned over and over again before you can actually heal (when melee whirlwinding)

just some food for thought. Thanks for listening and the hard work with the coding, etc.

[Yoda]

I wanted to suggest possible tweaks to level the playing field and stimulate others to do the quest, which is the spirit of the quest.

- Would it be possible to seperate mobs slightly better, for example have all 4 spawn in different areas or have the first set spawn in first half of the quest map and the second set in the latter half of the map. Right now with every mob everywhere, it might get frustrating when looking for brutes and yetis and you find yourself surrounded by golems and polar bears
- I would reduce the spawn somewhat and possibly increase the partial or full respawn to ensure sufficient mobs are in the event area.
- Would it be possible to change the collection items from 20 to 10, but include like in the other quest, kill a minimum of 20 or 30 of each?

just some food for thought. Thanks for listening and the hard work with the coding, etc.

agree with all of the above 100%


as well this

With the increased spawn it seems the area is too overwhelming for a "mid-level player" quest. I am afraid that it was intended for many more players to enjoy than the few with sufficient relayers to handle the massive amount of mobs. I would like to see more players enjoy the very creative deco items created for this quest, and not just a few which is currently the case. I am having trouble with 600hp and 17 relayers

that states my opinion completely and why I objected to the diminished heal.. it really should never be about 'us' and by us I mean 17 relayers over 500hp.. trying to balance based on how we handle it will create stuff that alienates the midlevel and lower level player which is without a doubt the majority of the shard.. sure we may cry that its too easy.. well tell us to shuttup because we are being elitists..

[SOL]

Yah... when I read the description about hard/mid/easy I was thinking this meant hard (decked in relayers) mid (maybe a relayer or few, goc gear) easy (regular players but probably not newbs.) Ehhhh wrong!

Last year when I started the shard I made the mistake of venturing in there to play the easy quest as a regular new player... instant repeat dying and lost heart for the game. Quit for months! Just immediately felt like this was a shard way outta my level if that was considered easy lol. Wish there were more seasonal fun areas at a far easier level, anything to increase newb retention rate and even just the casual active players. Regardless of who's buying what, it's all of us actively bringing our interest and time that fuels the fire.

[Yoda]

thats how I expected people to feel about it.. I know I tried to help some guild members with artistic elf and it was really telling to see the effect of diminished heal on them.. when I bring that up for discussion for clarities sake I am not talking about me having issues with it.. I can handle it.. but an undergeared player its precisely what sol described

<QUOTESOL>Regardless of who's buying what, it's all of us actively bringing our interest and time that fuels the fire.

just love that sentance right there =) all hail community gaming

[Ornias]

Well if you guys didn't see my 30 to 50 death messages yesterday, that's about the number of times I died trying to do the easy quest. The mobs even for the easy quest are overwhelming, at least for me. I lost some gear and a level 9 darkened sky the first go at it. Didn't give up tho, when I finally collected the ore I was all phew done! Nope. =P Gotta kill at least 30 treants and those other things and collect their loot. Have 17 treants left and 18 of the other kind. Lol. I think I'm done although I would have loved to be able to get some awesome deco. Just not very good at this game lol. :)

[Styx]

Fantastic effort guys, I Can't help but feel the respawns are a bit.. Eurgh (for lack of a better word)

I'm all for challenges and what not, however there is nothing more irritating than slowly but surely clearing yourself an area in the corner to fight stuff piece by piece, maybe expecting a few extra mobs to spawn here and there and poof, the entire region is fully respawned before you had a chance to loot. Now i get the idea of this was to keep the area's populated during high demand, But that's a problem every game/content faces during release, it would have been fine after a few days when the novelty/repetitiveness starts to settle in =)

That has to be my only gripe with the entirety of these quests so far.

Again epic job non the less, so Thank you =)

[+Nyx]

Regarding the Santa and Artist Elf quests - I'll look at the mob numbers in a little bit. I vaguely remember bumping the mobs up / increasing their spawn time toward the end of last year's event since there was such a huge flush of players going in there to try and collect all the deco or get the earrings last-minute. I'll probably lower the overall numbers there. I'll also look at the spawn range to see if we can get them not spawning in the safe zone, but that's rather tricky for various confusing reasons.

Regarding the reindeer quest - All of the reindeer quest mobs have the same drop rate, so I'll look at the Yetis to see if there's some sort of error on them. It's also good to note that all quest items are temporary. Even the mobs themselves are temporary. They have a very similar poof time, but it's possible to kill a mob in the few minutes' window between when its quest item has decayed and the mob itself is set to despawn. I'll also look at changing one of the mobs who has poisoning. There will still be one, and still be a MS mob. I already removed the one that stunned after all the griping, so I'll have to think what to replace one of the poisoners with. I'll decrease the overall number of spawn, but after that I'm done modifying the spawn numbers. I do have dozens of other things to do on the shard (let alone in RL - Christmas isn't that far off after all!), so I can't be sitting at the winter event all day every day fiddling with the mob numbers.

Overall, though...I'm not exactly sure what all the flip-flopping is about. First y'all complain there aren't enough mobs, I add them, then y'all complain they respawn too slow, so I increase the spawn rate, and now you're complaining there are too many (I haven't changed the overall number of spawn since opening day). The mobs no longer stun, they have far less HP, far less strength (therefore don't hit as hard). I didn't intend this quest to be for those without gear (it *is* labeled "medium/hard" afterall), and I also didn't intend for it to be run on rails. Can the majority of the shard complete this quest easily? No. Did I want it that way? Yes. For those with little to no gear, there's a deco quest with 53 reward possibilities. I remember several of you saying last year that *that* quest was rather too easy and not at all a challenge. So what did I do this year? I came up with a repeatable quest that could challenge you.

Those of you with relayers have gotten so used to just running in and killing everything without really even having to pay attention, run away, or even think about what you're doing. It's sad and irritating for those of us spending days, weeks, even months (and in the case of the facets, years) developing content with an eye for being more than just another rails-ready thing for you all to do then complain you're bored because everything's too easy. I swear, there's absolutely no pleasing those of you with 6+ relayers. We do anything that accommodates everyone, you complain it's too easy and we cater to the newbs while doing nothing for the geared folks to 'use your gear'. Some of that complaining even gets rather bitter and snide, claiming that once Coli has gotten y'all to donate to get your relayers, then he (and by extension the rest of the staff) don't care to create anything that lets you use it and challenges you at that level, or some variation thereof. But when we do create something that is difficult, and challenges you in a real way, then all we hear is constant complaining it's too hard because, heaven forbid, you died several times with your relayers on. I see those of you being polite here in the thread but then being rather snide on the shard, or snottily griping that it's just for deco so why would it be so challenging and I just do not get it. Especially from those of you in the veteran discussion group who have repeatedly asked for rewards -other than gear- since you're -already- geared. You either want to be challenged or you don't. And if you don't like the challenge of this quest, why are you all so excited for +V's facet? Do you think he is somehow going to go easier on you than me?

I also don't think most of you really understand how the diminished healing works. It limits the number of times per second you can heal. It does not limit the -amount- you can heal. So, it doesn't affect lower players who don't yet have insta-heal (since they can't heal 4x per second in the first place). It only affects those of you who do. As I've explained previously, it was utilized in Umbris/Sgail so we could see how it works in a long-term sense, the function had just been added and was our only way of evening the playing field at the time (After all, we are developing on a game made in 1997, and are very limited by that, as well as what Coli can/is willing to code for us). Other than these areas, where has it been used? Only in these events or other similar ones. Temporary events that are open to everyone, geared or not. Would a player with less relayers have a harder time with these events even though their lack of insta-heal wouldn't be affected by the diminished healing? Absolutely. However, we have a fair portion of players who don't really strive to obtain relayers, but they want to participate in these sorts of events, and they wouldn't really be able to compete for the mobs with the rest of you, if you were all on your precious insta-heal rails scripts.

Yes, it's for deco, rather than some uber piece of gear. But if all of you geared folks are fussing this much over working hard for deco, you're not going to be able to utilize Touria -at all-. While +V has no plans to use heal diminishing in Touria except possibly in very specific areas, everything there will be so much more difficult than you have any concept of, the insta-heal won't be the "godmode" y'all are used to. Start getting used to working harder for things, folks. You asked for it, we're delivering it bit by bit.

Anyway, I'll look at the issues I mentioned above and make an announcement as well as a followup post when they're completed. Then, universe and complainers willing, I'll have a little time to finally get back to building that custom dungeon.

[Yoda]

thanks for the explanation on how the diminished heal works, that satisfies me completely as far as how it would impact a younger player which was my only concern

[Unbeliever]

I'd be happy to share my experience and observations on the event if it'll help staff or players. :)

I've only done the Artistic Elf event. Did it yesterday around 8PM Eastern U.S. time. Knowing nothing about it going in, I was able to finish it in relatively little time with little problem. Now let me qualify that statement: I feel that I'm almost as noob as it gets, despite having played here for four months already. I'm still wearing the exceptional platinum platemail suit that was given to me in my first two weeks and I don't even own a good weapon yet. I have a level 11 petrified yumi that I rarely use, preferring to use mules and cast healing spells and buffs/debuffs. I'm always carrying a spellbook and a shield. I actually manually click every spell icon and skill gump, refusing to set them to macros (except recall/sacred journey).

I was able to easily survive forays into and when required, kill, all mobs using a combination of only magic and barding skills. Provocation, Discordance, Peacemaking, FS, EB, and EQ for offensive. GH and Cure for defensive. I think I used bandaids once. I have 16 mana regen, non-med armor, 146 hit points, and from 54-70 in resists. With a bit of running around I was able to retrieve the needed items from corpses pretty easily. Never at any point went below 50% health and usually not that low except when stopping to loot.

I think 'easy' described this event very well. As a total noob, I was able to handle it without much fear of dying (except when the teleporters bounced me backwards into mobs I was trying to escape) but I had to stay moving and casting constantly in order to achieve my goals and keep from getting overwhelmed. I'd suggest to players that got repeat killed to not wade into mobs of monsters ten deep but use hit-and-run tactics, even if you don't care for them. If I can survive there, BELIEVE ME, almost anyone can. :D

[Yoda]

good feedback I would just like to say after doing it this evening... I am shocked befuddled and just kidding totally kidding.. I think it fits the bill perfectly for "easy" quest and think a bunch of of the newer players should go get some deco, totally in the spirit of the community and as it was designed a nice quest with 57 deco items for all..

try it again if you had a bad whomping experience previously.. I never had a problem with it.. but I am well.. me