2009 Halloween Event Bugs and Feedback

The Halloween Event has been updated for 2009. In addition to the Zombie Apocalypse and the normal City Zone Trick or Treating, City Zones can now host the “Deadly Apocalypse” Event.

Heroes and Villains who enable the “Zone Event” Channel on their Chat Tab will be alerted to the new Deadly Apocalypse Event. (Noted as “Supernatural activity”.

Deadly Apocalypse Event

The fog has rolled in, the sky has darkened, and something is not right. A howling wolf sounds in the night and players are alerted, via Global Alert, that the event is happening in a City Zone (Trial Zones, Hazard Zones, PvP Zones, and Co-Op zones do not have the event running in those zones).

• As the Halloween Deadly Apocalypse occurs in a zone, the sky changes to a different color.
• If the Deadly Apocalypse Event is not already running in a zone, Costume salvage redemption at Annah / Granny Beldam has a chance to trigger the Deadly Apocalypse event across all viable zones
• 4 Haunting Banners (destructible objects) appear across a zone, but are surrounded by a magical barrier (they appear on the MiniMap)
• Each Haunting Banner is protected by one of four Haunting Defenders/Ambushers who protect the magical barrier
• There is a chance that Elite Bosses appear as Defenders, depending on the size of the group
• Players must defeat Defenders (of each "type") before the magical barrier goes down and they can attack the Banner itself
• If all 4 Haunting Banners are destroyed before the timer runs out, an Aspect of the Sigil (Giant Monster) appears
• If all 4 Haunting Banners are not destroyed before the timer runs out, the Aspect of the Sigil does NOT spawn and the event cleans itself up
• If either condition is fulfilled, the event cleans itself up.

• Players who are within 250 feet of a Banner will have their User Interface (UI) taken over by the Event UI which shows the timer and their status
• If players travel outside of the radius of the Banner, the UI goes away
• UI displays a progress bar which shows how close they are to defeating the themed type of mob
• The status of each Haunting Banner is represented by an Icon in the Event UI. When all Banners appear in the zone, they are shown in the Event UI. Once a particular Banner is defeated (i.e. Transparent Terrors), its representative icon is “blacked out”.
• The Red Progress bar indicates how close the player is to bringing the Banner to “vulnerability”. As blue creeps in and takes over, that shows the player is making progress towards making the Banner vulnerable.
• If the Players do not manage to defeat all four Banners in time, the Giant Monster will not appear and the event will clean itself up. The Player will be alerted to the end of the event because the zone will revert to "normal" and a closing sound effect will sound.

• Dark Fiend - participate in defeat of Dark Fiend Banner
• Hell Hath No Fury - participate in defeat of Women Scorned Banner
• Terror - participate in defeat of the Transparent Terrors Banner
• Monster Masher - participate in defeat of the Monster Mayhem Banner
• Monstrous - participate in the defeat of the Aspect of the Sigil Giant Monster
• Hell and Back (Accolade) - receive Dark Fiend, Hell Hath No Fury, Terror, Monster Masher, and Monstrous badges to earn this Accolade.

Any word on if the timer has been changed at all? Like had a minute or two added to it?

Crap! I missed the last one to get together with friends and this time I have a job interview at 3:00. I guess I will get to the last hour or so of it anyway.

If it's like last time, it may run a little longer than planned

OK, I was having problems with the UI not appearing

Joined team
Headed for banner (actually headed for rest of team)
Got AE UI not event
Quit team
Got event UI
Joined a different team, kept event UI

At no point did the banners appear on my map, this was because I didn't have the "special" radio button checked on my minimap. Was that added with a default of unchecked at some point ?

It makes it a little trickier if Eochai is standing right on the banner location (KR NW loc)

Event is fun, but you do need a lot of people, suspect off peak on low pop servers no chance of completing. Failing by about 2 seconds to spawn the aspect with plenty of people rather frustrating.

The distance to the aspect could do with updating a touch faster.

The event UI was not appearing for the first time till a couple of seconds after I'd landed at a banner, not from 250 yards.

Well I only had time for one event (in Galaxy City). It went well and we did it with 12 people or so in the zone. I really appreciate/like the new timer/location after all banners are down...it at least gives you a general sense how far away you are from the Greater Aspect GM.

Dinner time now....

I did encounter one thing that can be classified as a bug.

I was on a team of people that started out in Atlas Park then moved on to Kings Row. I had lingered behind because a few of us were pestering a certain redname in local, so I was a little late to the party. While I was still in the other zone, someone else was invited to the team. I saw the message 'Someone has joined the team' but noticed my team window did not say the new name. Instead, for a minute or so the team window looked as if there were two people of the same name on the team. I mentioned it in team chat and was going to screenshot it when something refreshed and it updated. Still, it seems noteworthy.

At this point, my only change to the process would be the Greater Mystic Aspect distance counter updating faster. Everything else seems to be fine.

In No Particular Order:

The Beastly Power:
I attempted to take the Beastly reward power twice. Neither time did I receive the buff. This was on Hero side with a Scrapper; lv36, auto-SKed to 49. The buff did not appear in either the icon list beneath the HP bar or Combat Attributes.


New Spawn System At Banners
Mobs now appear in a puff of smoke within visible distance of a banner. Previously, they ran in from outside.

The new Spawn animation is pretty, but I find it tactically far less interesting than the old version. Previously, Mobs would come in large groups and sometimes came through one of several narrow choke points around the banner. You could be constantly moving from spot to spot as you tried to keep them clear. The Mobs also ran all the way in to the banner and were extremely likely to see you if you were in proximity. With the new Spawns, the Mobs will sometimes just stand there and do nothing while they wait for you to come kill them. The show up too far away to see you if you are on the opposite side of the Banner sigil.

This is boring when it happens. If spawning the Mobs at a distance was problematic for some reason, then it would be better to still give them a waypoint at the Banner so they run in as soon as they spawn.

More mechanically, the new spawning method is causing Mobs to appear inside buildings. I had this happen twice in Port Oaks. I was too "busy" to write a proper bug report at the time, but I gave the /loc coordinates for both locations to Ghost Falcon. Mobs spawned inside buildings could still fire through the walls; Players could only respond with AoEs.

For future content, I'd prefer to see a more tactically complex situation.


The Story
Story has been added for where the Banners came from. You can see it by clicking on the tiny "i" that appears in the Nav bar and scrolling all the way down to the bottom. This is not something that springs out at you and I don't know that I ever would have seen it if someone else hadn't told me it was there. This may be the only way it could have been added to an already "in the can" project (with a million other things going on), but for future content this is a "non-optimal" solution. I would not like to see it repeated.


Breaking Banner Immunity
That you have to defeat enemies at all of the banners before the red bar begins to descend is non-intuitive. I also didn't see it in the instruction window when I read through it. I'm afraid this will end up frustrating some players who gather in a large group and turtle together in the same place (standard Invasion tactics). From their perspective, they brought a large amount of firepower and several teams worth of players to the task; yet still accomplished nothing: obviously it takes even more effort than that. So some of them will conclude "why bother".

The idea of trying to get everyone separated a bit rather than in one big lag-ball of green numbers is a good idea. But if the players don't understand that's what you're trying to do, it could back-fire on you.


Minor Bug In Aspect GM Meter
I was looking at the Nav bar when the final Banner went down in a successful Event. When the range-to-Aspect meter appeared, it showed up for just a second as something like "aspect:distance". It then flashed over to being an actual number. I'm not even sure that's exactly what it said for that second, but it was certainly not a number. That's way to vague to put in a bug report, but I still wanted to mention the observation since it's a "new" bit of tech.

Not that it's likely this thread is being read anymore, but here's my one and only main issue with the Deadly Apocalypse event, and I hope this will be addressed next year: if only say, 1.5 to 2 teams worth of people bother to participate, it's nearly impossible to finish.

But wait, you say ... that' s by design! It's supposed to require big participation. Well yeah, great in theory. But when you live on a lower population server, two or three weeks into the event after all the badgers have long since finished their business, and the event happens a few dozen times a day, ten or fifteen IS big participation. There are two issues that need to be corrected for next year, though they're related:

1. The banners scale up too quickly for too few people. I like the "glyphs" idea making them tougher, but the ramp needs some adjusting. When you have the only dozen people who are interested hammering one banner, ignoring all mobs, and there's two or three glyphs active, you'll lose ground. It's frustrating and pointless.

2. Time; if you're going to keep the banner scaling as it is, then each banner defeated needs to add about two minutes to the event timer. This is especially true in zones like Atlas, where you tend to get lowbie participants who can't move quickly to the next banner across the zone. You can easily lose a critical minute or more just getting set up on the next one.

Funny thing is, all my badger characters already have the Halloween accolade. I don't really have a dog in this fight. I got them during the first two or three days, when tons of people joined in, banners died rapidly, and when you might actually miss a badge because an entirely different couple of teams took out a different banner across the zone. However, for the past several days I've been helping a friend who had to join in late. I've called in all available assistance from zone, globals, friends, and SGs. No luck. A few times we've managed to get to the final banner with only a minute or so left to finish it ... not nearly enough.

I really enjoy the event, but the scaling needs some adjustment for consideration to lower levels of crowd participation. I don't care if Hamidon takes 50 people to kill, but a badge-centric zone event like this, happening multiple times per day for a few weeks, needs to take these things into consideration.

Thanks,
FCM