Discussion: The Deadly Apocalypse is upon us!

Ya, who thought that putting Boss spawns in for sub-level 10 solo characters was a good idea?

Nothing quite like my level 4 Warshade spawning an orange con Vampire Lord.

That definitely needs to go. No bosses for solo characters.

I agree, the boss spawns are annoying to the extreme. I've been trying to get the 'Fashonable' badge today, and after over an hour of knocking on doors and flying back to the police drone, I've gotten only 3 costumes, and a 'trick'/'treat' ratio no better than 3-1. I decided to log off when I saw the zombie event start and noone was broadcasting looking for a team.

And now we have this emergency server maintenance to deal with a map issue. This means that I'll have at best 5 hours - barring mapservers, DC's and having to reboot my system because of V-Mem loss - to get a total of nearly 100 costumes across 7 toons.

If I had 5 days (I don't play 24/7) I might be able to get them. And as to the idea of teaming up with otherss, the problem with only the person clicking on the door getting the treat is why I really can't do so.

Oh. yeah! There's another suggestion. If possible, can costume credits be made to apply to the whole team, rather than just the one who clicks the door? That would remove the disincentive to team for Trick or Treat. As it is now, the soloer and the team member will, at best, spend the same amount of time clicking doors, but the team member will have had all of their defeat badges for a good while longer.

Well, just taking a look at my spreadsheet, I count 6 of my toons (3 of them on Infinity) who have gotten all five of the base Hallowe'en badges, but only the 'Clothes Horse' badge for costumes.

BTW, Steng arn't part of the base five badge counts, so why are they part of the ToT spawns? They might not be the most annoying of all the event spawn, but with near-perfect hit-ratios and large DoT, they are near the top of the list.

At the very least you should give us 1 more day to make up for today. Best case give us til after the weekend. Halloween 1 more week!!!!!

And it's been announced that the event is being extended 24 hours because of all the issues today.

[/e sarcasm]
Whoop-dee-doo.

I now have the Fashionable badge on 6 of my Infinity toons, but know that unless the devs change things for team costume drops, there's no bloody way my 2 defenders on that server will get it.

But after what happened tonight, I'm thinking of doing a 24-hour boycott. On two different toons, I knocked on one of the doors near the IP entrance in KR, with both times getting a single crone. Both time, I fly back to the far corner of the entrance behind the police drones - and both times she stops behind the street sign there, just out of range of the police drone.

When I get a 3- or 4-1 trick/treat ratio, and there's a only a 1-in-3 chance per treat of a costume, I'm a little put off.

I can understandthat they want to give us a chance to get the Hallowe'en salvage, while at the same time make it a challenge soas to disuade any farmers looking to get them to sell off for profit later. However, I have one villain that I was able to amass five full sets before she got the final costume badge.

Sorry, but I fully believe that there should be, if not an appology, at the very least an explination for this event. I've been online with this game since just after the 2nd anniversary, and this is the one special event that I have had the least fun with.

Your luck on the Treats is terrible. I wonder if there might be a quirk on Infinity. I wouldn't have believed it before the last couple of days, but when 3 out of 3 characters on Triumph were getting spawns at weird rates, I started to consider it. All of them were getting way more Witches than normal, enough that they all got that badge at around the same time as the ones for groups where you need 1/5 of their number. They also got an even lower Zombie spawn rate. It's a small sample size, but it was consistent for all 3 of them, spread out over 2 days.

Being that my characters that soloed the thing were averaging 4 full sets, I don't think that it was so much stopping farming as stopping mass clicking and ditching the mobs that caused the salvage to switch to drop-only. My guess is that the spawn rates for higher ranks were changed to prevent last year's Spirit famine, and if it was, it worked like a charm. To compare the drop rates, I took 8 characters through the event on Virtue in 2006, the first year with the salvage, ranging from solo to duo to full team, and got about 28 sets between them, or about an average of 3.5 sets each. This year's average was a little better than that, even.

Edit: Upon further review, I was looking at the wrong notes for my totals on Virtue from the first year of salvage. It turns out that the 8 of them collected more than 65 sets together, making that average closer to 8 sets per character, or about double the average that I got this year from a larger sample. I still have doubts about the desired effect being to reduce farming and selling for profit, though, since a lower amount will lead to shorter supply, and a likely increase in cost. I'm leaving my mistake unedited with this explanation.

To your last point I offer a counterpoint. I was on a GM team in Talos and Bricks on Saturday, teaming up with another team to hunt for Eochai to eventually find Jack. After something like 15 spawns of Eochai in Talos, we went over to Bricks thinking there was a better chance of Jack over there. Well over a dozen Eochai later, we eventually wittled down to where we could combine into one team. By the time 4:30 AM rolled around, I had to beg off and log.

We got a lot of comments in Broadcast along the lines you say, that if it wasn't Jack then they wern't interested. And as to others getting there to "...steal of of their cookies.", considering that you need 20 Unseelie for the Ghosttouched badge and there are usulally less then a dozen (if that) handing around the big guy at any one instance, I can see where someone who "Just needs one last one for the badge" swooping in to take it. But then, I've always looked down on that.

If it wern't for the fact that you need jack for that one badge, you woulnd't see half as much of those comments as you see now.

And yes, not everyone can have every badge on every toon. However, as I said, I want to try and get Fashionable for the 12 of them because it fits with the SG they're in. Also, it's the fact that it seems that these badges are much more tougher to get in this event then any of the other events. Case in point, I have every non-timetrial badge for the Winter Event, and it was all done with all 12 just in the last year of the event. Here, it's one hell of a slog to get even half the goodies.

(Not to mention that I have resigned myself to the fact that I only have one toon with all 6 banner badges, and I don't think I'll be able to get the last 2 on a second toon.)

I understand what you mean by cutting down on alts but if you really think of it there's alot things going against you if you have alt-itis. To me they WANT you to have alt-itis. This is just they way I feel and the way I see it.

Well, I tried going after the ToT defeat badges on a lvl12 SoA simply because of the extra day.

They utterly beat me down. Between the DoTs, the damage not really scaling appropriate to the level, and the bosses, I have zero desire to try again this year. It got to the point where I was only doing the doors in the vicinity of the Port Oakes hospital, since I knew I'd be ending up back there soon enough anyways.

For a Crone, I would end up going through an entire tray of greens and STILL be in the orange-red zone of health when she was defeated (if I got lucky).

Please fix that for next year.

I think it's important top remember that the devs have said on several occasions that the purpose of the game is not to just punish you for playing it, but to actually make you wish you'd never been born.

If you check out other MMO forums, you'll see that this is the standard MMO design scheme that is used accross the industry.

I resigned myself to not getting the banner badges. Too much work for the times I play.
Easy enough to find a team, but a single team couldn't do it.

A lot of my toons already had the costume badges from last year, which felt a whole lot easier to do then than now.