Winter Event Test ~ Official Feedback thread

Interesting winter event. It appeared as if those in the winter zone that timed out were kicked out to random spots instead of back to where we started.

One bug that I /bugged in game, with the luge run in the chalet area: I had Ninja Run and Sprint on, and at the left fork that goes through a portal to the top of the next section, you appear there backwards, facing up the slope. I was also zoomed in to first person view, and had to turn around and use my mouse wheel to get back to normal.

Still, that combination, and I missed silver by one second, so it looks decent for the newer players to be able to get those couple and not have to have SB/inertial Reduction except to get gold, once they're a bit familiar with the run.

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I just ran the baby new year mission.

Upon rescuing the BNY I got the reward message with the candy cane option. The problem is the there was a red notification telling me I didn't have enough salvage space to receive the reward. This did not go away till I had deleted 5 pieces of salvage from my inventory.

To my knowledge invention salvage and event salvage were supposed to be in separate salvage areas for personal storage and the amount of storage is 999 pieces of any particular type.

At the very least this is going to make it very hard to buy the respec.

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Was in a zone when it closed - appeared floating in air at 2281.8 16.6 1395.3 in Steel Canyon (the city zone I entered event from). FYI - those coords are outside the war walls for Steel.

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Just done a second run, and this time, and the team fell through the map again when the timer ran down - I ended up at 2399.0 -2000.0 1030.3

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@Golden Girl

City of Heroes comics and artwork

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All that crap is grey to me, no XP --- Positron

I was also kicked out of the second Winter Realm (Which I was late getting to, I didn't realize it was there to go to.) and ended up almost a mile west of the hospital in SC. My loc was around 2138.1 930.0 1707.5, although I had flown upward for a while before getting that information.

I agree about the lack of presents. There were a lot of heroes in Steel getting them, but they still seemed rather sparse.

And like Dark Ether, when going through the portal on the luge my facing was random. First time through I was facing to the right, in first person, trying to run across the slope, second time I was running uphill toward the portal (Note: My avatar was running up slope toward me. My POV was looking past the portal location, seeing her run at me.) and the last time I came through looking to the left and trying to run across the slope.

Using Walk on the slopes looks...weird. First the walk animation was going very quickly, then it would transition to the sliding animation. That seemed to alternate when ever I did a jump or used the portal. And my time Walking down the Luge was faster than my time flying it. (Neither fast enough for a medal though.) I don't have the Natural pack, so couldn't check out Ninja Run.

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Justice Blues, Tech/Tank, Inv/SS
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Fighting The Future Trilogy
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Took down another Lord Winter with the same bug returning to Steel. Loc 2318.3 3.6 1517.1
A third run spit me out at the following loc: 2624.8 -165.2 1671.1
Another run, location: 2383.9 8.7 1389.6

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By the way, this new idea of a single faction or co-op raid map that's triggered from something done in a normal zone is totally awesome
It could be combined with the Halloween Banner tech, maybe - like for the Steel Canyon fires - there could be several tasks that have to completed at once, like defend firemen from the Hellions, or destroy Hellion fuel supplies, that would work like the Banners - and once that was done, a multi-team instance of the burning building would trigger, and inside would be some kind of fire demon that the Hellions were trying to summon, which is why they were setting the place on fire in the first place - plus there might be NPCs to rescue, and maybe multiple fires and/or summoning wards to be dealt with before the demon could be attacked.

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@Golden Girl

City of Heroes comics and artwork

Third run through Lord Winter's realm, and this time my location under the map when the timer ran down was: 2421.3 -2000.0 1351.3

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@Golden Girl

City of Heroes comics and artwork

Once kicked from the Winter Realm I reappear at loc: -2084.5 0.0 1501.6

I was flying at the time so that is my exact location upon zoning, it was funny to watch all the non-fliers fall to their (near) death. That's what they get for being Aerial Challenged !

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Quick observations about the event:

- Exit from WL Realm not immediately obvious.

- Once the WL Realm kicks you to your zone, you're place off the map. My best guess of why this is happening: Your location is saved mid-teleport-off-the-map somehow, corrupting it.

- Occasional waves of fog in the WL realm seem to be hitting players with lower-end hardware worse than ones with higher-end hardware, making it more difficult for them to spot the secondary monsters.

- Present "preparation timer" causes a massive gathering of players running toggles. This may cause players with lower-end hardware/connections to suffer greatly, or be unable or unwilling to participate and risk a crash.

- Presents seem to be spawning strangely-leveled mobs.

- If a second instance of the WL Realm spawns, it produces an error: "Unknown command: enterscriptdoor

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Manga @ Triumph
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boot bug at end of successful completion ended up underneath steel loc 2451.2, -2000.0, 1354.9

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The powergamer in me says 8 merits and 20 canes still isn't enough for an event that requires such coordination and population - I'm afraid it'll turn into something like the Deadly Apocalypse event where people will only run it for badges for the first week or so of the event and then it'll be damn near impossible to find a team for.

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My experience: I heard about the test on the forums, so I logged in to the test server. I went back to the forums to get the name of the global channel. In the global channel, I learned that I should be in Steel. All of that is just test server stuff.

In Steel, I found presents, opened them, smashed frostlings, just like last year. They were all gray to me, so it got boring quickly. On the live servers I would probably have gone to a level appropriate zone, or just left the spawns behind me like litter.

After a while I got tired of trying to figure out what else I was supposed to be doing so I asked on broadcast. A few kind people pointed out that blue circle on the map. There are so many icons on the map these days that it didn't really stand out even when I was looking for it. Or maybe it hadn't been there before? I'm really not sure. Everyone else somehow knew when the door would open or for how long or something. I'm not sure how they could tell.

I found the big present. I had no idea what it was or what I was supposed to do about it, so I clicked on it. Of course, that zoned me into the Winter Lord's domain.

I wasn't sure what we were supposed to do, but everyone else was clobbering a giant snowman, so I did that too. After a while, someone said "he's phased, find the guardian!" I wasn't sure what they were talking about. Then I noticed the "unaffected" message coming up, and the lack of orange or gray numbers over his head. I looked around for this "guardian" and saw a crowd of heroes beating up another giant snowman, so I pitched in.

We switched targets a few times after that. I was always following the crowd. Eventually the Winter Lord went down. I didn't get any merits or badges that I noticed. I wasn't even sure if we were done. A bit anti-climactic. I guess some people left, but I hung around beating up snowmen. They got pretty scarce after a while.

I could see the timer counting down. We got a couple of warning messages, then we were all booted out. I dropped like a rock for several seconds, then hit bottom in a patch of blue nothing below and way off to the side of Steel Canyon. I typed /loc on my way down and got this:

2321.9 -2000.0 1410.9

Overall it was less confusing than the banner event. It was fun, but not fun enough to do multiple times unless I was with a team of people I enjoyed teaming with. If the rewards are high, that might get me to do it too.

Oh, and at the end I had 32 candy canes, a temp snow beast power, a mystery gift, and half a dozen present inspirations. Turns out I already had 9999 merits, so I guess I couldn't gain any more. I was already level 50, so no xp. I didn't notice the inf.

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Avatar: "Cheeky Jack O Lantern" by dimarie

Just done a 4th run - the under map location this time was 2222.1 -2000.0 1411.9

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@Golden Girl

City of Heroes comics and artwork

Fun event! I was booted out of the zone, in flight, and ended up under Steel at 2305.0 38.1 1363.9

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After 4 runs at it this evening, here's my feedback:

First Run: The Run with GF and villians.
This was the only run in which we spawned two instances of Lord Winter's Realm. After defeating Lord Winter in the first instance many people were able to use the cave portal to travel to the second and defeat Lord Winter again, reaping additional awards.

Through some GM wizardry Ghost Falcon ensured that red and blueside defeated the Winter Lord in quick succession. This was the only instance that we created out of four that had heroes and villains in the same zone. There didn't seem to be any trouble from what I saw, but there was little time to test and I had no pets.

Second and Third Runs:
Nothing too eventful with these runs. I would estimate that we had at least one full team and a team of 4-5. The "resistance equalizing" seems to have made it easier for smaller teams. We didn't have nearly as much as trouble as we experienced in the first test.

Fourth Run: Did we break?
During the fourth run Lord Winter did not enter his phased state at 50% health (maybe it was 75%). He did summon the Guardian. I think we *might have* held him, preventing him from activating his phase state. Just a guess though. In any case, he didn't phase.

Speaking of phase, even though many of us knew how the Winter Lord works and broadcasted his phase states many players continued to attack him. These are players at least knowledgeable enough to access the test server. I forsee some frustration on the live servers.

I'll edit for more impressions later.

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I arrived towards the end of the test period. Logged in at first with a lvl 43 Scrapper, and had no real problems defeating the Lord/Winter/Winter/Lords as part of team of mostly lvl 50's, with several teams in the zone. Then I switched to Redside on a lvl 14 Fire/Kin Corruptor, and had no fun at all. I think there was either one or two full-up teams of lvl 50's already there, nobody had room for a sidekick spot. I generally only got off a shot or two before dying, and hence spent most of the battle repeatedly running back from the field hospital. Fortunately I had help from Ninja Running with that part.
It seemed like the Winter Lords were summoning actual lvl 50 Frostlings, not GM-coded ones. I couldn't get anywhere near them with a lvl 14.

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By the way, Ghost Falcon has confirmed that spawning the Winter Lord can be done solo - he's spawned after a certain number of snowmen are defeated, regardless of team size.

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@Golden Girl

City of Heroes comics and artwork

BUG: On the Expert Ski Slope (half-pipe), the teleporter is still sending you to the top of the track facing sideways.

BUG: I forgot to check and the event is over, but, the Naughty and Nice Halos were supposed to be color tintable, but were not. Is that being worked on?



This just in: Ninja Run *very* helpful for ski badges.

With Sprint+NR, I got the Bronze badge in my first downhill run and Silver in my second. About 10 tries later I got the Gold (with two times being less than a second from Gold).

On the half-pipe ice course (toboggan/bobsleigh/skelton/luge), I only had time for one run, but was 8 seconds away from gold. I'm sure I can shave off that time for the gold. Most importantly, I didn't fall off that course!

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Speeding Through New DA Repeatables || Spreadsheet o' Enhancements || Zombie Skins: better skins for these forums || Guide to Guides

I began testing redside in Cap Au Diable. This is what I found;

On Test Server at least, and probably on low pop Live servers, meeting the criteria to spawn the Winter Lord seemed to take a very long time. The group rose from solo to 8 players over the course of 30 minutes before the Winter Lord was spotted. I believe we were the only team on at the time. This was ... boring.

Once the Winter Lord was up and we were informed of his location we took to him with a vengence and promptly were looking at the Big Present, (it's a bike isn't it? C'mon you can tell me.) I clicked it immediately, like you do when you don't know any better, and then noticed the Preparation Timer. We were all there, so Preparation Time wasn't necessary, but I understand it's there to allow word to go out and other teams to arrive. This may never happen redside. We waited. Did you know that 180 seconds seems like a really long time sometimes?

When the Preparation Timer was over we zoned into the Winter wonderland and flew/hovered/ran/jumped straight to Lord Winter. A note on his appearance, could he not at least have a crown or something? We began the assault and I noticed that I was constantly getting Held, something I don't usually experience on this toon anymore. The Northern Lights were overwhelming in number, hard to target and we obviously had to eliminate them as best we could. I broke off to reduce their numbers while the rest of the team continued the assault.

The new Winter Guardian mechanic, was a complete surprise, and I don't mean that in a good way. I was mashing away on Lord Winter for a bit, with all the effects going off and trying to stay alive between being perma-held and detoggled, I hadn't noticed the lack of damage being done to LW. The flashed up messages I was too busy to read, and it was only when a fellow team-mate informed me that I knew what we had to do.

By this stage it was too late for us to defeat Lord Winter before the timer ran out. We tried, we failed.

Suggestions for improvement:

• If it isn't already, make the number of Frostlings defeats required to summon the Winter Lord a proportion of total zone population at the time. Obviously there would be a minimum number also, this should be quite low. This would mean that on low pop servers or at low pop times-of-day it wouldn't take too long to spawn the Winter Lord.
• Lower the Preparation Timer to 2 minutes. Didn't really need the time alotted.
• Lower the number of Northern Lights. There was a real swarm of them for a single team of 8. They were really hard to target using the click method, and Tabbing around I more often than not got a Frostie off in the distance instead of the Northern Light I was right next to.
• I don't know how you can, but the warning about Lord Winter being unaffected until the summoned Winter Guardian is defeated needs to be made clearer. Perhaps a zone-in popup dialog box outlining what's required would do it. With all the effects going off I didn't notice a thing, then turned around to see the Winter Guardian behind me.

Okay, this is already too long, essentially, this event looks fun, but is too hard! Mwah.

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K5K - The Killbot 5000
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Just finished 3 runs, two blue, one red.

Blueside -

Run 1 - Level 25 Blaster (Energy/MM). I had read about what to do on the forums, so I just opened presents until a WL spawned (by another team). Raced to the spawn point, got a team invite, killed WL. Hit the present, zoned to snowy Croatoa, nothing spectacular - again, because I got the briefing from the forums. Zoned out using the portal, back to SC no problem.

Run 2 - I ran a level 16 Psi/MM Blaster, SSK on a team led by a lvl 50. Our team was 5-6, there were at least 2-3 other teams in zone on the event. Someone spawned a WL, took him down, zone to snowy Croatoa. Once there, we were able to take down LW to75%, got the dialog about the WG, found the WG & took him down - same at 50% & 25%. After the first run, I was looking for a specific visual clue about the WG and was able to spot him as a silhouette against the background. I was also able to see a visual clue that LW was phased, but it was much more subtle than WG coming in.

We stuck around to test the kick bug, and I was kicked to under the map. LOC 2549.3 -2000.0 1620.6 (after falling, which took me by surprise and was taken down to about 1 HP, unlike falling in Ouro). I started flying towards the Perez Park gate and was popped back into Steel before I got there. Final LOC 4161 0.0 1128.0.

Run 3 - Redside. I started on a level 25 Stalker, but since about half the presents I found were on rooftops in Cap, and the Frostlings run away down to the street, that was no fun, so I switched to a level 39 Corr (Fire/Therm). It was hard to gather a team, so we were not clear whether we needed a full team to spawn the WL. It did finally happen once we had a full team of 8 (almost immediately after getting member #8).

Team makeup - Leader was a lvl 50 Brute. We also had 2 Doms, 3 Corrs, and a second Brute. One Corr was/Kin, I was /Therm, so a few buffs & heals, but not many. This was the same team Killbot is talking about - he was the level 50 Brute Leader.
Taking down WL wasn't a cakewalk, but not too hard.

Once in snowy Croatoa, we had a lot of problems. It seemed like we were almost continually Held and there wasn't anything we had to break that. Domination didn't break it even (per one team mate). I hadn't noticed this as much on the 2 blueside runs because I was running a Blaster who could still blast due to Defiance. Nobody on the redside has that ability, so when the massive Holds went off, our team did ZERO damage for several seconds at a time(and they seemed like minutes). It took us almost 5 minutes before I could even see LW's health bar budge. It was more like 10 minutes before we brought him down far enough to call a WG.

We were all kicked from the zone while fighting that first WG. At least we weren't kicked off the map,we all zoned into Cap just fine.

Overall comments - blueside it was fine. Not enough explanations, but we could get teams to do what needed to be done. The presents seemed a bit sparse and a couple of locations I remembered from last year didn't have a present every time I flew by (but maybe I was beaten to them).

Redside - it will be very difficult for villains to complete this for a couple of reasons:

1 - lower populations will make it harder to get the 2-3 teams required to complete all the tasks.

2 - the massive mag holds will paralyze teams with almost no one able to continue to do damage during the holds - no Defiance, no Clear Mind (question - does CM break these holds? I wasn't on a team with an Emp to see). Even the level 50 Brute was routinely getting held. Once Held, we died quickly.

I doubt I will even do this event more than once on my badging Villain - and only because she is the Fire/Therm Corr I tested with. Presents on rooftops mean that my meleers will not be hunting them. This particular Corr has a couple of tools that *might* help accomplish bringing LW down.

We need lots & lots more explanations about what people are to do. It was not intuitive why the big present didn't do anything right away when clicked - I can see folks wandering off before they can zone. We lost the dialog about summoning the Guardians, and many missed the fact that LW had phased and wasn't taking damage because of all the flashing and noise involved in any GM fight. The Northern Lights were another wrinkle (I still don't completely understand what's the deal with them) we couldn't handle redside - someone must have know what to do blueside because I didn't notice them as much there.

Rename Lord Winter, please? While typing this up, I was having trouble keeping my abbreviations straight, it's very confusing. Someone on Test tonight suggested "Fimbulwinter" which is a great idea. (Thanks Muiramir).

Those are first impressions. I'm sure that I will recall other details after reading what others have to say.

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Altoholic - but a Blaster at Heart!

Originally Posted by SpyralPegacyon

"You gave us a world where we could fly. I can't thank you enough for that."

As noted during the event, my original attempts to enter Lord Winter's Realm 2 failed. However, I did NOT get spawned under the map in the later runs so perhaps that was a blueside only problem. Getting a Winter Lord to even spawn was a major headache redside after the first run. Might also be good to do an Event announcement when one spawns so it is more obvious to everyone in the zone.

While next to nobody has Dimension Shift, it's nice that you can use it to get the Northen Lights out of your hair for a few seconds. The debuffs on the Northen Lights scare me almost as much as Lord Winter himself. It's depresingly easy to get killed simply by trying to get from the hospital back to your team. Lord Winter may need tweaks to his hold magnitude because it could not be broken by Domination and the hold was an AOE. If the hold mag has to stay, it might be less maddening as ST with high accuracy. It might be a good idea to place the phasing warning from LW in the Event HUD itself so it won't get lost amongst all the battle text.

LW seems to have annoying scaling issues that will make this a nightmare for people redside and/or on smaller servers. One idea is to weaken LW's strength but as a tradeoff, limit the maximum number of people per instance to around 24 or so players. This way it can be planned for how his absolute maximum and minimum strength will be for teams. It should also help reduce lag if the instances are smaller.

LW looks dull. Almost anything to make him stand out from his minions is a plus. Arguably, you could use a Huge body type with a white/pale blue suit and top hat (Wedding Pack tuxedo + Magic Pack skull & tophat combo? maybe even with Cyborg pack laser eyes) to have someone who looks like, well... he would lord over winter instead of just another snowman.

An NPC somewhere needs to have info about this event to help clear up the confusion for players who weren't on Test.

Due to difficulty getting players redside an interesting idea arose. Why not allow present spawning in RWZ and Cimerora? The coop nature of the event allows people to override some of the problems of lower populations.

EDIT
My first two times were on a lvl 23 Elec/Dark Stalker and the third was on a lvl 18 Grav/Earth Dominator. I was on Killbot's team when it took forever and a day to spawn a WL and I was getting a large number of Frostling spawns.

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Further thoughts, in no particular order:

* The potential co-op nature of it could be fun, but I'm not sure how often that's going to actually happen; even with Ghost Falcon threatening to throw people out of GR Beta if they didn't toe the line and a server-wide beta channel, it was a hassle getting Blue side and Red side lined up. We *almost* got another one near the end, but blue side ran out of time while red side was still waiting for their package to reach its expiration date.

* Lord Winter is not terribly interesting as a name, and too confusingly similar to the name of the Winter Lords also part of the event. Suggestion: Rename him to Fimbulwinter (or one of it's alternate spellings), the fearsome great 3 years of winter that precedes Ragnarok. Appropriate for the ruler of an always-snow realm and the event style in general IMO.

* Even with all the prompts and with some of us explaining based on last test's knowledge, people were still just banging keys at Lord Winter wondering why his HP wasn't dropping. I really, really hate to say this, but I think it needs to be more obvious. Or I need to write a macro that explains this thing and expect to push it nearly as often as my attacks :/

* Confirmation from Ghost Falcon: Spawning a Winter Lord, and thence a gate box when defeated, is based entirely on frostlings defeated in the zone. Neither team size nor time taken matters, so eventually even a solo person can spawn one (but it will probably take them quite a while). Opening boxes and running off accomplishes *nothing* toward spawning a Winter Lord, you have to defeat the frostlings spawned. There is supposedly no decay on the frostling count, so it will accumulate gradually with time and persistence. (Well, it's likely that server reboot resets the count.) Please spread the word on this, as it's radically different than last year. And it might not be a bad idea for the official event pop-up to specifically refer to "defeating frostlings" in some fashion.

* I'm still worried that people will slog through this in the first week, and after that it will be extremely difficult to get teams on low-population servers and sides. One team of 8 really isn't enough (it's probably possible, but random pickup of 8 isn't likely to do it). Due to the timeout on the box-entry, it's going to be much harder to get enough folks into the zone than it was for Halloween, and it takes no less (possibly more) people to win. Additionally, it's back-loaded rewards, so you can easily waste a half hour in a failed attempt and get nearly nothing (the 2 merits for the gate-guardian Winter Lord, and maybe the odd cane or two).

Suggestion: let the gate present stay open longer. This increases the odds that people will be able to show up and take part. Other fixes would be more helpful, but I'm not sure what can be done at this late date, and this would at least improve our chances of collecting enough people to attempt the meat of the event.

* The resistance reduction seemed to be helpful, both in real terms and in no longer discouraging certain power sets from participating at all.

* Having the map with the large chunk of frozen river on it show up more often would be nice, as it's IMO the most fun to play with after you've won (or if you've given up).

* On all but the largest teams, the Northern Lights were a real problem. On the giant everyone attacks, they aren't really relevant; but when you've only got a team or so in the zone, they're really painful.

* Applying GM / Rikti Invasion scaling to *all* the realm's monsters would be a really good idea, as currently it seemed like they weren't. A lower level person, or a team that gets level-dropped due to the leader disconnecting, can get ripped apart by the "small stuff".

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