2009 Halloween Event Post-Mortem

(With apologies to AmazingMOO for starting another thread, but I want to cover more than just the Deadly Apocalypse zone event.)

The 2009 Halloween Event ran from October 20th through November 11th, a total of 22 days. I informally polled about 30 people; of them, all but one thought that that was way too long, that it had gotten dull by the end of it. November 11th is also way, way too late to still be celebrating Halloween. If the event is to run anywhere near this length (and I can excuse that, since some people do have a lot of characters to badge), it really should start earlier. In my personal opinion, October 20th is also way too late to be starting it, given that Halloween decorations start to go up (at least in my neighborhood) at the beginning of the month.

I also noticed that all but one of the announced ending dates for the Halloween Event were for nights on which the servers were not scheduled to be rebooted. I've heard it claimed that events can be stopped, manually, without rebooting the server, but it has never happened in all my years of playing City of Heroes; events end when the server is rebooted. It would minimize confusion about when the events will stop if you just announce up front that they will end during server maintenance on a given date.

With those two issues in mind, I would like to strongly suggest that the 2010 Halloween start and end earlier, and both dates be set for Thursdays, the currently scheduled day of the week for server maintenance, that is to say, from October 14th through November 4th.

(Not go get ahead of myself or off-topic more than necessary, but the Winter Holiday event has the same problem. May I please request that it also start earlier than usual, as in US Thanksgiving or the day before, and end no later than the first maintenance period of January?)

As of 2009, the Halloween Event now consists of four zone events: Trick or Treating, Eochai and Jack in Irons, Zombie Apocalypses, and Deadly Apocalypses. Let me treat each one separately.

Trick or Treating 2009: Several changes were made, from past years.

Quite a few doors were disabled for Trick or Treating, compared to past years, but it wasn't entirely made clear whether or not some of them should have been disabled. For example, it's unsurprising that the inner (decorative) door in Studio B no longer works for trick or treating, and the data pillar in the AE buildings. I can sort of understand why the Arachnos office building interior mission-doors in Port Oakes and Cap au Diable don't work. But was it intentional that the doors inside the Golden Giza worked? Did anybody check any of the various "hotel lobbies" like the ones in Port Oakes and St. Martial, or the Crey building in Nerva?

Trick or Treating does work in PvP zones, and I'll be dipped if I understand why anybody would want it to. To me, it just invites griefing, by giving people a way to add XP debt to a fight that they're winning by knocking on a door next to where they're about to kill someone; at the very least, I'm pretty darned sure that nobody was Trick or Treating normally in those zones. Why enable it?

Treats now drop small inspirations instead of medium, drop costume-change temp powers as before (or a rock), and do not drop event salvage. This was presumably done to reduce the incentive for "fly-by knocking," tapping a door and flying off without fighting the mobs that spawn from a Trick. I hate it, because it turns the vast majority of "Treats" into no treat at all: a costume power you already have and a worthless inspiration. At the very least, I would prefer that they bring back the medium inspirations; they're not that valuable, and they would at least help replace the ones lost from fighting bosses solo (see Tricks, below). It also doesn't give feedback when it grants you a costume temp power if you already have the power. This is misleading, because at the very least, it resets the timer; granting the temp power, even if you already have it, should display a message in the Reward subchannel of the chatbox.

Tricks spawn one or more enemies, and taunts them onto the person who knocked; the taunt feature was added last year, again to discourage drive-by knocking. This year, defeated enemies from trick or treating were the only source of event salvage. Having the defeated enemies drop costume salvage was a good change for people who were trick or treating with teams and who have archetypes that can't absorb an alpha strike, like defenders and some corruptors; under previous rules, those people never got any event salvage unless their sturdier team-mates shared it with them.

It remains a problem, though, that solo trick or treating poses a really, really uncomfortably high probability of spawning two lieutenants, a boss, or worse, a lieutenant and a boss. This is especially rough in the pre-level-20 zones, where frankly, nobody but tankers, scrappers, brutes, masterminds, and some dominators have any chance of surviving such a spawn. This is even more true given how many of them do negative energy damage, which is almost completely unresistable for low level characters on average. Trick or treat enemies also almost all debuff accuracy or to-hit, which is rough on solo characters who don't yet have SOs or level 25+ IOs. Both Trick or Treat bosses also mez, and only 6 of the game's 14 archetypes have native mez protection, and only a few of them before level 16. I would like to strongly suggest that there be two spawn tables for Trick or Treating, one for pre-20 zones, and one for post-20 zones. The pre-20 spawn tables should have all the boss spawns removed, and the double-lieutenant spawns.

I also strongly suspect that you have an off-by-one indexing bug, new for this year, in your spawn table. There was one spawn type that, in past years, was the most common solo spawn from a Trick: 3 zombie minions. This year that was the rarest spawn. Unfortunately, the Dead Head badge assumes that zombies will be very common, and is set to require 75 zombies. On every character I badged with, solo or in teams, I had all 4 of the other badges half an hour before I managed to get Dead Head. Please double-check the code that picks randomly from that spawn table for indexing errors; if there is no bug and it is behaving as intended, please reduce the Dead Head badge from 75 zombies to 50.

(next: Eochai and Jack in Irons 2009)

Eochai and Jack in Irons 2009: No changes were made from past years, at least not that I could tell.

Almost continuously, all level 20+ zones spawn one of two giant monsters: Eochai, or Jack in Irons, with Eochai appearing two or three times more often than Jack in Irons. Each one has a very limited number of possible spawn points in each zone; each spawn point is decorated, when they appear, with a scattering of pumpkins on the ground. Each giant monster spawn is accompanied by a mix of minion, lieutenant, and boss Unseelie ghosts, of a fixed level for each zone. Defeat Eochai for one badge and 2 merits, defeat Jack for one badge and 2 merits, defeat 21 Unseelie, total, for the third badge.

My only comment on this is not a new one: it also makes exactly no sense to me for these to spawn in PvP zones. The spawn point at the memorial plaza in Siren's Call is especially problematic, since that's a popular spot for fighting and right on top of an exploration badge. Please remove the Halloween Event giant monster spawns from the PvP zones; nobody's fighting there normally, that's for sure.

(next: Zombie Apocalypse 2009)

Zombie Apocalypse 2009: Each zone spawns either a Zombie Apocalypse or a Deadly Apocalypse (below) on a recurring basis. There is also a chance of one or the other whenever someone turns in event salvage, year 'round; half of those will be in Paragon City (and environs) and the other half will be in the Rogue Isles. Zombies spawn using the same code as Rikti invasions; defeat a certain number of minions, lieutenants, and bosses, and one elite boss, for four badges.

As with Rikti invasions, it remains impossible for any team, or even multiple teams, to win the boss or elite boss badges without at least half of the team being level 30 or above. In theory, enemies are level-less; in practice, they're level 30 enemies, with level 30 enemy powers and resistances; you get (effectively) temporarily sidekicked up to level 30, but your powers don't get level 30 enhancements and you don't get any new powers. What this means in practice is that in Mercy Island in particular, which is a far out of the way zone never visited by high level characters (unlike Atlas Park), a Zombie Apocalypse is just one pointless team-wipe after another. This is actually slightly worse for zombies than it is for Rikti; even fewer low-level characters resist toxic damage than the mix of energy and lethal that make up most of the Rikti attacks.

At the midpoint of this year's event, because of complaints by heroes that it was taking them too long to get the badges, a decision was made to speed up the timer on apocalypses. I cannot say from my own experience what the effect of this decision was on heroes, but for villains, this decision was an unmitigated disaster. Because we have so few zones, this meant that at any given time at least one, usually two or three, zones were under some kind of attack, and during those attacks, all street-sweeping missions are impossible. Four times in three weeks, I got stuck waiting half an hour or more, while an event happened for which I could earn no more rewards, before I could continue on with my mission; one of those was during a strike force. Please revert this change.

(next and final: Deadly Apocalypse 2009)

Deadly Apocalypse 2009: This is new for 2009; there is a 25% chance that any apocalypse event will schedule this instead of zombies. Four banners appear, representing monsters, ghosts, fiends, and women; an odd selection, and one that provoked some discussion of misogyny on at least one of the global channels I'm in.

Players have 16 minutes to defeat all four banners. How to do so is, and I want to stress this, not documented anywhere in the game. A buried hint says to go talk to Anna or Granny Beldam; they do not have the instructions, either. That left players to find out the mechanism to defeat the banners by trial and error. This resulted in roughly half of the Deadly Apocalypses I participated in failing, and failing in a manner that generated long, loud, personal, and very hostile arguments over whose fault it was that the event failed; people who had guessed wrong or learned it wrong were consistently very angry that those of us who did know wouldn't do it their way, and insisting that if instead of half of us doing it right and half of us doing it wrong, if we had all done it wrong, it would have worked. Those arguments alone made me very tired of the Deadly Apocalypse long before the end of the event.

(For those who ignored it or who learned it wrong, the only way to unlock the banners is to defeat a specific number of enemies at all four of them simultaneously. If enemies are not being defeated at even one of the four, the unlock process will not even begin. No matter how fast you are defeating them at one, or even three, of them. However, once the banners are unlocked, it is essentially impossible for anything less than a full team of 8 to defeat a banner; they have too much regeneration, and will shrug off the total damage output of even three level 50 characters. So you must split up to unlock, then combine to defeat. Get it right, next year.)

16 minutes to defeat all four banners is very tight timing for an average team, especially in the lower level zones. In Mercy Island, where most team members have no travel powers and the island is divided in half by a high wall with only one door, it may actually be impossible without at least four team mates who have the Assemble the Team veteran reward. But I hesitate to suggest that you lengthen it, because 16 minutes is a long time to lock all NPCs out of the zone if nobody's fighting the banners, if we're just waiting for them to expire. I don't know what the best possible answer there is.

Once all four banners are down, a random Giant Monster with a special name appears somewhere in the zone, and everybody who was at the last banner to fall gets a distance indicator on their compass. Everybody needs to track down that monster FAST, even though it has an incredibly long timer on it, because the giant monster is, frankly, a punk, and dies in seconds to the first six or so people to show up. If nobody from your team got there, or if you get there too late to get a high enough share of the damage, your whole team misses the reward.

Speaking of rewards: there are no rewards other than normal XP and inf for unlocking the banners. Each banner gives a badge when defeated. Defeating the giant monster gives a badge, two merits, and one of four temp powers: two ultra-short-duration long-recharge mez powers, and two ultra-short-duration self-buff auto powers. By comparison to the temp powers from the Winter Event, thse are weaksauce, but at least they are new rewards.

Here's my post-mortem.

I like that you get Halloween costume salvage for defeating Trick mobs now. Thumbs up for that change.

I do NOT like that you can click a door at level 1, and get a dishpan hands Vampyri boss. The difficult is all sorts of screwy. However, I accept that some ATs can ToT fine in the lower levels, and some cannot.

Also, the timers seem to be off, or random, or something. Previously you could only click a door once a minute or so, right? This time, sometimes I could click the same door almost right after getting a Treat. Sometimes it would take 30 seconds between door clicks. Sometimes I couldn't click on -any- doors for over a minute.

good luck D.B.B.

Maybe it would work better to have the event start with a low frequency then ramp it up gradually.

Yeah, the event just keeps going and going. It's worse than the scheduled Rikti Invasions when they continuously bomb zones all weekend and you just get sick of it and everybody stops showing up.

Jack being rare is sort of irritating, but it was worth Merits working to spawn him at least. And they should, like, mention that he doesn't spawn in Cap redside...I spent with a team and we killed the pumpkin king many times without any of us realizing he doesn't pop in that zone. Only found that out later when I caught the badge in Sharks and someone said so. Why doesn't ol' Jack pop in lower level zones if the big pumpkin does? Seems stupidly arbitrary.

Also took awhile for people to stop arguing that you had to do the banners one-by-one. I left a few zones early in the event when nobody would listen and they all bunched up at a single banner instead of at all four--that banner event was going to succeed, why waste my time.

getting salvage from fighting makes sense to me. What did they do in the previous years to earn it? (never was subbed during the halloween event timeframe)...did people just Superspeed around clicking doors and ignoring spawns? The small insp treats seemed alright, I just kept eating them like candy.

Right, I did forget to mention that they changed the timers this year. This year's timers SEEMED to be: 10 seconds per door, can't use the same door for 60 seconds (not as sure of that one), no restriction on using a door someone else has just used. Does that match other peoples' experience? There also seemed to be what I was guessing was anti-macroing code, where sometimes the doors you'd been using would all just lock up on you until a longer timer had run out or until you left the area and clicked one new door.

Thanks for the write-up, Brad, well done.

--NT

Nice write up and some well thought out commentary. I don't agree with everything, but the broad strokes are solid.

Personally, I never experienced any difficulty understanding what to do during a Deadly Apocalypse. But then, we kick all sorts of *** on Infinity.

I got lots of Badge on lots of Characters, I personally think the extentions were neesary in light of the bugs that effected the events. I would argee on on great time in October than extending it into November. I did Trick or Treat in Saint Martia Hotel Lobbies.

Doom/Batman in 2012

The Resistance has boobs too, and better hair!

I love love the Halloween event. It is my favorite in-game event. But three weeks was too long. I spent the first two weeks cramming in as much of it as I could, and then spent the last week mostly doing normal mishes. The biggest pain for me was when I needed to street sweep in a certain zone and an event was happening and there were no normal spawns. I'd have joined in the event, just to pass the time, but by week three, not too many people were participating.

I agree on the door zombie spawns. For all my characters that were new to the event it was the last badge to earn. And after so much trick or treating I'd click on the door, look for any zombies and leave the rest behind.

I really liked the supernatural events. At first it was a pain because everyone was doing it so I had to run several of them on the same character to get all the badges. And being on the lighter populated servers I had to pretty much wait until the weekend to accomplish anything, especially red-side. But it was great to see the various teams form up and everyone pretty much cooperating.

Good analysis Brad. Also, completely correct on the Deadly Apocalypse not having any instructions on how to even start it in-game. As a new event it needed a little bit of a lead in (especially since it was an atypical event were "beat on your target till it dies" doesn't work).

The new ToT got old so fast and only led to entire teams camping doors, which was boring and got annoying when it was your mission door and you came out to be in the middle of a big mob of ToT monsters with a bunch of players blocking your way out.

I ended up getting much more salvage off the market than from doing ToT myself.

And now I see that Banners still happen randomly when somebody turns in costume salvage, oh joy.

I thought the event was a lot more fun than last year (with the Deadly Apocalypse added) and had a blast for the full time and was even a bit disappointed when it ended.

Any news on the winter event?

While I agree that the event went on for too long, it was due to some lost play time from some server rollbacks they had to do, so it made sense. I mean, they could've simply ended it on time anyway, but then we'd be hearing about people who lost precious Halloween time due to the game being down, so they went the safe route.

On the whole, I really liked it. The new zone event has laid down some interesting new tech for the game, which I hope is the lead in to more interesting zone events overall.

I wouldn't have minded the length of the Halloween event at all if I had something to keep me going during the darkness. If the ToT spawns had been the same as the previous years, I would have stuck with it to try to get all the ToT badges for all my characters. But the new spawns burned me out.