Winter Event 2009 Sneak Preview on the Live Servers!

Pretty Similar to DE's post above. We had a full team of 8 and were doing pretty well until the Northern Lights just got too bad. We had people getting sent to the hospital and killed inside the hospital just as soon as they stood back up.

THe NL's were like a Nictus Army only much, much worse. You cannot target them or defeat/ disable them. At least it didn't seem like you could.

Not sure I'll bother trying this again. There's fun and then there's annoyance.

Was in on that back-to-back session on Triumph that Catwhoorg mentions and a couple failed attempts elsewhere including a single redside team attempt on Protector as that was all we could muster.

A few bits of feedback on the event:

• Map Icon for The Winter Lord Present/Portal - a lot of folks had trouble differentiating this from neighborhood markers, especially on crowded maps. Lead to team confusion for latecomers in team chat trying to sort out how to get in, where on the map it was, etc. while the rest of the team is experiencing event driven chat lag and are otherwise distracted by combat. Simple solution that may actually be easy to implement: Make the present marker a snowflake about the size of mission markers. Maybe even make it cycle colors the same way that the troll rave and Steel Canyon arson markers do. Assuming that is just a simple couple hour bit of production and asset swap, I'd imagine that problem could be fixed before the event goes fully live for real.
  
• Completability - wow. as Catwhoorg above points out, with 3+ concentrated teams (probably most folks front line characters considering this was the first night), Lord Winter and his Guardians fell in about 1/3 to 1/2 the clock timer. But then I jump over to Protector, a notoriously low population server, especially redside (sorry drunk server, love you, and you are my second home--but you are often more empty than other places ). Considering the enthusiasm and response on Triumph and what /gfriends were saying about their home servers, I was shocked that THIS was the sneak peek on Protector. It feels like without some sort of regen scalability based on how many folks are in zone, so it is AT LEAST completable by smaller groups (though still harder than 3 teams), the devs are setting us up for some bad self sustaining feedback loops with the dynamics of these events. I imagine it is too late to do anything about it this year, but definitely something y'all should consider for future events and next year's take on this (and the Deadly Apocalypse).
  
• Map - I understand the need to recycle assets and maybe I'm missing something about the mythos of this event, but why are there delapidated shacks all around Lord Winter's realm? I honestly was hoping for a stark arctic pink sky and all of us to be facing Lord Winter on some sort of mile high glacier of almost blinding snowpack with hints of glacial blue shining through here and there. This just felt like... I dunno... Croatoa remixed. Again, I realize, FAR too late to do much about this one. But the aesthetics of the zone really could use some attention. At least crank up the light so it feels like a stark cold winter morning, not foggy dusk.

I noticed that some of the Winter Horde in the BNY mission are normal ones and some are level-less. That's kind of strange. The ones that are level-less don't count toward the Cold Warrior badge, this is both the ones in the BNY mission and the ones in Lord Winter's Realm.

Here's the list of the Candy Creeper's wares as seen by a brand new level 1 hero:

Two attempts, both successful. But the lower level group in Steel Canyon finished with only about a minute or less to spare. Higher level group in PI had no problems, over 5 minutes left when done.

I don't have any major problems with it, it's a mini raid event. It doesn't seem too hard if you have a good mix of people and enough people present. The rewards seem about right too.

That's just it, "The right mix of people."

I'm starting to wonder if someone has decided that "Well, noone is doing Reichman TF, so let's make every special GM to his streangth and toughness until they start playing him."???

Exemplar didn't affect it in past years.

Just had something odd happen, don't know if this is a bug or not:

In Port Oaks, on Victory server. Winter Lord appeared, nobody else around to fight it. Found it hanging out in the piers near the Arena. Just for laughs, I decided to lure it into the drones. That worked, and they killed it.

Then, the large present/portal to Lord Winter's realm opened. I went through and ran around (did not try to take Lord Winter by myself). I did NOT think that beating the WL with a drone should have triggered the portal- I was only kidding around. Is this a bug?

For that matter, I thought he was not supposed to spawn in Port Oaks at all?

As far as the Northern Lights being "unbeatable"; someone said in game that they phased sometime. That might be why some people thought they are indestructible. I know that I certainly killed some.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Avatea The Winter Lord will not spawn in Mercy Island and Port Oakes.

I don't know if this is significant, but this evening on Pinnacle the Winter Lord DID appear in Port Oakes at least once, and did spawn a Special Present when we beat him.

My full 8-people team was about to start a Tarikoss SF in Cap au Diable Defiant when we read that there was a big pressie there, we touched it and were sent to the LW Realm, where there were more people gathering for fighting him. He went down in just a few minutes, and we get both merits and canes, BUT no badge at all. It was pretty weird, as NONE of the team got it, but we thought that it was related to the fact that it was a "teaser" of the real Event, but some friends of mine did earn the badge in Union, that's when I petitioned.

Anyone can share the "spoils" of defeating LW, but you traditionally have to do at least 10% of the damage to merit a badge.

Went through it twice last night on freedom, successful both times.

Chatting with a few players after the 2nd run, we were in agreement that it was fun, different from the banner event, but shared the same concern that it may suffer the same fate as the banners. That is, it will frustrate people attempting it later on in the event cycle once enough toons are badged out. Hopefully the merit reward incentivizes people to return to it.

Other than that, I bugged the fact that the message "Winter Lord drops a present" doesn't seem to show up in any of the chat channels (that i had on anyway) and to check it. It jsut blew by so fast the first time I got it, and occured in Skyway, that I was left a bit confused before hopping to Talos where I could see it in action with more people.

Finally, one thing that may be working as intended, was the gift-clicking. High levels can click on gifts in lower level zones which, if they do spawn enemies, can be way below level and make for an easy candy cane hunt. Not sure if you continousouly get the naughty message if you don't clean up your spawns though.

All in all, it's fun. As much as I'd like to see candy canes drop more frequently (I'll probably be away for most of the duration when this event is running at the end of December), I think they drop at a good rate between presents and the WL/LW that it doesn't turn into a Monty Hall situation. Pick and choose which hereos you want to gear up with Winter's gift and costume parts.