Zombie Invasions

Can someone splain me the point of defeating zombies during a zombie invasion? I tried looking it up on the Wiki, and it lists badges but these are only awarded during Halloween events. Not to mention that I've defeated many of them now and gotten nothing. There is no badge listed that I might get, something that always happens with defeat badges the with the first defeat that counts toward the badge. They do not award much in the way of XP of Inf, I looked at the info and they don't drop anything special in the way of salvage.

Am I missing something, or are these Zombie Invasions primarily there to cause me grief?

The defeat badges should be awarding any time there is an invasion - not just during the Halloween event. One of them also awards a costume piece (the pumpkin head).

The main purpose of these event is to gather the player characters in one area so that mass carnage ensues. The problem with this is that for right now, many players do not respond to the call and in fact, avoid the invasions entirely.

Note that you can avoid being affected by an invasion by going to a different zone or into a building, like a store, the train station or an instanced mission. IME, they don't spawn all that fast, so just running straight to your mission should allow you to avoid them if you want, meaning that the only missions affected are the "Hunt X" missions.

Zombie badges appear in the "Event Badge" category, not the Defeat category.

I don't generally bother with zone events unless I'm trying to help someone else. For my own sake, no. Why should I? I don't care about getting the badges, the xp and inf are very poor for the time spent, merit rewards on giant monsters are iffy, a lot of the zone events I find kind of confusing, and most importantly they just lack fun. There's no upside.

The thing about the zombie invasions is, with a decent-sized team, you can usually get all four badges in one go. And once you've done that, there's not much incentive to do any more of them. I do get a kick out of them, though... it's fun just seeing a giant mob of heroes whaling on bad guys, like a George Perez drawing come to life.

The Rikti invasions still seem popular. At least, I usually don't have any trouble finding a team for them.

Also, for the Steel Canyon fires, you can:

A) Team. Thus, each fire defeated by any teammate counts for all teammates

B) Tag it - just hit a fire someone else is working on once, and when they defeat it, you get credit.

The only time that I'll refuse an invitation to a firefighting team is when there are people fighting the fires while I clear out the Hellions, which keeps them from restarting already-extinguished fires, that won't even bother trying to invite me until I start on the fires themselves. If you weren't willing to share credit while I was protecting you from getting a massive explosion to the face, then you won't get any easy credit for the fires that I put out on my own.

Generaly, outside of the Halloween event when invasions happen regularly, people aren't prepared to drop what they're doing and try to assemble a team to fight the zombies.

The only time Zombie Invasions are worth hanging around for is when they happen in Dark Astoria - but even then only when you're a Night of the Living Dead fan and hang around Romero Heights.

The problem you're encountering here is the fact that most of the players that wanted the badges got them during the Halloween event.

The regular zombie invasions have 4 tiers of zombies to fight. Minion, LT, Boss, and Elite Boss. If you've been fighting them solo, you've probably only seen minions and LTs. Bosses and Elite Bosses spawn when there are enough people fighting the invasion, just one or two people won't spawn them. The numbers you're looking for here are 100 minions, 33 LTs, 25 Bosses, and 1 EB. As far as I can remember, there is no progress bar for these badges.

A low level character is likely not going to kill 133 zombies in one invasion without a team. The best advice I can offer as far as getting the badges is: Make notes of which characters have fought invasions before, and switch to them when you see an invasion notice pop up in your chat window. It will take a while, but you'll eventually get the badges. Around Halloween, people will come out of the woodwork with characters that have been created since the last event, so it tends to be a lot easier to put teams together for it then.

For Zombie Apocalypse/Rikti Invasion events, I will almost always join in if I happen to be in the zone when the event starts. Even with characters that already have the badges. I find these mass chaos events fun.

Supernatural Activity (ie Banners), I usually skip as it's just too much of a pain to try and coordinate multiple teams with any effectiveness. It seems like either you can't get enough folks together to take things down, or else everyone just does thier own thing and end up wiping out one or two of the banners (and/or the GM) before everyone gets in place, resulting in missed badges/rewards for the event. I will join in if someone else is already setting up the teams as I'm passing through though.

GM's (any) - If I'm in the zone when the call goes out, I'll join in. But I'm not making an effort to travel to a zone just because a GM's there.

Steel Canyon Fires - I normally pass by unless someone is specifically calling for assistance. Being able to use just one, slow-recharging, power is annoying. If I'm on a Storm or Ice powered character I might do a little fire-fighting now and then.

Troll Raves - these I fight whenever I've got someone in level range in the area. Again, mass chaos events are fun

Overall, I base what I do with events on if I'm having fun with them or not. I've got my "badge collector" character that I keep current with every badge possible (although he's still missing a few...MoSTF and such), and I like to get badges on my other characters, but I won't go out of my way just for badges...

You should have been at the Carnie Rave Event on Justice last week. Nothing like a giant pack of Dark Ring Mistresses and Master Illusionists to make for a fun time just don't forget the blues.