Reflecting on the Winter Event and the ghosts of Winter Lord's Past

I joined one team that took down a Winter Lord spawn. Other than that, I really didn't participate in anything this time around. I suppose I could have run Snaptooth or Lady Winter , but really didn't have the urge to.

I swore off the ski slopes years ago. Those things got me so mad I vowed never to try them for times again.

Trials take quite a bit of time to create, even if they're not Incarnate Trials - like just check out the amount of new art assets and details on the Dr. Kane Trial - and they simply mightn't have had enough time to make a totally new Trial for the Winter event when it happens so soon after the Halloween event - so it's quite possible that they decided to work on new Trials for the events that didn't have any Trial type stuff at all - Halloween and Valentine's Day - and to convert what was already almost a Trial anyway from the Winter event into a genuine Trial.

Reducing DFB to 1-10, then adding a 10-20 Trial based around the fires in Steel Canyon or the Skyway City Troll raves could be cool.

I opened a few gifts, fought a wild WL, and visited Lord Winter's realm once. I did buy the pack so I can access those costume parts year round. After 5 years, I'm just not up for most of the winter event anymore.

Just curious but why was it such a bad idea to have it as part of the LFG? I thought it was much better, also was run much more often than previous years due to people being able to just organise it whenever they felt like and take their time.
No more "quick we only have 15 minutes to get there!", hope they add all future mini events to the LFG tab like this one and the halloween one, much better imo!

Thing was, IMO, we never needed an LFG queue. I think what we needed was a global channel dedicated to teaming (that is not Help or a private channel) and a way for team leaders to advertise a team is forming on an ad board kind of thing, possibly with the option to allow people to auto-sign up. Just list the leader's name, level, number of league members, and a short comment from them; right clicking it brings up an option to send a Tell to them and (if not disabled) auto-join that League/Team.

IMO completely leaderless teaming is a pretty optimistic outlook, even for something like Death from Below.

Anyway, the whole LFG thing got started because as originally described iTrials were supposed to be like zone events where people come and go mostly anonymously. The actual design of the trials doesn't really support that though, so no matter what technical fix you throw at the LFG queue it's not really answering a need. Funnily enough, about 10 months ago we were all screaming at each other about whether closed leagues would even be allowed, because in their original format trials were supposed to be open to everyone and the idea of kicking someone/locking a league was considered unethical. It's interesting how board opinion has done a complete 180 on that topic as more trials have been unveiled.

I did Lord Winter exactly once, and that was as part of a pre-formed league. The queue was, as usual, utterly worthless. I did Lady Winter once as well -- still forgettable other than the nice frozen Agincourt map -- and ran Baby New Year on a few characters. And I picked up plenty of presents, although I rarely bother trading in candy canes.

I'm still waiting for a mission where we get to go beat the hell out of the Gamester for leaving those dangerous presents all around. Maybe this year....

The LFG Queue does not work for me on any of my characters, for any of the content, except for Incarnate Trials. So it's still useless.

I tried to organize a few winter event teams on Triumph, but it was quite a struggle. Many longtime vets have gone off the event. And Lord Winter's realm proved surprisingly difficult for F2Pers. But I did manage to run the trial about a half dozen times to top off some badgers.

I did the gift giving and receiving badges on 9 or so of my more favored characters, including all 5 incarnates.

This was also my first year to ever nab the Speeder badge (gold on the bobsled) and I got it on about half a dozen characters.

Lastly, I took about 6 characters through the basic Snaptooth and Lady Winter badges.

I did not get Toy Collector on a single character, though I got credit that took me halfway there on a number of characters just by incidentally opening gifts.

But between the time it took to get a viable Lord Winter realm league together and the overall redundancy of the event mixed with not being in town for much of the duration, I was in something of a holiday malaise. I think the holiday/seasonal events in general bum me out more than they entertain me because I feel some compulsion to badge on all my characters while the options are available. This makes the game feel more like work than it already does on some days. These events feel like a distraction from what I once considered the core of the game: being a superhero or supervillain. Add to all this a bunch of great sales on a many AAA and indie titles from a certain digital download game service, and I found it hard to spend my game time logged into CoX for the holiday event this year.

On my first day inside the winter event I got to do the Winter Lord big-snow-men thingy with my Elec/Mace tank and found I had forgotten how dull I found it last time. We failed due to not enough fire power so we broke up and reformed with other toons (Bots/Dark MM for me) and wiped him up pretty quick. Unless I missed something, it's a pretty simplistic game of "drop the big guy 25%, go fight the other lesser bug guy, then come back to the first one, drop him another 25%, fight another lesser big guy, go back, etc. Not much fun, not a really great map or anything... I guess if you're a badger it's good for that. Having done it once more, I don't worry about the difficulty others had getting onto a team for it.

Afterwards I ran my toon from that one into the Lady Winter (man I hope I'm getting these names right) and found I could solo her and did so. Her mission is alright I guess, lots of snow monsters to beat up. Then I ran BNY and found out I got better XP so I soloed that one a bunch. It helps that I find that one of the most all-round fun maps in the game.

I also bought the winter pack as I'm a sucker for costume-stuffs and would hate to get caught short with a great needs-a-halo costume toon idea in July...

I was able to run the Lord Winter's Realm trial once. I defeated one Winter Lord. I grabbed a few candy canes on my way through the various zones. But over all, I missed out due to the holiday season. I remember the event being a bit longer last year, and I was disappointed that it was shortened this year, since I usually have more time to participate once the holidays are past. As it is, I just didn't have time this year

I spent a lot of time getting all of the winter badges on 6 or 7 different newer toons... all except the Lord Winter badge and the Winter Lord badge. I didn't work really hard at either, but I only had a couple of chances to join Lord Winter trials (usually did at least two runs in a row though), and only fought 1 spawned WL.

I'm very good at skiing by now though.