Lost Cat

Remember the big cats? They're back.

In fact, if you believe the patch notes, they're multiplying:

New cats, visible while under the effect of the Chatoyant Elixir or similar effects, have been added to each major city.

The patch happened on Tuesday but I didn't get around to reading the notes for a couple of days. By the time I dropped into the forums to see what might have changed there was an additional note:

We have temporarily disabled the additional visual effects of the Chatoyant Lens while we address an issue.

 Lens? What lens? 

Ah, that lens!

I went to Hooligan's Row to get one. All the holiday event vendors are hidden away down there. I'd completely forgotten about them. Why they're tucked away in such an obscure spot beats me. You'd think ANet didn't want people to find them.

The vendor is a cat, naturally. All the cat sells are chatoyant elixirs and the lens. The lens costs ten elixirs. The elixirs cost five tiger's eye pebbles and a beryl orb each. At current prices, as this reddit thread points out, it's much cheaper to buy the ten elixirs on the Trading Post than it is to buy them from the cat.

I didn't need to do either because I had fifteen chatoyant elixirs in my bag from last year. See? I said they'd come in useful.

The lens is a rare quality accessory with appropriately feline stats. The rubric tells you it "causes you to see extra cats while equipped".

I slotted it and went looking.

I couldn't see any new cats. I couldn't see any old cats. I went to a few of the places I remembered the giant cats from last time and there was nothing.

Maybe it was the temporary disablement. Perhaps it disabled all the cats even though that's clearly not what the note said.

I left it for the while and went to do something else. Then this morning when I logged in I thought I'd try again.

Bingo! Big cat sighted in Gendarran Fields!

Only one of the old ones, though. I wanted to see a new one but not so much that I wanted to run around all the big cities searching for them. The patch was a few days old. Someone would have updated the wiki. Someone would have posted a list. With screenshots, most likely.

Yeah, you'd think. But nope. Nothing. Nada. Not a sausage.

No-one cares for cats any more, it seems. I tried all the obvious places - the forums, the wiki, reddit. I asked google. I searched "giant cats" and "big cats" and "new cats" and "gigantic cats". No-one's saying anything about any of them.

Even that reddit post on the lens only went up this morning. The patch was Tuesday. It wouldn't be like this if Dulfy was still around, that's all I'm saying...

So I went and looked for myself. I tried Lion's Arch first. The cat in the water was there. No-one was looking at him. I was the only one there. Last year there was a crowd but I guess giant cats are old news.

I did a lap of L.A. looking up at the sky. I got a crick in my neck but I never saw another giant cat.

Then I tried Divinity's Reach. Found the one in Melandru's Plaza right away. Did another circuit of the city: no joy. Opened a few new waypoints, that was all.

Finally I tried Hoelbrak. It's probably the most compact of the main cities. Last year's cat was there. Couldn't see another.

It wasn't that the Lens wasn't working. Not if you trust the patch notes:

Thank you for your patience while we addressed this issue. The content has been re-enabled.

It might be me, of course. It occured to me the patch note says "new cats". It doesn't say "new giant cats". Last year's event included a load of normal-sized cats that appeared around you now and then. You could touch them and get a temporary buff. Maybe it meant there were new ones of those?

That would be... unexciting. And come to think of it I haven't seen any of those cats either. Not even the old ones.

I'm calling off the search for now. Maybe there are new big cats and maybe there aren't. Maybe that's the April Fools part of it all. I wouldn't put it past ANet. They've done worse.

If someone does post a list before the event ends in a couple of weeks I'll add it here. Then I'll go round and take some pictures. Otherwise, I think I'll let sleeping cats lie.