Saturday, August 17, 2019

How Funky Is Your Chicken?

Not that anyone cares - I'm not even sure I do - but I'm still playing Riders of Icarus. For a given value of "playing", that is, one where a full session means logging in and going afk for thirty minutes then logging out again.

RoI, in addition to being a more than half-decent MMORPG for anyone who can actually be bothered to get quests, run dungeons and, y'know, kill things, is by a country mile the most generous idle giveaway game I have ever seen. After a few weeks, I already have more really good things in RoI than I've collected in Guild Wars 2 over seven years. Just sayin', ANet.


A couple of days ago I got a psychedelic chicken. It's not actually called that, of course. I only wish it was. Its official name is Tropical Ramphastos. Good luck remembering that.

It clearly is a chicken because it runs on two legs and can't fly. I'm not entirely sure what the point of ground mounts is in a game predicated on flight but there's a lot I don't know about Riders of Icarus - most of it, most likely. My chicken has an 11% run speed buff, which makes it my fastest ground mount by far, so maybe it will come in useful somewhere.


First of all, though, I have to level it up. This takes ages if all you do is sit on the grass under a tree. I finally got my Skywhale to twenty-five, the same level as my Trickster, then I moved to another nice freebie I'd picked up, a fighting crab called Skallion.

Skallion seemed to be taking even longer than most familiars to get going. In the end I put him back in the stable at Level 15 in favor of the chicken. It's going to be a week or so before I pick up the next giveaway Legendary mount so I ought to be able to top both of them off before then.

There's another special login event running because of course there is. In fact, I believe there are something like five or six login events stacking throughout August, including several that require logging in at specific times of day. I literally can't keep up so I've been pretending those aren't happening.

The one I am working on (if doing absolutely nothing counts as working) is the one I probably wouldn't have noticed if Massively:OP hadn't popped up a notice about it. It's a Summer Fishing Event although I may never see a fish. The event comes with its own seven-day login cycle, for which I need to do nothing at all. I'd already done the first day without even knowing it was on.

As if to prove how incredibly generous the game is, the rewards for each of the first six days include a pack of 50 Elluns, the cash shop currency. That's 300 Elluns in total just for being there. I already have over 300 Elluns and this will double my stash.

It takes an increasing number of Elluns to open each new Familiar slot or to increase Inventory but so far the free currency stream is running much faster than my needs. It's as if GW2 handed out a few hundred gems every month to free-to-play accounts, something that's about as likely as an announcement for a new expansion.

Most of the other rewards for the fishing event are temporary cosmetics. In keeping with many imported F2P MMORPGs, RoI loves rented items. I don't usually care for such things but when you get them for nothing...

On the seventh day there's a Legendary mount that's yours to keep for good. I haven't managed to find a picture of it so we're going to need to use our imagination here. It's called Watermelon Banana Boat. I just can't wait!

As if that wasn't enough, which it clearly ought to be, while I was fiddling about in my bags after logging in to take some screenshots for this post I found yet another Legendary Mount in my backpack. It's the four-ticket top of the shop Familiar I bought with my July login tickets. I'd completely forgotten about it.

I wondered what it would look like. It's called Gilded Infernal Demeroth, which tells me nothing.


Turns out it's a frickin' gold dragon! It has the best stats of any of my mounts so far and it looks utterly amazing. I have more incredible-looking mounts with overwhelmingly powerful stats and razzle-dazzle particle effects in Riders of Icarus than I have ever had, and most likely ever will have, in any MMORPG - and I've done nothing to earn any of them.

It's fantastic! I could play this game indefinitely just as an idle collection simulator. Oh, wait, what am I talking about? That's how I am playing it.


Maybe one day I'll get back to questing and levelling up but right now I don't entirely see why I'd bother. I'm having all the fun with none of the effort and it's all for free.

Soon the game will be changing publishers to VFUN, whoever they are. I've already done all my pre-registration stuff so I'm hoping it will be a smooth transition and that the game goes on to have a long and healthy future under the new management.

I'd really hate to lose my stuff, now I have so much of it and all so good.

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