To recap, it's a gambling game where you buy scratch cards from a large, formally-dressed cat standing behind the counter of a booth known as a Midnight Catzebo. You obviously hope you're going to win big but I've been playing every day, or at least every day I remember, and I haven't exactly won big yet, although I also haven't lost big either.
Most days I just about break even. I tend to stop if I either win or lose more than a couple of hundred thousand. I had a good run this morning with the biggest single win I've had so far, 300k, but I lost that much a couple of days ago so I'm pretty much back where I started.
Having scratched a lot of cards now, I'm certain the cheapest, the 10k ones, are a waste of time. About 90% of them have a single 10k win, so if you buy the full day's allotment of twenty you're going to end up very slightly out of pocket. I've given up bothering with those altogether, except for a little project I'm going to get to in a moment.
The three types of 50k cards are a lot more entertaining and also where the real money is, if you get lucky. Then again, there's a real chance of blowing more than you can afford before you've noticed if you aren't careful.
There's no reliable return of your stake money here. Most times you either get nothing or a decent chunk of cash. There are frequently multiple winning slots on a single card. I've had four or five several times, adding up to 200k or so. Conversely, there are a lot of duds, where you don't win anything.
When I first discovered the event, I wondered how many Catzebos there were, scattered across Hethereau. And what the cats operating them were called. I'd seen a couple, so I knew it was a franchise of some kind with multiple outlets and both the cats had odd names (Catvioli and Cat Cake). I was curious (Appropriately enough, what with the cats....) to meet the rest and find out if there was some kind of theme to it all.
I was still figuring out how that worked. I always seem to take a long time figuring out the basic systems in games these days. I play everything in an ever more casual and laid-back, not to say soporific, fashion or so it sometimes seems. I only started taking a proper look at the map a week or two ago.
It turns out that, like everything in NTE, it's extremely well-designed. The search function is versatile and powerful and you can set a tracker for anything you see on the map. All the icons are meaningful, too. You can see the Catzebos well enough just from the little cat-heads that weren't there before.
Next, I discovered you can sort all the categories either by district or for the whole city. I got the list up for Hethereau first, to see how many Catzebos there were altogether. It's a nice, round number - ten. Then I selected Miguel District, where Flora happened to be, and started from there.
Since I seemed to have made a pointless little project for myself, I thought I'd do it properly for a change. I used to do a lot of this sort of thing in MMORPGs back in the day but with the advent of narrative-driven games, quest helpers and never doing any damn thing if it doesn't come with an Achievement or a reward attached, I've fallen out of the habit.
I once spent several days going round all the vendors in Norrath I used regularly with characters of different races and varying charisma stats, making notes on how it affected sales prices. I kept the info in a book on my desk and referred to it when I wanted to sell anything valuable. That's the kind of entertainment I used to make for myself, back when we made our own entertainment. We were simple folk...
Luckily, this project didn't take me days. More like a little under three-quarters of an hour and even that included two trips, one each with Lacrimosa and Sakiri, on the Ferris Wheel that stands (Precariously, in my opinion...) on top of the Floe Cinema. I just happened to bump into them as I was passing. That might get its own post although it probably won't.
In keeping with tradition, I dug out a notebook and made notes as I ported and trotted around the city. I'd usually take screenshots these days but it occurred to me that even though I was going to take a shot of every booth anyway, it would actually be more efficient to transcribe the details by hand as I saw them, rather than to go back through all the pictures afterwards, looking for the information I needed.
I would have had to take screenshots of the map, too, if I wanted to give the precise locations. Easier just to write down the names of the streets while I had the map open. It would have been easier still if I'd taken the time to write them down neatly enough so I could read them afterwards but there you go...
Since I was going to be at the booths anyway, I thought I might as well buy a scratch card at each of them and keep a record of my wins and losses, just for the fun of it. I'd already spent my allocated limit for the day, so I chose to buy just one 10k card at each stall, which gave me a chance to test my consistency theory.
Out of ten cards, nine had a winning panel.Every one of them was worth 10k. House takes 10%. Just as I thought.
As I was going round, I found myself thinking about the post I was going to write but also, for some reason, about the ongoing controversy over AI that's raging around Blaugust and something Paeroka said stuck in my mind, about how Blaugust doesn't have any rules about what constitutes a "post", so you could legitimately post a single word every day and it would qualify.
That gave me an idea. What if I didn't use the screenshots of the ten Catzebos right away? What if I saved them and posted one every day in Blaugust when I didn't have time to write a proper post? I don't have a back-up plan for days like that this year and that would be a super-easy way of hitting the target.
Would that be more creative than prompting an AI for a picture? It's arguable. It might be less creative. I didn't draw those cats myself. Or name them. I very much didn't come up with the idea of putting cats with funny names in booths. All I did was go to where they were and take a picture. Where's the creativity in that?
Take it a stage further. What if I prompted an AI to make a picture of a cat in a booth and then I got my phone and took a picture of my monitor showing the image and posted that? Would that count? How about if I did it on the laptop then carried the laptop around the house and garden and took pictures of the screen with the AI-generated image but with different real-world backdrops? How significant a part of the post is the AI image then? Where even are the lines? It's angels and pinheads all over again!
These are the kinds of things that go through your mind when you take on a repetitive project like this.
Tempted as I was, I decided not to save my cat pictures for Blaugust, not least because now I've had the idea I can recycle it easily enough if I need to, later. The "photos of AI images" thing is amusing me, too, and the main reason I have a blog is to keep myself amused, so...
Getting back to the ostensible point of this post, I can now tell you the names of all ten cats manning (Or should that be "Catting"?) the booths. They are all male, as far as I can tell, if that's relevant, or they present a male aspect, at least. They all look like 1930s gangsters, if we're going to be frank.
The Ten Cats, in the order I found them, are:
Miguel District
Cat Ball - Flamingo Avenue
Catvioli - St. Torres Avenue
New Herland
Cat Pastry - In the square with the Wertheimer Tower
Cat Dice - Nutcracker Road
Cat Tart - Camelot Avenue
Cat Sugar - Yuanmu Hill
Bridge Crossings
Cat Pancake - Bluebeard Road
Unheard Shores
Cat Puff - Just off Coastal Highway Z42
Illusion Town
Cat Cake - Fiscus Avenue
Cat Roll - Coastal Highway Z42It does very much look to me as thought these cats must have been named by someone thinking mainly about how hungry they were feeling. With a couple of "Things I Can See On My Desk" thrown in for the sake of variety.
The outlier is Catvioli. He's the only cat with a single-word name and also the only one whose name isn't an easily recognizable object or foodstuff. I looked it up just in case it had some meaning I wasn't seeing but there doesn't seem to be any. I saw someone on some thread or other suggesting it might be a pun on ravioli but that seems like a stretch.
And of course we'll never know. This is a time-limited event and not a very significant or important one even in the context what might constitute importance in a free-to-play, gacha game. No-one cares what the bloody cats are called or why.
And yet I've just spent about three hours of my life on it, and that's on top of the three hours I spent on much the same topic a week ago.
It's nice to have a hobby, isn't it? Keeps us off the streets, anyway. If anyone's under the delusion what kind of pictures we use to illustrate our posts actually matters, maybe they should chew on that for a while.
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" it might be a pun on ravioli but that seems like a stretch." I don't know, but that was my instant thought when I saw the name.
ReplyDeleteI still do these for the Industry Level stuff. Like you point out, I always lose some money but I earn enough to push my Industry Level up. I'm not very high though... 33 or something.
Really glad you're not going to be posting images as posts for August. I'm honestly low-key dreading all the fluff posts that come with the month. Not that I read many blogs these days, but yours is one I do read! Um, obviously. LOL
If I did post pictures as whole posts, it would only be on the days i wouldn't have posted at all, normally, so no loss there. Although experience suggests I'm incapable of just posting pictures. I always end up with at least a paragraph of text for every image when i do a screenshot post.
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