Look In The Envelope

Guild Wars 2's Lunar New Year festival ends today, although at time of writing it's still running. The boom will come down whenever ArenaNet release the weekly Tuesday update, something that happens any time from three in the afternoon to eight in the evening, where I live.

As I wrote, back on January 11, I was a little late to the party this year, what with not actually playing the game on the regular any more, but once I'd been made aware it was happening, I was diligent in not missing a single day. Not that I did much while I was there, nor intended to. 

Other than running a few races for the fun of it, if they happened to be up when I arrived, all of my efforts were concentrated on buying every Lucky Envelope I was allowed on each of three accounts, then transferring all of them onto my main account to open. Just doing that took me fifteen or twenty minutes a day, easily.

For once, I didn't cash out as I went along but kept everything in my bags 'til the end. That means for the first time ever I'm actually able to see exactly what I got and how much money I made - or lost.

I opened all the envelopes in the Silverwastes, a map with a permanent 30% bonus to magic find. Lucky Envelopes are one of the very, very few openables to benefit from that generally useless stat so it's theoretically worth making some effort to raise it when opening them. 

For the first week and a half or so, I really didn't try all that hard. I ran a booster or two and had some MF food up but my magic find was somewhere around 450. It's generally reckoned it has to go over 500 to make much of a perceivable difference. About halfway through the run I grabbed some banners and boosts from various sources and by the last day I was running more than a hundred points higher. 

I finally topped out at 569 although it would have been twenty points  more if I'd taken the right accessory out of the bank. I was wearing the wrong one the whole time. It's not a large enough sample to be statistically significant, I'm sure, but subjectively it definitely did seem that my luck improved once my MF passed 500.

In the three weeks I was doing the event I received a ton of festival food and fireworks, the total amount of which I haven't bothered to tally. Nor have I worked out the value on the Trading Post should I choose to sell. I could do that. It's almost all tradeable. Most of it goes for coppers but some of the food is quite valuable so the total would run into a few gold, I'm sure.

I also acquired enough sparks of luck to add three percentage points onto my permanent magic find. MF is a fairly arduous stat to raise after about two hundred or so, so that's a not-insignificant jump. I also got three small lucky envelopes every day for a daily achievement whenever I opened the big ones. Those all gave minor rewards too but I didn't keep a track of what I got. Nothing significant, that's for sure.

In the twenty-one days I kept up with the event I bought five hundred and four Lucky Envelopes at a cost of one gold piece each. Here's what I got back, not counting the food, fireworks and luck:

Cash Items

• 13 Ornamental Gold Trophies - (8g 88s 88c) - Total Value 115g 55s 44c
• 519 Golden Rabbit Figurines - (88s 88c) - Total Value 461g 28s 72c

Total Value 576g 84s 72c

Useable Items

• 8 Lucky Rabbit Lanterns
• 4 Minis of Festival Lantern
• 3 Superior Runes of Fireworks
• 2 New Year's Weapon Chests

The rabbit lanterns, a back item with stats, can be upgraded into Golden Rabbit Statues but you only need one lantern per statue. I'll be making some of those at some point because the appearance is actually quite nice, for once. As for the rest, they don't sell for much now but as the years pass they tend to go up in value so I usually hang on to them. (And then never sell them but that's a different issue altogether...)

The minis are nice but absolutely worthless. There are tens of thousands for sale at 3 copper a time. The runes are decent and sell for over a gold each but I already have quite a few. They'll go in the bank.

The pick of the bunch is definitely the two weapon chests, if only because neither the box nor the weapons it contains is tradeable. If you want the skins, this is the only way you're going to get them. And, as it happens, the skins aren't bad. 

I chose the staff, called First Night's Spark, which is a cluster of red firecrackers on a stick. It goes
rather well with my Elementalist's current outfit and fits her style as a fire mage. I'm saving the other chest for now. You get to choose one weapon per chest and there are two skins left I don't have. I haven't decided which I want first yet.

All in all I'm pretty satisfied. I came out just over 70g ahead on the deal after the full three weeks. I could have made considerably more by just selling the envelopes on the Trading Post but then I wouldn't have got the two weapon skins or had the fun and excitement of opening the envelopes. Seems like a fair trade-off to me.

One thing I have come to believe as a direct result of the event and my rection to it: at this stage of my mmorpg career I almost prefer login rewards and free gifts to actually playing the games, at least when it conmes to games I know well already. I was incentivized to return to GW2 only by the prospect of opening these envelopes and every evening I found myself actively excited to do it. 

As numerous posts here over the past two or three years can attest, I can often find more to say about these kinds of giveaways than I can about the gameplay. I've often claimed to be able to see the positive side to lockboxes and as time goes on it's becoming harder and harder to deny that in many ways it's the boxes I like best about the games I play. I wouldn't ever pay a cent to open one but if they come free I'd rather open boxes than kill monster, most days.

Luckily for me, there seems to be no shortage of free boxes to open and no sign of the flow drying up any time soon. I've done opening envelopes in GW2 for now so imagine I won't be logging in there again for a while but I'm sure another game will pick up the slack soon enough.

If not, it's only a day until the next Amazon Prime giveaway. There'll be a post about that, too, I'm sure.

Hello Moto

It's back. The April Fool's joke that didn't know when to stop. Yes, it's Super Adventure Box, now upgraded to Festival status.

Some people love it, of course. It's the highlight of their year, apparently. Bree at Massively:OP called it "The best thing ever added to Guild Wars 2". I don't think it would make my Top Fifty (and no, I am not doing a list).

I definitely don't hate it. It's okay as far as it goes. I've killed a few idle hours inside Moto's box along the way. There were a couple of years when we had some little mini-guild outings there, back when there was someone in our guild other than me and Mrs Bhagpuss.

As the years pass, though, I find less and less to amuse me in the nursery colors and shapes. Last year I didn't get around to visiting SAB at all. This year will pass the same way, I imagine.

I did speak to Moto when I was taking a few screenshots for this post, just to see if he had anything new to offer. He didn't. I think even his line about bug fixes and polish goes back a few years now. 

The patch notes are a little more forthcoming. There are some new "ooze enemies...tucked away in each zone" and you can get an ooze mini by completing the annual meta achievement. There are some other new achievements and the usual additions to the weapons and items you can buy. And the "responsiveness of the bouncy mushrooms and trampolines" has been improved. About time! I'd been losing sleep over that one.

One thing I do think might be new is the extremely detailed set of instructions on the official website. I don't recall seeing anything like those before. It's so comprehensive, in fact, I wouldn't hesitate to call it a walkthrough. 

I'm a little puzzled as to why ANet feel it's necessary after all this time. Is customer service inundated every year with floods of puzzled, frustrated players, unable to figure out what to do? Are they expecting a massive influx of newcomers who've never seen a pixillated cloud before?

It seems like a lot of effort for something everyone's already so familiar with but I guess it can't hurt. It would be a little churlish to complain about getting too much information after so many years of calling devs out for not giving us enough.

Last and definitely not least on the "Really?" scale we have the Doritos promotion. Here's the offical press release: 

"Enter to Win A Year’s Supply of Doritos® Snacks

All that bouncing is sure to make you hungry. Awesome news! Every time you complete your daily Course Work: Super Adventure Festival meta-achievement, you’ll earn one entry to win a year’s supply of Doritos® snacks. Just log in every day and accomplish three of the superbly educational tasks offered under the Daily Super Adventure Festival category in your achievements panel".

I'd make a sharp remark but honestly it's beyond irony. You could get a term paper out of the internal contradictions of that one paragraph and a dissertation out of the cultural implications of the promotional contest itself.

There are giveaways in game, too. They're underwhelming. A free Super Adventure Box Of Fun and five Continue Coins. Those can just stack on the ones I already have in the bank.

But as I said, I'm not hating on Super Adventure Box. It adds color to the game. It's (mostly) harmless. People like it. Well, some.

I still think ANet missed a trick by not spinning it off into a standalone game and developing it separately. It sits uncomfortably inside GW2, where it struggles to fit the lore (although they've made a brave attempt to shoehorn it in). As an annual festival it spends most of the year gathering virtual dust, when plenty of people would like to be able to play it. It's not to my taste but even I can see it has more potential than it's been allowed to realize.

For me, it's not even the real Superadventure. That name belongs to the hardback annuals I sometimes found at the foot of my bed on Christmas morning as a child.  

Comic annuals are a British tradition that hasn't entirely died out even to this day. Growing up in the sixties and seventies I used to get half a dozen or more most years and the Superadventure series, which collected stories from what seemed like a random selection of DC comics, were one of my favorites.

I'd be a lot more interested in that kind of Super Adventure. Maybe someone at DCUO could give it some thought.

For now, though, we'll have to make do with the Super Adventure Festival. It's with us for twenty days. The lid comes down on the toybox at noon PST on April 27. 

Better get jumping.

Super Adventure Festival Is Go! : GW2

On the first of April 2013, I posted this. Three years on it remains the third most viewed post ever on Inventory Full.

I was never a huge fan of The Super Adventure Box, myself. About the most positive thing I could find to say about it in that post was this: "The best part? I can skip the whole thing and still not miss out on the goodies!"

In the end I did spend maybe a couple of hours in there in total. I still have quite a few of the baubles and coins stashed in various banks, awaiting the day SAB might make a comeback, because I hadn't saved enough to buy those "goodies" I apparently wanted before it vanished, seemingly for good. I have absolutely no idea what those goodies might have been, by the way...

I didn't really care much whether SAB ever returned but others were a lot more invested. Indeed, it's fair to say the long absence of the supposed joke "game within a game" had turned into a festering sore for some. It wasn't quite on the scale of the NGE but it was getting there.

The sudden and totally unexpected re-appearance of the 8-bit emulation seems like a lot more than a co-incidence, coming as it does with Mike "Two Hats" O'Brien very plainly operating in full damage control mode. He appears to be on a mission to save the company and the game that you might well argue that, as President, he's been sleepwalking towards disaster for the best part of four years. I have this mental picture of him waking up from a Rip van Winklesque slumber, staring around him wild-eyed and croaking "My Game! What have you bastards done to my GAME?!"

Anyway, all fantasy aside, bringing back S.A.B. is a masterstroke. It's like literally buying goodwill. Okay, it's like metaphorically buying goodwill. Literally metaphorically.

The Box will be with us for almost three weeks, until April 19th. Chances are it will be leaving just as the Big Spring Quarterly Update arrives, allowing for at least an illusion of continual development. I suspect we may be about to see a lot of that kind of thing. At least an illusion of progress beats stasis, I guess.

It's unlikely I'll find much time for box jumping, although I imagine I'll give it the odd, desultory scramble, here and there. Even though it's not my thing it's good to see it return. It was always a relatively harmless amuse-bouche for the general population and a wildly popular cause celebre (not sure why I've gone all gallic all of a sudden) with a particular demographic. It seemed churlish to withhold it.

What's most telling, though, is that Super Adventure Box is officially confirmed as a recurring, annual event from now on.

SAB has a great, regular home in Guild Wars 2. As a yearly festival, SAB will now be a dependable fixture in Tyria

Now can we please do the same for The Festival of The Four Winds?

No Bombing At The Moonfire Fair! : FFXIV:ARR

The Moonfire Fair arrived in Eorzea yesterday, coming as something of a surprise on pretty much every level. Firstly because who was expecting any kind of holiday event to appear barely two weeks after launch, secondly because the image conjured by its softly evocative name belies the bizarre and jarring reality and thirdly because all the rewards are bloody swimsuits!!

There seems to be a strange tradition of swimwear festivals among some non-Western MMOs. They pop up in news articles or promos from time to time but always in games I don't play so I can't say I've payed much attention. Until now.

Oh, I was a little surprised all that time ago back in GW2's series of beta weekends when I arrived in Lion's Arch to find a whole lot of people in swimming trunks and bikinis lounging on the beach. Especially since it was nighttime. And then there was Southsun. Still, when all's said and done,those were beaches.

Isn't that a fire risk?

Ul'Dah is not a beach. Ul'Dah is a hot, dry desert city baking under a fierce sun. Beyond the steps of the city lie dusty plains and scrubland studded with gritty outposts and dangerous beasts. True, there is a very nice seaside resort just down the road but those gates are firmly locked right now. Gridania isn't a beach town either. It's a sprawling settlement deep in a thick forest. It rains a lot and my guess is it's pretty cold. Limsa Lominsa is on the coast but far out on a rocky promontory, whipped by winds, suitable for fishing in good wet weather gear but not, so far as I can tell, for beach volleyball.

Inappropriate weather conditions and absence of anywhere to lay down a towel doesn't cover the half of it, though. It seems that when the Fair comes in through one city gate all normal dress codes and indeed any form of modesty and decency go straight out the other.

Hmphh. Some people just have no self-respect.

Of course it's not as though the guards in any of these cities ever seem to enforce any kind of modicum of considerate or even sane behavior on the public streets in the first place. You can set up a crafting station just about anywhere, never mind it stops the traffic for blocks around and then there is that strange thing where when you take up a new craft all your clothes fall off, so I guess public semi-nudity is already something of a cultural norm in the three city states.

As a good tourist I always try to adapt to cultural norms. In this case that means both the real culture behind the game and the culture in which the game is set. Also, free stuff. It might never have occurred to me that what a Lalafell really needed along with her ancient magic crystal, her supernatural gift, her deeply mysterious destiny and her membership of a Secret Society was a blue two-piece swimsuit but if it's free...

Topaz! It's rude to stare! She's just a poor lady that can't afford clothes.

I spoke to the Cascadier Captian at the Moonfire Fair and got a long and frankly incomprehensible spiel that left me none the wiser. I had the vague impression I was supposed to go throw buckets of water over some firemen to cool them down.  Well that couldn't possibly be right. That would be silly, wouldn't it, and heaven forfend anyone should think there's anything silly about all this.

So I asked where I might get the Wet Ash the swimwear salesperson takes in trade and Mrs Bhagpuss offered to send me some in the post. She had some left over after buying bikinis in three different colors as well as a pair of shorts that she couldn't wear because apparently while you can walk the streets almost naked and no-one will bat an eye, if a girl should put on a pair of shorts meant for a guy cats would lie down with dogs and like that.

I do so too know how to have fun.

Anyway, I wanted to get the whole full-fat Moonfair experience for myself, not just mooch Wet Ash off a Linkie (going with that for the Guildie eqivalent) so she told me to go look for one of the special FATEs. She'd been doing them in Costa del Sol, a place I have yet to visit in Eorzea although I've been there often enough in real life. At least from the sound of it beachwear would for once be entirely appropriate, but apparently the FATEs can pop anywhere so I didn't feel the need to make a special trip.

They might be able to pop anywhere but they don't, at least not very often. Either that or I was just unlucky. I wandered around for an hour or so chasing a mysterious masked man in a black robe who turned out to be remarkably lax with security procedures and eventually I happened on an unfamiliar FATE full of Bombs (that's a type of mob. Yes, it confused me too).

If I keep my gloves on this didn't really happen.

Several minutes of highly entertaining, highly explosive combat later I had a bag full of wet ash. A fast chocobo ride back to Ul'Dah, a quick handover and my Lalafell became the uncertain owner of a blue bikini and a sparkler (I forgot to mention the fireworks) and that so far as I could tell was that.

Nothing left to do but go dance with the catgirls. Please throw money.

Events, Dear Boy... : EQ2

When exactly did it start? There must have been a time once, when you could wake up fresh, in that room you favored upstairs along the corridor away from the bar perhaps or maybe out among the pines, rolled in your dew-drenched cloak beside the cooling embers of your campfire, looking forward to a day filled with adventure. Another day of magic and mayhem just waiting to be seized.

It is Soulday, Grayeven 3 of the year 3881 and I have otters to train. It's been a busy week. A busy month. A busy year. Even before the Frostfell Village wardrobe had folded itself through four dimensions and packed itself flat back under the bed, the ever-traveling fair came rolling into Gorowyn, half-elven barkers hanging bunting from any Sarnak that couldn't scuttle away fast enough. They'd barely packed away their tents before full moon signaled a frenzy of mushrooming and root-beer in fairy grottoes across Norrath.
 

A Dungeon? Might be able to fit one in on the 17th

Then there are the Holy Days. The gods made a poor job of being dead, or gone or whatever it is that gods do when they lose patience with being farmed twice a day and five times on Sundays. Errolisi Marr still finds time to sponsor a whole raft of dubious romantic rituals for the day held in her honor. Day? Hah! It lasts two love-sodden weeks by when we're all heartily glad to see the back of her. Don't say anything though because here comes her god-buddy Brell, twenty feet tall with a tankard like a bucket, god of fatty liver disease and drunken one-night stands and another one who thinks there are fourteen nights in a Day.

The hangovers have scarcely had time to fade before Bristlebane arrives and we all know what fun he is. Oh come on. Some people have no sense of humor. At least he can count.

I think it's some Elven thing?

Oh but wait, that's not all. Those are just the events that get on the Calendar. At least that gives them a veneer of internal consistency, unlike meta-events, viz and to wit Everquest's  Anniversary, currently being celebrated in EQ1 by the appearance of loot-laden Fabled versions of everyone from Fippy to Venril Sathir and in EQ2 through the medium of modern dance Chronoportals.

I only pick on Norrath because that's where I spend a lot of my time. I could throw a dart at my monitor and come up with a similar list from any icon on my desktop. (I wouldn't do that. Obviously.) I was barely in Azeroth for three months and I think I saw four major Holidays. Rift is pretty much all either event or holiday, with the current one being a post-modern masterpiece of self-congratulatory backslapping. Someone at Trion has the irony meter turned up to 11, that's for sure.

Excuse me, weren't we at war?

Is it too much? We've done dailies (How we've done dailies...) but dailies at least have the "merit" of always being there. Events bring a pressure if not to complete then at least to take part. They're fun, especially first time through, but they come back year after year and they bloat. All last year's rides return and there are mutterings if anything's missing and if there's nothing new. When does a good thing turn into too much of a good thing?

I'm a big take it or leave it-er. In the words of Richard Hell, I can take it or leave it each time. Even so, I get pulled in. I know people who trudge through each Imaginary Holiday with the grim, set smile of an ex at a wedding. I've even known people stop logging in altogether, overwhelmed, unable to keep up.

I'm not against fun. I used to get as excited as anyone when Santug Klaug popped up in Plane of Knowledge and started yelling or when someone started jabbering hysterically over guild chat about giant skeletons taking over Qeynos Hills. But those were surprises. They were adventures. We didn't know they were coming. Not to put too fine a point on it, we didn't have a Calendar!

When you find yourself wishing it would just be over already, it's not fun any more. I like events but if we could just snap them along a bit? Maybe the "Days" could last for a weekend, not a fortnight? That'd be a start.

104 Beats That: EQ2

 I spent much of yesterday flying through hoops. Hadn't intended to but sometimes that's just how life turns out.

Norrath's travelling Festival rolled up at Halas last week giving The Flying Freebooters the excuse they needed to charge their boosters and set up the death-trap they call a racing circuit. I have no idea who the Freebooters are, other than yet another set of gnomes with a pirate fixation and a desire to find new and exciting ways to get us all killed testing another half-baked engineering project. 

Psst! Ladies! Wanna see my Crash Pad?

The gnomes offer a bribe for flying in races meant to knock the kinks out of their contraptions at no risk to themselves. It's a "C.R.A.S.H. Pad" that looks like a cut-down Enterprise. You can use it as a ground mount or as an appearance mount for flying if you have an actual flying mount. Most of my characters already have at least one so I wasn't planning on racing, but the gnomes had a juicier inducement on offer and my plans changed.

You get the mount just for completing five circuits. Anyone can do that. But if you can do it fast enough you get a title. Not just a title, a prefix. Everyone wants a good prefix and Mrs Bhagpuss especially wanted this one - Snowflake Chaser. So did I, come to that.

One careful owner

Flying the races gives Mrs Bhagpuss motion sickness so the actual piloting falls to me. Not usually a problem. I learned to do these races in DCUO, which uses the exact same system, and the Norrathian version is generally much easier. Generally, but not specifically. I found the Frostfang Sea course exceedingly hard.

To get the title you need to complete the course in 104 seconds. After a dozen tries my best time was 116. My average time was more like 124. Worse, I couldn't figure out how to improve. I'd have given up had a guildie not logged on for his once-a-week casual session, taken a couple of runs at it for practice and then and nailed the damn thing on his next run with a second to spare.

Frustration This Way

I couldn't tell myself it was plain impossible now I'd just seen it done, so I tried a bunch more times and still got nowhere. I went in search of inspiration. And more inspiration. I watched those two videos and at last I could see exactly what I'd been doing wrong. I got back on the horse bike C.R.A.S.H. Pad and tried again. And I still couldn't do it!

This time, though, at least I was getting close. 106 seconds. Then 105. So many 105s... Refine, refine, refine. Shave that hoop. Cut that corner. Hit every booster, miss every cloud until you find your dream. 

Ratonga pilot + gnomish engineering = fireworks

It took me around six hours to get the title on four characters. Time well spent? Well, I got this blog post out of it. And Mrs Bhagpuss and I are both Snowflake Chasers. Twice.