Most poorly Conceived Event to date
This by far is the worst conception for an event yet. The rewards where good so I'll give you that but otherwise it was awful. First, the dungeon was about the worst pick the team could have made as it does not lend itself to large groups of players. The beginning spawn was ridiculously high in some areas and empty in others leading to primarily bots working the spawn and gaining huge number of rewards in a short time. From there every attempt at fixing the situation just continued to make this worse. Until in its final form it wasn't possible to get 10 drops in an hour even using a potion. I really hope that the team puts a little more thought into the next dungeon event and not work so hard to drive customers away.
Comments
a.) They get rid of 3rd party clients
b.) They make the items account bound w/reduced costs
...nothing will change. We all know a.) will never happen and b.) probably won't either lol. It has only gotten worse with each ToT event. First with Doom and people spam withering in the lich room... fast forward to Wildfire+Hythloth and there were dozens of the same afk bot sampires running around 23/7 for the entirety of the events. Yeah, Destard has been the worst and just expect it to get even worse
I will be slow to reply because I cannot log in/stay logged in to the forums.
Make this your signature if you are tired of Vendor Search being broken, over FIVE YEARS and counting.
Vendor search rendered useless after Publish 106 – Forsaken Foes on August 14, 2019.
Reasons players were not in the dungeon:
The rewards were not that good. (If they were, players would be in the dungeon. (Getting the drop you want in Shadowguard takes many hours. Players do it.)
The first two days some players got 400+ points. They got all the suits and items they needed. So they did not return.
It was easier to get eggs. The price of ingots were down to 1M per. At the end. I bought 300 from a player that is not a bot. He collected many thousands of eggs. He had 500 ingots when I happened to call out in chat.
The price of ingots or drops being so low also proves the rewards were not that valuable or desired.
It was easier for me to buy eggs or ingots than fight in the dungeon. If I liked collecting eggs, I would have gone that route.
Players could get 300+ eggs a player session.
I too found this event to be unenjoyable, so i simply didn't do it. I found something else to do. I find the quests to get into shadowguard to be rather stupid as well so i choose to not do that either.
If mass players were to take a stance against the 3 unapproved clients (R,RE & O) then i could see that as noble. Not just for one flunk event.
Never be afraid to challenge the status quo
ESRB warning: Some Blood. LOTS of Alcohol. Some Violence. LOTS of Bugs
How about something like this
We hope everyone enjoyed the treasures of fey event .for July and August we will have new loot available at the black market and coming in late September (drum roll please) the long awaited release of NL
Now is this difficult? Asking too much?? Does not even have to allow reply just a little COMMUNICATION
Wind event: Thought this event went really well. It was fair to all of those that played it from start to finish. If you made the effort to play it you got Easter eggs and a vine wrap. On my shard four or five moderately advanced players could take it from start to finish.
Easter egg hunt: Not really my thing so can’t comment on the bots. But the vendors were not hard to find and I got a few of most things with the eggs from the Wind event. For collectors think this event was well done.
Destard eggs for ingots: Really enjoyed having this option available. It really beat getting killed half a dozen or more times in the dungeon every night. Really hope UO continues to offer this kind of option. Bots were a lot faster than the players. Most appeared to monitored by the players that wrote the programs for them. But upon creating a rune set and learning how to use it I could collect and turn in for ingots about 100 to 150 eggs per hour. That was a lot better for me than the drop rate in the dungeon.
Destard dungeon: Think for much of the time the dungeon was really out of control. Some nights it was quite playable and other nights it was not playable at all. Never knew what to expect. Did not see that many scriptors on my shard. Think they played in the off hours. Drop rate really left a lot to be desired. Feel those willing to go into the dungeon should get more drops per hour than those collecting eggs but for most players think they did better collecting eggs. This resulted in not many players being in the dungeon a lot of nights. Think in the end UO did finally get the spawn about right in the dungeon.
Ending date: Think most players and UO personnel thought eggs for ingots and the dungeon events ended July 4th. That just made sense. It is not logical that the ending dates for these two parts of the same overall event would have different ending dates. Since UO never did provide a firm ending date for the egg gathering event it really disappointed me that UO did nothing after it realized that most players had expected the event to run until July 4th.
Overall between the egg collecting and the dungeon I got what I wanted. Was glad UO provided the two options. But think this event also shows that UO needs to do better overseeing these events and communicating with players.
To my understanding,
https://dev.epicgames.com/en-US/news/epic-online-services-launches-two-new-free-services
Would it solve all of the cheating issues for UO ? I have no idea....
Are there better options to stop cheating in UO ? Possibly, I do not know.... but at least, I would like to see something being done to stop all the scripting, the cheating, the use of unapproved Third Party applications....
Nobody complains about bug fixes (except those who were profiting from exploiting them)
can just do that instead”
I had fun with this event. And I really like the prizes I got. And had a super lot of fun decorating with the new artwork.
Thanks!
If we are talking about the entire event, I think that the Devs have consistently done better on the dynamic spawn. Event at Wind was pretty good overall. While it wasn't really an issue to do the spawn on ATL, I do think the last level or 2 of spawn was a bit tough for smaller shards that might only have 1 or 2 people looking to do the spawn.
I do think that the egg collecting piece was a nice change of pace and while it wasn't really something I was into I can see how others would enjoy it. It's just a shame that people who really would like to do this had to compete with bots (speaking for ATL only). If this is done in the future, I hope they make it a little more interactive to hopefully prevent such rampant botting.
The Treasures event in Destard, unfortunately, was fumbled from the start and really had a tough time getting back on track. The first two days of the event had the "hole" where people were able to get a ton of drops by just standing in one spot spamming area spells on a very quick spawn rate. Personally, I had a blast but obviously this wasn't intended so their "fix" was to move the spawn point slightly and severely reduce the spawn rate (this happened after 2 days).
All this did was hurt people that actively wanted to play and helped promote bot/scripting. The lag was horrible and it was near impossible to actually kill stuff given the auto attack/AI spam dozens of toons were running. The event was unplayable on ATL. This was the case for almost 2 weeks. I understand they wanted to monitor things but this part of the event in particular left a bad taste in the mouths of many people (myself included) given that all they had to do was log into ATL at any point to see how bad it was; instead they initially opted to say that they didn't turn the spawn rate down (that was obviously wrong because the "fix" basically just moved static spawn points on the first floor away from the entrance yet everyone complained about the horrible drop rate) and say that they "couldn't move the spawn away from those spawn points" which was another lie because they eventually did just that. At this point it was way more productive to just go gather eggs (all the bots were still inside the dungeon at this point). Again they let this go on for 2 weeks. The huge problem here was that for some reason they allowed EJ accounts to get drops which I think shouldn't be allowed.
The new fix which actually moved the spawn around the dungeon (kudos to the Devs for eventually making that happen) helped but the initial ratio of spawn to players was low and many players still spent a good amount of time running around looking for stuff to kill more than actually killing (at least on ATL). This issue was further compounded by a combination of players not killing the paragons as they spawned (leading to long trains of paragons) and things like paragon shadow wyrms / greater dragons / ancient wyrms all being too hard for a single player to fight (which mean people like me had to literally spend 15-20min spamming for help instead of killing stuff). Again none of this was ideal and collecting eggs was still better than fighting in Destard, but at this point the bots starting shifting over to scripting eggs. People pleaded with Devs to open Fel (especially on ATL) because the balance was still off and this wasn't just on ATL people said that. Hats off to the Devs though for listening and a few days later they decided to open up Fel only on ATL only for the weekend.
That weekend that only Fel was open on ATL was hands down the best part of this event for me and many others. It wasn't the PK-fest 24/7 like some people claimed it would be and actually proved to fun and lucrative with the perfect balance of risk vs reward. Random people actually had a reason to work together to kill a paragon dragon etc in the spawn area (or to kill a PK). I think this was a very good trial run and should have remained to be open in Fel even when they opened Tram back up.
Once Fel ended and Tram was turned back on, the spawn rate did seem a bit higher to me or maybe just less people continued to do the dungeon (hard to say). The problem of paragons still remained though because level 2 could quickly become unmanageable if just a couple of paragon shadow wyrms / weald protectors / Crystal lattice combos spawned. For people with only a single account or not in a guild this was a problem. I'd call out in Gen Chat for 15-20min (sometimes giving up and just logging) trying to get help. At one point I posted a pic of 4 paragon shadow wyrms plus a few weald protectors etc (there were actually 6 SW there that day); that is the epitome of unbalanced. This is basically how it remained for the next 6 weeks.
I eventually, like many others, became tired of this routine and just stopped doing the event literally less than half way through it (this doesn't include not playing during the first week or 2 of the static spawn spots). I did pop into Destard from time to time in the mornings just out of complete boredom but I had very little desire to spend more than an hour there (whereas every other event I'd easily spend 2-3 hours working the spawn).
The other thing that I think also played a role in the lack of player desire / participation was the rampant botting/scripting that went on (initially in Destard and then for eggs). Some people have dismissed it and say "just be smarter than the bot" but I think that's unfair to the casual player who just wants to play the game and not have to compete with a program that runs 23/7. The average player is not going to be happy with only being able to get a fraction of the amount of reward because there is a bot running the whole time (and it doesn't care if it gets 10 or 100 bc it's running all day / every day).
The final thing that I think contributed to a sub-par event are the rewards (and some prices). I think the quiver/fey tali/shrine teleporter were all home runs and great items but there wasn't much else to really entice people to grind it out for drops (and this event was the biggest grind I've seen as far as events go). The whips were interesting but honestly not much better than an imbued whip AND were 100 drops each. The bow/cyclone also kind of fall into that category where something imbued could be even better outside of the Bane property. Time will tell but the same thing with the apron (also 100 drops) where it is giving +10 alchemy but it doesn't actually go towards crafting bonus; this item seemed like a very specific item somebody needed for a specific build (we will see how many pvpers are using them in a couple months). The 50% SDI spellbook was a cool color but 250pts was a very hefty price for something many people have now obtained (last event same thing was only 200pts). Everything else was either a repeated thing like a jaw bone/HCI earrings or, in my opinion, was simply a head scratcher (for the price) like the 40pt "certificate" or the 50pt title deed. There needed to be, at least in my opinion, some big ticket item 125-150 drops that was essentially equivalent to the demon chest from Hythloth.
So while there were a handful of things that were done well, I think that most of the things outlined above are what lead to a sub-par event. To make things worse (ie add to the detriment of the event), it felt like the Devs just did not want to admit they messed up and tried to act like everything was fine by very limited communication and updates. The fact that the last time they gave any update on this event was 5/12 before the event went to Fel on ATL (ie 2 months ago) tells me they made the decision to put out X event and had very little interest in "making it right" after they implemented it which is never the right thing when dealing with paying customers.
The spring fever part of the event ended when I expected it to, as I had taken note of the date the npcs were to be removed from the notes. I suppose I should have thought to remind people, but everyone had the same information as I had. On the whole I enjoyed the event
because I didn’t have to fight in a dungeon
I hope they continue adding other ways to get the rewards
fun event for sure !
The things some people write is just embarrassing. There's twenty five years of content. If an event isn't their cup of tea, find something else to do.
1. Testing. Why on earth was it moved from Origin still broken
2. Yep you guessed it developers communication..
wind champion spawn - really good.
On the shard that I live, we saw vendors popping up owned by said script farmers selling items and drops. Funnelling that gold back to the ATL hub. Making it pretty hard to support the argument for shard bound items and promoting off-atlantic shard economies, as the end result is the same as if the items could directly be transferred.
overall conclusion: 5/10 rating for this event.
This was the first time they've done it...could they have done better? Yes....maybe next time they will make it so scripters can't take advantage of it but I do love the concept. I was glad I didn't have to grind in the dungeon....thankful for the people who did so I could at least get a full suit to display on a mannequin, thankful for the extra deco item (Fey Ingots)
I did go into the dungeon a few times near the end and was getting drops in a reasonable amount of time.
I do hope that they keep the concept....as in, having 2 ways to get the Treasures of Dungeon items. Hopefully this time around gave them some ideas on how to make it better, not so scripter friendly etc.
I actually liked the rewards this time around. In Corp Mani Xen (Fey Slayer Talisman), Serpent Skin Quiver (first Luck cloak slot piece in game), the Ankh of Devotion (Shrine Teleporter), Grimoire of Nature (30% SDI Fey Slayer Spellbook), the Silverbranch Bow (Bane Yumi, has Double Shot+AP, both of which are useful, wish it had Stam Leech instead of Life Leech though, the Life Leech makes it a no-go against Osiredon), and the return of Solaria's Secret Poisons (best Earring slot item for Dexxers), and Serpent's Jawbone. With so many rewards that i wanted, it sucked though that the drop rate inside Destard was so low, even with the capability of taking out the Paragons with 2,300+ Luck. The Egg Gathering route, you had to compete against tons of scripters, especially on Atlantic.