A few things actually, and none of them are running particularly well.

It's probably time to file a few complaints about the way this game is being run. Of course it does no good to complain to people like [GM]Fugen or the TheHermit. They like things just they way they are. TheHermit actually wrote a public congratulations (scroll down) to the Emo/Goths who put together the new unreadable forum. Honestly, that page makes my eyes water!

So far no amount of complaining has done anything to get this changed, so it's time to go higher up.

Playdom bought Acclaim, maybe they will have something to say about this? You can read the original press release for yourself and see how things are now. TheHermit announced this as a merger, which is just about the last shred of his credibility. Howard Marks, the former owner of Acclaim is still involved though and should be reachable. His postal address is;

Acclaim Games Inc.
Attn: Howard Marks
9595 Wilshire Blvd Suite 900
Beverly Hills, CA 90212

Phone: (310) 492-5188 Fax: (310) 943-2332

I'm still looking for an email address for him, but he apparently likes to be hard to reach. Howard Marks does have a Facebook page, and those of you who have one too could perhaps try to reach him there? I'm not a Facebook user, so I would have no idea how to even find that.

David Perry is also a top dog at Acclaim, apparently the guy in charge of creative material. I would love to hear what he has to say about this new forum theme.

If all of that fails, Playdom has a support contact page that doesn't yet support 9Dragons. It doesn't matter to me at all. I used that page and put the word "9Dragons" in big letters both in the topic and text and included a link to the new forum, and explained the problem. You should feel free to complain too, particularly if we're being ignored now.

So, what else?

We're having another collection quest event this week, organized by [VGM]Olix and his team. I used the word "organized", but I didn't really mean it. The lists came out on time but that's about as organized as it gets. The lists are difficult to impossible to complete.

In particular there are requests for items that only DB level players could collect from Tibet, and they are rare drops. Besides that, Asura doesn't have any DB level players so that was never going to work. Asura is on strike anyway. They had yet another rollback last weekend and I imagine there are a lot of really pissed off players over there. There has been no compensation offered yet either.

The other problem is that the VGM's themselves haven't been the least bit interested to show up and collect the drop items from players. I waited several hours on Sunday night/Monday morning to hand in items for the first list. Then I waited another several hours on Wednesday for items on the second list. Even though I was in and out all day Wednesday I know that no VGM showed up because several players did actually stand at the event stage all freaking day.

It was only when Olix himself showed up at the chat section of the GoogleDoc that we got some action. I guess he emailed/SMS/phoned a couple of people, and we got some attention finally. [VGM]Hypatia sat in that same chat section all day and didn't ever show up to take collections. Why do these people want to be VGM's if they aren't going to do the job?

Anyway, the collection for Bardo is going really well and I'm expecting a 3x event for 4 hours on both Saturday and Sunday. After all, we put the effort in even if Asura, Nirvana, and the VGM's didn't. I'll update this post later when we get the actual announcement.

Edit: It's official, we're only getting 2x for Saturday and Sunday with 4x for skills. I wish [VGM]Olix the best of luck trying to motivate players to contribute next week.

- SpearDriver