This one caught me by surprise. We all knew it was coming, but I wasn't expecting our Chinese New Year event until tomorrow. Indy21 rarely works this quickly to sort out problems. Maybe this is a sign of things to come? We can hope...
First of all, there is a hat which is sort of nice. That has always been a fun part of the calendar events. Well, fireworks were always pretty cool too, but good clothing items have always been a nice change from the usual. However, this one is sort of bjorked and is a lot more work than usual.
I stayed with the German language text file for this one because you get a windgram quest to start the whole thing. The quest starts in Hefei with the general goods merchant close to Wan Daye. You get sent to the Girl with the Rabbit Hat, who looks suspiciously like Little Wind from the Brotherhood of Thieves clan map. There are jade cases popping up in Hefei and most don't contain very much, which doesn't really help, but you can get a couple of items from them that will get you a constitution pill from the Girl with the Rabbit Hat.
After that you go out and grind like usual. You'll get drops of "dried rice". That's the translation from German anyway. I haven't tried the English text file yet. You take those dried rice droppings (eww...) back to the Girl with the Rabbit hat and trade them for "secret rice cakes". When you have one of each rice cake you'll get the next quest for the hat.
When you have one each of the 5 rice cakes you'll get another windgram. If you're using the English text file the windgram is empty. Take your 5 rice cakes back to your clan map. You'll get your hat from the clan leader. It's not a bad item for lowbie characters, but not all that useful if you've made it to 2nd role, and you're wearing that clothing set.
The hat give 10% speed (so does the 2nd role set), 10% critical hit rate, and 10 dex. What it doesn't give is VE return and that is far more useful for real grinding. So the hat is probably not too bad for PvP, but that's about it at least for high level players.
I wonder what these rice cakes are worth to sell?
- AxtTreiber
Games Campus has announced the next patch already. It seems like we had our last patch just last week. Oh wait, we did have our last patch just last week! I vaguely remember that GamersFirst is still playing with the Halloween patch. Man, Indy21 must just hate those guys.
Anyway, we're getting a Chinese New Year event just as the Koreans already have. Yep, we'll have the usual stuff to play with, a bunny hat at the very least. Hopefully a deco too. We'll see. The new patch is supposed to be rolled out on Thursday around 10am, here in Germany.
According to the patch notes on the forum there will also be some updates to the German language text file, not that that bothers us too much, and the Liaodong Merchant will be selling his usual list of stuff, weapons and passes to the dungeons.
When we get that patch the wallpaper event will be closed for new entries, and today is the last day to register for the dueling event on the Friday the 4th. I won't be entering either of those. I'm not much of artist, and my local football team is playing on Friday night, so I'm going to the pub!
Still, I'm looking forward to Thursday. Calendar events are always fun.
- AxtTreiber
I'm not sure why but Games Campus isn't interested in providing us with a regular schedule of events. That's too bad too, because I suspect they're missing out on the casual players of this game. The only way to get those people to log in regularly is to provide events at known times during the week. We saw that very clearly with Acclaim and their Bardo server.
Those people will spend some money of course, but mostly for permanent items like decos, or the separators for the slots on decos and weapons. As for me, and I'm fairly hard-core on this game, xp events are the only time I'll spend money for xp cards. Yeah, I just bought a bunch and I'm planning to go into no-life mode for the rest of the weekend.
The weekend xp event will start at 5pm here in Germany and will run until whenever the Games Campus staff get to work on Monday. Let's hope for a snowstorm in Berlin this weekend!
Also, Kung Fu experience boost items are on sale at the coin mall. They are 30% off. By the way, there is no reason to buy those if you have premium already running. You can't use both at the same time.
There are a couple of other events going on. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Games Campus is hosting a wallpaper event celebrating the coming Chinese New Year and The Year of the Rabbit. That event is still open and there are some awfully nice prizes being offered. Our publisher is also planning a PvP dueling event next week. You can register on the forum for that.
The Korean version of the game has a New Years event underway as well, with deco and some pretty nice rabbit hats. We haven't heard if we'll get that patch in this version, but we can hope. I wouldn't count on it though. I hear the GamersFirst people still have their Halloween event going on. I have to wonder what the relationship between GamersFirst and Indy21 is like these days.
Anyway, we have some events to play. Let's gogogo...
- AxtTreiber
Games Campus have given us the details of the "event for creative types" that I wrote about yesterday. It's a wallpaper event and they would like the artists out there to create a wallpaper 1280 x 1024 pixels in size, in the jpg format. For a theme of course it has to be 9Dragons related, but lets not forget the game is set in the Ming Dynasty era, if you would like to do a wallpaper in a more realistic and less game oriented style. Campus would like players to work in the Chinese New Year theme too, and in particular the fact that next year is the Year of the Rabbit.
There are quite a number of other traditions involved with Chinese New Year including visiting relatives, some rather large meals, and a tradition of gift giving. Children often receive red envelopes with money. We've seen useful game items such as soups and dumplings in various versions of the game and we had red envelopes that dropped from mobs too, a couple of years ago. Maybe someone can work with those ideas too?
The Chinese often wear red clothing at this time of year. It's thought to be lucky, and superstitious housewives wouldn't think of sweeping any dust out the door at just this time of year. You wouldn't want to sweep your luck out, would you?
Anyway, the contest runs until 3. February at 12 noon, server time. There will be 10 Judges selected by Games Campus and prizes will be awarded as soon as possible after that time. You're only allowed one entry per person.
Now for the good news. The first place winner will receive 5000 campus credits. That's more than a 90 day premium! The second place winner will receive 2000 campus credits, and there are 2 prizes of 500 credits for the runners-up. Send your wallpapers to 9dragons-de@gamescampus.eu
Did I make this entry 1000 words yet? Is this worth a picture?
Good luck people, and feel free to post links to your entries in our comments section too.
- AxtTreiber
- Red
Games Campus, the publisher of 9D Germany is planning a few things for this coming week, but we don't have too many details yet, just a couple of Twitter and forum posts that aren't too specific. They've been pretty good so far about giving us useful details in advance of events and such, and I'm sure that will continue.
They seem pretty impressed with themselves over their ability to deal with the goldsellers and spammers in their version of the game. I'll give them credit too, I have rarely seen a spammer in Hefei in the few weeks the server has been running.
Am Montag geht unser offizielles Statement zum Thema Goldseller raus. Mit breitem Grinsen wurde der Pressetext eben abgesegnet.
"On Monday our official statement concerning goldsellers will be given out, with a big grin!"
I'm looking forward to see what they have to say.
In a forum post that is slowly getting buried, Camlost gave us a few more ideas about what is to come this week, but again there weren't too many details.
Nächste Woche kommt noch etwas mehr, oder anders gesagt eine Menge mehr.
Am Montag starten wir ein Event, das allen Kreativköpfen unter euch die Chance geben wird, einen schönen Batzen CC zu verdienen.
Im Lauf der Woche werden wir dann auch erste Details zum nächsten Patch herausgeben, der einiges an Neuem bringen wird, ich sage nur Blutige Ebene, eiserne Hasen und Japaner.
"Next week will come a little more, or better said, a lot more."
"On Monday we're starting an event that will give our creative types a chance to win Campus Credits."
"During the week we'll give out more details about the next patch, which will bring news about Bloody Plains, iron rabbits and Japanese."
That last sentence has got my attention more than the information about "creative types". I'm a reasonably good writer but do you notice there isn't always a lot of imagery in my posts?
I'm not sure what "Bloody Plains" is about but iron rabbits is obviously a reference to the coming Chinese New Year which is on February 3rd this year. It will be the Year of the Rabbit.
The "Japanese" is obviously a reference to the Liaodong map, and I"m sure looking forward to that. I'm running out of grinding spots.
It'll be fun to see if the Games Campus people can do a better job of their next patch then the GamersFirst people did on theirs. Some of the errors in the G1 patch were quite amusing, NPC's are missing, vagabond lightfoot is broken, and the incredible new anti-hacker plan doesn't do a darned thing! You can read about those problems here.
Anyway, if anyone finds more on the coming Games Campus events please post in our comments, and I'll edit the good stuff into this post.
- AxtTreiber
I recall from a post by TheHermit on the forums that the Chinese New Year event was planned to run for two weeks, and that is just about up. Obviously Acclaim isn't likely to patch out that event on a weekend. They've made that disastrous mistake a couple of times and they aren't likely to repeat it. The staff at Indy21 don't work on weekends. We've also got big 5x reward events going on, and Bardo is under enough pressure from that.
Still, I expect that sometime Monday night late, or perhaps Tuesday of next week that we'll get a patch to remove the CNY event.
So why am I writing this?
If you want to make yourself a second Tiger Hat or this cool new Duanwu Fan relic, it's probably time to do that, or at least soon. Any extra Persimmons, or Pinwheels or the other items are likely to be useless after CNY has been patched out.
In other news [GM]Fugen is doing his level best to get as many people upset as possible. He tried to run a TGW event for non-nukers tonight and had to face down a lot of very upset players for it. I guess nukers see the TGW epithet as being their natural born right, and no one else should ever be able to get it. It was nice of him to try I suppose, but plenty of nuker players are paying customers too.
I'm still objecting to his use of Twitter to announce these Flash events. Fugen's Favorites are always going to have an advantage over the rest of us, and I can't for the life of me see why he can't use the in-game announcement system to tell us about these Flash events. If he were to use the announcement system no one would have any sort of advantage and everyone could get involved.
- SpearDriver
Me, "Anything I can report on, on the blog?"
GM, "Huge Patch. hint, hint"
My brain is whirling...
Chinese New Year? Tibet? A few bug fixes?
And then there is this from the Hermit, in the forum...
Event should patch Thursday evening PST as it does not begin until Friday PST for us. It runs two whole weeks so fear not, much fun is on the way.
This translates into Friday morning for Bardo players.
- SpearDriver
The Hermit and Historian have publicly said on the forums that the current version of tradeable XP cards will be on sale, 50% off, until midnight PSD. Very soon after that the XP cards from the coin mall will not be tradeable. For us on the Bardo server that means, sometime Monday morning or possible Tuesday morning, we're getting a patch. I can't quite believe that Indy21/Acclaim would put out a patch for just this. There may be more coming.
(Update: The price on XP cards in the coin mall was just raised to stupid levels, to prevent people from buying them. The patch is obviously not quite ready.)
From a few reliable sources I've got a couple of possible items. For starters there is a long list of bugs to be fixed and both Indy21 and Acclaim are aware of them. This new Master and Disciple system is near and dear to the Hermit's heart. I'm sure he's wants to get that system working properly.
Also, Chinese New Year is on the 14th of February this year, and "Chinese" New Year is not just for the Chinese. It is more of a lunar new year festival that is celebrated all across South-East Asia and for them it is just as serious as Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years, all rolled into one. This is the one time of year that families make a serious effort to come together. The programmers and developers at Indy21 will not allow the kind of fiasco we saw with the Christmas patch. The new year will be the Year of the Tiger, by the way. It should be a cool looking hat.
Also, the Hermit has said that he's hoping to have the Tibet map patched in, in February. One of the priorities to get that running well, will be to lift the PS1 level cap, fix the chi breathing bug from Hermit12 to PS1, and decide what to do with the PS level players who have apparently gained experience. I suspect that many of those PS level player are not going to be happy with the decision, but I'll wait to say what I think is going to happen.
And the last rumor I want to share tonight, the Tibet map will have mobs in the low Little Master levels, and DAMN I'm happy about that. I might be able to avoid the palace grind completely. That place is absolute murder for a warrior these days.
- SpearDriver
I think that's how it's spelled, and that is almost all of the Chinese I know. That means, "Happy New Year" in Chinese and according to their ancient lunar calendar it's that time.
For the Chinese it is a time to relax and to go meet family. My wife and I were in Singapore last year for CNY and that city was Closed. There were plenty of things for us to do there, but the shopping was pretty limited. Still, I liked it enough to go back again for a second trip last year.
In terms of the game, Acclaim has given us another hat item and it's pretty good. It gives +10 all attributes, 500 HP and VE and a nice critical dodge number. How you get that hat isn't all that clear. There are three quests you can do, and they start with a new fortune-teller NPC in Hefei. Just go look for the crowd.
You have to buy a bunch of keys from him and then try to be the first to open the various chests that spawn in front of him. The fortune teller was Grand Central Noob Station this morning when I did it. You use the keys to open the chests and collect the fortune letters. Letter number 3 actives a quest that in the end only gives you 200 gold. At the end of that quest you have to tell three words to the Black Market mask seller. The three words are the name of the item you picked up from the first NPC. You can do this quest repeatedly.
To get the hat you need to get fortune letter number 7. Then you get a chain-quest where you talk to a whole bunch of Hefei NPC's. Eventually you end up where you started the quest and you'll get the Ox hat. Uhm, I might get a deco to cover it up. It's pretty noobish.
There is a third quest and you have to be really patient with it. You need fortune letters 2 and 9, and two copies of fortune letter 0. That triggers a quest from the fortune-teller, and I think that gets you a +500 HP buff that lasts 60 minutes. I'm not sure if you can re-do that quest so I haven't started it yet.
The hat can be put into storage, so all of your characters can use it. This also means we need to watch carefully for a sign that the New Years event is ending soon, so that we can all go make a new hat. The one I got today lasts until the 4 of February, almost 3 weeks!
I got a dumpling ambrosia drop while grinding today. I suspect we'll see a few of those in this event. Dumplings are a traditional New Years food item, and these ones are going to make Hybrids and Nukers particularly happy. Each ambrosia gives you 500CK damage for 10 minutes.
And lastly, there is a new in-game drop. It's a red envelope with cash in it. It is traditional in Chinese families to give children a red envelope with money in it, for New Year's, or for their birthdays. I got a few of them today on the grind and NPC'ed them for 120 gold each at the clan map. I'm not sure if there is another use for them, but it's a nice touch that is based on a real tradition.
If you want another tradition? Wear something red for New Years. It's supposed to be lucky. And don't touch the dust in your house. You would be sweeping your luck away.
Did you find anything else in the event?
- SpearDriver
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