Showing posts with label News. Show all posts

We've got some good news for the league. We've managed to attract a number of active players, and some of them are really high level. We've got all the active players from the Devil's Mind league with us now, and a few of them are active pvp'ers too.

I wasn't planning to go to SVS this weekend because most of our high level players haven't been seen for a while. With this group, I'll go make the reservation as soon as I post this. Hopefully a few people will read this before the weekend and we'll have some fun with that fight.

Also, there is a 2x complete event this weekend. All of xp rate, skill rate and drop rate will be doubled from noon Sunday until midnight on the 1st of November. It's not often we get a complete event so lets go out and enjoy it. I'll be on my nuker for this event because...

The bad news is, the second half of Tibet has been delayed yet again. This time "for some weeks". "Technical reasons" is all we were told but you know that translates from Korean as "Indy21 fucked something up again".

Oh well.

The next patch has been announced but it doesn't look like too much of a big deal. This is mostly a patch for bug fixes. It won't be possible to enter CC5 for instance, if your black or white side didn't win then war on Bloody Plains. I wonder if players with an old CC5 entry buff will still be able to enter, if their side wins. A lot of people get an early start on True General Wei this way.

The empty gift box is going, finally, and some of the mini-maps will be updated. A few of them have locations incorrectly labeled in German. Too bad those can't be switched back to the English versions too. On that topic, some of the English language content in the Master & Disciple system will be replaced with German as well.

Really though, Games Campus should just admit defeat and set the language to Vietnamese. At least that would keep the largest number of players happy.

The post announcing the patch notes also says there will be a few other small bugs fixed, but don't give any details of what those will be. This whole thing will be patched up on Wednesday morning between 8 am and 10:30 am.

As always, if you find something new, or a new problem/bug please post in the comments.

- AxtTrieber

There is a bit of a loud-mouthed prick who has been tossed from German servers, with the IGN of Skyline. He and his sock puppets have been throwing shit around on the Games Campus forum and I must admit I was doing my best to keep him agitated. It wasn't difficult.

Now that many of his accounts and sock puppets have been closed, and probably his new playing characters too, I suspect he may try to move his stupidity over here. I'm not in the mood to be deleting posts from anybody. Most of you know that I almost never do that. It's easier to set the comments to moderated and I'll check the blog more often over the next few days to see if any comments need approval.

In other news Lilith and I had 3 successful full runs of the Golden Coins Mansion, and we both got our killer epithets. Lilith will need a few more levels to do a proper job of finishing for epithet runs, but I figure ShadowGuyver could do that job now. I would like to figure out where ShadowGuyver is too. He is Missing in Action.

We'll be doing epithet runs for league members once we get a couple more people just a little higher, or Shadow shows up. So get your passes together people. You'll need 3 purple passes, or 30 Letters of Yakumo, and don't forget to pay your tanker. I personally want clothes from the CS6 male damage set. The GCM boss drops those.

I have a few manuals to give away to our active league members, and a few elixirs too. Stay tuned to league chat for our next runs and anyone CS++ who can heal themselves could probably get some loot on their own.

Update: xenawarior went away happy tonight. She got the conqueror epithet for the Golden Coins Mansion, which may not look too cool up front, but if you're using a high dex build you'll get a 7% dodge bonus for using that epithet.

Golden Coins Clan's Sealed Gate(GCM conqueror)
Reflect 4% of physical damage to target
Reflect 4% of Chi Kung damage to target
Dodge increased by 7%
Chi Kung dodge increased by 7%

She probably also has a bag full of elixirs and manuals to use, or sell.

- AxtTreiber

Like the sign says, the ice map is coming. The post just went up in the forum.

On Thursday morning at the usual times there will be 2 patches rolled out, one to bring us the ice map and the second to synchronize things for the French language server. I have to say though, I sure wish they would concentrate on one server and give the players the language options like we had at Acclaim. That would really help the server population.

Anyway, we've got some good news and I'm sure a few people will be going into no-lifer mode next weekend. The grind spots at the GL1 levels are going to be a little crowded for the first few days. Hopefully we'll have an event, and I'll be pulling out my xp cards.

As usual if you find anything bugged or new on the next patches please let us know in the comments section.

- AxtTreiber

There are a few small things in game that are worth a comment or two, so here goes. We got a patch this morning but to be honest I can't see what it did. Even Games Campus are calling it a mini-patch. Even the minor bug on the living/resources map tabs wasn't fixed. If anyone finds something new please leave a note in the comments.

I think most people know that the Viet players make a habit of trying to sell in-game items for real world money. I don't know what Games Campus policy is about this sort of thing, but they do it anyway. DuLong has a regular price of 3000 campus credits for a defense trink, for example. You know what? I think they've run out of customers! There are only so many people who will do that sort of thing, pay real money for game items, and we have a low population on this server to begin with.

I mention this because in the last couple of days, 3 or 4 people have told me that they ran into that boss and no one else was there. The usual small army of Viet campers/buffers weren't around. I doubt they've all been banned from the game, so they're probably spending their time hacking away at something else.

Which brings me to my next topic. It's pretty clear to anyone who has played in any part of the PvP areas that damage hacks are the next big thing for a number of players. At the storm versus storm event last Sunday night someone hit me for over 8k hit points, in one shot. I even had an HP pill running, from the Master & Disciple NPC, and that was overwhelmed too, in that single shot. We all know that's not possible. With my dodge and ck dodge numbers, and level, most people wouldn't be able to hit me at all. It had to have been a high level nuker, and there are only a few of them.

I filed a complaint about it with Camlost and he actually got back to me pretty quickly. He said that that sort of thing is hard to prove, and I knew that. At least he's aware of the problem and watching out for it. It will probably require video evidence to get these assholes tossed out of the game. A lot of players came to this server, started over from Zero (again), just to get away from the hackers on the GamersFirst servers. It would be a real shame to see this server go down in hacker flames, because this place really is the last chance for 9Dragons.

- AxtTreiber

Patch 17 should be rolled out for us tomorrow. I've complained a couple of times about not getting any notice about upcoming patches, and Games Campus is back to their 2 days advance notice idea. Who said complaining never works? There is no time given in the patch notes announcement but it makes sense for Games Campus to get this sort thing done early in the morning, when the Koreans are still in their office too.

This patch will end the Chinese New Year event and the Valentines event at the same time. Apparently they plan to leave the girl with the rabbit hat in the game so that you can still make those rice cake attribute pills if you want too. I'm sure most people will simply sell the dried rice drops to the NPC's for gold. That's what I'm doing.

You should never give away something for nothing and maybe Games Campus knows that too. With this patch we'll be able to enter the Gold Coins Mansion and the Beast Tower as well, not that anyone is high enough level to finish those dungeons yet. It will be interesting to see who is willing to damage hack those bosses to get those epithets. I have no doubt we'll see a few people with killer epithets within 1 day.

I was watching the chat this morning while drinking my coffee and I'm certain that Camlost has banned a few people in the last day or two. There were a couple of Viet roars that included the words "Fuck You Camlost". Methinks someone got caught doing something they shouldn't. So far there has been no information in the forums about it, or about how long these people are banned, and I doubt we'll ever hear.

According to their forums something similar is going on at GamersFirst. A bunch of people have been banned from that version of the game too. That should be a good thing for those servers but probably wont help us much on 9D Germany. I'm sure a few of those banned players will start characters over here.

Like always, I'll update this post if we find more things/bugs in Patch 17. Please post in the comments if you find anything.

Update I: There is new information in the patch notes post on the forum. Apparently we're finally getting another set of Hotkeys that you can use in combination with Ctrl/Strg key. A lot of other games have this set up and it's a nice change. I know the healers are going to love this one.


That second skill bar comes with your best lightfoot skill loaded in the center slot. That slot is already attached to your Alt-Key. That's going to save me yet another hot key on each bar.

Update II: The valentines epithets are now +5 only which is sort of too bad, and the living screen, resources map tabs for the pass sellers have not been repaired with this patch. The Retrieving Family Treasures quest has been fixed.

Update III: Maybe that lightfoot skill attached to the Alt-Key isn't such a good idea. We haven't figured out how to change it yet anyway.

Update IV: We're still getting the flower gifts from the giftbox, even though that event is supposed to be over.

- AxtTreiber

As of tomorrow the Games Campus version of 9Dragons will have been running for 2 months, and I'm pretty happy to say that I am basically level capped. I made it to Crimson Snake 12 in those 2 months. I could squeeze out a couple of more levels on the last mobs on the ship, and a couple of people have done that. Those mobs are 2 levels lower than me and and even though they are still green, the xp rate is getting low. The place is getting a little crowded too as players catch up to the no-lifers like me, thanbip and Urza.

Hopefully we'll get the ice map soon so that players can spread out again. One of the nice things about that map is that you have a couple of areas for each mob level.

Until then I will be playing my nuker since most of the skills on that character are now basically finished. I have c11 on almost everything, and c5 on my VE shield. Cheng 6 is more than enough of a VE shield, up to the EC levels.

We still have the Chinese New Year and Valentines events going on. A lot of players have completely stopped grinding because they are farming the flowers. If you find a set of red flower spawn spots it's usually pretty easy to figure out the spawn pattern and you can collect a lot of flowers that way. I may do some of that tonight too, if I get bored on my nuker.

In other event news, Games Campus will be offering 50% off the usual price on selected items. Each day this week around noon the discounted item or items will be announced in all the usual places, Twitter, Facebook, and the forum. The sale price will be good for 24 hours. If there's anything really good I'll update this post with the sale items.

Monday: Trigrams and Jades
Tuesday: Chakra Purge
Wednesday: Jade Separators, Dragons Scales and Tears (good one!!!)
Thursday: Yesterdays items are carried over, with Courier Passes and Teleport balls added.
Friday: Qilins Mirror
Weekend: Experience Cards 30% off (starting Saturday around noon)

- AxtTreiber

We're finally starting to get some gold into the game. Quite frankly we've been starving for it and it's been hard to sell some items for anything close to what they're worth. I'm talking mostly about the black market items from CC3 of course. It's a gamble what you'll get from there and you have to sell off the items you don't need in order to get your gold back. Because there has been so little gold in the game, most players haven't been willing to buy anything that they don't absolutely need, and need it right now.

In some ways that's been good. Players have been forced to think about what they actually need, right now, and they aren't being foolish about spending gold on items that obviously have a stupid price in the stand.

As of the Chinese New Year event, and now the Valentines Day event running at the same time, we're getting 3 items that drop reasonably well and they are actually worth something to sell to the NPC. Our double drop-rate event over the weekend helped too.

A few of our experienced players remembered that old trick, farming the haystacks for these things. I must admit I went and did that too for a couple of hours. The dried rice, red flowers and white flowers can be sold to your clan map NPC for 60k gold each. Please take your stuff back to the clan map even if you have to run a little further. You get 10% more for your drops there. If you sell your drops to an NPC on the Hangzhou or Nanchang maps the owners of the fortresses there will get that 10% extra gold.

You're being lazy and making the enemy rich at the same time.

Still, it was sure nice to suddenly have 20 million gold in the bag. I bought a mini defense relic, some 300 CK damage wristbands and a VE hat that I haven't been able to get in Wild Tower dungeon runs. These were all things that I "wanted" for my nuker, but never had the gold to buy them.

I was able to sell a bunch of stuff this weekend too. People have some gold in the bag, and they're in a buying mood. Collectible items for the Wan Daye blue jade sell like water now, and manuals go pretty quick too. Even the 110 dodge ornaments sell fast. I didn't raise my prices on those things. I just wanted them out of the bag.

A few people have complained that we'll see some price inflation, and I agree that we will, at least on some items but I don't think that this new gold coming into the game is going to be all that bad so long as it's not permanent. You just have to look at some stands and you can see more black market items for sale. A LOT of gold was taken out of the game this weekend too. Those weapon ornaments are 2.1 million each to buy from the black market, and that's a lot of red and white flowers!

Prices for blood essence and experience cards will no doubt rise, and like a lot. People no longer have to sell precious items like that to make a small amount of gold, so they are holding on to them longer. That's too bad. I've been buying both those items every chance I got. I wont be doing that for the next little while. Hopefully prices will come back down.

So, what did you buy this weekend?

- AxtTreiber

It's all well and good to get new material, new events, and bug fixes, but could we please have more than 10 seconds notice that the servers are going down? Games Campus used to give us a couple of days notice for stuff like this. It was nice.

Anyway, the patch notes are out and Camlost is making full use of the International Corner of the forums these days. The announcements are now in English too, so be sure to check the forum from time to time, as well as this blog.

Apparently red flowers will be blooming all over the maps, and white flowers will be dropping from mobs. We're supposed to take the flowers to the merchant beside Wan Daye and trade for items that haven't been described yet. Otherwise, the disconnection issue is supposed to be fixed with this patch, and the notes say that the Chinese New Year event will continue for at least another week.

In league news, we have two more FC++ players in the league, ShadowGuyver and Lilith. Hopefully we'll be doing Killer of Beasts epithet runs for them tonight. Normally you could get the KoB epi much earlier than that but they'll have to play the finisher role for each other. Hopefully there will be some pretty good drops!

Update 1: The red and white flower drops are working and the items from the General Goods Merchant beside Wan Daye are pretty impressive. In particular there is a silver ring that is a 10% damage relic. It doesn't appear to have an expiry date either. The gold ring is a reflection relic and I'm not sure how useful that will be. There is a 3rd item there too, a flower pot, and I'm not sure what that does yet.

Update 2: The descriptions for items in the resources map tabs is missing. I checked the pass merchant on the Hangzhou map and all of his normal items are there. I don't know about the other merchants.

Update 3: The drop rate has been increased for the weekend.

Update 4: The gate to the Hangzhou map, from Liaodong doesn't work. I relogged. It works now.

Update 5: When you buy the flower pot from the General Goods Merchant beside Wan Daye you get to talk to the master of ornaments. You choose who to give the flowers too and you get an epithet. If you choose to give the flowers to Jiang Daxi the epithet is +15 all attributes and an xp rate increase that doesn't work.

You can also choose to give the flowers to the refining bitch Mo Tailan. Who in their right mind would ever do that? But you can. The epithet from her is also +15 all attributes and an increase in the drop rate. We're still trying to figure out if that drop rate increase is working.

- AxtTreiber

It had to happen eventually. A patch on the German version of the game has gone sour but it's not really surprising. It was going to happen eventually because that's how Indy21 does things. Apparently patch number 12 has some fairly serious problems, and of course today is Chinese New Year. There is nobody home at Indy21.

One of these days the publishers of the game will learn to roll out patches on your average Tuesday, at say 8am. Korea is something like 6 or 7 timezones ahead of us, so at 8am on an average Tuesday, Indy21 will still be at work. Someone at Games Campus obviously wasn't thinking too clearly about this. Problems with patches and Indy21 are not a matter of "if", but "when".

As I write this my launcher has downloaded patch number 14. It's ok, 13 is an unlucky number anyway, and we didn't really want a patch with that number. As near as I can tell nothing has changed from patch 11. Basically we got a roll back on the client. Hopefully there has been no rollback on the character database.

Update: A lot of people are getting disconnected! Holy cow have we got a league for them!

Update II: Our drop rate has been increased by 4x. I'll be hosting Wild Tower runs all night. All the high level (EC++) players in the league are welcome. The treasure boxes in the first 4 rooms should be loaded with manuals. I want to remind you guys though, I kill the last 2 poison pillars before the boss room for a reason. If the boss is getting to you and you have to run? Run Early, Run Far! The top of those steps is out of range of the bosses area effects.

Update III: There are new collection items in Hefei with "unknown items". If you click on them you will get disconnected.

- 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 announced patch 11 today and even handed out the patch notes. The patch is scheduled for Tuesday morning, probably around 9am. How's that for confidence? I can remember when it was like pulling teeth to get information from a publisher, about what was already released. These guys tell us in advance what's coming, and when. Did I use the word "refreshing" lately?

Here it is in German;

- Liaodong ist eröffnet
- Die Schlacht um die Höhle ist implementiert (weitere Infos HIER)
- Der Wahre General Wei ist implementiert
- Sprachdatei Update
- Mehrere ausnutzbare Bugs wurden entfernt
- Die Wege zum Drachen-Quests sind abschließbar
- Unsichtbare Wände weiter verringert

English anyone?

- Liaodong is open
- Black vs White War is implemented
- True General Wei is implemented
- Text data is updated
- Bugs fixed (details on this one would be nice. which bugs?)
- Road to the Dragon quests can now be finished
- More invisible walls removed (there is a really annoying one in CC4...)

So I have until next Tuesday to get that defense trinket from Vicious Fist or I'm going to have to buy it, because after this patch I'm going into no-life Grinding Mode for about a week. Obviously it's going to be a race to get the True General Wei epithet.

Black vs White war is coming. It's been announced in a couple of places on the forum. We're getting war twice per week, at 6pm on Tuesdays and 8pm on Saturdays. The first war event will be the first Saturday after the patch.

Grind People! Let's make our presence felt, and if anyone wants an epithet run, let's get it done this weekend.

With regards to war, last night I made a deal with Crystalstorm, LM of Thors Nightmare. We have a truce between our leagues for the duration of war events. It makes sense. Black side clans will have to work together to win that war. If this works out I'll try to extend the truce to Storm vs Storm events and the ownership of the fortresses.

Make no mistake though, if you're running around Bloody Plains looking for karma, you're fair game too. I don't want to hear any whining about that.

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

Games Campus announced what they are planning for the server settings and I'm thinking it's a bit of a mixed bag. It's not all good news, but it's not all bad either. For starters it will be a PvE style server with player versus player action limited to Bloody Plains. That suits me just fine. Hopefully we'll get war events often enough to attract players there regularly.

The experience rate for the server will be 2x the base rate, which is not particularly good. They know that the G1 rate is higher than that. Games Campus has also said that experience rate events won't be all that common, not even weekly, although they are planning for some special events like Christmas. I expect a lot of new players will quit after it takes longer than a day to level up. The no-lifers won't care.

The skill experience rate will not be quite as high as it was for the beta test, but at 3x the base skill rate it will still be fairly easy to get skills up to the C6 level, using cheap clan map manuals. After that things will get slow of course, and I think we can expect to see more than a few people using skill trainers or lego robots. The Games Campus people haven't said one way or another if they'll allow their use. Of course the insane skills are still going to be insane to level up.

The drop rate will be returned to normal low rates, and I'm not sure this is so good either. There will be fewer players here than in any other version of the game. That means fewer drops collected, sold, traded, and used. It could take quite a long time to get Wan Daye's Blue Jade Seal for instance. Manuals, Tomes and skill books will probably be fairly rare too, until players are high enough to run the higher dungeons.

Otherwise the Games Campus people are promising more updates to the game, with new material, clothes, maps, weapons and more. They seem to think that some of this will help to make up for the lower experience rates. We'll see. I hope Games Campus understands that they are the last chance for this game. They are the 4th publisher of this game for the western markets, and every one before them failed, some in a more spectacular fashion than others.

We players have another choice in playing 9Dragons. We can start new characters here, or put up with the absolute bullshit coming from GamersFirst. I'll be starting a new character on the German server and see how it goes.

It's not good news, not that anyone is expecting much from them. 9DGermany did their test on the template characters and things weren't a total disaster, so G1 is going to be releasing templates to us in their version of the game, based on what we submitted as lost characters so many months ago.

We aren't getting our old characters back. We are getting a character that is close to the level of our old characters, with a package of equipment that is suitable for that level. It works out like this;

Level Ranges
1-80 = No Template character
81-100 = Level 96 Template Character
101-115 = Level 108 Template Character
116-128 = Level 120 Template Character
129-139 = Level 132 Template Character
140-150 = Level 144 Template Character
151-160 = Level 156 Template Character
161-172 = Level 168 Template Character
173-188 = Level 180 Template Character
189-200 = Level 192 Template Character

For me it means that my SpearDriver (DB6, or level 198) character will be dropped 6 levels and that seriously sucks. At Dissolved Body levels it takes at least a week of grinding just for one level. My AxeDriver character will gain 2 levels, and my nuker will drop 1 level. Still, that's only part of the story. The characters will come with zero karma, no epithets, and probably no elixirs either. They apparently all have a messed up build too, with Essence being set to 1 per level. Oh and, skills are all going to be set to c10. You think book prices are expensive now?

One of my least favorite G1 forum mods, Pelos was displaying both his abusive arrogance and ignorance over the lack of epithets. Yes, we need the Killer of Shen Mo epithet. That's why every frigging player in the game goes through pain of camping him, with every single character they have. I sure wish that guy would go back to the Knights Online forum, assuming that he knows anything about that game.

An awful lot will depend on what that "package of equipment" contains. We'll need clothes and weapons and there is little hope that Indy21 can get all the right stuff on each character. We aren't getting any of our old equipment back, and that includes all the coin mall items. I don't know if I'll be able to play at all if that's the case. Warriors don't do well on the Tibet map without a dodge deco. Hell, nobody does well grinding at the Altar either without one and that's exactly where I'll have to go with my AxeDriver hybrid character.

It looks like the process of claiming a template character will overwrite one of the existing characters on your account, which probably means deleting all the equipment you have on that character. I'll be moving stuff around today to try and save what I can.

There are also no answers about conflicting names, and lot of people are dealing with other players who have squatted on their old character names. There are also a lot of people out there who didn't get the chance to fill out that character claim form, and for now they are completely out of luck.

All in all this just hasn't been thought through very well, but I'm looking forward to whatever else comes up. I'll sure there will be issues.

Sometimes you just have to be persistent. I found this post on the Games Campus Forum this morning.

Eine offizielle Ankündigung zum Thema Serversettings (Exp-Rate, Skillrate, Droprate und PvE/PvP) gibt es am Freitag.

"An official announcement on the topic of server settings will be given on Friday."

I may not like their decisions on these topics, but at least I'm getting what I asked for in my last post! I'm sure their answers will raise another series of questions, but I really wonder why other gaming companies can't communicate like this.

I checked the various forums for the game this morning, as I usually do before going in game, and found this post from a regular on the Games Campus forum. ForestWolf gives us a link to a German language online gamer publication. The article says pretty much everything that Games Campus has already told us, but with one little gem. The game is restarting on the 21st of the month.

Why can't Games Campus tell us this sort of thing directly, in their own forum?

Unfortunately this sort of thing has been the mindset of all the publishers of this game so far.

The Peeps Don't Need to Know (so we won't tell them...)

Games Campus has some basic decision making to do in the next two weeks, and we players would like answers.

1. What are the experience rates going to be set to?

During the beta test we had the old, low Acclaim rate, but it was a beta test so who cares. The characters have since been wiped. With those old, low rates we at least got regular events with raised xp rates. Are we going to see that here?

Acclaim later permanently raised xp rates, by lowering the required experience to level up for each level. They did that when the level cap was raised, with new maps and new material. Are we even going to have the LiaoDong, Ice map, or Tibet map to play with?

2. How about skill experience and drop rates?

We had some really nice rates for these during the beta test. Except for the insane stuff, most skills were easy keep up to their level cap. It was possible to buy the items needed from NPC's, elixirs to make good weapons and it was easy to get good clothes. Map collections were easy to fill too, and that helped a lot. Will this continue in Open Beta? I sure hope so.

3. Refining rates?

I tried to refine several weapons during the beta test. The results weren't good but as long as the drops rate provides a good supply of Blood Essence, nobody minds too much. Still, it would be nice to make a least a +7 weapon, when you take three identical items and hope for the best. One of them breaks at +4, the next at +5, the next at +6. Games Campus isn't going to sell a lot of Dragons Tears/Scales with those refining rates, unless they're priced at about 50 cents each.

4. Items from the Korean version?

There are a variety of items that have never been released into the western games. We can see the screen shots from their game, and a few people can read Korean too. Clothes with elemental resistance, or slots? Slotted Wan Daye weapons? Those would sure be nice, and there are a lot more items out there.

5. PvE or PvP?

The western versions of the game have never had a balanced PvP system, and for that reason alone I think it should be confined to Bloody Plains at least until we get some balance. Who really wants to be the target of a pimply-faced, snot-nosed 14 year old with attention deficit disorder, and a super powered nuker?

I for one will not pay 10 cents for that sort of gaming pleasure.

I could go on and on about the issues in the game, and the decisions that need to be made. I can even accept that these basic decisions haven't been made yet, but at the very least I would hope that once these things are decided, that Games Campus will tell us directly how things are going to be run in their version.

That means "tell us directly, in your forums, and not in some obscure online gaming magazine that half your potential customers can't read anyway".

The German version of the game is closing its Beta test on Wednesday afternoon, and all the existing characters will be deleted at that time. There isn't any set date yet when they'll open with their open beta version, just a note in their forum that says "shortly before Christmas". Christmas is only 3 weeks away, and I don't really know how much "shorter" you can get.

But it's obvious they have quite a number of bugs to fix first. There have always been bugs in this game, but the bugged quests are a must in terms of being repaired before the open beta can go head. That will take some time, and we all know how slow Indy21 can be at times. Hopefully they won't break anything else in the mean time.

Anyone else remember the fiasco at last year's Christmas event with Acclaim?

Games Campus is giving away a number of rewards as well. Anyone who even logged in during the Beta will get a 7 day premium for free. If you reported a bug or made a suggestion in that time you'll be getting a 30 day premium for your work. And apparently a small number of people will be getting a 90 day premium for outstanding work. I'm hoping I'm on that list for the Zhangzhu quest guide I wrote. We'll see.

The last event for the Beta test is another GM PvP event starting at 6pm local time tonight, running for an hour. Screen shots would be welcome. Please post what you get in the comments section. There are more rewards too. Anyone who kills a GM will get 2 XP cards per kill when the game restarts later this month.

I'll update this when I get an exact date that the game will re-open.

- AxtTreiber

So here's the list whats going on with GamerFirst's 9dragons for two weeks in a row:

Yo, as some of you noticed, our previous hosting server was suspicious. Template images are now hosted at one of my company servers. Should work like a charm from now on and no more broken images!