Showing posts with label Tips. Show all posts

Games Campus in connection with buffed.de are offering a free 7 day premium package to the first 200 people who register with buffed.de. Obviously you're probably going to get a fair bit of spam from buffed.de but who cares, or you can just use a throw away email account. Unfortunately it's all in German but it's not that hard to go through the process.

The word Registrieren is not hard to understand. You'll then need to select an account name, and a user name, and a password which you type twice. You'll also have to type your email address twice. buffed.de will send you an email to confirm your address and you have to use the link in that email to confirm.

The, you go to this article and scroll down. Click on the words, "Jetzt Item-Code zu 9 Dragons gewinnen" and you'll get a popup with a button that says "Premium-Key Anfordern". Click that and you'll get taken to a page with a long string of numbers.

Copy that long string of numbers in the coupon page at the Games Campus website. You have to be logged into the Games Campus website when copy that string of numbers, but when you do a 7 day premium package will be delivered to your coin mall inventory.

Go quick people, there are only 200 packages available.

- AxtTreiberr

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

A couple of people have asked lately about building PvP healer characters, and frankly I know nothing about them. Obviously there are a lot of healer/hyb types on the 9D Germany server now because they can solo grind harder/longer than any warrior or nuker can. The topline equipment the warriors and nukers need just doesn't exist yet, so people are wondering how to PvP with a healer.

One of our fairly new members, ShadowGuyver has offered a screen shot of the equipment his character used on the Acclaim servers to do just this. He's got some nice stuff there.

Check it out!


He has said that he'll add more information in the comments section of this posts. Feel free to ask questions here too!

- AxtTreiber

I wasn't sleeping very well last night so around 3:30 in the morning I got up to play for a while. I got to chat with a few of the really high level players on the German server and I got some interesting bits of information.

First of all the current level cap is Flower Crown 3, but not because of some sort of artificial limit. There are no more mobs after that level, and yes there are a couple of people at that level already. They have very little to do. They can run the Wild Tower dungeon for loot from each room, but they can't even come close to finishing it. They can also run the Choice of Fate and Valley of Hell dungeons, but the bosses don't drop very much because of the level difference.

Lastly, they can camp bosses, and they've been doing that, basically milking the HP and Def Trink bosses while they can. They would very much like to have the Liaodong map as soon as possible. So would I.

They also told me that the 2nd role quests are bugged for everyone except Heavenly Demon. Apparently a kill on one of the Cave of the Conqueror quest mobs fails to register, leaving you stranded in the quest series. So, no 2nd role skills, no good clothes, and very slow grinding in the high EC levels. Because of that I will probably stop grinding my AxtTreiber character at EC8, where I could normally put on the clothes. I'll start camping those bosses too I guess.

At this point I don't see any need to spend any more money on experience cards either. I'll be EC1 today and a couple of our newer members are planning to join me there, and I mean today. Last night I mentioned in chat that we could spend a few evenings this week running CoF and VoH too, making sure that everyone has their epithets, so go get your passes people.

I wasn't planning to start a new character this early but if we don't get a patch very soon, we may see my nuker much earlier than planned. At the least I can get him to RL12, switch over to nuker and start training skills.

Anyway, here's hoping we get a patch sooner than "soon", with bug fixes and the Liaodong map.

- AxtTreiber

I bought a Paysafe Card today and I can't believe how simple it was. First off, I didn't know where I could buy these things so I went to their website, which transferred me to a German version of the website. Right on their front page was a search engine where you can type in as little as your postal code and you'll get back a map showing all the retailers in your area who sell these things. It turns out that the local shop where I buy my weekly lottery ticket also sells these things.

Who knew? I sure didn't.

The guy at the shop actually used the same machine that prints the lottery tickets, to print my Paysafe Card. There is a 16 digit pin number on the card which you enter into your Games Campus account. There is a link to that on their forum, under CampusCredits Kaufen. I simply followed the links, entered that 16 digit number and voila! I have 2750 Campus credits.

I sure wish we had this sort of a system available with Acclaim. I always used my credit card with them but I never like to use that for small purchases, particularly with the exchange rate difficulties that Acclaim saddled us with. I bought a fair number of their coins at the start of each year and stretched them out over the year by buying coin mall items when they were on sale.

Of course, I lost everything (including over 6 months of premium play) when Acclaim pulled the plug on us. Because I had spent the coins I didn't get any refund from them, even though I never got to use those items.

Strangely enough, a number of G1 players wish the assholes at Acclaim were still in business. I don't. I'm glad they're gone and I've moved on to Games Campus and 9D Germany even though I have to start over on a character. Spending 25 euros today will help an awful lot.

Now what to spend those credits on? Hmm, perm deco, some xp cards, a few courier passes would be nice...

- AxtTreiber

We've had an event going on over the weekend on 9D Germany and I've had a few thoughts on it, and I found a few bugs. The experience rate hasn't been too bad and I made it to SM7 last night. The normal experience rate is 2x the base rate, and this event is supposed to be 2x that number. With an xp card on I can level up in about 30 to 40 minutes, but that's me. I know exactly where to grind and which mobs are worth to use an xp card on.

As a melee hybrid I'm looking for high aggro melee mobs that gang up on me. Kill One and Heal, repeat for 30 minutes and avoid ranged attack mobs so that you don't have to move for the entire 30 minutes that the xp card lasts.

The skill xp rate was also supposed to have been doubled, but this isn't great. It's bearable as an event rate but training skills past c8 well and truly sucks. There is a complete lack of manuals in the game too which isn't helping things. I'm not looking forward to the rest of this week, and getting these skills done.

And lastly, the drop rate is just pathetic. I was not able to collect enough drop material to be able to build myself the Wan Daye RL weapon, and I had 6 Blood Essences already from the Games Campus forum quizzes a couple of weeks ago. There are 2 quests where the reward is a level 2 non-dungeon elixir, so I had to earn 1.5 million in gold to get the other 3 elixirs needed to build that weapon.

I leveled right past the stages where that weapon would have been useful and never got that much gold. I bought almost nothing in the early stages of the game too, because I know how useful that weapon is. I pick up every single drop in this game and quite frankly if I can't get a Wan Daye RL weapon, the game drop rate is simply too low. I hope Games Campus will consider this carefully.

As for bugs there are still a few, and a couple of them were known in the beta test phase. They haven't been fixed yet and I'm a little disappointed by that.

Der Aufmerksame Sohn, or The Mindful Son quest in Hefei has a text bug. You absolutely must have a German style computer keyboard in order to complete the text of that quest. That's one of the quests where you have to repeat some text and in English the answer is "Green Orchid". In German the answer is "grünes Orchidee".

I don't have that "u with an umlaut" character on my English language keyboard. According to standard German spelling "gruenes Orchidee" should also be acceptable but that answer doesn't work in the game. I posted about this problem on the Games Campus forum and got no response.

Edit: Based on Jim's comment I have now changed my text file to English. I don't need that, as I can read in German just fine, but I'm not interested to have to type in German. For starters I can't spell worth spit.

Otherwise there is a text failure in the instructions for the Corrupt Elder Monks quest, and there is a very similar text failure in the series of quests concerning the Five Eagles of the Brotherhood. There are also some text failures on the naming of some weapons, mostly Blood Dragon Gloves.

The last annoying thing in the game so far is the disconnection rate. Games Campus is using Game Guard to protect themselves from hacks. That system will disconnect you from the game every 30 to 40 minutes no matter what you are doing, and that isn't going to help Games Campus to sell XP cards.

That's all I've found so far. Did you find any other problems in game? Please post in our comments section if you did, and screen shots are always helpful too.

- AxtTreiber

I'm not all that impressed with the way GamersFirst is handling 9Dragons. In fact, I don't know any player that is all that happy with GamersFirst. Fortunately we now have another option for our 9Dragons habit. The Games Campus version is available in a beta edition which means it's in a test phase. All characters created now will be wiped before the actual game play goes live. I don't think everyone playing now actually understands that.

TS and I started playing this a couple of days ago and it's going quite well despite the fact that TS doesn't speak German. I think that any reasonably experienced 9D player with Google Translator on hand will do just fine in this version. I think TS has only asked me for a couple of translations so far.

I've seen a few of our old friends (hi Mayen!) in game too, and a number of people have addressed me as SD despite the fact that I'm using a germanized version for the name of my new hybrid, AxtTreiber. TS is being as creative as usual with his character name.

The servers seem to be in great shape. I've only experienced a couple of momentary lags while lightfooting and I've never noticed a thing while grinding. The GM tools work and GM's are in game answering questions in English and German, and they are looking at problems too. For instance, the gate from the BoT clan map to Shi Zhang is blocked. It's sort of strange because you can easily go from Shi Zhang to Tai Shan. But the GM's came, took a look and made a few notes about it. That's why it's a beta/test phase after all. They even teleported a few players to Shi Zhang while they were there.

While we're playing this beta/test phase there are several events planned and they have been made public on the forums. How is that for a nice change? Events, planning, and posted to a public forum? It's refreshing. The Games Campus edition of 9Dragons has been described as the Korean version of the game with the US stat system. I'm not sure how accurate that is about the stats system, and I'm not going to do a detailed comparison. I just wanna play without any headaches.

There is some new material too. The tutorial map is a story of its own and is worth doing. There are new drops there that can be traded with a resource NPC (the tutorial NPC actually) for some goodies, some new quests, and some nice items for doing those quests. You can come out of the tutorial with a reasonable weapon, 4 pocket 50 defense clothes and your choice of a couple of epithets. It feels like a nice start, even for a veteran player.

Another topic dear to us is the disconnections issue. We are the Disconnected League after all. I haven't been disconnected yet by the game, not even on a map jump. I still get my 24 hour disconnection from my ISP though. There's nothing I can do about that.

There is no anti-hack system in place yet, but they know about it. Actually one of the players complained about this in the Games Campus forum and made certain to mention the problems we've seen in the G1 edition with the Viet players. The nice thing about the replies were that no one yelled RACISM, no threads were closed, no posts deleted, and no one was banned from the forum. Compared to the treatment we players get on the G1 forums this too is really refreshing.

Of course we were all happy to see G1 when they came on to the 9Dragons scene, and nobody is all that happy now. We were all convinced that they couldn't be worse than Acclaim, and they are. So I'll watch closely to see how things develop with Games Campus for now.

Still, they couldn't be worse than G1, could they? Could they?

Update: These guys just got even better. They announced almost 4 hours in advance that the server would be coming down for a mini-patch. But that isn't all they announced! In the forums they announced what they are trying to fix, and when the time of the next patch is likely to be.

- SpearDriver2

It's been a long time since we had this topic on the blog and because I made EC6 with my warrior character yesterday I thought I would bring it up. It's an important milestone for all players but for warriors in particular the game suddenly gets a lot easier to play, and starts to be enjoyable again.

For the last 8 levels or so I've been struggling. A warrior needs a full set of buffs to be able to grind effectively and unfortunately healers and hybrids aren't always around when you need them. I was grinding on yellow Devas for quite a bit of the time because they can't really gang up on you. Still though, I had to meditate after 2 of them, and only sometimes could I kill 3 before I had to run and meditate. The other advantage to the deva grind is there is a place to run to, when you have to meditate.

At the low EC levels you start to get a series of Road to the Dragon quests, but only if you've completed all of the previous RTD quests. Don't ignore them, they are there for a reason. If you haven't already seen them, Fullneo wrote a great set of guides for those quests for all the black clans; Brotherhood of Thieves, Sacred Flower and Heavenly Demon.

The quests mostly involve a lot of running back and forth to the Cave of the Conqueror, which has never been my favorite grind spot. It's a lot easier now that we have the anti-PK buff, but I died once anyway when one of the bosses spawned right on top of me.

I really hate when that happens.

When you're finally done that running back and forth you'll have the title of Senior member of your clan and a number of new skills are available at your skill trainer. In particular you'll get a new active skill that does a lot more damage than the old ones. You also get a free chance to reset your chi points and mastery points if you've messed them up along the way.

The best thing though, for warriors anyway, is the new Advanced Masteries that open up. For a warrior the first things you get are an extra 500 points of defense and 1000 hit points. You'll also get a set of clothes from the quests that you can use at EC8. Those clothes give another 360 points of defense. Like I said, "for warriors in particular the game suddenly gets a lot easier to play, and starts to be enjoyable again."

Now it's time for the EC level Party Quest.

- SpearDriver2

It is Labor Day today in North America, similar to the May 1st holiday that is celebrated in most countries around the world, so I'm not expecting an update from Hyperion. The soonest we'll hear from him is tomorrow when he might have some news about the character database. We'll see.

Don't get your hopes up that the game is going live tomorrow. That is not what he said in his last update and you can read the post below this one for more details.

In the mean time I've played a few other games, after all it's been 2 weekends of down time since we last had 9Dragons to play. I would have died of terminal boredom without something to do in the evenings. I started out with GuildWars because a few of the Restless League were working on that. The game is not free-2-play but there is a 10 hour free trial, so I got started with that.

Earlier this year I was playing Aika during the great GameGuard Disconnection Event and I've discovered that Aika is a direct rip-off of GuildWars. Characters, mobs, scenery in Aika, they all come straight from GuildWars. The two games even have the same painfully slow jerky movement speed for the characters, and in the end that is what turned me off Aika. It has turned me off GuildWars too and I doubt I'll go back to that game even if the new installation of 9Dragons is a complete failure.

I decided to try a GamersFirst game just to get some experience with their games. I downloaded Sword2 and started to regret it 3 hours later when it was still downloading. That is one bigass game. The total download time with updates was over 6 hours, and I only spent 5 minutes playing it. That has to be a new record for me. I'm told that you either love that game, or hate it. You can put me in the "meh" category.

One thing I found out though is there can be password problems with G1 games. The password you used to build an account to gain access to the forums can be too long for the password field of some of the G1 games. I had to change my password and knocked two characters off the end. That's only a small Oops! but it shows that G1 isn't always paying attention. I had this problem with Sword2 and I'm told it affects Knights Online as well, which was the next game I tried.

Knights Online or KOL as it's often called is a Swords and Sorcery MMO with a huge number of servers to choose from. I went to Ronark2 at random and I'm probably the only English speaking person on the server. A few descriptions in the server list might be nice.

Character movement speed is slow but there is a sprint mode. If you spam that while using the WASD keys to navigate you can get to your destination in about one-third the time needed to walk. I'm playing a Ranger/Archer type because that character type can melee as well when that would be more useful, like 9Dragons it depends on the mobs. He also has a small ability to heal and that makes the grind time a little longer.

The time needed to rebuild hit points or energy is excruciating long. That is one of the minor disappointments with KOL. I can chat in the IRC channel while I wait for HP/SP to rebuild. The party system can be used to complete quest kills quickly so people are constantly spamming each other with party invites, even if you aren't going after the same mobs. One of the character classes has a teleport skill too, that draws you back to them and the mobs they are working on. I find that so freaking annoying that I checked the "no party invites" box and now I'm grinding alone.

Lastly, the most highly annoying problem in KOL is the number of auto-grind hacker bots out there. There is an auto-target function with the Z-key and it's really useful for Archers, but a lot of players have combined that with speed hacks and damage hacks and they can take over a grind area. They obviously aren't grinding in quests, they are just taking XP from mobs, quickly. If one of those guys is grinding in your quest mobs you can forget about that mob for now. Best just to move on to your next quest mob and hope for the best there. I can't imagine what PvP looks like in KOL.

I posted about the hackers in the 9Dragons forum at GamersFirst and a KOL forum mod answered. They know about the problem and are working on it. "Working on it" obviously doesn't include banning people using the hacks because G1 Admins obviously aren't even looking. Maybe they just need a GameGuard style system to solve the problem but whatever, I would hate to see those guys invade 9Dragons.

So what have you been playing? Real-Life? Lovers and Losers? Daddy? Monopoly?

- SpearDriver

Last Sunday Ravenclaw held a boss spawn event in Hefei, CC1, CC2 and CC3, with a bunch of True General Wei bosses and others. I decided to try get the TGW epithet for my DB2 warrior. I want to share how I prepared for TGW because I am sure I would get it in normal circumstances.

My spear is nothing special, normal PS +9 and 4 sloted. The relics that I used were: a bad karma 7% damage plate, 5 Blood Beads of Earth, a 300 damage Heavenly Bear Ralisman and an EC bad karma +15 str relic (almost all borrowed).

I use the CS damage clothes set with a 6% critical hit jacket.

For buffs I had 5 Yin-Yang and 4 Body-Soul damage buffs. I also had a TGW buff, Carnival of Souls, normal hybrid and healer buffs, and I used the BoT +120% dmg suicide buff (that made me to eat some kgs -,-).

You probably know you can use 3 pills at the same time. I used a 1k damage pill, a 30% critical hit pill and 50% critical hit rate pill. I had the [Unsealed] Conqueror of North sea epithet too, for even more critical hit rate and damage.

So, Lets dance! The first TGW was spawned in strolling valley and I started to hit him from 100%. A nuker got credit for the kill of course, and the killer epithet. The same happened at event stage too. I was hoping the boss at the event stage was in an LOS spot but many nukers successfully hit him and they got the kill. I went to CC also to try few of the bosses spawned there, without success because almost all my buffs were gone by then.

There is a stun nuke bug, when a nuker gets a critical hit, the damage goes to 65k, and True General Wei has high defense and CK defense so nukers will almost always out-damage the other players with stun nuke, but I won’t quit trying.

- Hinata

I found a post on the forums and these are impressive, but only top players will be able to get them. I really mean, "only the top players". I can't get these bosses yet. Apparently as early (yes, I'm joking...) as Projected Soul 10 you'll get a series of quests to kill each of Princess Gaga's body guard, Princess Gaga, her brother, and then her father the King. Here is what you get for each level...

From the Body Guard
1. Terror of Foreign Forces - phy/chi def 250, speed 7%, dmg +200, critical rate 700/10000,
chi att rating 7%

Princess Gaga
2. Slayer of Falling Flower - phy/chi def 300, speed 8%, dmg +250, critical rate 800/10000,
chi att rating 8%

Prince Xiamen
3. Slayer of Evil Prince - phy/chi def 350, speed 9%, dmg +280, critical rate 900/10000,
chi att rating 9%

King Liang
4. Kingslayer - phy/chi def 400, speed 10%, dmg +300, critical rate 1000/10000,
chi att rating 10%

As you can see these are going to be very popular for PvP players and warriors in particular will get a huge benefit from that CK defense number. In fact, most will be able to easily max CK defense without wasting a lot of chi points on Wisdom.

First of all I want say thank you and well done to [VGM]Olix and the VGM team. There was a 100% improvement in their effort in this weekends collection quest event. I personally saw Snow, Hawk, Aster, Tian and Hypatia at the event stage taking collection items. Getting a VGM to show up to Bardo for the last collection event was harder than pulling your own teeth. It's nice to see the change in attitude.

In exchange for that work the Bardo players filled the collection lists in darn near record time, even the ridiculously difficult Needle Cases of Secret Needles from Tibet. Today I was grinding on those mobs for several hours and I got exactly 5 of the needle cases. There will be no point to have that item on a future list for some time to come because we scratched everybody to turn theirs in. There aren't any more in storage, so Olix? Just don't ask. Ok? Thanks.

The event wasn't completely smooth. Last night the start was well over an hour late, and the official excuse is that there was a problem with the GM tools, and they weren't able to start the event. I find it suspicious that the event was started shortly after the end of the Germany-England game in the World Cup. They made it up to us though, for being late, and we got 6x for almost 6 hours. My own words in chat were, "welcome to the marathon".

One of the things I do when playing the game is keep track of my base experience rate. That's the rate you can grind on white/green mobs without any extra buffs like the Carnival of Souls. Your own stuff, and premium are fine and what ever you can get for one hour. Just go grind and keep track of your starting and ending experience percentage. That's your base rate.

When I know that base rate I can plan to grind as much as I need to when I know we're going to get a really good event. I do it anyway just so I can plan my grinding for the usual events. I don't like to work too hard for my levels because at Projected Soul levels it's hard enough, thank you very much. At Hermit 11 last week I was getting 2.75% per hour of grind.

Last week I knew I needed to do a little extra work if I wanted to reach Projected Soul 1, so I did that most evenings while watching the World Cup games with just one eye. By Friday night I had Hermit 11 level with a few extra percent for padding. I knew that with a 5x event for 4 hours I could easily reach Hermit 12, at least 50% of the way to Projected Soul. As you can imagine I was looking forward to Sunday.

My plan for Sunday was to reach PS 1 and be most of the way to PS2, so you can imagine how disappointed I was when the event didn't start on time. That's really, really annoying when you've put the work into reaching a nice goal. Obviously I was ecstatic when they announced a 6 hour event with 6x the normal experience rates. Because I knew my base rate it took me only a few moments to realize that I could reach PS 2 if I really pounded it, and late in the event I got it.

I was a little surprised late in the event that my xp rate went down rather badly. By that time I was the highest member of the party and a few of the others were as much as 4 levels below me. I've written about that sort of thing before, and sometimes you are better off grinding alone. I stayed with them almost to the bitter end and went to bed happy. Getting some extra results is always nice.

Today, just for the hell of it I went and did another base rate test and I'm now getting exactly 2% per hour of grinding time. I'm not real happy about that number. That is one hell of a big drop from just 4 levels ago, and it's no wonder that Goodgrrrl and RedCross have quit the game, and that Gehrk is taking a break.

Still, I have 30% of Projected Soul 2 collected now. There are some nice quests at these levels, and with my base rate and the normal weekly events I will easily make PS 3 next weekend, if I continue to keep one eye on the World Cup games.

- SpearDriver

Updated: Scroll Down

I think we're up to the 9th edition of these collection quests, but who knows anymore. Some of them have been great and others were a total flop, like the last one. I sure hope the VGM's have got their shit together for this one.

For our newer players who don't know what a collection quest is, let me just say that it is a chance to get filthy rich if you've been picking up your drops along the way. The VGM's will put out a list of 15000 items to be collected and turned into them at the event stage in Hefei. That will be 1000 each of 15 different items that regularly drop from mobs. Some of the items are easier than others.

So, how do you get rich from that? The VGM's will give you Conqueror's Cave chest keys in return for the useless stuff you turn in. The last few times they gave keys at the rate of 1 key per 35 items, and that's a lot of keys if you've been collecting. Those keys easily sell for 8 to 10 million gold each. Imagine making 10 million gold for every 35 cotton pouches, or silk pouches, or bear paws, or spider shells.

Yes, it's that easy. You new, low level players don't have to sell your Blood Essences or Golden Threads to get rich, and you shouldn't either.

This first list usually comes out on Sunday night at midnight GMT, and we'll have until late Tuesday night to finish that list. On Tuesday night at midnight GMT we'll get our second list and we'll have until Friday to finish that list. You will be able to see the lists on a public GoogleDoc.

On top of that, if we actually complete both lists we'll get one hell of a good experience event next weekend. Completing both lists usually gives us 5x experience for both Saturday and Sunday. If we only get part of the list we can expect something less than 5x, but what we get will depend on how well we can finish the lists.

You've heard me say in league chat to "collect all your drops". This is why. And really, how hard is it to tap your space bar a couple times after each kill? Now let's go get rich, and let's get a good event for next weekend.

Update: [GM]Fugen is making an effort to get the price of Blood Essence down, somehow. His latest grand idea is to give away 1 BE for every 30 drops donated in this collection event. The total number of drops collected is 30k, so the VGM team will be giving away 1000 BE in the next few days.

I've got some bad news for Fugen. I sold 2 stacks of BE last night, over 500 of them for 7.5kk each and they sold fast. Adding 1k BE to the game isn't going to change the price of that item even one little bit. But, I'm happy to take his BE and I have a lot of stuff to donate.

The experience rates have been decided too, and are as follows.

- 50% valid items: The experience rate will be boosted x2 for 4 hours.
- 75% valid items: The experience rate will be boosted x3 for 4 hours.
- 100% valid items: The experience rate will be boosted x5 for 4 hours.

The actual start time for the extended event will be 1500 GMT both Saturday and Sunday and the list is now out. I think this will be a doable list, depending on the Tibet grinders.

- SpearDriver

We just got a patch to fix the Master and Disciple system so I thought I would do a little testing. All of my usual characters have the Master status and my nuker had by far the most points. He already had the quest to become a level 3 Master, so I did that first. It's mostly just a lot of running around Shi Zhang, and then a quick trip to CoF. You don't even have to finish that CoF run, just pick up an item from a chest in the second room. You take the quest item back to Hefei, and you're done.

The next step is a LightFoot quest around Datong. I hate Lightfoot quests, and I swear the next time courier passes are 50% off at the coin mall I'm going to by a big bag full. After Datong you get to lightfoot around Hangzhou too. And then finally you get sent back to the Conqueror's Cave to do a similar quest to what you had for the level 4 Master's quest. You talk to an NPC by the name of Ge Ziyu, then kill a mob. It's all quite quick, but it is CC, so you're best to do this one at a quiet time of day on the server.

My nuker can now have 4 disciples, but I'm not looking for any disciples for that character at the moment. Low level players, you want to find a Master who is willing to be online pretty much all the time, and I don't play my nuker often enough to be a good Master.

I've also been wanting to test the Disciple side of the system, but I don't really have any low level characters except for stand characters. I've been using one of those to pick up low level items for the collection quests. He's LS12 and waiting to chi breathe. He's going to wait a long time too because I have 3 active characters and that's enough for me. My LS12 character would be good for some testing, but where to find a Master who would put up with a bit of screwing around?

I still have a small network of computers here from my daytrading times, so I turned one of those on and downloaded the game again. I logged into my SpearDriver character on that computer, and then, onto my LS12 stand character on my main gaming box. The characters met up, and SpearDriver had a disciple. I put a set of uebernoob clothes on the stand character and sent him out to kill things.

By the way, this is pretty much, completely against the terms of service as put out by Acclaim. Dual-logging is not allowed because a player can gain an advantage over others by using it. I'm sure I'll get away with this because I'm not leveling up any character, I'm just doing a bit of testing. I don't recommend you do this.

So, what did I find out?

A character who can't possibly be killed (uebernoob clothes, FTW!) by white/yellow mobs can generate 1000 contribution points in about 90 minutes. Obviously it would take a little longer if you had to worry about running to meditate once in a while. Most low level players do have that problem.

White/Yellow mobs give you 2 contribution points per kill, and orange mobs give 3 contribution points per kill. Experience event multipliers also affect contribution points. During a 3x event, orange mobs will give 9 points per kill. It would be worth it for a master who wants points fast to provide good clothes and regular buffs to his disciples, so that they can grind on higher mobs. That might actually be more fun than grinding on the ice map.

That Disciple buff is HUGE! Never mind my ubernoob clothes, with that buff leveling fast during an XP event the effect became so great that I would be able to grind a warrior type lowby, without having to meditate. I would level up the character so fast, that I wouldn't need to meditate. Of course, I'm a very experienced warrior player. A new player to the game might not be able to do that. If you grind with active only skills it doesn't matter if you've run out of Vital Energy.

RedCross put together the exact details of that disciple buff in a previous post.

I tested that up to 35k points, and Red's spreadsheet is completely accurate.

When a character leaves a Master before he reaches SM1 the master will lose half of the points generated by the Disciples. So keep them happy. After reaching SM1 the master will lose no points when the disciple leavees. The disciple doesn't get the great buff after SM1, and can only contribute a total 0f 40k points anyway, and so it really is time to go.

Because the master will lose half of the points generated by a student, there is no reason to dual-log and run your own student like I did. You would have to grind that student to SM1 to get the full effect, and then what? Delete the character and start over? You're better off to find good students and treat them well.

A disciple who leaves his master doesn't lose much, but that beautiful buff goes back to the start when you sign up with a new master. I was suprised by that, but it makes sense.

And the last thing I found out is that Blood Essence drops reasonably well when you're grinding on orange mobs. I got a couple of them every event last weekend, while I was doing this testing.

In the end I'm really starting to like this Master and Disciple system, and I hope the bugs have been removed from the rest of it. Any new player to the game who wants to level fast should look for a Master, and be picky about it. You want your Master to be online pretty much all the time. You only get that disciple buff if your Master is online too.

If you are a Master? Be prepared to be online all the time. You only get those contribution points if you are online while your Disciples are killing things. Treat those Disciples well. Get them the items they need so that they can spend their time grinding. Teach them to pick up their drops, how to set up the hotbars, where to grind at each level, and what mobs drop the valuable items.

In the end, you'll both benefit from this system.

- SpearDriver

The low level players in the game are starting to clue-in to the advantages of having a Master. They've heard all about the Disciple Buff, and are actively looking for masters. I played most of yesterday on the Brotherhood of Thieves clan map trying to collect tobacco leaf and viper skins for the collection event (more on that later).

More than once I got asked if I could be a Master for someone. If you are an active SM1 or higher player my advice is to check back on the clan maps for disciples. And my advice to disciples is to make certain that your new Master intends to be online pretty much all the time, so that you get the benefit of that Disciple Buff.

We've known for a while that the Disciple Buff gets better as you kill mobs and build your contribution points. Contribution points are affected by experience events as well, so you want to grind your disciple character during those events, and you want your Master online for them too. Make sure that he doesn't have a "main character" that he wants to play during experience event.

The buff gets better but it gets a little confusing because some of the things are poorly named. A brand new Disciple is a 3rd Rank Disciple, but he gets a 1st Class Buff. I'll stick to that naming system too, and let's have a look at some numbers that RedCross was able to bring together.

With the First Class Buff That new Disciple can expect better HP/VE, damage or CK damage, and a little bit more in the way of gold drops. I don't know if that gold drop rate affect the drops on weapons or other items. Here is the chart;













At 1900 contribution a Disciple will have the 2nd Class Buffs and they are somewhat improved with a speed bonus!













And with the 3rd Class Buff at 12,000 points the Disciple also gets an Attack Rating Buff that also affect CK Attack Rating.












And as I mentioned, the contribution points are affected by experience events as well. You can raise this buff really high, really early and then you get to continue using it until the disciple reaches the SM1 level.

Great work Red, getting this information together for us!

- RedCross and SpearDriver

When I first started playing this game this topic was a constant complaint among what I thought were fairly high level players. This was when the level cap was quite a bit lower than what it is now. At the time the "break" in the curve came when you got to the CS or Crimson Snake levels. Characters there could level faster than characters at the EC/FC levels and like I said, a lot of people were pretty upset about it.

In terms of numbers, you collect experience from each mob that you kill and we see that as a small percentage change on the game screen. Back then you needed to collect a higher number of kills, or experience at the EC and FC levels than you did at the higher levels. The total amount of experience needed to level up increases every level. Except that there was a "break", and suddenly you didn't need as much. As a chart it looks like this red line.


The blue line would be the ideal thing of course, and thank you to Margeman because I shamelessly stole that graphic from one of his posts on the Acclaim forum. That broken XP curve was flattened out slightly in a couple of the game patches and the situation isn't anyway near as bad as it used to be.

I also found out that EC level players aren't exactly high level players. They just looked that way to me because I was new to the game.

The situation now is similar, but the levels have changed. The high CS levels start to get really slow and the first time I went through those levels with SpearDriver I just thought it was because I was grinding on the ice map after CS9, and the mobs were harder. The mobs are harder but now I know better.

I just went through those levels with my AxeDriver character and I can tell you there is a break in the xp curve from CS to Golden Lotus. That character is now GL2. At CS12 I was getting 12% or so in event time with an xp card on. At GL2 in similar party conditions and yellow mobs I'm getting 18% per xp card. Leveling up is now slightly easier at the GL levels because this experience curve is still broken.

I don't know how this will go over the next few GL levels but I will keep track of it.

The chat channels and various message boards related to 9Dragons have been buzzing today about some new items that no one has seen before. They are all very similar to items that are already in-game, but they are better, much better.

It started here today in the comments section of a post I put up several days ago. One of our readers wanted to know about a new HP hat he had seen that gives 2/1000 hp return. He saw it in a stand on Nirvana. I know there are some unusual clothing items from the Black Market seller on CC3, but they can't be coming from there. The CC maps have been down for several days.

It occured to me that these might be Qilin's Mirror objects and I checked the price of that item in the coin mall. There is no way anyone has bought one of those recently. They are priced so that people won't buy them. That doesn't mean that nobody has any Qilin's Mirrors. They were a Thanksgiving Day give away item and like usual many, many people loaded their alternate characters with those give away items just in case they might one day be useful.

The Qilin's Mirror just got useful and here are a list of items than can be had, along with some screen shots. If you don't have a Qilin's Mirror in your bag, you can drool for now. These are some nice items.

1/3/5 BE's, 1 Exp card, 1 Drop card, 300/400 damage vagabond wristbands, 20/25% speed vagabond boots, 6/1000 and 7/1000 hp absorb ornaments, 6% and 7% speed ornaments, 1/1000 and 2/1000 HP and VE absorb hats and much more!

- RedCross and SpearDriver

In the past I've had problems with a couple of bugged quests, and sometimes you just can't get rid of an item from your bag, no matter how hard you try. For example, there is a lowby party quest where you can get rid of the "old pouch". You know, the one you get from the old man, for running back and forth in Datong?

The party quest to get rid of the pouch is worth doing. You get a pretty nice ring in exchange that is useful to a lowby character, except that half the time that party quest is bugged and you can't complete it and you wind with a book or the pouch still in your bag.

You can get rid of stuff like that by taking a screen shot of the item in your bag. You send an email to 9dsupport@acclaim.com with that screen shot attached to the email. You'll have to include your account name, character name (even though they can get that from the screen shot), and short request asking them to remove the item you want gone.

I've done this a couple of times and the request is usually handled in a few hours time.

A few of you probably have a few extra pumpkins in the bag. Just send an email, and the support people will take care of it.

- SpearDriver