Archive for February, 2009
When does a new server stop being new?
Answer: When it starts acting like an old one.
In late January 2009, I rolled up a new character on the Borean Tundra server, a brand new server that had opened on January 16. The server was just over a week old, and since it was closed to all new transfers for three months, I thought it would be a lot of fun to start over in brand new territory — a born-again newbie on a born-again newbie server. I was most looking forward to running instances at level, with other people my own level, instead of being innundated with “Paying 5G for wc run plzplz!!” in Trade and General. So, with an eye to being desirable for pugs, since I didn’t want to join a guild, I rolled up a blood elf priest.
This was not my first priest. I already had a priest on my home server, but I had not played her past level 34 and so long ago that I had forgotten how to play her, and I’d deleted her awhile ago.
My original intentions were to stay on Borean Tundra, at least until the AQ gates opened (I had missed much of that hoopla since I had been in the process of changing main servers at the time), or at least until it stopped being fun. I didn’t realize that “stopped being fun” would come first.
At first, BT was all I had intended it to be. The newbie zones were full. There were groups everywhere looking for healers, and I had more opportunities to pug any instance I wanted than I could do. I did at-level pugs for RFC, WC, SFK, RFK, and SM graveyard and library wings. I had offers to do Gnomer and DM but I didn’t end up going to those due to poor timing. I was counting every copper and silver; I didn’t earn my 35g for mount money until I was almost level 35, and that meant forgoing my own training for 32 and 34.
But shortly after I got my mount, I realized that the times were a-changing.
There were enough 80s on the server now that I could see massive changes in the economy. Suddenly, there were twinks appearing and prices on gathered goods were going rapidly upward. Within two days of getting my mount, I had 40g again. There were fewer and fewer “lfg RFC” and more and more “paying for RFC run!!!” in city chat. People weren’t as interested in running instances, even in their mid-30s, and more interested in just making the pell-mell push for 58, Outlands, 68, Northrend, 80.
In other words, it was becoming my home server, without my friends, my husband, access to my guild bank, and the earning power of my 80.
I went to BT for two challenges: playing the content thoroughly at level, and having to count my coins and make careful choices. These began disappearing rapidly at the mid-30s, and suddenly it wasn’t different anymore. So I transferred her “back” to Whisperwind, familiar names in chat, and an 80 hunter husband who’d rush her through whatever she wanted.
It was something of a letdown, but it was fun while it lasted.
“Logins are In the Air”
- Please note: the Love is In the Air minicast was published on February 11th. If you are looking for specific details on how to do these achievements, please download this podcast. This blog entry is strictly an op-ed piece.
- achievement:
- Pronunciation: \ə-ˈchēv-mənt\
- the act of achieving: to get or attain as the result of exertion
- a result gained by effort b: a great or heroic deed
- Apparently, in this case, “exertion” means the act of typing in your password and authenticator code in as often as possible.
- “Love is in the Air” is Blizzard’s Valentine’s Day event. At a mere 6 days, it’s one of the shortest event windows out there, with 12 achievements that count toward the meta-achievement (getting the title and counting toward the “What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been” achievement and proto-drake), and 14 achievements in all. Here are the durations of other holidays with meta-achievements, with the number of associated achievements, past and future:
- Winter Veil 2008/2009: 18 days, 12 achievements
- Lunar Festival 2009: 20 days, 12 achievements
- Children’s Week: 7 days (well, it DOES say “week”), 8 achievements (only 7 for meta-achievement)
- Midsummer Fire Festival: 14 days, 12 achievements
- Brewfest: 13 days, 9 achievements (only 8 for meta-achievement)
- Hallow’s End: 15 days, 16 achievements
- Love is In the Air has twice as many achievements as days to complete the entire cycle. Only Children’s Week is nearly as short as Love is In the Air, but it’s one more day and five fewer achievements to complete. The remaining ones are nearly two weeks or longer.
- There is another important distinction between the Love is In the Air achievement set and the other ones: almost all of the achievements rely on two things: luck and the ability to log in many, many times a day. To finish this achievement set, you need to have acquired 20 Unbestowed Friendship Bracelets, 10 Handful of Rose Petals, 10 Silver Shafted Arrows, 10 Love Rockets, an unspecified number of Boxes of Chocolates, and an unspecified number of Bags of Candies. The “unspecified number” means that in addition to the random element of getting the Box or Bag in the first place, there is yet another random feature of getting the right combination of chocolates or make the correct types of 8 candies. The Box of Chocolates is relatively easy — it’s not uncommon to find four types in the same box, but I know at least one person who has gotten four Boxes of Chocolates and still hasn’t sampled all four types.
- I’ll get to the real bugaboo — the Bag of Candies — in a moment.
- Unbestowed Friendship Bracelets are relatively easy, since you get 2-4 of these every time you get a Gift/Pledge of Adoration.However, if you’re unlucky with amounts, this means you are going to have to get ten Gifts/Pledges of Adoration to get enough bracelets to finish this.
- The Love Fools are even easier because if you get in a group, you don’t even have to have these yourself — you just need to pity one, even if someone else drops it. You don’t need a Romantic Picnic Basket, because all you have to do is find a picnic with the same faction in Dalaran, sit down and enjoy.
- The Rockets, Arrows, and Petals are all controllable to an extent because you can acquire 5 of these any time you turn in a Horde or Alliance Gift Collection, so you have a way, through effort, of making up for any shortfall there. Still, unless you’re willing to do the work to get six Horde/Alliance Gift Collections, you’re not going to get all of your rockets, arrows and petals this way (not to mention this is assuming you dispose of all of these with no mistakes and don’t need extras).
- My real issue lies with the Bag of Candies. People across many, many servers are reporting an incredibly low drop rate with this particular item. You need to create 8 different candies using the bag, but you have no control over what you create. There are 10 charges per candy bag, so the chances of getting all 8 on your first bag are not high. Most reports I have heard suggest that most people need at least 3 bags to finish this achievement. True, there are some rare individuals who’ve gotten lucky, but these seem to be the exception, judging from the large number of complaint threads in the General, Customer Service, and Suggestions forums on the official boards. And the drop rate is unusually low — some people are estimating 2-3%. Blizzard has admitted the drop rate might be too low and they are looking into the situation.
- I finished the Love is in the Air achievement set late this morning. My first candy bag got me 7 out of 8 of the candies. The second candy bag yielded nothing new. I finally finished it on the third candy bag.
- How many times did I log on and get my Gift/Pledge of Adoration to finish? The answer: thirty-four times.
- Over six days, this would be an average of 5.67 hourly check-ins per day. And I know people who have logged on more than that who still have not finished the luck-based ones.
- I can do this for one reason: I am self employed and work in the same office with my gaming computer. Every hour, I would log onto Maggie and get my Gift/Pledge of Adoration, set the timer I keep in my office, log off. When the timer goes off, I log on again, get another Gift/Pledge, reset the timer, rinse and repeat.
- But, what about people with normal away-from-home jobs, or school, or kids with parents who won’t let them log on hourly from morning to night? Blizzard has a tip about spending time with your friends out of World of Warcraft as well as in it, but this “achievement” seems to mean the opposite. As my friend Christy said, it’s more like a stress test of Blizzard’s login servers.
- I don’t mind difficult achievements. As much as I am not looking forward to some of the PvP achievements during Children’s Week, for example, I’d rather do those than simply have a marathon login session in the hope that I MIGHT get lucky and get what I need to complete the achievement. Logging in, checking in with a guard, opening a package and logging out doesn’t seem like I am really exerting any effort. It’s just luck. Plain old, blind, random luck. And so much of this achievement set is purely that: random luck.
- One suggestion made by Fuschia of the Shattered Hand server that I wholeheartedly endorse is to add the Bag of Candies to the Horde/Alliance Gift Collection reward options. This would allow people to farm those the way they can farm petals, arrows, or rockets, and give one more opportunity to substitute work for luck.
- Oh, and the troll picture? That’s Taheisha, my level 1 troll rogue I had ported up to Dalaran to make life easier for everyone. Whisperwind has a population of over 28,000, only 120 troll rogues over level 10, and only 24 over level 70, so that’s not many troll rogues to throw rose petals at, particularly for Alliance characters. I made her to stand up on the north bank steps to help people finish the rose petal chucking achievement. Given the amount of time she spends with multiple stacks of rose petals, I’d guess the effort was appreciated.
Update: Apparently, Blizzard both claimed that the Bag of Candies was working as intended, but also applied a hotfix to increase the drop rate. Contradict much?
