I suppose it isn't entirely surprising that most of the Christmas additions to Last Chaos, introduced with last night's maintenance patch, are glitched; we don't seem to have had a very good record on beta-testing additions lately, and as basically this year's Christmas stuff is the same as last time, our chums at Aeria, and our wacky Korean developers, must have assumed that everything would work again.
There are lots of extra drops, suitable for decorating a Christmas tree with - baubles, socks, and stars, for example. The only problem is that they vanish from your inventory if you log out. What you are meant to do is click on the main Christmas tree in Randol, which removes all the decorations from your inventory, and brings nearer the next time when candy cane presents arrive under the tree for everyone. A five-minute warning of gifts arriving is given. You should also get a slightly useful buff for donating your decorations - that does not always happen, at least Memree on Katar-4 didn't get anything. And getting the buff at the end of a playing session is less than ideal, anyway.
The special Christmas gift boxes are back, which arrive next to you after a countdown every hour. It's easy to miss out by being somewhere they don't spawn, such as a town or the lobby at Prokion Temple, though, which trips up new players. The best bet is to leave one's character standing in the guild hall, as the boxes do spawn there.
The prizes you get do vary - they include not the durable Santa hats from last year, but 30-day covers for existing headgear. This would be fine, except that they are usually not for your own class, and, so far, cannot be dropped, traded, or stored, making them a waste of space. Someone in town was saying that the books to transform a horse pet into a reindeer are glitched, and one shouldn't attempt to use them; certainly they, like the tree ornaments, have a habit of vanishing from one's inventory, and apparently that also applies to some other possible drops. The reindeer effect is meant to vanish at the end of the event - last year it didn't, and Barbarienne's horse is still in that form, which is fine by me as it looks pretty cute.
On the face of it, the best possible drop is a "platinum drop booster"; a normal item drop booster adds 30% to one's chance of getting a drop from a single kill, and tends to sell for not much short of a million gold, depending on the server - so how much would a platinum one be worth, if it adds 2000%? I remain to be convinced it really adds that much, but no doubt it does give an extra boost to one's chance of something good.
I did have just enough time in the morning for Memree and Kaerella to go out to Katar-4's Prokion Temple for an hour; Kae used her pssp and managed to get 396 skill points, while going up by 7.76% experience. Memree added 36.93% and 132 skill points - and stayed a little longer, adding another 2.56%, and 19 more skill points, so that she had enough to get a few more special skill levels. In all 1128 pet points and 446 guild points were added as well.
The afternoon session was a bit short, as I spent rather too long wrestling with a custom Christmas card-sending site that refused to work properly, but there was time for another Memree-Kaerella team-up, which brought Kae 363 more skill points and 7.06% experience. Again Memree stayed on for a few minutes afterwards, so that 1009 pet points and 392 guild points got added, and enough skill points, 126, to get the last mining skill level. Then Memree visited her Introducer Camio at the start of Misty Canyon, and got rid of the latest 34.71% experience.
Standing around in the guild hall seems to be replacing pet-levelling as the thing to do while not actually playing, so Kaerella did a little of that, before I logged her out and logged MistressDomino in. It seemed to make sense to have MD and Memree doing it, as, both being in Discipline, they can share the same guild hall - and if the right type of Santa hat is dropped, the appropriate character can pick it up. The item is "reserved" for whoever "kills" the box for a while, even if the box was summoned to the other character
Another glitch was the subject of discussion in the forum shoutbox; the battle skill book for an Ichi or Scra-Chi pet, which is an annoyingly common drop from the moon statue in Randol apparently, has suddenly become sellable to NPC merchants for around five million gold. People have thus been getting and selling as many as they can - but the fun came to an end this evening when Aeriaks1lent announced in-game "DO NOT sell [P2] Battle skill books in game to NPCs. Repeat offenders caught selling the item after this announcement will be considered exploiting." That brought a number of worried people in to check they weren't about to be banned, predictably.
For the evening, RedRyder went out to the orc soldiers and mummies in Prokion Temple on Katar-1. Unusually I did get player-killed once, by a red-named rogue called ObscuredByClouds - high enough level to come in using invisibility, snare me, and kill me in one or two hits. That was annoying, as it meant I had to go back to Randol to get the "Elizabuff" applied again, but that was my only interruption, and I got the full 324 skill points I needed to finish maximising Red's special skills. So that's another pretty big task ticked off the list.
Next of course came the little matter of pestering the first Introducer Camio in Misty Canyon into killing RedRyder enough times - 28 in all, as she'd added 81.54% experience. And then, with the Elizabeth's Enhancement buff re-applied, back I went to Prokion Temple, this time avoiding the orc soldiers entirely, and just hitting mummies and ghouls, since they give a better ratio, while Red is level 25, of skill exp to experience. The place was a bit crowded, and there were a lot of Brazilian players around, who generally seemed used to a slightly "pushier" style of play, not respecting the territory of someone who was already busy in a particular room or area.
I'd noticed a lot of Brazilian players recently, and, when I asked in the shoutbox, was told that their local version of Last Chaos was closing down at the end of this year, and so they seem to be migrating to us, and forming their own guilds - and indeed their own parties, it seems if you look in the "parties recruiting members" window you are as likely to find something "Brazilieros" as "solo". With them working hard in Prokion Temple, it isn't hard to foresee a time when Brazilian guilds will be serious contenders for castle sieges, and generally making life interesting for the older-established English-speaking top players.
As I wasn't using a pssp or anything, it didn't matter if I ran out of monsters occasionally; there was a fair bit of PK-ing going on, but the only attack I got was by mistake, and I only lost half my health before the rogue in question moved on. She might well have been meaning to target Brazilian players, there did seem to be a bit of "needle" between factions.
Still, by the time I had to log RedRyder out, she had added 8.15% experience, and 166 skill points, which seemed a pretty good ratio to me. It also disqualifies Red from going to dangerous events like mad monster spawns, as from now on she will have a store of unused skill points to protect.
Luckily, though, Memree, on level 31, with the +10 armour and +15 weapon, is without spare skill points, since she is still investing the sp she gets into her special skills, so she was the rogue who ran down to Merac Castle, getting it onto her memory scroll, in time for the "Storm the Castle" event on Katar-4, which was scheduled to start at ten o'clock, UK time.
It would be harder to have a bigger contrast between this STC and [GM]Valsharyn's one for Auzura; someone said that it was [GM]JediMike who was in charge, but I never saw him, and he never said anything until a single line right at the end to say that the event was over. It just began with a spawning of thorny mantises and death knights on the bridge, without any word, and away we went.
The turnout was pretty low; we seemed to be in single figures right at the start, but people did begin to turn up, so we may have got to, oh, two dozen or more - plenty of them at around my level, but luckily we did have some people who could tank the Anubis Spear Men, Hell-Otuus, and Dark Harpies. It was just as well that it was the old-fashioned spawning, and not the massively hard recent one where the throne room is packed full of quanians, introducers, punishers etc. Our GM made up for his lack of attention (presumably he was managing the Cariae-4 event as well, and probably going through computer records to see who'd been selling battle books in bulk) with some generous spawnings of loot - while there were a few monsters alive at that point, luckily it was just a few remaining spear men, who aren't aggressive.
So we grabbed as much loot as we could, and then moved off and found another heap of goodies - in all Memree's inventory weight went up by over 10%. I know she got 14 large attack potions, as she wasn't carrying any before the event started, she may have done almost as well when it came to item drop boosters, skill point boosters, and large defence potions, and doubtless got plenty more tool aids. So, quite a rewarding outing, even if two memory scrolls had to be used to get me back to the action after I got killed. 7.97% experience got added, despite the deaths.
After that, both Memree and RedRyder settled in to spend the night in the Discipline guild hall, hoping that the Christmas gift boxes accumulate as the hours pass, and have some useful items in them, such as those platinum item boosters.
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