Legacy Campaigned Out

Working on various (legacy) campaigns on my alts is one of my favourite things to do in Neverwinter. So I was pleased that Cryptic ran a lot of double campaign currency events over the past couple of months - in fact they covered all the legacy campaigns during that time: first a week of Sharandar, then Dread Ring, then Icewind Dale and so on.

However, this proved once again that you can have too much of a good thing: After eight weeks or so of grinding campaigns like a maniac on multiple alts, I'm just terribly burnt out. (Even with double currency and a signet of patronage, nobody should try to complete the entirety of the Chult campaign several times in a single week. Just saying.)

And thus, I once again find myself drifting away from Neverwinter for a bit to recover. Somehow, that's how it always goes.

Redeemed Citadel Event

Cryptic decided to take event gaming to a new level with a special one-time campaign to restore the redeemed citadel in Avernus. It's pitched as "the entire server working together" to progress through four different phases, however on closer inspection that seems to be nothing but a cosmetic veneer, as the news item also states that "if a milestone is completed by the server early, there will be some time—a few days or weeks—before the next milestone begins". After less than two days we've already progressed more than 20% towards the first milestone, but looking at the pitched event duration on the calendar, I'm guessing that each phase is going to last 28 days regardless.

In a savvy monetisation move, you earn some pretty good rewards for grinding the event - but you can earn double the rewards (including some unique additions) and a new race by also paying. On one level I find this kind of monetisation quite annoying, but I can't deny that I'm tempted. If you're already doing the grind, why deny yourself some of the potential rewards?

Paying also removes the timer for earning the rewards - otherwise you have to complete each grind during its dedicated time slot, which works out to earning about 1000 of Zariel's favour a day - for nearly four months. Based on our efforts the first two nights, this isn't completely unreasonable if Neverwinter is your only MMO and you play every day, but for a more casual player it's quite a big ask.

Summer Festival Binge

Neverwinter's summer festival is one of my favourite events, and following my recent rabbit-holing I ended up binging hard on it during the last three weeks. My original plan was to just log every alt quickly every day to claim my free Favor of Sune, but then I'd always think something like: "Well, while I'm on this character I might as well pick up the daily stronghold quest, plus it's double Dread Ring/Icewind Dale/Tyranny of Dragons week and I haven't finished that on this char yet, so..."

The result were way too many hours played, to the point where I actually couldn't wait for the event to be over again. It's rare that I end up trapping myself in this sort of "overdoing it to the point that it's not fun anymore" binge but I did fall victim to it good and proper this time.

And what do I have to show for it? I wasn't even really particularly excited to buy any of the event rewards... though I now have the new Sun of Sune companion on every class I guess. Mind you, considering that its abilities seem to make it more of a magical death attractor than a useful asset I'm not entirely sure that's a win either...

Tales of Old

My husband and a guildie have spent the last week going on about this event that's going on right now called "Tales of Old" and yesterday I finally gave in and agreed to take part. Apparently it centres on a selection of old dungeons that were previously removed and are selectively being returned for this event in a sort of challenge mode.

The framing for the event is that your party is working with a bard called Nipsy to spin an epic tale of how you supposedly once conquered a particular old dungeon, and you re-tell/re-run it several times to embellish your exploits. The first time you just do/did it without using any consumables, the second your artifacts didn't work either, the third time around you were hurting yourselves with every at-will power you cast, the fourth time all the enemies were doing poison damage on top of their normal abilities, and the final time you also had most/all(?) of your stats halved and are shrunk in size.

There are limitations both in the form of a timer (though it's not too tight and can be extended) and a death counter, which work together quite nicely to keep you going at a decent pace but without getting careless, as running out of "lives" ends the adventure just as prematurely as letting the timer run out.

We only did the first three difficulties in our run of Lair of the Mad Dragon as it was coming up to the event's reset time and my husband found out first hand that being in the instance when it resets leads to nothing but a very bad time. These were all fairly chill, though I'm told that the difficulty ramps up considerably at stages four and five.

As someone who's generally not super keen on Neverwinter's dungeons I was pleasantly surprised by how much fun this was, though I can imagine the required repetition becoming quite tedious in the long run. Still, now I want to try some of the other dungeons in the rotation before the event ends in a few days.

April Fowls

In the past, Cryptic impressed players on April Fools' Day by creating a whole new, lovingly crafted joke campaign for the event, which became so popular that they just turned it into a generally recurring event after a while.

Since then I don't recall seeing anything new for April Fools, so I was pleasantly surprised to see them come up with something new this year: "April Fowls".

This silly event is chiock-full of bad chicken puns and mostly consists of a few daily quests that involve you turning into a chicken and using unique combat abilities. The currency you earn from them can be used to buy a giant chicken mount or a couple of vanity pets.

There is also a chicken themed PvP brawl that involves you taking on the same chicken forms and abilities as in the daily quests while pecking enemy players to death. I've only done it once so far but couldn't stop laughing pretty much through the entire thing.

It's not the most sophisticated event ever, but the light-hearted silliness of it all is just right for the current climate in my eyes, and for a limited-time event it's been great fun. It's on for a few more days if you haven't had a chance to give it a go.

Also amusing: guards continue to salute me while in chicken form.

Neverwinter vs. STO

There is a little chart called "weekly top games" on the Arc launcher, and for as long as I can remember, Neverwinter has held the number one spot on it, followed by Star Trek Online in second. Ever since I came back though, I've noticed that STO has been in first place some weeks. Has Neverwinter really decreased in popularity that much?

I consulted the Steam Charts once again, just to get a gauge on the relative popularity of the two games, and they do indeed show more people having played STO than Neverwinter for most of 2020. The last time that happened was back in 2016! Then I realised that STO recently celebrated its 10th anniversary though, which I'm sure helped it garner some extra attention, and activity does appear to have been dropping off again since that event ended on PC.

That said, the Neverwinter chart has definitely seen better days too. The game's last major peak appears to have been in July 2018 with the release of Ravenloft (understandably), and after the release of Undermountain in particular you can see a noticeable decline in interest (also understandably if you ask me - people don't like having to relearn the entire game!). We'll see if the current climate encourages more players to give the game another chance, like I have.

Balls

While my Neverwinter-playing remains somewhat low-key right now, I did make a point of doing a round of the summer festival every day of its duration on both of my clerics. I wasn't after any specific rewards, I just enjoyed the rhythm of the daily event activities.

For some reason I'm a real sucker for herding chickens and pigs in particular. I even became a proper pro at quickly finding Henrietta the Golden whenever she spawned after a while.

What's funny to me is that I then couldn't really be bothered to spend time on actually using my rewards, which means that I've now got several dozen ticket balls saved up for next year I guess. The only thing I did make a point of spending were my fireblossom petals, since those are a temporary currency and disappear after a few days if not used.

There's a definitive pattern here, as I recently also failed to actually buy any of the Nightlife rewards in SWTOR for the second year in a row. I'm clearly doing this whole MMO thing all wrong, just having fun in the moment and not even remembering to collect my rewards.

Confused Birthday

It's Protector's Jubilee again, and this year I'm not even on holiday. Surely there's no better time to check the game out again than during its sixth birthday celebrations!

Unfortunately Cryptic has delivered a double-whammy in terms of making it hard to get back into the game: Now that I'm finally getting over my disappointment with mod 15, it's hard to pick things up again because they've literally changed everything: classes, powers, companions, boons etc.

After claiming my first freebie today, I thought I'd try to get back into the swing of things by doing something simple on my cleric: the anniversary quests. Turns out that Elminster wouldn't give me any though. I tried logging another character and for her they showed. Bug? I tried to check the forums but they wouldn't even load.

Still business as usual then.

(I'm genuinely sad though; I was really in the mood for those anniversary quests. Knowing how slow Cryptic is with fixing bugs, I don't expect to actually be able to participate in the event on my main now.)

Fishing Farewell

Hey, the winter festival is back! I may be feeling a bit meh about the game in general, but I always enjoy this event.

Unfortunately I immediately ran into another downer when I went to do some ice fishing and found that the ice on the lake had been smashed and you are now supposed to just fish there using the same mechanics as in Sea of Moving Ice and Chult.

Now, I like that fishing mini game, but I kind of liked ice fishing more. More importantly, the latter was just a completely different beast from "regular" fishing, a fairly fast-paced mini game that was more about racing across the ice effectively and beating other people to the good fishing holes than about anything else. Now you just stand around and fish for ten minutes.

Also, they trashed all the fishing poles that I crafted last year and are making us start over with a new and crappy pole, because for some reason these things are never allowed to carry over from one activity to the next. Not happy.

Limit or Target?

Last weekend's bonus RP event came with a twist: the now directly awarded points went towards filling up a little bar that showed that you were able to gain a maximum of 100,000 bonus RP per character during the event. I was soon questioning this limit though, because even after several hours of play on my rogue I hadn't even hit 10k. Just how intensely do you need to play to earn that many points? Why even have a cap at all then?

But then I realised: another new feature was that you could buy boosters that would increase your RP gain. So maybe this cap was less about having a cap and more about making people spend money to reach it, knowing that the ambitious would feel bad about not filling their bars. When I think back to all the agonising WoW players used to do about hitting the valor point cap back in the day, it all makes sense. Quite a clever move.

Summer Festival Haul

My original goal for this year's Summer Festival was simply to re-purchase the farmer's weapon skin for control wizards, since I "lost" the old one when I replaced my wizard's main hand. Nothing says "arcane power" like fighting with a floating watering can.

So I did that. While I was there, I also decided to get my wizard the water horse. I'd never been particularly fond of that mount, but it suddenly struck me that it seemed kind of appropriate and magical.

While checking out the rewards, I realised that some of the available mounts might suit my other alts, so I also got my rogue and guardian fighter involved to earn the Sunite Steed and the boar mount respectively. Both are characters for whom I've struggled to find mounts that feel "right" for a while, so we'll see whether any of these stick.

The big disappointment came in the form of the ticket rewards from Sahha. Checking out the vendor, I had spotted a nice set of fashion gear that could be purchased for bronze tickets, the most basic currency. "Sure, I can work on that too," I thought.

However, a dozen ticket balls and more than two thousand volleys later, I realised that I was barely halfway towards being able to purchase one of the items, never mind the set. How are you supposed to ever afford this stuff? Buy loads of balls from the store? Play Sahha all day, every day? Come back to the event five years in a row? I'm used to this game being grindy, but that just left me incredulous. It's not that big a deal in the end since the fashion was never my main goal anyway, but it was still kind of disappointing. At least everyone was friendly and honest during my ball-bouncing pugs (despite of all the warnings I'd read about scamming attempts).

P.S.: It's Blaugust! If you've ever been at all interested in blogging, check it out.

Summer Festival Thoughts

I completely skipped the Summer Festival last year, so I thought it would be fun to revisit it this year. Especially since some of the cosmetic rewards are really nice and actually quite easy to obtain.

Somehow... it all seems somewhat less fun than I remember though. I forgot just how much I dislike the water fight event for example, simply because I'm absolutely terrible at it. My current strategy is to run in and throw balloons until I hit someone, then run out of the area before I can get hit back, as I'll just end up with a score of zero if I stay.

And Sahha! I remembered that being decent fun despite of its slowness, but now it's just driving me nuts. They should just put a fence around most of the playing field, because it's way too easy to knock the ball out of the area, and with every reset creating 15-20 seconds of downtime you spend more time just standing around and twiddling your thumbs than actually chasing the ball, and that for ten whole minutes. It's ironic that the Sahha ball quest giver tells you that gathering the raw materials for your own ball is much more time-consuming than getting one from actually playing the game, when in reality it's the other way round.

Happy Fifth!

Yes, it really has been five years! I honestly continue to be impressed by how well this plucky little MMO has continued to do (based on realistic measurements of success, not WoW killer standards). I don't see a lot of talk about it in my little corner of the MMO blogosphere, but based on what limited player numbers we have to try to gauge its success, such as Steamcharts, it actually seems to be one of the more popular "second tier" MMOs, seemingly outperforming some competitors that seem to get a lot more buzz (again, in my little corner of the blogosphere), such as EVE, Rift or Secret World Legends.

In unhappier news, I managed to time my summer holiday in such a way that it will prevent me from actually participating in the Protector's Jubilee event (except for a quick check-in today) for the second year in a row. I'll never feel bad about going on holiday of course, but I do feel kind of bad about missing out all this free stuff and fun activities. I should really be better at this by now, considering I know exactly when this particular event will occur every year...

Twilight Rage

I've been spending some time at the Winter Festival this season after giving it a pass last year and it's still surprising amounts of fun! But the sheer bugginess of the Twilight Run has sent me into a rage more than once.

Okay, level sync getting removed when you collect one of the bonus baggies is just funny and doesn't affect the run itself.

Lag and rubberbanding making you miss objectives is super annoying but hardly new.

However, what's with the gates and the quest bugging out all the time and not giving proper credit? I once managed a run where I only got 10 points for the slalom gates, and no, I had not managed to miss every single one of them bar one.

The quest getting stuck entirely is even worse - most often I had it suddenly stop at one of the rally gates and then just complete after the run is finished, but twice it also managed to bug out at the very end, saying I had failed to reach the finish line and staying that way until I did another full run for zero points (at that stage, even running over a bonus bag would give me nothing) to run over the finish line a second time.

Bonus RP Event

One of the above is currently going on in-game. When the first one came around, I sighed a bit. Wasn't part of the point of the big refinement changes to make sure that people wouldn't feel like they needed to wait until a special refinement weekend anymore to upgrade all their items?

However, in this case I worried for nothing, because Cryptic stayed true to their word. Unlike the previous double refinement events, the new bonus RP changes nothing about the way you actually upgrade your items - it just causes refinement items to drop with higher frequency while you're out questing in the world.

From my limited experience this isn't really something to write home about, but for a casual player like me it can provide that extra push to take an alt out for a spin, knowing that on top of whatever else I'll be doing, I'll also be earning extra RP.

Like previous changes to invocation, this is another step towards encouraging people to actually play instead of simply rewarding them for logging in at the right time. I don't know how well that's working out for Cryptic, but it does seem like a sensible plan.

Challenge of the Gods

This weekend saw the reappearance of the Challenge of the Gods event. This is one event that I'd only really been peripherally aware of before. I remember accidentally picking up a challenge while in a dungeon with my hunter ranger once and being very confused by what was going on.

This time I actually paid more attention and I now think that it's a pretty neat event. Basically mobs will often drop little items that on looting start a challenge (timed quest) for a certain god. These are always very simple tasks, such as killing five enemies within a minute or killing ten without using a daily power (full list here, though I'm not convinced it's entirely accurate).

I actually found it decent fun. Not all challenges are equally feasible at all times - for example completing a heroic encounter can be trivial on some maps but virtually impossible on others. The ones to do certain things while under half health seem impossible to do if you play a high-level character that never even drops that low or has talents/abilities that cause you to instantly heal up again. But that's okay, as the challenge items are plentiful and you can always ignore any given drop and just wait for the next one.

It's not hugely rewarding (I mostly just kept getting pointless potions), but it's a little thing to mix up your play session, as you find yourself playing just that little bit differently to meet your next challenge.

Survey

Via Neverwinter's official Twitter account, I was made aware of a survey they are running to get player opinions on their various events. I immediately noticed that the summer festival was missing from their list, and others pointed out that double campaign currencies weren't listed either. I suppose it wouldn't surprise me if Cryptic struggled to keep track of all of their own events, considering how many of them there are!

I gave most of them good ratings actually, I just don't care for things like double glory for example because I pretty much never PvP. Still, when they asked me which events I liked the least, I actually had a hard time choosing and simply picked a couple where based on the name alone I couldn't even remember what they were about and explained this in the comment box: If I can't even remember what it was, it can't have impressed me that much.

I bet everyone's going to vote for more double AD and double refinement weekends! I know I did.

Masquerade of Liars

... is the name of Neverwinter's Halloween event, which I somehow always managed to miss until now. As it turns out I didn't actually miss very much, as it's just another token grind for a couple of costume items and companions. However, I do sort of like the flavour of the masquerade illusionists strolling around Protector's Enclave while magically disguised as anything from giants to trolls to Valindra herself.

Siege of Neverwinter

This is another event that I've repeatedly managed to miss - until last time, when I was at least aware that it was happening but decided to ignore it at the time, just to kick myself later for missing out on a cool mount.

I thought that it was set to recur a week or two before the Protector's Jubilee (Neverwinter's birthday), as the original Neverwinter intro cinematic also starts with the city under siege. However, for some reason the event is live again now, so clearly I was wrong about that.

Either way I've been appreciative of another opportunity to try and get that armoured horse. The event neither asks nor offers much, consisting of a small combat area with a couple of cycling heroic encounters. Since it's all scaled to level 60, the mobs pretty much explode in the presence of level 70 characters - I often can't even figure out where an event end boss has spawned before he's already fallen over dead. You can do as much or as little as you like, as the daily only requires you to complete two encounters. It's easy XP for levellers and a great farming ground for stronghold vouchers though.

Summer's End

I really spent a lot of time at the Summer Festival this year, despite of still not caring that much about any of the rewards. It was just fun. Nonetheless I ended up getting myself the full Sunite outfit as well as the water horse, simply because I could.

My only gripe was that they gave the festival an unexpected extension... why did this annoy me? Because one of its main currencies, Fireblossom Petals, are only temporary, and I had spent all my leftovers on what I thought was going to be the last day. If I had known that the festival was going to continue for another couple of days, I would have saved them and would have ultimately been able to afford another one of the nicer items.