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...

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.

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).

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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.

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.

Sahha

The Summer Festival has come around again and since I remember quite enjoying it last time, I wanted to have another look at it... however SWTOR's Dark vs. Light event has its hooks in me pretty firmly right now. I kept telling myself that I probably wasn't missing anything as the festival would just offer the same activities that I've already done before, however it turned out that I was actually wrong about that!

There is a new ball game called Sahha, which is played in an instance in teams of 5v5, and while it's a bit slow, I did find it decent fun to play with my guildies. Once again Cryptic gets credit for trying to come up with some fun non-combat gameplay as an alternative to all the fighting.

Summer Festival

I was never really playing when the Summer Festival came around before, so I came back from a week-long holiday to be confronted with the start of this (to me) new event. Unlike most events in Neverwinter, it actually has a whole map dedicated to it (even if it's not very large).

The activities on offer there consist of silly fun like throwing water balloons at people, herding chickens or picking flowers. It's quite nice to enjoy more non-violent tasks in an MMO for a change, though there is also the option to kill trolls and kobolds for those who are so inclined.

The only downside in my opinion is that most of the events are tied to one of those 15-minute long "contests", which means that doing the daily quest to participate in three different activities can take up to three quarters of an hour. And while throwing water balloons at people is somewhat fun, it's not necessarily fun for that long.

As I'm not interested in any of the rewards, I don't think that I'll be coming back repeatedly, but it's nice to have seen the thing at least.