2012/2013 Christmas Event + IsFörsvar's Return Feedback

[goldmind]

Christmas Event
[ link ]

     The Christmas Event this time around - I felt - was rather lacking due to the fact that it wasn't an Event that I or most players would come to know. There wasn't an NPC to interact with where it would lead you to one place to begin a story-filled adventure. There wasn't a quest given by a helpless NPC citizen asking you to go kill some monsters. And there wasn't a proper conclusion to the Christmas Event to wrap up the entire Christmas quest. Instead, we got something that was potentially just as engaging or interactive IF you like waiting for the adventure to come to you as oppose to YOU going to the adventure.

     Having said that, the amount of effort put into making the informal Christmas Event possible is still appreciated. There was some fun to be had for some or many players, that is for sure. However, for players who were expecting more, well, not every expectations can be met sometimes.

     As for me, I can't say I liked the 2012's Christmas Event. It wasn't truly satisfying for me. I had a little fun but that was only because the 'interactive Events' were announced while I happened to be online. If I took a week-long December break I would have DEFINITELY missed all of it because the interactive Christmas Event was only active during December 24th through December 28th.

     There isn't much for me to suggest for improvements if an informal Christmas (or informal Halloween) Event happens again. I only hope that it doesn't happen again. Some players like to spend their Christmas on aRO, and it'd be nice to have a traditional aRO Christmas experience. But again, for those who participated in the interactive Christmas Events, there was still some fun to be had which - ultimately - wasn't all bad.





IsFörsvar's Return
[ link ]

     Once again, AnesisRO brings to the player base a brand-new custom server content. It is a remake of the 2011's story-driven quest that brought many good memories during the Christmas seasons. All of the good things that existed from the 2011's Christmas Event exists here and they are all engaging. However, there are some good things mixed in with the bad.

     Story-wise, the remake had been designed as if the quest was a punchline of some sort. Spoilers here. In the final moments of the quest, your dialogue says that you only wanted to start this quest because you just wanted to see if the rumoured legend was true. Now that you know the Princess is alive and not a rumour or a legend at all, it promptly ends your quest. That's the punchline. The Princess INSTANTLY loses its crutch and purpose which is ironic because this whole quest is based around her. In other words, there should have been more interaction between the player and the Princess. But again, this Chapter is a remake and so there is supposedly more Chapters down the road. I would consider this Chapter as a Prologue which would make more sense than a 'complete story-driven quest'.

     I'm going to get this out of the way and say that the rewards and prizes ... weren't all bad. They were okay. This is just my opinion. Yes, sometimes we expect more, diverse and valuable gears and items. However, for a story-driven quest it is appropriate to get weak rewards due to the fact that this quest is ongoing and will sometimes surprise us in different ways. Basically, not getting the "good stuff" early on in the quest is still okay. It's not okay if the ultimate reward after 10, 11, or 12 Chapters/Episodes is 1x million Jellopies or something just as silly.

     NPC dialogue. Everyone has different opinions, so not everyone is going to feel precisely the same way about big factors like NPC dialogue.

     My first initial reaction is that PR Kirek is borderline right about what she said (whether a joke or not).

Dialog is crap as always, I blame pandora and skoll being to busy on other projects.

     After completing the IsForsvar's Return storyline (even the after-story quests) and letting everything soak in, I looked back to my initial reaction. If only there wasn't so many grammatical issues and so many spelling errors and so many generic dialogue, then I might not have said what I said. And, to be reasonable, there was a good amount of these three flaws combined. There were many moments when a few spelling errors or generic dialogue just stripped me right out of the story. Yes, it happens as per individual. If these things were taken care of, then it might not have been so bad from a broad perspective.

     By generic dialogue, I mean dialogue which were said differently but essentially says the same thing. Or dialogue which is far from adding mythos to IsForsvar's history.

     I would see this ...



     ... and then see the exact same thing except in different words.



     Sometimes, something like this would make me take pause ...




     Ultimately, the dialogue needs to be cleaned up in order to present a nice story which I feel is the main factor that impacts the player positively or negatively. The only dialogue I liked was the conversation between Bathing Girls and Bathing Guys. It had a sharp and funny tone.


     Variety in activities. There was many things to do which was nice. The part where the player must entertain Angel and her Demons was done well, I thought. It was considerably challenging even with tiered gears on. It was fun. On a different but similar note, it would be nice if the quests given had a deeper convo than just the typical:

     "oh hai, I have a problem. can you help me?"
     "oh noes. what should I do? can you help me?"
     "oh great. I need help. can you help me?"
     "my X or Y sibling is in trouble. can you help me?"

     One final thing I want to comment about in regards to the IsForsvar's Return quests is the Writer's Block quest. The quest you get after completing the story once. That quest had potential for branching choices. If possible, I would like to see it become a more significant part in future IsForsvar's Return storyline.


     The amount of varied and customized monsters was a welcomed treat. I like the fact that something as minor as this had thought put into it. Even if it was a blue-coloured version of common monsters, it was still nice to see variety. Some things I can suggest is to have some monsters with spawn slaves. 1x Tatacho can have 3 spawn slaves like 1x Blue Flame Skill + 1x Saru + 1x Snowier. Or 1x Snowier can have 3 spawn slaves like 2x Arctic Fox + 1x Saru. Or it can be the other way around. Make it dynamic! The monster Ice Titan is a pretty big and frightening monster as it is. So make it more big and frightening! If possible, enlarge the Ice Titan sprite size by 3x. Visual factors can have good impact, too. What about Arctic Fox? You can make them hunt in packs. So, 1x Arctic Fox can have 10x Arctic Fox spawn slaves. To prevent abuse, you could disable loot on slaves.


     All in all, IsForsvar's Return story quest was done surprisingly well despite very simple annoyances. In future installments, I hope to see better story-writing and increasingly-appealing rewards in order to attract a larger audience. I've talked to a few who ignores custom content such as this entirely which is a shame.

[singer of strange songs]

God damn you, Legacy you can never be pleased!!ASDFGHJKL!!!!11one.

 Kidding 

As for me, I can't say I liked the 2012's Christmas Event. It wasn't truly satisfying for me.

Let me stop you there...They said it wasn't an event to begin with so you can't really be mad or glad about it. I WISH they would follow through on what they promised...although its too late now. Pandora was sick. Skoll being the cool person Skoll is could have been considerate enough do Pandora's duties of dying to players and mass spawning. Or hey! Even Hashtag could have helped while Pandora was feeling under the weather. Oh well.

IsFörsvar's Return
[ link ]

I was annoyed with the reward at first but after realizing that this was a permanent quest being added to this server AND the start of even more, It felt right...kind of....3-4 hours depending on class and skill level don not equate to being rewarded an old card album and old purple box. Those items are easily obtained from MVPs and with that much time spent on doing the quest you can easily hunt 3 of the same mvp and get the same results. There are boxes other than obb and opb you know. 

The ending of the quest threw me off. Even if its the start of more quests, how they make a continuation off of, "Just wanted to know if you were real, goodbye trololo" will be interesting and the dialogue is expected to be unpolished when you've been working on a project such as this for over 6 months. Lol.

[goldmind]

As for me, I can't say I liked the 2012's Christmas Event. It wasn't truly satisfying for me.

Let me stop you there...They said it wasn't an event to begin with so you can't really be mad or glad about it.

     Yeah, that's true. I still consider it as an Event regardless because it is tied to a big holiday even if it wasn't a formal, traditional Event.

[Pandora_]

Yeah...we know the Christmas event was....a mess. Our mistake for being unorganized and not getting the stuff that was planned for it done quick enough, but everyone makes mistakes and we are working on fixing those ones so things like that don't happen again. =)

The typos/grammar errors in the Farvir quests can be fixed as we go along, if you want to take SS of anything like that that you find we can work on getting it slowly fixed up as Kirek adds more to it =) (obviously not a priority but it can be worked on)

Thank you for the feedback!

[goldmind]

     Ha ha, well ... I would do that if I was a beta tester or something.     =P

     I think most players wouldn't mind much of the spelling errors, anyway. We see it on mainchat all the time.

[Kirek]

OH MA GOLF people ;_; i get it already Kirek no write dialog anymore. Pandora come here my little box muahahaha .... wait a moment -_- how do I chain this box up....? more importantly how do I bribe a box to do my bidding?

I hope to improve IsFörsvar in the coming months, before starting next chapter. And you're right Goldmind this first chapter was Chapter 0 aka Prologue since it was a remake. I would like to get everything tweaked before to much is piled on top. But I am also working on your Holiday events again. You can blame the lack of a formal Christmas event on me. I was to busy trying to get IsFörsvar Finished and ready. XD and you've already seen some of the bad of that.

And on that note back to work on quests.

P.S.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to think up useless/random Dialog... well for me.

[Hashtag]

As for me, I can't say I liked the 2012's Christmas Event. It wasn't truly satisfying for me.

Let me stop you there...They said it wasn't an event to begin with so you can't really be mad or glad about it. I WISH they would follow through on what they promised...although its too late now. Pandora was sick. Skoll being the cool person Skoll is could have been considerate enough do Pandora's duties of dying to players and mass spawning. Or hey! Even Hashtag could have helped while Pandora was feeling under the weather. Oh well.

I would have loved to have gotten involved with it and actually did attempt to get near a computer so that I could, but it just wasn't possible for various reasons =(

[goldmind]

     Other things I've noticed is that the quests are all tailored towards solo-play. Also, none of the quests run on a time-based restriction. I suggest that - as a way to extend solo-play - is to add some quests that have time-based restrictions.

     For example:

     NPC A: "Hey buddy, you know that swarm of [insert randomized monster] down by that [insert specified map zone]?"

     NPC B: "Yeah. What about it? Don't tell me you took on that challenge, did you?"

     NPC A: "Yes, I did. I cleared those monsters in under 1/2/3/4/5/etc minutes!"

     NPC B: "Wow! That's even better than my score."

     NPC A: "Hmm? What do you want stranger. We don't take kindly to non-IsForsvar residents."

     NPC B: "I think he/she wants to take on the Time-Attack Monster Challenge."

     [Do you want to take the challenge?]

• [YES]

          NPC A: "Okay, fine. Try to beat my score."

          [Destroy X amount of Y monster.]

          NPC A: "Come back and talk to me when you're done. Your time starts now!"

          When the dialogue closes, it will initiate a clock which will keep track of how many minutes/seconds it took the player to kill monsters and come back to the NPC.

          NPC A: "It took you X minutes and Y seconds to kill Z monster. Pretty good.

          Now we won't have to worry about monsters coming from that field.

          Here's something for proving your worth."

          [rewards a Gift Box]

• [NO]

          NPC B: No? Well, I'm not sure what you want then.


     I mean, so far, I can count up to 3 different types of quests which are all pretty standard.

• kill X monster
• collect Y ingredients
• talk to NPC A and travel to NPC B

     It'd be nice to see more variety.