Good thing I'm not participating in this, don't want to cringe over cosmetics.  

Posted by Darkk

Quick games a good game. No clue why I would bother waiting minutes on end for a candy to drop so that I can earn a one time use glow stick. I was just semi-afk at mod fountain waiting for the exclusive halloween blob to respawn, 80 minutes later and i'm still waiting. The NPC's seem to be scattered around the map and disappear at random times. The laggy affects/animations are also stupid. Be more creative next time, maybe some sort of limited time quest, like the pitch black maze in deadwood 2-3 years ago. Still boring lol, but better than this ****.

How about actually playing instead of just AFKing and hoping candy falls into your lap?  

Posted by Dusty

How about actually playing instead of just AFKing and hoping candy falls into your lap?

Well isn't it supposed to be fun, then why does it take a hour to get like 10 candy without even being sure of getting something cool  

Posted by iBubble

Well isn't it supposed to be fun, then why does it take a hour to get like 10 candy without even being sure of getting something cool

Well we asked for input from the community and absolutely no one could recommend a single idea for Halloween that didn't involve just giving players a variety of a hundred hats/furniture made specifically for a one-off event. We said early on that having a ton of prizes wasn't going to happen again because it's a huge time-sink. Also people are complaining they haven't gotten everything before the event was even out for a whole day.

Last year everyone complained that Halloween was boring, and it was just a "maze-fest" because of the candy bowls. This year everyone thinks candy-bowls were the best thing ever and wonders why they removed.

And to end it all, players have been nothing but outright rude and insulting the entire time. Not a single constructive criticism, nothing but whining and insulting. Do you think staff sit around a table and try to think of the most boring things ever? Yet the incentive to even put any effort into making things better next year isn't there because all the hard work gets in return is a monsoon of negativity and insults. That's not to say people can't be critical because things aren't perfect(hence why event was heavily monitored the entire time yesterday and tweaks and changes made), but just throwing insults and acting entitled isn't being constructive and neither is suggestions like "we want way more rewards and we want a reward every single time we do anything!" It's not feasible, it's not realistic. We just can't do that, it's too much work to do every year when Halloween is followed by Christmas which also needs hundreds of new prizes made specifically for that event.  

Posted by Dusty

How about actually playing instead of just AFKing and hoping candy falls into your lap?

Maybe people wouldn't have to resort to AFK if it was easier to get candy. You have ghosts which are uncatchable due to the massive amounts of lag. The orange candy ghost and green candy ghost north of graal have been there on the first day and NO ONE caught it because of that lag. Also, why are ghosts only catchable from behind? Not to mention how you have massive mobs fighting for one ghost which again, can't be caught do to the lag.

Candy goblins by far is better than ghosts but way too many cons. Good thing that it spawns in bushes so that it's less common but like the ghost, there is a massive mob north of swamp for the large bush patch for the goblin, and when the goblin does spawn, no one can get the candy because of the mobs. You can't even move in the mobs.

Pumpkin blob is the best way by far. Just like blob but emits candy when defeated as oppose to spoils. Candy drops ways from the pumpkin blob to make it harder for players to get it. But yet again, huge mobs that prevent you from moving.

Now granted, the mobs aren't your fault. But to be honest, what DID you expect from this event because it clearly wasn't mobs. Just face it, it was poorly planned out. Nice idea and concept, but with 3000 players on, the ghosts are always lagging, mobs make candy even harder to get which is an insult to injury because most players are getting tricked.  

Posted by Arsenal

Now granted, the mobs aren't your fault. But to be honest, what DID you expect from this event because it clearly wasn't mobs. Just face it, it was poorly planned out. Nice idea and concept, but with 3000 players on, the ghosts are always lagging, mobs make candy even harder to get which is an insult to injury because most players are getting tricked.

Did you suggest anything that players wouldn't mob around and server lag wouldn't cripple?  

Posted by Dusty

Did you suggest anything that players wouldn't mob around and server lag wouldn't cripple?

Hiding the visibility of players in a certain area doesn't take away that lag? Seems to work fine in Nexus, Revolution, Onnet.  

Posted by Aguzo

Hiding the visibility of players in a certain area doesn't take away that lag? Seems to work fine in Nexus, Revolution, Onnet.

That's not really how it works on the overworld. Especially since ghosts and goblins spawn pretty much everywhere we can't really isolate that to specific spots.  

To Dusty, this year wasn't bad, it just didn't play out very well. Players always complain, no matter what. The problem as I see it is not that there's not a lot of items to get, or because it's difficult. There's 3 ways to get the candy: ghosts, goblin, and pumpkin. Everyone complains about the time consumption, but that's not the problem. The problem is the difficulty factor. The ghosts most of the time do not have a candy in them, and when they do, there's going to be multiple people trying to get that 1 candy too. The pumpkin causes mass amounts of people to come, which is great, except for the fact that you can't walk over other people in PK zones. This makes trying to maneuver through all the people near-impossible. When the candy does come out, people usually end up getting hardly any, or a lot. There lies the problem; it should have a zone around it where players can walk over each other, but still PK. The problem isn't that it's time consuming, but rather that the difficulty from how it was all executed. I'd prefer if the ghosts randomly dropped the candy, rather than catching it in a net; they would have the same candy rate as they do now, it would just randomly drop it on the ground to be picked up. Another idea that wasn't great was alowing players to give multiple candies at once to a trick-or-treater. It sounds cool, but it won't ever play out very well; no matter how many prizes are available. Furniture also doesn't seem like a very good item to get as a prize. People would love to just buy as much as they want. Now on to my ideas for next year.
As for tricks, I think they're cool, and mostly everyone else does too. In fact, the past couple years, I'd hope for a trick sometimes. I suggest creating other ways of getting tricked, besides only using your candy. There's a few mirrors in Graal, there could be a system that if a player is looking in the mirror, randomly, it will apear to crack, or there may be a 'ghost cat' type-NPC that roams the map, and when it passes a player, they too get tricked. These tricks would last longer than the tricks from trick-or-treating. It would be a nice, easy, interactive activity going across Graal. I'd also recommend that you not be able to give candy to a trick-or-treater while you're tricked, depending on how long you remain tricked. Everyone loved the witch that went around during previous halloweens. This caused people to hunt for it, and win the prize, which was a simple prize, yet took people a while to get sometimes. It would be great to do that every year, obviously with something new, but it would just be 1 item you get from it. For example, this cat mount that was made this year - there would be a cat that appears in random locations of the map, and you would have to do something to get the prize (the cat mount). Whether it be feed it cat nip and hope the cat likes it, or answer a question about halloween like the previous one did. If you get the question wrong, or it doesn't like the cat nip, or whatever other thing you can think of to do to obtain the prize, you would then be tricked. Tricks are the hidden gem in Classic's halloween. There's some pretty cool tricks you could play that make people laugh and enjoy it. A trick I just thought of was a headless horseman-type trick - there would be a gani where the player is holding their head in their hands, or it's just completely gone. There could be a trick where a ghost follows you around and does something like steal your hat and put it on himself, all different kinds of things. I honestly think tricks could be the best part of halloween, and secondary would be getting prizes from trick-or-treaters. That way you wouldn't need as many prizes, but still have plenty of activities that can keep players busy, rather than activities that focus solely on obtaining a reward.  

Posted by Dusty

That's not really how it works on the overworld. Especially since ghosts and goblins spawn pretty much everywhere we can't really isolate that to specific spots.

Who said that they had to spawn everywhere?

People were talking about dungeons, Guild based events, where you would enter a building to participate. Leaderboards for that event. A prize system that wouldn't cheat you too much.  

Posted by Aguzo

Who said that they had to spawn everywhere?

If they spawn in particular locations then people will just camp out there and wait for them to spawn.  

Posted by Aguzo

Who said that they had to spawn everywhere?

People were talking about dungeons, Guild based events, where you would enter a building to participate. Leaderboards for that event. A prize system that wouldn't cheat you too much.

Nice and vague suggestions. Absolutely no detail or plan or anything to it. It's easy to suggest vague ideas that have hardly any thought put into it but sounds amazing on paper.

"Oh man, a dungeon sounds amazing!"

Dungeons do sound amazing to players. So anyone who hears you suggest a dungeon will concur and think it's the most amazing idea ever, so suddenly you think it's a good idea. But there's no flesh or detail to it... therefor the actual idea is useless. Then you have to plan an actual dungeon out. But wait! An actual dungeon would only be fun one time, and even the best planning and content would result in, at best, an hour playthrough of a dungeon. Zelda games have some of the best game-developers working on them and they've been at it for decades... and even their most creative and fun dungeons have at max an hour of play-time per dungeon. Some as short as 15 minutes. Then what? Players will complain that there's no more to do for Halloween...

And then next year comes around and no one wants to play the same dungeon as last year! So we have to make a new dungeon. Completely contradicting the goal of Halloween - to create a self-sustaining event we can reuse every year the same as Christmas and Easter.

Also the server will still lag with 3000+ players on regardless of if they're in the same room. And dungeons will be very action-packed, and therefor baddies(which will NEED to be serverside) will also lag. So yes, lag will still be a complaint and players will whine that they can't complete the dungeons because the baddies are too laggy in the same way that the ghosts are laggy.

And guild events exclude everyone who isn't in a guild. That's a horrible idea for a holiday event.

But like I said, there's no downside to leaderboards imo. I've already explained why a prize system that rewards you 100% of the time every time is bad. Players hate consumable prizes(like glowsticks and jellybeans) but they want a unique prize every single time they visit a Trick or Treater! They'd run out of prizes by the first day, and again, complain when they have nothing else to do for the rest of the week. Even if we did what Thallen suggests and add aaaaaaaaaaaaall the hats from the previous years, players would still complain that they got an "ugly" hat they didn't want instead of the the really cool hat they wanted.

You think no thought is put into these events but the above is the kind of thought-process you have to have when creating content that players never seem to consider.

Posted by Coco

If they spawn in particular locations then people will just camp out there and wait for them to spawn.

Which is exactly what happened to the goblins. Players found spots that spawned them frequently and decided to exploit it and then wonder why they don't spawn as frequently anymore. You give players the benefit of the doubt and they will always find a way to ruin it.



Classic doesn't have the benefit of being a cookie-cutter MMO/RPG that can just feed players item drops like new swords and armor with different stats from dungeons that just spawn mobs that run right at you. I really wish it did have that benefit, it would save me a lot of sanity.  

You guys also introduced an interesting aspect recently - decorated bow and arrows. This would be a great item to make and sell for each holiday.  

Posted by Coco

If they spawn in particular locations then people will just camp out there and wait for them to spawn.

I meant that as a way to say that they could even spawn in a dungeon like a mob event, and if you catch enough ghosts in a certain time you get awarded x amount of candies. Anyways, it doesn't matter anymore.  

Posted by Dusty

Well we asked for input from the community and absolutely no one could recommend a single idea for Halloween that didn't involve just giving players a variety of a hundred hats/furniture made specifically for a one-off event. We said early on that having a ton of prizes wasn't going to happen again because it's a huge time-sink. Also people are complaining they haven't gotten everything before the event was even out for a whole day.

Last year everyone complained that Halloween was boring, and it was just a "maze-fest" because of the candy bowls. This year everyone thinks candy-bowls were the best thing ever and wonders why they removed.

And to end it all, players have been nothing but outright rude and insulting the entire time. Not a single constructive criticism, nothing but whining and insulting. Do you think staff sit around a table and try to think of the most boring things ever? Yet the incentive to even put any effort into making things better next year isn't there because all the hard work gets in return is a monsoon of negativity and insults. That's not to say people can't be critical because things aren't perfect(hence why event was heavily monitored the entire time yesterday and tweaks and changes made), but just throwing insults and acting entitled isn't being constructive and neither is suggestions like "we want way more rewards and we want a reward every single time we do anything!" It's not feasible, it's not realistic. We just can't do that, it's too much work to do every year when Halloween is followed by Christmas which also needs hundreds of new prizes made specifically for that event.

I know how it goes but simply having more(better) ways of getting candy for everyone would have made this better, apart from the trick or treat event I liked halloween