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Post by downrightdude on Jun 29, 2024 15:23:01 GMT -5
Love Baelia's background!!
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Post by June Scarlet on Jun 29, 2024 15:43:44 GMT -5
Wait wait wait. A rift in space. Spewing out little bits of void. That means... Wait, what does that mean? I'm missing the reference here, though I can tell one is being made.
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Post by Ian Wolf-Park on Jun 29, 2024 16:11:06 GMT -5
Wait wait wait. A rift in space. Spewing out little bits of void. That means... Wait, what does that mean? I'm missing the reference here, though I can tell one is being made. Fraze is referring to Doctor Who, if I'm not mistaken, more specifically, the Tenth Doctor, played by David Tennant. Timey wimey wobbly stuff. Seems appropriate, considering what is happening in Neopia
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Post by Duke Pikachu on Jun 30, 2024 2:52:40 GMT -5
3 pages to catch-up on, I really need to get better at posting in the moment. Sorry for multi-posting, but I may have to take each page at a time. As a person who didn't log into Neopets very much last year, I really appreciate the Timeline widget that summarizes all the site things that have been building up to this! (I'm kinda surprised at how direct the Advent Calendar comic summaries are, but then, how else can you translate those to a single written paragraph?) The timeline is very nice, though I'm wondering what they'll do with it now that the Plot has started and we have the individual chapters? The previous day's meeting dialogue, which took place on the Hub page, has its transcript added as a page for Chapter 1 (which is also very nice, especially since it adds some dialogue to the previously wordless comic (even if its not quite the same as hovering over a comic panel and dialogue appearing)). So it feels like anything which occurs is going to be documented as pages part of the current Chapter, not really leaving anything to summarize for the Timeline (unless the timeline summarizes what happens in each chapter, which would feel kind of pointless as you should just read the Chapter for fuller context as its currently and readily available unlike AdCal 2023 or experiencing the slow "Greying" of Neopia characters & landmarks which you had to "be there" for to experience). As for splitting AdCal 2023 into different segments on the Timeline, I initially have no issue with it as luckily the events of AdCal happened in 3 major parts thus each could receive its own paragraph. That is the weakness of the Timeline where each event they can only offer a short couple of paragraphs summary. The longer the summary the awkward the presentation may become. The only solution I could think to let them add more details is having a "Chapter 0" where they have an entire page they can not only write more and longer paragraphs if needed (and not split it up), but also go more indepth on exactly when things occurred (such as when certain characters/landmarks became Greyed, the discovery of the graffitied posters, etc.). Oh BOY the era of chaotic deflation continues. Wand of the Dark Faerie prices are crashing in expectation of it being released as a plot prize. Before I get to my critque, let me make it clear I have no problem with them making the super powerful Battledome weapons more available. Making them top prizes is a nice incentive to participate and a way to decrease their cost on the market. And, while I do have some of these Battledome weapons myself, I don't plan on ever selling them so when I give my criticism note I have no personal financial investment in it. Heck, I actually have a quite few extra Void Blades I waited a bit too long to sell it was revealed to be a 800 point prize (which, now with the Void Essence collecting, is a very reachable likely before battling starts, likely can get 2 if you log in everyday). However, I have no issue with the Void Blade being sold so cheap cause it's pretty much now one of the "standard" Battledome weapons so should be less of an investment to acquire. THAT all said, I do hope they increase the cost of the super powerful BD weapons. If TNT thinks 60k points is a reachable goal as suggested by the Trophy bar on the Rewards page, the Wand of the Dark Faerie shouldn't cost less than a TENTH OF "MAX". WotDF, Grapes of Wrath, Thyoras Tear, and even Techo Fanatic Megaphone and Thunder Sticks should all at least be above 10k at least (and either Sword of Reif shouldn't be there or at least ALL the Anagram Swords should be available, but this then gets into the tricky question of just general inclusion of Hidden Tower weapons which all has a set cost already). If we're to assume 60k is a reachable goal for everyone, I would suggest this as the costs for them (give or take a few thousand): Grapes of Wrath: 30k WotDF: 40k T-Tear: 20k Techo Fanatic Megaphone: 10k Thunder Sticks: 20k Note originally I had them higher though I'm going by the philosophy you should be able to afford to get 2 or 3 of the top prizes if you participated to the fullest. Still, even at these amounts (plus limiting them to 1 per purchase) I feel it strikes a decent balance between cost & value. Because am I insane to think that these powerful items should be harder to obtain? Like before this event most if not all of these were looked as "End Goal" items, items to work for, items you would log in everyday to play the site to earn NP, get items you can trade/sell, participate in events to one day be able to obtain it either through intended means or from another player. And while giving them as an event/plot prize is fine... they should be worth a considerable amount of points as you're now trading months/years of slowly building up to earning these items for a possible one-time chance to earn it within a few months for participating in what's supposed to be a fun activity for little to no NP. And, you know, I'll admit there is maybe a bit of a "resale" value here too. While I don't ever plan on selling my BD weapons, a reason I'm all for Stamps & other album items being made more available so they become cheaper and hesitant on BD weapons is because Stamps are consumable. BD weapons aren't (most of the good ones anyway, aka the ones we're talking about), a player can resell their BD weapons if they ever decide they're done with battling or with that weapon. OR, they can can LEND that weapon to a friend and/or guildmates knowing that weapon should come back to them eventually. Can't do that with Album items (or Books or TCG cards), once you use them they're gone thus every player who wants to have it needs their own. And of course I'm just in general in disagreement that some items should have ever been available this way. I complained about Illusens Staff being a prize (let alone one so cheap you could get I believe THREE at the end of last Faerie Festival if you got max points and wanted to, and some did purely out of spite) so you better believe I don't think WotDF should be a prize either! What's the point of doing the 50 Level Faerie Quests now? Like, at some point do they plan on revamping them and having them give out new top prizes? Also, they're so focused on giving out the super powerful BD weapons that they're sorta neglecting another side of the Battledome that has been heavily inflicted with inflation issues and archaic mechanics making it difficult to do without a guide: Training. Congrats, you were just given an "End Goal" BD weapon for very little... to bad you don't have the stats to really use it to its full potential; infact I wouldn't be surprised if training items prices have gone up as a RESPONSE to powerful BD weapons being made real easy to get. So you have the weapons, but now you don't have the stats and gonna cost you a lot more to do it (whereas before you generally train up and upgrade your BD equipment as your stats & finances reached certain goal marks). Like, why not offer Codestones (both Normal & Red), Dubloons, and the stat boosting items? Why is TNT so focused on upending the side of Battling that is supposed to be expensive (for higher leveling battling, which note would be just between players; cause guess what, for 99.9% of a player's experience they're not going to need a weapon even as powerful as the Void Blade for most of their daily battling!) but neglecting the side which should be inexpensive cause you have to do so much of it? Of course, if you say any of this on the Boards you get called a "1 Percenter" and users saying "Why should I have to work when I could have the fun now?"; so many (of at least vocal) just want instant gratification. And I'm afraid TNT is listening to them more than the users who are making an argument for making a more fulfilling site experience that'll have players wanting to come back to the site daily. Final note, the "instant gratification" users also wouldn't be complaining if either the BD weapons were set at a high cost from the get-go (and would probably get super excited if they saw the costs get lower as TNT becomes more aware of the average points most users were going to end up having) or you didn't show the costs at all! They're just complaining because they saw current TNT have no clue on value-cost balance, they price the super powerful BD items cheaply, and now these users think they should get those BD items for that price. I wish they would REALLY take a note from old TNT and NOT put "costs" up until the Event/Plot was done. While we had to wait a while to spend our prize points, old TNT were able to make reasonable cost-value decisions based on both the average amount of points most users got & consideration for the outliners (both on the high and low ends). I don't have high hopes for the Battledome aspect of the event, tbh. This FAQ response has me scratching my head: I'm just like... what? Battledomers aren't inherently violent people. xD They're gamers. The Battledome is the backbone of the game economy. Things like Neggs and codestones from dailies, and high-end weapons (Wand of the Dark Faerie, Thunder Sticks etc.) are worth in-game currency because people are training in anticipation of having powerful enemies to fight. Battledome pets are valued in the pet-trading economy for the same reason. If the attitude of the devs is that the time people put into actually playing the game doesn't matter, then... I don't know. I guess I'll just try to keep my expectations low and think of this as a weekly comic strip with maybe some light puzzles every now and then. The game itself feels like it's no longer functional and has not been for a long while. I think it's been long established current TNT aren't great with wording things. Infact I read this and I feel I'm being talked down to; like you could read this with a condescending tone and it'll equally as fit. Like, those first two sentences are not needed, or rather its where most of the "talking down" to is coming from. I give you an alternate response to this question: QUESTION: Do I have to participate in the Battledome Challenges? ANSWER: No. For those who do not want to focus on battling, each Battledome challenge will be accompanied by an activity where you and your Neopets help the Neopian Hospital’s efforts to treat those injured in the ongoing scuffles. You can learn more about the details of donating your pet’s time to the Neopian Hospital once the battles begin! See how less condescending this is? It's a straight answer that doesn't present players who don't want to battle as pure & innocent angels who'll faint at the sight of blood (and implying players who do like battling as violent barbarians who are doing the blood showing). My hope is that it's not a "This or that" choice, and that battledomers can do both to get some extra points from the battledome while also participating in the hospital. Would really suck if TNT has been like "Train those pets!" all year leading up to it, and then the people that spent time and effort training their pets get the same (or worse in the off chance that your pets aren't strong enough for the max battledome rewards, while hospital-goers can max their points) rewards as the people who didn't. It's good that they want to make sure players aren't excluded, but I'm scared that with all the "1% bad, make the rare items only given out once available to everyone" rhetoric that's consuming the neoboards that they'll go too far in that direction and not properly reward people who put in the time and effort. Well, the activities in a given event generally fall into a few different categories. You've got battling (war plots, Obelisk skirmishes); puzzles and one-time activities (puzzle plots and low-effort events like Fedtival of Neggs); games (GMC or Daily Dare); grinding (Altador Cup); and donating items (Charity Corner). Of those, battling (and donating items, to an extent) rewards prior effort, while the others reward current effort. And it should be possible to strike a fair balance between those. The Curse of Maraqua plot waaay back in the day also had the option for players to choose between a battle or support role. Supporters (I had to check JN for this) earned points by donating a certain pool of of items, and racking up scores in certain games. So in a sense, the time and NP you could have spent training a pet were instead put toward games and donations. I think implementing a sort of Charity Corner/Altador Cup combo for support players in the current plot could be a fair way of doing it. (On the other hand, I'm still salty about being screwed over by CoM's rank system for battling, but my point remains.) The fact that you're still salty about getting screwed over by a rank system is my exact fear. If we are forced to pick between being a battler or a supporter, instead of being able to dip our toes into both, then I'm afraid of the following scenario: Let's say that both Battling and Hospital have a 10,000 point upper limit. I have a battle pet that is strong, but only a little more than halfway to the 750 max mark. If I pick battling and get locked into it, what if I hit that point where the monsters they bring out require that 750 stat max to continue progressing and getting points? I'd now be locked out of my full 10,000 points while pets that picked hospital would not be stuck behind the same hard wall, and would be able to continue all the way to 10,000 points. I would therefore be punished despite putting more time and effort into the game, and using millions of NP worth of codestones over the past year compared to someone that didn't do that and chose hospital. And the thing is, I'm someone who's about halfway to the stat cap with good weapons. What happens if a new player doesn't know and gets locked in as a battler? They'd be able to score even less points. However, if they let us participate in both, that could be mitigated, as now I can put in the same amount of effort towards the hospital as any other player, while being rewarded with the opportunity to score additional points through the battledome thanks to the effort I put in prior to the start of the plot. Obviously, I'm complaining about something that we don't know about yet. They could very well be implementing a system that prevents my potential grievances, but I wanted to air out my worries. From what I remember, the Supporter option for Curse of Maraqua had its fair share of problems. There was two ways to earn points: Play games or donate items. For the games, there was only 5 and the scores you needed to get 1 or 2 points would take several minutes to get to, so not exactly the fastest way of making points. For item donation, there was a set list which was mainly Healing Potions, Codestones, and Bottled Faeries; take a wild guess what happened. Yeah, it didn't sound fun to be a Supporter as you either were only making a handful of points every hour or spending a lot of NP on inflated items many of which were expensive to begin with. There was a reason after CoM they dropped the Supporter role, though this was at a time before they really went all-in on plot puzzles. ALSO, keep in mind this was the old BD so for battlers they had to deal with the opponent's HP gradually increasing over time, which leads to the above mention BD lockout if the opponent's HP got too high they couldn't beat them before being knocked out. So there was issues on both sides, though if you had a high stat Neopet you most certainly should have picked battling. Hopefully this won't be an issue. Even if we're forced to choose Battler or Supporter (which I hope they don't do because there's really no reason for it; original TNT did it for Curse of Maraqua as an attempt to keep players for high-stated Neopets from getting ton of points over players who didn't. This is no longer such a big issue as the new BD has 3-level set difficulties (with Easy usually low enough even slightly trained Neopets can win, especially with strong BD equipment), Supporter just needs to ignore having item donations with a set list. Like for the Neopian Hospital segments, if they want to keep things "simple" what I'm seeing is them doing a Charity Corner-like activity. If they have a more complex puzzle, maybe it'll be something like you're given a patient, have to figure out what exactly is ailing them (which could be a combination of things like injury, hunger, demoralized, dirty, has an illness, weak, etc.) and are given instructions what can be done to make them better (if injured used the right amount of healing potion but don't waste any; if hungry figure out what they like and see what food supplies you have; demoralized see what kind of toys they like; dirty see what grooming items they like using; has an illness figure out which one and use the cure; weak figure what training method would help them out, etc.); just be sure it doesn't cost NP nor takes that much time to figure out what you need to do.
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Post by Fraze on Jun 30, 2024 3:12:33 GMT -5
Wait wait wait. A rift in space. Spewing out little bits of void. That means... Wait, what does that mean? I'm missing the reference here, though I can tell one is being made. Doctor Who reference, as Ian Wolf-Park said. A Weird Spacetime Thingy shows up (as happens a lot in that show), and it turns out that it's a portal to the void and is leaking void particles into our reality. The Doctor can see the void stuff floating around by looking through a pair of those retro red-and-blue 3D glasses (which never showed up in the show any time before or since). I highly doubt TNT was intentionally making a reference, but I was amused by the oddly specific similarities.
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Post by Moni on Jun 30, 2024 13:22:05 GMT -5
I don't have high hopes for the Battledome aspect of the event, tbh. This FAQ response has me scratching my head: I'm just like... what? Battledomers aren't inherently violent people. xD They're gamers. The Battledome is the backbone of the game economy. Things like Neggs and codestones from dailies, and high-end weapons (Wand of the Dark Faerie, Thunder Sticks etc.) are worth in-game currency because people are training in anticipation of having powerful enemies to fight. Battledome pets are valued in the pet-trading economy for the same reason. If the attitude of the devs is that the time people put into actually playing the game doesn't matter, then... I don't know. I guess I'll just try to keep my expectations low and think of this as a weekly comic strip with maybe some light puzzles every now and then. The game itself feels like it's no longer functional and has not been for a long while. i feel like this is a huge misread of the message. pretty sure they are just trying to give a "diegetic" answer, not actually implying that battledomers are violent. like obviously the neohospital is not a real game mechanic but they still mention it as it would be "in world", so ...
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Post by Stephanie (swordlilly) on Jul 1, 2024 1:21:12 GMT -5
i feel like this is a huge misread of the message. pretty sure they are just trying to give a "diegetic" answer, not actually implying that battledomers are violent. like obviously the neohospital is not a real game mechanic but they still mention it as it would be "in world", so ... It does feel less offensive when I try to read it in the voice of a roleplayer, thank you. Although I think it could still be more friendly, like: “That’s okay, not every Neopet is a fighter! There are important non-combat roles that also need to be filled. The Neopian Hospital will be recruiting nurses to help out on the front lines, so keep an eye out when the battling starts!” Something like that perhaps, rather than implying that some participants are “pacifists” while others are… warmongers? xD And the “Heavens, no!” part making it sound like battling is something scary or off-putting. But as Pikachu pointed out, they’ve never been very good at talking to players :’)
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Post by Ian Wolf-Park on Jul 1, 2024 4:56:50 GMT -5
I DO love today's comic page tho. Actually, this plot has me thinking more about Baelia than I had in a long while. I'm assuming the enchantment currently being used to turn Neopia gray is similar to the one used on her. Would be really cool if she's a major character in this. You must a psychic, as it would appear that she will play a role in the plot. Visit Faerieland in order to view the conversation.
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Post by Ian Wolf-Park on Jul 2, 2024 4:44:08 GMT -5
Today's the first day to receive the 1st of the 'Time is of the Essence' achievement if you started collecting the Void Essences on June 27/28
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Post by Breakingchains on Jul 2, 2024 10:09:00 GMT -5
Oh and Tavi is here too! That's really cool to see, I always liked her a lot from what little we saw of her in canon
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Post by Carolyn on Jul 2, 2024 20:27:11 GMT -5
Ahh this is gonna be a Jellyneo deep dive answer, I'm sure, but is Tavi from one of the books?
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Post by Blueysicle on Jul 2, 2024 20:30:12 GMT -5
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Post by June Scarlet on Jul 2, 2024 20:30:31 GMT -5
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Post by Ian Wolf-Park on Jul 3, 2024 5:25:52 GMT -5
If you started collecting Void Essences on July 27/28, weekly prizes are now available. Remember, 80% (56/70) must be collected in order to qualify.
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Post by Breakingchains on Jul 3, 2024 9:06:24 GMT -5
It appears I have somehow already forgotten a day.
My perfect streak got broken real quick. xD;;
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