Your opinions on the 2007 Dragon Festival? I wasnt impressed.

I think those were actually meant to be mock version of those horn like things that Abbadon forces through the ground. You know, like they had mock chaos rifts too? And it being in cantha, they coated it with a dragon scale imitation, make it tie in a bit or something.

Overall I found the event very pointless and lackluster... Didnt bother with it after a point.

And yes, the hat sucks. Grasp mask would have been much more welcome!

I'm waiting for Halloween 2007!!

I think a lot of people don't know enough about how their computers work.

I'm sure some of the lag people are experiencing is because of RAM deficiency.

Normally you wouldn't have such huge crowds all moving around at the same time in the one district. So there's a lot to animate and keep track of. Too many things to render and such means your RAM fills up quick.

No free RAM = Very choppy performance.

I liked the actor thing. That was fun. Wish we got the Grasp Mask instead though...

Got the hat - like most others I'll never wear it. Plus this one is ugly too.
(the only reason why i had enough tokens to get the hat was because a guildy gave them to me!)

AFK-ed the whole weekend! I found myself outside of the rings on two occasions after coming back to the game - i must have rubber-banded or something. Other then that - i ran the game for up to 22ish hours and didn't get a disconnect. So not much of a problem here.

AFK-ing FTW!
So anything that allows me to work on my lucky title while NOT HAVING TO PLAY is a winner in my book!
Max points for this - I don't care about the rest of the event!

They threw it together and said "If they don't like it, too bad"

Quests were the only thing I participated in.
Missions were bullshit, look at the last mission (Shing Jea) for example:
But this time you need to close 4 rifts simultaneously. If you don't close them all fast enough after each other or simultaneously, the rifts will reopen spawning new monsters.

The hell?
It was 11:27 and I figured what the hell, last mission, have nothing else to do, why not (Before reading Wiki)

So I go in, hit the portal right where all the Headmasters are normally. Kill the 3 guys, figured this seems easy.
Guy pops up.
Kill and close.
Another.
Kill and close.
Went on about 5 times, as soon as I saw the Scythe of Chaos pop on turn #6...Forget this, mapped back to Shing Jea.

Sure they're going say "We're working on Teh GWEN and GW2!!!1 Leave us alone!!!"

But c'mon.
I saw a level 15 sin that was LFG for mission, laughed to myself.

Yea the hats were junk and pointless, the unassigned presents .. I saw a ele stand by storage and at times 3-4 presents popped at ONE time right near storage, I wouldn't be surprised if that ele had 50 by the time it ended. I had like 27 standing near the victory token guy on the right.

They messed up.

And please don't give me that "They don't need to do anything at all !! be grateful you bastard!!!"

Go right ahead and have no extra little events, I don't care.
9 rings, 6 rings(?), Rollerbeetle, Dragon Arena, that Hatchling game, missions do nothing for me.


Be cool if for the final quest or mission you fought a level 23 Dragon

My opinion:

I mostly liked the festival. I particularly liked the "reenactment" aspect, added quite some humor to the proceedings.

However, I constantly felt that the festival was small, that there was little content. I didn't quite realize why at first, but I do now:

Half of the content was denied to me.

To expand a bit: Half of the festival were the missions, and the missions were impossible to enjoy for me. First, the missions were only accessible for a short time period, meaning that I had to enter at exactly the right time to gain access at all. Second, the missions were simply too hard. They are, insofar as I'm aware, at FoW/UW difficulty level, which is, at least at this time, beyond my ability.

With time, I might have learned enough to get the missions, but time was not available - I could only try the mission three or four times before I was no longer able to enter due to the timing limitations.

My ritualist's party once even got close to reconquering tsumei village (I think there were about 8 enemies left). But, when I finally died and was hot to try again, to finally get it right - I was no longer able to enter.

As a consequence, I must admit that although the event was quite fun, the fun was over too quickly. It was a fine fun event, but only day's worth. The other events so far were full three day extravaganzas... And I can't really say why, since Halloween didn't have much content...

And Kisu´s speech had an enormous spoiler for Nightfall players.

I wasnt even able to leave that capital city during the event, because everytime I tried to leave I got cut off. Thats how bad the lag was.

The present drops last year werent assigned for the previous dragon festival. It isnt that bad having to run for presents, aslong as you dont have lag going on. You just camp a spot and pick them up.




I have to admit to doing the AFK on the 9 rings thing myself, but I only increased my amount to 5000 lucky before my tickets ran out.

The best part for me was when the presents started falling down and a few minutes in i see in chat "go away, this is my spot".
So i find the guy walk over to him and start taking "his" presents.
"this is my spot"
"go away"
"stop stealing my presents"
"shoo"
"GO AWAY!!!"
"OMFG GO AWAY, THIS IS MY SPOT!!!!"
then he left, in those 10 minutes he picked up 3 presents, me and this other dude about 25 each.

I disagree. I found it boring and unstimulating - I just afked in the rings to get luck points.

I thought it was really cheap ANet just rolled-over the quests from last year. That was pathetic. They should make every event different somehow, otherwise what's the point? Ok, running presents and orbs is standard, but the rest should be changed.

Be more original next time!

Bugs:

http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/8804/bug1fs9.png
http://img299.imageshack.us/img299/768/bug2sl0.png
http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/917/bug3tt9.png
http://img516.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bug4na2.png
http://img516.imageshack.us/img516/5190/bug5iu1.png
http://img516.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bug6rn6.png
http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/8632/bug7ck4.png

Yes, it's true that last year the presents weren't assigned. And at the first Wintersday the presents weren't assigned. So if we look at it in context we get

Wintersday 2005 - Non assigned presents
Dragon Festival 2006 - Non assigned presents
Wintersday 2006 - Assigned presents
Dragon Festival 2007 - Non assigned presents.

I thought the assigning presents introduced in WD 2006 was a good idea. Everyone who is there gets a fair share, and those who want to wait around to loot the afkers can. I don't like that those with uber connections are sniping presents from those suffering from lag. Sort of kills the spirit of things. I went to one present drop... after seeing all the hate being thrown around i didn't go back for any of the others. I really thought they would have had enough sense to carry forward the successes of last wintersday... but then I must remember to expect less than nothing and be pleasently surprised when something good happens.

True, true, true :P

I didnt even go to Shing.. :P

~Prof.

my lag was 100% connection rubberband, no choppiness at all. and only during present dropping and beetle race, any other time it was fine.

the only thing that pissed me off was the unassigned gifts and lag, otherwise it was pretty cool

I made enough money to get my monk an elite woven armor, so i don't see what would NOT be nice about a festival like this.

Too many spoiled cry babies here imo.

I did find the gifts quite unpleasant, I was in quite an empty district yet only picked up 6 or 7 gifts while someone next to me basically said the follwoing:

"lmao I got 87 prezzies pwt"
"omgs yous suck hhehe!"
"hahah too slows noob!"

etc, although other people did tell him to shut up, and one nice person gave me a present (I didnt manage to pick any up for the first 5-10 mins, how am I supposed to know where they spawn?) so assigning would be nice, and like all, after 5-10 mins they can be picked up by anyone if he person is afk

Also luckily I missed the emperors speech so I never saw the nightfall spoiler that someone mentioned he said (yes Im still only about half-way through )

First off-

I enjoyed this event immensly, as I have all the other major holiday events. I meet some new friends and played with old friends. Had a great time partying with everyone.

The Hat is, well, okay. Certainly not up to the level of my Freezie crown, but It'll be handy when I want to make a GW parody of Alien vs. Predator.

I made, all told, about 10k in various ways. And that's not counting the black dye I got at the beginning of the event just by wandering outside and killing a mantid for no reason. Got to build up my stock of fireworks, and I finally had a reason to use my sugar rush stuff! I didn't have a lag issue, but I saw many who were having problems with it, and then also reading these posts it makes me aware of how lucky I was.

The Quests were fun. The sort of easy, relaxing thing you'd expect from a holiday event, not a hardcore gaming weekend. The Missions were WAY to hard for a casual player like myself, and probably a good majority of others, to complete. Though with rewards of only 50 tokens, I think it was supposed to be a sentimental victory as opposed to a material victory. I doff my cap to anyone who completed them

AND I PRAY TO ANY DIETY THAT LISTENS THAT THEY NEVER HAVE UNASSIGNED PRESENTS AGAIN. That was the worst part of the event; having all the people running around like chickens with their heads cut off, bickering about one thing or another. In the end, I found the best way to handle it was to just choose a secluded spot off to the side, and grab any presents within easy reach. Even then I still had annoying Wammo's standing by with sugar rush incase I wasn't paying attention for 1/15th of a second however.

Overall, it was an entertaining event, I attended as many of Kisu's arrivals as I could. Cerrtainly a good thing to tide me over between Canthan New Year and Halloween '07

Can't wait for Mad King Thorn to come now

To all you guys who were lagging, did you try a trace to see if it was anet or a router somewhere on the way?

I'm playing from norway, and my friends and I - 5 people - had no lag whatsoever. One of them had system lag from all the players, but still the usual 200ish ping. We got about 30-40 presents each during the dropping (and before you jump at me, I'm one of those in favor of assigned presents) and I never had any lag issues in dragon arena or RBR.

It wasn't bad. I'm very glad they decided to hold another festival, because I really love these things, but it wasn't as good as most of the other events they hold. Personally, I quite liked the mask, but I do agree that the other masks the enemies were wearing, particularly the grasps, were much better. I also enjoyed the game were we had to collect the celestial charges, but towards the end, everyone figured out the areas were they spawned, at that point, I just sat at the corner, because I had nothing to do.

The present drops was easily one of the stupidest things I have ever seen in this game. It was stressful, and frustrating. The lag caused some people not to get any, and there were a few areas were you could stand, and pick up four-five every few minutes. I never thought I'd see spawn camping in GW. I'm guilty of this myself, but only because I knew if I didn't, some other git would. The presents really should have been assigned to give a little something to everyone, instead of everything to someone. I made over 15k in Rice wine.

Honestly, I rarely ever get lag in GW. I get mild lag when there are events like this, no matter where I am, even in instances with only myself. This weekend was the worst it has ever been. I've never seen my character rubberband so much. Not just in Shing Jea, but in my Guild Hall, as well. Just everywhere.

Any other game, download, browsing, etc is running fine and at decent speeds. I can only narrow it down to lag issues with Guild Wars. No idea if it's some traffic issues between my connection and Anet's servers, or if it's Anet's servers period - but it's certainly not my connection. I can only assume it has to do with tons of people being on at once. Just makes sense, I guess.

sounds like youre the spoiled one... a lot of us got no more than a few hundred gold from presents because of the lag :\

Nope the missions were virtually exactly the same as last year minus some reskinning of grasps into actors. Last year they activated at set times too. Although i do agree they were Frustrating hence why this year i only attempted 1 and never bothered with the rest (much like last year)

The Quests werent really designed for newbies, although they were easy for a lvl 20 with heroes anyone hero less had to PUG or solo missions (which takes longer and makes it harder) and new chars with henchies stood no change against lvl 18 Grasps

I rather liked the selection of items u could get, it was an expanded choice from last year (since they added in the Sugar Blue drinks, the Fireworks and FireWater and Brulee which have become more common items for non halloween or Wintersday events)

Well 1st off No Dragon Arena was identical to before, Anet didnt change it abit (so at no point did u Ever fight Dragons), and its actually pretty fun, if u give it abit of thought u it can be very tactical, such as where to stand, when to dodge, when to use set skills, and most of all it was a Closed Deck Arena so its perfectly balanced Arena.

All in all i loved the event, ok the mask wasnt the best, and there wasnt really too much new this year but it was fun i managed to finally get lucky tier 1 and i managed to earn a decent amount of money even on top of spending a considerable amount on tickets to play nine rings.

I had no lag all the event although i know alot of others did but i imagine this was due to alot extra players being online for the event (a good proporation of which were afking lucky or just came on for the present hunts) Speaking of Pressie hunts although i do think assigned pressies are more fair on everyone. it was Fun trying to run around and claim them, sometimes i got decent amounts, some times i got low amounts but it was still a bit of harmless fun. If people were really lagging that much they couldnt pick up there own pressies (since pressies spawned next to every person in the town including npcs) then all they needed to do was find a nice remote place in the town (so others cant pick up there pressies) and just press ";" and space whenever a pressie spawned for them.

it was pretty lousy in my opinion.

1)Masks:
some previous event gave multiple masks, and we got to see 5 masks equipped on npc's (Chaos wurm, Black arm thingy, Chaos rider, Grasps mask and the one we got now.)

so now we just got 1 crappylooking ah well, guess we can't complain to much about this aspect.

2) Massive repeat.

so they just had new skins for enemies, higher levels for them on hard mode and altered what the npc's say...
only point of interest here were new skins, i couldn't care less about new lines

3) Crazy missions:

now this wasn't to hard once you have a proper set up and know what the enemies do.

30 minutes just is to short to play around with your teambuild. this is one stupid timeframe

4) Games

Same as last year but now also with rollerbeetles (didn't think they had it previous year but could be wrong.)

Games here are semi-fun but old and mostly used as a way to get (un)lucky points.

Overall i'd have to give it a 3/10 rating wich the 3 points scored are mainly for the new npc skins and old games returning.

Well I quite enjoyed myself, got plenty of booze for my ale hound and had some fun on the games.

The mask was disappointing, especially when clearly better skins were being worn by the actors. But maybe they could be made available for Halloween

As for lag, I experienced one spike during the Emperor's first visit, other than that I had little or no lag for the rest of the weekend. I play from Scotland.

Overall a 7/10 from me.

Have a whiff of this. This was me and 3 heroes in Sunqua Vale. I've been looking at numbers like this for over a week now. Insufferable. I took this shot while doing the 4 Imperial Guard Hanso quests to get 240 tokens. This was the only viable way to get tokens for me. (I bought the other 10.) The only way to do this was to click (once and only once) where I wanted to walk, and then don't do anything else until I arrived there. Thank the gods for heroes, they did all the work for me. It took almost 3 hours to do these 4 quests.

My guess is, there's a technical problem somewhere just a few hops removed from ANet's servers, because very large amounts of people are playing like this. Whole countries! I can't understand why this has to take this long to be fixed. I'm sure it's a tough problem or whatever, but if the company I work for had this problem we'd slap our bandwidth provider with our SLA until they peed megabits.

As I see everyone posting their opinions, I would like to post mine too.

Quests
Quests which were designed for all players, even low-leves, has been quite popular and I think many of us has liked them, since if you had like 8 characters, you could do them and get 240 tokens for "free". I have only one char, I play, so I did them only once.

Missions
They were hard, rewards could have been doubled, but I think it was quite fun to do them. I have tried only two of them - first one on friday (Jaya Bluffs) and the second was on saturday (Seitung Harbor). Jaya Bluffs has been bugged on friday, so I quit it after I was unable to close 4th portal. Seitung Harbor was better, I did it with heroes I cleared 40 mobs, so I am proud of myself and happy that I did that on the first try.

Festival games
I started with dragon arena, where I wanted to earn missing 10 vic. tokens, ended with 11 consecutives (Ive met a decent group), which gave me some points into gamer title - not so many, but it was fun to do. Some of you complain, that there is nothing related to tactics, but I think, youre wrong, if you have same skills like your oponent, only way you can win is to have either good tactics or a good skills ... (Why the first rank of the Gamer title is called Skills? Got it?)

Present giving/chasing ...
Now I come to the part that many found annoying. I participated at each finale except 2 of them. I was able to get at least 25 gifts from a single round. I saw many people running around a chasing the gifts. But better way was to stand still at place and wait for the price drop. They always spawned next to players, the more players around you, the more presents spawned. In later rounds when some of the districts /36-38/ has been cleared a bit I was able to get 100+ gifts from a single round (I think my best round was 114). The funniest part of theis was seeing people shouting, "go away, this is my place ...", "you are stealing my gifts...", "youre a scammer...", after I was a bit quicklier at picking up the boxes. After all I was able to get around 600boxes this weekend, which is for me a very good score, at least for my L2 drunkard where I miss now only about 600 minutes.

Lags
I saw, that there was some problem related to the lags, but since I am used to it from previous games like 600ms-900ms, it doesnt hurt me lot, I am used to it and can live with it and still can compete against people with a better connection, what I saw at price grabbing. Best way to minimalise the lag for me was standing in a corner looking at the wall, where I havent seen many people standing/running around while I was picking up the boxes (this way I had 200-300ms ping, which is normal for my GMS connection)



I see a lot of people taking things in GW too seriously, people - its just a game, its a way you can take a rest from "real-life" when you are sick of meeting real people or you just need to fly into a virtual world...


This is my personal opinion, you can accept it, or you can flame me for that, its your own personal wiev.

Anet did a great job, giving us the oportunity to make something different from a normal day at GW. I dont care this event was repeated, just think of people that have started like 6-8 months ago, they have the right to enjoy these events too, not everyone is playing GW for 2 years...

Biggest dissapointement. That, what I really hope was a bug - not a design feature, which exchanged all your stacks of 250 victory tokens for masks. Really if I wanted several masks, with the festival hat NPC, I could have bought extra ones for 10 gold.

One is quite plenty.

Spent the weekend racking up victory tokens to at the end spend on fun stuff / share with guild mates that didn't manage to get the 250 needed for a mask, then loose most of them getting a load of worthless replica-masks. - We're not in the realm of happy fun times here ok.

Dragon's nest is a lot more fun than rollerbeetle races.

The free-for-all present giving. Not the best idea Anet has had.
Really, I don't have anything in principle against it, might be a bit unfair on people with lags. Which there were plenty. But first the competition of ninja-ing the celestial charges. Then on top of that the ninja-presents. Just gets too much of the same thing.
The celestial charge race was fun, but then the same again with the presents right after it - just too much.

Much better solution would have been to spawn the presents straight into your inventory - number of presents based on how well the district did in the celestial charge race would have been nice. Something like give out one present / 5 points of the score the Canthans beats the foes with.
Perhaps with a if you've not even tried and at least had a go of delivering one celestial charge - you only get half the number of presents at the end.

The festival was ok, but a few things did not work out nicely:

• The missions were extremely hard, and the only time I was not wiped, it was bugged which denied my mission reward. (Rift count bug)
• Lag all-over the place at the euro dictricts. I enjoyed the festival in International districs where it was still playable. (With orange ping indicator)
• Unassigned present drops I found a bit unfair. Players with lag cannot get anything. Players who don't have sugar rush or don't use auto select nearst item keys get less than players who rush around. I joined the rushing after a disappointing first round, but it did not feel good.

Other than this, the festival was a welcome event, and the towns looked very nice.

The Event was great.

Love the ring-games since I had much to do in RL last weekend so it was nice because I could still make some progress.

The Dragon Arena is almost completely based on player capability (connection plays a small part), being completely balanced. It's practically ideal PvP.

I guess my point is, what are you smokin'?

So what you didnt like ffs lil whiny @#$%! Just amazes myself how many peeps complain and still play o.0 I bet hardly any of you whiny peeps have made a thread about what a dam great job anet have done in keeping a great number of us hooked for 2yrs and why you are still playing.

This weekend was great for people who know about titles and have GOALS in this game. For people who expect something else then mayby you should ask why you bother to play.

Could it be me or do some of us expect to much from people that have done a great deal and still bother to listen to us at all.Mayby mummy and daddy have to keep up to your expectations every weekend but for my guild and I we thank Anet for all the items that you provided for free to complete our titles(GOALS).

In short if your still playing after 2 years then ask your self why have anet kept my whiny ass here so long?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

You obviously have never read any of my threads before, or my posts! I kind of have a reputation for being an Anet kiss ass!

I'm usually the first person to jump on Anets defense and telling people to calm down and give them a break.

I have infact made a few posts along the line of "has anyone bothered to fact Anet for their hard work".

But sorry....

....this time they kind of made a hash job. Its just my opinion. Compare this to other festivals and they were actually fun.

I think the people not getting presents were probably the types that hover around others, like a fly round... well you get the point. They see you get something then buzz around, like directly competing is going to help. The key is to find an empty spot and just stand there. I easily got around 30 presents each game by doing that. Someone else suggested presents spawn near players - that does seem to be the case, but I'd still not suggest standing near others, unless they're clearly AFK.

I didn't have time for missions, but I don't begrudge their inclusion. So what if they're hard? It's not like there's nothing else do.

From presents and quest rewards I made over 80K this weekend (no exaggeration). That was mostly trading VT's for rice wine and then merching it. I sold one stack of VT's for 7K to a player who was asking for them, but mostly only delt with NPC's, to save time/effort.

Oh and people who didn't like the mask - did you also realise it cost you at least 5K?

I didn't participate a lot, but overall had a good time. I made a ton of gold selling tokens. That's always a good thing. I was surprised at the prices people would pay when they were so easy to come by. The only thing I would have changed would have been to make the mask dyable. That was a little disappointing to me.

Masks:
The mask wasn't the best (especially not the possible demon masks available) but still nice to have (looks cool for some necros).

Quests:
The quests with some of the over the top acting were quite amusing and gave enough tokens so that we thankfully didn't have to grind for the mask and could get some items (or just sell said items like my boring non-eventing guildies).

Missions:
Missions seemed challenging but fun (I liked the fan chaos rifts). However the rewards should have been much better due to the difficulty. A guild group completed Jaya Bluffs mission (including pulling a group when the rift bug appeared) but didn't bother with any others after we only got 50 tokens..

Prizes:
Ugh, bad idea to have the presents unassigned, especially with the number of people suffering from bad lag this weekend. Just left it to be abused by speed-boosting players greedily grabbing all they can. Should have been like wintersday.

Lag:
Worst part of it all. Most of the lag was due to the Frankfurt backbone hub issue which is still outstanding (can't believe the number of times I typed that in alliance chat), with the extra server loading from the event definetely not helping. Was resigned to using international districts throughout and lag suffered there was still bad..

Wasn't the best event but I wasn't around for the first dragon festival so I didn't experience the disappointment of a lot of stuff being the same as last year and overall enjoyed my time.

missions hard? i managed to do the seitung harbor mission and the tsumei mission (number 1) both 2 times in half an hour, the other one whear bugged, but else i also should have done them. so NO the missions are not hard, vanquishing certain area's is much harder

Mate I read just fine and no I dont spend to much time on forums becuase it takes my time away from the game......

You need goals mate then you would see why the weekend was nice .If you like to read then spend some time on the 9 rings and read away.

It's a bit of a 'mystery' how you could have collected 100+ gifts from standing in a corner. But then I'm sure you gave them all away to others, as keeping so many would have been extremly selfish and not at all in the spirit of the event.

I liked the event just fine, the only problem was the presents were not assigned as they were during the Winters Day event. That caused bad blood between players.

The only other thing was, the mask is not dye-able.

But over all, the event was just fine

It doesnt matter where you stand, sometimes only one price appears, sometimes 4 appears at once. It only depens on how quick are you collecting them.

When I mean standing in corner, I mean looking into wall, but not wall-hugging. I was collecting near the hench. spot and I am sure I wansnt the only one who got that amount of presents on one run, I am sure there was a lot of quick people who got even more than me.

No, I kept them for myself...

i had no problem with it really. It probably wasnt as fun as last years because the games werent NEW. i like them its just last year i was more excited about the new games.
on the last unlucky/lucky weekend i spent a forutne on the games (was my primeval armor fund). this time i onyl had 10k on me so i spent that. Ive actualyl made quite a fortune this weekend as ive done the quests on 6 of my characters. I had over 1000 victory tokens which i sold for a huge profit, nearlyty enough to get my primeval again. i also got money from the pressies

Lag at times was bad, but you cant help it reaelly. There was nothing major except i got disconnected (my computer i think). I was still able to pick up some pressies. was funny, people did complain about not getting any but its there own fault really everyone would be pissed if u got it yourself so its just a game
ive progressed in my lucky/unlucky titles and i only spent 10k on tickets, i still have most of them left.
The mask wasnt bad at all in my opinion i like the look of it; Anet didn't have to give us anything to be honest. its better than nothing