Christmas Quest 2011

The Christmas Quest 2011 is now over. The quest involved finding a variety of items for Santa's elves and finding 4 lost reinboos.

The only prizes I can confirm at this moment are: Elf hat, Reinboo stick toy, and dyed gloves (I got some light blue ones).

One of the questions rolling around in my head was would it have made a difference (in prizes) if I used purple paper? I used every combination of paper except purple and it didn't seem to make a difference in prizes between two characters. In fact the character who used the most common paper got 1 additional prize (which could be due to the fact that I forgot to heal the elf on the top floor with my alt).

I have to say though the prizes seem a lot less cool than the orange caps that got freely distributed the same time. Considering the amount of work to do this quest, it's kind a bummer that the prizes from the Christmas quest were not more significant, especially given the cool giveaway hats a lot of people missed.

The quests also felt unconnected. Did Santa give a prize if you didn't find all the reinboos, but found made all the presents? Did Santa give anything extra for healing the elf on the top floor? I think what needed to happen was to break up the prizes, some awarded by Santa, some awarded by the Santa look alike outside of the shop, or maybe from the lead elf. That would have made the quests seem less broken up.

The gifts themselves were kind of cool looking. Even though they weren't functional, items like the rag doll and ball of string were pretty awesome looking. And what about Balthazar (or whatever his name was). If you spiked the gifts were you given anything?

Lots of questions.

100 Spiky mushroom drops

Continuing my previous experiments I decided to do a quick 100 Spiky Mushroom kills. The drops resulted in 10 iron potions, 2 hard spikes, and I didn't track the rest. Both drops are also slightly over the percentages listed on the wiki 8% and 1.5% respectively. This seems to confirm that the drops are actually better than the percentages on the wiki... at least sometimes.

100 Snail kill rewards

A conversation in town between DarkLight, Prsm and myself prompted me to do a little snail-drop analysis. I spent some time this morning killing 100 snails to determine drop rates. Here's what I got:

18 cherries, 15 plums, 13 pears, 11 green apples, 10 blueberries and 3 reed bundles.

I think much of the conversation in town was around the accuracy of drop rates. It's been noted before that just because something has a 3% drop rate it doesn't mean you'll necessarily get 3 out of 100. I don't remember who it was that posted about this before, but there was an excellent post about the fallacies around percentages in TMW.

If you look up snails on the wiki you'll see I came slightly under the drop rate numbers for cherries (20%) and reed bundles (4%), but quite a bit over on green apples (5%) and blueberries (5%). Blueberries are the best health drop from snails so it's not a bad thing to be 5% over on (drop rate would have been 10% if you calculated based on my finding). Funny enough plums was dead on. Pears were slightly over by 3%.

If we add up all the overage percentages it comes to more than the underage percentages, meaning the drops are actually more lucrative than the percentages on the wiki suggest - they just may not be for a particular item in a particular moment in time.

I'm sure that if I killed another 100 snails I would come up with different numbers. It's an interesting experiment, but by no means does it reflect a verification of the wiki.

$100,000 a hour

I came across a post somewhere in the forums where a player made the offhand claim that they could make $100,000 per hour in TMW. I decided to put the theory to test. As a warrior I'm a little slower than a ranger would be... but in this case the real problem was how fast monsters spawned.

Tarq usually kills red slimes in a couple of stabs. In about 18 minutes he'd collected a variety of items that ended up selling for $12,000. It's not $100,000, but it is around $65,000. If I had of held out there may have been a ruby in there pushing the value up more. But my kills relied on uninterrupted time and you almost never have that when killing red slimes.

Willee coyote, the good people of TMW

Lately I've been trying to level up. As I reported the other day I lost a bunch of experience (and this screen shot is actually a bit older, I'm still back at 26%) in the server outage. During the time I was making a really concentrated effort to level there were a few people who helped along the way. Willee and I have coordinated on quite a few kills. For a warrior it's nice to have a ranger around to rapidly dispatch zombies and skeletons. It's a quick way for both players to gain experience. The ranger benefits from the warrior being able to hold (sometimes) monsters still, and the warrior benefits from the rapid dispatch of monsters.

Willee dropped an object in the graveyard which I picked up. Initially I looked through my inventory and didn't see it. When I did I offered it back he told me to pass it on - which I have. It's good people like Willee who make TMW more fun to play. It's not about giving people objects, and it gets really tired when people sit there begging for items without having even attempted the quest (e.g. Asking for 10 pink antennas). Sure it's not a big deal for some to give up a scythe, it's about people who actually want to play the game.

Old tmw character database

It seems all I do lately is moan about problems with The Mana World. Unfortunately I can't say it's going to change today. The main server went down again. To be fair it doesn't happen that often, but whenever the database is restored there always seems to be some significant loss. This time I lost a huge amount of experience - I was slightly more than half way to level 87. I didn't check but it also probably means I don't have the Christmas quest stuff anymore.

What I don't understand is how nightly backups are not made? There must be a time where the server is quiet enough that a simple shell script can tar and gzip that databases? I can't say I'm not guilty of the same or worse on Auldsbel, but I do have regular nightly backups running in the event the database gets corrupted - something that has happened quite a bit with the main server.

I hate bitching and moaning, but it's extremely frustration to go from about 57% experience to 9%. Ah., this reminds me I think I also completed a couple of other things, which I'm going to have to go over in my mind to figure out. If I'm bitching it's the kind of stuff that makes players leave. It's the kind of stuff that made me frustrated enough to stop blogging about tmw in the past.

Buck up campers, stuff happens. So moan a little about it and move on. Do the quests again, level up, and keep playing - it's the seasoned veteran's way.

New client, lost focus

In my ranting about lag I forgot to mention another less desirable thing I noticed - client side focus. The client side focus seems changed. It might be me, but I find the focus off. Focus used to work on the closest monster, but now it doesn't always pick the closest monster, it sometimes ranges all over the place making it really annoying to kill closer monsters quickly. I wonder if I tried with an older client...

Lag monster

There's a horrible monster that recently arrived in TMW-land - it's called the lag monster. In the last week or so the amount of lag has been very pronounced. Even with the new no-botting rule clarified the amount of lag makes me wonder if a fair amount of botting is still going on. It's also worth questioning whether the main server is undergoing load from something else other than TMW.

Anyway it's good to be back and writing about TMW again. A tremendous amount has changed since I last wrote, more than a dozen quests added, a number of monsters and prizes. Happily some old faces are still around.

Despite the popularity of the Ranger class I've stuck with warrior all the way through. I've chosen the Tank/Poison route. I haven't been poisoned by a scorpion, spider, snake, poison skull or any other monster in a very long time. It might surprise some to know that I also have the speed skill maxed but not focused. Speed is a cool skill to have, but it takes away some of the extra resistance to poison focusing on poison offers.

Zombies, I can handle a couple at a time, but getting mobbed by 3 skeletons and 2 zombies is usually a problem unless I've got a fair amount of healing. A couple of times I've been stuck in this scenario because a player purposefully draws a mob my way, talking to you axel14. Inevitably I kill all the monsters, but it's not cool. I understand when people need help, but there's a difference between the pattern of someone who needs help and someone just trying to draw a mob.

One of the things that I really like is the addition of snails. Snails are easy to kill and offer a lot of healing items. It's been a great benefit not buying water/beer - though I still buy from time to time.

The graveyard still seems to be the best place to train for experience. From time to time I get the itch to take down a yeti. On their own they're simple, but in groups of 2 they still hurt like the dickens.

That's it for today... bugged by lag, hope its resolved soon. I thought it could be on my end, but we don't have torrents running and tomato (firmware) shows things good on our side. Wondering if the main server is being lagged out due to some unannounced stuff at the ISP.