Thanks guys for another wonderful festival! If I may, a little critique on what I liked/didn't like?
First, the new pet, the Aeridini, is my personal new favorite of all the pets! I really love my griifis too, obviously since my stable is overflowing with them, but i have a feeling the griffs are going to have to share space with the aeris now, lol. In particular I really, really like the two catchable named varieties, both the Tiger Lily and the Spotted Woodpeckers, which I was able to get both of this time. Yay! I don't know if my luck was better this time around or not, but I was really disapointed in the St Patricks day mini festival not to have gotten ANY lucky tagged pets, so this was sooo much better for me.
The zone was as usual fun to hunt in, and I spent wayyyy too much time I shouldn't have looking for the aeris, lol. The one thing I found disappointing was not having crates/chests/nests spawn in the regular part of the zone till late in the festival, and even then there weren't that many of them. I like having those around, cause it gives my otherwise rather mindless rambling a focus, something to go for instead of aimlessly rambling around in circles. Otherwise, I liked the simple map this time. Sometimes the complex mazes are cool too, but we had enough of that with the egg hunt. I still didn't find nearly as many tagged pets of all the different kinds as I did in the Winter Festival (the first one I actively participated in), so that was kind of disappointing, but at least those I did find tended to be worth more. I still keep wishing you would add in tagged COMMON, no carry pets, that would spawn more often. I wouldn't catch many of them, if any, but at least we would get to see them and enjoy all your hard work in creating them more often. Oh, and I must say? The Lady Bug Lunemara is one of my all time favorite Tagged Pets of any species! I so want one with the Ladybug Wings mutation, lol.
The Egg Hunt was one of those things I loved to hate... quite honestly, if it weren't for the nests spawning in it, I might seriously have done it the first time (when I could actually get the 20 eggs) and not again once you changed it to make it more "challenging". Meh. Can I just say how much I hate playing a game when I feel it is rigged for failure? Which is exactly how I felt when I realized that I can either go for the eggs and MAYBE get all twenty, or go for the chests, golden eggs and rare nests, and pretty much never get the twenty eggs. So, I went for the chests (which mostly weren't worth the bother, unless they happened to drop a Wheel ticket) and the all too rare nests. Thank god for these nests... almost all of my tagged pets came from the nests, including my first TL Aeri and one of my SW aeri as well. I do wish the spawn rate for the nests was higher (in both the egg hunt and in the regular part of the zone), but that's me being greedy, lol. But if you decide to do the "challenge" thing again, add in some kind of function or something where if you don't "win" every so often, the game makes it easier for you or something, 'cause it was really frustrating to realize I COULDN'T win, and never really came all that close after the first time. I think the closest I ever came was 2 eggs left... I know others were getting all twenty, but I have no idea how they managed it.
The avatar item drops were really nice this time, especially the "tree" outfits, which immediately as soon as I got them, were applied to my avatar, thanks! Love them! They go nicely with the theme too, which is great. Your artists did their usual excellent job with all of them. Can I just say though, that it is really annoying to go through all the trouble to fight them, and have only the default armor drop, and that not even legendary? Toward the end there, I think I got ONE wheel ticket to drop the last day I was roaming the zone. Out of about a dozen fights with the four Nameds, with NO avatar items dropping either. Got to the point where I was wondering why bother fighting them. The armor isn't worth that much time, especially since the market was flooded with it at that point so no one was buying the purple ones any way. Thank you for making it the bracelets though, it was great to get a few level 60 orange bracelets to use! I don't do the dungeons hardly ever, so this was a nice bonus for me.
Then there is the wheel... believe me, I really appreciate that the wheel now includes two slots where you MIGHT get a wheel pet as a prize... I just wish they dropped more often. I know it makes sense to have them really rare so they are worth more, and this time I finally got one! And its an aeri! But really? I used around 75 tickets I picked up from the zone and from the golden eggs in the egg hunt, and got one pet, one magical pie, a handful of traps (thank you thank you thank you for adding the master traps here!) and a ton of filters (some of which were going for less than 100 gold on the market at the time) and pet dyes. The dyes are nice, and the filters even I wouldn't mind if they weren't pretty much 90% of the drops. Oh I got a few traps too, but not a single master trap, which i was really looking forward to... I guess my gripe is just about the scale of how rare the rare stuff is. I know it can't be common, and shouldn't be... but it shouldn't be SOOOO rare that I've only gotten ONE wheel pet in three festivals. I keep wondering how many wheel tickets some of these people are using that are getting multiple wheel pets each festival. Or maybe they just have some kind of enhanced luck somehow? Whatever, it's frustrating to spin and spin and get nothing much worth dealing with from the wheel almost every time. BTW, I know others complained about getting so many mutators, but I LIKED that, since we can use them on the festival pets we want to use for projects and such, so I personally miss that. Seemed nice to me. I love having the traps on the wheel for the same reason, especially the master traps. It allows people like me that can't afford to buy with RL money some of this stuff, which in turn makes the rare chance of finding a legendary pet in the zone exciting, since there is at least a hope you can get a master trap to catch it. The first legendary pet I met in the zone in the Winter fest I had to kill, because I didn't have a master trap to catch it with.
And can I say? I kind of miss the door to door thing... it was too time consuming in some ways, but I liked that it got you to interact with the other users and see their avatars. Maybe it's not such a great fit for this particular festival, but I hope you will bring trick or treating and caroling back to their respective festivals. And maybe passing valentines at the V-day fest? lol...
Anyway, overall, I really enjoyed the festival, as I always do. Some of the above may sound like a greedy gripe fest, lol, just my two cents on what I liked and didn't, for what it was worth. Keep up the good work! It's stuff like this that keeps me playing. I really am looking forward to the Summer Festival now, to see what you add for that! And of course a chance at catching my own Lighiri ;) |
