Patch 11.15 Strangers Festival Has Begun!

Today at 12 (Noon) CST we will release patch 11.15 with the start of the Strangers Festival, you will find new monsters, quests, critter capture mission, as well as textures, trees, and more changed. We are also happy to announce that you can now place mounts and ingredients into your Player House customization chests to allow players to display their mounts as well as additional storage.

Patch is now live!

  • Strangers Festival start on Dec 5th and running through January 7th 2020
    • Updated terrain textures throughout Higshteppe, Greater Highsteppe area, Lamavora Battlefields, Hulthine’s Basin and Wastelands
    • New Water Texture for zones for winter theme
    • New Tree and Bush models for Winter Theme
    • Added 2 new “Stranger” (Yeti) Monsters to zones
    • Added new “Heart of Strangers” monster
    • Added new “Minion” Snowmen wildlife
    • Added new “Minion” critter capture creatures
    • Added Festival questline and festival critter capture mission
    • Added new Snowman Transmog armor
    • Added new Snowman pet reward
    • Added new cape for Festival questline
    • Added new festival achievements
    • Updated Player House with new textures and props
    • Added new “Snowman” tinkerer blueprint and house furniture item
    • Added new common Winter themed items to “Furniture Vendor”
  • Added additional achievements for building tinkerer items
  • Fixed bug that showed blueprints and tinkerer materials as sell-able to apprentice smith
  • Potential fix for Paladin Unbending implemented
  • Potential fix for bug that caused multiple potions to appear on Player Market stalls when items where purchased
  • Updated the Mission vendors
    • We are now showing 3 levels above your current level so you can see what missions you have coming up in the future, the missions above your current level will be grayed out and will show what level needed with tool tip
  • Updated Ravens View Camera to show Runesmith runes above your own head
  • Updated Ravens View Camera to allow players with PVP on to use camera inside their player house
  • Updated Ravens View Camera to show Customization Furniture inside player house
  • Attempted fix for dungeon bosses not resetting properly between deaths, should now always reset to first attack even after players die and reset boss
  • Fixed a bug with Auction house where you couldn’t buy out if the bid and buyout price was the same on an item
  • Updated Player House Customization chest to accept ingredients and Mounts (Tinkerer Ingredients are excluded from this)
    • You can now place ingredients (lure crafting, alchemy, runesmith) along with mounts into the Player House Customization chests to display and decorate with these items as well as use these chests for additional storage of these items
  • Added an additional check to prevent Player House customization furniture from being moved between rooms
  • Added a potential fix for Player House customization chests resetting position of furniture after it has been placed in the crafting room (first room you enter into your house)
  • Added a potential fix for mouths on other players cycling through all animations once players start speaking
6 Likes

and about the shard 14-15 weight?

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Oh that should be in there too, I believe.

2 Likes

Update should be live now!

I really like how Wastelands looks now, nice!
Also the winter areas are neat and that we don’t need to capture 500 critters again… looking for the minions I postponed with them currently being so overfarmed. Likely all will be done soon with it, but I like if events don’t take away too much time from dungeons etc.

As for this, likely no use for me since it would lock my house again, lol… however I dunno if devs realize lack of storage space is actually critical since weeks, for some. I regret buying all the shop stuff, seriously and stopped many activities like dragon breeding or farming. Deleted things from the old game I really, really wanted to keep :frowning: . Deleting low shards, constantly, barely keeping anything. However, lots of higher shards are adding up we can’t do (yet), around 1.5 tabs are filled with them. Which is completing the nightmare, plus the inability to sort these by color or anything.
All my mounts I got on me, as other 0.1 and all 0 weight items so putting those elsewhere wouldn’t solve much anyway (though I still regret not being able to use that feature). My player inventory feels like dragging a warehouse with me, slowly.

How hard can it be adding 2 or 3 tabs, buyable or not, to the existing chest? This should’ve been done when all the reborn items, dyes (1 tab I got full with those, constantly trying to sell off rare singles, not even bothering to collect anymore) etc. were released, months ago. The class-related gear also stacks up, slowly. Leather, cloth, plate and merging phys and mag dmg was introduced so multi-class players are not constantly overencumbered. However at the end of day we need different runetiles on gear or want to have different affixes on some (xp!) or simply can’t even use raid gear on other classes, so whatever… I don’t know, there is no incentive to play anything anymore if all this is not solved anytime soon. I don’t come on to delete everything I get or to transfer things to my dummy with the help of friends, just to figure I need some things back on my main after all, which also is tedious since there’s no shared chest.

PS: I had the same issue in another game, No Man’s Sky btw, where farming and crafting was pointless due to lack of storage place. I only came back to that game cuz devs recently up’ed the storages greatly, by factor 10 or so, finally making crafting attractive or possible… Not sure why it’s always underestimated what problems lack of storage space could cause, least for collectors and completionist-style players and all who don’t just wanna “dump” things randomly in one chest, but sort it after categories, leave single spaces in between if possible etc.

1 Like

you try to fix this (a bug we like) but wont fix this

a game breaking bug.

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Having rare critters being bigger now is really handy. Thnx for this addition :+1:

I think the critter capture III achiement is missing btw for the snow festival. Even though another achiement relies on it.

Overal really like the things that were done for this festival. The things to do feel a bit less of a grind and more like exploring which makes it better.

Have to still check some of the missions, features and bugfixes out the next days but looks good so far. Def an improvment of the previous festival :ok_hand:

Thanks for the heads up!

We had another report of this and that’s actually a mistake in the description of the achievement. The actual requirements for that achievement are to complete the Winter Festival quests and the “A Special Snowflake” achievement. We’ll get that description updated as soon as we can.

Wastelands should stay like this forever. It looks so much better. It looked bland before with the color scheme.

4 Likes

Any reason that the crafted Snowman is not tradeable? Since I can’t place it anyway in my own house I was looking forward to open a Snowman-Shop :frowning: …

probably so you can’t sell snowman pets after the event is over or something

Well it’s not a pet, it’s a furniture, and it could be made un-sellable with the end of the event… but yea perhaps too much work since the AH also needed to be purged then.

And on 2nd thought, it would be a very nice reward for those playing the event, to be able to sell these things to those forthcoming players who missed it.

nice job on the event, made me miss the frosted spit a bit. This one is a great event with some interesting things to do, kind of grindy In some parts but fun and rewarding. the minions were a bit of a pain when trying to get the print out of them I got to around 76-77 before the print dropped but a nice animated decoration look cool. (though I think we need a decorations box to store un-used decorations or a craft-able chest to put items in to for after Christmas) the minions dropping snow is a fun thing as well. though it’s slightly odd that the snow man cant be sold/traded. But good job anyway on the event.

3 Likes

I also wanted to say I enjoyed the festival. I came in a day or two late so I did most of the quests solo meaning I wasn’t competing for rare spawns. The quest line was fun to do and the right amount of grind IMO. the search for the lights was fun for the most part, i would slowly end up getting frustrated on that 1 last light for each quest that i couldn’t find but just asked for help and got past it so that was cool.

The critter capture was enjoyable. 100 captures for achievement completion felt right and getting 25 rare ones for full completion felt wayyy better than capturing another 400 so really good job on that one.

The visuals are good too. my initial reaction was " I’m going to go blind " but I think the devs got the brightness of the snow at a good point. the wastelands feels more alive and interest too, I can’t even remember what it looked like before.

The transmogs and pet are neat. the snowman look is interesting as a set but slightly odd when worn individually (my mage is currently rocking snowman body with my dumb floating head on top rather than the snowman face). The spikey shoulders feel slightly odd and couple people seem to agree with that but I get it - what else can you really add for non-existent snowman shoulders?

p.s. the snowman pet is evil, listen to the evil cackle when you pet or feed it.

4 Likes

A change not mentioned in notes is that ALL rare critters got bigger models now. This is so much better than the “fast” ones where you had to riddle if there’s really a rare critter in a batch or not… all that is left now to wish for is a number of progress in achievements, as incentive to go for the rare achievements.

1 Like

I got 3 blueprints and I’ve killed maybe 60 snowmen.

They drop white accent dyes, which was nice, but being that they are the scarce mob to hunt down for the kill quest (you run around quite a bit finding them), this provides a lot of incentive for non-questing players to kill them. They also sometimes spawn behind obscured areas and stand still. So, it was double edged. Players trying to finish the quest relatively quickly, can’t because they have to run aimlessly hunting rarer snowmen which are being killed by everyone. However if you’re interested in farming dyes yourself, this is not really a problem since you plan to kill them anyways. The kill quest was significantly better than the Fall event because it wasn’t just killing 500-600 mobs(because of skewed spawning). The boss at the end, though it was just attackxN smash tremor smash attack (loop) was nice and required at least a tank or possibly a healer.

The little dwarf / snowmen models were nice and fairly unique. The other, larger mobs/boss were nice too. The large mobs looked different enough (positive) but they still had a semblance for a lot the mobs we see (negative).

Can’t complain about the snowman armor, it looks good as a snowman & is something I’d wear for the holidays maybe. The gloves resemble a lot the skeleton hands but the wrist is different and the branch is restricted to the brown color. I thought this was a pretty fair / good use of the skeleton hands.

Snowmen were not as painful to catch as the monkeys(who had weird running animations) I also lol’d when the first giant/rare snowman came out.

I can only assume that if there is a winter title, it has to do with catching 400 snowmen or 25 rare snowmen (or both) which (if true) is disappointing (as I have not unlocked it yet). Creature capture just isn’t that interesting, to me. It’s okay to do here and there but you find yourself wandering the map to look for little snowmen and very interestingly, catch snowmen over and over. Nothing fun happens in between here.

I’m also not that crazy about titles, they don’t look good with my name at all. I would have been more excited to receive like a special holiday creature-capture gun than a title for capturing so many snowmen.

Snowmen drop snowflakes which surprisingly wasn’t used for anything else besides quests, like for example, the snowman blueprint. Could have been tradable as well and transitioned the “collect snowflakes” pieces of the quest to simply killing the snowmen. Or get the snowflakes back from the next part of the quest.

The jungle npc has snow all around him, the rest of the jungle does not. The yellow snow mobs, the blue and not white snow, etc… I have suspicions as to how things came to be lol. I enjoyed the map changes but didn’t like very much how it looked, and sometimes how out of place ( like 1 spot the jungle ). It was weird. Several players also commented how they expected snow, not rain. Basically get points for doing the map change, but the execution was not super high grade. Making a big map change isn’t a quick job. Maybe next year? :stuck_out_tongue:

Getting holiday furniture was cool. I wish we had way, way more slots in the house. Also I wish we could put down craftable chests / other items (like weapon displays similar to the achievement items) which actually hold the item you put in them & stick together). Placing items right now is all based off your hands, there’s no like snap-movement or easy angle rotations. Items you’re grabbing maybe should be highlighted because when I put items near each other I find myself grabbing the wrong one and messing it all up.

I thought the wastelands looked a lot better but I couldn’t put my finger on as to why, and now I know.

Snowman cackle is l-o-l (good). I think various players would also appreciate that it’s only an epic pet, not legendary like the monkey was (who prob shoulda been epic).

Snowman shoulders look horrible without the body equipped.

Various typos / incorrect reward text vs. what you got actually. This isn’t major but proof-reading your quests/text/code might be a good practice. It just does’t reflect well to have a ton of typos. I even remember reading a reddit post some time ago where some guy encountered a ton of typos & some unrelated bug and he just thought Orbus was crazy bugged and quit immediately lol.

I liked the cape / holiday music. Find the lights quest was pretty alright. Turning all audio down aside from SFX made finding them pretty easy as you could hear them for large distances.

I think cool rewards might have been like a throwable snowball tool to hit other players, or snowball PvP matches / picking up items off the ground (snowballs). Snowglobe house deco / some kind of music player (or the snowglobe) to play the holiday jingles from the lights quest. Present boxes that you could combine with an item and give to other players (who, when break it, receive the item) - though more valued tradeables would make this actually viable. Maybe two types of boxes, one box that keeps the item hidden and the other keeps the item visible (like grinder reward chests that hold rarer items ). Personally I prefer rewards that have long-term usability [like, possibly the cape] as opposed to something like snowman armor which I’ll rarely use. The fall / skeleton hands are very long term usable and partially that is because the bone can be dyed (thus fitting many styles). House collection pieces are something long-term assuming they can fit in with a typical house environment or at least like a “rares” section of the house. Except that the house is just something only you can access, and nothing is very trade-able. If someone doesn’t want their snowglobe(for example) and someone wants to pay 100k dram for it, why prevent them from doing that? Let that man fill his house.

Overall: It was a good update. I’d consider it as a small-closer-to-medium update. I can see the models/map taking awhile. It’s hard to phrase. Essentially the content was the questlines & buying some house furniture, which you complete pretty quickly. This enriches the game. After that, what is leftover is hunting snowmen for their dyes (and possibly blueprint, if you didn’t get one). Arguably creature capture for a title ( but I see this actually as a negative ). You also get to experience the map for a while after, help other players with the final boss of the questline. These are all good additions.

Beyond that there is some limited continuity of experience. I’d say not force players to “you will do holiday stuff for weeks if you want all the rewards”, which you are doing just fine. But also there’s limited “holiday-event-mini-endgame” for players who want to continue juicing/experiencing the holiday event. Maybe this isn’t something you want. As I mentioned, for me it’s getting the dyes while I can. There’s a lot which could have been done here, like requiring some kind of holiday/tradeable ingredient for the holiday furniture (which would also be trade-able), ice-hole-fishing for special fish (maybe even a way to put them in an aquarium or a wall-mount-display), even cool weapon tramsmogs (a straight candy-cane wand) and other things I could list. I also think you (might) underestimate how cool tools can be. It’s kind of basically part of your transmog, so having more options would be nice. I’d even take tool-transmogs as a thing, for items which serve identical purposes.

Aurora Borealis looks sick irl/vr btw, just a last thought :stuck_out_tongue:

Either way I enjoyed the update! Simply throwing stuff out there.

2 Likes

ohh talking about snowman spawning in obscure areas I found 1 guy chilling on the side of the cliff.

He was just contemplating life so I kicked him down and stole his snowball for the quest :smiling_imp:

4 Likes

This is something they said is coming I believe

1 Like

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