Why did the cursed toys dissappear from my pet?

They disappeared from everyone and everything. At least, that's my understanding.

My poor pet

I don't mean to sound venomous, but I feel like this whole event was really stupid. People dropped a lot of their character's gold on those items thinking it was another in a very long line of mini-sale events the IRE games have been having, wanting to get the neat collectibles for their character. And it's not like the toys were incredibly useful, they just output a line of text.

And then it's like, "Oh, you thought it was too good to be true that we'd be giving any sort of item away for less than several credits? We'll, you're right!" *makes all of them disappear*

I don't know, it was a neat concept having mean toys come alive, but the whole thing didn't really set well with me. It seems deceitful to your customers and players. Maybe there are still plans down the road for this event, though, and all the toys will magically reappear to anyone who bought them. But I doubt it.

I seem to be the only one that's really upset about it though, so maybe it's just me.

It's just you, it was a cool event. If you feel robbed then head to the facility and beg all the gnomes until you get your money back.

I thought it was awesome. I had no need for the toys, and therefore didn't participate in the stupidity of setting up an alias/trigger to buy out the gnome woman and drop a bunch of gold simply because I HAD to have absolutely EVERYTHING new. The only way you would have actually lost something is if you went and bought credits with real money and sold them for gold to buy toys, in which case, you might need to reflect on your attachment to the game.

Plus, the toy shouts were just too cute to be mad at.

Lol. One time, I traded my HR for an SoJ and the SoJ poofed, so I complained to Blizzard.

Ahem, anyway. The gold belongs to IRE, why are you complaining about them merely redistributing their own gold?

I'm sure this event will turn interesting, just as soon as the Demigods finish getting all their dingbats from mass slaying toys.

Nah, I don't care much about the gold, I only bought 1 set of toys plus a couple more. I actually called out on CT any time the gnome was there after I got mine. It's more the principle of the matter rubbed me the wrong way, that we were tricked based on the fact that we would expect these things to be very overpriced normally. I actually probably won't buy credits after this, just because I think it's a fitting counter-trick.

But I'm glad everyone else had fun and enjoyed it, I can't really argue with success.

Wait, you get dingbats for slaying toys? When did this start? O_o (curse work and its eating of my time)

Probably a not-so-simple question: When will this end? I'll be really sad if I don't see any of the action

Dingbats???

Yes, you turn the corpses in to Girda in the aetherplex's portal, she pays a dingbat per toy.

I have missed almost this entire event because of work being particularly busy and a few too many social commitments, so I don't really know what on earth is going on.

That said, your decision to have your character buy toys was an in character and thus a roleplay one. I can accept that many players will have bought them because they wanted a neat collectable, but I find it hard to sympathise too much with this because (1) such things are available in the dingbat sales and (2) it smacks of metagaming. For whatever reason of plot, the toys are now gone. You now roleplay accordingly. This situation needs to be distinguished from one where the administration in their administrative capacity offer one off items and then retract them.

Nor do I buy the argument that people dropped a lot of gold. The toys were inexpensive and the people who got burned by buying in bulk were taking a risk in order to turn a profit. Gold is particularly easy to acquire in Lusternia - the purchase of a full set of toys hardly represents a great time investment.

This event might well have been really stupid. I haven't been here to watch and see. But I don't agree that it was really stupid for the reasons you have given.

To put my two pennies in here with Fain, as someone who has been watching the Event at least nominally, that was most definitely not the intention. The intention was to have a fun, cute little event - while I do think people should have went, 'Hmm, 1k gold for what normally runs around 15 dingbats....' and would have from that alone been suspicious, the cost of a full set (six) was 6,000 gold at it's peak (600 gold at its cheapest). This is only 1,000 gold more than one gets as a reward from doing the Stewartsville or Shanthmark or Paavik Quest - and 4,000 gold less than raising Marani. It is, at its least, about five minutes of work, at its most about an hour.

As Fain said, the only people who suffered were the ones who bought tens of tens and even (and, I'm not kidding) hundreds of the things. Now, the event isn't over, more is coming, the toys have not as of yet quit raiding and Girda has not as of yet quit giving out Dingbats for their corpses. I suspect the average player who would spend 6k gold on one each of the dolls will probably manage at least one if not two corpses - at its worst that's one dingbat, the going rate seems to be between two and three credits per dingbat, but at one credit per dingbat, at the current market value, 6,800 gold. That's an eight hundred gold profit - on one corpse if you bought all six. There was really no need to buy more than that (unless you were giving them to friends, but then it was a gift and therefore was of sustainable value to you - you gave it to be nice), and the people who bought tons were, to be blunt, a bit greedy, when it was very apparent there was a limited supply.

I'm a little upset, really, that you think we're just in it for the money - there's only what, three paid members on the staff. Two of them are coders and probably don't pay much attention to events, and the other is our delicious Creatrix. Now, throwing everything I know about Estarra and everything that the years I've known her has taught me about her out the window and pretending she was honestly just here for the money, I'm a bit bothered by the insinuation that administrators like Fain, myself, Lisaera, Maylea, Terentia, Raezon, Nocht, and Viravain (plus all of our ephies!) are sitting up in Havens plotting on how we can best 'screw over' the players, or that we're so vindictive that we're going to plan events to make you spend hundreds of thousands of sovereigns on the same damn six toys so we can take them away to, because this certainly would make me want to, buy credits for the dingbat bonus (which isn't even running right now!).

In all honesty, we know some of the events lately have been a bit rough, so I believe the intention was to have something fun for everyone (players and administrators) that wasn't ludicrously world threatening (even though I do love a good Kethuru event) or again lead to the shifting player politics of alliances and factions wherein everyone received a choice and we were left to take the blame. Hell, we're giving out dingbats as a reward for killing the suckers. Really, I mean, what more do you want here? :\\ Start handing out artifacts? Wait, that's still like five months away. Come on guys, we aren't some evil vile corporation, Lusternia and your credits aren't paying my rent or putting food on my table. Really, if it didn't threaten the survival of Lusternia, I could care less about credit purchases - I got by just fine with a few meager purchases.

And personally, I'm so worn out on the 'favours demigods' complaints about killing stuff for rewards - yes, I know, we all do. And if we made it influencing it'd favour them to. What do you want, evil puzzles that invade the world and use a stupifier ray to turn denizens into zombies and you need to perform sudoku 1,000x to defeat them?

Hmm, that sounds kind of interesting, actually... Hey, Estarrraaaa....

Post script: Crikeys, I'm verbose, aren't I? Sorry, didn't mean to hit that length!

I couldn't agree more. Raiding toys makes for a fun event, and it's a welcome distraction from some of the other things going on lately.

Now that's something. Also, I only spent beyond 6k to give a few toys to a few friends.

While I'm not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing that this is a good or bad event (I haven't participated so I have no idea either way) whenever it does involve killing things for any award it does seem to favour demigods because of the critical hits they can get against whatever they're fighting seem to grossly outweigh what any non-demigod can get. Admittedly I don't have numbers or any way of seeing this as true or not but from just hunting with demigods on non-event hunts it seemed like I would get 1 or 2 critical hits to their 5 or 6. More critical hits, more likeliness to kill things and thus the reward for killing quests favours the demigods.

On the influencing it would still favour them, yes, but not as much as the killing ones seem to as you can't get criticals in influencing and most of the buffs to influencing are easily attainable (albeit hunting buffs are easily attainable as well) but then the stat gaps come into play where Demigods can reach well beyond what people who are not demigods can reach. I'm not really sure if any of this made sense so feel free to disregard and I'm not to trying to sound like I'm complaining - I guess you could call this my two-cents.

EDIT: Come to think of it... killing events don't favour demigods they favour critical hits. Hmmm.

How about some toy raids during peak hours?

Okay. Here's the thing. What are demigods generally? Answer: People who have been playing Lusternia for a fair amount of time. Yes, there are exceptions, and yes, there are people who started their characters when the Basin was just a twinkle in Estarra's eye and are still not demi, but I think that overall demigod == a fair amount of time invested. (Also note that if you were ascended by your respective organization, you still probably invested a lot of time into the manner in which you got it by building a reputation, maneuvering, swindling, ect.)

So I ask - why shouldn't players who've invested more time have an easier time getting rewards? You run more, you get faster. You never run, you get passed by everyone as you wheeze and hack. If you bash all the time, you should be proficient at bashing - or at least to a high enough level to have the health buffer to keep you afloat. You don't bash a lot, you shouldn't expect an easy time of it.

Influencing is going to favour people who've trans'd Influencing and Dramatics, and/or have the appropriate runes/mount skills - these again are generally people who've been around for some time.

Knowledge based quizzes are again going to favour people who've been around Lusternia for ages.

Does it create an imbalance for who wins stuff? Yeah. But I can't really think of an event that could balance out the difference between lots of experience/tons of skills/arties and someone who's not been around for some time/not of a high level/no arties/little skills except the non-event of a random lottery.

Perhaps for other rewards the challenge could be less, but dingbats are freakin' valuable. There's my two and one half cents.

Like I said, it wasn't the amount of gold that I spent, or that anyone else spent, that annoyed me. I didn't spend more than I what I could get back in a few hours of bashing. Nor is it the idea or the quality of the event - I think I said that the idea of mean toys coming alive was an interesting one. No, the reason it annoys me is that I feel like I was essentially tricked into buying them, thinking I was getting something that was rare and novel. As you said, gold is easy to come by. The dingbat ones you mention are much more expensive, so I can imagine that any players who don't have a lot of money to spend on those dingbats were quite elated whenever they thought they were getting a little artifact that they wouldn't normally be able to get. And it bothers me that they were taken away and essentially told, "haha, you wish."

I could probably get those dingbat artifacts if I wanted, so I'm not even including myself in that group. But just knowing that there are probably a few players out there who did feel that way does annoy me.



Well, I didn't. Perhaps that was stupid on my part and on the part of everyone else who bought them, but in essence this is the reason the event annoyed me. Again, not because of the amount of gold involved or because of the quality of the idea.



I know you aren't, I realize that the vast majority of the admin don't get paid. I said I won't buy credits because I imagine the event creator being like, "hehe, I tricked you out of 10,000 gold", and my retort being, "well, here's a better trick."

But like I said, there's not a lot of point to this argument since it seems like the vast majority of the player base did enjoy it and don't think of it the same way I did.

I almost can't believe you think that. That is the most ridiculous conclusion I've ever heard. It also stinks of getting mugged and deciding to shoot a passerby in revenge because he didn't help you. Likely the event creator wasn't/isn't a paid member of staff.