The live events just keep coming... Bristlebane Day is now active on Test and Beta servers! Jesters, thieves, bards and fans of mischief, alike, are encouraged to enjoy the Bristlebane Day festivities! You never know what laughs and pranks await you during these holy days honoring Fizzlethorpe Bristlebane, The Grand Prankster. Princess Evelynn has a lofty challenge awaiting those with an appetite for fun in Sinking Sands, while other celebrators can be found in the Enchanted Lands, and every city. The oddest of objects have been spotted in Antonica, The Commonlands, Darklight Wood, Timorous Deep, Greater Faydark and Frostfang Sea. Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for special events, especially in Enchanted Lands, occurring only on the highest of silly days, 4/1/2013! New features for '13! New contest - "Bristlebane Bounce: Sinking Sands". New holiday achievements A Plethora of Pranks Conniving Confections You Jelly? Snack Attack New Tradeskill recipe book, “Perfectly Serious Items to Craft IV" sold by “a Bristlebane Day merchant” in city tradeskill houses. The recipes require holiday harvestables gathered from "Jester's gardens" and other low level harvestables as components.. Returning features: In-game mail to announce the event and summarize location of quest givers. Impossibly Rare Objects holiday collection found within Antonica, Commonlands, Darklight Wood, Timorous Deep, Greater Faydark and Frostfang Sea. Jester's garden can only be found within Antonica, Commonlands, Darklight Wood, Timorous Deep, Greater Faydark and Frostfang Sea. Previous craftable recipe books sold by “a Bristlebane Day merchant” in city tradeskill houses. Perfectly Serious Items to Craft Perfectly Serious Items to Craft II Perfectly Serious Items to Craft III "Gigglegibber Scavenger Hunt" - Repeatable, once per year The Bristlebane Quest Outline started by Blat Berisen - NOT repeatable "Ratical” - Repeatable, once per year Added “Merrymaker Trout" reward choice. “Gnary a Joke to Tell” and silly Bristlebane Day themed dungeon - Repeatable, once per year Added Petamorph Wand: Living Crate" reward choice. "Bristlebane Day Snack Snatcher: Enchanted Lands" - Repeatable Added “Bristlebane Day Madcap" reward choice to top reward choices. Updated contest score board to show the top 10 scoring characters, and their top score. It will no longer list the same person more than once on the board. This event content is currently set to run 03/29/2013 at 12:01 AM PAC time until 04/11/2013 at 11:59 PM PAC time on the live servers, with special hijinks and quests available on 4/1 only. Please post any feedback and bugs that you encounter with this event in this thread. Thank you! ~Kaitheel
Some specific things to note: 1) The "Bristlebane's Celebrative Courier Mask" and "Merrymakers Mask" currently, do not have art. This is a known issue, but it will be resolved by the time this event is activated on live servers. 2) I have not activated the 4/1 specific content, yet. That will be activated a bit later. For now I just wanted the base event tested. 3) Have fun with the bounce contest in Sinking Sands it is different functionality and we want to make sure it works well, and is intuitive. 4) The jester's Gardens have a chance of spawning on top of the Brewday bushes, but that won't happen on live, as the events will not both be active at the same time. Thank you! ~Kaitheel
Hello, Kaitheel! Thanks for activating this on Test - made me a very happy halfling! A bit of feedback. Okay, a lot of feedback. The race is fantastic, and I love seeing a different mechanic than the usual "run into X objects in an open field". It's a ton of fun, and more importantly, I found myself going back and wanting to improve my score. The choice of reward (I only got as high as 60 points, though, so there may be some I haven't seen yet) is great - I know the same people who will love the race will also go back to collect all those rewards, as well. Now, off to actually test the quests!
The race in Sinking Sands bouncing around is delightful! Lots of fun and brings back memories of the "bouncy room" in KoS. I will never get the achievement but, I am not your demographic so no worries
The "Folly of Mask" only has an appearance when you first equip it. Once you zone it disappears, even after un- and re-equipping, and camping and coming back. Either it's bugged, or yep, that was Folly! Pretty orange mask. The description had me hoping it had a goofy effect!
I ran the Bristlebane Bounce 9 times (well 10, but one time I purposefully got a low score to see what the lowest rewards were). Obviously by the end of this I'd like to think I quite had the hang of the contest. I'm not going to say that 100 points is not feasible, especially since one person had the unlikely luck of hitting 129, but at this point it seems excessively difficult to achieve. My own high score was 99 and I almost wept because it was hard as heck to get and still not enough. Firstly, the enormous prize level is at, at the least, 76 points. It may be a bit lower than that, but I can't confirm otherwise (my next lowest was 53 and that was a huge prize--edit: just realized I got 68 once, no idea which prize type I got that run though). That means the achievement level is at least 25 points above what is set for the rock bottom of enormous, possibly higher if I'm wrong about 76 being the starting point. So far nine people have done the bounce on Test, with high scores of: 1. Edaak 129 2. Cyliena 99 3. Fallyn 88 4. Finthistle 82 5. Jerren 76 6. Lizabethan 65 7. Remik 44 8. Hopitor 42 9. Cloudrat 23 I know it's only been a few hours, but my recommendation when setting this achievement would be for you to keep an eye on that leaderboard, OR have a "testing event bounce party!" and grab a decent upper-average of scores that exceed the minimum score for enormous prizes. I agree it should be a challenge, but as I said with Brewday, this is pure fluff and should not be impossible/frustrating/not fun. Maybe you'll find out in the long run that 100 is still good. I have a sneaking suspicion that 90 would be better. The title was cute, was a bit disappointed to not get a second one at 10 runs. I'm personally not a fan of the appearance set but I'm sure others will be. I have no opinion on the masks since, as you mentioned, they're not functioning yet. As for the race itself, once you put the frustration of not hitting the achievement, it was a lot of fun. I found that trying to aim for the higher bounce platforms and gold baubles usually netted me a lower score than just running around and bouncing randomly about. Sometimes the fish platforms would bounce me sideways which was annoying. Other times I would get bounced so high that I would sail over tons of things and not hit a single bauble because my aim would be thrown completely off. I did take two videos, one of my first run and one of my tenth run, which I will upload tonight and link once they are done uploading so you can see how a player is running it. edit: Oops, forgot to mention my own scores... in order, I got: 1. 81 (one other person) 2. 53 (one other person) 3. 21 (this was a purposeful bad run and shouldn't count) 4. 99 (two other people) 5. 68 (one other person) 6. 77 (one other person) 7. 77 (only me) 8. 83 (one other person) 9. 76 (only me) 10. 91 (one other person)
Videos, as promised. First time doing the Bristlebane Bounce (81 points) Tenth time doing the Bristlebane Bounce (91 points) - I was wearing the outfit (sans cap) you get from the Bounce quests in this one, if anyone is curious about it, though you only see my backside, sorry.
Bristlebane Bounce results, from Beta server. I ran 10 trials, in the zone all by my lonesome: 40 47 39 55 74 56 49 84 61 52 I'm not sure I'm going to get much better at that, but at least I got my matching hat. I did the best with my UI off and in a deep 3rd person POV. It's FUN, but very challenging.
Holiday corner in HoT guildhall in Gorowyn is up for Bristlebane. Quest and race rewards aren' t in yet, but crafting ones are and stuff you can buy from the merchant. Love these cordons too!! Hoping someone will be able to get the outfit from the bouncing race to dress the mannequin lol
Make sure Cy has access to place in guild hall and I'll decorate a mannequin with it, Cloud. I have all the items from the bounce event.
Top score on test is still 129, only score above 100 and lowest is 64. I managed to do a 70 on my best run, it's highly challenged. I'm not sure that in the current state the achievement can be done by more than some extra lucky and very good at it players. The enormous prize seems to be at 70 (got no score between 64 and 70), so pretty hard to get. Might want to put a 1c price on the armour though, we get a bit too much of them in the end. There's one thing I find frustrating: when reaching the floating level of fish, I very often get bounced sideways due to my arriving at a low angle, which prevents me from bouncing upwards. The rare times were I actually bounce upwards and reach the yellow level, there's nearly never a yellow light in the vicinity which is doubly frustrating! Yeah, I'm not good at it, but could you perhaps add a bit more yellow lights so we have more chances at actually hitting one and so higher average scores?
Bristlebane day house items are in my usual house, Qeynos Opera house under Leucosia, "Live Event - Bristlebane day 2013" under medium house (or hall of fame in 30 hours or so).
ok, after seeing the video above, I asked hubby to patch Test on his computer and I'll give it a shot when I can. Extreme perf/high particles usually works on my lower spec (well, not so lower, GeForce 9800 GTX, dual core, on XP, so old but "should pass") but I sure don't have kind of fluency close to what Cyliena has. btw, VERY VERY good idea to put the particles explanation on the blue window.
Today I tried the bounce again... by the way, only one more person has managed to hit 100 since yesterday, so that makes two whopping people now). I discovered that run speed buffs will affect how fast you move.. why are people still not zeroed out for these contests so there's an even playing field and testing sample? Anyway, I claimed and used my Ring of Swift Travel, and that combined with.. something else I had.. put me at 95%. I definitely noticed a HUGE difference in the air--when I could aim well, I was able to get multiple higher baubles per bounce because I traveled faster and further. However, I was also at a disadvantage because the bounce platforms would not bounce me at least a quarter of the time.. I was literally running straight through them with nothing happening. People need to be capped at a certain run speed. Obviously 95% was enough to "break" the course. Give everyone a buff with 150% then cap movement during the course at 50% or something. Another bug: I was able to remove the Fleet Feet buff while waiting for the countdown. I couldn't see any of the bouncers then. Deleting the quest and regetting it worked fine, but maybe you shouldn't be able to cancel that buff if you have the quest. I took a video of one of my 95% run speed runthroughs, will post it here when it is uploaded. I still haven't hit 100 by the way and am now officially giving up on that pipe dream, considering that I have two full armor/mask sets that I am not interested in in the least. Cloudrat: dumping one of the armor sets in HoT guild bank, enjoy. (They're in bank 3, three rows up from bottom and the two masks with current broken appearances are below the cap)
If you speak to the various NPCs involved in Tin Metal Protection (Barb Islenet, Abner Siblet, etc) even after completing the quest, they're kind enough to give you their quest items (Pretty Pink Goggles, Thundermist Merlot, etc) again. It obviously doesn't hurt anything but feels a bit broken. Now what would be cool would be if they gave you house item versions of their items if you happened to go back to them once more... that's be a fun little hidden bit. Maybe an idea for next year? I know we get the cards at the end of Tin Metal Protection but a second set would be nice, too.
Made a quick try on hubby computer and did 66 (which is way better than my average 45-54). He tried twice, one at 55 and one at 66 too. Computer definitely makes things easier. (going from XP/dual core/GeForce 9800 GTX with slightly frying graphic card to a 7/quad core/GeForce 560 GTX+) The 66 awarded the 2 masks, so enormous price probably starts at 65 or 66, good news. Hubby thinks that the flying fish should have a more reliable hitbox, you often only graze them and they disappear without bouncing you upward, or you even make them disappear when flying just under them.
Oops, almost forgot to post the video I took! Around 20-30 seconds in it starts to become minorly noticeable.. I think it's around 1 min 40 secs in that it becomes a lot more noticeable. This was at 95% run speed.
It *seems* easier to pull the bounce race achievement of with a large race than with a small, which makes some sad sense (in the same way that being larger, with a wide appearance mount such as a gryphon makes the other event races easier as you cover more surface area, so can be sloppier at aiming for stuff). My ogress, with her racial enlarge ability, Commanding Presence, up is the first/only one of my folks to earn the bounce race achievement.
Niggly: You cannot see the entire (crafted) Brilliant Bristlebanesque Banner in preview mode, even if you zoom all the way out. (Usually you can kludge it with streamers, but this one you can't.)
