Okay, this is my first post here, but instead of having a long winded introduction to myself, I'm just going to get straight into things. I want to talk about one particular website's Christmas/Winter event, and this website is Solia Online.
Solia is an avatar forum website in a similar vein to GaiaOnline that hasn't been around that long, but it already has a dedicated fanbase, due to it bribing members of another, now defunct, website into joining with the promise of items and gold being transfered, all packaged as an update. But that's another story, for another post, for another day. I want to talk about their winter event.
Instead of having a "traditional" Christmas event, Solia's decided to do something different. They decided to have something called "Nightmare After Christmas", where members of the site are divided into three different factions- humans, zombies and ghouls- and fight to the death. When you reach a certain number of kills, you can get an event item. There's only one problem with this idea though (aside from the near-plagarism of the name)- it's a shitload of fuck.
The problems arise right from your joining. You can't choose which faction you join. It's totally random, so from the word 'go' there's been an imbalance between the factions, as it seems that zombies are the most common race. This makes it harder for humans and ghouls to gain kills and get the items. And while we're on the subject of the items, each faction has it's own item set, so you have to do three times the work to get all the items. But it's hard enough to get enough kills for a single item as you can sit there, chipping away at one person's health only for someone else to jump in and get the killing blow. Add that you've got a stamina bar that limits the number of times you can attack that only fills up by posting, but that feature doesn't seem to work. A number of people have complained that the stamina bar hasn't been refilling at all, which is something that should have been ironed out in the beta stage. It's bullshit of the highest degree. People have also found that their kills haven't been registering- again, it should have been ironed out in beta.
So, what happens when you die? Well, that's easy, you go to the hospital, pay 45 gold and get your health back. It doesn't seem that bad, does it? Well, as you can only earn a maximum of 40 gold per post, you have to make at least two posts to earn the gold you need to heal yourself. But that means that there's two chances for people to attack you, so you can find yourself getting killed as soon as you get healed. Which obviously means you need to make two more posts to earn the gold, making four chances to get yourself killed. It's a vicious cycle, but as posting is the only way to earn gold, you can't really complain about it. Unless you've got a load of unwanted items and you're willing to sell them back to the store, then you may be able to get the gold you need. But why should you drain your inventory just to take part in an event? It's crazy bullshit.
So if you don't like the sound of that you can always opt out. But if you do that your avatar doesn't change back to it's pre-event human form, as you would expect. I managed to change myself back to my human form as I didn't want any part of that fuckshit, but I can't remember how, so I can't advise others on how to do so. In fact, the feature to be able to change back wasn't added until a number of hours after the event was started. Also, once you opt out, you can't join back in. That's right, once you click the link saying "I don't want to fight" that's it, game over. You can't join in later even if you wanted to, or if you somehow click the link by accident, you're fucked.
But going back to the initial problem of not being able to choose your faction, at least the admin team added the feature to change your faction. But not until twenty four hours after the start of the event. You read that right, they're adding things as they go along. They released an unfinished event, that had no testing (or so it seems) and told people that it was the real deal. What kind of bullshit is that? You wouldn't expect a car company to sell an unfinished car that had no safety tests, so why should this be the same? It's laziness, plain and simple. Solia's team wanted an event, so they quickly lashed something together and quickly put it on the server and allowed people to access it. But then, as I stated at the start of my post, they literally bribed people into joining, so I'm not really surprised.
So, at the end of the day, we're being issued with an unfinished, untested event, which has actually been badly thought out. The battle system has been made so that it's totally imbalanced, but despite the number of complaints and glitch reports, nothing has been done. And when people say how unhappy their are, the mods lock the topic, so no-one else can add to it. The moderators are gagging people if they don't agree with what the Solia team wants people to think, and they want people to think that this is a great event, when it isn't. But if you surround yourself with "yes" men, you turn to crap. It's happened to GaiaOnline already, it's starting to happen to Roliana, and it's only a matter of time before it happens to Solia Online.
Xean, signing out.
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