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Release Notes 3/28/2024
kaiserin
Posts: 3,092 Cryptic Developer
Foxbatcon
For the next 2 weeks this event will be running.
Account Currency
Foxbatcon Store Cred
Fox Hunt Mission
The Real Foxbat Mission
Misc
Powers/Devices
Costumes
Currency
Trade Paperback
ZEN Store
The Swift Skater keypack will be available for the next 2 weeks.
For the next 2 weeks this event will be running.
Account Currency
- Added new account-wide versions of currency for this event.
- This currency accumulates on your account, and can be accessed by any character.
- You can view the currencies through your currencies tab in your inventory.
- Known Issue: Currently there is no chat notification when you obtain these new currencies, we expect to have this fixed by next week.
Foxbatcon Store Cred
- This currency drops from random enemies, mission rewards, and open mission rewards and can be used to purchase items in the store.
- There is currently no limit on the amount that can be earned per day on your account, but there is still a per-character limit on how many enemies can drop per day.
- Expires after 30 days.
Fox Hunt Mission
- Completing this mission will grant 1 Foxbatcon Premium Cred.
- You can obtain 1 of these tokens once every 20 hours (from mission completion) on your account.
- This currency is replacing the 'do 10' wrapper missions and expires after 30 days.
- Completing this mission multiple times on other characters before the 20 hour timer is up will grant standard rewards.
The Real Foxbat Mission
- Completing this mission will grant 1 Foxbatcon Sidekick Cred.
- You can obtain up to 3 of these tokens every 20 hours (from mission completion) on your account.
- This currency is replacing the 'do 10' wrapper missions and expires after 30 days.
- This mission will be available after completing the Fox Hunt mission.
Misc
- Added Foxbat Modern Tights to the event store. This item requires 10 Foxbatcon Premium Cred to purchase.
- Foxbat Stunt Double sidekick now requires 10 Foxbatcon Sidekick Cred to purchase.
- Foxbat Stunt Double sidekick purchased during this event are now bind to account on pickup. Existing versions will not be changed.
- Added new self-heal ability to Foxbat Stunt Double.
- Added Foxbat Zombie Mask and Plunger costumes to the event store.
- Moved Musical Auras from Drifter to the Foxbatcon store. Added color variations.
- Added Rabbit Ears and Inflatable Unicorn costumes to Emma's store.
- Added ??? to the ??? store.
- Added Rubber Duck, Scissors and Microphone Stand costumes as possible drops from Swag Bags.
- Updated materials and added a new pattern on the Microphone head.
- Added Drifter Salvage purchases for Foxbatcon Sidekick and Premium Cred. The cost of this purchase scales based on the number of Cred you currently have and will set the amount of currency to 10.
- Increased Foxbat Store Cred drop rate from enemies.
- Adjusted Gold costume prices to 500 (from 400).
- Adjusted Vehicle prices to 700 (from 750).
- Adjusted Bag price to 300 (from 600).
- Adjusted Archetype price to 700 (from 750).
- Adjusted Title price to 20 (from 50).
- On 4/1-4/2, starting and ending at 12am ST, and 4/5-4/8, starting and ending at 12am ST, the 'A Buggy Mess' open mission will be available.
Powers/Devices
- Fixed an issue with how Devoid was applying on the Therakiel Blade device.
- Fixed an issue where certain ranks of Sigils of the Storm was causing the Negative Ions applied to not count as the player's.
- Fixed an issue where some Ultimate devices were not placing certain Ultimate powers on cooldown when used.
Costumes
- Added Triangle pattern to short gloves.
- Added Line pattern to short tight boots.
Currency
- All last-year event currency has been expired.
Trade Paperback
- For the next 2 weeks this event will be running.
ZEN Store
The Swift Skater keypack will be available for the next 2 weeks.
- Cost: 3000 ZEN
- 35x Cosmic Keys
- 1x Swift Skater travel Power Pack
Post edited by kaiserin#0958 on
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Comments
"The man I was is the crucible which has forged the man I have become."
And this Event is still boring to the bones!
"Find 10 Things around MC" Should have NEVER been Normalized
While finally got Account EVENT tokens! I sure hope the forum regulars who quit the game are happy they finally got their request fulfilled
... But What is this? .
Talking about illusion of change!
This doesn't just replace 10' wrapper missions, now it BRUTE ENFORCES IT
The way I tolerate those god-aweful 10 dailies reward missions was by
1. Log in
2. Grab the Dailies and Log out or do other things
3. Do the Dailies tomorrow during the same time they get refreshed so I can do them TWICE
4. Repeat so I can only suffer with the event grind every Second Day
With this you are ENFORCED to do the mission once per day now,
HORRIBLE!
At least make it 2 times the Day Limit instead of only 1 hard cap
While Account Wide event sidekicks is Cool!
I don't recommend anyone wasting it on the Foxbat Stunt Double!
F Tier sidekick!
Maybe wait for Week 2
The Premium currency working on completion instead of acquire is a bit awkward, but the other improvements are greatly welcomed. It does make it a little harder to play catchup if life drags you away for more than a couple of days since you can't double-up after a missed day, but I'm not sure how to lock Premium Token's cooldown to the mission acquisition instead of turn in without it being abusable. For me, at least, it's minor concern though.
It's probably too late to hook this up for Week 2, but any chance there could be Imaginary skins for Flamethrower/Tractor Beam?
That combined with the outmoding of wrapper missions in favor of "first reward every 20h" reads like this is meant to punish people for backlogging dailies to be able to do, say, eight sets of dailies every two days for four characters instead of four sets of dailies a day for four characters. Which reads like we're back on that whole "desperate for daily player counts regardless of how much it might encourage players to just give up interacting with this content at all" grind.
So far, five-ish hours of Foxbat dailies later (because the catch-up game is so much fun) I'm already not liking the changes one bit myself beyond simply having account-wide event currency in the first place. I suppose I'll see if my mind changes after more of this, but I doubt it will given my concerns over on the PTS post still stand. We should not be punishing people for wanting to consolidate all of their grind-time together, and while account-wide event currency would normally be good for this, dailies really need to start their CD when initially picked up rather than turned in otherwise even a slight hiccup in scheduling is going to sour things for days in advance. Especially since- and I'm thinking forward knowing full-well it won't just be Foxbat getting this treatment regardless of my opinion on the matter- many dailies wind up being dependent on people not sucking horribly at the game plus actually having enough people online at once to not slip forward eight hours due to not being able to complete a half-dozen dailies in a timely manner, like CHQ Mega-Destroids and Mechanon, Mechanon Liberator, DLs/Takofanes, Nightmare Colossi and Clarence. These NEED daily cooldowns to start when accepted to not horrifically punish U.S. nighttime and early-morning players, and anyone with a similar schedule at a bare minimum. (This is part of why I insist the 10-day-wrapper-costume / "Premium Cred" and similar-such tokens need to be at least 2 a day, as well, or else we need to go back to wrappers and cooldowns starting on pick-up rather than turn-in.)
This is a big journey, so far if you're reading this, wish you a good day
Why.
I assume the whole Premium Cred and Sidekick Cred existence is so you don't have to keep writing up those Do 10 Quests, deleting the item from the reward, and replace it with another reward every rotation. Just dropping the item in the shop and be done with it. I would also guess those items will now be in the store for the next event after that so they just don't disappear/drop in the Paperback Shop a year later.
I see a Huge flaw on this with compared to the old system where you bought the Costume directly on a discounted price!
Let's say someone buys the Premium Events Tokens on a discounted price after doing the daily like 2-3 times!
Ok now what? They are stuck with the extra Premium Tokens you purchased this way and you have nothing to do with and them, plus they expires in 30 days.
Now you created a new Premium Currency that goes down the drain
Suggestion: Add an option to the Event Vendor to Convert Premium Tokens into something else
That can be the Regular Event Tokens or SCR or Questionite
Or/and have the vendor have different deals for trading
1 Premium Token = 50 Regular Event Tokens
5 Premium Tokens = 20 SCR
10 Premium Tokens = 50.000 Questionite
"will set the amount of currency to 10"
How's Wibbles, the rubber chicken one you can get for the cred from the rock vendor?
Having the currency work across your account is nice, sure, but - at least to me - does not offset the above problems.
I will have to check about it!
I didn't realized it was already available from Week 1
This, along with jacking up gold items to 500, is a poison pill hidden amidst an otherwise decent set of QoL changes.
- Universal currency for the event shared to account
- Able to do missions on any character and get the rewards on any of your characters regardless if you play it or not
- Decrease some of the rewards currency
Negatives
- Missions now coodown starts when you finish them and not when you pick them , very very bad for people that cant login especialy in Easter. On the past you could log and get missiosn and farm then on the next day playing 2x the time.
- Rewards on golden costumes going up 25%. That can be ignore maybe from some old players that have all the rewards except new ones but this increase hits new players alot and specialy on some events like Anniversary or Foxbat that have a million costumes to get, dont know if that was tested but as a relative new it leaves a bad taste.
Extra Things to be thought in future events
- I would like to be able to exchange the extra gold/sidekick currency in general foxbat currency
- Having to expire the currency after 30 days is bad but i guess since this is a test its fine kinda ...
General speaking you only had to put the currency in account storage as you did , all the other changes are feeling to extreme and a bit rashed atleast to me and brakes the nice cool thing with the missions cooldown on missions Events.
For sure not very happy
I think the price increase hurts players with few alts. As a player who has 60+ alts, I find it fair to me.
-=-=-=-=-=-(CO in-game handle: @WarCan )-=-=-=-=-=-
"Okay, you're DEAD, what do you do NEXT?"
I've seen a few people angry about this, but you absolutely can still do all your grinding on one day still; in fact, arguably the new system is even better since you can literally "finish" the entire event in one day if you have enough alts.
You do still need to log in every day, but you had to do that in the old "take mission, do it twice next day, take mission on day 3, do twice on day 4" way too.
What you're neglecting is that if I have six hours of dailies (and I do) I have to explicitly do them all at once. As soon as I log on. Before anything else. One character at a time. Stopping because someone asked me to slot fill as DPS for TT or because that one guy called out an Eido gathering again is no longer an option.
So! Not directing this wall of a post at you specifically as some "aha gotcha, you utter fool, I am so incredibly smart and the realest CO player" (that'd be stupid) but using it as an excuse to once again highlight the issues I'm seeing with how dailies plus the wrapper-tokens are implemented, especially now that I've had a few days to have my concerns and fears validated by testing:
A few examples of problems with this are the following. Internet issues or similar (such as power outages) lasting for several hours will throw off the pace at which I can do dailies over following days. I cannot prioritize real-life responsibilities over dailies any more unless those real-life responsibilities likewise have an exact rigid schedule, which anyone who, you know, exists in real life knows is never a guarantee, and being treated poorly by the game for daring to prioritize real life over it is... bad for QoL. The Unscheduled Maintenance/Bug Boss isn't bad itself but it's also a taste of what's to come if (and presumably when) this system is applied to other events: now that daily CD starts on turn-in rather than pick-up, good luck trying to do your eight Takofanes or twelve Nightmare Colossi at four in the morning. Spreading these examples out to other players than me:
Little Timmy can't pick up his five characters worth of dailies, go to school all day, then come back home and complete them at a casual pace and then have them off-CD to pick up the next morning to repeat the process any more. He has to take them up the split second he gets home, rush them instead of doing anything else, and if his parents give him so many chores that he falls more than four hours ahead of schedule, well...
Looking to the future, Mister Overseas now has to violate his sleep schedule if he wants to do his ten Clarences in a timely manner instead of spending thrice the time just gathering for them only for half of them to fail anyways because too few people plus too many "WHY PRESS SHIFT WHEN I CAN FACEROLL KEYBOARD AND DO 300 DPS WITH MY EPIC CON-STACKED FIRE STRIKE DPS" type players getting deleted every single time an AoE exists anywhere within fifty miles of the fight. And god help him when Blood Moon rolls around and those late-night late-into-the-event Takofanes where everybody's trying to throw roll around.
Boondocks Man is going to get a taste of the true Champions Online experience when fighting with his god-awful ISP just to try and do a handful of dailies, when whether or not it's partially overcast out determines whether his internet's dropping out for a minute or two once an hour, or going out thirty minutes an hour like clockwork. (Ah, what fun memories of being Boondocks Man close to a decade ago myself, having to use one of those Virgin Mobile Broadband2go thumbdrives for internet. Yes, those are real, and Boondocks Man is technically a real category of players no matter how rare they might be in a game with as small a playerbase as this one.) No retries, have fun rolling forward those daily cooldowns endlessly whenever you get unlucky with these cosmic elements entirely out of your control back to back, multiple days in a row, which will so very often be the case for your totally-garbo internet, power grid running on tinfoil and a prayer, buggy computer constantly having software or hardware oopsies and more; that's what you get for not living in the middle of some big city and running that sweet, sweet Google Fiber to your $5000 custom gaming PC like a real gamer!
And beyond.
This only isn't problematic if you're doing the absolute bare minimum, but shoots anyone who's trying to catch up from previous years in the foot. And I suppose you can make up for it by just... oooh, I don't know, making half a dozen Epidemic/Hurricane spam builds, 40ing them out and running endless circles around locations with lots of weak mobs for eight hours a day instead since event currency IS account-bound now, but does that really sound like a better alternative? (Besides, remember the Vibora Bay graveyard vampires? Spots good enough for doing that reliably- and not the Westside Prison's wasteful "here's a crumb of tokens, now log out and come back 10 minutes later" would absolutely have all their drops disabled in a heartbeat if it became a widely-used strategy, and then we're right back to where we started.)
However. I do see the... other solution. Which is, namely: take aggressive advantage of currency sharing to have, like, forty 40'd-out Soldiers, Unleasheds or Blades or something else like that, or DPS FFs if you can afford to spendspendspend (or are a Lifetimer, and really, just buy Lifetime instead of 40 FF slots separately; don't do it to yourself) and using them to just repeatedly head-bash against the "throwaway daily" that every major event seems to have, whether that's Blood Moon's Trick Or Treaters, Winter/Christmas's Tinker Toys, Foxbat's Save The Swag, Anniversary's "kill a handful of these Destroids, they keep multiplying like cockroaches oh god help," so on and so forth. And while that is valid, going about that to such an extent feels like it's just begging for account-shared currencies to be nerfed somehow... or by costume prices to be hiked even more to compensate, which would hurt all the players who aren't here to grind six hours a day to catch up on old unlocks.
... And don't get me wrong, I have way more than that spit-balled number of 40 maxed-out characters, I could do this if I wanted to, but it seems like it'd be... in bad form to normalize "just avoid 90% of the event and do the tiny dinky throwaway over and over with four times as many characters as you used to grind the whole event with and only ever do the full set of dailies on one single character for the 10-day wrapper costume and/or Loyal SK since that's now the only thing obligating that I bother with anything other than the dinky little baby daily over and over" as a playstyle.
This is just what I've come to observe from sitting down and thinking about how I'm having to adapt doing sixteen sets of Foxbat dailies a day to play catch-up, applying what I'm observing to other events, and sprinkling in a little sprig of "thinking about how other players who don't have as many resources (read: FF slots, or slots and existing 40'd out characters in general, as well as sheer exorbitant amounts of spare time to waste) as I do will be affected by this" on top.
There's also other tidbits people are sleeping on, like how it isn't just the fact that gold costumes now cost 25% more, but the removal of wrapper missions in favor of wrapper tokens also means that that burst of extra tokens at the 5-day or 10-day mark (depending on the length of the wrapper in question) doesn't exist any more. And that really just highlights the nature of the changes to event grinding as they are now: it's perfect for hyper-casual grinders who only want one or two things and absolutely nothing else, but massively punishes completionists or people who want most of the event's unlocks in exchange, and is also incredibly bad for new players showing up to years worth of backlogged grind who don't yet have the excess of slots and 40'd-out characters necessary to just lock-in with the whole "tiny dinky throwaway daily mission spam strat" I mentioned earlier.
Update: I do want to briefly talk about the ""finish" the entire event in one day if you have enough alts" comment. This is entirely true if you're only counting new pieces introduced on that specific week as the entire event! If you're counting the entire event from past to present as the entire event, though, then as of writing this we're currently at, unless I miscounted... Assuming you do one Foxbat Philography (11T), one Save The Swag (30T,) one Fox Hunt (30T,) and one The Real Foxbat (50T,) and in the process get an additional 10T from mob drops while doing Save The Swag (you'll usually get a little less but you might occasionally get a hair more,) you'll get 131 Tokens. (Only 120 if excluding Foxbat Philography, but I included it since it's available once a year so counts towards "completing the whole event in a day" en masse.) Being lazy and relying on a calculator to do the work for me shows:
17,950/131 = 137.02290076335877862595419847328
Or without Foxbat Philography,
17,950/120 = 149.58333333333333333333333333333
Both of those are beyond the normal character cap, so unless you're a legacy player with at least a dozen or so extra slots beyond the current cap, it's physically impossible to complete it all in one day... but I'd instead like to just use this to highlight the fact that, if we assume you can do one character every 10 minutes or so (a fair assumption in most cases but if the servers are having lag issues or your net is having issues or if real life is pulling you away at all this can be a lot longer, hence my "whewh 6 hours of dailies for 16 characters" complaint earlier, because I have NOT gotten as much time to marathon this game as I'd like in recent months) at minimum you need ~1371 to ~1496 minutes to get everything here, or 22.85 to 24.9333etc. hours of doing this exact same process over and over. Again, safely assume double this to account for real life distractions and server/net issues, and completing within a day borders physically impossible.
... And this is Foxbat, one of the easy events. Take something like Blood Moon or Anniversary where most of the event requires other people to be just as timely as one's self and it becomes nearly-impossible to get things done at all late-night just because not enough players- good or otherwise- are online, and a pain to get things done during the middle of the day due to so many people competing for limited spots in zone, when your cooldown only starts when you turn in the mission, not when you initially pick it up, and a different flavor of pain arises.
Dailies really, really need to start cooldowns when picked up rather than when turned in. That, and wrapper tokens need to be handled that same way.
The two new currencies are not a good idea in my books. They are good *in theory*, but the problem is the cooldown. What should be happening is -both- should maybe have a maximum of 3 per 20 hours, or maybe 5. We're already getting -more- currencies on top of what we already have been doing. The missions were fine beforehand as we could have done them in tandem and pretty much they were the least grindy of the events.
I am happy about *one* thing out of all of this however, the event currency itself becoming account wide was the only good thing I can reasonably see. I don't like having to grind a bit more just to get more of that currency but hey, as long as the currency is account-wide, I don't have a problem with it.
I'd say increase the amount of the sidekick and premium currency you can get per 20 hours and then the new additions would be nice.
This, so, so much. The on-turn-in cooldown timer forces you to dedicate your time explicitly to grinding the event. Gonna be busy for a day? Tough luck, you can't stock that mission for later, and now you've missed a day (or messed up your timers). Endgame stuff happening? Now you have to readjust your schedule tomorrow because of that later turn-in.
And as Mister Overseas Boondocks Man, I agree; this is gonna be terrible when OM-heavy events come around. Even the bug, which lasted for only one day, messed up my CO schedule for the following day, when I forgot about the on-turn-in cooldown.
...so yeah. That cooldown sucks balls for me.