siniri

STREETS

Missed it again. Maybe I'll be lucky tomorrow. Everything else seems to have dropped since this morning -- the one in the 40's is back down in the 30's.

It's a glitch, I think. If you left them equipped, you should see them on the equipment page in the battledome. Send in a ticket; hopefully TNT can trace them.

Here you go!

I won an Icetravaganza scratchcard at the kiosk today. Asking 140k on TP, will discount for TDN (NM your username). I just scratched a card about half an hour ago; current jackpot was over 600k.

I still have my scroll of freezing up for trade, too, asking 115k (same discount). It's a 100% freezer, but fragile.

I did a fouturne cookie thing and ended up with a quest from the battle faerie and i cant seem to find what she wants! need help finding Aisha Warrior Sword

 

Thank,

 

Punkz

I found one in auctions (current bid would be 51k).

pluslepie Aisha Warrior Sword 1 49,141 NP

mysticelfsong Aisha Warrior Sword 1 50,000 NP

benben1276yeah Aisha Warrior Sword 1 54,951 NP

caspertine Aisha Warrior Sword 1 54,952 NP

bookrabbit Aisha Warrior Sword 1 95,000 NP

That was ~10 SW refreshes; there were a few "no results found" refreshes, too.

Thanks for the info, simoneshh. Now I wonder if anyone has completed wave 1 after wave 2 started, so we can find out what color their checkmark is in their wave 1 bar.

Since none of you get to see the Zombie Hooligan, I thought I'd share. after beating him in a 7-win challenge, he said, "Hee hee, that tickled. You're kind of chokato and faeryllium, you know that?" He's quite a weirdo!

They are classified as retired, you can't get them anywhere but user shops anymore

That's technically true, but I've still won them from Scorchy Slots and Dice-a-Roo. TNT needs to change the coding on those games befure they'll be completely retired (and perhaps also the RE's that give them out, too).

Thanks for that tip; I've managed to get a faction challenge before each battle so far today (I'm on my third-ninth battles now, and 3rd challenge).

How are the other Seekers doing? Anyone need any help? We can outwit the rest, even if we can't out-strength them.

No, it's back down to 56. I missed it. Go back up, BOTT!

What I wonder if, we seem to be able to do "our part" by losing too, does that mean we get all the points by losing too at the end? (if we are somehow able to do all those tasks as well)

In the last several events, TNT has used the checkmark system to show completion of each stage, and you got credit or not (there were a few group-participation stages in TFR in which they didn't indicate how much was necessary, but they did tell us when battle caps were met, and the checkmark system began after TFR, I think during the Discovering Moltara event, and has been used for every event since then, with the exception of the AC, which has its own scoring system). A gold checkmark is generally for completing on the day of release (I'm not sure if it's during the current wave for the current war or is still "day of" -- can anyone who completed one of the waves before the next one started but not the first day confirm what color their checkmark is?). A green checkmark is for completing the step, but not on its day of release (has anyone gotten one of these? when did you complete the first wave?). Usually, having all gold checks earns you the highest prize.

Plots and wars are more complex, so they can allocate points based on how much you participate on each step. So it might be that those who complete the doing your part bars "on time" (getting all gold checks) will get the max points, while others will get points depending on what percentage of each bar they fill. During TFR, there were additional challenges, but they didn't provide additional plot points (just whatever you earned naturally by completing the challenge) because they gave prizes as you completed them. TNT never tells us how the scoring will work until after the event is over, but they've been getting gradually better about giving hints with checkmarks/"step complete"/"cap reached" messages. So my inclination is to take it that filling the bar each wave indicates reaching the max points available for that wave. But of course I could be wrong; the caps could be much higher.

The number of wins on mighty jumped from 40 to 50 from wave 1 to wave 2. I have no idea how many losses that would take, but I suspect it'd be several times that. If the required number of wins for each wave continues to grow, I suspect it will be very difficult to lose enough times to fill the bar completely. (Honestly, I really hope that's true. It wouldn't be fair to top level battlers if someone with a pair of scarab rings on level 10 was able to earn the top prize in this war. There needs to be spread in terms of final plot points so the top level prizes become valuable. TNT's been at this a while, though, and I'm sure they'll create the spread somehow. They've gotten a lot of backlash in the past for not creating spread, e.g., in that Moltaran mini-plot.)

So if I'm right and filling your bar = capping out on points for that wave, why should you battle any extra? 1) Because no one knows if I'm right, and it's a gamble to assume that I am. 2) To help your faction. You do want them to win, don't you? I'm sure TNT is keeping track of the points earned for each faction, and that will determine who wins the obelisk (and the coolest trophies, and probably the theme of a few more of the prizes vs. the other factions' themes, though they'll all be represented). I think the faction challenges might count extra, but I'm not really sure. (They do need to be made less rare, I think.) 3) Bragging rights. Your trophy may link to your final battle record for the war, and anyone who visits your look-up can click through and see that you beat each baddie 5 million times on mighty.

I'm hoping that once someone "wins" the obelisk, it will open, revealing its malevolent power, and we'll all have to work together to fight its power, giving us a little bit of puzzling, though I don't think TNT has ever done that in a war before. Then again, the last war was about a decade ago, I think, and they've had battles in most plots, so they might decide to throw a bone to the puzzlers, who haven't had a plot in a while, either (TFR was the last real plot).

My first war, I got a single point as a Meridell peasant. And I worked really hard for that point, but I just hadn't trained or invested in weapons. The first few plots with battling I participated in, I made sure I trained (continuously, not just during the events -- most of the time, it was just once a day) and slowly upgraded my weapons (winning ones in the plots helped a ton), and I did better each plot. TFR, I was able to cap against all the baddies, though it did require some of the items TNT gave us during that plot and quite a few losses while figuring out the best strategy (or just getting lucky).

I've spent years and millions of NP training and equipping my pet. I want the hardest baddies in a war to be at least as hard as the hardest baddies were in the last plot. If people are willing to put the time and NP into becoming better battlers, it's only fair that their efforts are rewarded in BD-related events. Just like people who practice games tend to do better in DD and GMC, or people who do lots of puzzle-type things might do better in puzzle-based plots.

I'm not a battler. I pretty much only battle for plots and wars, though I completed DoN for the trophies and tried out the new BD so I'd understand it for the next plot/war (and then made it a daily once I realized there were loot drops). My battle pet is at the 600 str and def boosts, but that's not even the max. Nor do I have top-tier weapons. I'll be fine with it if I can't cap out; if I do cap out, I hope I at least have to struggle, because I still have room to grow as a battler, and it'd only be fair to those with stronger, better-equipped pets than mine. If I can easily beat all the waves, there'd be no incentive for me to continue training to reach the last few boosts or to upgrade my weapons for the next event.

If you don't want to train, don't. But just know you won't do very well in wars or plot battling. If you want to do well in the next event's battles, train regularly even after this one ends, gradually upgrading your weapons when they're not inflated. Meanwhile, do what you can with what you have, balancing your other goals with how well you want to do in this war, and keep your war goals realistic based on the amount of effort you put in beforehand.

Oh, Bott, you tease like a lupe trapping faeries inside bottles. It's down to 57. :(

Haha, yeah, I was thinking the same thing as I posted that -- the reason the BD coders can't "fix" things like no HP increases for later waves of this war is that they're busy adding abilities to the regular challengers. And I've heard rumors that stances will be making a comeback soon, too. Plus... whatever this obelisk unleashes on us. Personally, I'd love to see agility factor into the BD (a chance to strike first or avoid an attack), though I know others would be very against that.

I do wonder how the abilities will be changed, though. I went ahead and bought Shhh! because I had enough bottled faeries for it (I cashed in my unidentifiables and got a ton of earth), and today I earned enough light blessings to be able to switch over to Lens Flare. I haven't done it yet because I'm still bug-squishing, and I don't want to "waste" the blessings in case things change.

SPORTED

Ah, but you guys forget that the regular BD challengers might have abilities added to their repertoire once this war is over. And so some of them might be able to freeze us for three rounds in a row soon. Eep!

I finally got a challenge at ~35 wins or so. Then I got a timed challenge of 6.2 minutes and finished it with 4 minutes to spare. The lag was pretty nail-biting, but it'd gotten much better by the time I got the challenge.

My pet is such a good Seeker; she decided the lab ray should turn her Tyrannian today so she'd blend in better during battles.

TNT has changed their answer on this over the years (i.e., in one editorial they said it was not okay, but in all others before and after that one, they said refreshing manually, using your own power, was perfectly okay). For completeness's sake, here are the relevant editorials, in chronological order (hiding repetitive ones in spoiler tags)*:

Issue 219: Some people say that you can get frozen from refreshing to much. For example some avatars people say you can only get from refreshing and they say that you can get frozen from refreshing to much. Is that true? ~ x_tammeh

Just like many things in Neopets and life, there is a line. Let's clarify. Basically, anything that plays the site for you, and requires no effort on your part, is considered a "bot" and will get you frozen. Even your "cat." This includes auto refresher functions in browsers, or putting a weight on F5 to do things the old fashioned way. If you don't do any of that, you don't have to worry.
- Hitting refresh repeatedly for a few minutes, allowing the page to load. ? Great
- Holding down F5 for 10-30 seconds at a time, checking for the avatar/challenger, then trying again if it has not been achieved ? Still
good.
- Holding down the F5 key for 20 minutes ? Okay, but try to take a break for your mental sake and ours.
- Leaving your "cat" on the F5 key while you make a sandwich. ? Not good.
- Leaving your "cat" on the F5 key all night while you sleep ? Bad.
- Using a program that refreshes for you at the same rate as a human ? Frozen!
- Using Opera to open 100+ pages and hitting "refresh all" ? VERY frozen.

Basically, anything that plays the site for you, and requires no effort on your part, is considered a "bot" and will get you frozen. Even your "cat." This includes auto refresher functions in browsers, or putting a weight on F5 to do things the old fashioned way. If you don't do any of that, you don't have to worry.

P.S. What does TNT have against cats? Dogs are way more likely to stay on the refresh key than a cat. The only way to get a cat to sit on it would be if the cat thought you didn't want it to sit there.

For people stuck in the battledome (who are told they can't heal because they're in battle): Go to the "challenges" page of the BD and see if you're still in a fight. Sometimes it glitches. If you've still got HP, go ahead and complete the fight. If you can't re-enter because you lost all your HP, you can do 1 of 2 things:

1) Withdraw from the fight by clicking the appropriate button on the challenge page.

2) Try to gain some HP. You can't use the springs, but you might heal from Wheel of Knowledge (1/day), Wheel of Excitement (every 2 hours), TDMGPOP (1/day), or training HP (however long a training session takes you, from 2-24 hours).

After you finish the battle, you'll be able to use the Healing Springs again. I once got stuck-stuck (each battle I withdrew from made another battle pop up, until I got worried about my win record with so many withdraws/losses against easy opponents) and submitted a bug report, and TNT fixed it for me -- but this was in the very early days of open beta. I think they've fixed that issue, but just in case, I thought I'd mention it.

I think we'll have several more waves, not just one. We had more waves during TFR, and that was a plot. This is a war, with no puzzles (so far... a girl can dream, right?). I understand that for people who haven't trained much (and I was there in past events, I understand the frustration), this seems like a big jump, but when you look at the scale of training boosts, it's only an increase from 0.75 to 1.5 (up 3 boosts, or double the difficulty) and still very low on the scale of absolute difficulty. For those who have been training for years hoping for another war, they're still squishing bugs. It'd be rather disappointing for them if they never saw a challenging opponent. I think TNT's doing a decent job of trying to keep everyone engaged -- you can still "do your part" by losing, as demoralizing as that might be (if you're stuck doing this, make sure you go to the healing springs and both heal and buy a potion every half hour -- just compare SW to springs prices before buying to make sure you can't get it cheaper -- or buy the better potions at the springs and resell to fund buying cheaper potions for your pet). And even if you can't complete every wave, it's just motivation to train, buy better weapons, and practice battling before the next event. Everyone started at the beginning (unless you managed to adopt a well-trained pet, I suppose...).

Regarding the timing, I think TNT has done a decent job addressing lag. I was annoyed this morning, too, but they're working on it constantly, and it improved relatively quickly. Knowing there will be lags and malfunctions, factoring in that players come from every timezone and that some will struggle in each wave to finish doing their part (while some will have limited computer time each day), I think the length of time per wave is reasonable. I especially like that they gave a head's up when the next one would start so people could plan in advance. (During ToW, the last activities hit during grad school finals for me; by the time I was ready to finish, it was over, with no real warning. Not TNT's fault, of course, but it was still frustrating to be in the middle of a task, submit it, and find out it was too late.) Part of the fun of events is not knowing what will happen next and trying to anticipate. I think TNT's doing a decent job balancing the desire for information with leaving room for surprises.

TSUNAMI

You can only link to Neopets official fan sites, and you can get warned for trying to link to any other site. Spritzie's right, the best way is to embed the link into your petpage using HTML, and then link them to the petpage. Seems silly, but dem's da rules.

PILFERS (0, 2, 5)

LOAFING (0, 3, 4)

MYSTERY (0, 2, 5)

TERRORS (1, 1, 5)

ORANGES (1, 2, 4)

VARIANT (1,3,3)

THAWING (1,3,3)

TRIVIAL (1,2,4)

TSUNAMI (7,0,0)

Great job! I didn't think it'd be guessed so quickly.

This one made me laugh!

... and he changes colour to Tyrannian!!