Your opinions on the 2007 Dragon Festival? I wasnt impressed.

JeniM: incase you didn't notice, the spawns are rather uhm, random? Yes there are certain areas that a gift can spawn in, but look at it this way, shing jae is divided into a grid with say 400 squares (maybe more, maybe less) and then numbers for grid locations are picked randomly and each one gets a gift. If someone is comping in one spot, there are still 400 others available to you. Each has exactly the same odds of getting a gift.

I wanted to enjoy this festival, but in the end I just ended up standing afk on a circle. Lag was too horrible to do much else. Getting 250 victory tokens was torture. At an average ping of 3,400 and spikes of as much as 25,000 it took me ages to do the 4 quests. It was a real challenge to move around, much less do anything else. Luckily I didn't need to do anything else, my heroes were more than up to the task of spanking those actor/grapsp.

I thought it was a wonderful event! (of course, it was my first one so I suppose I don't really have a basis for comparison).
I was hoping that the demon mask would be more of a traditional mask, but hey..it'll look good for Halloween, and it's my first one (yea!)
I must confess, I do agree with many about the present drop. Assigning them would seem to be a better way of doing things.

The Dragon Arena was crap last year and it was this year...
Rollerbeetles were probably too laggy to do anything and are almost entirely luck based.
As said, the Hat was a major dissapointment.
The missions weren't hard... people just walked into them expecting them to be a complete walk in the park and got owned.

Of course it would've been better if the entire thing wasn't overshadowed by the presence of the 9/16 rings of afk. Huge drain on the servers for the rest of the events. Why the hell couldn't these of just been opened mid week randomly after the event? Nobody gives a crap if it doesn't make sense with the festival, i could afk them just as easily mid-week. I've done the quests, had a go at the odd mission, but mostly i've just spent the weekend on a corner ring, the rewards simply weren't good enough (even though the missions may have been a challenge) to make me bother.

I will give em credit for having a laugh with the Demons been played by fairly dangerous actors though. That was a funny idea.

I wasn't experiencing any lag myself. During gifts I was hovering at 200 ping and about 40-50 fps.

The dragon arena is pretty similar to fps instagib which is always a can of worms. Some say it's just luck, others say it requires tactics.
Personally, I found that it was extremely effective to wait until my opponent fired a shot first, which was easy to dodge and left me able to fire back fairly safely. The touch spell came in use when you ran into other players who had the same idea.

Overall, who cares. It's just silly fun.

I would have preferred it if the gifts didn't contain plats, as people get so incredibly worked up over it it's unreal. I was called a "FKCEN N1G(you work out the rest)" in pm's by some dude because he was running towards the same present I was. Local chat was just *filled* with people claiming others were taking gifts from 'their' spot.


I found the whole event rather amusing. The npc's with masks and over-acted lines cracked me up at times. Rollerbeetle racing fun. Dragon arena was fun. Easy missions were a bit too easy. Hard missions were too hard at times (dervish + shatter enchantment = warrior with mage armor and 3 attacks). Boardwalk games were kinda dull.

Definately one of the better events I've experienced compared to other mmo's. There's currently an event going on in Lineage 2 where monsters randomly drop items that you give to an npc and get fireworks in return. That's it. They've done this event like 3 times in the past.

I can't avoid giving props to anet for rigging these events without asking monthly fees.

This year was pretty fun, and more fun than last year. I'm glad the missions were tuned more towards my style; I was starting to get lazy after getting Legendary Guardian.

[edit] There's nothing wrong with Dragon Arena; what's your problem? :O It forces you to use the most important pvp skills in the game (counting duration times on other people, kiting, pressuring the bad members of the opposing team) and you can do it without having to unlock anything.

And it's random. Hoooooraaaay random.

The "problem" with it is that the rewards are junk. Hooray junk rewards; now the only people who play it are the people who enjoy it. :]

In the end thats all I did, rank up twice, now I have 6% more chance of not breaking my lockpicks :/

The first mission was too difficult, which caused me not to bother with the other missions.

The spawns are not random, and there are not spawn points. The spawn points are YOU. They spawn around people. Just stand still and they will spawn right beside you. Stand beside more people and more will spawn at your feet.

The missions were too tough to be enjoyable, and the hats could have been much better.

I enjoyed being chased by the grasps though.

The hat is ok. It's something that my characters can wear without looking too out of place. The only gripe is I can't seem to dye it.

Dragon arena, I like it even more than the actual gw pvp, and I still do.

The missions... are way too hard. I seriously thought the game have just glitched me into hardmode or misloaded the underworld by accident. Sheng Jea is the STARTERS ISLAND for crying out loud. Knocking ~10 levels down from each enemy (under normal mode) would have make these "festival" missions much better.

The quests on the other hand are fun though. One thing I do liked the most is the ability to trade in the 240 victory tokens into 24 red bean cakes/rice wines and then merchant them for 4.8 platinum. As a casual player, this can help me out a bit.

As for Lag? You serious? Compared to Wintersday, this Dragon Festival is at least 20x better.
-Wintersday's Kamadan DvG = ~1 fps
-Dragon Festival's Sheng Jea = 20~25 fps
Even the "normal" Kamadan/Sheng Jea was only 30-ish fps in a normal day. Also I have yet to see my first err7 this time around... *knock wood*... compared to the previous events. It is a superb improvement this time.

Thats because 2/3rds of the district is afk on the rings out of site. Wintersday the players in the district were in the same place as you.

Let's see:

Rollerbeetle Racing provided something to do while friends were offline

Was able to make quite nice a profit selling and trading Victory Tokens

Oh and stealing presents = Win

As for the hat, didn't bother getting one, useless to me.

Overall 7/10 not bad.

Didn't go to the first and didn't go to this one either. Did try and enter the Dragon Arena but it wouldn't let me in? tried twice then logged out.

Amen to that. didn't they do that for the Halloween event of 06?

oh ya.. about a 6/7 out of 10 in my book

7/10 for me too. My guild and I haven't done Tombs/FoW/UW so I was rather shocked at the difficulty of the missions. The best any PuG I was with did was 6/8 posts captured during Haijun Lagoon.

The mask is pretty cool, but it reminds me too much of the Headcrab from Half-life. Now all I need a zombie outfit for my toon for halloween. :P

I agree that the presents should have been assigned to players like they did during Wintersday, though I loved running the orbs while dodging mask-wielding maniacs to avoid total genocide.

Overall, the missions probably could have been toned down some, and an option to choose which mask you wanted would have been awesome too. Dragon Arena and the boardwalk are always FTW with me. GG Anet.

I loved this years dragon festival for one reason - Heroes! Last year, with only L4 henchies it was impossible to complete the mission without relying on guildies (which were in short supply once the lackluster rewards were announced).

This year Jin, Dunkuro, Olias and I managed to complete 4/5 of the missions and it was a blast! That last mission was a killer. Kudos to anyone that managed it.

Pretty cool event. Nothing majorly different but I did enjoy it.

its was on x-mas, but that time presents had random drop spot, this time they dropped in the same place and ppl were camping them.


meh its the same as any other time anet puts the boardwalk up, afk-athon.

96 presents in one go, this is fun and is making me rich

I'm really disappointed. It just seemed like they saved the event from last year, re-loaded it and changed a few skins here and a few lines of text there.

I'll probably get hit with a lot of "wah it was a free event yadda yadda" but in my opinion this event is down there with the Tengu event in terms of overall quality and the final prize. (meaning: they both sucked.)

The lag prevented me from doing any of the games during the event. Not only that, but we didn't get any new games from that of last year, or since the last time the boardwalk opened. The missions and quests were the exact same as last year. At least with events like Halloween and Wintersday, they changed up how the finale worked. This seemed like the "event team" was like "Here, deal with it, we made it in one day - vacation time now."

The whole play act was cute, but I would have much better had a festival called "Demon Festival" if we were just going to be celebrating the victory over battles in Elona. I was hoping we'd get a special change in plans and we'd get invaded by some of the forces from GW:EN, to be honest, as that was one of the things that ended up making the Dragon Festival so good last year (that being that we got a little 'preview' of the whole invasion scene in Nightfall.)

Really disappointed, expected better with less lagging. *steps on demon mask*

Tried to bump up my lucky title on 9 rings.
The longest i lasted was 1hour then i got err07 booted..then i was unable to move when i logged back in. I cann't give it a rating as i was unable to participate fully.
I ended up trying out dungeon runners (no comment) and a new PvP beta