Event The Christmas Mission

Sorey

Read the NPCs dialogues, pls
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Hello, everyone!

Listen carefully: The PWO staff received a message from a talking Delibird asking desperately for help. Every year, delivery birds are required to deliver Christmas presents all over the world. It is an exhausting task, and this year, it seems things are going to be a little bit different due to some new technology they possess.

We readily accepted the mission of helping it to deliver the Christmas presents. However, it’s a huge job, even for the staff, to be done by our own. Knowing how our community is always ready to help those most in need, we wanted to ask you to help us in this mission. We don’t have much detail, but the Delibird said it would be waiting for you in Viridian City / Cherrygrove City.

Please, help us to make the Christmas magic happen once again!
 

DH94

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Something is wrong with the deerlings...first it was blank and now this smudge...
 

DH94

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Why must you make the quest so hard, why, why? dying right now
 

Isguros

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Was that necessary to tell? :)
The entirety of this side-quest entails Binging to find out which of the 40 or so popular ciphers was used to encrypt the message. To be transparent: I initially posted a link to a site that could help you decode the cipher, but those who already went through the hassle of wasting their time with search engines didn't want others, who've had taken the time to check this forum topic in a last-ditch attempt to look for clues/hints/answers to solve the quest they've been tasked with, to be spared of the trouble they had to deal with. So if anyone has issues with me linking to a site that explains this particular cipher and teaches you how to manually decode it, then go tell the staff team to give players the means to obtain the much coveted Vouchers themselves.
 

Jinji

PWO's Resident Gengar
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A discussion regarding this has already taken place in Discord in the public view. I humbly request we do not drag this matter further through the mud than it has been already.
 

Isguros

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Oh sorry, it appears it was a different Jinji that liked the message asking (me) if it was necessary.

P.S.: could you please link me the discussion on Discord, cause, even though I've looked, I haven't seen people dragging this quest through the mud on the PWO server.
 
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Jinji

PWO's Resident Gengar
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I was directing my reply more towards vyom than to you, Isguros. And I wasn't saying the QUEST had been dragged through the mud. I was simply stating, my opinion of YOUR actions has already been stated, and I feel it's not helpful to anyone to keep labouring the matter.
 

Sorey

Read the NPCs dialogues, pls
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Greetings everybody!

The event will be coming to an end on Saturday 9th January at 12pm (UTC).

Thanks for the attention and thanks for participating on the event! I'm loving seeing Blyz Town plenty of hunters! :D
 

German-Cano

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I would like to congratulate everyone who participated for this wonderful event to happen, i am very happy to see PWO alive again, it was a great reunion with old friends, a lot of nostalgia involved and it was a different way to end a bad year that was 2020, more once congratulations to all Staff and to us, the players for not letting this wonderful game die.
 

Sorey

Read the NPCs dialogues, pls
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The 2021 Christmas Event is now over. Thanks for joining us on this mission, everyone! Lazy Delibird wanted to let you know that it is very excited to have some people doing its work once again meet you all on next Christmas.

The Items Seller and the Ice Punch Tutor will be accessible in Viridian and Cherrygrove Cities for a couple of weeks.

Hope you all enjoyed the event!!
 
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Prof.Rygar

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This was a great event. Good selection of pokemon is one of the most notable parts. Other than stupid bee (which most of us are too traumatized to talk about).

The quests were well thought out. Hiding the presents had some difficulties, in that some of the hiding places we had to walk up to and were basically standing in them and others we had to be near, and face them to get the present in. The cipher decryption part wasn't hinted at quite well enough imo, and a little re-wording the message from the boy could give just that slightest of hints more to nudge players in the right direction without giving them the answer. Whoever thought up losing a battle to the NPC, I'd like to report you. It is against the rules to give out wins! You cheater. Also, that loss un-anchored me from the PC I was at, which was quite annoying and potentially costly. I never agreed to that part. Being anchored to some place that I frequent, like Battle Tower, has been one of the best things, and getting back there requires a transportation ticket.

I wonder if it would be possible to create "NPCs" that are just like some kind of block, and we can interact with them, and like, while holding Spacebar, they follow us, so we can drag them, which could help create some incredible puzzles for future event quests. Just in this event, having an object like this in the houses could make it necessary for us to move something to block the NPCs vision to make it easier to move around. (though, that might not make much sense logically).

The overall design of the maps wasn't boring, or too complicated. Though, when I initially got there I was slightly lost, and after visiting the grass I wanted to check out town, but couldn't find the "out". A little bit more, of something, to attract the eye down to the path to the town is needed for good level design.

The selection of Items for sale isn't too boring. I think it has something for just about everyone.

Overall, great event. One of the best I've seen. Good work.

The biggest complaint I have is that the RNG program is broken and HEAVILY Favors certain players and ignores others. Took me over a week of 12 hour days just to find 1 shiny and it was a crummy bee! I have an army of them now. I should be able to take over PWO in 2 - 3 weeks, so, look forward to that I guess, and if everyone could calmly and efficiently fall in line with this, that'd be great. Thanks. (Otherwise you have to face an army of angry stingers!)
 

Klay

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funniest moment of the event:
Screen_Shot_12-28-20_at_12.02_AM.PNG
 

Ramensnoodle

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Please move away from making event grass areas as patchy as this in the future.

ps. Need more pc space!!! Yet another event where I was limited in my ability to just freely catch pokes
 
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DH94

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Firstly I need to thank all the staff involved for making this happen.
I really enjoyed hunting in the event with great spawns (arguably too good), a small yet functional map with good tutor, tms and unique items and for making an interesting quest which actually required the players to read the dialog and use their brain to complete the quest and not just countless hours of grinding to obtain a certain amount of items.
I agree with Rygar that there should be some small hint of an existence of a cipher, since many players had no idea it was a cypher in the first place on the first day of the event.
Some players with No Starndardsx on the other hand unfortunately had no trouble spoiling it for everyone and calling player, who oppose rewarding players with 0 effort invested in the quest, toxic.
In the future I would be very glad to see something like this cipher implemented again, but with additional twist, that a part of quest differs for each player and could not be handed out by a 'helpful' individual.
I had the pleasure of enjoying 140h of hunting in this event and managed to find plenty of shinny and rare pokemon (had a slight space problem as well) and am really looking forward to the next update.
Cheers everyone :)
 
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shodan21

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My thoughts:

Spawns: 9.5/10. Yeah, the bees were annoying, especially in terms of shiny hunting, but super-common Scyther and easy t2 Mime/Gligar were quite generous. The only real negative comment here is that there seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to why these spawns were chosen - they certainly don't fit a wintry theme. Plus, the Deerling fiasco: the images in the client were included incorrectly, leading to missing icons and other such problems. The back/front images (used in battles) have no autumn forms; the follow images (for you and other players to see as you walk around) have no spring forms, and the icons have a duplicate of the spring forms labeled as autumn (with no autumn forms). To say nothing of not actually following the rules of how the forms work - but I don't fault that, since I wouldn't expect PWO to have that implemented properly yet.

By far the biggest problem with the spawns though: Beldum. Catch rate 3/255. Only learns Take Down, and will Struggle after PP runs out on that. That's just mean, and I'm glad I didn't find a shiny one - I don't need that kind of stress in my life, lol. I feel like that was included to spite the complaints about Baltoy's Selfdestruct and Ralts's Teleport from last event ;).

Also, here's my t2+/shiny tracking (over 89 hours); third column is hours and minutes between encounters, on average:

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Would be interested to see how those numbers line up against the actual spawn tiers. I don't think Leafeon is actually a hard t4 as this data suggests - I think that's just a sample size issue - so it looks like Trapinch was the only actual t4, and a relatively easy one at that, while Roselia, Cacnea, Mawile, and Aron were all t3. Perhaps the biggest indicator of how generous the spawns were is the total row - roughly every 9 minutes I found a t2+ spawn, which is remarkable. Of course, the last row highlights my biggest gripe with this event, which wasn't really about the event itself: the shiny chance. I know, I know, it's been said a thousand times, but it's still pretty ridiculous for certain people to see average times between shinies consistently at 6h or less while mine sits at a stupid-low almost 18h - boosted by a 28.5-hour (!) dry streak after #5 to close out the event. I don't know what the deal is with the way it seems to consistently favor certain people and screw over certain others, but it feels like it ignores my MS, and it's incredibly annoying to always be on the losing side of that coin. Anyway.

Quests: 8/10. I thought the quests were pretty fantastic. Placing the invisible presents was a fun puzzle, one that I'm familiar with from other games (looking at you, RuneScape) that use similar mechanics. Bonus for next time: make the NPCs move for increased complexity. The cipher NPC was also a neat puzzle that took some effort to understand and solve, although I too was disappointed by some who thought it would be good to give away the answer to others, and I was also disappointed by those who clearly didn't want to put in any effort to solve it themselves and instead tried to pry the answer out of those who had solved it. The Aron quest was a typical "find rare poke and faint it for an item" fetch quest, which wasn't bad since it was only one item and Aron wasn't a hard find. However, when the event was released, caught Arons held the item (and many of the other spawns held snow powders), which was fixed a few days into the event. I know staff are, uh, short-staffed, but this is not the first time this has happened - events are released with problems like this, and they're fixed partway through, giving earlier players an advantage (I didn't have to faint any Aron, because I knew from other players that I could catch them and receive the item).

Another issue with the quests - and this was a problem with the last event as well - is that the player is given basically no direction. Players who came to the event should certainly be expected to talk to the Lazy Delibird, after which they would complete the invisible presents task, but there was absolutely no clue given that there was anything else to do - my first thought when I finished that part was "... that's it?". Even worse, the NPCs to talk to for the other quests were in houses, and players were taught via the Delibird's quest that NPCs inside the houses were hostile and would throw the player out if seen. The cipher NPC's house was no different in this expectation, since the same script check that stalled movement occurred at the entrance to his house, even though there was no NPC inside that would expel the player. So, the player was on their own to figure all of that out, until some of us did and let others after us know.

Map: 6.5/10. Not much to say about it. As Ramens noted, the grass was annoyingly patchy - there wasn't a single contiguous run of more than 4 tiles of spawn grass. I didn't really like how far the spawn grass was from the PC, or some of the narrow paths around the map (especially in front of the houses - with the script trigger pausing your motion in front of each house, there was no way to avoid that for a house you were passing rather than entering). Other than that, the map was sufficient. I didn't notice any particular mistakes like with the last event's map, and it was fortunately not super maze-y like that one either.

Rewards: 7/10. Ice punch tutor wasn't particularly necessary, since it was available in last year's winter event, and available again in the Jihai Village event for Primeape, the most common poke that needs it - I didn't need to tutor a single poke with that move. Plus, since the spawns didn't have a wintry theme, only four of the spawns could even learn it: Mr. Mime, Mawile, Aron (as Aggron), and Beldum (as Metang or Metagross). Nest balls were nice, but not really helpful for Beldum, since the spawns were levels 20-24, and Nest balls only provide an advantage over Ultra balls for pokes at level 20 and below. Avalanche and Blizzard TMs were nice, Hail TMs were okay, Ice Gem and Icy Rock are intriguing. The negative, though, is what was not included: two of the common spawns (and by far the most sought-after t1 shinies in the event) - Scyther and Murkrow - are usually built for using Superpower, which would have been a much more useful tutor. Cacturne and Aron also can learn and make use of this move.

Overall: 8.1/10 (no, I didn't average the above scores). Good event with generous spawns and fresh quests that didn't feel haphazardly rushed like the last one. :cool:
 

Jobey

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I may not have caught any good pokemon, a leafeon, a deerling, or a single shiny (even though I had an MS >.> ) LOL and didn't get to play as much as I would have liked (thanks Nestle LOL) but the 56 hours I did get to play I really enjoyed.

Was a cool event with nice spawns, good tutors, and simple yet effective quests for easy vouchers. The best part though was I also got to hang out with many of my friends, which I miss doing as it's so rare these days to have time to be on PWO.

Thanks for the event and congrats to players who had a nice haul. I look forward to next time! Until then I hope you all take care and I wish y'all best of luck. :)
 
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