vgfan100

Greetings mercenaries,

Halloween is coming up! You know what that means? The 2017 Vindictus Halloween Party is officially upon us, and the events are bigger and better than ever (hence why I'm planning at least 2 months in advance). Every year, this party has brought players, particularly on East server, together to celebrate the creativity and spirit of the Vindictus community. This year, we're going to invite all NA server regions (East, West, EU, and AUS) with one (maybe two) events! The Halloween Party will be streamed on my Twitch channel . Special thanks to Saygo and the Vindictus team for potentially sponsoring the prizes for the Vindictus Costume Contest.

So, without further delay, here are the details. Fair warning: this is a long post. Here's the table of contents for reference:

1. Schedule of Events/Deadlines
2. Hide and Seek
3. Dullahan Speedrun Tournament
4. Vindictus Trivia (on Twitch)
5. East Server Photo Shoot
6. Cosplay Gallery Walk / Costume Contest
7. Costume PvP Tournament

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Who: This is for all players on East server only (unless someone is willing to host a similar event for the other servers).

What: GMs (maybe?), other players, and I will hide in various locations either in-town in any channel or a specific battle. The whole server will compete to be the first player to find the person hiding.

Start Time: 5:00PM EST
End Time: Before 6:00PM EST (1 hour after the start of the party)

Rules:

• The person hiding will not use glitches or bugs in the game to hide.
• One hint will be given through megas and another hint will be given on stream.
• The person hiding will whisper me the winner. The player who finds the person hiding must stand next to them and type something along the lines of “I found you” in General Chat.
• For those who volunteer to hide, if someone whispers you for your location, do not tell them. This event will only work if you stay silent until someone finds you.

Prizes: The winner of each round will receive 5 million gold. If you manage to win all 10 rounds, you will net 50M gold!

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Setting Up Your Team's Run

One player per team will do the following:

• Set up a Twitch account
• Download LiveSplit. This is a program that is used by many speedrunners on Twitch. The program is basically a fancy stopwatch, and it is free to download. You may create splits for completing segments of a run and compare your run to other players. For this event, you do not have to create splits. All that matters is the final time. You may set any key on your keyboard as your Start/Stop global hotkey for LiveSplit.
• Download a streaming app (OBS, XSplit, etc.), enter your stream key from Twitch to link your channel to your streaming app, and create a scene, capturing your game and LiveSplit. My recommendation is to place your timer on the lower-left side next to the chat box.
• Submit a link to a highlight of a full run of Dullahan on the Official Dullahan Speedrun Tournament Team Registration thread along with your Twitch channel name and server. A list of players who will be streaming their team’s run will be formed in this thread.

Note: The submission of your full run is not what will be used for the actual event. This is to prove that you can stream the run, and this helps me set up your team's run along with other players in real time (or with the Twitch delay xD). Here’s an example of what I’m going for except the timer will be exclusive to each team's run: A Link to the Past 4-Player Speedrun

How Teams Will Form

Teams of 4 players will be formed with 3 players joining the one player who is streaming the run. The player who submitted the highlight will edit their post to include a list of all 4 team members; this includes their IGN and character/class (e.g. KidIcarus - Sword Lann). Players may confer with each other to come up with a team name if they wish. Otherwise, a list of players and the server region will be used.

Who Competes?

All NA servers can compete! This includes East, West, AUS, and EU!

Streamer is Team Leader

The player who is streaming your team’s run must be present at the Halloween party. They do not have to host the boat, but if the streamer is not present by the time your team is up, your team will be disqualified because I have no means to track your team's time for the competition. The more teams we have, the more exciting this event will be!

Who Goes When?

The order for which team goes when will be randomized. I will post the order shortly after the cutoff time for team registration so your team can plan. The races will take place from 6:00PM to however long it takes depending on how many teams we have. Four teams will run at the same time. Be sure all team members are ready to go. If a member of your party is missing when your team is up for the run, the team will have to do the speedrun with less players, which will put the group at a significant disadvantage.

Will I Be Participating?

Sadly, I will not participate in this event myself since I have to manage it. However, if we reach at least 200 viewers at any point during the stream, I will battle Dullahan with a team wearing NO ARMOR (Only my weapon and accessories will be equipped) at the end of the party! RIP me!

Rules:

• Time starts when Dullahan’s HP bar appears. Time stops when his HP bar reaches 0.
• You may use any means necessary to revive yourself. This includes Goddess Graces. However, every 4 Goddess Graces used will result in 15 seconds being added to your team's final time. The goal for this rule is to promote skill in suriviving the battle and using Phoenix Feathers/Guild Feathers/Evie Revivals (when applicable).
• You may use transformations during the speedrun.
• You may use any artifact you wish.
• You may use any consumables you wish. However, you may NOT use damage increase potions or stimulants. These items have been found to create an unfair advantage for certain classes. It will be difficult to enforce this rule since I cannot check in-game, but if it is found that a damage potion or stimulant was used during the run, your team will be disqualified. Show good sportsmanship for all teams, and un-equip these consumables before going into battle so you are not tempted to use them. (Credit to Blyat & Leucosie for this rule)
• You may use pets (but seriously, why would you? ).
• Your team cannot be 3 or 4 of the same character (e.g. 2 Crossgun Kais & 2 Bow Kais, or 3 Fionas and a Staff Evie). Furthermore, only one Karok per team (because 2 or more Karoks make this raid absolutely broken with his clashing mechanic). This prevents teams from having an unfair advantage due to possible imbalances with certain characters in this raid. For clarification, you can have, for example, two Scythe Evies, one Sword Lann, and one Spear Lann. Form your teams wisely! (Credit to JynXi for this rule)
• If even one player manages to stay alive during the entire run, your team will receive a huge 30 second deduction from your final time. Don’t get rekt by the boss!

Prize: TBA in October

Who: All NA servers/Twitch

When: 6:00PM EST (1 hour after the start of the party)

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I will ask a total of 10 trivia questions related to Vindictus on my Twitch stream. The first person to give the correct answer will receive one ticket. Every person in Twitch chat will receive one ticket for being in chat, and the more tickets you collect, the greater your chances of winning. The prize? 10k NX!

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• Server Group Photo
• Cosplay Group Photo (Any players who have a cosplay for their character may participate in the photo shoot)
• Pictures will be posted on Vindictus social media at the discretion of the GMs

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This year's Halloween Party will invite all servers to participate in a gallery walk, either in-game on East server or through Twitch. If you have a cosplay that you would like to show off in-game on stream, meet us in Ch. 1 Rocheste by the stairs leading to Rocheste Castle. I will host a costume contest for all servers to participate in. You may either be present on East server in your costume or, if you're on a different server, you may send a screenshot of your character in costume through a whisper through Twitch along with the category you are submitting for. You may only sign up one costume per category. The categories for this year's costume contest are:

• Scariest Costume
• Silliest Costume
• Sexiest Costume (excluding Inner Armor only)
• Best Combination of Gear
• Best Cosplay

To avoid delays, when a category is called, the judges will begin judging the costumes 2 minutes after the announcement and make a decision 10 minutes after. Judges will be myself, GMs (maybe), and other players who volunteer. I will need a total of 5 judges for this event. If you are interested, you'll be compensated for helping. The winner of each category will receive 10k NX!

There is also an incentive for showing up to the gallery walk. You will be able to participate in the final event of the party.

Where: Rocheste Castle steps, Ch. 1 / Twitch

When: After the East Server photo shoot

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Last year, I hosted a PvP tournament that was intended to be for cosplayers only. This year, the tournament will have a registration requirement of having a costume for your character. For example, you can be Naruto, the Incredible Hulk (shoutout to Nyterminator ), or a scary mummy. In other words, It can't be generic (for example, sorry but no Karoks in pink speedos ); it needs to be a costume. Bragging rights are on the line in this hilarious yet very intense event.

Logistics:

• Anyone who is interested in participating in the tournament must show up at the cosplay gallery walk on East server. You will not be entered in the bracket if you do not show up and present yourself in your costume.
• At the gallery walk, I will ask if anyone would like to compete in the PvP tournament. At that time, send an in-game message to me via the mailbox with a message of interest ("I'm in!") and your cosplay reference if you have one (i.e. My costume is "so-and-so" from "blah blah blah")
• Every player who participates will be assigned a number. The bracket pairs will be determined by RNG to make tournament order as fair as possible.
• If you would like to use a weaker weapon to balance your stats against your opponent, that would be a very kind thing to do on stream. It would also make the fights more exciting!
• Each bracket round is Best of 3 matches. In other words, if each player wins one round, the 3rd round will decide who moves on.
• There will be no Losers bracket. If you are out of the tournament, you are free to go. Feel free to stick around and watch the tournament or battle each other in another PvP Arena channel, but if there's a large number of combatants who will be fighting next, I will ask you to leave the Channel 1 Arena to make room for those who are competing (You can still watch the matches on Twitch).
• Overall, just have fun. Do fight your hardest to make this event exciting to watch, but also be mindful of who you are fighting against and show good sportsmanship.

Where: PvP Arena Ch. 1

When: After the Gallery Walk (around 10:00PM EST)

Prize:
1st: 10M gold
2nd: 5M gold
3rd/4th: 2.5M gold

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I agree! There was no reason to take away Hard Mode, Hero Mode, and, heck, EASY Mode away from Season 1 and Season 2 (excluding Hero Mode for some raids). We should be allowed to play on any difficulty, not be forced to play on a certain difficulty.

It would be nice if there was an increase in drop rate and relevance of rare items with the increase in difficulty. Heck, you could introduce Redeemer Mode (Limited HP pots, no GGs, no trans, no buffs) to the "used-to-be raid" battles; this would mimic the good ole' days of when a majority of Vindictus was actually challenging! It wouldn't be impossible to implement, and it would encourage players to challenge themselves for fun.

EnigmaTaro wrote: »

Maybe people should start using rookie weapon and armors and see how they fare in these battles.

I haven't tried old contents on new characters to see how boss mechanics got eradicated but haven't geared players been oneshotting and got bored of these s1/s2 bosses even before update? Who even does ekinar if fast ES doesn't drop there? People are claiming as if they even do hero mode s1, when people only run minimal stuff that yields any source of gold.

Relevant contents are still as hard as they were, and I bet only a few of you here ever thought about soloing neamhain (but that's really gear dependent to finish within one hour). If you really call the game too easy, just downgrade yourself, own weapon ranging from +0 to +10 or higher like I do and calibrate difficulties that way. Players complain all the times instead of finding solutions of their own. Feel free to correct flaws in my argument since I wrote this in a rush.

Or what we could do is have the host adjust the difficulty of the battle on a sliding scale based on level or stats. This will at least allow players to set their own challenges and have the party meet those challenges together. For example, setting Neimhain on the highest difficulty will net you Neimhain's Wings or her outfitter (something to entice the players to beat this challenge on the hardest difficulty (meaning the Attack Cap)... kind of like the free stuff we got for beating Neimhain when she first came out). Of course, you can lower this to the original difficulty and still get the rewards we get now, which is still viable. The reward system for other battles could be titles and higher-quality weapons/armor/drops you gain from beating these higher difficulties or a way higher gold/exp/ap reward scaled to the difficulty? I don't know; it's a thought.

I was mostly hyped about the RISE update because of the optimization improvements, but this difficulty nerf (should I even call it a nerf?) is just ridiculous. There's no difficulty setting at all for Season 1. Maybe I'm missing something about Hero Mode being unlocked for Season 1, but right now, there's only one difficulty, and it's Normal (a.k.a the new Easy Mode). At least Season 2 has Hero Mode for 4-plater battles, but it's either play Normal Mode or play Hero Mode. Why not implement a slider for selecting the difficulty and reward players for taking on tougher challenges? Also, I understand why DevCat removed 8-man raids for filling boats faster and reducing lag, but why force this on to everyone? Why not keep the option to host 8-man raids if you can host 8-man raids? That's what got me into Vindictus the first time I started playing back in 2010, and now DevCat wants to remove that? Why?!

Honestly, after RISE, I feel like the only activities that are actually fun to play are as follows:

1. Season 3 Full Map Runs/Raids
2. Redeemer's (Neimhain)
3. Abyssal Arena
4. Niflheim
5. Ein Lacher (This one's iffy unless you see only stat increases as a good enough reward for the amount of effort you have to put in)
6. AFK/Chat in Colhen Ch. 1

That's basically it. There's no incentive to play Season 1 or Season 2 anymore because the battles are stupidly easy and don't reward you for challenging your skills.

Now, don't get me wrong. RISE brought a ton of good things for the game, such as a better enchant system, better graphics for both Colhen and Perilous Ruins ("gorgeous" is a more accurate description for Perilous Ruins; it looks WAY better), and Character Buffs that help out Lynn and Lann with stamina issues and staying in combat. I will still continue to play Vindictus because I do enjoy the later content, and it's a game that I have dedicated a lot of time and resources to enjoying; I don't want to quit that easily. I noticed that there was an up-tick in players trying out Vindictus for the very first time on Twitch, which is a good thing. However, if this difficulty issue doesn't get addressed immediately, other players, both new and old, won't be so forgiving and will find out how little challenge this game offers, get bored, and leave (maybe for good).

Why is the thread made?



I had to do it. I'm sorry.

In all seriousness though, titles alone are not a good indicator of who is the best at each class. If you want to go off of titles alone to find out who is good at what class, you would have to make a list of every character on each server and the amount of titles they have. This is practically impossibly unless you have a ridiculous amount of time to do this. A better indicator of who is the best on each class would be how that player both contributes to the battle (DPS, healing, buffs, reviving, etc.) and their overall personality towards other players and the community as a whole.