The countdown has begun

Fellow friends of Aranock,

It is my pleasure to announce an exciting new area being released at 9pm EST this Friday, May 29th.

You will notice a green countdown timer once you log in saying how much time left until next Automated Monster Lotto. 

More details to come following the grand opening.

See you soon.

US EST = 9PM Friday night.
GMT +8 = 9AM Saturday morning.

The brave and the courageous are required.
Bring lots of mana, heal or replenishing potions.
There are no rank restrictions - it caters for Privates through to Warlords although if you do not have heal then you will most likely struggle.

Hint: Do NOT use any special potions or scrolls BEFORE you enter the first portal.  It will be wasted.

Congratulations to Okotom (Earl Seyan) and Icecold (Gen AT) for completing the Automated Monster Lotto successfully.

Commiserations to Bash (Brig AT) for killing the last NPC on level 9, 3 minutes after the competition closed.

Well done to those others who tried and were not successful.

There will be a second event today UK in the UK time zone for their trial.

Key observations from today's event.
You need a good supply of gmana or greps to be able to make it.
You will need an rpot, gpot or dpot depending on your rank.
Levels 7-9 auto attack so be ready.
The perception is that ATs and Seyan find this easier.  We will need some other races to step up to the challenge and test this hypothesis.

Do not touch the end portal in the room of there are any NPCs, including your GC, in the room.  You will be disqualified.

Note the time.  If the ML closes, you can not complete it, even if you killed all the NPCs on level 9.

ooh what time is the UK one?

10 hours and 6 minutes from the time of this post.

When you log in it will tell you how long to go.

Daaang I won't finish work in time. You've effectively ruined my life

Two characters passed.
Bill (Lt Gen Warrior) and Matt (Knight AH) both made it through - well done.

There were a number of other valiant but unsuccessful attempts.

Level 7-9 appears to have unstuck players with low or no immunity and with no effective mass AOE spells like C2.
The auto attack section was harsh.

Constructive suggestions are welcome.

Thank you LL for all the hard work you've done. 

I'd love to hear feedback about our area. It's a simple yet entertaining area I find.

How do you feel the reward system is? Do you think you should only receive a reward after the 9th round? Or should you get a smaller reward after every round? Or how about when you finish each portal (3 levels each)? And then a big reward at the end?

Essentially the purpose of my idea was to encourage players to log in at set times that we choose because the rewards are worth it. If this portal is only open for an hour every 92 hours, and you get wicked exp, I'm gonna set my alarm at 3am and wake up just to complete it.

Know what I mean? How do you feel the rewards for completion was?

Thanks again for coming out and will appreciate any feedback good or bad!

Also, I think that you should be able to complete it if you've already started.

What I mean is that the portal only works for an hour, but if you get in at 00:59 and it takes you 15mins to complete, you can still do it.

Unless we are really trying to make people race through it 

Note to self.
Change timer to be on the start portal and not the end portal.

This works now that the recall point has been changed to the big portal room.

First, I'd like to say it was really fun and quite challenging.  The coolest part, I thought, was that we got to fight other players (even if they were controlled by AI it was still really neat.)

amanar wrote:

How do you feel the reward system is?

Currently, the reward system (unless I was just extremely unlucky) seems far too low.  On my Knight ranked Arch Hara I received 25k experience and 1.4k luck.  In pents, I can make just under a million an hour, or about as much as I got for the lotto in around 90 seconds.  To pass the lotto I used 2 gpots and around 20 minutes of my time.

It wasn't much better on my Lt. General ranked warrior, I received 35k experience, or as Purity put it less than I could make in 4 minutes of abandoned town.

It's also worth noting that I feel as if my hara passed mostly out of luck.  There were multiple times in rounds 7-9 I survived by less than 5% of my hitpoints, against enemies that could have stunned me at any moment.  I think the autoattack rounds are particularly brutal against people without immunity.  

My warrior's experience was quite different.  With only maybe 145 mod immunity tops and not enough resist to prevent curse, I made it through with relative ease.  There were no times where I was in fear of dying on him, it was simply fear of running out of mana to heal (never got close even).

My suggestion, for the autoattack rounds, would be to make the enemys spawn when the player enters the arena (so they have to take time to spell up) or give them a random 10-20 second delay on spawning so that they still have the element of surprise but at least a caster could go somewhere and stealth or spawn a GC.

amanar wrote:

Do you think you should only receive a reward after the 9th round? Or should you get a smaller reward after every round? Or how about when you finish each portal (3 levels each)? And then a big reward at the end?

I think, honestly, the current reward should be given out after each portal, with something substantial at the end.  Even if I'd received 30k experience for every portal, it stilll wouldn't have been equivalent to penting, but I'd probably do it just for the change of pace. As for the big reward, Motoko mentioned in his post for Azrael's Last Party something about currency you could collect to exchange for gear.... I think that would be a great reward for passing all 9 portals.  It also encourages repeat wins, rather than just deciding "oh, I've already beat the lotto, might as well keep penting."

If your goal is to use this as something to encourage people to log in I think you should do it frequently, rather than once or twice a week.  The best way to encourage people to play is to give them a reason to log in routinely, not try to force them to log in sporadically for a big reward.

The reward should not be EXP or stat scrolls or luck, we have enough areas to give those.

EXP grinding is done through pents/abandoned town/labs/first kills/poles, thats enough, its pretty easy to rank up these days.

Stat scrolls are easily gotten through RD/prison... in general stat scrolls arent even really good because its easy to get exp. RD needs a buff and needs to have more special drops.

Luck is easily gained by donating gold, which is plentiful. Also you don't really need luck since most things are pretty easy and its kinda hard to get saved or die.

The lotto needs to add some special gear or currency for special gear.

Motoko wrote:

Luck is easily gained by donating gold

Limited to 20k from donations. That is enough for 3 guaranteed saves.

A special and rare item as a reward is the way to go. Working on it.

just did the ML - can you only complete it once? i tried to go in portal again but wouldn't let me

also i think may have been a bug as the monsters from level 6 or 7 onwards would say they wanna kill me but they don't attack

Levels 7-9 want to auto attack on sight and hence the words.

However, I did notice that the light is faint and their eyesight is poor so if they do not auto cast light then some may not be able to see you.
Was it dark and you flying in stealth mode?

We can ask Amped to turn up the lights a bit if stealth mode is not appropriate.

Bill wrote:

I think the auto attack rounds are particularly brutal against people without immunity

This may be an area where we need to tweak it a bit.
Auto attack and too many NPCs = Death if you do not have immunity.

The NPCs are spawned at the same time as the player is sent to the room.
We could limit the auto attack to rooms with only one or two NPCs if that makes more sense.

i was on slow with no light casted on me, even when i cursed/blasted/attacked them they would just walk around and when they walked towards the "lighted" area they wouldn't attack me either

151 mod perception for infravision.

Sarkan wrote:

and when they walked towards the "lighted" area they wouldn't attack me either

It does not matter if they are in light, it is whether you are in light and can be seen by them.