Garden: Successes and Glitches

On the last day of Double Gardening, most of my wizards have reaped a second final harvest (most had gardens sitting at elder waiting for this), inflating my mega snack supplies and restoring gold for my two main accounts plus lots of pricey amulets in the banks and shared banks so the next round of gold-depleting hatching on Double Pets hopefully won’t wipe out all my gold again 🙂

I’ve had some funny glitchy stuff going on for a few weeks with plants developing at different rates.  At this point I mostly only garden with the wizards who have Plant All, so in any given patch I know every single plant went in at exactly the same time.

The strangest one was a couple of weeks ago when Jasmine R. tended a large patch of Couch Potatoes.  One Couch Potato suddenly went completely off, not only in when it had needs, but in progress, so it was only halfway to elder when the rest of the patch hit elder harvest.  I then replanted the rest of the seeds and it took the entire second round for that plant to finally mature to elder.

This weekend, for several wizards I planted large patches of Evil Magma Peas and Couch Potatoes, again using Plant All so all planted simultaneously, and scattered plants throughout each patch were on completely different needs schedules than the rest.  They did all hit Elder at the same time, but I had to cast lots of extra spells to cover the ones with needs off-schedule from the others.

The Evil Magma Peas moved along at pretty much the normal pace, but the Couch Potatoes all seemed to be slowed down.  Normally if I plant a bunch of them on a Thursday afternoon, I would expect to be collecting a final harvest by anywhere from late Saturday night to early Sunday afternoon.  This time they all took until Monday afternoon to hit elder harvest.  Good thing we had an extra day this time 🙂

Other than a couple of lower level wizards who didn’t have Summon Pixie when this event started (thanks to double XP they got there!)–meaning slower progress — I’ve harvested just about everything I planted and am planning a gardening hiatus at least until we’ve had Double Pets.

The gardening has been taking so much time I haven’t really looked around much to see what else is going on, though the Facebook Adult Non-PvP group posted that the Daily Assignments Reward Bonus is already going.  I don’t do the assignments too often and the only ones I looked at required long hikes to remote places plus a battle and I just didn’t want to waste the time so not sure about the rewards.

Since they’re rotating through benefits, I’m guessing a new one will appear tomorrow, so keep watching the news feed that shows up on the log-in screen for the game.  More fun to come.

Gardening changes?

June 14, 2018

I feel like I’m seeing some changes in gardening drops recently, though I don’t keep any records, so it’s just based on memory and feeling.  When KI first introduced housing item drops, they were fairly infrequent.  Then they started dropping copioiusly.

At every harvest of Evil Magma Peas I would wind up with 3 or Djembe Drums and/or 3 or 4 Egg Baskets.  At every harvest of Sword Ferns I would get 2 or 3 Sword Trees and 3-4 Ninja Sword racks and/or some color of Sword Displays.  Lately if I have 52 EMPs growing I’m lucky if I get one Djembe Drum or one Egg Basket per harvest.

I also used to get huge numbers of Treasure Cards from the EMPs.  I was constantly selling off Tower Shields and Feints and I kind of thought I got Pierce and Earthquake at more levels than just elder harvest.  I still get the TCs and Feints but not in the numbers I used to.  And Earthquake and Pierce only drop at elder harvest.

Same thing for reagents — I’m not selling as many reagents per mature and/or elder harvest as I used to.  Now, to be fair, besides my lack of record-keeping, for some time I have mostly only participated in gardening during Double Garden events., so my memory about normal harvests is dipping a bit into the past.  But it also feels like I don’t get as many of some of these dropped when it Doubles.  Just wondering if anyone else is noticing some subtle differences in the drops.

Also thought I’d point out an odd occurrence in using Plant All (see picture above).  After harvesting, there were 44 seeds in my backpack and I planted all of those.  Then I realized I still had some energy and could fill in the six unfilled slots in that particular plot  So I planted two, one on top of one another (for some reason Plant All won’t fill in an empty plot that’s sitting above one you filled), and then used Plant All to plant the other 4.  It asked me about 4, it emptied all the seeds out of her backpack, but she was left with two blank plots.  Huh?

Daily Assignment bonus goes on

In an unusual move, when KI changed the news feed on the opening window of the game Monday, they took off the Daily Assignment Bonus news item though it’s supposed to continue through Sunday, June 17.  Generally these events stay on the feed through their entire run.

I’m only vaguely participating in the event but I did the assignment with several wizards to check out the rewards and they were all still receiving double rewards and the rewards page still says “bonus” on the top.  It doesn’t seem to be meaning anything much for the treasure chest days except if you get a temporary mount it’s for 15 days instead of 7.  Otherwise, it’s mostly drops temporary mounts and weird housing items (and the same ones seem to show up repeatedly) it doesn’t seem the chests really give much extra.

If you like doing the Daily Assignments you apparently still have through Sunday even though they’ve dropped the announcement from the news feed.

Another Double Pets — and no Double Gardens… still

April 5, 2018

KI started yet another Double Pets event today, just after some of us were commenting on the adult non-PvP Facebook group about hoping for a Double Gardening event.

I gather KI either (1) makes more money off elixir sales or (2) loses less in crowns since double gardening helps people expand their seed supplies without purchasing or (3) maybe both, with the double pet events, so the Double Garden events have become few and far between.

As usual, I have many wizards hanging out with full gardens at elder harvest, now for something like 2 or 3 months, waiting for a double event.  Sometimes I wind up needing gold and having to harvest and replant before an event finally comes around…

Meanwhile, through Sunday, April 8, you’ll receive double XP for both pet games and pet snacks.  At the moment I still feel like it’s mostly a big waste of time or a crap shoot in which I spend way too much boring time with little chance of getting what I hoped for, so don’t know that I’ll be taking advantage.  And it sure doesn’t inspire me the way the garden events do to buy a membership for my non-member accounts to participate.

I wonder how much they really lose in crowns for seeds since many of us build (built) our gardens by farming for seed drops.  For me, the double events just meant I was able to build my supply faster — for which I felt so incredibly grateful as I don’t enjoy endlessly fighting the same mobs over and over 🙂  I didn’t pay crowns for the seeds to begin with.  And some folks try to plant more during the event and harvest another round and buy elixir to do so.  I’m curious how much more they profit from double pets than double gardens?

Bottom line, if you’re still working on pets, this is a good time to speed up the training.  If you’re waiting for double harvests in gardening, don’t hold your breath.

More pet blahs

After some more pet debacles during intense hatching and training during the birthday celebration, I eschewed the next two or three (or more?) Double Pet events, having thrown up my hands in defeat.  But I decided to do some training on incomplete pets and to try a bit of hatching between two of my accounts.

As usual, none of the pets have all five talents I was aiming for, though I’ll admit all the ones you see above are pretty good, so I’m just shrugging and settling for these as I’m again pretty much disgusted at the whole process…

Sword and Shield has been the hardest thing to get rid of — and it’s such a dumb ability, I can’t imagine why it’s even on offer.  The pet can randomly cast both a blade and a shield on you but pretty much 100% of the time the blade isn’t for your school and the shield isn’t one that helps against your opponents.  Useless.

In the early fall hatching, etc. I managed one pet that was what I wanted and have been unsuccessfully trying to get the same thing (quint heals–see pic below) for many of my wizards.  Last fall’s efforts included 12 unsuccessful hatches with a kindly wizard from the Adult Non-PVP players group…  Also something like 8 hatches between the wizard who has the quint heal pet on my first account and another wizard on my third account…  all unsuccessful though she is questing with the “best I could do” pet and it’s ok enough.

I keep wondering why KI felt the need to make it THIS hard to get a pet you want — and why they think this random bit–with the endless hours you can waste on a basically boring and tedious process–is fun.  The people with the patience to do this to have different pets for different circumstances for every wizard astonish me — can’t imagine doing it!! 🙂

Double XP affected by DDoS attacks?

Besides the usual difficulties these attacks cause for getting into the game and getting kicked off the game, I’ve been noticing an impact on the harvest drops.  On two of my accounts for certain crops my wizards – and mostly two particular wizards- are getting no treasure cards.  Getting in and staying in has been such an issue I hesitated to try to plant some quick-growing crops but I’ve done it anyway so am interested to see whether the treasure card drought for these two continues.

For instance, one of the main reasons I grow Sword Ferns is to collect TC blades.  They normally drop blades at every level of harvest and then give even more at elder harvest, so if you get double rewards, there’s a boatload of blades.  Two of my wizards harvested 40+ Sword Ferns apiece at elder harvest as soon as the double rewards started and got … ZERO blades.

Now on these particular two accounts I’ve had an ongoing problem that the Harold Argleston warning about having reached the maximum number of treasure cards doesn’t work any more.  Not ever.  But I’m aware of it and am pretty careful about checking on how close to the 999 max I am and every time I’ve harvested a chunk of plants, I check in to see if I need to go to the Bazaar to sell a bunch off before I harvest more.  So realizing that my TC blade counts  had not changed at all after harvesting (including that I always sell or trade off all the ones for schools I don’t use so there should have been some piles of blades where normally there are none) that many Sword Ferns was a shock.

For these two accounts I’ve also been feeding a lot of seeds to pets and those wizards are not getting treasure cards for that either.  For Rylee W. (level 92 Life), there may be a bigger problem.  As noted in a recent post, I’ve been taking her in to farm Loremaster and she’s only getting one gear drop each time, with an occasional reagent added.  Nothing else.  Including no treasure cards at a boss who regularly drops more than one at a time.  So there may be something going on with this character where her programming is screwed up in some odd way that keeps her from ever getting a treasure card in any circumstances.

It also seemed like I got quite a bit less in the way of housing item drops than normal for certain crops.

Since KI seems to have taken to changing the growing times, drop rates, energy globe refill times, etc. to lower the benefits of these events, I’m not sure whether these drop issues are because of the DDoS attacks or are just part of the plan to reduce benefits?  Curious if others are noticing issues with the rewards this time?

A few hours of double pets and strange times at Loremaster

Miss Gigi at Mega

January 7, 2018

I”m again very late making note of a Double Pet Rewards event but you have till something like 8 a.m. tomorrow e.s.t. to train those pets for double points from the games and the snacks.   Hurry and you can get a few pets trained up while it’s still on.

Having been seized with a longing for one of my Life wizzes to get Pigsie, I’ve been farming Loremaster (the only place it drops) with three of my Life wizards.  Two of them have joined a Storm wizard in getting Krampus — pretty much useless to me for any of them as I don’t have a Fire Amulet and don’t intend to get one…

The Storm got it on her one and only battle with Loremaster before she was even in Dragonspyre by porting in to help someone, which led to me realizing you can pick up the Loremaster quest without having attained the world (she was almost finished with Mooshu and had done most side quests too so she was at a level that could have been in DS if she’d finished the main quests so I don’t know how low a level you could be to pick it up).

So today I put my one Fire wizard in just to see if she could get it and sure enough on the second try she got it.  Leaving me with four wizards who’ve gotten Krampus, three of whom won’t ever use it and one who will.  And no wizard has gotten any other permanent spell from Loremaster.  None.  Ever.  I keep thinking in these dungeons where you can get a spell dropped it would make more sense if KI tuned it up so you’re more likely to get the spell for your wizard’s school. But then I don’t do secondary schools…

Meanwhile I’ve been mostly farming with Rylee W., my level 93 Life wiz.  Not only is she not getting Pigsie but in almost every team she’s winding up directly across from Loremaster — which means she’s taking most of her hits — and only getting one drop.  Every time.  One drop.  And it’s always a low level item of gear, not any treasure cards, not any housing items and definitely no spells.  I’ve farmed it enough to know you often get 2 or 3 TCs, a gear item and a snack or a housing item so I find it very weird that randomly this particular wizard receives one and only one drop (besides the gold) 99% of the time.*

Meanwhile, back on the Double Pets.  I did decide to train a pet for my Fire wiz and wound up with a pet with 4 may-cast heals and a Fire damage boost, so pretty pleased.  The weird thing here was that I trained a bunch last night and then shut down.  Something like 14 hours later I got on today to finish mega and her energy had still not filled all the way back up from last night’s training.  I don’t have super energy gear, so she only needed to get to 114 from something like 6, but she’d only made it to 99.  In 14 hours.  Really?  I usually can come back after more like 8 or 10 hours and find the energy globe full.

I know many of us have been noting during Double Garden events that KI seems to be slowing down the growing time on various plants so there are several you can no longer plant at the beginning of a Double event and get it to elder harvest during the event.  So I’m wondering if now they’re also slowing down the refill time on the energy globes during Double Pet events?  Is anybody else having this experience?

Okay, so that’s my current noting of mysterious events in the spiral 🙂

What’s left of today is also our last shot at holiday drops and dungeons.  Have fun!

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* Actually for Rylee, I’ve noticed her regularly receiving one drop to Morgan’s many a huge amount of the time when I have the two of them questing together, so it may not just be quirk of Loremaster … might be a quirk about Rylee 🙂

Strange tutorials, tips and the new log

One of the things I most dislike about reinstalling the game is the kerfuffle that happens with tutorials.  With every one of my wizards the game acts as if I’ve started a new wizard and starts popping out tips and the quests that just pop up from a professor or character in a bubble on the right.  To some extent all my wizards have issues with repeated tutorials and summons to quests (I think my level 92’s have been told they have text chat and what a treasure card is a few dozen times), but it’s especially bad when you start over.

Now to add to the madness, KI has added a page in the spell book that keeps a list of these.  You open to the quest pages and in the upper left hand corner you can click for a list of these tips.  The problem is there doesn’t appear to be any way to delete any of them.  The few times I’ve done one of the quests and gone back to look, the call to the quest has still been there.  Same for tips I’ve looked at.  At the beginning it also kept the repeats, so the “this is a treasure card” tip could be in there more than once.

It seems like something has been activated that keeps out the duplicates and sometimes takes a completed quest out automatically but otherwise they seem to stack up and I can’t find a way to get rid of the ones I don’t need.  It means the log doesn’t help me much because I can’t tell whether the call to Ambrose, say, is a new one or one of the ones that’s popped up half a dozen times since I completed the quest.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve popped in to Ambrose’s office after one of these “calls” only to see a grayed-out punctuation mark over his head and no new quest on offer.

I used to wish that the quests that showed up over there would get put in the quest book as I sometimes forgot I was supposed to go see Moolinda Wu or whoever.  But this doesn’t help any more than seeing the tip and having it disappear because the list seems to take on the weirdly-recurring tips, as well as the new ones.

I think the new list is a great idea but the whole tutorial/professor quests thing needs some tweaking so you don’t keep getting the same tips and quests over and over.  Even more the new list needs to be tweaked so it doesn’t accept the same quest again once it’s been in there and so they either get automatically erased when you’ve read the tip or done the quest or you can delete each one after you’ve read it or done it. Then it will be a great addition.

Game down followed by multi glitches

Three something in the morning, I’m up because my muscles are causing trouble, and taking advantage of the birthday celebration by training a pet.  Grumpy Gobblers is the game in which I can collect all four (in this case eight) points pretty much every time so I’m lobbing my pet at the lego-like structures.  Suddenly the game freezes and I can’t get anything to go again. I wind up using control-alt-delete to close the program, get on again and same thing happens.

I’d used the free elixir and wound up wasting at least half, first spending 10 points a round on nothing– game didn’t finish and couldn’t feed pet so zero points–and then by having to quit before I’d used it all.  I logged off and tried to get back on the game.  No dice. Tried a couple of times and finally gave up.

Early the next afternoon I tried to get on again and couldn’t do it.  Waited a while and couldn’t get on again.  I kept getting an error message I’d had before and started running all kinds of fixes as well as the usual, restart computer, turn off/turn on router, try a second computer, change firewall settings, etc.  Finally it occurred to me I should check the Wizard101 Non PvP Facebook group to which I belong and there discovered the game was down for everybody.

I couldn’t get back on till after midnight and then I ran into glitches so often everything took ages.  Every wizard with a garden froze upon casting the first spell.  When it started up again it would close the gardening menu, take the wizard off her mount (literally no longer equipped) and prevent casting any further gardening spells.  Each time I had to “quit” and re-enter.  When I tried to plant gardens, it would disconnect from the server every 5 or 6 seeds and then I couldn’t select a seed or do anything else until I quit and came back in again.

Also tried to do some pet training.  It kept freezing, either during the game or when I tried to feed my pet.  Eventually a “Connection Lost” message would pop up, I’d quit and then come back in.  This time the xp would have registered when I came back in, but still, a tiresome way to play.

There was much speculation today as to what caused the game to go down.  I’m not going to engage.  KI will probably make a statement about what happened.  And clearly, whatever went wrong, there are still glitches because of it.  Hopefully all will be worked out soon.  I’m hoping the birthday celebration will extend through Wednesday since we all basically missed a day.

Another Double Pet Rewards

July 30, 2017

I’m very behind on posting so I’m just in time for the last day of Double Pet Rewards.  You have till something like 8 a.m. EST Monday morning to get double XP on pet games and snacks if you’re a member.

It’s been a little odd this time.  I’ve had several wizards who either couldn’t get into the Pet Pavilion without closing out and starting again or took several tries.  And the Gobbler game froze midstream and I had to close the game and log in again — of course lost the energy points anyway…

I have managed to finish training some decent pets:

Shellnobi Warrior

Deer Knight

I’ve also tried to find hatches for my Storm and Fire girls, who’ve never managed to have very good pets, but no dice this time…