Spontaneous Monotony

Just wishing everyone a Happy New Year, via my Asus Eee.

 EDIT: Forgot my most important tip; MAKE SURE YOU LOG IN TO THE GAME HALF AN HOUR BEFORE THE APPEARANCE. Even when the servers work during these events, there is usually very serious lag which may prevent you from connecting if you leave it any later. Just connect, zone to your district of choice and then go do something else for 25 minutes.

The showpiece grand finale of this year’s Wintersday festival in Guild Wars is almost upon us. For those of you who weren’t playing the game last year (or had better, alcohol-related, things to do on New Year’s Day :P) I’ll give a brief rundown of how it works.

The finale happens in the ‘primary’ towns of Tyria and Elona - Lion’s Arch and Kamadan respectively (well, when Prophecies was simply known as ‘Guild Wars’, Droknar’s Forge was actually the primary town but that’s another story). Sorry Factions users, but you get the Dragon Festival instead of Wintersday. Anyway, the appearances are the usual every three hours starting from 8am GMT. The two gods (Grenth and Dwayna) hang around giving out presents - the ’special event’ items you probably have a zillion of from event quests and games anyway - for about 25 minutes, then they give out a hat. The difference between Wintersday and (for example) Halloween is that the type of hat you are given will depend on the god who ‘wins’ your district of the town by having the most followers gathered around them. To remove the unfair randomness, and ensure that people are able to get the hats they want, players have a tradition of making odd-numbered districts Grenth and even-numbered districts Dwayna ones.

Remember that if you are in a high-numbered district, server lag/staging can mean the event doesn’t start right on time (sometimes as much as 10 - 15 minutes later). Don’t worry about this, it is entirely normal and will not make you ‘miss’ the event. In fact, if you are lucky enough to get into a lower-numbered district, you can even use this to your advantage by ‘zoning’ to a higher numbered district which gives out a different hat as soon as you get your first one, and get two hats in one outing. I did this last year entirely by accident (was zoning to Kamadan to see a guildie, who was in d53).

Also remember that LA and Kamadan give out different hats - last year the former gave out the traditional santa hats/antlers (Dwayna/Grenth respectively) while the latter gave out Freezie Crowns and Jester Caps. So if you want to get all the possible hats you will have to attend four events - unless you use the zoning trick.

Useful links

• Wintersday finale appearance times (official wiki)
  
• Guild Wars network news - ArenaNet haven’t run even the smaller events (like the Dragon Festival) this year without massive server issues, and Wintersday is bigger than any of those. Leave yourself an extra event slot or two spare in case their network goes toes-up again.

BT have never really had ‘fans’, being the former monopoly telecoms provider and generally charging more than competitors for their internet service (in between making questionable use of their near-monopoly against said competitors). However, until recently their saving grace has been that the internet service is generally fast and reliable. Unfortunately it has been deteriorating rapidly in recent times. Many BT IP addresses are listed on spam blocklists (I’ve had quite a few ‘email not sent’ messages to this effect from my mailserver), and in the past week or so BT’s network has simply stopped connecting anyone to NCSoft’s network (their websites, as well as the Guild Wars, City of Heroes and Tabula Rasa games). Perhaps it is in fact the reverse - due to the aforementioned spamlistings, servers in between BT and the destination are discarding connections due to security concerns? Either way, BT’s fault.

Problems with the distance from the telephone exchange, or with the weather, are understandable if irritating. What isn’t acceptable though is for the actual service - connecting the paying customer’s computer with whatever servers he or she wishes to access - to be so indefensibly dire.

For a long time Gamespot has been one of the web’s most trusted sources of reviews. CNET’s corporate management have managed to destroy that reputation - built up over years - in a matter of days. There are two things that we know for certain - Gamespot editor Jeff Gertsmann recently gave a negative review to the new Kane and Lynch game. He was then fired. Now the rumour which has caught on is that the two were linked - that Gerstmann was fired after Eidos threatened to cancel advertising campaigns on CNET’s sites.

Of course, this leaves many people in search of a review site which still has some integrity left. One I’ve seen mentioned in a few places is 1UP - if anyone has any other Corruptspot alternatives then post a comment here and I’ll add them to the list.

Of course, that has not been confirmed (and given the confidentiality rules surrounding employment it is pretty difficult to do so), but the response of CNET staff has been as good as in many people’s eyes. Instead of giving the company’s side of the story, CNET’s moderators are closing any forum posts (often including abusive comments in their reply) which question the company’s conduct. One of the few surviving complaint threads is (at the time of writing) 1096 pages long. Not posts, PAGES! Given the level of aggro this is causing, I suspect that the costs in terms of lost credibility (not to mention loss of a great many paying subscribers, myself included) are far higher than whatever the value of the Eidos advertising was.