Wintersday finale approaches
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.
Tags: Games, Guild Wars, Wintersday