Canthan New Year has introduced me to one of the weirdest pieces of game design I have ever seen. You can buy tickets for minigames on the boardwalk. There are three games, and there is no other use for tickets. One of the games is an unexciting whack-a-mole, and it costs 1 ticket to play for several minutes.
The other games are squares of 9 and 16 rings. You stand in them, and there is a random distribution of winners and losers. It costs tickets to play, and you can win more tickets. The end. You can go AFK and stay in your ring, thereby winning or losing in each round until you run out of tickets.
You will run out of tickets, because both ring games are net losers. You can profit in the short term, but if you stand in the ring long enough, you will run out of tickets. If you quit during a positive-sum short run, you can sell your tickets back or play more whack-a-mole.
You can pick up some tokens and Gamer points with whack-a-mole, but otherwise the game tickets are a pure way of converting time and money to points towards the Lucky and Unlucky titles. You otherwise increase them by picking locks (or failing to).
Capping either title in the most efficient way possible will cost you millions of gold and thousands of hours. It is as if they anticipated Cow Clicker, minus the clicking.
: Zubon
You left out that advancing your Lucky title actually gives you an in-game benefit. Not as good as Wisdom, or even Treasure Hunter, but still nice.
You can add the titles to HoM at rank 2, but even that is still a hefty price for anyone new to the game. I got to rank 1 before giving up. Maxing the titles is nigh on impossible without spending several festivals AFK.
And talking about games of chance, still haven’t received a celestial dragon after opening loads of lunar fortunes. Only had to do the quests on one character last year and got the celestial rabbit, it was an easy 1+1 points in HoM without much work.
My celestial dragon was my first miniature, so 1+1 HoM. Took ~75 fortunes. Expected number is 200, so for every person who gets it at 75, someone should be around 325. A guildmate got it in 2. That was followed by a mixture of congratulations and hatred.
I argued against the “9 rings” for ages. It is a way to keep people logged in, and a way to measure how many of them are addicted enough to work on said title track. And to burn a few millions gold from the “economy”, but it’s rather poor for that.
Besides that, it’s just piss poor. Nobody can tell me he does like AFK gaming of this kind.
I suggest working on other title tracks, unless you want more than the “God Walking” title and really everything.
These grindy “titles” are violating a ton of the early GW mantras like “skill > time & no grind”.
The money isn’t the problem for rich players, running GW for days in the background is just stupid. There are enough other stupid grinds for the title track that are not nearly as stupid… oh well… :P
It’s an overnight thing, leave the system on, get a good night’s rest. Same for finale.
There are lots if other ways to get lucky /no unlucky points, that is just one pd the fastest. There are also other boardwalk games bit most are kind of useless – – but when was going to a RL carnival particularly profitable?
“…is no other use for tickets.”
Actually, you can trade tickets in for Festival Prizes, which can be one of several items. It’s grab bag, but still useful if you’re working on titles. Rice wine, bean cakes, victory tokens and 1 platinum are all prizes available.
See here:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Festival_Prize
Found that since posting, although as the math on that shows, it is also a net loser compared to just buying the prizes you wanted. You lose trying to win tickets and then lose more redeeming them. It’s a time-limited gold- and time-sink.