Disconnected Hero League

Good News, Bad News

2011-10-27T17:40:00.005+01:00

We've got some good news for the league. We've managed to attract a number of active players, and some of them are really high level. We've got all the active players from the Devil's Mind league with us now, and a few of them are active pvp'ers too.

I wasn't planning to go to SVS this weekend because most of our high level players haven't been seen for a while. With this group, I'll go make the reservation as soon as I post this. Hopefully a few people will read this before the weekend and we'll have some fun with that fight.

Also, there is a 2x complete event this weekend. All of xp rate, skill rate and drop rate will be doubled from noon Sunday until midnight on the 1st of November. It's not often we get a complete event so lets go out and enjoy it. I'll be on my nuker for this event because...

The bad news is, the second half of Tibet has been delayed yet again. This time "for some weeks". "Technical reasons" is all we were told but you know that translates from Korean as "Indy21 fucked something up again".

Oh well.

G1 closed, GC continues

2011-09-16T04:46:00.004+01:00

Yo Disconnecters,

G1 9d is no more and they are planning to move all their databases to the GC, but this only works trough transfer agreement. I did that transfer too even tho I don't have any items or playable characters :) But we will see if they can recover something from acclaim's screenshots. Maybe yet another "acclamed" database loss? :)

- Red

following message is from gamescampus

http://9dragons.gamescampus.com/news/noticedetail/1/4074

Hello Dragons,

At this time, our team is awaiting the database from GamersFirst. If you noticed, the transfer button is no longer on the top left. This does not mean you have missed the transfer. Rather, we are waiting for the database in order to allow yout complete the transfer from G1 to GC. For those that have done the transfer on our page already, please re-do it again. Once we get the database sent to us, we will be bringing back the transfer button (top left of homepage). At that time, you will be able to complete your transfer over to GC and begin playing your characters again.

Transfer Instruction
Open up the homepage
Click on the Transfer Button (Top Left)
Follow the listed directions
For the most part, it's pretty direct. Just follow the directions and you'll be just fine

Note- If you are not using a widescreen monitor, you may have a hard time finding the transfer button. In that case follow the directions below to find the transfer button

Locating Transfer Button
Open up the 9 Dragons homepage in windows mode (not full screen)
Scroll to the top left
Look for the "BLUE" transfer button

Please make note of this announcement as this is to inform you of the transfer notice

Sincerely,
9 Dragons Team

Screen Shot Contest

2011-08-06T15:20:00.002+01:00

The Games Campus publisher is holding another of their forum events and we're thinking to enter this Gif as our league entry. I'll open the comments section for this post.

Reference Mode

2011-07-18T20:24:00.003+01:00

A few people have asked politely to have this blog re-opened so they could look stuff up once in a while, so I have done that. To keep it that way, and to keep controversy to a minimum I have turned off the comments section. I don't plan to post news or new material.

The blog is now a 9Dragons reference book only. If you wish to quote anything written here I only ask that you give a link to our source material.

- AxtTreiber

Friday the 13th Event

2011-05-12T19:15:00.001+01:00

My rough translation of tomorrow's event:

There is something brewing together in Hefei. The bad omens are piling up ...

White men have come to the conclusion that all indications are that on the 13th this month, at Friday, something terrible will happen in Hefei. They estimate, it is especially during the period of 12 to 18 o'clock to stay away from the capital, if you do not want to be hurt!

If you offer yet deciding during this period to be in Hefei, do not say we did not warn you!

Clan Games Campus

Nothing Special

2011-05-02T22:37:00.004+01:00

This is my first message here so bare with me. Just posting this because AxtTreiber aka SpearDriver is on vacation.

At the current moment there is nothing special going on, on Games Campus. Only thing going on at the moment is the Item Mall Auction. Its the same as the previous one, this week you can pm "Versteigerer" with your bid for certain items. The original message can be found here: Click Here

The items and days are as followed:

Monday till Wednesday (02/05/2011 - 04/05/2011):
2x 7/1000 Hp into Life Weapon Ornament.

Wednesday till Friday (04/05/2011 - 06/05/2011):
1x 30 day Premium Package.

Friday till Monday (06/05/2011 - 09/05/2011):
4x Jade Separator (adds 1 slot to weapons or deco's)

Person with the highest bid in gold gets the item. All auction days run from 14.00 on the start date till 14.00 on the ending date. Items will be placed in your bag at the end of the auction if you got the first place in the bidding and the gold will be removed automaticly.

P.S. I hope you have a nice vacation SD.

On Vacation

2011-05-01T09:03:00.002+01:00

I'm not sure what to do about this blog in the long term, but for the next couple of weeks my wife and I are on vacation in the Canary Islands.

Nothing here to celebrate

2011-04-20T15:00:00.007+01:00

Patch 23 was rolled out today, but it's nothing to celebrate. We were told in advance that the Tibet map would be added to the game today and we got it. So, maybe 3 people can start grinding there. The lowest level mobs are level 176 and from my playing days on Bardo I know that those mobs hit hard.

For those people who can get to the third village on the ice map it's an easy jump to Tibet, and it's safe from the gate to the first village. You'll get 100% value for all the items you sell to the NPC too, so it's worth to save up a couple of bags full and at the end of the grinding day, jump to that map and sell your drops.

I was expecting to find the 800 defense clothes at the drapery, and they were there for about an hour. I bought several sets and passed them on at my cost to league members. It doesn't pay to be a nice guy though because Camlost decided that these are "a bit too powerful".

Seriously? What?

Some nuker might get his feelings hurt when he can't one shot kill everybody in Bloody Plains?

Fuck You Camlost. This is just one more bad decision. Pathetic drop rates, trying to sell skill experience items in the coin mall, hackers still in the game, all those lucky refiners from a small SE Asian nation, and no plan to deal with shared accounts.

What's next? Chi Kung defense items in the coin mall?

In other news I bought one of the NPC weapons from Tibet, because I really badly need a new axe. I'm using a borrowed FC level axe and I'm almost Little Master levels. Ridiculous, right? The story gets better. I cut that axe 12 levels, down to LM6, added one slot to it with a bronze separator and the refining bitch broke it at +3.

There really is nothing here to celebrate. Move along.

-AxtTreiber

Another one bites the dust

2011-04-19T15:25:00.007+01:00

ShadowGuyver pretty much gave up the game last night. We did a run in Gold Coins Mansion for him, to get that killer epithet. It was fun. It's just sad to see another experienced adult player leave the game. Let's face it, they're hard to replace. That guy in particular will be really hard to replace. He's been playing for years and was even a volunteer game manager back in the Acclaim days. There aren't too many around who know more about the game than I do, but he would be one of them.

He's got good reasons though and we all have to respect them. He's graduating university in a few weeks and is already searching for a job. He's got a girlfriend too now, one of the original sort of time sink. He hasn't been too happy about the state of the game either, and in his own words, "Games Campus hasn't done much to improve the game".

He's right of course. This league is called Disconnected for a reason, and we all still get dc'ed far too often. The game crashes at the map changes are pretty annoying too. There is still no such thing as PvP balance even with the artificial attack rating cap on the nukers. All it takes is one high level nuker to show up and no one else will ever have a chance to take one of the fortresses. In Black vs White war Batuo can single-handedly defend the white side Hermit.

PvP balance may not be something that Games Campus can ever fix but there are plenty of other issues they could deal with, and obviously they don't have the same concerns that we players have. Refining hacks get a three day ban, quest repeats are still happening, damage is hacked on the bosses, level hacking is back, and shared accounts are more common than ever. The lack of responses from Games Campus mean it's just not worth to report them anymore.

And in the mean time, another one bites the dust.

See ya Shadow, it was a lot of fun having you around! Come and see us once in a while.

- AxtTreiber

A few things

2011-04-17T16:29:00.009+01:00

I don't have much that is important to report, but I thought I would share a few things from the news this weekend. First of all the experience event is going reasonably well and a fair number of people are actually playing. I have a new member in my band, and 2 people are waiting for invites to the Sacred Flowers band. We may have to reform that band because the bandmaster hasn't been seen for ages. ShadowGuyver, I would appreciate it if you could check in with us once in a while so that we can reform the league and dump that mostly inactive SF band.

Xenawarior? Are you up to being bandmaster again?

Laskarina from the UnitedForces league made it to Hermit 1 this weekend. There should be a special entry on the wikipedia page for no-life losers, just for Laskarina. Man, I thought I was bad. I might make it to HM12 tonight. It's looking like next weekend will be a 3x event. It will be interesting to see who gets what sort of levels.

Games Campus will bring us the Tibet map and School of the Rising Sun dungeon next week. There are a total of maybe 3 people who could grind in SRS now, so that's not really important. I've been instructed to not post in English on their forum anymore, except in the International Corner. I'm really not in the mood for that sort of game publisher stupidity. Yes I can speak and read in German but I touch type in English. I have to physically look at each key to type in German while I think about how about how to spell things, and I can't spell worth spit in German.

I suspect I won't be posting much more on the Games Campus forum. It's their loss, not mine.

Speaking of game publisher stupidity, I posted a suggestion that Games Campus should change the package size of the experience cards. The current price for a package of 50 cards is 3300 Campus Credits, or about 66 cents each. The only problem with that? The easiest way to buy Campus Credits is with a Paysafe card, and those come in 25 euro amounts. For 25 euros you get 2750 credits. If Games Campus packaged 40 xp cards for 2750 credits the unit price would be 68 cents each.

This doesn't look difficult to me but I doubt they'll do anything with that suggestion.

Traditionally, the publishers of 9Dragons don't pay much attention to player suggestions and in this regard Games Campus isn't much different. What we have here is a game being played by a bunch of people with no life, and being run by a bunch of people with no brains.

Good combination! How did you do in the weekend event?

- AxtTreiber

A choice for events

2011-04-13T16:36:00.004+01:00

We already know that the Korean server has a fairly cool Easter event planned for their servers. One of the regulars on the Games Campus forum posted a link for us. I can't read a word of it though, and I sure wish there was a google translator for text in images, so we could find out more details.

I'm bringing this up because Camlost posted a poll today in the forums, and we have some choice as to the server settings for the Easter weekend. Use that link and go vote. You don't need to be able to speak German to understand the choices for the server settings.

In addition to the poll though, the German language text Camlost posted suggests that we are probably getting some sort of an event for Easter.

"Ostern kommt schneller als man denkt! Wir sind schon am Vorbereiten eines netten Ostereis für euch...

Easter is coming faster than we can think. We are already preparing a nice Easter Egg for you..."

The rest of his text just introduces the poll and the choices we have. We have until Wednesday of next week to vote, but there is no reason not to do that today. In the mean time, if anyone can read that Korean text, it would be nice to know what it says.

- AxtTreiber

Experience Event

2011-04-12T16:30:00.004+01:00

Maybe they are finally starting to feel sorry for us, or maybe this is just the usual once per month experience event that Games Campus has been giving us so far. Either way I'm happy to see it. At the Half Maniac 2 level I get about 8% per hour of grind. Without events and xp cards I can't even level up every day, and that is pretty frustrating. I'm not planning to spend any more money on this version so I'm saving the xp cards I have, for an event.

Finally we have one.

This weekend, starting Friday at 6pm local time until Monday morning at 10am we'll have 2x the normal experience rates. Yes, it's another marathon. I don't think I can get to the Lost Mind levels but I will probably be fairly close.

Good luck and have fun this weekend. It's Time To Grind!

- AxtTreiber

Collection Event - sort of...

2011-04-08T11:52:00.003+01:00

Many of the players on 9DGermany are doing their best to convince Games Campus to put on more events, but the message isn't getting through. For better or for worse 9D players got used to regular weekly experience events and many people simply wont play without them. I have players in my band stuck at RC/RL levels and they haven't been seen in weeks. They want regular events and didn't get them on this server. They voted with their feet, and left.

I mention this because this weekend Games Campus has come up with an event!

It's a nice idea but really, only about 15 people will be able to play this one. It's a collection event. Sort of. You have to collect 20 pieces of steel as your entry fee to join a special True General Wei spawn event on Monday night. Games Campus will spawn TGW 3 times and people who already have that epithet are not invited to the party.

I have a small chance to get this epithet. I am one of about 15 people on the server who are Half Maniac, or Humble Master level. In the 5 years or so that I've played this game I've never had this epithet. Obviously I'm going to try for it and I'm collecting all the damage equipment I can find. My competition includes a bunch of incredibly lucky weapon refiners and +9 is the new +10.

Hey ShadowGuyver, can I borrow your axe?

So far there aren't lot more details for this event. Apparently we'll be teleported to where ever the spawn spot will be. That probably means CC5. I hope not. We probably wont have time to get the anti-PK buff and I'm on a PvE build. The first nuker who decides to clear the room will end the event for me. I'll have some herbs with me, against the poisoned air, but I really don't have anything to save me from a nuker.

I'm just going to have to hope for the best. Any suggestions?

Update: Like I said, I had a small chance to win one of these but it didn't happen. Thanks though in particular to Lilith for the loan of an nice axe and healer support during the three spawn.

Just for the record I had damage relics and decos from the Master & Disciple system that totaled an 80% increase in damage and some attack rate. I had 1k damage pills and 20% crit rate pills too. For clothing and epithets I used critical rate damage clothes that with my masteries and premium added 21% to all critical hits. I know I was getting True General Wei's attention. He was hitting me back regularly.

It's annoying to use these good items for nothing, but without them you can't possibly win, and what hell, it's at least worth it to try.

- AxtTreiber

Three day bans

2011-04-06T11:02:00.005+01:00

This is what you get for giving three day bans to hackers...

Yes, he's running around with another plus 10 bracers. That is what you get for a 3 day ban.

You get a player who comes back and hacks himself another weapon. I took that shot around midnight last night and I would normally send it to GamesCampus, but Camlost clearly no longer cares.

So, what are we playing next?

- AxtTreiber

Patch 22

2011-04-05T12:13:00.004+01:00

The next patch has been announced but it doesn't look like too much of a big deal. This is mostly a patch for bug fixes. It won't be possible to enter CC5 for instance, if your black or white side didn't win then war on Bloody Plains. I wonder if players with an old CC5 entry buff will still be able to enter, if their side wins. A lot of people get an early start on True General Wei this way.

The empty gift box is going, finally, and some of the mini-maps will be updated. A few of them have locations incorrectly labeled in German. Too bad those can't be switched back to the English versions too. On that topic, some of the English language content in the Master & Disciple system will be replaced with German as well.

Really though, Games Campus should just admit defeat and set the language to Vietnamese. At least that would keep the largest number of players happy.

The post announcing the patch notes also says there will be a few other small bugs fixed, but don't give any details of what those will be. This whole thing will be patched up on Wednesday morning between 8 am and 10:30 am.

As always, if you find something new, or a new problem/bug please post in the comments.

- AxtTrieber

Slowly getting frustrated

2011-04-03T15:00:00.006+01:00

This game is really losing steam and players are leaving again. We're pretty much back to the situation we had with GamersFirst before they brought out the template characters, and what a fiasco that was. At that time our reader numbers here were just barely reaching 800 unique readers per month. For the month of March we had only 860 unique readers. That's down from 1200 in January.

In our league we're down to about 10 really active players. That's actually normal for most of the leagues on the Games Campus German server. I've spoken to a few other high level players and they all have have the same situation we have. They have high level characters in their leagues, and a few characters designed to hunt bosses, and that's it. The lack of regular weekly events has pretty much destroyed the crowd of casual players and Games Campus doesn't seem to be willing to do anything about that.

The situation isn't just here on 9D Germany. Our friends in the Restless League on the GamersFirst server have pretty much had enough too. They'll be meeting this week to see what they want to do next. Most of their long term members have left 9Dragons already. Some have gone on to play Guild Wars. Guild Wars 2 should be out soon, and that might be a good option for me.

The other factor of course is the presence of the Vietnamese hackers and again, Games Campus doesn't seem to be willing to do anything about those people either. A number of them have had hacked weapons taken away, but apparently hacking those weapons in the first place isn't good enough reason to ban players from the game. Those guys are now using +9 weapons, instead of +10. It's their new standard equipment, and I'm sure those were hacked too. There is about a 3% cumulative chance to refine a weapon to +9.

I had a 2 slot weapon fail at +4 last week. I'm not putting up with this anymore.

I'm looking around again for a new game to play. I have a 90 day premium package in the bag, and I'll start using that today. I have a few credits left over that I will probably spend on XP cards. After all, I might as well use those credits up before moving on.

Star Wars Old Republic is coming soon. They are accepting applications for beta testers and are allowing leagues to pre-register league names already, so it shouldn't be too long. I have signed up for the beta tester program. Age of Wulin is more active with their Twitter page too, but I'm not expecting a beta test for that game any time soon.

I'll still be around and playing this game as I've done for a long time, until I can find something else I want to play. Like I said, I'm not putting up with this anymore.

- AxtTreiber

Moderated

2011-03-29T11:05:00.012+01:00

There is a bit of a loud-mouthed prick who has been tossed from German servers, with the IGN of Skyline. He and his sock puppets have been throwing shit around on the Games Campus forum and I must admit I was doing my best to keep him agitated. It wasn't difficult.

Now that many of his accounts and sock puppets have been closed, and probably his new playing characters too, I suspect he may try to move his stupidity over here. I'm not in the mood to be deleting posts from anybody. Most of you know that I almost never do that. It's easier to set the comments to moderated and I'll check the blog more often over the next few days to see if any comments need approval.

In other news Lilith and I had 3 successful full runs of the Golden Coins Mansion, and we both got our killer epithets. Lilith will need a few more levels to do a proper job of finishing for epithet runs, but I figure ShadowGuyver could do that job now. I would like to figure out where ShadowGuyver is too. He is Missing in Action.

We'll be doing epithet runs for league members once we get a couple more people just a little higher, or Shadow shows up. So get your passes together people. You'll need 3 purple passes, or 30 Letters of Yakumo, and don't forget to pay your tanker. I personally want clothes from the CS6 male damage set. The GCM boss drops those.

I have a few manuals to give away to our active league members, and a few elixirs too. Stay tuned to league chat for our next runs and anyone CS++ who can heal themselves could probably get some loot on their own.

Update: xenawarior went away happy tonight. She got the conqueror epithet for the Golden Coins Mansion, which may not look too cool up front, but if you're using a high dex build you'll get a 7% dodge bonus for using that epithet.

Golden Coins Clan's Sealed Gate(GCM conqueror)
Reflect 4% of physical damage to target
Reflect 4% of Chi Kung damage to target
Dodge increased by 7%
Chi Kung dodge increased by 7%

She probably also has a bag full of elixirs and manuals to use, or sell.

- AxtTreiber

Free 7 day premium

2011-03-24T18:24:00.004Z

Games Campus in connection with buffed.de are offering a free 7 day premium package to the first 200 people who register with buffed.de. Obviously you're probably going to get a fair bit of spam from buffed.de but who cares, or you can just use a throw away email account. Unfortunately it's all in German but it's not that hard to go through the process.

The word Registrieren is not hard to understand. You'll then need to select an account name, and a user name, and a password which you type twice. You'll also have to type your email address twice. buffed.de will send you an email to confirm your address and you have to use the link in that email to confirm.

The, you go to this article and scroll down. Click on the words, "Jetzt Item-Code zu 9 Dragons gewinnen" and you'll get a popup with a button that says "Premium-Key Anfordern". Click that and you'll get taken to a page with a long string of numbers.

Copy that long string of numbers in the coupon page at the Games Campus website. You have to be logged into the Games Campus website when copy that string of numbers, but when you do a 7 day premium package will be delivered to your coin mall inventory.

Go quick people, there are only 200 packages available.

- AxtTreiberr

Patches 20 and 21

2011-03-24T14:15:00.003Z

I haven't seen any patch notes yet, but I haven't seen anything out of the ordinary either. It might be that the only thing new with these patches is the opening of the North Seas Icy Palace map. One thing that I know wasn't fixed is that really annoying and empty gift box. I had a little trouble with one of the CS level quests too. I kept getting a little text box that said I had the perfect reindeer horn, but it wasn't in my bag. Eventually I got it.

Otherwise everything seems to be what I expected and remember from the ice map. The experience rate is just as painful as ever and I really pity the fools who don't have xp cards. I'm sure glad I can afford them. The mobs hit just as hard as ever and a dodge deco is an absolute must for survival. Even with a dodge deco the mobs hand out external wounds like candy canes at Christmas. Anyone with a PvP build is going to be hating this map.

There is a quest series that gives you a number of damage globs. You get the choice of normal damage or Chi Kung damage. I have no doubt that some enterprising Viet will find a way to repeat that quest. Look for them to be on sale in Hefei within an hour.

The drop rate still sucks donkey balls. In a few hours of grind I didn't get a single slotted weapon, and I really would like a better axe. I keep hoping that Games Campus will reconsider this, along with regular experience events but as they say, "hope dies last".

Did you find anything unexpected? Please let us know in the comments.

- AxtTreiber

The Ice map is coming!

2011-03-21T15:50:00.002Z

Like the sign says, the ice map is coming. The post just went up in the forum.

On Thursday morning at the usual times there will be 2 patches rolled out, one to bring us the ice map and the second to synchronize things for the French language server. I have to say though, I sure wish they would concentrate on one server and give the players the language options like we had at Acclaim. That would really help the server population.

Anyway, we've got some good news and I'm sure a few people will be going into no-lifer mode next weekend. The grind spots at the GL1 levels are going to be a little crowded for the first few days. Hopefully we'll have an event, and I'll be pulling out my xp cards.

As usual if you find anything bugged or new on the next patches please let us know in the comments section.

- AxtTreiber

Bored Bosses

2011-03-16T13:57:00.004Z

I'm a bit of a slave to my disciples these day, which is actually okay. I have three pretty good ones at the moment and I should be a level 2 master very soon. When they aren't online I can grind my nuker, or shoot devas until my fingers bleed. It's a right of passage for all nukers. You just have to go through it.

When my disciples are online though, I don't have much to do. ShadowGuyver rather cheekily pointed out that at Golden Lotus 1 I'm not actually leveled capped, but I have no real desire to grind on blue mobs or waste passes in the Golden Coins Mansion.

To keep from being totally bored I sometimes go walking the maps picking up gold coins. I got over 60 of them this morning, and that's 3 blood essences. That's more BE than I've gotten from any boss lately. After they turn blue they really stop dropping very much.

The other thing I couldn't help notice this morning is that there were more bored bosses on the maps then there were players. Macro users don't count of course. On Shi Zhang there were exactly 2 players actually out grinding and there were 3 bosses standing around with nothing to do. What's the point of being a boss if you don't have any players to terrorize?

The Datong map was a little better. There were a few more players around and a few more macro users too, but most of the bosses were wandering around too. Even Shen Mo was spawned at the desert location and nobody was on him. We fixed that quickly of course, and now my nuker has that epithet too.

I'll walk the Hangzhou and Liaodong maps today but I'm not expecting anything better. I'm really starting to worry about this server. You know there is a problem with the server population when the bosses are standing around bored.

St. Patricks Event

2011-03-15T13:17:00.002Z

Thursday is the 17th of March or St. Patricks Day, and that sounds like a perfectly good reason to have a marathon 2x experience and drop rate event this weekend. Starting Thursday at 5pm, until 10 am the next Monday morning that's what we're going to have.

Not that St. Patrick and history of Ireland have anything at all to do with China and/or the martial arts. Oh well, let's not let that get in the way of having a good time!

After all, now is the perfect time to make my second level capped character on this server.

Patch 19

2011-03-09T16:44:00.003Z

Patch 19 was announced today, and there is more good news to come too. The patch will be rolled out tomorrow morning at about noon, and the server is scheduled to be back up by 1:30pm. Here is the English language post about the patch, complete with a correction from a friendly player. No, it wasn't me.

This is not a major patch. Indy21 and Games Campus are simply fixing a couple of errors that have crept into the game over the last few patches. It's a nice approach to game management, something we players have been asking for, literally for years.

The lightfoot bug on the new 2nd skill bar will be fixed, and that didn't take long. The ;escape or ;flucht mechanism should be fixed too. There are a bunch of places where you can sort of "drop off the map", and they've always been there. You just go to peace mode and type ;escape and a couple minutes later you get moved to a safe spot. In German you should be able to type ";flucht" in peace mode and do the same. That hasn't been working lately.

Also, all of the collection stuff related to Valentines and Chinese New Year will be removed. If you have any flowers left over you should turn them in quick. And last, the resource map tabs listings of items from each map merchant should be back in place too.

Like I said, just a few small errors that have crept into the game, and now they're getting fixed.

We would still like to see the North Seas Icy Plains map sooner rather than later. Every day a few more people hit the level cap and the grind spots could be pretty crowded if we don't get that new map soon.

In other good news the skill experience rate will be permanently doubled from its current very poor rate. That doesn't help me much. I just put up with it and got the job done on most skills, but hopefully this will encourage a few players who gave up to come back and try again. For our active league members there will manuals available shortly after we get the Ice map. It wont take long before CS level members can join me for full runs in the Golden Coins Mansion.

We did a full run of the Wild Tower today, with just two of us, so we're getting there as a league. It would sure be nice to see a few more people playing regularly though.

- AxtTreiber

Some down time

2011-03-07T16:02:00.002Z

The game took a night off last night, and of course Games Campus doesn't provide around the clock support, so a few of us went and had a forum event instead. We were mostly just goofing off, but it all remained pretty civilized. Pretty much just on time, like when Camlost got to work this morning, the game was up and running again.

As a compensation event we are getting 2x the usual experience rates until Wednesday at noon. It would be nicer to have this sort of thing on the weekends when more people could take advantage of it, but 48 hours of compensation time, for less than 12 hours of down time is still pretty generous. Drop rates and skill rates are not affected by this.

I personally have some down time today too, and wont be playing. Maybe not even tomorrow too. We'll see. I think many of you know that my wife is a doctor and one of the down sides to that is, sometimes she comes home with a bug from a patient. She was sick 3 days last week, and today it's my turn. Norovirus is not fun at all.

Another guy taking some unwanted down time is our former league member St33L. His account has been hacked and the characters deleted. Obviously he's not very happy about this. I've talked about hackers here a few times but lately it really hasn't been a problem. I think everyone has gotten used to the idea that you have to keep your account name and password a secret. Sharing your account with someone, so that you can level up faster is just begging to lose everything you had on that account.

Camlost did answer him in public and they appear to be willing to help him rebuild that character. At least to a certain extent. I really doubt Games Campus will be willing to do that regularly, so don't count on it.

Have fun with the event, and maybe I'll see you tomorrow.

- AxtTreiber

A few things

2011-03-02T11:46:00.003Z

There are a few small things in game that are worth a comment or two, so here goes. We got a patch this morning but to be honest I can't see what it did. Even Games Campus are calling it a mini-patch. Even the minor bug on the living/resources map tabs wasn't fixed. If anyone finds something new please leave a note in the comments.

I think most people know that the Viet players make a habit of trying to sell in-game items for real world money. I don't know what Games Campus policy is about this sort of thing, but they do it anyway. DuLong has a regular price of 3000 campus credits for a defense trink, for example. You know what? I think they've run out of customers! There are only so many people who will do that sort of thing, pay real money for game items, and we have a low population on this server to begin with.

I mention this because in the last couple of days, 3 or 4 people have told me that they ran into that boss and no one else was there. The usual small army of Viet campers/buffers weren't around. I doubt they've all been banned from the game, so they're probably spending their time hacking away at something else.

Which brings me to my next topic. It's pretty clear to anyone who has played in any part of the PvP areas that damage hacks are the next big thing for a number of players. At the storm versus storm event last Sunday night someone hit me for over 8k hit points, in one shot. I even had an HP pill running, from the Master & Disciple NPC, and that was overwhelmed too, in that single shot. We all know that's not possible. With my dodge and ck dodge numbers, and level, most people wouldn't be able to hit me at all. It had to have been a high level nuker, and there are only a few of them.

I filed a complaint about it with Camlost and he actually got back to me pretty quickly. He said that that sort of thing is hard to prove, and I knew that. At least he's aware of the problem and watching out for it. It will probably require video evidence to get these assholes tossed out of the game. A lot of players came to this server, started over from Zero (again), just to get away from the hackers on the GamersFirst servers. It would be a real shame to see this server go down in hacker flames, because this place really is the last chance for 9Dragons.

- AxtTreiber

Auction using Game Gold

2011-02-28T14:47:00.007Z

Evidently Games Campus has decided there is quite a lot of gold floating around the game, and they've decided to do something about it. They've decided to auction off a number of fairly sweet items through their forums, and you get to bid with game gold. The post is unfortunately only in German so far so I'll do my best to keep you updated here.

You place your bid using the PM function on the forum, in that thread. The character running the auction is a new forum name, Versteigerer, which is appropriate. That name means Auctioneer in English.

The first items for auction is a pair of 7/1k hit point return weapon ornaments, and the auction is open until Friday, but no time on Friday is given.

From Friday until Monday you'll have the chance to bid on a 30 day premium package, and next week from Monday to Thursday 4 Jade Separators are going to be auctioned off. Here is a quote from the forum with actual dates;

Dienstag (01.03.2011) bis Freitag (04.03.2011)
je 2x [Neu] Emblem von Quilin - Waffenornament, 0,7% deines Schadens heilen dich

Freitag (04.03.2011) bis Montag (07.03.2011)
je 1x 30 Tage Premium-Paket

Montag (07.03.2011) bis Donnerstag (10.03.2011)
je 4x Jadeöse - Fügt einen weiteren Slotplatz zu bestehenden hinzu

Weitere Angebote folgen bei Interesse!

Like I said, some sweet items and an interesting idea. They will continue with the idea if there is enough interest. I think that if Games Campus continues with the great coin mall items there will be plenty of interest, particularly for the players who can't afford to buy those items.

They have a format they would like players to use too;

----------------------------------------
Betreff:
Stille Auktion für ITEMNAME

Text
Account: ACCOUNTNAME

Gebot: GEBOT IN GOLD
----------------------------------------

Put the item name as the subject of the PM, and in the text of the message your account name and offer in game gold. If you're the winner they'll drop the items on your account and manually remove the gold.

Good Luck to all bidders.

Update: All auctions start and end at noon, in the German timezone.

- AxtTreiber

Storm vs Storm

2011-02-25T14:41:00.004Z

The next Storm vs Storm for the Hangzhou map will be on Sunday the 27th, at 5pm and I have reserved us a place at the event. Everyone in the league is invited to participate, particularly anyone who has any buffs to offer. They all add up. Mobs in the fortress are CS level though, so it will be up to the higher level players to take the fortress.

We really do want that fortress. Players who are grinding on the Hangzhou map get an xp bonus, and we have a fair number of people there right now. There is also the small matter of the 10% tax on all sales to NPC's on that map. The fortress owners get rich pretty quick, and if we do win I'll make sure there are cookies in every lunchbox.

The other reason we want that fortress is because the current owner is a particularly annoying nuker by the name of Jazz. He owns the Elites hero band and as far as I can tell, he's pretty much the only member. I hardly ever see anyone else with that name band name in the game. It doesn't matter, they're all going to be fair game on Sunday afternoon.

In the mean time I'm going to be grinding AxtTreiber again, to Golden Lotus. Every little bit helps when you're dealing with nukers!

- AxtTreiber

Golden Coins Mansion and the Beast Palace

2011-02-24T14:00:00.007Z

I'm doing a little testing in the Golden Coins Mansion and the Beast Palace. I know GCM really well, but it's been a while so a little testing doesn't hurt. At CS12 I can grind in there but the xp rate is not great. The hallway mobs are green for me and they drop CS12 BD weapons. The mobs in the lower two rooms are white/yellow for me and the mini-bosses are bright, bright red. LaCeNa, from the Thor's league and I were able to take those two down with no problems. These mobs didn't really drop very much.

The mobs in the side chambers are yellow/orange for me and again the bosses were bright, bright red. I'm not going to say it was no problem to take down those mini-bosses but we did it. We had to carve out a meditation spot in the hallway and I was throwing a lot of heals around, because LaCeNa is only CS10 and those mobs were red for her. She still out-damaged me though.

Obviously I have very little chance of getting the True General Wei epithet any time soon, which is sort of depressing.

One bit of good news is that the mobs in the side chambers will drop GL BD weapons and I got both a set of gloves and a spear, no slots of course and not really what I need. Isn't that always the way?

The top two rooms are full of red mobs and I only stayed there long enough to kill one mob.

In that 30 minute run I got only 3% of xp, which really isn't that good for a grind spot. Too much time spent killing the mini-bosses I guess. I got a couple of other drops though, a Water Seal and a set of male 10% vagabond boots, so at least that's promising.

LaCeNa and I tried the Beast Tower but I got disconnected almost immediately and didn't have time to make any notes. Last time I was in there it was a one hour grind dungeon, which helps, and as I recall, there is a set period of time in there where you can't meditate, so plan for it. Turn off your Meditation and Steps buffs, and switch to an old noobie active skill that doesn't use much VE. Of course, the better plan is to take a healer with you.

These dungeons will be great to break up the monotony of the grind until we get the Ice Map. I'll happily go in any group of three CS/GL characters, and we can split the price of the passes.

Who wants to go to the Golden Coins Mansion? Camlost, maybe?

(hehehe, thanks for the run Camlost. that was fun...)

- AxtTreiber

Patch 17

2011-02-23T12:53:00.015Z

Patch 17 should be rolled out for us tomorrow. I've complained a couple of times about not getting any notice about upcoming patches, and Games Campus is back to their 2 days advance notice idea. Who said complaining never works? There is no time given in the patch notes announcement but it makes sense for Games Campus to get this sort thing done early in the morning, when the Koreans are still in their office too.

This patch will end the Chinese New Year event and the Valentines event at the same time. Apparently they plan to leave the girl with the rabbit hat in the game so that you can still make those rice cake attribute pills if you want too. I'm sure most people will simply sell the dried rice drops to the NPC's for gold. That's what I'm doing.

You should never give away something for nothing and maybe Games Campus knows that too. With this patch we'll be able to enter the Gold Coins Mansion and the Beast Tower as well, not that anyone is high enough level to finish those dungeons yet. It will be interesting to see who is willing to damage hack those bosses to get those epithets. I have no doubt we'll see a few people with killer epithets within 1 day.

I was watching the chat this morning while drinking my coffee and I'm certain that Camlost has banned a few people in the last day or two. There were a couple of Viet roars that included the words "Fuck You Camlost". Methinks someone got caught doing something they shouldn't. So far there has been no information in the forums about it, or about how long these people are banned, and I doubt we'll ever hear.

According to their forums something similar is going on at GamersFirst. A bunch of people have been banned from that version of the game too. That should be a good thing for those servers but probably wont help us much on 9D Germany. I'm sure a few of those banned players will start characters over here.

Like always, I'll update this post if we find more things/bugs in Patch 17. Please post in the comments if you find anything.

Update I: There is new information in the patch notes post on the forum. Apparently we're finally getting another set of Hotkeys that you can use in combination with Ctrl/Strg key. A lot of other games have this set up and it's a nice change. I know the healers are going to love this one.

That second skill bar comes with your best lightfoot skill loaded in the center slot. That slot is already attached to your Alt-Key. That's going to save me yet another hot key on each bar.

Update II: The valentines epithets are now +5 only which is sort of too bad, and the living screen, resources map tabs for the pass sellers have not been repaired with this patch. The Retrieving Family Treasures quest has been fixed.

Update III: Maybe that lightfoot skill attached to the Alt-Key isn't such a good idea. We haven't figured out how to change it yet anyway.

Update IV: We're still getting the flower gifts from the giftbox, even though that event is supposed to be over.

- AxtTreiber

2 Months of 9Dragons

2011-02-20T13:20:00.015Z

As of tomorrow the Games Campus version of 9Dragons will have been running for 2 months, and I'm pretty happy to say that I am basically level capped. I made it to Crimson Snake 12 in those 2 months. I could squeeze out a couple of more levels on the last mobs on the ship, and a couple of people have done that. Those mobs are 2 levels lower than me and and even though they are still green, the xp rate is getting low. The place is getting a little crowded too as players catch up to the no-lifers like me, thanbip and Urza.

Hopefully we'll get the ice map soon so that players can spread out again. One of the nice things about that map is that you have a couple of areas for each mob level.

Until then I will be playing my nuker since most of the skills on that character are now basically finished. I have c11 on almost everything, and c5 on my VE shield. Cheng 6 is more than enough of a VE shield, up to the EC levels.

We still have the Chinese New Year and Valentines events going on. A lot of players have completely stopped grinding because they are farming the flowers. If you find a set of red flower spawn spots it's usually pretty easy to figure out the spawn pattern and you can collect a lot of flowers that way. I may do some of that tonight too, if I get bored on my nuker.

In other event news, Games Campus will be offering 50% off the usual price on selected items. Each day this week around noon the discounted item or items will be announced in all the usual places, Twitter, Facebook, and the forum. The sale price will be good for 24 hours. If there's anything really good I'll update this post with the sale items.

Monday: Trigrams and Jades
Tuesday: Chakra Purge
Wednesday: Jade Separators, Dragons Scales and Tears (good one!!!)
Thursday: Yesterdays items are carried over, with Courier Passes and Teleport balls added.
Friday: Qilins Mirror
Weekend: Experience Cards 30% off (starting Saturday around noon)

- AxtTreiber

Another dumbass forum event

2011-02-17T12:40:00.003Z

You thought the Valentines poetry event was pretty lame? Well, I certainly did. We're getting another forum event, another photoshop event really. Show Your Kung Fu. Great.

How about getting on with the game material like the Ice map and a couple of dungeons?

How about answering questions from players that have been sitting in the inbox since last weekend?

How about a skill rate event so we can get these freaking skills done?

And I have to say, this is my first post related to 9D Germany that gets an Idiots tag. At least there is football on the weekends, and Champions League next week too.

- AxtTreiber

Finally some gold

2011-02-14T13:49:00.003Z

We're finally starting to get some gold into the game. Quite frankly we've been starving for it and it's been hard to sell some items for anything close to what they're worth. I'm talking mostly about the black market items from CC3 of course. It's a gamble what you'll get from there and you have to sell off the items you don't need in order to get your gold back. Because there has been so little gold in the game, most players haven't been willing to buy anything that they don't absolutely need, and need it right now.

In some ways that's been good. Players have been forced to think about what they actually need, right now, and they aren't being foolish about spending gold on items that obviously have a stupid price in the stand.

As of the Chinese New Year event, and now the Valentines Day event running at the same time, we're getting 3 items that drop reasonably well and they are actually worth something to sell to the NPC. Our double drop-rate event over the weekend helped too.

A few of our experienced players remembered that old trick, farming the haystacks for these things. I must admit I went and did that too for a couple of hours. The dried rice, red flowers and white flowers can be sold to your clan map NPC for 60k gold each. Please take your stuff back to the clan map even if you have to run a little further. You get 10% more for your drops there. If you sell your drops to an NPC on the Hangzhou or Nanchang maps the owners of the fortresses there will get that 10% extra gold.

You're being lazy and making the enemy rich at the same time.

Still, it was sure nice to suddenly have 20 million gold in the bag. I bought a mini defense relic, some 300 CK damage wristbands and a VE hat that I haven't been able to get in Wild Tower dungeon runs. These were all things that I "wanted" for my nuker, but never had the gold to buy them.

I was able to sell a bunch of stuff this weekend too. People have some gold in the bag, and they're in a buying mood. Collectible items for the Wan Daye blue jade sell like water now, and manuals go pretty quick too. Even the 110 dodge ornaments sell fast. I didn't raise my prices on those things. I just wanted them out of the bag.

A few people have complained that we'll see some price inflation, and I agree that we will, at least on some items but I don't think that this new gold coming into the game is going to be all that bad so long as it's not permanent. You just have to look at some stands and you can see more black market items for sale. A LOT of gold was taken out of the game this weekend too. Those weapon ornaments are 2.1 million each to buy from the black market, and that's a lot of red and white flowers!

Prices for blood essence and experience cards will no doubt rise, and like a lot. People no longer have to sell precious items like that to make a small amount of gold, so they are holding on to them longer. That's too bad. I've been buying both those items every chance I got. I wont be doing that for the next little while. Hopefully prices will come back down.

So, what did you buy this weekend?

- AxtTreiber

Patch 16

2011-02-11T12:17:00.013Z

It's all well and good to get new material, new events, and bug fixes, but could we please have more than 10 seconds notice that the servers are going down? Games Campus used to give us a couple of days notice for stuff like this. It was nice.

Anyway, the patch notes are out and Camlost is making full use of the International Corner of the forums these days. The announcements are now in English too, so be sure to check the forum from time to time, as well as this blog.

Apparently red flowers will be blooming all over the maps, and white flowers will be dropping from mobs. We're supposed to take the flowers to the merchant beside Wan Daye and trade for items that haven't been described yet. Otherwise, the disconnection issue is supposed to be fixed with this patch, and the notes say that the Chinese New Year event will continue for at least another week.

In league news, we have two more FC++ players in the league, ShadowGuyver and Lilith. Hopefully we'll be doing Killer of Beasts epithet runs for them tonight. Normally you could get the KoB epi much earlier than that but they'll have to play the finisher role for each other. Hopefully there will be some pretty good drops!

Update 1: The red and white flower drops are working and the items from the General Goods Merchant beside Wan Daye are pretty impressive. In particular there is a silver ring that is a 10% damage relic. It doesn't appear to have an expiry date either. The gold ring is a reflection relic and I'm not sure how useful that will be. There is a 3rd item there too, a flower pot, and I'm not sure what that does yet.

Update 2: The descriptions for items in the resources map tabs is missing. I checked the pass merchant on the Hangzhou map and all of his normal items are there. I don't know about the other merchants.

Update 3: The drop rate has been increased for the weekend.

Update 4: The gate to the Hangzhou map, from Liaodong doesn't work. I relogged. It works now.

Update 5: When you buy the flower pot from the General Goods Merchant beside Wan Daye you get to talk to the master of ornaments. You choose who to give the flowers too and you get an epithet. If you choose to give the flowers to Jiang Daxi the epithet is +15 all attributes and an xp rate increase that doesn't work.

You can also choose to give the flowers to the refining bitch Mo Tailan. Who in their right mind would ever do that? But you can. The epithet from her is also +15 all attributes and an increase in the drop rate. We're still trying to figure out if that drop rate increase is working.

- AxtTreiber

Patch 15

2011-02-07T12:26:00.003Z

This one caught me by surprise. We all knew it was coming, but I wasn't expecting our Chinese New Year event until tomorrow. Indy21 rarely works this quickly to sort out problems. Maybe this is a sign of things to come? We can hope...

First of all, there is a hat which is sort of nice. That has always been a fun part of the calendar events. Well, fireworks were always pretty cool too, but good clothing items have always been a nice change from the usual. However, this one is sort of bjorked and is a lot more work than usual.

I stayed with the German language text file for this one because you get a windgram quest to start the whole thing. The quest starts in Hefei with the general goods merchant close to Wan Daye. You get sent to the Girl with the Rabbit Hat, who looks suspiciously like Little Wind from the Brotherhood of Thieves clan map. There are jade cases popping up in Hefei and most don't contain very much, which doesn't really help, but you can get a couple of items from them that will get you a constitution pill from the Girl with the Rabbit Hat.

After that you go out and grind like usual. You'll get drops of "dried rice". That's the translation from German anyway. I haven't tried the English text file yet. You take those dried rice droppings (eww...) back to the Girl with the Rabbit hat and trade them for "secret rice cakes". When you have one of each rice cake you'll get the next quest for the hat.

When you have one each of the 5 rice cakes you'll get another windgram. If you're using the English text file the windgram is empty. Take your 5 rice cakes back to your clan map. You'll get your hat from the clan leader. It's not a bad item for lowbie characters, but not all that useful if you've made it to 2nd role, and you're wearing that clothing set.

The hat give 10% speed (so does the 2nd role set), 10% critical hit rate, and 10 dex. What it doesn't give is VE return and that is far more useful for real grinding. So the hat is probably not too bad for PvP, but that's about it at least for high level players.

I wonder what these rice cakes are worth to sell?

- AxtTreiber

Well, it had to happen

2011-02-03T11:32:00.007Z

It had to happen eventually. A patch on the German version of the game has gone sour but it's not really surprising. It was going to happen eventually because that's how Indy21 does things. Apparently patch number 12 has some fairly serious problems, and of course today is Chinese New Year. There is nobody home at Indy21.

One of these days the publishers of the game will learn to roll out patches on your average Tuesday, at say 8am. Korea is something like 6 or 7 timezones ahead of us, so at 8am on an average Tuesday, Indy21 will still be at work. Someone at Games Campus obviously wasn't thinking too clearly about this. Problems with patches and Indy21 are not a matter of "if", but "when".

As I write this my launcher has downloaded patch number 14. It's ok, 13 is an unlucky number anyway, and we didn't really want a patch with that number. As near as I can tell nothing has changed from patch 11. Basically we got a roll back on the client. Hopefully there has been no rollback on the character database.

Update: A lot of people are getting disconnected! Holy cow have we got a league for them!

Update II: Our drop rate has been increased by 4x. I'll be hosting Wild Tower runs all night. All the high level (EC++) players in the league are welcome. The treasure boxes in the first 4 rooms should be loaded with manuals. I want to remind you guys though, I kill the last 2 poison pillars before the boss room for a reason. If the boss is getting to you and you have to run? Run Early, Run Far! The top of those steps is out of range of the bosses area effects.

Update III: There are new collection items in Hefei with "unknown items". If you click on them you will get disconnected.

- AxtTreiber

Patch 12

2011-02-01T15:53:00.004Z

Games Campus has announced the next patch already. It seems like we had our last patch just last week. Oh wait, we did have our last patch just last week! I vaguely remember that GamersFirst is still playing with the Halloween patch. Man, Indy21 must just hate those guys.

Anyway, we're getting a Chinese New Year event just as the Koreans already have. Yep, we'll have the usual stuff to play with, a bunny hat at the very least. Hopefully a deco too. We'll see. The new patch is supposed to be rolled out on Thursday around 10am, here in Germany.

According to the patch notes on the forum there will also be some updates to the German language text file, not that that bothers us too much, and the Liaodong Merchant will be selling his usual list of stuff, weapons and passes to the dungeons.

When we get that patch the wallpaper event will be closed for new entries, and today is the last day to register for the dueling event on the Friday the 4th. I won't be entering either of those. I'm not much of artist, and my local football team is playing on Friday night, so I'm going to the pub!

Still, I'm looking forward to Thursday. Calendar events are always fun.

- AxtTreiber

Events

2011-01-28T09:44:00.010Z

I'm not sure why but Games Campus isn't interested in providing us with a regular schedule of events. That's too bad too, because I suspect they're missing out on the casual players of this game. The only way to get those people to log in regularly is to provide events at known times during the week. We saw that very clearly with Acclaim and their Bardo server.

Those people will spend some money of course, but mostly for permanent items like decos, or the separators for the slots on decos and weapons. As for me, and I'm fairly hard-core on this game, xp events are the only time I'll spend money for xp cards. Yeah, I just bought a bunch and I'm planning to go into no-life mode for the rest of the weekend.

The weekend xp event will start at 5pm here in Germany and will run until whenever the Games Campus staff get to work on Monday. Let's hope for a snowstorm in Berlin this weekend!

Also, Kung Fu experience boost items are on sale at the coin mall. They are 30% off. By the way, there is no reason to buy those if you have premium already running. You can't use both at the same time.

There are a couple of other events going on. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Games Campus is hosting a wallpaper event celebrating the coming Chinese New Year and The Year of the Rabbit. That event is still open and there are some awfully nice prizes being offered. Our publisher is also planning a PvP dueling event next week. You can register on the forum for that.

The Korean version of the game has a New Years event underway as well, with deco and some pretty nice rabbit hats. We haven't heard if we'll get that patch in this version, but we can hope. I wouldn't count on it though. I hear the GamersFirst people still have their Halloween event going on. I have to wonder what the relationship between GamersFirst and Indy21 is like these days.

Anyway, we have some events to play. Let's gogogo...

- AxtTreiber

It's not all smooth

2011-01-26T20:33:00.007Z

We got patch number 11 and that went just fine. The servers opened yesterday right on the predicted time, so I guess the GM team had time to play a little too. That's fair, but it's not all smooth on 9D Germany.

First of all I'm just glad to have the Liaodong map to play on. In most evening hours I have my grind spot all to myself. Vietnam is 6 hours ahead of us in Germany and the Viet players who actually live there typically set up their macros and go to bed around 5 to 6 pm my time. That's on the weekdays of course. On weekends it can be quite different.

For some reason there are very few European based players in my mob range.

The other thing I like about the LD map is the weapon drops. The drop rate isn't any better than the pathetic base rate the rest of the server gets, but the weapons that do drop are worth a lot more. I actually have 3 million gold to my name, but sadly that's still not worth taking to the black market. Maybe on Friday?

As I said though the last day or so hasn't been that smooth and that means there have been map/server problems. Last night the Brotherhood of Thieves map, Taishan went down for the night, and so did the starter map, Zhangzhu. People got trapped and Games Campus didn't find the problem until they showed up for work this morning.

Nobody likes to take work home, but the GM's aren't available 24/7 in the 9D Germany version of the game. It wouldn't hurt if someone could check the forums once or twice in the evening hours. To make things worse we had an unexpected server outage today, with about a 20 minute rollback. I really hope that Games Campus is taking this stuff seriously, and putting in plans to repair problems quickly.

Up until last night Games Campus has been technically superb, as you would expect from a group of Germans in a technology company, but there were 2 failures in less than 24 hours that I wouldn't like to see repeated.

I hate Rollbacks.

- AxtTreiber

Patch 11

2011-01-21T11:57:00.008Z

Games Campus announced patch 11 today and even handed out the patch notes. The patch is scheduled for Tuesday morning, probably around 9am. How's that for confidence? I can remember when it was like pulling teeth to get information from a publisher, about what was already released. These guys tell us in advance what's coming, and when. Did I use the word "refreshing" lately?

Here it is in German;

- Liaodong ist eröffnet
- Die Schlacht um die Höhle ist implementiert (weitere Infos HIER)
- Der Wahre General Wei ist implementiert
- Sprachdatei Update
- Mehrere ausnutzbare Bugs wurden entfernt
- Die Wege zum Drachen-Quests sind abschließbar
- Unsichtbare Wände weiter verringert

English anyone?

- Liaodong is open
- Black vs White War is implemented
- True General Wei is implemented
- Text data is updated
- Bugs fixed (details on this one would be nice. which bugs?)
- Road to the Dragon quests can now be finished
- More invisible walls removed (there is a really annoying one in CC4...)

So I have until next Tuesday to get that defense trinket from Vicious Fist or I'm going to have to buy it, because after this patch I'm going into no-life Grinding Mode for about a week. Obviously it's going to be a race to get the True General Wei epithet.

Black vs White war is coming. It's been announced in a couple of places on the forum. We're getting war twice per week, at 6pm on Tuesdays and 8pm on Saturdays. The first war event will be the first Saturday after the patch.

Grind People! Let's make our presence felt, and if anyone wants an epithet run, let's get it done this weekend.

With regards to war, last night I made a deal with Crystalstorm, LM of Thors Nightmare. We have a truce between our leagues for the duration of war events. It makes sense. Black side clans will have to work together to win that war. If this works out I'll try to extend the truce to Storm vs Storm events and the ownership of the fortresses.

Make no mistake though, if you're running around Bloody Plains looking for karma, you're fair game too. I don't want to hear any whining about that.

PvP Healers

2011-01-19T18:23:00.003Z

A couple of people have asked lately about building PvP healer characters, and frankly I know nothing about them. Obviously there are a lot of healer/hyb types on the 9D Germany server now because they can solo grind harder/longer than any warrior or nuker can. The topline equipment the warriors and nukers need just doesn't exist yet, so people are wondering how to PvP with a healer.

One of our fairly new members, ShadowGuyver has offered a screen shot of the equipment his character used on the Acclaim servers to do just this. He's got some nice stuff there.

Check it out!

He has said that he'll add more information in the comments section of this posts. Feel free to ask questions here too!

- AxtTreiber

Chinese New Year Wallpaper Event

2011-01-17T13:49:00.009Z

Games Campus have given us the details of the "event for creative types" that I wrote about yesterday. It's a wallpaper event and they would like the artists out there to create a wallpaper 1280 x 1024 pixels in size, in the jpg format. For a theme of course it has to be 9Dragons related, but lets not forget the game is set in the Ming Dynasty era, if you would like to do a wallpaper in a more realistic and less game oriented style. Campus would like players to work in the Chinese New Year theme too, and in particular the fact that next year is the Year of the Rabbit.

The animal signs of the Chinese Zodiac repeat every 12 years, and in addition each year comes with an elemental aspect. The coming year is the year of the metal rabbit and I would bet artists who can work on that idea will have better chances of winning.

There are quite a number of other traditions involved with Chinese New Year including visiting relatives, some rather large meals, and a tradition of gift giving. Children often receive red envelopes with money. We've seen useful game items such as soups and dumplings in various versions of the game and we had red envelopes that dropped from mobs too, a couple of years ago. Maybe someone can work with those ideas too?

The Chinese often wear red clothing at this time of year. It's thought to be lucky, and superstitious housewives wouldn't think of sweeping any dust out the door at just this time of year. You wouldn't want to sweep your luck out, would you?

Anyway, the contest runs until 3. February at 12 noon, server time. There will be 10 Judges selected by Games Campus and prizes will be awarded as soon as possible after that time. You're only allowed one entry per person.

Now for the good news. The first place winner will receive 5000 campus credits. That's more than a 90 day premium! The second place winner will receive 2000 campus credits, and there are 2 prizes of 500 credits for the runners-up. Send your wallpapers to 9dragons-de@gamescampus.eu

Did I make this entry 1000 words yet? Is this worth a picture?

Good luck people, and feel free to post links to your entries in our comments section too.

- AxtTreiber

- Red

The coming week

2011-01-16T19:00:00.006Z

Games Campus, the publisher of 9D Germany is planning a few things for this coming week, but we don't have too many details yet, just a couple of Twitter and forum posts that aren't too specific. They've been pretty good so far about giving us useful details in advance of events and such, and I'm sure that will continue.

They seem pretty impressed with themselves over their ability to deal with the goldsellers and spammers in their version of the game. I'll give them credit too, I have rarely seen a spammer in Hefei in the few weeks the server has been running.

Am Montag geht unser offizielles Statement zum Thema Goldseller raus. Mit breitem Grinsen wurde der Pressetext eben abgesegnet.

"On Monday our official statement concerning goldsellers will be given out, with a big grin!"

I'm looking forward to see what they have to say.

In a forum post that is slowly getting buried, Camlost gave us a few more ideas about what is to come this week, but again there weren't too many details.

Nächste Woche kommt noch etwas mehr, oder anders gesagt eine Menge mehr.

Am Montag starten wir ein Event, das allen Kreativköpfen unter euch die Chance geben wird, einen schönen Batzen CC zu verdienen.

Im Lauf der Woche werden wir dann auch erste Details zum nächsten Patch herausgeben, der einiges an Neuem bringen wird, ich sage nur Blutige Ebene, eiserne Hasen und Japaner.

"Next week will come a little more, or better said, a lot more."

"On Monday we're starting an event that will give our creative types a chance to win Campus Credits."

"During the week we'll give out more details about the next patch, which will bring news about Bloody Plains, iron rabbits and Japanese."

That last sentence has got my attention more than the information about "creative types". I'm a reasonably good writer but do you notice there isn't always a lot of imagery in my posts?

I'm not sure what "Bloody Plains" is about but iron rabbits is obviously a reference to the coming Chinese New Year which is on February 3rd this year. It will be the Year of the Rabbit.
The "Japanese" is obviously a reference to the Liaodong map, and I"m sure looking forward to that. I'm running out of grinding spots.

It'll be fun to see if the Games Campus people can do a better job of their next patch then the GamersFirst people did on theirs. Some of the errors in the G1 patch were quite amusing, NPC's are missing, vagabond lightfoot is broken, and the incredible new anti-hacker plan doesn't do a darned thing! You can read about those problems here.

Anyway, if anyone finds more on the coming Games Campus events please post in our comments, and I'll edit the good stuff into this post.

- AxtTreiber

The Laziest Disciple Ever

2011-01-08T11:02:00.005Z

We've had the Master & Disciple system in the game now for just a little over a year. In fact, we had our largest number of hits in one day, the day patch 101 came out early last year. We've written a lot about the Masters & Disciples, and if you're new to the game, it's worth to read the background information that we've put together.

You can find all of our articles on any given topic in that side bar to the right. It's in alphabetic order by topic.

If you listen to any disciple you'll always hear them complaining that their master is never online. I don't know why anyone would want to be a master if they aren't going to be online all the time, and I try to tell wannabe disciples to be careful who they pick as a master. Once you pick one, you're stuck with him for 72 hours. A good grinder can get to SM1 in that time, so ask around and find yourself master who can actually help you.

The other side of the coin is the complaints from the masters, all about lazy disciples, and I've had my share. The guys I hate are the ones building a new alternate character, and they want a master for that character but, "event now, so I is go plays my main. k, thx, buhbai". Grrr...
The least you can do if you you're building an alt-character with a master is to get that character to SM1 as quickly as you can, so the master can give that spot to the next disciple.

We're doing fairly well recruiting for the league on the German server because we've been able to get a few people to SM1, and we always have disciple spots available for players moving over to this server.

Anyway, let me tell you about The Laziest Disciple Ever.

I got my band going a few weeks ago and I needed a couple of people willing to join us, to build a band for each of the Heavenly Demons and Sacred Flowers and then form a league. Obviously I would prefer to have people I know and have played the game with before. WuTaHe from the Restless League joined us to start a Demon band, and to help that along I took him on as a disciple.

He did great. Obviously he's an experienced player and was able to reach the RL1 level in just a couple of days. With a few map shouts, Lion's Roars, and a few people I had in my friends list, he got his band started. We met up in Hefei, formed an Alliance, and Disconnected was a league again.

Here's where it gets funny. After that DeMoral (his new character name) ran to Xuanshe on the Shi Zhang map, he sat down and then did not move at all for more than a week! In fact, he only finally got disconnected from the server yesterday when Games Campus took the server offline for patch number 10. He's still RL1!!!

DeMoral/WuTaHe wins, hands down, the award for Laziest Disciple Ever! Still, I miss him, and forgive him. It's ok, he can come back. I won't be mad.

Uhm, I miss xenawarior too...

- AxtTreiber

Promotion prices, but why?

2011-01-05T13:28:00.008Z

Games Campus has discovered promotional prices and until the 10th of this month at noon a few items are on sale in their coin mall, but I kind of have to ask, why?

First the items and prices.

[ewig] Decos fallen von 680 auf 470 CC
90 Tage Taschen der Gespenstergeister fallen von 280 auf 200 CC
365 Tage Taschen der Gespenstergeister fallen von 950 auf 620 CC

Camlost announced this promotion in the Games Campus forums. It's in German of course and for those of you who don't speak German the first item is the Forever Deco reduced from 680 Campus Coins to 470 coins. What is that, about a 30% discount? That's cool, I would like another deco for PvP and 470 coins is about 5 euros. I can afford that.

There are a wide variety of Forever Decos available and unfortunately Games Campus doesn't provide a good looking image of each of them. A nice image would make it easier to choose the one you want. One of our members complained about that on their forum. Maybe more people need to complain?

The other items in the promotional sale are the 90 and 365 day bags that a character can equip. I've never bought those in the past but some people seem to need them. Those are also priced at about a 30% discount.

If you're interested to buy these things, and can't navigate the coin mall because it's in German feel free to whisper me in game (AxtTreiber) and I'll help you find the items you're looking for.

Now back to my rather cynical question of, why should be we buy these things? Ok, a PvP deco would a nice luxury if I could build one, but so far I can't. Drop rates are so low that I can't get enough gold together to buy the ornaments that I would attach to a PvP deco. I've already spent over 5 million gold at the CC3 Black Market and I didn't get the ornaments I wanted for my normal dodge deco.

The way I see it, there is no reason for me to buy another deco right now.

The other factor to think about is the (Vietnamese) hackers. I've reported a couple of them just to see what would happen. Nothing happened. I just saw one of them using the Hangzhou map chat. That's the same map where I saw him repeating quests yesterday.

I don't expect Games Campus to ban hackers based solely on player reports, but the server side software for this game keeps a log of all player actions and there is a search tool for that log. All the actions of a single player can be reported over a period of time with that search tool. Hacks such as repeating quests can easily be proved.

If nothing is going to happen to the hackers, I see no reason whatsoever to spend money on this game.

- AxtTreiber.

The Vietnamese Disease

2011-01-04T13:07:00.008Z

Yes, they are a disease and they are contagious. The 9D German server from Games Campus now has a sizable number of them at fairly high levels, for that server anyway.

The problem with this disease is that the Vietnamese players don't view 9Dragons as a game. For them it's a business. It's a chance to make some real world money by selling their gold and precious drops to the gold sellers who also infest almost every MMO out there. First of course, they have to get that gold and those drops.

Low level maps don't have much of a drop rate for gold and goodies on any version of 9Dragons, even if it's particularly bad on 9D Germany. The Vietnamese solution is to level hack, by repeating every quest they possibly can. It's a lot faster than grinding and they have identified quite an interesting array of quests that can be repeated. I personally watched a guy repeating a quest from the Bisha tavern yesterday, and the same guy was repeating The Disturbance of Shimei I very early this morning.

The in-game items that are easily sellable are the drops from the important bosses in the Cave of the Conqueror. The Defense trink, the HP trink, Blood Beads, Karma Plates, high damage wrist bands, etcetera. The Vietnamese have no problem with hacking the game any way they can in order to out-damage anyone else who might want those items too. These are mostly memory hacks using small, precise applets to repeatedly reset memory locations to allow faster recast, or higher damage while their characters are on the attack.

So far GameGuard isn't able to stop these applets from altering specific memory addresses during game play.

This became a problem over night, at least for me, because I couldn't sleep again last night. My AxtTreiber character was EC2 so at 4:30 this morning I decided to take a run at the def trink boss in the Cave of the Conqueror. Well, I would at least go camping for a while. When I got there I found a group of well known Viet players camping too. I had a pretty good idea what would come next but I stuck around anyway. I think I got called a lot of dirty names too.

A couple more known Viet players came and went, and after an hour or so the boss spawned. We were all over it immediately of course but the boss was dead as fast as it spawned. I think I got in 4 hits, and that's just not normal. The nuker behind me seemed to be on auto-cast, and the others around me had to be doing 10 times the damage I was doing.

I've done a lot of boss hunting in the last few days. I know how long it takes to kill one, even the easy ones. This was just unreal. I didn't get any external wounds from the boss because she wasn't alive long enough to hand it out. I've never seen anything like it. Fortunately there was no drop or I would have been really upset.

Games Campus would like to keep the gold sellers out of their game. Who can blame them, and that's why our drop rate is so miserable to begin with. Campus can go after the gold sellers themselves, and cut off their IP access to the game, and eventually all proxies too, but I would suggest Campus is going to have to do the same with the foot soldiers who are willing to sell their gold and precious items for cash. Fortunately they are easy to identify.

It's your move Games Campus.

- AxtTreiber

Late night information

2011-01-02T08:19:00.006Z

I wasn't sleeping very well last night so around 3:30 in the morning I got up to play for a while. I got to chat with a few of the really high level players on the German server and I got some interesting bits of information.

First of all the current level cap is Flower Crown 3, but not because of some sort of artificial limit. There are no more mobs after that level, and yes there are a couple of people at that level already. They have very little to do. They can run the Wild Tower dungeon for loot from each room, but they can't even come close to finishing it. They can also run the Choice of Fate and Valley of Hell dungeons, but the bosses don't drop very much because of the level difference.

Lastly, they can camp bosses, and they've been doing that, basically milking the HP and Def Trink bosses while they can. They would very much like to have the Liaodong map as soon as possible. So would I.

They also told me that the 2nd role quests are bugged for everyone except Heavenly Demon. Apparently a kill on one of the Cave of the Conqueror quest mobs fails to register, leaving you stranded in the quest series. So, no 2nd role skills, no good clothes, and very slow grinding in the high EC levels. Because of that I will probably stop grinding my AxtTreiber character at EC8, where I could normally put on the clothes. I'll start camping those bosses too I guess.

At this point I don't see any need to spend any more money on experience cards either. I'll be EC1 today and a couple of our newer members are planning to join me there, and I mean today. Last night I mentioned in chat that we could spend a few evenings this week running CoF and VoH too, making sure that everyone has their epithets, so go get your passes people.

I wasn't planning to start a new character this early but if we don't get a patch very soon, we may see my nuker much earlier than planned. At the least I can get him to RL12, switch over to nuker and start training skills.

Anyway, here's hoping we get a patch sooner than "soon", with bug fixes and the Liaodong map.

- AxtTreiber

It was a year

2010-12-31T21:18:00.007Z

I'm not usually the type to write introspective pieces. I prefer to report news, or juicy rumors when I can get them, and I'm sure most of you have noticed that I'm not afraid to hand out my opinion on any given subject. I like to think it's one of my more charming qualities. Still, it is New Years Eve and this has been quite the year for us, and for the game as a whole.

One publisher failed and another has failed quite spectacularly and repeatedly too, but people are still playing the game on the GamersFirst servers. I have no idea why. Yet another publisher has opened a server and not too many people have moved there yet. Yet. Don't be put off by the possible language barrier on Games Campus 9D German server. There is plenty of English spoken there and our league is off to a good start.

One factor for the near future will be the issue of event times. GamersFirst obviously have no idea what they're doing. It's a major holiday long weekend here and they have no event at all.

Games Campus isn't quite that clueless. We have an event for this long weekend but it's 2x only for experience rates. Skill rates and drop rates haven't been adjusted to match up with experience rates, and drop rates were low to begin with. When an experienced player like myself can't get a Wan Daye RL weapon there is something wrong. I haven't seen any Wan Daye weapons in the game so far.

I have been pushing Games Campus on the issue of drop rates and regular events too, as opposed to the marathons we've had so far. The only way to attract people to the Games Campus server, and to get them to play regularly will be to offer regular events, much like what we had with Acclaim. I really hate to show Acclaim as having done something right, but they did do at least that one thing right. We had regular events.

There isn't much more to say. Our league is spread out all over the place. Some of our people who followed me to 9D Germany even went over to the white side! No more cookies for those guys. And we haven't heard from many good people in a long time.

When goodgrrrl, RedCross and myself started this league and started recruiting we were all about the same level. We played together every day and always had someone around to get buffs, or help with a quest. People don't all level up together though and eventually we spread out a little. At one time we got to a point where we started losing people because as one person put it, there is no else around these levels but me! We lost a few people because of that.

Before Acclaim pulled the plug though we were coming back together level wise, and we started playing together again too. We were partying up, grinding together, trading buffs, running dungeons and generally having a very good time. I miss that, and I miss our old league chat from Bardo.

They may have been the best of times that we'll see in this game.

Auld Lang Syne.

- SpearDriver

GamersFirst gets a new Map!!!

2010-12-31T02:59:00.003Z

GamersFirst is getting a new map! They must be incredibly excited about it!

Of course, we already have the guide to that map.

Poor GamersFirst, so Second Place...

-AxtTreiber.

I bought a Paysafe Card

2010-12-29T14:27:00.005Z

I bought a Paysafe Card today and I can't believe how simple it was. First off, I didn't know where I could buy these things so I went to their website, which transferred me to a German version of the website. Right on their front page was a search engine where you can type in as little as your postal code and you'll get back a map showing all the retailers in your area who sell these things. It turns out that the local shop where I buy my weekly lottery ticket also sells these things.

Who knew? I sure didn't.

The guy at the shop actually used the same machine that prints the lottery tickets, to print my Paysafe Card. There is a 16 digit pin number on the card which you enter into your Games Campus account. There is a link to that on their forum, under CampusCredits Kaufen. I simply followed the links, entered that 16 digit number and voila! I have 2750 Campus credits.

I sure wish we had this sort of a system available with Acclaim. I always used my credit card with them but I never like to use that for small purchases, particularly with the exchange rate difficulties that Acclaim saddled us with. I bought a fair number of their coins at the start of each year and stretched them out over the year by buying coin mall items when they were on sale.

Of course, I lost everything (including over 6 months of premium play) when Acclaim pulled the plug on us. Because I had spent the coins I didn't get any refund from them, even though I never got to use those items.

Strangely enough, a number of G1 players wish the assholes at Acclaim were still in business. I don't. I'm glad they're gone and I've moved on to Games Campus and 9D Germany even though I have to start over on a character. Spending 25 euros today will help an awful lot.

Now what to spend those credits on? Hmm, perm deco, some xp cards, a few courier passes would be nice...

- AxtTreiber

Some thoughts, some bugs

2010-12-26T23:59:00.012Z

We've had an event going on over the weekend on 9D Germany and I've had a few thoughts on it, and I found a few bugs. The experience rate hasn't been too bad and I made it to SM7 last night. The normal experience rate is 2x the base rate, and this event is supposed to be 2x that number. With an xp card on I can level up in about 30 to 40 minutes, but that's me. I know exactly where to grind and which mobs are worth to use an xp card on.

As a melee hybrid I'm looking for high aggro melee mobs that gang up on me. Kill One and Heal, repeat for 30 minutes and avoid ranged attack mobs so that you don't have to move for the entire 30 minutes that the xp card lasts.

The skill xp rate was also supposed to have been doubled, but this isn't great. It's bearable as an event rate but training skills past c8 well and truly sucks. There is a complete lack of manuals in the game too which isn't helping things. I'm not looking forward to the rest of this week, and getting these skills done.

And lastly, the drop rate is just pathetic. I was not able to collect enough drop material to be able to build myself the Wan Daye RL weapon, and I had 6 Blood Essences already from the Games Campus forum quizzes a couple of weeks ago. There are 2 quests where the reward is a level 2 non-dungeon elixir, so I had to earn 1.5 million in gold to get the other 3 elixirs needed to build that weapon.

I leveled right past the stages where that weapon would have been useful and never got that much gold. I bought almost nothing in the early stages of the game too, because I know how useful that weapon is. I pick up every single drop in this game and quite frankly if I can't get a Wan Daye RL weapon, the game drop rate is simply too low. I hope Games Campus will consider this carefully.

As for bugs there are still a few, and a couple of them were known in the beta test phase. They haven't been fixed yet and I'm a little disappointed by that.

Der Aufmerksame Sohn, or The Mindful Son quest in Hefei has a text bug. You absolutely must have a German style computer keyboard in order to complete the text of that quest. That's one of the quests where you have to repeat some text and in English the answer is "Green Orchid". In German the answer is "grünes Orchidee".

I don't have that "u with an umlaut" character on my English language keyboard. According to standard German spelling "gruenes Orchidee" should also be acceptable but that answer doesn't work in the game. I posted about this problem on the Games Campus forum and got no response.

Edit: Based on Jim's comment I have now changed my text file to English. I don't need that, as I can read in German just fine, but I'm not interested to have to type in German. For starters I can't spell worth spit.

Otherwise there is a text failure in the instructions for the Corrupt Elder Monks quest, and there is a very similar text failure in the series of quests concerning the Five Eagles of the Brotherhood. There are also some text failures on the naming of some weapons, mostly Blood Dragon Gloves.

The last annoying thing in the game so far is the disconnection rate. Games Campus is using Game Guard to protect themselves from hacks. That system will disconnect you from the game every 30 to 40 minutes no matter what you are doing, and that isn't going to help Games Campus to sell XP cards.

That's all I've found so far. Did you find any other problems in game? Please post in our comments section if you did, and screen shots are always helpful too.

- AxtTreiber

A New Start

2010-12-25T10:15:00.003Z

Yesterday I found a few of our older friends and a few new ones and we put together the Disconnected Band on the German server. It's going well. A couple of people wanted to join the moment they saw us. It was like, "hey, I know your website!!!", and "you guys speak English!!!", which is going to be the purpose of our league.

We have 11 players so far and 4 or 5 are bilingual with German and English, and a couple of Ro players too. Our league chat is all English and people are around to translate if you need it. There are instructions on how to change your language files though, and you won't need much help if you want to play on this server. Check the comments section from the last post for more details on the language files.

Still, we're only a band and we would like to be a league, and I've had a number of Heavenly Demons types asking to join us but none have time to be the bandmaster. Gerrus or WuTaHe, if you're out there I sure would like to hear from you, particularly if you're willing to be an HD bandmaster.

And lastly, I miss my xenawarior friend. I need an SF bandmaster too!

- AxtTreiber

Today at 4pm

2010-12-21T12:28:00.007Z

The German version of the game goes live today at 4pm local time. You'll have to work it out for yourself what that means for you, because I don't know what timezone you live in. They actually said, "4pm or so" but these guys have been really good so far about working to an announced time. They are German after all.

This brings up a couple of things, in particular for this league. I would like to try to restart our league as an English speaking league on that server. An experienced player doesn't actually need to be able to speak German to play there. TS did just fine in the beta test. He only rarely asked me for a translation on anything, but that is sort of the point. Between us and the Restless League there are plenty of bi-lingual people We could make this work if we work together.

To that end I would like to hold our annual Christmas Hide'n Seek event in Hefei, of the German server. I have 6 BE as prizes from the Games Campus forum quiz that went on last week. The first 5 people to find me will get one. I'll be masked of course, and I'll probably have a few people as decoys too. I suggest 4pm local time, on Christmas Day. This is a league only event, and hopefully we will have that formed before Christmas Day.

You can find me in game today on a character called AxtTreiber, a germanized version of AxeDriver. Hit me up with a friends request and lets party up. Keep in mind also there is a guide to that start map here. Games Campus is now calling that map Bambusdorf, or Bamboo Village.

Server Settings for 9DGermany

2010-12-18T19:14:00.006Z

Games Campus announced what they are planning for the server settings and I'm thinking it's a bit of a mixed bag. It's not all good news, but it's not all bad either. For starters it will be a PvE style server with player versus player action limited to Bloody Plains. That suits me just fine. Hopefully we'll get war events often enough to attract players there regularly.

The experience rate for the server will be 2x the base rate, which is not particularly good. They know that the G1 rate is higher than that. Games Campus has also said that experience rate events won't be all that common, not even weekly, although they are planning for some special events like Christmas. I expect a lot of new players will quit after it takes longer than a day to level up. The no-lifers won't care.

The skill experience rate will not be quite as high as it was for the beta test, but at 3x the base skill rate it will still be fairly easy to get skills up to the C6 level, using cheap clan map manuals. After that things will get slow of course, and I think we can expect to see more than a few people using skill trainers or lego robots. The Games Campus people haven't said one way or another if they'll allow their use. Of course the insane skills are still going to be insane to level up.

The drop rate will be returned to normal low rates, and I'm not sure this is so good either. There will be fewer players here than in any other version of the game. That means fewer drops collected, sold, traded, and used. It could take quite a long time to get Wan Daye's Blue Jade Seal for instance. Manuals, Tomes and skill books will probably be fairly rare too, until players are high enough to run the higher dungeons.

Otherwise the Games Campus people are promising more updates to the game, with new material, clothes, maps, weapons and more. They seem to think that some of this will help to make up for the lower experience rates. We'll see. I hope Games Campus understands that they are the last chance for this game. They are the 4th publisher of this game for the western markets, and every one before them failed, some in a more spectacular fashion than others.

We players have another choice in playing 9Dragons. We can start new characters here, or put up with the absolute bullshit coming from GamersFirst. I'll be starting a new character on the German server and see how it goes.

It's a Disaster

2010-12-17T23:38:00.006Z

I need more floor, because I'm rolling on the floor, laughing my ass off, and I'm running out of floor space.

The people at GamersFirst obviously did absolutely no testing on the template characters that Indy21 created for them. A sample of only a small percentage of the characters requested would have turned up problems, and I mean, just check the submission form against the characters that Indy21 created.

I "claimed" the lowest level character in the list of characters that was offered to me, my old CS1 nuker that I rarely played. I got that character back and even got a choice for a new name. The process to write over a G1 account character worked just fine, and yes you have to have a character there for that write over effect. I'm not sure why that's a problem for so many people.

The equipment I was given on that character was pathetic.

First off, the character was reduced one level to FC12, which is not that big of a deal, but the equipment given was pretty much, Just Kill Me Now stuff. The clothing was SM level 2-pocket clothing that nobody would ever use. An SM level character can build better 4 pocket defense clothes than that stuff.

Among other things that character also got level 1 to 3 of each ND elixir, probably each with the usual success rate, new FD level GK/BK relics. That character also got a +6 bracers with no slots, but strangely also got an awful lot of perfect nuggets too. What the hell are we supposed to with these nuggets when the weapons aren't slotted?

Who put these template characters together? Are they really so clueless about the material available in their own game?

I haven't yet claimed my next character. I'm waiting to claim my GB4 vagabond, to see what he is equipped with. After that I will claim my AxeDriver character, which for some reason is now marked as female. At the moment I can't claim any other character due to the "unhandled exception" error.

I sure wish this game would start to make sense.

- SpearDriver

News from GamersFirst

2010-12-16T13:01:00.003Z

It's not good news, not that anyone is expecting much from them. 9DGermany did their test on the template characters and things weren't a total disaster, so G1 is going to be releasing templates to us in their version of the game, based on what we submitted as lost characters so many months ago.

We aren't getting our old characters back. We are getting a character that is close to the level of our old characters, with a package of equipment that is suitable for that level. It works out like this;

Level Ranges
1-80 = No Template character
81-100 = Level 96 Template Character
101-115 = Level 108 Template Character
116-128 = Level 120 Template Character
129-139 = Level 132 Template Character
140-150 = Level 144 Template Character
151-160 = Level 156 Template Character
161-172 = Level 168 Template Character
173-188 = Level 180 Template Character
189-200 = Level 192 Template Character

For me it means that my SpearDriver (DB6, or level 198) character will be dropped 6 levels and that seriously sucks. At Dissolved Body levels it takes at least a week of grinding just for one level. My AxeDriver character will gain 2 levels, and my nuker will drop 1 level. Still, that's only part of the story. The characters will come with zero karma, no epithets, and probably no elixirs either. They apparently all have a messed up build too, with Essence being set to 1 per level. Oh and, skills are all going to be set to c10. You think book prices are expensive now?

One of my least favorite G1 forum mods, Pelos was displaying both his abusive arrogance and ignorance over the lack of epithets. Yes, we need the Killer of Shen Mo epithet. That's why every frigging player in the game goes through pain of camping him, with every single character they have. I sure wish that guy would go back to the Knights Online forum, assuming that he knows anything about that game.

An awful lot will depend on what that "package of equipment" contains. We'll need clothes and weapons and there is little hope that Indy21 can get all the right stuff on each character. We aren't getting any of our old equipment back, and that includes all the coin mall items. I don't know if I'll be able to play at all if that's the case. Warriors don't do well on the Tibet map without a dodge deco. Hell, nobody does well grinding at the Altar either without one and that's exactly where I'll have to go with my AxeDriver hybrid character.

It looks like the process of claiming a template character will overwrite one of the existing characters on your account, which probably means deleting all the equipment you have on that character. I'll be moving stuff around today to try and save what I can.

There are also no answers about conflicting names, and lot of people are dealing with other players who have squatted on their old character names. There are also a lot of people out there who didn't get the chance to fill out that character claim form, and for now they are completely out of luck.

All in all this just hasn't been thought through very well, but I'm looking forward to whatever else comes up. I'll sure there will be issues.

Answers on Friday

2010-12-15T10:42:00.003Z

Sometimes you just have to be persistent. I found this post on the Games Campus Forum this morning.

Eine offizielle Ankündigung zum Thema Serversettings (Exp-Rate, Skillrate, Droprate und PvE/PvP) gibt es am Freitag.

"An official announcement on the topic of server settings will be given on Friday."

I may not like their decisions on these topics, but at least I'm getting what I asked for in my last post! I'm sure their answers will raise another series of questions, but I really wonder why other gaming companies can't communicate like this.

December 21, apparently...

2010-12-09T09:54:00.006Z

I checked the various forums for the game this morning, as I usually do before going in game, and found this post from a regular on the Games Campus forum. ForestWolf gives us a link to a German language online gamer publication. The article says pretty much everything that Games Campus has already told us, but with one little gem. The game is restarting on the 21st of the month.

Why can't Games Campus tell us this sort of thing directly, in their own forum?

Unfortunately this sort of thing has been the mindset of all the publishers of this game so far.

The Peeps Don't Need to Know (so we won't tell them...)

Games Campus has some basic decision making to do in the next two weeks, and we players would like answers.

1. What are the experience rates going to be set to?

During the beta test we had the old, low Acclaim rate, but it was a beta test so who cares. The characters have since been wiped. With those old, low rates we at least got regular events with raised xp rates. Are we going to see that here?

Acclaim later permanently raised xp rates, by lowering the required experience to level up for each level. They did that when the level cap was raised, with new maps and new material. Are we even going to have the LiaoDong, Ice map, or Tibet map to play with?

2. How about skill experience and drop rates?

We had some really nice rates for these during the beta test. Except for the insane stuff, most skills were easy keep up to their level cap. It was possible to buy the items needed from NPC's, elixirs to make good weapons and it was easy to get good clothes. Map collections were easy to fill too, and that helped a lot. Will this continue in Open Beta? I sure hope so.

3. Refining rates?

I tried to refine several weapons during the beta test. The results weren't good but as long as the drops rate provides a good supply of Blood Essence, nobody minds too much. Still, it would be nice to make a least a +7 weapon, when you take three identical items and hope for the best. One of them breaks at +4, the next at +5, the next at +6. Games Campus isn't going to sell a lot of Dragons Tears/Scales with those refining rates, unless they're priced at about 50 cents each.

4. Items from the Korean version?

There are a variety of items that have never been released into the western games. We can see the screen shots from their game, and a few people can read Korean too. Clothes with elemental resistance, or slots? Slotted Wan Daye weapons? Those would sure be nice, and there are a lot more items out there.

5. PvE or PvP?

The western versions of the game have never had a balanced PvP system, and for that reason alone I think it should be confined to Bloody Plains at least until we get some balance. Who really wants to be the target of a pimply-faced, snot-nosed 14 year old with attention deficit disorder, and a super powered nuker?

I for one will not pay 10 cents for that sort of gaming pleasure.

I could go on and on about the issues in the game, and the decisions that need to be made. I can even accept that these basic decisions haven't been made yet, but at the very least I would hope that once these things are decided, that Games Campus will tell us directly how things are going to be run in their version.

That means "tell us directly, in your forums, and not in some obscure online gaming magazine that half your potential customers can't read anyway".

Closing Beta

2010-12-06T14:12:00.007Z

The German version of the game is closing its Beta test on Wednesday afternoon, and all the existing characters will be deleted at that time. There isn't any set date yet when they'll open with their open beta version, just a note in their forum that says "shortly before Christmas". Christmas is only 3 weeks away, and I don't really know how much "shorter" you can get.

But it's obvious they have quite a number of bugs to fix first. There have always been bugs in this game, but the bugged quests are a must in terms of being repaired before the open beta can go head. That will take some time, and we all know how slow Indy21 can be at times. Hopefully they won't break anything else in the mean time.

Anyone else remember the fiasco at last year's Christmas event with Acclaim?

Games Campus is giving away a number of rewards as well. Anyone who even logged in during the Beta will get a 7 day premium for free. If you reported a bug or made a suggestion in that time you'll be getting a 30 day premium for your work. And apparently a small number of people will be getting a 90 day premium for outstanding work. I'm hoping I'm on that list for the Zhangzhu quest guide I wrote. We'll see.

The last event for the Beta test is another GM PvP event starting at 6pm local time tonight, running for an hour. Screen shots would be welcome. Please post what you get in the comments section. There are more rewards too. Anyone who kills a GM will get 2 XP cards per kill when the game restarts later this month.

I'll update this when I get an exact date that the game will re-open.

- AxtTreiber

Template Characters

2010-12-04T09:13:00.009Z

Last night Games Campus, the publisher of the German version of the game, managed to provide their players with level 100 template characters. I have to wonder how they did that. Games Campus has only been online with this game for a couple of weeks. Ok, everybody got pretty much the same characters. The last character that everyone created was turned into an EC4 Heavenly Demon nuker (for black clans), or a Wu Tang warrior (for white clans). We all got +12 weapons and some of the skills were set to C12 as well.

They messed up a few things of course. Nobody had any sort of epithet so you had to go out and do a couple of quests for a good one. The Lightning Fist epithet is easy to get at EC4, and so is the Punisher of Demons epithet. The HD nukers didn't have much for shields either. The low level Chi shield was C12 but the more useful VE shield wasn't trained at all.

The nuker I got was wearing beggar clan boots, and the rest of the clothes weren't all that good either, but at EC4 you can make level 5, or 300 defense clothes and that was one of the first things most people did. I also went and bought some poor mans slotted clothes from the seamstress, and made a quick trip to the Black Market in CC3. It cost me 10 million gold to get a bunch of extra dodge ornaments.

The build on the nukers wasn't all that good either. It certainly wasn't set up for last nights PvP event against the GMs. The Hefei quest to change your build was still available and a lot of people went and did that too. The template characters didn't have any karma either, but the Bloody Plains Flowers quest was available, so you had your choice of good karma or bad. I have some of the old FD and RC level bad karma relics so that's what I used.

Even with all the good and bad that went into these template characters I can see why Games Campus did things this way. I'm a reasonably good cook and a couple of times I've had to cook for some large numbers of people. I don't have any problem to do that, but everybody is going to be eating the same thing!

In other words, this situation isn't quite the same as what GamersFirst is facing when trying to get our Acclaim characters back, or give us a template character that resembles what we used to have. In the end it was a good test of the template characters idea, but obviously Indy21 and the publishers are going to have to put more thought into the idea.

I don't know when Games Campus is going to go live with an open beta version of the game, but I sure hope they have the bugs fixed, particularly the bugged quests, before they think they're going to make any money on the game.

So, how did you do in the GM PvP event? Does anyone have any screen shots for us?

- AxtTreiber

9D Germany is patched

2010-11-30T15:54:00.010Z

The guys at Games Campus had planned this patch for yesterday, but let us know it would be delayed a day both in their forum, and on their Twitter account. It's kind of interesting to see a 9D related Twitter account that is active. I have to wonder how other game publishers with "community liason" staff can't manage to inform their players what's happening with game development.

The first change in today's patch is some text updates for various things, including some quests, and Zhangzhu. If you have been using the English language text file with the German client, I suggest you switch back to the German language text file before down loading this patch. I don't have any reason for suggesting that, it just seems prudent to me.

There is a new quest on the Shi Zhang map, so there is probably a similar one on the white clans map too. There could be a problem here for players using the English language text file. This is a "new" quest, and the text probably doesn't exist in that text file. The NPC is a peddlar claiming to represent Wan Daye. On the black side you have to kill 7 bandits that are nearby and you get your choice of clan relevant weapons, including a set of bracers that are usuable by hybrid players.

The weapons do a little extra damage and give 3% speed and are designed for OC level players, so they aren't a bad little gift item. The bracers I got are marked as "combinable", so supposedly they can be slotted too. I tried that and couldn't figure it out. You probably need to use a Jade Separator just like you do with a Hermit weapon.

Apparently the "Mindful Son" quest series is now fixed too. Edit: No it's not.

And lastly, those damned good and annoying invisible walls that were all over the place are finally gone! I personally tested the gate from the Brotherhood clan map to Shi Zhang, all of Hefei, and the gate from Shi Zhang to Datong.

If you see something that still needs a fix please let us know in the comments section. I know that the Games Campus staff have been reading this blog, so they will find your reports here too.

- AxtTreiber

Quests in Zhangzhu

2010-11-27T18:54:00.025Z

This new version of the game is totally German, and that is obviously going to be a problem for some people. It was mentioned in the comments section yesterday that you can replace the NDTEXTDB_DE.XSD in your game folder/data/script with the US version of that file, and you get everything in English again, except the new material.

The tutorial map, Zhangzhu, is completely new so I don't recommend you replace that text file until you've finished the grind on the first map. It's heavily quest based and the text goes missing if you replace the German text file with the English language file. To help players with that new material we've put together a quest guide. Anyone with any corrections or more information is invited to post in the comments section and I'll add things as I get them.

Like usual, all quests start with the large blue exclamation mark, and further steps in the quest use a question mark. Just keeping that in mind makes each quest easy. I'll give the German language name of the quest and a simple translation, and the NPC name where the quest starts.

Erste Begegnung (First Meeting): Tan Xiao (Tutorial/Collections)
You get told to distribute your 10 attribute points, and come back.
Reward: gold, xp

Bitte von Tan Xiao (Request from Tan Xiao): Tan Xiao
You are given beginners Lightfoot and Meditation. Deliver food to her Father, then back to Tan. She then explains meditation, chi breathing, etc.
Reward: xp

Gib eine Waffe (Give a Weapon): Tan Xiao
Tan sends you to the Hermit, where you select black or white clans, and then the actual clan. He gives you a weapon too.
Reward: a weapon, xp

Anfanger-Axtangriff (Beginner Axe Attack): Hermit (Accupressure Buffs)
The Hermit sends you to your clan trainer for your first active skill. Other forms of this quest name depend on the weapon type, such as Schwertangriff (Sword Attack). You don't just talk to your clan trainer, you select a skill from him and then go train on the training posts nearby.
Reward: xp

If you chose to go vagabond in the game you'll have these 2 quests forever marked as incomplete because you didn't select a clan from the Hermit in Gib eine Waffe. It is still safe to do the Gib eine Waffe Quest though. Doing this quest does not make you a clan member. That is still handled the old fashioned way for each clan.

Bitte von Wei Wu Min (Request from Wei Wu Min): Wei Wu Min (Innkeeper)
Kill 5 foxes.
Reward: LS4 relic, gold, xp

Sabelberg, Schwertwald (Saber Mountain, Sword Forest) Wei Wu Min
Talk to 2 women of the village.
Reward: xp

Der Wunsch eines Madchens (A Little Girls Wish): Wei Xiao Wo (Little Girl)
Collect a fox hair and a fox tail. (with so many people starting the game now, you don't even have to kill a couple of foxes. just go pick the items up from the ground...)
Reward: lollipops, xp

Schwester des kleinen Madchens (Sister of the Little Girl): Wei Xiao Wo
Deliver a hair brush from the little girl and get told off by her older sister.
Reward: xp

Mittlepunkt der Welt (Mid-point of the World): Wang Xiao Ri (Wan Daye's Servant)
Go to Hefei and speak to Wan Daye.
Reward: Bambu Roll, xp, 4 pocket 50 Defence clothes

Das Land ist in Aufruhr (The Land is in Uproar): Tan Xiao
Go talk to your clan trainer. Wannabee BoT get sent to Kill 3 Moonkids. Other clans might have a different target.
Reward: LS2 relic, xp

Besuch bei der Liga der Bettler (Visit the Beggars): Zhu Shi (Beggar Clan)
A beggar tries to distract wannabee black clan players. I'm sure the stinking white clans get the better treatment from a clan trainer from our side. Too bad they never listen. Oh well, we'll just have to kill them. (but you'll still have to go to the Beggar map to finish this quest)
Reward: xp

Das Land ist in Aufruhr II (The Land is in Uproar): Wei Xiao Wo
The Little Girl sends you to talk to a few clan trainers.
Reward: xp

Einem jungen Mann Arbeit Verschaffen I, II, III, IV (Create Work for a Young Man): Xiao Jin Lai (Storekeeper)
This is the stupidest series of quests ever. Just follow the quest marks and click through them. You will have to run to Hefei and speak with a couple of NPC's to get a pretty good relic.
Reward: gold, xp, backpack, relic

Hanstoff von Xiao Guo Xiao (Hemp Cloth of Xiao Gu Xiao): Xiao Gu Xiao (Seamstress)
Collect 5 pieces of cloth from female bandits.
Reward: xp pill, xp

Das Gepack von Fang Yuan (Backpack of Fang Yuan): Fang Yuan (Shao Clan)
Talk to the Sacred Flowers Clan Trainer, then get the backpack from the Moonkids.
Reward: 2 relics, xp

Der Bergkonig (The Mountain King): Tan Xiao
Talk to the village headman.
Reward: relic, xp

Hilfe von unbekanntem alten Mann (Help from an old man): Hermit
Change your point distribution if needed.
Reward: none

Kiste der Banditen (Bandits Chest): Tan Xiao
Collect Bambuspfanne and return them to Tan Xiao.
Reward: Bamboo Item, xp

Besuch bei der Bruderschaft (Visit the Brotherhood): Chuan Lang
Just like it says, go talk to an NPC on the clan map. Each clan has a version of this quest.
Reward: xp

Das Hobby des Dorfobersten (Hobby of the Village Headman): Wei Chun Xin
Talk to the Hunter and kill 5 each of 2 types of wolves.
Reward: gold, xp

Das Gegengift fur den Vater (Antidote for a Father): Wei Xiao Wo
Talk to the doctor and kill 5 snakes.
Reward: xp pill, xp

Im Kampf Getotet (Died in Battle): Wan Xiao Ri
Talk to the big sister, and get told off again. Hey, it's free XP.
Reward: xp

Hilfe fur den Toa-Alchemisten (Help for the Taoist Pharmacist): Xiao Zhi You
Collect 8 firewood from the stumps at 137, 208. Collect 5 Wild Gingseng at 123, 90
Reward: level 1 elixir, xp

Alter Weiser in Bambus-Wald (Old Wise One in the Bamboo Forest): Wei Wu Min
Go talk to the Hunter.
Reward: xp

Gestohlener Honig I, II, III (Stolen Honey): Wei Chun Xin
Go talk to the Hunter again, and again. Buy him a bottle of the blue liquor. Then he talks. Eventually you get the orders to go kill the bear.
Reward: xp, epithet

Kung Fu Trainieren (Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting!!! Ooo, Ah!!!): Wei Jin Xiao
Go talk to various NPCs (again).
Reward: gold, xp

Die Axe mit Zermalmendem Chi (The Axe with Grinding Chi): Tan Xiao
Talk to various NPC's, including one in Hefei, about the weapon that can split a massive rock.
Reward: xp

Den Felsen zerstoren (Destroy the Rock): Jiang Qibao
You get a windgram from Hefei to pick up a weapon in the village. Destroy the rock and save the kidnapped soldier by killing 6 each of 2 types of Bandit.
Reward: gold, xp

Chi an andere ubertragen (Donating Chi): Xiao Zhi You
Talk to the Hermit. He makes you Chi Breathe.
Reward: xp

Verruckte Banditen (Insane Bandits): Tan Xiao
Kill 10 Bandits
Reward: strength ambrosia, xp

Plotzlicher Tod am Platz (Sudden Death): Tan Xiao
Kill the Mountain King Zhang Zhong.
Reward: xp, epithet

Die Ankunft des Drachen (The Beginnings of a Dragon): Tan Xiao
Every NPC on the map wants to talk to you because you're a hero.
Reward: Ginseng powder, xp

Bier Trinken (Drinking Beer): AxtTreiber
Go get a beer. You earned it.
Reward: beer

And that ends our not so short tour of the Zhangzhu, or the Diamond Mine as it's sometimes called. I hope this guide helps. You know, we're always looking for good writers and artists for this blog. If you would like to help out, please let me know.

- AxtTreiber (and RedCross for that awesome graphic!!!)

9D Germany

2010-11-26T07:41:00.013Z

I'm not all that impressed with the way GamersFirst is handling 9Dragons. In fact, I don't know any player that is all that happy with GamersFirst. Fortunately we now have another option for our 9Dragons habit. The Games Campus version is available in a beta edition which means it's in a test phase. All characters created now will be wiped before the actual game play goes live. I don't think everyone playing now actually understands that.

TS and I started playing this a couple of days ago and it's going quite well despite the fact that TS doesn't speak German. I think that any reasonably experienced 9D player with Google Translator on hand will do just fine in this version. I think TS has only asked me for a couple of translations so far.

I've seen a few of our old friends (hi Mayen!) in game too, and a number of people have addressed me as SD despite the fact that I'm using a germanized version for the name of my new hybrid, AxtTreiber. TS is being as creative as usual with his character name.

The servers seem to be in great shape. I've only experienced a couple of momentary lags while lightfooting and I've never noticed a thing while grinding. The GM tools work and GM's are in game answering questions in English and German, and they are looking at problems too. For instance, the gate from the BoT clan map to Shi Zhang is blocked. It's sort of strange because you can easily go from Shi Zhang to Tai Shan. But the GM's came, took a look and made a few notes about it. That's why it's a beta/test phase after all. They even teleported a few players to Shi Zhang while they were there.

While we're playing this beta/test phase there are several events planned and they have been made public on the forums. How is that for a nice change? Events, planning, and posted to a public forum? It's refreshing. The Games Campus edition of 9Dragons has been described as the Korean version of the game with the US stat system. I'm not sure how accurate that is about the stats system, and I'm not going to do a detailed comparison. I just wanna play without any headaches.

There is some new material too. The tutorial map is a story of its own and is worth doing. There are new drops there that can be traded with a resource NPC (the tutorial NPC actually) for some goodies, some new quests, and some nice items for doing those quests. You can come out of the tutorial with a reasonable weapon, 4 pocket 50 defense clothes and your choice of a couple of epithets. It feels like a nice start, even for a veteran player.

Another topic dear to us is the disconnections issue. We are the Disconnected League after all. I haven't been disconnected yet by the game, not even on a map jump. I still get my 24 hour disconnection from my ISP though. There's nothing I can do about that.

There is no anti-hack system in place yet, but they know about it. Actually one of the players complained about this in the Games Campus forum and made certain to mention the problems we've seen in the G1 edition with the Viet players. The nice thing about the replies were that no one yelled RACISM, no threads were closed, no posts deleted, and no one was banned from the forum. Compared to the treatment we players get on the G1 forums this too is really refreshing.

Of course we were all happy to see G1 when they came on to the 9Dragons scene, and nobody is all that happy now. We were all convinced that they couldn't be worse than Acclaim, and they are. So I'll watch closely to see how things develop with Games Campus for now.

Still, they couldn't be worse than G1, could they? Could they?

Update: These guys just got even better. They announced almost 4 hours in advance that the server would be coming down for a mini-patch. But that isn't all they announced! In the forums they announced what they are trying to fix, and when the time of the next patch is likely to be.

- SpearDriver2

The Login Server is Down

2010-11-24T14:22:00.006Z

Ok, you could be excused if you didn't know that. After all, if you're one of the herd of twitchy, nervous reprobate Eurotrash teenagers playing this game, you just got home from school. I'm so glad I'm not one of those types. I'm also glad I know to check the load-o-meter website whenever an apparent problem comes up. Today you get to see this!

That tailing off effect on the server load is because there is a natural disconnection rate from the servers. If the login server goes down for any length of time, the population in the game goes to Zero Percent in a few hours. Zero Percent is a very small number of satisfied customers!

So what is everyone going to do while we wait? I mean, besides spamming the forum or the IRC channel. A few of us in the IRC channel actually figured it out.

The French will go for a coffee and a cigarette, and the Germans will wonder what Mama is making for dinner, while the Dutch will simply go do some drugs.

The Romanians will probably call their little-brother wannabe lawyer, or go play Aion on a private server (which is where most of them already are anyway).

The Tuga, Spanish and Italians will be watching Champions League tonight, so they shouldn't be a problem. While the Brits are in their own timezone and they are already an hour late, but will probably catch up in the complaining polls because there are actually a fair number of them still playing the game. Not clever enough to setup a private server for Aion, I guess.

Did I miss anyone important?

All in fun of course, but seriously, I'm sure this will be the last straw for even more people.

- SpearDriver2

9dragons status check

2010-11-18T05:09:00.005Z

So here's the list whats going on with GamerFirst's 9dragons for two weeks in a row:

- GM tools not working in the way they should

- Maps being crashed and unable to being restarted

- No exp events in past 2 weeks, till Indy manages to launch a new patch

- No sign about template characters nor database recovery process

- plus errorcode, spammers, hackers, scammers, macroers... and disconnects!

They like to postpone important things

-Red

Template rehost

2010-10-30T07:39:00.005+01:00

Yo, as some of you noticed, our previous hosting server was suspicious. Template images are now hosted at one of my company servers. Should work like a charm from now on and no more broken images!

Before I go

2010-10-25T12:47:00.013+01:00

No, I'm not leaving the game. My wife and I are going to visit a beach for a couple of weeks because we're already tired of the cold. But before I go I thought I would make a list of things we've all been bitching about, and who knows? By the time I get back some of them might be solved!

Ok, that might be a bit of wishful thinking but I know at least a couple of the staff at GamersFirst do actually read this blog. The staff and forum mods at G1 can track the IP of each user on their forums and I find it really nice that I can do the same thing here. At least one has been seen reading the bosses section of the blog. I wonder what that means?

So anyway, lets think of this as a Players Priority List, as opposed to whatever priorities G1 and Hyperion may have in mind.

1. We Want Our Characters Back: GamersFirst obviously knows this one, but they aren't doing a damn thing to make it happen. The standard line is that Indy21 is handling the issue but by now G1 has probably seen that Indy21 isn't much good at handling in-game issues, never mind anything else. G1 is going to have to get involved in the process of getting our characters back, if it's ever going to happen.

This thread from the forum pretty much sums up a lot of players feelings on this subject. We're wasting our time here and I'm in the same frame of mind. I don't have much interest to grind, never mind spend money on the game.

2. Stable Servers Would be Nice: You can look back on the load-0-meter website for the last few weeks and see that almost daily there has been a server outage or a mass disconnection. This particular situation is actually worse than anything Acclaim ever threw at us. This is one issue that G1 cannot blame on Indy21.

3. Mapload Disconnections: This is one issue that G1 is blaming on Indy21, but I don't understand that at all. I've been having this problem since G1 took over the game, and it has only gotten worse over time. I estimate that I get disconnected from the game on 4 out of 5 map changes, or character changes.

4a. Respect for European Players: I'm not saying "more respect" for European players, or even "some respect" for Europeans. How about any respect at all? The European players outnumber all others by about 2:1, but it's like pulling teeth to get announcements published that include GMT times.

4b. Weekend Event Decisions on Thursday: I'm making this 4b because it's part and parcel with "respect for European players". Peak playing times for all players are Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings. The decisions about our weekend events are happening on Friday afternoon in the California timezone, which is well after midnight for us. We Europeans lose that event time for one peak playing period. The events are often extended to Monday but that is a work/school day and most of us can't take advantage of it. Let's have these decisions by Thursday at the latest so we can all enjoy our weekend.

4c. Black vs White War on Phoenix: Why is the weekly war scheduled for midnight GMT on a Sunday night? Oh right, it's that complete lack of respect for European players again. Silly me.

5. Payment Options for G1 Coins: The payment options for G1 coins are a patchwork at best, with most countries using different systems. If you're going to accept Paypal, why not accept Paypal from every country where it exists? This makes no sense.

6. Test Characters Should Be Retired: Everyone likes to see how they are doing compared to the others, particularly the high level players, but G1 test characters are taking up the top spots on those lists. I remember I almost had an orgasm when I made it to the Bardo top 100 list. How hard is it to mark the "retired" option for test characters in order to take them off the lists?

7. Punishing Players for Being Players: Players are being punished for doing what they do, deciding for themselves how best to spend their time in the game. The case in point is the Major Levels gift event. Some of the noobs in the game have collected a couple hundred or more XP cards, and they're being banned for a week or more and the cards taken away? Hey, the noobs didn't invent the event. They're just being noobs.

Maybe the next time you want to run an event you could talk to a couple of veteran noobs first.
There are a few of us left, for now...

8. We Want Our Characters Back Dammit: First and last, because it's that important.

Now about that beach...

- SpearDriver2

The Second Role

2010-10-24T13:54:00.004+01:00

It's been a long time since we had this topic on the blog and because I made EC6 with my warrior character yesterday I thought I would bring it up. It's an important milestone for all players but for warriors in particular the game suddenly gets a lot easier to play, and starts to be enjoyable again.

For the last 8 levels or so I've been struggling. A warrior needs a full set of buffs to be able to grind effectively and unfortunately healers and hybrids aren't always around when you need them. I was grinding on yellow Devas for quite a bit of the time because they can't really gang up on you. Still though, I had to meditate after 2 of them, and only sometimes could I kill 3 before I had to run and meditate. The other advantage to the deva grind is there is a place to run to, when you have to meditate.

At the low EC levels you start to get a series of Road to the Dragon quests, but only if you've completed all of the previous RTD quests. Don't ignore them, they are there for a reason. If you haven't already seen them, Fullneo wrote a great set of guides for those quests for all the black clans; Brotherhood of Thieves, Sacred Flower and Heavenly Demon.

The quests mostly involve a lot of running back and forth to the Cave of the Conqueror, which has never been my favorite grind spot. It's a lot easier now that we have the anti-PK buff, but I died once anyway when one of the bosses spawned right on top of me.

I really hate when that happens.

When you're finally done that running back and forth you'll have the title of Senior member of your clan and a number of new skills are available at your skill trainer. In particular you'll get a new active skill that does a lot more damage than the old ones. You also get a free chance to reset your chi points and mastery points if you've messed them up along the way.

The best thing though, for warriors anyway, is the new Advanced Masteries that open up. For a warrior the first things you get are an extra 500 points of defense and 1000 hit points. You'll also get a set of clothes from the quests that you can use at EC8. Those clothes give another 360 points of defense. Like I said, "for warriors in particular the game suddenly gets a lot easier to play, and starts to be enjoyable again."

Now it's time for the EC level Party Quest.

- SpearDriver2

Hackers in G1

2010-10-21T05:02:00.005+01:00

I dont play 9D anymore, but i check forum once in a week and same with irc-channel in hope to get my original characters back. It is a bit hilarious to see G1 9D suffering the same problems as Vietnamese 9D did. This time hackers have found a way to spawn Cao Bei quest mobs to the Hefei map. Obviously they also knows how to get killer epithets and rare items through hacks.

Hyperion has asked Indy21 to disable VN hacking tools, but can they really do that in time?

- Red

Still less than impressed

2010-10-18T15:22:00.008+01:00

Ok, it was nice to have a 4 day long weekend to play with good experience rates, but it's not like we got to play uninterrupted. The servers are still lagging hard from time to time and characters are dying because of it. Mass disconnection isn't as bad as it was last weekend, but it still happens. That sort of thing builds frustration and players will quit because of it. The constant disconnections at the map loads do it too. I don't think G1 understands that yet.

I think G1 still don't understand how many people have quit the game, or how many are now quitting on a daily basis. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that our readership numbers doubled when G1 announced they there were taking over as publisher of the game. Our reader numbers are declining again and the current 30 day rolling number is only just over 1100 unique readers.

The server load images at the load-o-meter show some pretty good numbers for the last couple of days. I think the Phoenix server went over the 50% point for the first time, but that obviously has more to do with the experience event than it has to do with satisfied customers. Frankly, the future of this game is bleak unless G1/Indy21 somehow get the old character database back from Disney.

The 4x xp rates over the weekend helped me to get past the dreaded Golden Blossom levels. Experienced players know that's the make or break point for most players. XP rates drop badly in those 12 levels, particularly at GB4. I may have only delayed that SLOOOOOW feeling but things pick up again as a character gains the second role at EC6, and hopefully I'll get there this week. SpearDriver2 is EC2 now.

Lastly, the coin mall opened up this weekend and I've seen a couple of people wearing IM decos. I'm jealous. I used to have 4 of them dammit, and I could really use a dodge deco now. I'm getting sick and tired of having to run and meditate after killing a few mobs. A low level character with crap equipment is really no fun when you've had better.

I've also seen a few posts in the forum from people who are having difficulty buying G1 coins with people being charged multiple times. The company known as Playspan seems to be one particularly difficult company. Sometimes coins aren't delivered at all and when they are, purchased items are sometimes delivered to the wrong server.

All things considered, I'm still less than impressed.

- SpearDriver2

I was wrong

2010-10-16T16:25:00.003+01:00

In my last post I told you that it would not be possible to get the major level gifts a second time on one account. I was wrong. I haven't done it yet myself but in the event that is going on you can get the GC and OC gifts in less than 90 minutes. Delete that character and start again. You'll have 3 XP cards every 90 minutes or so.

That's one way to farm the game I guess, and you just have to look at the clan bases to see how many NOOBS there are in this game. There are drops all over the clan maps, and I picked up quite a number of golden threads and flowstones. It's a ridiculous KS situation on all of them, but I'm told the Wu-Tang map is the worst. There are a lot of mobs on that map.

Did you find anything else in the new patch?

- SpearDriver2

Patch 120

2010-10-14T16:34:00.008+01:00

We're supposed to be getting this patch tonight, along with some maintenance time. The post in the forum has a few details about what the patch is supposed to do but I'll wait for the actual update before putting any details up.

The really funny thing about this patch is the fact that G1 has pre-announced it. Anyone who has been around the game for a while knows that there has been a curse on every single patch that was pre-announced. Something goes wrong every time, and I'm actually looking forward to this one, just to see what happens.

Edit: Ok, the patch came and it's up and the most important thing I guess, at least for G1 is the fact that their item mall is now up and running. I'm not buying anything. They claim to have fixed the bugged mobs on the Icy and Tibet maps, but I don't play there at the moment. And apparently a few quests that were being exploited have been changed so that they can't be repeated. The rewards have changed too, so there is no longer any reason to repeat those quests.

In addition we're getting a new event that they're calling Lucky Level Up. It doesn't look too bad so far. For every hour you're in game you'll get lucky golden coins. People with dual logged perma stand characters will love that. And there are gifts for every Major Level gained, which means every time you chi breathe you'll get a nice gift. The GC1 gift is an XP card that is storable, but not tradeable. So there is no reason to get multiple accounts grinding to GC1. Also, the gift appears to be once per account, so there is also no reason to be deleting characters and grinding again to GC1. You'll only get that gift once per account.

I'll give them credit, G1 is a little sharper than Acclame when it comes to dealing with noobish players.

In other news, Hyperion joined the IRC channel today. If you want to speak to the man personally you might like to join us there. There is a link to that channel in the top bar of this blog.

Edit II: We now have 4x base rate experience in effect, and what we would normally call 3x for skills. This is supposed to last until fairly late Monday afternoon for Phoenix players. GoGoGo!!!

If you find anything interesting/faulty with the patch please post it in the comments.

- SpearDriver2

Same old, same old

2010-10-11T14:16:00.010+01:00

The game is turning into the same old thing we had before with Acclaim, and quite frankly that's a shame. Everyone was pretty excited to be getting rid of Acclaim, even though we didn't have any clear answers about our characters. A New and Improved publisher couldn't be a bad thing, could it? Well yeah, it could be and it could just be the same old, same old.

We still don't have any clear answers about our characters, but one thing that is clear, G1 will make decisions without the input of the players. Hyperion started a thread about the possibilities we have concerning our characters and later he even turned it into a poll. Fairly new, low level players voted for the option that would make them rich with good items, and veteran players with high level characters voted to wait for the character database. The low level players out-number the veterans.

The great scam in all of this is that Hyperion had decided before the thread was ever posted that we're getting template characters based on the levels claimed on the character claim page from a couple of weeks ago. So we're all getting the same things. These people haven't played the game and simply don't know what items a low level player needs, never mind what material a high level player needs. I can see this turning into a fiasco.

The situation with the servers is another good example of same old, same old. Mass disconnections occur almost every 30 minutes during peak periods and no one seems able to fix it. That's as bad as Acclaim ever was. The other problem is that the peak periods occur on the weekends, and G1 employees don't like to work on weekends.

G1 is apparently making some rather major changes to their networks and apparently all their games are affected. With all their problems, it's clear to me that they weren't in the position to be taking on a new game, but they did anyway.

Have you ever seen someone dive head first into the shallow end of the pool?

That's what this reminds me of.

G1 appears to be on the edge of opening their item mall. With all the problems so far it seems a little optimistic to expect that people will start spending money on the game. I won't be paying 10 cents for the game until I get my old accounts and characters back. Even then, I'll be using the items I still had in my inventory before buying anything.

The one bit of good news that I can post today, the prices in the item mall will be 11% lower than the Acclaim coin mall. We European players will actually see much better discounts than that. If you recall, we brought you the news a long time ago that Europeans were paying much more than the Americans for our Acclaim coins. Depending on exchange rates we will be getting much better prices than we used to.

Of course there are problems. Paypal doesn't appear to be an option for European players and I doubt they will support the SMS pin code system that some players had to rely on for Acclaim coins. I'm sure there will be other problems too, because thinking things through doesn't seem to be a strong point for game publishing companies.

And lastly, the situation in the G1 forums is the same old thing we ever had on the Acclaim forums. One particular forum Nazi just handed me a 7 day posting ban, at the request of another player, for hijacking a thread. I looked through the RoC and didn't find that one anywhere. The thing is, it's not worth to fight it. So I have yet another reason to not spend 10 cents on this game.

G1 has a long way to go, on several issues, and forum mods in Nazi Mode is no way to turn pissed off players into paying customers.

- SpearDriver2

Joining TS :3lena says Goodbye

2010-10-03T09:45:00.005+01:00

Hi all,

It was great playing with you all but i am just unable to find the same zest i had earlier.I feel like a big part of me has been taken away, as what my representation used to be in game i.e 3lena has been taken away, game doesn't seem the same to me anymore. I cant find the love for the game anymore :(

I will time to time log in the game to say hi to you people :)

But i will not be playing to level my char or because its an event etc

SO i will join TS my master ;) and bid farewell to the game.

Good Luck All
3lena - Disconnected
Kriti- EternalWinter
Hell_Dweller - Heavenly_Taipeing

It's a weekend

2010-10-02T11:26:00.006+01:00

It's a weekend, but I don't know how much of a gaming weekend it's going to be, which is too bad because there is a skill event going on for the next couple of days. GamersFirst has gone back to the old base rates to determine the multiples when they describe events, and they are calling this 2x for experience and 12x for skills.

For the longer term players this comes out as 2x for experience, which we've been getting the whole time with G1, and 3x for skills, which is nice but I'm still not going to rebuild my skills manually.

It's not a bad offer but the network chimps at G1 are randomly pulling cables and rebuilding their network this weekend. That's not just for 9D, but for all the games they publish. What it means for us though, we're getting a Disconnected Weekend! Yay, we win!

Practically speaking we might as well not play until they get this thing figured out. Fortunately we can see how things are going with the servers with the load-o-meter website. As you can see, things still haven't settled down since that 36 hour event outage a couple of days ago.

I'll be back to play once things settle down.

- SpearDriver2

It's been a day

2010-09-30T15:27:00.007+01:00

You know, one of these days the publisher of this game will learn to thoroughly test the patches from Indy21 before applying them.

Ok, I should also point out that G1 is pointing fingers at GameGuard for discontinuing their services to 9Dragons. I'll be blunt. I don't believe that for a minute. Companies like GameGuard need their publishing companies, just as much as the publishers need the players. They don't just discontinue service without warning. Ok, Acclaim did exactly that, but that's Acclaim. They knew they weren't going to be in business any longer, and knew it for a long time.

Anyway, back to the original point. Indy21 has messed up the client software before with regards to GameGuard and I have no reason to believe that isn't so this time around. I'm waiting on a credible source to tell me what's up, and I'll just have to wait for now.

If this is a system error or programming mistake from Indy it could take days to weeks to be repaired. The last time Indy21 had such a problem I couldn't play for well over a month. Even if this is an easy to problem to solve I doubt everything will put back together before the weekend.

We'll see.

Edit: I've got official confirmation that GameGuard (or nprotect/INCA if you prefer) did in fact pull the plug on the 9Dragons game, and it will now be up to GamersFirst to figure out what the next step is.

Edit II: The game is up, sort of, for some people. You pretty much have to uninstall the old version of the game, but of course before you do that copy your screen shots into a new folder somewhere else.

Then you have to start again from scratch with that damned GamersFirst Live down load system. Yeah, the system that comes with a sneaky download of a P2P client, Pando Media Booster. Both of those programs get a registry mark to auto-start every time you boot your computer. This is not the sort of thing a responsible publisher does. It's not like I'm going to down load a G1 game every time I start my computer, and Indy21 doesn't put out patches every day either.

I recommend you uninstall both of those pieces of software once you have the game downloaded again.

- SpearDriver2

It's been a month

2010-09-28T23:47:00.004+01:00

I haven't posted much in the last few days because to be honest there hasn't been much to write about. I also haven't played much except to get a hybrid character to a point where he can farm CoF passes.

The game itself is running, sort of. Maps on some servers just seem to die for no reason and it can leave players trapped sometimes for hours at a time. It would be nice if the GM/Admin types were watching the forum more closely because people do report the situations, but nothing quick seems to happen.

On the positive side [GM]Nevermore now has ownership of the IRC channel and he's been showing up regularly, like, when he's at work. That helps to get things fixed, so if you've got a problem you can always stop by. He's most often there during the European evening and late night hours.

In other news, one of our readers re-posted an item from this blog to the G1 forum. The post has been taken down already. I answered in the thread too, asking people to not re-post entire items to another forum or even another blog. People get creative here and often times our posts are not accepted under the Rules of Conduct in other locations. G1 has some pretty strict rules actually and I would guess over 75% of our stuff would be deleted if it were posted there too.

It's their forum, their rules, let's respect that. They do not complain at all about our material here, so long as it stays here. That's fair. If you find something funny here and you would like to share it please take a sample of the post, and include a link back to this blog.

There's not much else to say really. It's been a month since The Great Acclaim Scam Event. We still don't have our characters back and G1 is being awfully coy about that topic. The promised manual rebuilds are nowhere on the priority list either. Right now, mountains are in no danger of being moved.

So, if I haven't seen you game, what have you been up to?

- SpearDriver2

Where does everyone come from

2010-09-24T14:59:00.006+01:00

Last night in the IRC channel we started talking about players and where everyone comes from. It came up because of an in game announcement that the servers would be going down, but the time was given in Pacific Standard Time. That's a little silly for the Phoenix server where most players are from Europe.

It's even sillier when we all know there is a good portion of the gamer population who can't figure out when the event times are because they either don't know what time zone they live in, or can't figure out what GMT means. How are these people going to figure out PST?

I use Google Analytics to track how many readers are coming to the blog and since The Great Acclaim Scam Event the numbers of readers here has doubled. A couple of months ago, in any 30 day period we would get 750 to 800 unique readers. That idea of "unique readers" is important, at least for me. Even though I check the blog a few times per day for the comments section, I only count as 1 unique reader for the whole month.

Since that Acclaim Scam Event we're now regularly getting 1400+ unique readers and depending on Hyperion, and whether or not he's done something silly lately, that can be 1500+ for 30 days. I can change the time range too, and since this time last September we've had 9126 unique viewers, who have looked at over 100k blog posts. This blog provides information to a lot more people than just the 25 or so active players we have in our league!

So where do those people come from? By country the top 25 countries make up 87% of all the unique readers, and only 13% come from the USA, Canada or Brazil. These look like significant numbers and probably represent the 9Dragons player base fairly well. Someone could argue that this blog is for Bardo/Phoenix players, but I would point out that 10% of our players on Bardo/Phoenix are not American. Also, a fair number of Europeans play on Asura/Yin for the Player vs Player part of the game.

Anyway, here's the list. This is where the players come from.

Refund from Acclaim

2010-09-23T15:09:00.002+01:00

Hi,

I just wanted to let you know all that acclaim are refunding money back.
I have received a refund of 60$ a few days back.

Just wondering how much TS has received :P

Also i don't plan to continue with my character much longer if they don't bring the database back as i had multiple 90 days premium package and some other different premium packages with me.

I will not be spending any money anymore as well.

Did you receive any refund ?
How long you plan to continue and do you plan to spend money again?

My 9Dragons Forum

2010-09-22T20:09:00.004+01:00

Hi all, I created a "NAZI George W. Bush wannabe mod" free forum feel free to post there and comment(ask me for permison to be author).

Here it is: http://9dforum.blogspot.com/

Regards Lucky.

Random Talking Shit

2010-09-20T10:50:00.012+01:00

Over the weekend the tone on the G1 forums got downright dark. The Forum-Nazis came out in strength and started a lock/delete/ban march that was not quite like anything I've seen yet. Late last week Hyperion started a thread that gives the current information on the old character database, and then he locked it. He actually expects that people will read that post and never comment on the situation ever again. He doesn't know this community very well.

We want our characters back, dammit.

And why do people keep asking me when we're getting our characters back? If I knew, I would post it here, so quit asking me. Ask Hyperion. He likes your questions.

The other sore spot over the weekend was the 1.2x skill xp event. The G1 people had the nerve to call that event a 5x event, even though we used to have permanent 4x for skills from AKK-lame. Of course if you brought that up on the forum, the Forum-Nazis had the perfect excuse to treat you like the bug you are. STOMP!!!

Otherwise we did have 5x rates for experience and quite a number of no-life grinders used that as the perfect excuse to stay in the basement for the weekend. Pizza delivery dudes must have made a fortune.

How come there are no pizza delivery dudettes?

I only made it to FD2 because I took some time off to try to sell some shit, and I tried to get anything I could from Knife of White Shadows. I must have killed that dude over 25 times and I still didn't get the dodge trink from him. Drop Rates Suck.

Speaking of drop rates, my FD2 character is still using an RC10 spear because nothing else has dropped. How pathetic is that?

I'm still trying to get my Wan Daye RL4 spear and this economy is so wucking funderful that it's impossible to sell anything. The Restart Retards who promised that we would all start out with an economy that was somehow "fixed" actually gave us an economy that is castrated. Some of them are actually complaining that BE prices are all the way up to 300k already. Of course they are. It's the only thing that sells and you need 5 of them PLUS 2.5 million gold to make a WD RL4 weapon.

Of course a part of the blame for this economy can be handed to the morons who refuse to pick up their drops. How freaking hard is it to tap the space bar a couple times after every kill? Gold doesn't grow on trees in this game, it lands on the ground in front of you. Pick it up, for funderful sakes! You'll pick up weapons that you can NPC for 2k gold. Did you know that a stack of bear skins is worth 8k?

The only way we're going to get a useful amount of gold into the game is if everyone turns their drops into gold, so quit being so wucking stupid about it.

It's our turn to have a rant and G1 won't let us rant on their forum. Aren't you glad there are no Forum-Nazis here? Get your rant on people. The most creative rant will get 1 golden thread from me. Sorry I'm being so cheap, but it is a castrated economy after all.

All I ask is that you keep the rants absolutely truthful.

- SpearDriver2

Restart!

2010-09-17T13:39:00.004+01:00

Yesterdays restart didn't go all that smoothly, but it also wasn't a total catastrophe. I'll give G1/Indy21 some credit, they did have staff online working on problems almost the whole time. They probably still have staff at work. The servers just went down for a few minutes and that was at like, 5am in California. They must have had a long night at GamersFirst headquarters.

A couple of days ago RedCross posted a guide to how things would proceed from here, and it was pretty funny at the time. I've been adding check marks to everything as they happen, and it would seem that RedCross is good at predicting the future. If you're at all concerned for your health, you don't want him looking into his crystal ball for you.

I came across [GM]NeverMore in game last night. He told me that yes there is a problem with the messenger service, and they are working on it. It still wasn't working when I left for the gym today and I don't what's up with that as of "right now". The bigger problem is that the GM tool is/was not linked up to the Phoenix server, so fixing things was a little difficult.

Am I the only one who wished they didn't change the server name? Was that necessary?

The other problem we may have because of that problem with the GM tool is our usual Friday night experience event. G1 haven't even said yet if we're going to be getting XP events, but without that GM tool, they can't turn on an event even if they wanted too. We'll just have to wait and see. Knowing how fast (slow) Indy21 works, I'm not getting my hopes up.

In other news the load-o-meter website is up and running again! We'll be able to monitor the state of the servers ourselves and I really appreciate that little look at how things are going in 9D Land. One thing we can see right away with the load-0-meter is that either a lot of players are missing from the game, or G1 has a lot more server capacity than Acclaim had. The reality is probably a little bit of both.

So anyway, I made it to OC12 in the 24 hours since the game has been up. I even got about 4 hours of sleep. Yeah, I'm hooked on this game but the one thing I'm not going to do is spend even 10 cents on it. I want my account and characters back, and once I have used up all my coin mall items there, I'll think about spending again. It was my plan last Christmas to make one major coin purchase and then use up those coins over the whole year. I still had almost 6 months of premium to go, as well as a lot of permanent stuff in use on my characters.

I want them back, dammit!

I'm not going to call for a boycott of G1 once they get their coin mall up and running. Everyone should have to decide for themselves how they are going to deal with this, but please let us know what you're thinking.

How did things go for you yesterday?

- SpearDriver2

The game is back

2010-09-16T10:34:00.001+01:00

9dragons is live

And you can download it now(finally)

register to G1 incase you didn't and click the download link on the 9dragons page. it's pretty obvious from there once you download gamersfirst live :)

goodluck , have fun and see ya ingame.

So what now?

2010-09-15T14:15:00.019+01:00

Whats going to happen after fresh start? Here is my plot whats going to happen

1 hour before server launch

- forums and download servers down

- people gathering to the irc channel check

- people visiting dc9d-blog for extra info check

- Europeans going to the bed check

## Server launch, hours later than expected check

- forum finally open(after IPS errors) and being filled with flames FLAMES check!!!

first hours

- game is patching very slowly check

- forum stays down(more IPS errors)

after first 6 hours

- clan bases are crowded check

- people exploring clan maps check

- map roars full of spam from angry acclaim 9d players check
- quest mobs are being ganged check

rest of the day one

- Europeans are about to wake up check

- most popular saying of the day: "NO KS!" check

- no refined weapons in sight check

- every lowbie place still crowded check

- macro users are back and no one cares check

Day 2

- still no leagues formed check (first band formed, Day 2 check)

- players waiting for rebuffs by GMs
- new players learned to beg to get GM buffs

- few people selling RL weapons with map roars check

Day 3

- first person to get CoF killer epithet check

- first person to reach datong/jinan check

Rest days of week one

- prices stays down, very down check

- first person to refine +5 weapon check

- high ranked people wearing cof clothes check

- still acclaim 9d players cursing with map (lions) roars check

Second week

- Item mall opens
- people able escape crowded quest mob spots and towns check

- few leagues formed finally check

- few people farming BE's from CoF check

- stands are full of GC/RL/FD weapons check

- BE price has reached 100k ea check

- Gold-sellers spamming in hefei check

Third week

- first league able to participiate SVS

- Shen Mo is being camped 24/7 check

- people realizes that there is no PVP balance

- BE price has reached 150k ea check

Fourth week
-karma farmers and boss campers all over CC 1-4

Second month

- first person to refine +7 weapon

Third month

- First nuker to get the TGW epi

Fourth month
-Indy21 finally gets to talk with Disney

Fifth month
- all hope lost for user DB recovery

feel free to add your ideas to the list in the comments :)

- Red&TS

9Dragons Servers will be up tomorrow (Thursday)

2010-09-15T05:01:00.000+01:00

Some news for new 9d players:

"Hello All,

My update today will be short and sweet...

9Dragons Servers will be up tomorrow!!!!!

This is indeed, big news.

I will post more information on what to expect tomorrow when I come into the office (which will be late, because I am anticipating staying late if need be)

Again, we do not have the account database, so the servers will be all fresh and clean for people that want to play again. This means, yes, you will be starting over, for at least the time being. I still have hope to get the Account DB in the future, but no one wants to wait for that to happen before we start playing again.

Historically speaking, there are errors, problems, issues, etc...with major launches like this. I will let you know WHEN the servers are up, and I expect you to hit them fast and furious. I do not plan to leave the office, except for food, until the servers are up and stable, so I have incentive to make this happen!

The Item Mall will not be available for at least a few days, possibly a week after launch...sorry, you won't be able to buy immediately.

What I suggest you do instead is reform your friendships, organize your leagues on the new servers, and try not to steal other people's mobs when questing.

I will post tomorrow what exactly you need to do and what to expect. Such as when you can download the client...etc...

The exact time of the servers going up is unknown, but our target is around 6pm (PST)"

Which is Thursday morning. I still have a bunch of storage accounts to claim... now i believe im doing that for nothing. i wont bother to start all over again with no equipment, no money and with all G1 noobs crowded on each clan base and quest mob.

more answers from Hyperion:

"When can we download the client so we can play? Tomorrow, I'm guessing around 3pm? Ill let you know when."

Be ready for super slow transfers 3 hours before server launch

"We will be giving EVERYONE a bunch of free IM stuff in the very near future....as well as some other secret plans that will come in the near-mid future."

Thats cool for those who still like to keep playing

"That and we did commit to doing it, and really, Indy21 is the one in charge of that issue, we are ONLY their megaphone to the players about the user DB."

Moving all responsibility to the Indy...

- Red

Discussion from the IRC

2010-09-14T09:17:00.000+01:00

For some reason a rather large number of people still haven't gotten it through their thick skulls that the GamersFirst headquarters is located in Irvine, California and that's the timezone they work in too. They have a small number of employees who are available at all times to help with in-game issues, but Hyperion isn't one of those people. For me, and for most of you Bardo players that means that his daily updates will be posted on the forums some time late over night, and we'll be able to read them the next day.

Today is Tuesday. The Monday Daily Update is now posted.

The reason I'm bringing this up is because yesterday we had a rather large number of people who I know live in the European time zones show up in the IRC channel wanting to know if there was an update yet, at a time of day when most of the USA, including Hyperion, would still be warm in bed. One of those people was even a former high level VGM in the game. How in hell can these people suddenly forget the facts about time zones?

And that's just my first rant for the day!

As a normal part of the discussion in the IRC channel, I gave my opinion as to what our daily update would likely contain, along the lines of "yet another version of soon, but we did manage to fix the input form so that you can claim all your characters". Strangely enough, that's exactly what Hyperion's post today says.

I can't imagine that that's all they got done yesterday, but I can imagine that that's all they're going to tell us, daily. Quite frankly they are treating us like mushrooms, in the same way that Acclaim usually did. Yes, mushrooms. You keep them in the dark, feed them bullshit and harvest them when you're ready.

The very real issue of getting the database back isn't being addressed. The very real issue of name-squatters isn't being addressed, and there is still no solid date for the very simplest start of a server, any server, so that people can at least play the game while we wait for our own characters. In a couple of days it will be Friday and the start of our 4th weekend without the game.

Hyperion, the longer we have to wait for answers to real issues, and a restart, the fewer players you'll have from the old community. That can't be a part of the plan for a profitable game. Can it?

- SpearDriver

Meanwhile at Indy tech. department (parody)

2010-09-12T20:22:00.000+01:00

- Red

A Signature Image

2010-09-12T00:40:00.000+01:00

If you've been looking for, or you're working on a signature image for the new GamersFirst forum I would like to suggest this one;

I would suggest a centered caption like, "The 9D Community", and I would also like that image to link to this blog.

Complete signature code, with link to this guide:

[center]
[b][size=2][color="#006600"]»[font="Trebuchet MS"]The 9D Community[/font]«[/color][/size][/b]
[size=1] [/size]
[url="http://dc9d.blogspot.com/2010/09/signature-image.html"][img]http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/2/the9dcommunity.jpg[/img][/url]
[/center]

Only the picture, with link to DC blog:

[url="http://dc9d.blogspot.com/"]
[img]http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/2/the9dcommunity.jpg[/img][/url]
note: remove enter before "[img].."

So far that is what I have in order to make that code into a signature image.

Last of all I want to thank Hoppelhase for taking the time to modify an image, and make it truly descriptive. Thanks Dude! Pizzas and Beers on Me when we meet!

- SpearDriver & Hoppelhase

A glimpse of hope

2010-09-11T06:33:00.000+01:00

You can claim your previous 9Dragons characters NOW!

It seems that G1 has found a way to restore our characters:

(quoted from the original link)

Good News Everybody!

So here is the deal. We made this page to collect and save your information in the eventuality that we get the user database in the future.

It is critical that you enter your information as accurately and completely as possible. This is because if/when we get the database it is possible we could only get the character data without the information being bound to any personally identifiable data. We are looking for 8 fields of information, so you shouldn't have a problem.

Certainly there will be instances where you don't remember the exact level/role/clan…but the more accurate it is, the better the chance we have to find your character when the time comes. 100% correct is not necessary; just get the information as close as you possibly can. (100% is best, 110% is even better).

This webpage will be up until next Friday 9/17/10. It needs to come down then so we can collect the information as soon as possible so we know how massive and elaborate the restoration will be when the time comes.

This is the major update we have for this week, 9Dragons will be returning to you NEXT WEEK! I will post more information as to what to expect prior to the launch of the servers. I will leave this post open for you to post in over the weekend, if there are any issues with the form, let me know here J.

Have a great weekend all!!!!!!!! (I'm excited)

AS you can see there is a down side for this mess, so for now your storage chars are not restorable, but other than that..RESTORE YOUR OTHER CHARS BEFORE THE TIME-LINE ENDS!!

You would need to know what is your level in numbers and what is your role name, you can check both below:

And the Role Names are;

Healer=Strategist

Nuker=Chi Kung Artist

Warrior=Warrior

Hybrid=Holoist

And you can click here to see the

levels in numbers

Not getting any happier

2010-09-10T10:28:00.000+01:00

Yesterday for me wasn't a great day in terms of the withdrawal from 9Dragons. Yesterday was exactly 2 weeks since Disney/Playdom pulled the plug on the game and I'm really not happy with what has been done since to get us back up and running with our characters. Compared to some of the first letters we received from the executives at GamersFirst and Indy21, very little has been done to get our characters back.

The first letter from Joshua Hong pretty bluntly stated that they would rebuild our characters manually if need be. Here it is, as he wrote it;

Our goal is to make the character restoration process as painless as possible. We know how hard you worked to build up your characters. To some of us, it means more than just a game. It’s our life. Although there will be some minor hiccups along the way, I assure you that we will help you restore all your previous characters with or without the screenshots of your characters.

My problem with this is that nothing has been said or done since. In fact the update yesterday from Hyperion said pretty much that the matter was out of their hands, and Indy21 is dealing with it. So much for the promises of a manual rebuild from Joshua Hong.

I'm not too impressed with the idea that Indy21 is dealing with this issue themselves. Indy21 has never impressed me for being able to get things done in a reasonable time frame. Actually, they are better known for adding random bugs to the game that seem to live on forever. We did get a letter from them too;

Recreate ALL player characters and accounts: It is my promise along with the rest of my team that we will move mountains to make this happen.

So far I haven't gotten a change of address notice from any mountains and it's becoming painfully obvious to me that we aren't getting our characters back.

The last thing that's really bugging me is that I don't have much to do around here at night. My days are well filled out. I'm at the gym most days and lately I've been doing "doubles" because I have time. That's 2 hours on the step machine every day instead of 1 hour. I do all the grocery shopping for us, and the cooking too. The apartment is pretty clean every day. My kitchen certainly is.

At night though, it's a different story. Television here is a wasteland of stupid crime stories, even though my wife seems to like them. We're usually here together and can talk about the day, or anything really while she's watching television and I've been playing. It became a comfortable routine for us, but now I can't find anything I want to play!

I've been through several games so far and I'm downloading Heroes of the Three Kingdoms now. I'll let you know what I think. Anyone else find something fun?

- SpearDriver

New Update

2010-09-09T18:59:00.001+01:00

Hyperion updated:

Hey All,

There is not much to update on today. We had some issues with deciphering the information we are looking at for character restoration. Basically, we are coming closer to being able to distribute the information you want, but hit a few snags and so now I will have to wait a day or two to get the formal process to you.

This was not altogether unexpected, we are trying to de-complicate the process as much as possible before asking you to go through it.

I did manage to get through about half my PM's which is good, and I hope to have them cleared out again by Friday. Generally, the questions are more of the "what will happen if...what will happen when..." etc etc...

I am trying to answer to the best of my ability, but what I have mostly been saying is "sit tight until I can update the WHOLE community..."

It should be clear by now that we plan to bring the game servers back up next week, and that the most recent user DB will not be in our hands by then. So we are coming up with a work-around that I think will work well for the vast majority of the active players. I will be specific when I can.

I think, given your enthusiam so far, that you will like the solution we propose, and genuinly hope that we will soon have all this nonsense behind us and we can all move on to playing 9Dragons non-stop for the rest of 2010!

Although not much good its an update, and here it is...

Other games and more about GamersFirst

2010-09-06T13:06:00.000+01:00

It is Labor Day today in North America, similar to the May 1st holiday that is celebrated in most countries around the world, so I'm not expecting an update from Hyperion. The soonest we'll hear from him is tomorrow when he might have some news about the character database. We'll see.

Don't get your hopes up that the game is going live tomorrow. That is not what he said in his last update and you can read the post below this one for more details.

In the mean time I've played a few other games, after all it's been 2 weekends of down time since we last had 9Dragons to play. I would have died of terminal boredom without something to do in the evenings. I started out with GuildWars because a few of the Restless League were working on that. The game is not free-2-play but there is a 10 hour free trial, so I got started with that.

Earlier this year I was playing Aika during the great GameGuard Disconnection Event and I've discovered that Aika is a direct rip-off of GuildWars. Characters, mobs, scenery in Aika, they all come straight from GuildWars. The two games even have the same painfully slow jerky movement speed for the characters, and in the end that is what turned me off Aika. It has turned me off GuildWars too and I doubt I'll go back to that game even if the new installation of 9Dragons is a complete failure.

I decided to try a GamersFirst game just to get some experience with their games. I downloaded Sword2 and started to regret it 3 hours later when it was still downloading. That is one bigass game. The total download time with updates was over 6 hours, and I only spent 5 minutes playing it. That has to be a new record for me. I'm told that you either love that game, or hate it. You can put me in the "meh" category.

One thing I found out though is there can be password problems with G1 games. The password you used to build an account to gain access to the forums can be too long for the password field of some of the G1 games. I had to change my password and knocked two characters off the end. That's only a small Oops! but it shows that G1 isn't always paying attention. I had this problem with Sword2 and I'm told it affects Knights Online as well, which was the next game I tried.

Knights Online or KOL as it's often called is a Swords and Sorcery MMO with a huge number of servers to choose from. I went to Ronark2 at random and I'm probably the only English speaking person on the server. A few descriptions in the server list might be nice.

Character movement speed is slow but there is a sprint mode. If you spam that while using the WASD keys to navigate you can get to your destination in about one-third the time needed to walk. I'm playing a Ranger/Archer type because that character type can melee as well when that would be more useful, like 9Dragons it depends on the mobs. He also has a small ability to heal and that makes the grind time a little longer.

The time needed to rebuild hit points or energy is excruciating long. That is one of the minor disappointments with KOL. I can chat in the IRC channel while I wait for HP/SP to rebuild. The party system can be used to complete quest kills quickly so people are constantly spamming each other with party invites, even if you aren't going after the same mobs. One of the character classes has a teleport skill too, that draws you back to them and the mobs they are working on. I find that so freaking annoying that I checked the "no party invites" box and now I'm grinding alone.

Lastly, the most highly annoying problem in KOL is the number of auto-grind hacker bots out there. There is an auto-target function with the Z-key and it's really useful for Archers, but a lot of players have combined that with speed hacks and damage hacks and they can take over a grind area. They obviously aren't grinding in quests, they are just taking XP from mobs, quickly. If one of those guys is grinding in your quest mobs you can forget about that mob for now. Best just to move on to your next quest mob and hope for the best there. I can't imagine what PvP looks like in KOL.

I posted about the hackers in the 9Dragons forum at GamersFirst and a KOL forum mod answered. They know about the problem and are working on it. "Working on it" obviously doesn't include banning people using the hacks because G1 Admins obviously aren't even looking. Maybe they just need a GameGuard style system to solve the problem but whatever, I would hate to see those guys invade 9Dragons.

So what have you been playing? Real-Life? Lovers and Losers? Daddy? Monopoly?

- SpearDriver

Reading what they want to see

2010-09-04T09:12:00.001+01:00

There are going to be a lot of really disappointed people next Tuesday, and a lot of us are going to be hearing the news that the game will be up on Tuesday. Let me assure all of you that that is not going to be the case, because this is a case of people reading what they want to see.

Hyperion wrote us another Daily Update late yesterday afternoon in his time zone, so as usual we here in Europe got to read it this morning. He's not actually a bad writer but he either needs to learn to use a comma properly, or get an editor. I'm not going to volunteer for that job.

The sentence that is going to cause a lot of frustration and disappointment for our twitchy, little hyperactive, attention-seeking teenagers is this one;

I really hope to be able to update you all on the status of the Account DB and when the Game will be up on Tuesday.

You should read that sentence this way,

"I really hope to be able to update you all on the status (of the Account DB and when the Game will be up) on Tuesday."

Of course those lovely twitchy, little hyperactive, attention-seeking twits will read it this way,

"(I really hope to be able to update you all on the status of the Account DB and when) the Game will be up on Tuesday."

Please don't let yourself get caught up in the rumors and the frenzy this weekend, and the disappointment on Tuesday. There is no chance that the game will be up on Tuesday, complete with all of our character data.

- SpearDriver

What he didn't say

2010-09-03T14:22:00.000+01:00

I'm reading today's Daily Update from Hyperion for about the 3rd time today, and yes that's the low-fi version of the link that I was talking about yesterday. Readable, just the way I like it.

Anyway, back on topic. While the latest update is a little longer than the previous 2, this one doesn't tell us very much either. In fact if you read it from another perspective, in terms of what he didn't say you can figure out more than a little bit. For example Hyperion admits that their website didn't get done yesterday, but what he doesn't say is that the game client hasn't arrived from Indy21 either. He would have announced it, if the game client had arrived. We've all experienced how pathetically slow Indy21 can be. Hyperion is now in the learning stage on that topic.

The other issue that Hyperion is completely avoiding is the player database. That is the one crucial factor for all players here. Either G1 gets the database back or players will move on. Somebody put together a poll on that topic and so far more than 70% have said they would move on.

What Hyperion does go on to talk about is the rules governing the forum, and I can already see the heavy hand coming down. Last night I was enjoying this new low-fi version and I saw several posts deleted and a number of people banned for a day or two. G1 might not be ready for the twitchy little hyperactive, attention-seeking teenagers who seem to be attracted to this game.

Players were really happy at not having to deal with Acclaim anymore, but the honeymoon is ending and Hyperion knows it. The forum will start getting rough if there is no game available this weekend. I'm sure we'll see more than a few kiddy-scrollers in the IRC channel this weekend too, either wanting to know where the game is, or why they were banned from the forum.

Have a good weekend people. You all have time for the league deco event. Let's see what you can do!

- SpearDriver

The G1 Forum Goes Emo/Goth

2010-09-02T00:34:00.000+01:00

Someone else will have to update this blog with the daily updates from Hyperion because I'm not going there while it's emo/goth. White text on a black background is very hard to read and actually makes my eyes water. In the PM's I traded with Hyperion, he was hardly sympathetic.

Someone please let me know if he changes his mind.

Edit: I found a partial solution to the new emo-ness that has been forced on us. At the bottom of each message page is the option to move to a "low-fi" version of the forum that is glorious in its white background with a good font size too. The down side is that you can't post from there.

For even more down side, all of the G1 forums use that black-on-black skin. Why do these gaming companies only ever hire emo/goth teenagers for their intern positions?

- SpearDriver

Hyperion's Daily Update

2010-08-31T11:56:00.000+01:00

It's really nice to see some communications from G1 while we all wait. In light of how we were treated by the likes of Acclaim this is relatively refreshing even if the daily update is a little light on details. Hyperion uses words like "within the next few days", and "later this week", and "Over the evening and throughout the week". It's safe to say that the game isn't going to up and running on September 1st as many people (including me) had hoped.

As TS said in a comment, "we'll see" has become the new "soon".

In good news Menandore just posted her submission Red Crowned Crane to our league deco event and let me tell you, it's fantastic. This sort of creativity is just what I was hoping for when I built that league event. And you know what? I Want MOAR!!!

We're not playing the game, so you've all got time on your hands. Let's see more deco ideas!

Update: Sept 1 Hyperion's latest update is actually for Aug 31, but because the G1 office is in Irvine, CA we don't normally see it until the next day. We Bardo players often had the same problem with Acclaim and I hope G1 and Hyperion will start to take the timezone difference into account a little more often.

Anyway, again his update didn't really say much but one thing that is very clear? Hyperion knows he has a limited amount of time to get this game up and running again. In his own words...

Again, I just wanted to say thanks to the community for being so supportive. I know the support won't last forever, unless we deliver on making significant advances in the game, which we WILL do.

We're all still at the stage of trolling each other on the forums and comparing notes about withdrawal symptoms. If you haven't read that thread yet, you should. It's one of the funnier ones so far.

So, I really have no news for you again today, and in this case "no news" isn't really "good news". Let's hope for better, soon.

- SpearDriver

To the blog writers...

2010-08-31T07:25:00.001+01:00

I'm going to post here to point out that when making a guide then if possible, please avoid forum links...for example few of the writers links to old Acclame forum doesn't work and aren't helping at all.

If there was no other way than just to give a link and not to paste large amount info to your post, then PLEASE check your made posts and fix the links when new forum has the info needed for it and/or edit your posts if the old forum guide info wasn't important in your post.

In short, check your info/guide posts and DO NOT FORGET TO EDIT the links!

It's about guides and helpful posts only. Links that showed some random topic in Acclame forum can stay, who's going to check them anyway?!

Cheers and take care you all! :)

Oh and this post can be deleted in the future.

A letter from the CEO

2010-08-30T16:10:00.000+01:00

So we got a letter from the CEO of G1 in their forums today and here is a link for you if you like. I"ll also post here as a quote so that we have it for posterity sakes. Let me first say though, he really doesn't say much. About all that he does say is;

Hi, pleased to meet you. Yes, Houston knows you have a problem and they are working on it. They will get back to you about that. In the mean time could you please go out and tell everyone what a wonderful job we're doing for you, even though we haven't actually done anything for you yet.

Sincerely, The Boss.

We still don't know a start date, and he said nothing about the character database either so I still don't have anything nice to tell you. Here's the letter from Joshua Hong...

Dear 9Dragons Community,

I’m the Founder and CEO of Gamersfirst. Over the last 8 years my team and I have built the GamersFirst community one member at a time and we are welcome all of you into our global network of MMO communities. Your vibrancy and passion were the main reasons why we signed this game from Indy21.

First, I was appalled by how you were all abandoned by the previous publisher of the game, Acclaim. As a gamer, I felt angered and disheartened, by how your community wasn’t shown any respect; I felt your sense of abandonment as they shut down your service with no notice and warning. I promise you that at GamersFirst, you will be provided the utmost respect just as the rest of our communities.

Secondly, I want you to know that Indy21 took no part in deciding when and how the 9Dragon servers were shut down. My colleagues and partners in Korea, at Indy21, were as shocked and surprised as the rest of us as they too were promised a seamless and smooth transition. It seems that the decision to shut down the 9Dragons service was made unilaterally by Acclaim and Playdom. Right now, our first and foremost priority is to help recreate your accounts on our platform as expediently as possible. We’ve already made progress and will be on it like there is no tomorrow. Quite frankly, this process won’t be easy and will require a lot of close collaboration between us and the community. With your help, however, I am confident that we can make it happen and we are committed to working 24x7 till this gets done. From my standpoint as CEO, I view this problem as an opportunity to prove our worth to you. So, from this point on, without any complaint or excuse from us, we will do everything in our power to serve you right.

So, where do we go from here?

Three things I ask you to do:

#1. Stay calm and give us a few days to launch the game servers. Our engineers from both Gamersfirst and Indy21 are working round the clock through the weekend since last Thursday to launch the new website and servers;

#2. Visit the 9Dragon forum as often as you can to find out up-to-the-minute progress. Also, please join our new facebook fan page so you can share information quickly and easily. Our goal is to make the character restoration process as painless as possible. We know how hard you worked to build up your characters. To some of us, it means more than just a game. It’s our life. Although there will be some minor hiccups along the way, I assure you that we will help you restore all your previous characters with or without the screenshots of your characters. You have my word on this. In fact, because you are going through the current crisis and remain loyal community member, if you came back and went through the character restoration process successfully, we will offer you a lot of incentives. I’m positive you will love the special offers to earn and keep your loyalty. Also, we have a lot of new content waiting at the sideline to be deployed. I’m sure you will like what you’ll see as soon as we launch the game;

#3. Tell your friends about the plan we have. Spread the news and let’s get them excited about the new opportunities. I want you to take this opportunity to help us restore and further energize the 9Dragons community. This is the time to test this community’s character and resilience. And, I know, you guys care about the friendships you built over the years and it’s just as important to you as to us.

Gamersfirst is the first and most experienced Free2Play MMO publisher in North America. We have more than 30 million players who created accounts on our platform; and these 30 million friends are welcoming you with open arms. Our mission is to put Gamers First. That means putting YOU first. So, tell your friends about us, about the change. There is new hope.

Cheers,

Josh
Founder and CEO
Gamersfirst.

Typical Acclaim

2010-08-27T13:19:00.001+01:00

I'm sorry I haven't updated the blog in the last couple of days, about the ongoing situation. To be honest I just haven't had the time, even though I've been in-game and grinding. Now though, the grinding has come to an end. In typical Acclaim fashion the servers were switched off with just a few hours notice, and if you didn't happen to be online at the time, you didn't get the message.

No doubt many of you are wondering about the promised 10x event that was planned for tonight. Ravenclaw/Kane started that event last night at midnight and let it run until the server shutdown at midnight PST. Not fair to many of you, but that is Acclaim. Sometimes I get the feeling that Acclaim has been run by this guy...

That guy is about to cook a chicken, and the chicken isn't even scared. Maybe the chicken knows more than the cook? You could probably say the same about Acclaim.

Anyway, so where are we at now?

We don't have a game to play, and I sincerely doubt that anything can be done to fix the situation today, tomorrow, or even this weekend. The people at G1 have a team building fun day going on today, even though I know many of them are actually at work trying to deal with this situation. From what I understand, it's all in the hands of the lawyers right now and no one can say what will happen in the near future.

And I'm sorry to say, that's all I know. Normally I'm better informed than this and I'm just as unhappy as the rest of you. Please check in here at least daily because I will post what I know or find out, and if you want to chat please join us in the IRC channel. There is a link on the top bar that will get you an almost instant connection.

Stay happy people, and maybe go do some real life stuff for a change. My wife and I are going to the movies tomorrow night! And if you really have to do something game-related, I'm going to leave the league deco contest open at least until G1 reopens the game.

- SpearDriver

New Publisher.(360th Blog Entry)

2010-08-26T02:14:00.000+01:00

Hi all Lucky Here,

I was looking for a new MMO to play when I found out that 9Dragons could be on its last days, when I discovered that 9Dragons will not "Die" instead it will "Reborn" under a new company named GamersFirst.

Here is the post I saw announcing the takeover of Western 9Dragons:

" GamersFirst and Indy21 Bring You The Best Martial Arts MMORPG
9Dragons Changes Hands To Today’s Leading Free2PlayPublisher

Irvine, Calif.– August 24, 2010 – GamersFirst, today’s most popular Free2Play online game destination, announced its partnership with Korean game developer, Indy21, to publish 9Dragons. 9Dragons, the hit martial arts MMORPG, previously published by Acclaim Games, will be published by GamersFirst come September 2010. Current 9Dragons players will be able to continue playing with all items and characters intact after the transition.

9Dragons is a Martial Arts MMORPG set during the Ming Dynasty of feudal China. Players explore the vast expanse of the lands as a member of one of the legendary clans of Chinese Martial Arts and challenge each other for ownership of immense Fortresses in massive PvP battles.

Players can fully immerse themselves in the robust powerful storyline that details the history of ancient China and their respective clans. Tilt the balance of power between the White and Black clans and participate in quests that lead each player on a journey of enlightenment and martial art mastery.

“9Dragons is the most authentic Martial Arts MMO on the market with a very active and fun community,” say Tracy Spaight, Executive Director of Publishing for GamersFirst. “INDY21 clearly made significant investments in best-in-class resources to create this stunning Martial Arts MMO. GamersFirst looks for great Free2Play MMO titles with strong and dedicated communities and with 9Dragons we noticed a rare opportunity to incorporate a new MMO genre to the GamersFirst catalogue in addition to working with INDY21.”

In addition to the solid foundation of existing PvE and PvP gameplay, the changing of hands will also include several new key features over the next quarter, including:
• Dedicated tutorial map for easing new players into the 9Dragons experience
• New high level dungeon encounter “Vault of the Ice Dragon”
• Updated “Tibet” map
• Brand new Kung Fu patterns to master
• ‘Most Wanted’ list – useful in avoiding—or becoming—one of the most dangerous and skilled players in PvP

“We chose GamersFirst, because it is a company that understands the Free2Play market and communicates with its gamer community,” said Yong-Nam Jin, CFO at Indy 21. “We have seen GamersFirst build Free2Play MMO’s with the same type of strong community presence that exists within 9Dragons and are looking forward to continuing the success of the game.”

Look out for details on the launch date for 9Dragons on GamersFirst at www.gamersfirst.com. You can also sign up on our Facebook fan site at www.facebook.com/gamersfirst

About INDY21
Founded in 2000, INDY21 began the development of a Full 3D role-playing online game 9Dragons. Now, 9Dragons has become of the most successful Free2Play MMORPG’s in its genre and has launched in the Americas , Europe and Southeast Asia. Staying true to their values and strong spirit, INDY21 has turned their passion of martial arts into a leading MMORPG, taking hold of the MMO world on a Global level.

About GamersFirst
GamersFirst is the leading Free2Play® MMO publisher in the Western hemisphere. Serving more than 30 million players, GamersFirst.com is where gamers decide the price of the games they love to play–even when that price is “free.” Powered by GamersFirst CONNECT, the end-to-end game publishing, game operations and game community platform made available to all of GamersFirst’s Development Partners, GamersFirst.com features the hit MMOs; Knight Online, Sword 2, War Rock and OurWorld and future hits including 9Dragons, MKZ, Victory and Taikodom. Read more about the company and find all of their games at http://www.GamersFirst.com "

There is a similar post at Restless Hero League's Blog i found out later, but since some of the readers might not read it aswell I decided to post.

In other news this is the 360th League's Blog Entry let us celebrate by grinding.^^

Regards Lucky.

Edit:

We had a x10 event wich later turned into x20 from 26th of August 2010 to 27th of August 2010, its a goodbye event from acclaim's GM's that unfortunatly most of Bardo missed.

Also is recomended that you SS all of your things by detail.(I also SS skils just in case)

Design your own Deco

2010-08-21T11:49:00.000+01:00

About a week ago we were goofing off in chat, talking about our favorite league slacker [B-Stard]. Apparently he has a brand new deco, which is pretty cool because I'm more or less stuck with one of the old and ugly clan decos as my 440 dodge deco. When I built it we didn't have the choice to buy reasonably good looking permanent decos from the coin mall. And while [B-stard] might b-slack, I'm a cheap b-stard and I'm not going to spend more money on this game any time soon.

But it got me thinking. If you could have any deco you wanted, what would it look like? Now I'm turning that idea into a league event, just because we haven't had one in a while.

So here is how it goes;

This event is open to Disconnected and Restless League members. You are to design a deco in character sized proportions, both male and female, and I want to see both front and back. You can choose any theme you want of course, but the winning ideas are going to be game related. Keep in mind, the game is set in the Ming Dynasty era of ancient China. Also, I don't want to see anything more blatantly sexual than any of the actual deco or clothes, or mobs in the game. I will be happy to see more than one submission per person, but there will only be one prize per person awarded.

Prizes? Ah yes, prizes. The winning idea will get 5 Blood Essence and an experience card. Second place will get 3 Blood Essence and an experience card, and Third place, 1 Blood Essence and an experience card.

Wow, with prizes like that I wish I could play too! When I was a kid I couldn't keep my crayons inside the lines, and I still can't. I guess it's a good thing I can write well.

Put your ideas onto an image server somewhere and give us a link in the comments section of this post. I'll put the images into this post as I get them.

I'm starting to think that this is going to be our best league event yet, and I'm looking forward to seeing your ideas. The event closes next weekend on Sunday, after the normal experience event.

- SpearDriver