Well, it would have been nice if you had clearly stated that part 2 only lasted until the 12th, instead of only vaguely hinting at it.
Several clannies wanted to do the quest, but couldn't afford that many SA upgrades this week, having to wait until monday (today) to get enough money to upgrade, so instead of the planned hunt together to get everyone through the second quest, they've now been screwed out of the second stage chances.
Both of them have quit in anger over this, in total 15 active accounts and 15 SA upgrades lost. (one had 7, the other had 8) They were really looking forward to this when it was finally figured out how exactly this quest worked and could be worked.
Keep in mind that a lot of us weren't told about this event until evening the 6th, which means we couldn't even start until the 7th...this gave us 5 days total to not only figure out how to work the quest right, where all the pieces were, gather them, gain access to the underworld/abyss, but also actually doing the quest on multiple characters (some weaker characters were hellish hard, if not near impossible to get through some of the nodes). That just isn't enough time. I won't be upgrading the rest of my accounts to SA as planned either, so I'll stay at 3 accounts out of 10 upgraded.
Much the rest of the quests were actually well thought through and I even complimented you guys in another thread for it, but this timing and time limit you put on this was just very poor to say the least.
Well, I'm sorry to hear that. I can understand how people needed time to get a payday and stuff, that is why I put part 2 in there, to basically stall before the drawing began. As far as the announcement coming out on the 6th... yeah, Cal, Bonnie, and I were pretty angry about that too.
For what it's worth, the chance to win part 3 increases each day you do it and I will be very surprised if anyone wins on any shard until late in the week. I did that to help people have more of a chance to do the first part and participate, without just making the contest feel like it was going on forever.
OK, for the math fans out there, I will just tell you all how it is working under the hood. Basically I built a list of player characters who are eligible by registering them when they complete part 1. In part 3, I take the number of characters in the list and then multiply that number by another number... the first day is 1,000,000. So, if 1000 people are registered, then the first day we roll a number between 1 and 1,000,000,000, if I rolled under 1001 then someone is a winner for that day. If they do the quest on that day, they win and the contest is over. The next day we roll again, but this time the list has 1001 people on it (because someone new did Part 1). Day 2 we multiply the number in the list by 100,000, and roll on 100,100,000. If we roll under 1002 then someone has won... though they won't know it unless they do the quest ***on that day*** with that character. So, any day might be YOUR day. The multiplier is divided by 10 each day till we are just multiplying the list by 1 next Monday. Every day after that we multiply the number in the list by 1 until we have our winners.
That is the main reason you can only do it once per day... because we roll at server up and that character is the pre-ordained winner all day, it's just that nobody knows it. It also means that it doesn't matter what time of day you do the quest as long as you do it sometime on the day that we picked your character.
OK, I spilled it, that's how it works. Have fun!
