Lockwood’s Black Sword
by BONZO, HSM team writer and artist
August 22 was marked as the day we would unlock the final battle with Brinsop, the Evil Dragon. The day came and went, and still we haven’t unlocked the final reward. The community hasn’t reached the quota of three hundred million dragon eggs. And so one more reward remains to be unlocked, to complete the set of dragon statues. Yet so many still have other unclaimed rewards.
What went wrong? It isn’t the first time the community has failed to reach a goal on schedule. During the Dead Island promotion in Central Plaza, we didn’t make the community number to unlock the severed head. It was given to us anyway, but did we earn it?
Was the egg-crushing game too ambitious? Or was the problem that it wasn’t a good game?
The initial target number of eggs for the community goal was impossibly huge: one less than a trillion. Nearly three months later, the goal was revised to 300 million — a much smaller number, but still a substantial one. A goal which we are still nearly twenty five million away from reaching.
This isn’t a complicated game. You run around a room and crush eggs. At the beginning, one color was dominant each day, making it easier to reach specific color goals and unlock their respective rewards. Equipping the Roguish Charm outfits granted you a 2x point multiplier, which made it even easier to reach the final tally. But there were problems with the game.
Running about crushing eggs is very dizzying and disorienting, if you do it for a prolonged period of time. When the dominant colors were cycled each day, if you missed the day when you could hunt down your target color, you had to wait a few days, or go through a very slow and arduous process collecting the eggs that were currently uncommon. Later, the game changed, and all colors spawned in equal numbers. But then hunting a specific color became more difficult.
The target goal of the first few rewards were in the hundreds, but later rewards required thousands. The final reward, the flaming sword, required only one egg — but it’s rare, it appears randomly, and the community had to wait until August 22nd to see it at all. The community reward has yet to be reached.
How was the three-hundred-million egg goal selected?
At this point, Home has established the expectation that we will see significant new game content every week. This year alone has seen tremendous changes in what is available. Since the egg game began in late May, the community received E3, No Man’s Land, updates to the Casino, the MiniBots multiplayer space and Blueprint:Home. Unofficially there were other events to engage us, including merged region spaces which are not supported by the regional TOS but were accessible through unofficial methods. The draw of doing something unapproved, and being the one of the few in the know, engaged our attention. So there were plenty of things to do in Home, besides running around to crush eggs.
To be fair, you weren’t meant to spend your entire Home time playing that game. It was meant to draw you in for a few minutes each day so you could work towards your final goal, spreading it out over a long period of time. It was also meant to encourage the purchase of the Rogue outfits, since they cut the time and effort required in half. Hence the large quota numbers, and the protracted wait for the mysterious egg that appeared on August 22nd.
However, periodically visiting the space to work toward your rewards proved problematic as well. If you left the space with four thousand total eggs in your count, you could come back the next day and mysteriously have a couple of hundred eggs missing from your tally. Many people found their total count had dropped to zero when they returned. Rewards won were still in inventory, but those partly earned were farther away than ever.
This encouraged people to try to earn the rewards in a single session. That kind of determination is admirable, but when I played for even five minutes continuously, it took an hour for my eyes to adjust afterwards. I tried closing my eyes as I played, but I kept getting stuck on walls because I could’t see where I was going.
I tried to find an exploit, as gamers tend to do, and discovered a few people who just sat by the wall near the gate and waited for the eggs to spawn in place and come to them. That essentially means leaving your controller alone while you do something else, just moving the analog stick periodically to keep Home from timing out due to inactivity. Once I tried playing the game on a non-HD capable television, with an average screen refresh rate, and didn’t last more than thirty seconds.
Despite the game’s problems, the rewards are very cool. The statues are nice additions to our decorative items. I highly recommend buying the Rogue outfits, as they will make the effort easier, and they look pretty awesome. Unless you are male and have some archaic gender identity issues for your avatar, take a close look at the female outfit — it is the better of the two. Paired with the final reward, the black flaming sword, it looks epic.
What I love about the sword reward is that Lockwood again breaks away from the norm. They took a seemingly cliché prize and, with a simple twist in design, made it something unique, interesting and totally desirable. Why are black flames cooler than traditional flames? Because they are black flames! We see yellow flames all the time, so that’s a cliché. Black flames make the sword magical, ominous, and wicked — something dark and fitting to take down a fire breathing dragon.
Darkness appeals to us as something powerful, and something mysterious and inexplicable. It’s a recurring theme: the Dark Lord, the dark force, black magic, black holes, dark energy, dark knight. It isn’t inherently something evil, but it’s something threatening, and in your hands it makes you threatening. This sword is totally bad-ass.
The community has some time to continue with its goal towards three hundred million eggs to unlock the final dragon statue. The hunt is not over yet. We didn’t get there by August 22nd, but we still have time to get it done. With a Rogue outfit, it should be easier, and the community can achieve one more task and earn themselves another awesome reward.
August 28th, 2012 by BONZO | 5 comments
BONZO is an editor and artist for HomeStation Magazine.
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I don’t think there was an issue with the egg count.
I think it was stupidity in exiting the game before the timer reached zero.
You could run around for 14 minutes, get a reward and exit the game. You would get the reward but the eggs smashed wouldn’t be added to your total count.
Personally I thought the rewards were kinda lame.
A Pinwheel?? How that fit the theme, IDK.
I just hope this community goal reward is huge. Another little statue would suck for the effort put into it.
I agree about the game; it makes me dizzy too, and then I get nauseous. So after the pinwheel and sandcastle I just gave up. I usually love the Lockwood rewards and think they are awesome for giving us so much free stuff. This time was just a rare fail.
How is this even considered to be a game?
It has to be one of the most banal activities ever offered on Home. It makes Orb Runner look like the next installment of Final Fantasy.
Count me in the camp of feeling more nauseated that captivated. I grabbed the first two rewards and then gave up until the sword became available for gathering a single semi-rare egg.
The only thing that the egg-crushing adventure proves is that a large percentage of Home users will spend their time doing just about anything to gather free rewards. Gameplay, challenges, strategy and depth will always take a backseat to rewards on Home.
I love Lockwood, and I defend them to the end because they are a company that listens to its audience and has given out some pretty cool free stuff as well as some awesome stuff to buy. This though to bbe honest was not a homerun. This wasn’t even a basehit. This was an idea that seemed to be a re-dress of the easter egg game and offered some sad gifts. A pinwheel and a sandcastle? Hmmm, I love Lockwood and I know that they read the forums (Sir Francis Bacon proves that). I hope they see that this was something they shouldn’t do in the future, at least not without a lot of tweaking. I too went simply for the single egg and the sword, and I never made it past the sandcastle. Funny part is they then turn around and offer up Mercia, and some of the level up rewards there are amazing. I still love you Mercia.
I really enjoy the egg game. I play one session at a time but play two or three each day. On the evening of 8/29 there were just over 9 million needed. It’s being accomplished at about 3 million/day.
You only need *one* piece of the outfit to get double points. You don’t need to buy the whole outfit if you don’t like it or don’t want to spend the money.
Some things I’ve worked out: I set the gamma high to see more clearly. I change to the “No Channel” option to avoid clutter from the chat log. I don’t look at the other players or kibitzers. I look at the eggs and run straight lines as much as possible.