What can KingsIsle do to compete against FFXIV?

 Last blog I said I was going to put up a new post detailing my ideas for improving Pirate101 so it doesn't get shut down, and here are my thoughts:

First off, for both Wizard101 and Pirate101, drop the lootbox packs. I know that sounds ridiculous, but the cash shop has so many more items that players can buy that the boosters don't really work. FFXIV's Mog Station cash shop has many items for various prices that are optional, but I buy them anyways as they are really cool glam, neat mounts or stuff I can... ahem...

I don't use the Pirate101 packs as much as the packs don't give random skills like Wizard101's packs do. I'm glad that they made the Grizzleheim spells craftable.

Wizard101 changes:

 

Either add a link skill system like MapleStory(where your alts can give one of your characters buffs depending on their school, like Life School alt giving your main 10% extra HP on level up) or do like FFXIV and allow a playet to switch schools and level them all up, learning all seven schools of magic on one character so alts are no longer necessary. You cannot count on one hand how many trash characters I had to delete due to wanting to play every school. I am not buying a potion to add a seventh character slot, thank you very much. I am not made of money.

Having one character be all schools will allow you to stick to one cahracter. I've made alts on FFXIV, only to abandon them because they are no longer needed. FFXIV has New Game+ to re-experience the quests if you really want to do so, so there is no need to start a new character for story reasons. Sure it's a lot of work grinding all of the characters up, but it's worth it.

 It wouldn't take much programming either. Just have a side-quest at Level 50(since you are go to Level 140, having it at Level 10 would be stupid as people would just switch constantly or burn themselves out, let them experience the first arc as one school first) and, upon completion, the NPC says that he'll pull some strings with the headmaster. Of course, that would retcon a lot of canon(like Falmea's story in the first B.O.X. event) but it would make the content more managable.

Of course, I know that will be impossible due to how leveling works in Wizard101 - you earn your majority of EXP from doing quests, which is why...

You should add an eighth school based on mob-grinding. FFXIV has a limited job called Blue Mage which gains spells by fighting mobs and bosses and learning their abilities. A Monstrology school which allows you to gain spells by kill a certain number of enemies would make the game more interesting to play.

Yes, I know you can make summon TCs of Monstrology Animus, but this sub-school would allow yout o level up your extra schools easily by giving huge EXP for killing mobs. It would have to cap out after a time, but it would make the game more fun.

If that won't work, then have this limited class be in Pirate101 by giving Pirate101 Monstrology as well. The thought of summoning some of the Armada as Treasure Coins would be amazing!

 

For both Pirate101 and Wizard101 have something similar to crafting but involving gathering materials from nodes. Wizard101 has places where you can harvest materials, but make a type of 'magic' where you can use spells to increase the yield of harvests or the chance of rare harvests(like 50% chance of getting Sunstone from Sandstone harvest spots) and give quests where players have to go all over the Spiral to gather stuff. Heck, Wizard101 has Fishing, why not have Pirate101 have it too? Give more varied content for people who don't want to spend their time battling.

 

Have a quest at Level 50 where Wizard101 players and Pirate101 players can get special artifact armor that looks cool and has stats that outstrip anything you can buy at the auction house. FFXIV does this and continue on that trend by having special armor you need special currency(which is farmed from dungeons) that outstrips that! If Wizard101 had artifact armor with a decent universal resist, decent damage boost for their school, and nice stats, players would go for it.

Finally, assign the FFXIV formula to your games, KingsIsle. FFXIV has a special dungeon requirement for queueing up: One Tank, one Healer, and two DPS(Damage Per Second). In your case, you would require one class to be a tank and soak up hits, one to be a healer and two to deal damage per turn.

Wizard101 has such a heirarchy: Life and Balance are considered Healers, Death and Ice are considered Tanks, and Fire, Storm and Myth are DPS. I know it would make queue times insanely long, but by making it so that certain schools of magic or class of Pirate due certain roles in dungeons, players will focus on making those roles special and think carefully about what pirate/wizard they want to be.

Also, create a party finder for your games, a message board in game that would allow players to recruit randoms to join them in a dungeon raid.

Pirate101: The Game That Could Have Been

 

 

I recently heard disturbing news that KingsIsle is going to stop updating content on Pirate101. For those who play Wizard101, you may not know about Pirate101. This game was created two years after Wizard101 got Dragonspyre to draw in more MMO players.

Pirate101 may be set in the same Spiral and have similar quest lines, but it's a completely different experience. Instead of being a young student in a magic academy being the Chosen One, you are a poor kid who was kidnapped by a robotic army called the Armada and rescued by a pirate who takes you to the home base of young pirates-to-be, Skull Island. There you begin your life as one of five types of Pirate: The gun-toting Musketeer, the blade-wielding Swashbuckler, the commanding Privateer, the magic-using Witch Doctor, or the beefy axe-maniac known as the Buccaneer. You then end up on a treasure hunt of the ages, finding El Doraro, the legendary City of Gold, while trying to stop the Armada from finding it.

This is a wonderful story that eases you into its narrative and takes you to worlds in a different way. Since you are a pirate, you get a ship, mainly a raft, that you replace with better and better ships along the way. You use your ship to sail down dangerous skystreams that lead to vortices that are gates to the Dark Aether, the skystream that connects the worlds of the Spiral, and visit new worlds.

While some worlds, like Mooshu and Marleybone, are familiar to Wizard101, you don't visit those until you are high level. Your early life is visiting brand new worlds like Monquista(which is basically ancient Hispania with monkey men), Valencia(home to the dread Armada) and Cool Ranch(a world based on the stories and legends of the United States Wild West era).

The most recent story update was a revisit to Valencia to storm the base of the Armada and defeat the leader of that army, the general Kane, the very first Armada soldier crafted long ago. But...

Now rumors are circulating that the supposed story update to Pirate101 that will let us visit Polaris(which is a world in Wizard101) is being cancelled. The devs have one reason, and sadly, it's the reason that Pirate101 was created in the first place so it can't be removed...

WIZARD101.

This game came first and had two years to grow, and now that Karmelle(its 14th world) has released and the player characters don't look like potatoes anymore, those who are introduced to KI will be introduced by THIS MMO, the more popular one.

There is Pirate101 support, or Pirate101 would have been shut down years ago. But Pirate101 is a zombie cursed by the Lord of the Whorl to be undead instead of a thriving game. People are worried about it being shut down for good.

 

MapleStory had a similar tale: After the huge popularity of MapleStory, they tried to go 3D with a sequel, MapleStory 2. It looked beautiful and had many good ideas...

GUESS WHAT HAPPENED TO THAT GAME

The original side-scrolling MMO was just TOO POPULAR to accept moving to a new game, especially one with a radically different graphics system and battle system. It tried, but failed due to moving out of the 2D side-scrolling that made the original popular.

Pirate101 isn't as bad off, in fact it was graphically better than Wizard101 and only the combat and companion system were different. Well, the pet training too, pet training is much easier in Pirate101. But even that cannot save Pirate101 from being shut down like MapleStory 2 was.

The devs clearly stated that as long as Wizard101 is played, Pirate101 will be ignored, and Karamelle is not helping Pirate101's cause by being so popular. With a level cap of 140, Wizard101 has a lot of content. So the community is trying to throw a revival event to drum up interest. I will be participating, but sadly, KingIsle might have a hard time getting me back...

As I said, my love and body now go to FFXIV. I'll put up a new blog later.

My Platinum Title FFXIV character!

 

This is my most recent character in FFXIV, Nocte Mystere. (Nocte is Latin for midnight and Mystere is Frence for mystery. I have her as Miq'ote right now but I play to Fantasia her into a Lalafell when I get to Heavensward for story reasons. ^_^)

Her current classes are:

• White Mage (Level 51)
• Black Mage (Level 50)
• Scholar/Summoner (Level 53)
  

• Rogue (Level 12)
• Pugilist (Level 12)
• Archer (Level 15)
  

• Dragoon (Level 35)
• Marauder (Level 21)
• Gladiator (Level 17)

 Her non-battle classes are all over the board but she is Level 50 in all Gathering Classes, Alchemist and just hit Level 50 in Leatherworker thanks to the Ixal beast tribe quests.

EDIT: I changed servers and created a new character, a Lalafell called Azura Platina, and she got all but three of the trophies so far. Happy New Year's 2021!

 

Goodbye Wizard101, it's be a sweet time.

Goodbye, Bartleby, it was fun.

I created this blog a long time ago to scribe my adventures in Wizard101. It is a great MMO, I do not hate it... that said, I am afraid I have to cut my ties with it forever:

1. The cash shop is a money sink. I lost over $560 on booster packs just to RNG one spell which should have been part of the Life Wizard's toolkit in the beginning.
2. Bosses are getting harder and harder to defeat with all of the stupid gimmicks in them.
3. Finally, I don't feel any desire to listen to the story anymore. I finally reached Polaris with two of my characters and... I am done. I had to play with the dialogue off because I am sick of it.
4. I have to pay $35 to unlock a seventh character so I can have all seven schools of magic in my account. :(
   
5. The characters I play as are butt ugly. I only played as girls who look like china dolls. I know they are HD ressing the player character looks, but it's too little, too late.
   

So why else? Well, I am in love with a new MMO...

I give my life now to Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn!

Yep, I am now in the FFXIV camp. This game corrects many of the problems Wizard101 had:

1. There is a cash shop but the stuff you buy is mostly cosmetic, no need to buy booster packs - all of the combat-related stuff is only found in game.
2. Yes, bosses can wipe you with dumb gimmicks, but unlike Wizard101, which is boring turn-based combat (who does that anymore?) FFXIV is pure action RPG fighting and you can avoid enemies if you so choose. The bosses are tough but you get plenty of breathing room to fight.
3. The story is amazing and you can skip cutscenes if you already saw them.
4. I did create three characters but only to experience the first part of the story in each of the three main hub areas - Gridania(elf forest village), Limsa Lominsa(pirate town) and Ul'dah(think Agrobah from Disney's Aladdin, this is my favorite area). These all meet up and you can have your character max every combat class in the game, of which were are 14(though you can only get 9 and you have to get to Level 10 and do your second class quest to get access to new jobs), so there is no reason to have multiple characters.
5. Finally, all of the characters are beautiful, as it's Square-Enix, not some dinky art company in my homeland. They have tons of money to throw away in Square's pockets and I love playing characters like the cat-like Mi'qote or the cute Lalafell.

 

Okay, I admit it. I'd rather play as a cute halfling axe maniac than as an ugly china doll wizard. Sorry, KingsIsle, you've lost a fellow Texan... but you probably won't miss me. Maybe I can petition Square to MAYBE do a crossover event with Pirate101 where Bonnie Anne and Ratbeard appear in Limsa Lominsa after some goblins accidentally tap into the Spiral. <_<

Maybe.

New Wizards! And a mini-rant about the Grand Tourney and Cuckoo Clock gauntlet items

So recently I got some more paid time on Wizard101 so I decided to renew Christina and Natalie's account... but this time I'm rebooting the game with two new wizards. Meet Chris Rainbowheart, my Balance Wizard on Nat's account, and Christina Fireeyes, the Fire Wizard on Christina's account! I decided to go with a Pyromancer because Blaze is running a Firehammer Pyromancer on his co-op walkthrough and I think Fire Wizards need some respect. ^_^

Nice angle! Now I see that Dalia Falmea is cuckoo for cocoa puffs. ^_^

Sadly, Baldur remains wide-angle. ;p

So recently I discovered that KingsIsle's recent update has completely transformed Wizard101 into Wizard101: Elder Scrolls edition. Yep, they've made a huge set of close-ups and wide-angle zooms for most of the quests! I'm not upset, but it's a bit jarring to see so many close-up zooms of faces! :(

Seriously, stop it KI. I don't mind the cinematics for epic moments like confronting Malistaire, but oh my freaking Arceus why Lord Nightshade?!?! X_X

 

 

 

So Chris and Fireeyes(I have to call my Fire Wizard by her last name to avoid confusion with my Exalted Sorceress) completed everything in Wizard City but Sunken City(which they'll do when we get Meteor Strike for Fireeyes) and I decided, hey, why not get through all the Gauntlets? My old retired Tightwad Conjurer(you can read her adventures through to Avalon here) was pulled out of retirement briefly to help Chris and Fireeyes through Winterbane and Spiral Cup(which she had) and Pagoda(which I found easily); then Chris got the Grand Tourney done and got a Forest Beast pet! (Which I'll probably train and breed with Nat's sister, the Theurgist.)

 

Unfortunately, Fireeyes cannot do that dungeon and I can't get the new Clock Gauntlet done because you see, KingsIsle is greedy as sin - they realized as soon as they created the Castle Tours and saw people abusing it for Winterbane and Pagoda of the Sun that any future Gauntlets would be abused, so they programmed all Gauntlets after the second with a lock(Winterbane Hall and Pagoda Gauntlet were created before Castle Tours so they escaped this fate) that prints an error if you try to enter the dungeon instance while in Castle Tours. So those fancy housing items are worthless to tourists except as decor. To get in, you have to leave and beg the owner of the house to be your best friend and go home so you can teleport in and use his facilities. That or have someone who is already a good friend with the owner to let you add them so you can port to them...

And the only place that has people doing the Grand Tourney and Clock Gauntlets is a new Darkmoor Manor house(from the new Witch Hunter's Bundle) which is owned by one Aaron Ghostthief... and since nobody wants to find houses elsewhere, everyone in the Spiral is hogging the place and the game will refuse to let you in or let you port in if the visitor capacity is full, so you have to wait hours until someone leaves. And guess what? When the people enter the gauntlets and then leave.

So yeah, I'll be hanging out in Castle Tours forever, waiting for half of the populace to go to sleep but not too many so I can beg someone to add me so I can get into the damn house of Aaron Ghostthief!

That, or I could continue the story and start on Krokotopia. *SIGH* :(

And I have to get to sleep tomorrow so I can start getting more trophies on Ratchet and Clank. X(

PEEPS! If anyone who plays Wizard101 reads this, go find other houses with these items! I found one with both Cuckoo Clock and Grand Tourney in a Red Barn Farm by accident and it was empty!

 

Oh, speaking of which, I had both new wizards buy the Farms(thanks to farming Halfang with my stronger wizards for hours) so I can start them as Gardeners. Chris is making his look like the Dwarf Woodlands(aka Snow White) from Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep - I even wasted my earned money on a Gem Bundle for the mine! ^_^

(If any Wizard wants to help me get into these instances, comment below! I am NEVER buying these - at least until Christmas when I get my usual slush gift card money. No point is paying $80 for two bundles which don't have houses in them.)

It's done! (new spell)

(I want to apologize for predicting the end of Wizard101 so soon - Skelemystk put me straight. Companies sometimes have to gut themselves when things go bad and KI made a bad prediction. Come on, I'm not buying mobile games, my phone is a phone #1 priority.)

DEER KNIGHT!!!!

Finally: After a month of slaving away and being in Khrysalis lock for years, I finally got the spell I wanted for a Necromancer for so long!!

DA DEER!

Woo hoo!

I was lucky that a few Cronus runs(with some nice Life Wizards helping Nat out) got two lucky Amber Drops and another Gladiator run got me a third. I also got a bunch of Sunstone from the Bazaar to craft the last Amber. So now I can use Da Deer!

Sorry, but I was so eager to use this spell after so long. After many sad runs of Loremaster, wasted Crowns on Knight's Lore and what not, Natalie has finally gotten her own...

Not my image, go here to the link

Until Khrulu in four levels, mind you. ;)

The Future of Wizard101... in Wizard201?! (idea post)

The last two posts in this blog have been sort of somber and dark, thinking about what's wrong with Wizard101 and how it could change. Now, I am not saying that Wiz is a bad game; every MMO, even the best and longest(WoW, cough cough) have their issues and people leave the games there. I'm just saying we need to look over how Wizard101 could become better in the future, if it's to last as long as big name games like MapleStory and WoW, and I wanted to bring up something I came up with a long time ago but never really brought to the public...

Yes, we need to have a sequel to Wizard101. Wizet has created a MapleStory sequel with 3-D graphics called MapleStory 2, which is pretty good, but I'm not talking about that... I'm talking about having your character in Wizard101 retire and sire a successor for Wizard201, where new adventures await in the same places.

Zenmaster Blue and Blaze LifeHammer, in their co-op walkthrough, discussed the possibility of there being a Unicorn Way 2.0 where all the enemies are much tougher. Zenmaster Blue shot it down but wished it would happen...

MapleStory has something like that - well, not really; they have Future MapleWorld where Ereve becomes a tyranny ruled by corrupted Cygnus and the Cygnus Knights after the Black Mage cursed Cygnus and her knights to become evil incarnate. But that's where the Dark Oriel comes in...

Here is my backstory for Wizard201: It's been ten to thirty years since the destruction of Azteca(you cannot go there any more) and the events in Darkmoor(where Malistaire was finally put to rest); Morganthe is gone, Old Cob is gone, and the Spiral knows peace at last.

A year ago, Merle Ambrose retired from headmaster of Ravenwood and head of Wizard City and appointed Gamma to find a suitable heir, then he vanished to parts unknown. When we start a new character, we get the same sort of scene as in Wizard101's character creation... only we are greeted by the sole character of Merle Ambrose's ghost. He's clearly dead but won't say why. We go through the usual character creation process, picking our school from the Book of Secrets(or skipping it and choosing a school) and then we are greeted by the new headmaster, which can be the wizard in Wizard101 whose player has died or participated in a recent Make-A-Wish visit(they've done that before in the past - Allan GhostDust is actually a player's wizard who stopped playing when the player died of cancer. :( ) and was appointed by Gamma due to his/her services to the Spiral.

I don't have any ideas for a story except that a big bad villain is harming the Spiral again. Maybe Morganthe 2.0 or something like that. But whatever the story, it'll include favorite places like Krokotopia, Marleybone, Mooshu and Avalon with Wizard City being the hub world again. ^_^

If KI cannot keep Wizard101 running, they can give players of the game compensation before it shuts down forever, giving them "perks" to their new wizards in Wizard201 like free pets, a large vault of Crowns for the Crown Shop, or even exclusive spells that only they can use(not recommended as it would make them better and players who have never played Wizard101 will feel cheated).

Here are some ideas that MapleStory could give to Wizard201:

1. A "Reboot" channel which is only switchable to if you own a special key that requires you to complete some very simple quests. In that server, there are some restrictions(you can't trade Treasure Cards and the Bazaar is locked) but you get more money and better loot drops from enemies as well as items that you can earn to almost guarantee good loot drops from bosses and the Second Chance Chests and some items(like Elixirs) only need gold(a lot of it, though) instead of Crowns, so players who have completed Darkmoor and don't want to go through the bosses and are RICH can burn all their gold in the Second Chance in hopes of a good gear. ;) Oh, and to ensure no abuse of the system, you are immediately switched out of the Reboot channel when you log out and cannot return to it for a few hours.
2. Pet raising is much simpler - instead of having the pets learn talents randomly, you can give the pet an affinity stat which is raised by things like having it equipped, feeding it the snacks it loves and having it do perfect in the pet minigames. The higher the affinity stat, the better the chance that it will learn the talents you want. It's still semi-random, but not by much.
3. Have double benefits occur more often. They're doing well with the various member benefits but they need to have them happen once a month for each.
4. Drop the pay-to-play aspect and have every world in the Spiral accessible without Crowns. I know it's a huge profit blow to KI but follow the example of MapleStory, let newbie wizards enter Avalon and get killed by dragons. It's not like you don't restrict players in Wizard101 to go anywhere they want. To remove the problem in Wizard101 which has new wizards getting joyrides to Polaris via porting, you can have the "Your friend is busy" error pop up whenever a wizard tries to port to a friend on a world they haven't visited via the Spiral Door at least once.
5. Let players do a quest to gain an extra pet slot so they can equip two pets; also raise the chances of triggering May Cast healing spells to give new players a break with their borrowed pets. They need to have some help.
6. Make Team Up more efficient and pair off wizards who are competent with new wizards so the newbies get to learn the lay of the dungeons. This makes it easier for solo wizards to get help.

I have a lot of ideas, but this is just the tip of the iceberg and I'd be stuck here typing all day. XD But we need a sequel to Wizard101 so that KI can keep players of that game happy. Feedback? What do you think about this idea? Please comment in the section below. Ciao!

THIS is why Maplestory is better (mini-rant)

Come on, Karma! I need six more Amber! Don't force me to craft it! :(

Now, before you tar-and-feather me, let me just say that I am not trying to be selfish - I KNOW that at 2:05 PM, all the kids are still in school(elementary school hasn't let out for summer yet) and adults are usually at a JOB - one which I sorely need. (I'm on Welfare.)

But would it KILL for Karma to have one straggler like myself show up to help me farm the Gladiator for my Alpha and Omega Ring? *angry growl*

Oh well, I can always do the B.O.X.Es. - at least ten people are hovering around the Professor's Box since, unllike Tart, it won't be around forever. *sigh*

The Cat Who Predicted Doom and Gloom (sad rant)

I'm sure everyone has heard the news - KingsIsle just had a huge downsize of its staff:  For no reason determined, they laid off 40% of their staff, including most of its art branch and Leala, who had been joining the Friendly Necromancer in KI Live podcasts for the past two years.

That is an omen...

An ill omen. Whenever a company has a huge lay-off, it means that they are in serious financial trouble, they are not making the skills to pay the bills, and it's inevitable that such companies end up filing for bankruptcy and disappearing from the Earth.

KingsIsle is doomed to fail and, because of this, they'll have to shut down their servers and delete their MMOs programs for Wizard and Pirate, meaning that, just like what happened to Star Wars Galaxies years ago, they'll have a farewell party and then, the countdown to shutting down forever. Then they'll dissolve and sell the computers to pay off what debts they have before going their own separate ways.

Now, don't get wrong. I'm not trying to be pessimistic here. I'm just looking at the facts: KI have to do a big layoff that gutted them. You don't have to be an economics genius to know why this sort of thing happens:

1. They aren't making enough money to pay the salaries of the people they had to lay off.
2. They aren't getting enough new players, or players who are willing to play beyond Triton Avenue and thus spend Crowns or buy sub cards like me.
3. Bigger games that have been around longer(MapleStory, World of Warcraft) are stealing players from them with bigger temptations(MapleStory is free to explore and World of Warcraft just turned Free to Play with more places to adventure in).

If KingsIsle wants to get back the people they had to lay off, they need to start making more money and ASAP before it's too late. They've already gotten Phase 1 of the Bankruptcy Syndrome - a big lay off that guts their company in the core(they had to lay off their head of art!). They need to wake up and work fast to fix the syndrome before Phase 2 - forced downsizing of their products, like having to cancel Rise and Destroy and AlphaCat and having to double the prices of their Crowns purchases and drop sales altogether - occurs. Because if they don't, the final phase - complete bankruptcy and the end of their products - happens and we can kiss Wizard101, Pirate101 and anything connected to them goodbye. No Mirage, no third arc, and no more PvP or cute piggles. :(

Here are my suggestions. I am linking this to the Friendly Necromancer's post in hopes that he sends this post to the bigwigs and convinces them to take action fast! I do not want to see Wizard101 be shut down and cease to exist because of bad financial decisions, I love that game.

Tips to Make Players pay more and get more money without them knowing:

1. Wizard City is Free-to-Play: You edited Pirate101 so that the Traitor's Cave and a new area were free-to-play, giving more content. Do that with Wizard City! I know it's not easy to reprogram an area and you might lose some Crowns Areas but new players will not feel cheated. Right now, if I want to create a new Wizard and explore all of Wizard City, I have to buy a sub card because free-to-play is restricted to only Unicorn Way and Triton Avenue. At the very least, make Firecat Alley and Cyclops Lane free-to-play so new wizards can get the Savior of Three Streets badge and feel good about it. Colossus Boulevard, Crab Alley and Sunken City are optional areas and thus should cost Crowns because by the time a new player wants to explore those areas, they'll have been sold on the fun of Wizard101 and be a payer. As it is, if I were a new player, the instant I got barred by the Crowns Area screen after Triton Avenue, I'd say "screw this ****" and go back to MapleStory. :(
2. Skeleton Keys in the Crown Shop, more Key Bosses: You went in the right direction by adding the Divine Ra as a Wooden Key boss in Zan'ne's library, he is an easy fight(3000 HP, only a little more than Meowiarty, which most players will be at by then) that has few cheats and gives some really nice loot, including some rare permanent mounts. Do more of that - have a range of Key Bosses from the ridiculously easy(maybe a buffed-up Riverclaw in Triton Avenue with a Wood Key) to the insanely hard(well, not as hard as Omen Striborg, who is impossible to solo ;) ) for every rank of Wizard. Three new Key Bosses a year for a couple of years will be enough to whet new and old players. To make it easier to farm these guys - as that is what people will want - and keep them spending money on subs, make Keys available in the Crown Shop, but not cheap: 500 Crowns for each Wooden Key, 2000 Crowns for each Stone Key and 5000 Crowns for each Gold Key. Players love fighting bosses for loot and if they want to save time farming areas like Darkmoor, they WILL pay the money for the keys. That's what the average players want to do - they don't want to farm for keys, they pay to win. :)
3. Update More Frequently: I know your programming isn't as clean as MapleStory's and it takes longer, but don't leave us hanging without some progress reports. You don't have to be fancy, you can Tweet #Heywearegettingthere with some concept art.
4. More Events: I love The Lost Pages and the B.O.X.E.S. event and the new Daily Assignments are just great for pulling players in every day, but you need a little more. MapleStory has tons of holiday events. Wizard101 has its usual anniversary event and Halloween event every October but it could do with a Christmas event and an Easter Event, not just having a holiday vendor hanging out in the Shopping District that nobody cares about. I'll be glad to give some ideas your way if you are interested. These events make old players interested in the questing and they MIGHT decide to hop over to your Crowns Vendor and buy a souvenir or two. ;)
5. Reduced Crowns Areas and Contests: Finally, drop the price of your areas a bit. I know that means a small $$$ loss from the Crowns Players, but you're going to be adding new worlds and you can make up that amount in due time with more people joining in. Also, give contests where the Grand Prize is a one-month free membership. By giving away a free membership every so often, a lucky player will enjoy the benefits and realize that, hey, I'd better drop my life as a Crowns Player and buy a subscription FAST, how could I live without member benefits and the other stuff from being a member!

I hope KI reads this and gets some ideas for Mirage and future worlds... if they ever come. After that big lay-off I am not holding my breath for the new worlds to show up until the Holidays, if we ever celebrate the next birthday of Wizard and Pirate, considering how bleak things are looking. Please, KI, listen to your players and maybe your games will celebrate their 11th anniversary like MapleStory is doing. In fact, go play MapleStory and find out how it lived for so long. ;)

As for me, you still have a loyal player in me, who will pay and play to the end. Natalie Owlwraith and her friends will keep questing until we reach Polaris. ^_^

Nat's journey through Azteca continues (update)

Nat's been rather busy as of late - while I do have Pirate101 rebooted and got through to Jonah Town there, I have four Wizard101 accounts with one month of time so I decided to get Nat through Azteca... oh, and I got a rare teleport tapestry from fishing!

Sadly, no Amber yet, not even after a couple of runs through Tartarus and...

Oh YEAH, Nat's Promethean now so she has access to the last Aquila dungeon and the money maker for gear. However, she only got the lame armor and another Poseidon trident after two runs of Hades.

She did get the Blade of the Felled Titan after her first battle with Cronus, however. It now sports a +7% power pip opal,  +5% Death Pierce Onyx and +72 HP opal. :D

Thanks to a nice Prodigious Theurgist called Connor Lifehammer, who had a surplus of wood keys and was met in the Pagoda of Harmony, Nat faced Ra several times and got her dream pet, the Mummy Cat. It's now Teen now. ^_^

 

Nat's also completed the final Astral spell quest in Azteca(which is actually easy since the required boss is Balance with two Life minions, but you still have to be careful), and in midway through the Floating Mountains as of this post. I plan to spend the next two days getting her to Khrysalis.

Also, the Silver Chest games are becoming more worth it - TWO SUNSTONES!!! (She'll be helping Ethan Jadeblade get through Azteca once Blaze and Blue get there in their video co-op.)

I also replaced my speakers with headphones(which my dad donated) because my speakers have given up the ghost - they still work, but only 90% of the time now.

Ciao for now!

Putting this blog in the blender... for now

So as it is, Natalie's doing well - she's gotten to Zultun Dock and is progressing through Azteca.

I also bought her third house and decided to create a "Hall of Everywhere" for it just like Skelemystk did for his glitched Life House, which includes teleport tapestries to everywhere she needs to go...

And after some consideration, I made a decision not to spend my $ on the new Ratchet and Clank yet  instead, I decided to renew her account time as well as some others... for a new story. ;)

Also, I didn't mean to lie - Nat's still got a ton of Sunstones to collect if she ever wants Deer Knight.

Finally got to Azteca!

So Nat's journey to Polaris is reaching the home stretch - she's reached the end of Avalon, and the kid gloves have come off. Young Morganthe was causing a lot of struggle for her and Christina - I had to spend some money on a Life Henchfroudling to keep them alive - luckily he didn't do anything to trigger the chaotic Young Morganthe and her unpredictable cheats.

 

 

 

After that it was a matter of being crowned a Knight and wielding The Sword of Kings. Nat was well and ready to take on Azteca.

And finally she got the Sunstones for Deer Knight. She had been piggybacking off of Christina for Sunstones in this place but now she could enter and leave at will. But she also got to Level 84 so I used that energy to fish up some nice new wands at the Elephant Graveyard. ^_^

Hoping for Spirit Caller Drums but no luck.