Christmas? What Christmas?

Once again, I don't have an awful lot to say about anything in particular. Preparations for Christmas seem to be eating up a lot of time this year. Christmas events in games, on the other hand, are having less impact than normal, mostly because they tend to be familiar to the point of ennui after so many years.

I haven't yet summoned up sufficient interest or enthusiasm to plonk all my characters next to Santa Glugg in EverQuest II's Frostfell Wonderland as I've been in the habit of doing in recent times. I'm pretty certain all the presents I got last year (And quite possibly the year before that.) are still sitting in the same bag slots they fell into when I collected them. While I am, as I often say, all about the free stuff, there comes a time when you have to acknowledge you already have more snowglobes than you know what to do with.

There's nothing new for Frostfell this year other than the new gifts and items on sale from the goblin vendors. After a decade and a half of continual development, the event really doesn't need anything added. There's already hours and hours of content just sitting there, waiting, all of which I've done many times before.

That said, I'll still find time to pick up this year's new crafting books. It's been a couple of years since I last made anything for Frostfell but I like to maintain the option. Oddly, I tend to take more trouble over decorating on Kaladim, where I only log in for the holidays. There's a lot to be said for just having a couple of rooms to decorate rather than a vast mansion or even a whole island. 

Over in Guild Wars 2, Wintersday begins tomorrow. There's "a rundown of the activities and new rewards" due this week, presumably as part of the Tuesday update, but so far I see no indication of any new events. Unless there's some big surprise, I don't imagine I'll be logging in specially, although no doubt I'll make an apearance in Tyria at some point before the end of the holidays, most likely whenever ArenaNet put a freebie in the Gem Store.

The same probably applies to New World, where the Winter Convergence festival is once again in full swing. This one does have some new content, which is to be expected, seeing as it's only the event's second year. It takes a while to build up a full dance card for these things.

The big ticket event this time is a new World Boss, the Winter Warrior, who, along with his legion of Frigid Folk, is "on a relentless mission to spread a Forever Winter across the land." Aren't they all?

He's making the rounds of several zones, Great Cleave, Brightwood, Edengrove, Ebonscale Reach and Brimstone Sands, where he'll happily take on "a party of 20+ players", although I suspect he's going to end up facing a lot more than that most of the time. Zergs win prizes, after all.

I will try to make the effort to see the fight at least once but I got a full complement of patterns from last year's event and I'm not seeing anything in the updated rewards that catches my fancy. For all that New World is supposed to be this year's Most Improved mmorpg, my enthusiasm wilted surprisingly quickly after a couple of weeks in Brimstone Sands. No fault of the game, more of my attenuated attention span. 

I didn't experience anything like the same fall-off in enthusiasm for Lord of the Rings Online after I bought the BeforeThe Shadow mini-expansion but I stopped playing it all the same. I just couldn't fit it in alongside Noah's Heart and EQII once Renewal of Ro arrived. 

Having been away from Middle Earth since the beginning of December, I can't even say what winter celebrations are happening there or whether they've started yet, let alone if the new zones are included. I know LotRO has quite a strong reputation for holiday events but my limited experience of them so far has tended towards the exhausting. There always seems to be a lot to do and I'm not really one for holiday chores.

Still, I probably ought to go look it all up and see if there's anything in my line. I'd definitely like to pick up levelling where I left off a few weeks ago and a holiday event might be a good re-entry point.

Of the mmorpgs I'm at least semi-actively playing right now, that just leaves Noah's Heart, where as far as I can tell there is, as yet, no specific winter or Christmas event in progress or announced. There are always "events" so it's hard to be sure but I haven't seen any santas, stockings or fairy-lights.

I would love to see something happen there, mainly because I'm fascinated to know which historical or legendary characters Archosaur would mangle and mutilate this time. The current season brought Caesar, Hannibal, Napoleon and Wellington onto the stage and the interplay between them is jaw-droppingly weird, partly due to the translation but mostly just by way of the game's general insanity. I wouldn't put it past them to add Santa as a Phantom. Or even Jesus, for that matter.

For the time being, though, I imagine it's going to be a case of the usual dailies in Noah's Heart and steady progress through the Signature Questline in Renwal of Ro. I've finished the first dungeon, which went astonishingly well, so I should have a couple of restful questing sessions before the next.

I hope that goes well, too. If not, maybe I'll find time for some Christmas fun after all.

Like Rabbits?

The entirely unanticipated addition of Chimeraland to my gaming schedule put a serious crimp in the plans I had to finish up the Winter Convergence event in New World before the thaw arrived. Prior to that, Amazon's decision to extend the event until the twenty-fifth of January had released whatever slight pressure I might have felt to get on and actually do the work but yesterday I realized, if I didn't knuckle down and get on with, it pretty soon it was going to be too late. 

Even then, I knew I had more than enough time left to jog along the roads and tracks of Aeternum, picking up lost presents along the way as I visited every town to collect my daily allotment of gifts and enhance my standing with the Yeti community. The event was already paced to feel relaxed and unstressful even before the deadline shifted.

Of course, that's assuming you didn't plan on being greedy. I guess if you saw the whole thing as an opportunity to fill every slot with endgame-ready gearyou might have felt more of a sense of urgency, but all I wanted was a bunny. (Did anyone else get a Suicidal Tendencies flashback just then?)

Come on! Who could say no?

The bunny in question, a clockwork automoton wearing a brightly-colored sweater, with a key sticking out his back, costs ten Premium Winter Tokens. You get a few PWTs from the questline but mostly you have to "craft" them by converting Winter Tokens at an exchange rate of twenty-five to one. That's quite a few to collect.

Having the tokens isn't enough, of course. You also have to have the reputation. By the time I finally pulled myself free of the Chimeraland gravity well to log back into New World for the first time in a couple of weeks, there were only a few days left for me to boost my rep by the three and half thousand points I still needed.

It sounds like a lot but it turned out to be pretty straightforward. I logged in for three of my free, one-hour-capped GEForce Now sessions but I didn't use the full sixty minutes in any of them. A couple of times I ran across pristine, untouched Gleamite strikes, which helped a lot. I hadn't noticed before that each Gleamite nodes gives a random amount of reputation, sometimes as much as thirty-five points. It adds up fast.

What with those, the five points for every lost present and the hundred or hundred and fifty from every town's present pile and winter village's gift sack, my reputation fairly flew along. I also stashed away a goodly number of tokens as I went, enough that when the time came last night to buy my bunny, I had more than enough.

So much more, in fact, that the question became what to do with the surplus. I had thought I'd spend it on the rest of the furniture for my house but when I came to look at the options I realised I didn't really want any of it. 

It's not that the items on offer aren't attractive or well-designed. They're almost tasteful. It's that I just don't like frozen (or fiery, for that matter) furniture. Never have. I know it looks impressive but I can't help but imagine how intensely uncomfortable it would be to use.

There is a hat that goes with the outfit but you'd have to be a "jongleur" at a new age "fayre" to think it was a good idea to wear it.

I would have taken appearance clothing if there'd been any but I could only see one piece and it looked remarkably similar to something I already had. Amazon gave away a whole load of Winter Convergence freebies as as a kind of login daily through the cash shop, all of which they very generously put back up for a few days at the end of the event. I'd already scooped up all of those, including a full set of visible gear, so I didn't feel it was worth spending another ten premium tokens on a coat that didn't look much different to the one I was wearing.

I did wonder about the much cheaper, lower-level gear. Some of the designs looked good. I particularly liked the antler helmet. New World has a dreadful "appearance" system, though. In theory you can swap out the looks of items you like and copy them onto gear with stats you need but items have to be flagged to allow it and almost no low-level items are. I think the developers assume no-one would want to make higher level gear look like lower level gear, which is literally what I do in every game that permits it.

Having vetoed that idea, I had a look at the level 60 stuff. The obvious choice would have been to buy as much as I could afford. My character is a few percent shy of fifty-five now, so it would be a good investment. I only had enough for two or three pieces, though, which seemed a bit half-assed. 

Then I noticed the patterns. There seemed to be one for every level 60 item on sale. The tool tip irritatingly refused to tell me what ingredients were required to craft the gear but google soon sorted that out for me. 

It seems they all use some Tier V mats and a lot of much more common ones. I've no idea how hard the rarer mats are to get but I noticed I already had a few, so it can't be impossible.

Even if it was going to be hard to get the mats, the patterns only cost a single winter token each. Raising all the necessary crafting skills and running down the materials to make a full set of gear would certainly give me something to focus on when I get to sixty. It seemed crazy not to pick them all up, so I did.

That still left me with a couple of hundred tokens. Working on a very long-standing principle, I figured the one thing I always want to be as good as possible would be my weapons, so I converted the lot, which gave me just enough Premium tokens to buy a level 60 hatchet and a sword.

Just acquiring the first of those also gave me an achievement. Luckily it was for "getting" a level 60 weapon, rather than, as you'd expect, for equipping one. It's going to be a while before I can do that.

With all of that out of the way, I ported back to my Mourningdale house and settled my mechanical bunny down in his new home on the front porch. He looks great there and crucially he doesn't look too specifically Christmassy. Neither do the two potted poinsettias although the wreath over the doorway may have to come down when spring arrives.

So will the mistletoe over my character's bed. I'm not sure who she thinks is going to take advantage of it (Or her.) there but what she gets up to after I log out is her own business. The other two poinsettias on either side of the fireplace can stay.

All in all I'm very satisfied both with New World's first major holiday event and with what I managed to achieve in it. I thought it was well-judged and appropriately generous for the season. 

Who sleeps with their boots on? Not to mention the sword...

Amazon have another of their regular "How do you like the game so far?" surveys up. I filled it out last night. Most of my answers were along the lines of "I like it just fine as it is. Don't go messing about with anything." I saved my powder for the final section, where they ask what changes you'd like to see. I told them I want a proper appearance system, one not based on the cash shop and I want more character slots, especially multiple slots on the same server.

If they can give me those I'd be more likely to play more often. Unfortunately, I suspect the game will be heading off in another, less casual direction, if only because what happens in every new mmorpg after the intial rush of attention fades is that the players who stick around are those who take everything the most seriously. I imagine New World will have to go through a phase of courting the hardcore before it gets back to flirting with the flighty. 

I'm going to really miss the snow, when it goes.

There is that promise of more and better solo content to consider but I have a horrible feeling it might mean solo content with heft, never really what I'm looking for. Still, Winter Convergence has been a good experience, all things considered. When the survey asked what I'd like from future New World holidays I answered "More of them".

Can't really hope for a better feedback than that after the first one.

Where Are The Snows Of Yesteryear? Oh. Still Here.

We're halfway through the second week in January. Christmas is long gone. I really wasn't expecting to be writing any more posts about snowballs and presents and jingling sleigh bells. Then I saw this. 

It seems Amazon Games' first attempt at a major holiday event, New World's Winter Convergence Festival, has turned out to be as popular as mulled wine and chestnuts round the open fire. Due to "the fantastic turnout" the decorations, previously scheduled to come down tomorrow on January 11th, will now stay up for another two weeks.

The event will end, for real this time, on January 22nd, meaning it will have run for no less than forty days, just barely shy of six weeks. It shows some prescience by whoever signed off on the somewhat generic name for the whole affair. It certainly has lasted for most of the season. 

The unexpected extension suits me very well. I hadn't been keeping track of the days. In my mind we had a lot longer to go before the snows thawed than would have been the case had Amazon stuck to the schedule. New World had taken a back seat to holiday events both in the real world and in Norrath and Tyria for me but I always intended to come back in time to pick up some more lost presents and rack up some more reputation with the grunting yeti in the Winter Village.

Had the deadline not been relaxed I'd have found myself in a bit of a festive pickle, trying to get everything finished in just a couple of days. As it is, I'll have plenty of time to make a few leisurely circuits of Aeternum,  jog-trotting from town to town, filling my packs with dropped gifts and mining gleamite from fallen crystals.

That's what I've been doing today and it's been very relaxing. A character in the mid-50s gets almost no aggro in most of the zones that matter for this event so it's merely a matter of putting in the miles. I played for about three hours this morning, all on the free version of GeForce Now, which continues to provide an excellent service, especially on a weekday morning, when there's no waiting for a slot at all.

Towards the end I used the fast travel option a couple of times, more because I've been at the azoth cap for ages and I'm getting tired of seeing all the excess blue stuff go to waste every time I hand in a quest. If it wasn't for that, I'd have preferred to stick to the roads. That's where the lost presents are, after all.

Actually, it's not, or not all of them. There are plenty scattered around the woods, forests and swamps. The Frigid Folk who've been stealing them must have some kind of light aircraft. Cutting across country, I also happened on several falls of gleamite, lying unharvested and in two cases ignored by other players passing through. I took as much as I could carry.

I wish I'd been lucky enough to see another gleamite strike. They're spectacular when they happen. If I knew a reliable way to predict when and where they'd hit I'd be out there ahead of time with a folding chair and flask of coffee. 

All of the visuals for Winter Convergence are exemplary. I had the opportunity to look closely at most of the major settlements, all of which are fully upgraded for the festival, and it was striking just how much care had been taken over the decorations. There's no sense at all of any kind of cut-and-paste job. Each town has been given a bespoke winter makeover that suits its style and setting.

I was particularly impressed with Windsward. There seemed to be an indigo tint to the streamers and lights that complemented the season perfectly. The way the bridges and railings along the stream that runs through the center of town had been garlanded and festooned was both twee and tasteful, just like Windsward itself.

In Restless Shore, home of pirates for real, unlike the wannabes in Cutlass Keys, someone has climbed into the rigging of the ship that anchors in the harbor to string lights. It twinkles from mast to spar. My own chosen home in Mourningdale looks sedate in comparison, a very appropriate look for a beleagured fort on the northern borders.

As I was making my rounds I took the time to finish off the penultimate stage in the main Winter Convergence questline, finding the two remaining Ice Caves and putting an end to the reign of terror of the yetis who lived there. To be honest, the yetis never come out of their caves, so what risk they pose to anyone isn't clear. They have loot and give reputation, though, so that's good enough for me. 

In my travels, I also happened across several quests I hadn't seen before. It's possible they were always there but given how many times I've pounded up and down the same roads I think it unlikely. One began what looks to be a series of introductory housing quests, handed out by the first stereotypically Italian NPC I've seen in Aeternum and quite possibly anywhere. 

The reward for that one was an introductory box of furniture. I was quite excited about that. I rushed off to do the quest and hand it in. Later, when I'd made it back to my house and opened the box, I was less than impressed to find all it contained was a lantern and a plain wood table. The follow-up quest rewards a dining chair. 

It reminded me of the charity pack you get when you rent your first inn room in EverQuest II. I got my first one of those a decade and a half ago and that had a table in as well. No-one ever thinks to give you the one thing you need most - a bed. 

Never mind, I'd already crafted one for myself. My character's fast asleep in it right now, worn out after all that running. She'll need to get a good night's rest. She'll be going out again tomorrow. 

I was very pleasantly surprised by how fast the reputation builds up. She's already close to the end of "Merrymaker", the third of the five stages. My aim is to get to the last one, Winter Regent, thereby opening all the options in the shop and giving me access to the one thing I really want, the Clockwork Rabbit.

With another two weeks to go and no competing festivals left in any other games I care about, that looks eminently achievable. Also worth noting is the return of the giveaway items from the opening days and weeks, all of which will be available once again for the final five days before the Winter Wanderer finally lives up to his name and wanders off.

By then I would imagine even the most fervent of festive revellers will be happy to wave him goodbye until next year. I wonder what Amazon have planned for Easter?

Ring Out The Old

Now the holidays are over, it's time to get back to normality - or at least what passes for it these days. Although, are the holidays over quite yet? 

Guild Wars 2's Wintersday finishes this afternoon, or maybe this evening, my time. (Edit: I literally don't know what day of the week it is! I thought it was Tuesday. Make that "tomorrow afternoon".) I didn't do all that much this year. I didn't even attempt the annual meta-achievement. I gave it a quick once-over at the start, wasn't feeling it and forgot all about it for a couple of weeks. 

Eventually, I came back around and did a few odds and ends but I never even got so far as stepping into the instances for Toypocalypse or the rest. I went round the racecourse a few times and paid my three gold to get the Dolyak started but mostly I just stuck to doing the Bell Choir event.  

I enjoy the mini-game itself and I've always found it an extremely reliable way to get presents. You don't even need to be any good at it although I'm not bad. When there's a full roster of a dozen people playing I generally come in the top half, quite often fourth or fifth. 

Once or twice I've even topped the table but only when there hasn't been one of those infallible robots playing, the ones who score maximum points every single round and never make even one, tiny little error. I assume those are either outright bots or players running some kind of illegal third-party app. I hope so, anyway. I'd hate to think anyone could be that robotic and not be cheating. 

As an active World vs World player, I have a much easier and more reliable source of Wintersday presents anyway. All year long I pile up hundreds and hundreds of those little green flasks, the "Potions of WvW Rewards." It takes about eighty of those to complete a WvW reward track and I have fifteen hundred in the bank - and that's after I used several hundred on this year's Wintersday.

I haven't counted exactly how many Wintersday Presents you get for a full track but it's at least a stack of two hundred and fifty. What with that and the hundred or so I got each time I did three or four rounds of bell-ringing, I've been able to open to as many as I wanted. I know that's literally true because I still have a thousand in the bank and I don't want to open those. 

Like most supposedly fun things in GW2, too much can be a soul-destroying experience. The entire premise of the game's reward system is founded on opening industrial quantities of containers in the hope of finding insanely rare objects. Along the way you rack up thousands and thousands of lesser items, some virtually worthless, most worth selling in bulk, a handful actually interesting, valuable or useable.

The sheer volume leeches all the fun out of the unboxing process, which quickly becomes just another housekeeping chore. It's an odd way to run a game and an economy although after a decade I think we'd all have to accept that it works. Some people even seem to like it.

I didn't get anything much worth having in my Wintersday presents this year. I made a few gold selling the overspill and I have one or two things stashed that would sell for decent money if I was willing to part with them. It was fun but not that much fun.

Over in EverQuest II the approach couldn't be more different. At Frostfell you get proper presents every day. Santa Glug hands them out and they're always worth having. They do repeat after you've been doing it for a while but even then, since a lot of them are housing items, you can still make good use of them.

There are always some new ones although since I only do the event sporadically I'm never really sure whether something I haven't seen before is genuinely new, making a comeback or just one I don't happen to have been given yet. Some years I've been quite diligent about parking characters in Frostfell Village and getting as many presents as I can but this year I haven't put in much of an effort in that direction, preferring to concentrate on questing instead.

I did log in my character on the TLE server, Kaladim, where most of the holiday content is now active. Naturally, I immediately received a petamorph wand that was new to me and which I would certainly have used on my Necromancer. Not much use to a dirge!

Frostfell also ends today, so unless I'm freakishly lucky I won't be repeating that win on my main server, Skyfire. On the other hand, the wands are tradeable and usually very cheap so I could just buy one. Somehow, though, that takes all the fun out of it.

As I anticipated, I haven't gone back to Bless Unleashed for the Feywinter event but it still has a few days to run so it's not too late. It finishes on January 12th. I could dig into it once the two I've been doing are packed up and put away.

I won't, though. Much more likely is a renewed focus on New World's Winter Convergence, which I've let slide in the knowledge that it goes on a lot longer than the rest. The snow in Aeternum won't melt until January 14th, which gives me another ten days to make some money, build my reputation and buy the house items I still want. 

One thing I won't be doing is finishing the questline. I've done most of it. All I have left to do is kill the final yeti in the first set of three. I was anticipating a bit more after that, given the yetis in question are only level 25, but I read through the incredibly extensive guide at Vulkk.com this morning and it seems the quest jumps straight from those easy kills to an impossible-to-solo at my level bunch of Level 61-65 Elites.

I'm not displeased about that. It means I will finish all the available, non-repeatable content in my level range, which is more than I expected. For the first iteration of what will presumably become a long-running, annual event, I thought Amazon made a pretty fair fist of it.

And that, I think, will be my final Christmas/New Year post for the season, although since this wasn't even the post I was planning on writing today, I guess I shouldn't be making any promises.

I'll finish up with one final New Year's gift, the third single from Let's Eat Grandma's forthcoming third album. It's most appropriately called Happy New Year. And here it is.

With a bit of luck this year might be better than the last two. At least we can hope!

Getting Into The Winter Convergence Spirit With The Winter Convergence First Impressions Blog Post (I Think I'm Catching The Tone Here...)

Winter Convergence. It's not the snappiest name for a festival, is it? It's the one they're going with though, so I guess we'd better all get used to it. I won't make any more snide comments about it, I promise. Not this post, anyway.

Forget the name. Now I've taken a first look at the event, there's one thing I can definitely say in its favor. It's big. For a brand new festival in a brand new mmorpg it's really quite impressive.

The game wants you to know about it, too. There are banners for Winter Convergence all over the place. I think I went through about five different screens telling me about it before I got into the game proper. 

Then again, I may have gone round more than once. I did have a little trouble coming back after my short time away. I won't bore you with the details but let's just say I'd forgotten a few things and then, when I got in, my internet connection went out

There were a few other issues as well, so all in all in it wasn't the smoothest of returns. It's just as well the event itself is highly accessible. If I'd had to make much of an effort I might have called it for the day and gone back to EverQuest II.

I didn't, though. I managed to get myself into the game, where my character was patiently waiting by the roaring fire in the Town Hall in Weaver's Fen. In retrospect, if I'd known it would be weeks before I saw her again, I'd have taken the trouble to run her back to her house in Mourningdale (On which she now owes property tax, also something I forgot about.)

The very first thing that caught my eye was the huge string of lights above the fireplace. It felt remarkably cheery and, like the entire Winter Convergance festival really, weirdly inappropriate.

I don't really want to start out by picking holes in what is, after all, supposed to be a jolly bit of holiday fun and it's very important to remember that so far I've barely seen any of the content and done almost none of the questline. It's theoretically possible that when all is revealed it will make perfect sense. I'd have to say I think that's unlikely but the possibility exists.

Even so, I'm finding the whole thing a little hard to swallow. There are a lot of lights for a start but I don't believe Aeternum's tech level supports electrical power yet. Everything seems to be lit by oil lanterns. I guess we'll have to assume these lights are all Azoth-powered but Azoth does have a very distinctive blue color and half these lights are pink. 

Then there are the "Lost Presents". One of the key ways to earn the holiday currency, Winter Tokens, is
by finding presents that have been stolen by "the Frigid Folk" and left scattered across the landcape. As yet I have only the vaguest idea who the Frigid Folk might be and absolutely no clue why, or more importantly how, they're stealing presents. 

For that matter I don't really know who they're stealing them from. Townsfolk, presumably, but why the beleagured inhabitants of all these towns, most of which are under virtual siege from the wide variety of arcane and malign forces surrounding and threatening to overwhelm them, should be making, wrapping and stockpiling gifts in such prodigious quantities mystifies me. I thought they were all running out of supplies, getting desperate. They've certainly sent me on enough missions on that ticket.

Then there's the Winter Wanderer and the Winter Warrior, two elemental forces, one of whom is also split into two, a Positive and a Negative. The Frigid Folk follow the Warrior but so far I've seen none of them. 

 

I have, however, met the Winter Wanderer's positive persona. He's a twelve foot tall yeti and he lives in a Winter Village that he built himself or so I'm guessing. I think there are several of them. As an elemental force I imagine he can be in more than one place at a time. 

I spotted one of the villages on the map just north of Weaver's Fen so I ran up there to take a look. I found my first lost present just outside the town gates. Hard to miss, really. You can see the blue glow from several hundred yards away. The presents also show up on my HUD radar display, although it's possible you need a certain level of gathering skill for that to happen. 

By the time I got to the Winter Village I'd recovered three lost presents, which turned out to be very handy, since one of the first things the Wanderer wanted me to do was combine three presents into a Winter Token at a Holiday Hut (These names are killing me...) How that works I couldn't begin to imagine but it does.

The Winter Village itself is fantastic. Absolutely beautiful and not entirely out of keeping with the built environment. The huts are reminiscent of some "German Markets" I've visited in real life, although in my experience it's usually been raining and the only "snow" has been coming from a hose poking out of an upstairs window.

The big advantage of being an elemental force of nature dedicated to Winter, of course, is that you can have all the snow you want. Not only that, you can make sure it only falls in convenient and scenic locations, in pristine swathes and attractive drifts and if any should happen to thaw it will immediately re-freeze into delightful icicles. No need to grit the roads or shovel the sidewalks, let alone buy a cylinder of compressed air.

Let's not cavil. The art department's done a superb job. The highlighted locations look beautiful. I could and very likely will use some of them for Christmas cards. I particularly liked the stage with the purple curtains and I was chortling to myself when I discovered you can crouch down and stroke the oversized clockwork rabbit's snazzy sweater.

I'm not quite so sure about the writing. The Winter Wanderer talks like Yogi Bear after a stroke. I don't know quite why such a supernatural entity should be so inarticulate although I have an inkling we may get to find out. He certainly knows my name, though. He wouldn't stop using it and since he was trying to convince me to do him a favor at the time, it made me suspect he'd read one of those management books on how to get the best out of your workforce.

After I'd made my first Winter Token the Yeti sent me off to find a regular settlement to grab myself a present from under the tree and check out the town board for winter temp work. I looked at the full map for the first time and did a double take. Most of it was green.

It seems my faction has been very busy while I've been away. When I was last there we had three territories. Now we have eight. We have lost Brightwood but we own everything else except Weaver's Fen and Mourningdale.

As it happened, Brightwood was the nearest so I went there, even though it was in enemy hands. It makes precious little difference to me who's setting the taxes. At first I veered off route a couple of times to pick up some lost presents but it seems there's not much need to go looking for them in the wilderness. When the Frigid Folk steal them they seem to like leaving them by the side of the road. I found one about every few hundred yards all the way there.

The tree in Brightwood was hard to miss. It dominates the central square, wreathed in lights and piled with presents. I helped myself to one of those then checked the town board, which had just three Winter missions. One of those autocompleted when I took it, since I happened to be running across country carrying thirty stone blocks. Actually more like fifty. Who needs a sleigh?

Around then my GeForce Now timer began to tick down the last few minutes so I decided to log out and write this. As I was leaving, I noticed yet another promo for a free gift in the Cash Shop (It actually tells you about it at character select but I wasn't paying attention then.) I clicked on that and got myself a lovely potted poinsettia for my house. I'll have to pay my taxes before I can place it but I was going to have to do that anyway.

There's also an impressive, free Hunter's Festive Coat outfit with ermine trim. I took that too, of course, but there wasn't time to try it on before I had to leave. Something to look forward to next time.

And yes, I will be back. I'm not remotely convinced by the lore but Amazon seem to have the holiday fun part down. Part of the event runs on Winter Tokens and part on reputation, using the exact progression mechanics as the three player factions, with a whole load of items opening up for purchase as you reach higher ranks. I only had a brief glance through what you can buy or earn but some of it looks pretty desirable.

If I wasn't already hip-deep in the snow of two other holiday events I'd jump right on this one but since it began later and goes on longer I'll probably save it for a while and do the others first. Winter Convergence has the huge advantage of being new, though, so I may not be able to hold back.

In addition to the things I've seen so far there are Ice Caves to explore, Gaelemite meteors to mine and a whole questline to follow. I'm sure this won't be the last time I post about it all. This is why game companies run these festivals. They get people logging in.

In this case I'd say, at first sight, they've done enough to justify the hype. We'll see if I still feel the same by the time the snow melts away in January.