January 12, 2024 EpicDuel Gifting 2023 Ends
Another Gifting Season Ends…
And what an end it was! EpicDuel ending 2023 with a bang as the volume of Gifts were double that of 2021.
Congratulations to our winners and all who participated, whether you were #1 or #10001. Gifting only works if people show up, and you all showed up with an incredible level of dedication and passion for the game that means so much to all of us who continue to keep the game running after nearly 15 years.
The top 15 winners this year are:
- Musashi
- Exempt
- I Am Mr. Nice Guy
- Lycan
- Impulse
- Ronald Mcdonald
- D Y S P O
- Enchant
- Smoking Shadow
- CactusChan
- Keosama
- F L O K I
- Thaddiemac X
- Lele
- Ahri
Though all the top 15 winners this year had impressive scores, with all exceeding 1 million gifts and 6 Gifters crossing the coveted 2 million gift threshold, Musashi exceeded all previous records with an incredible score of 5,038,987 gifts! Will it ever be beaten? Every year I think I've seen the highest Gifting score possible and every year I'm proven wrong!
We also want to celebrate the top 50, who put up some impressive gift scores themselves. The complete scoreboard will be added to Titan’s Peak as soon as we excavate a space big enough for this massive leaderboard of Gifters.
Though we had some challenges this season, they were challenges borne out of something positive: People gifted enough to literally break the game! The number of gifts slowed the servers and created frequent instability by the end of the event. That brings me to the next topic.
Where Did My Gifts Go?
If you logged in sometime January 10th after 4:30 EST, you may have noticed your gifts are gone. You may have also noticed there were many server crashes with the game being inaccessible for minutes or hours at a time. This was because there were so many gifts given this year that EpicDuel was literally unable to handle it. Every time someone opened their mail or used the /open1000gifts command, it hit a database table with millions of entries. Rather than wait for people to open their gifts manually while dealing with instability, we decided the best solution was to open every gift all at once.
Because at the end of gifting most players end up with 1000s of duplicate items, we decided it would be preferable to automatically convert them to 1000 credits a piece, rather than forcing everyone to sell everything one item at a time. Arcade Tokens would be automatically inserted into everyone’s inventory since they’re more valuable than common seasonal items.
Captain Rhubarb and I worked on a query to open millions of gifts and finally had an opportunity to use it when the server crashed again. If you logged in after this update, your gift queue would be empty, but your inventory would be overflowing with Credits and Arcade Tokens!
Long story short, you didn’t lose your gifts. We automatically opened them all at once to save you time and save the server from incessant downtime. If enough people missed out on the drop items, we could make them available for purchase from a shop to fill out your seasonal rare inventory.
Arcade Prize Pruning
One complaint we hear often is that many players’ home item inventories are clogged with too many home items. We want to fix that, but we can’t right at the moment, so we’ve removed home item prizes from the Bronze tier of Arcade Games, replacing them with Arcade Tokens or pure Credit prizes from 50 – 100 Credits. These slots will eventually be replaced with other items, but for now, you can spend excess Arcade Tokens without packing your home with more items that you could ever place in 100 lifetimes.
Secret and Silver Secret Prizes
After today’s update, we “opened” all the Secret and Silver Secret packages! By opened I mean inserted the prize items into everyone’s character inventory who owns one of the two or both packages. The packages themselves won’t be deleted until all are distributed (there are still a handful outstanding) and we are confident everyone got the items they should get. When we are prepared to delete them, we’ll turn extra packages into credits. We hope you enjoy them because I think Acatriel really outdid himself from the last Secret and Silver Secret packages he created.
Winner Prize Progress
As of right now we have been in contact will all this year’s Gifting winners and their prizes are underway. This should be a faster process than previous years thanks to Acatriel’s help and our stricter guidelines for requests. We still want each prize to be something the champion Gifters can be proud of and celebrate, but we also don’t want to drag the process out too long. It’s just as painful for us as it is the Gifters who are left waiting! That won’t happen this year. At least I don’t think it will. I have a habit of making positive statements only to be proven long later, but at this point, I’m optimistic!
Cyber Wolf Collection
The Cyber Wolf Collect has fallen behind due to the technical issues we’ve faced towards the end of Gifting and my own work piling up on me. However, we will still be able to release the items from the collection as they are completed without the need for a reboot. The ambitious projection is that all parts will be distributed by the end of January, but, again, I’m being very optimistic. We learned some valuable lessons when creating this year’s prize items that should help us develop content more efficiently for next year’s Gifting event to minimize waiting for prizes!
Thank you again for everyone who participated in this year’s Gifting event, the biggest of EpicDuel’s nearly 15 year history! Duel on! Tags: Nightwraith | 
