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Entropia Universe | Halloween Mayhem 2022 Event Preparation
The Halloween Mayhem event is upon us in Entropia Universe with it starting on October 27th and ending on November 9th. There are two different kinds of instances you can run during this event that I’ll be covering in further posts.
Halloween Mayhem Annihilation is a bit similar to the Easter Mayhem I ran back quite a few months ago. Like all events, I recommend people set a hard limit for spending since Entropia Universe is a real cash economy game, and events like these can get expensive quite quickly if you are not careful.
I’m rather glad I set a limit back during the Easter Mayhem as I Shockley hit my limit so fast with how bad my hunting was going. I almost questioned if I would do another Mayhem event again. I however decided I was for sure going to be doing the Halloween and possibly the Christmas Mayhem as well.
Mayhem event in general is a quite massive deals for a lot of the player base in Entropia Universe. Some people only return to the game to play in these. Many also spend a lot of time preparing supplies, gear, pills, and anything else months in advance. Not to mention building up their PED card to go the distance in this event.
About a week and a half before the event even started I found a bunch of D-class mining Amps at below-market prices. I wanted to shore up my budget and I went out on an insane mining run. Where I lost about a chunk of my overall budget. Not the result I was looking for but I wanted a bigger budget to play around with and I know even if it went sideways as it did I could just make some adjustments to my plans.
This had further consequences for me. The bulk of the ores I found can take a while to sell on auction. The secure transportation service that I trust and only use was also announced on the day I was planning to come back to sell my mores from the planet I was on that they were taking a couple of days off. So I ended up not having as much time as expected to try and sell my ores.
It is not that uncommon for Mayhem events for people to try and take care of any family, work, and real-life stuff ahead of time. So people can grind like crazy during the entire event. Many take off work, call in sick, and just don’t pick up their phones during this event. This is how big that event is for players in Entropia Universe.
There was a bit of good news for not making it back when I was expecting to be able to sell. One of the ores I had mined went up from 147 to 174%+. While I did not have a lot of it I quickly sold it and reduced my losses from the massive mining run I did.
After that, it was time to try and get what supplies I could. It would have been nice to have had the extra budget to buy Ghost armor and some other items. With the losses of my mining trip and now facing in-game liquidity issues with a lot of my money tied up in slow-selling ores. I had to stick to what I needed.
Thankfully the Gremlin and 5B plating armor set I have while not that great for this event. Is more than enough for what I’ll end up doing for the most part. While ghost would not have been ideal either as far as my budget goes it was an afforded option and it’s a shame I could not use this event as an excess to get myself that set at least for now.
The main reason many plan months ahead of time for this Mayhem event is because stuff starts to get pricy to buy. Like the example I gave with the ore price sky rocking. If you need (L) guns and amps during the event they are going to cost you a few percent more than normal. If you can find any in stock anywhere.
Thankfully I have quite the list of shopping malls and areas where I knew people are selling the guns and gun amps I would be using for this event. After a bit of shopping around, I not only found some guns below the rising market price but cheaper than I was buying them a few weeks back.
While the 5 guns and 3 gun amps I bought won't last me the entire event if I end up grinding that long. It was at least a good start. I also don’t know how long I’ll last till I hit my loss limit and I did not want to overstock either.
A lot of shops tend to try and sell every gun level but only have say one of each gun. This makes it harder when you want to buy a lot at once. Even more so if that shop owner can’t be reached to see if you can buy in bulk. So I’m just happy I got what I did and at cheap prices as well.
One thing I have been stockpiling for a while now has been consumable pills. I had some from Easter and many I got out of boxes. I’ll be burning a lot of what I’ve saved up for quite a few months now on this event.
The bulk of the pills I have is skill increased pills. I even have some 5-hour 50% or better skill pills to burn. I also have like 200 hours of 1-hour pills or something silly. If there was going to be a time I was going to be using these it would be now. I rarely use them otherwise.
Skilling is one of the things I want to go big on for this event. I’m less than 1.5 levels away from a damage profession to upgrade to a bigger gun as well. So it might end up being a blessing if I did not buy an insane amount of guns as at some point I might decide it’s worth getting something bigger.
At this point, you might be wondering why players in Entropia Universe go to such great lengths for such an event. During the event, you can get rare and normal mayhem tokens. Those tokens can be traded at an NPC for limited stocked items. These items can be worth thousands of dollars if not more.
These tokens are also not just one event and done. You hold onto Mayhem tokens and can use them in the next Mayhem events. Some players will spend a year or longer grinding these events every time they pop up throughout the year in hopes of buying an end-game uber weapon or armor one day.
Many consider some of the stuff on the vendor to be the last item(s) they hope to ever need. So once you start to understand that you can start to somewhat understand the madness of the player base around these kinds of events. People will make entire careers in the game out of those items.
Items from the vendor are also not the only thing. During the event, Halloween strongboxes drop. You can also loot (L) Mayhem armor that has some decent markup. However many are after large amounts of the boxes.
These boxes have a very small chance to drop a ring. While the last few Mayhem rings people have not been that thrilled about the ring. Many people including myself would not mind having the Halloween 2022 ring.
There are all kinds of speculation about how much these rings will end up selling for. Many people appear to be speculating in the neighborhood of 15,000-20,000 PED ($1,500 to $2k). There will be a lot of factors at play in how much they end up going for. The price expecting to decrease over time as more rings get added in from other events.
The interesting thing is any Halloween Strongbox at this time can now contain one of these rings. Even boxes that were looted during past Halloween events. That will only remain till next year and a new ring will replace this one in any boxes as a possible drop.
So if this ring ends up being worth a decent amount of money people will be buying these boxes from other players throughout the year. That also means you are not quite certain how many rings will end up existing till next year when they can no longer drop.
Many players horde these kinds of boxes till a ring comes along that they just got to have. They then will start opening their massive stockpiles. This year could be one of those years.
The catch with these boxes is they cost $1 to open. With Entropia Universe being a real cash economy many will use strongboxes as a method to depo into the game. As these boxes must contain keep balance of $1 worth of PED they have a based value of 10 PED. Naturally, items like rings can be sold to other players beyond that 10 PED base.
Sometimes these boxes also become worth enough that players will farm the Mayhem Event just to collect and sell boxes. Some will try and turn a profit while others will try and recover some of their losses in the short term by selling boxes to meet their long-term goals of owning a powerful weapon or item from the vendor.
As far as myself I’m not sure if I’ll be opening any boxes I loot or if I’ll be selling them to try and recover some losses that way. I would love to have some better rings and the Halloween ring is not the only one you can get out of the stronghold box. You can also get many other things like the non-tradable Mayhem tokens.
While the event was supposed to start at 14 UTC on October 27th for anyone who has partaken in a Mayhem event before in Entropia Universe. You should know better than to expect it to be on time and without issues.
This time around they were not that late getting it started. I thankfully am not one of those people who woke up early enough to be there as the clock reached zero to get in the instances that were not up on time.
I ended up showing up around the time many were calling out that one of the missions for Halloween Mayhem was bugged and a large amount of the players could not get the mission. I decided to play it safe and hold off till after that issue got resolved.
Many other players did not and they were a little miffed as a result. While many of them were busy grinding away points in Mayhem Annihilation the instance closed on the players at one point kicking them all out. I can only assume it was shut down to be worked on.
As a result, many players then went off to the second instance called Mayhem Survival. Survival is all about taking out waves (phases) of creatures and capturing a checkpoint every few stages of that event. Not that shocking the developers announced the servers needed to be rebooted to patch the issue they were having with the other type of instance.
This meant those that were in the middle of a phase would lose progress. I have not exactly run one of those Haloween Mayhem Survivals yet to fully understand how they work. Along with what kind of phase saving you could have. Needless to say, there are 25 stages, and getting interrupted during that with a server reboot left a few unhappy.
That however was not the biggest thing. To fix the mission for the first instance they had to wipe all point progression. So all those players who rush trying to be first at everything lost progress. Needless to say, the forums were a bit inflamed about that one.
Thankfully between the event being a little late and two or three hours later for a fix, things were back on track. I still waited a little bit longer before joining in on the Mayhem myself to start racking up points in Halloween Mayhem Annihilation.
Final Thoughts
In my next post, I’ll be going into the Mayhem Annihilation instance itself and going over it in more detail. Along with a lot of farming of Mayhem with you along for the ride.
Information
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Entropia Universe.