Exhibitions Report

The 29th exhibition "Aces from Io" has ended. 253 Beastlords have applied their pets to compete for the prize.

Now it is time to announce the winners!

1. hollahollaget_$ (#1239) - 879 points
2. TallyCat9 (#8439) - 857 points
3. pinkdragonwings (#16775) - 697 points
4. Linnix (#4901) - 652 points
5. Hades (#23915) - 636 points

Check the winning rosters here

Strength and Cunning

Written by lamarqueisdead

The Champions of Ganymede have used Throdamas as beasts of war for countless generations. The heavily armored Defenders plow through enemy lines, spikes and plating pushing foes aside so that the strong and savage Warriors can cut them down.

The Knights of Io ride into battle on the backs of enormous, elegant Symurghs, using the beasts' agility, grandeur, and ethereal power to intimidate their foes and carry out elaborate battle plans.

The Champions of Ganymede are not renowned for cunning strategical maneuvers. Their methods are brutal and harsh, and seen by the Knights of Io as barbaric. "The Ganymedians are as cunning as a stone golem, and about as ruthless," goes a saying amidst the Ioian knights.

The Knights of Io have elegant strategy, but do not utilize the brute power of their beasts to win battles. Because of this, the Champions of Ganymede see them as too soft and too fussy. One Ganymedian general claimed that the Knights of Io "fail to use their beasts at their full strength", which she spoke of as dishonorable.

The Knights and Champions have agreed to meet on Europa to settle the debate and make peace. They will remain on Europa for a week, in which several tournaments will take place. Symurghs and Throdamas will compete against each other, testing the strength and agility of both species. The tournaments will take place at the Cavalier Field, where Beastlord mounts are trained.

The Champions of Ganymede seek strong Defender and Warrior Throdamas to represent Ganymede in the tournaments. The Knights of Io seek agile and clever Symurghs to represent Io. The Champions and Knights will utilitze the Quests system to acquire the participants.

The victorious species will receive accolades from all three nations and bonuses from their native planet. For 7 days, the winning species will receive a 50% increase to EXP gain.

I predict... the winners will be symurghs. Breeding throdama morphs is time consuming and annoying + symurghs are more popular. I wish we wouldn't have such one sided contests :/

Ditto, though for me, it's because the requirements for Thordamas are more 'excessive' -- For Symurghs, you only need it to have high Agility and Intelligences, which can be achieved easily enough, but for Thordama, you need a morph, which most people won't breed for, till later, and has an extra requirement (pheromones). Would have been better if it was Strong and Tough Thordamas.

ditto

These events are getting boring; but thats just me.

Do you guys have any suggestions? What would you like to see (more or less of). You are of course entitled to your own opinion, we want to use this to improve things. I'm glad that people feel comfortable voicing it. :)

Lamarqueisdead did a nice job writing the quest- I can't argue that. I'm glad for it. 

Personally I like having quests that have a "point". I like having the reward for that species at the end. I'm only one opinon however, what works for you as players? Do you feel like you would like more events? Or are there too many events that it is becoming distracting and hard to keep up? Where would an ideal "balance" be? 

Please share! Let's use things like this as an opportunity to grow! 

For those complaining about the events being pretty one sided, well, sorry; when writing my quest events I focussed more on the story instead of the pets involved in them. And, in some cases, having an event that is so limited, as is the same with some exhibitions we've had, can prompt users to expand into this breeding area where they normally wouldn't have. Some great genes/combos, and even species, get ignored sometimes - these would be the ones that don't have a fighting chance.

The ajax-pet-search would be a great way to check to help try to find more evenly matched opponents but the problem with that is that it is a premium feature so not all users have access to it's refined search criteria. This is also faulted in that it can only find researched genes and you can't tell if the pets belong to an active user or not. Or perhaps only a handful of users own the bulk of the qualified pets and they aren't willing to lend them out.

In any case, I do plan on submitting more entries the next time a quest-event writing contest comes along. I'll keep in mind the fact that people don't seem to be liking ones where one pet has a major advantage. If there are any more concerns or suggestions please feel free to comment them and I'll take them into consideration. However, keep in mind that your opinions are just that, your own opinion, even if it's also the popular opinion amongst BK's users, and  I won't be making major alterations to my writing to accomadate what other peope want if it compromises how I want it to be.

I for one want more events (not necessarily quest-events) that help progress the story of Europa or provides some glimpse into its history. Some continuity including previously mentioned events, items, places, characters, etc would be nice. Expanding on ideas that have already been used/started would be awesome!

I agree with Sylvaniiel. When I wrote this story, I intended for it to be more of a lore-focused event than a popularity of species event. I wrote about what interested me and I enjoyed writing it.

Yeah, I know, as I didn't take into consideration number of pets as well, when I posted my rough-drafts (though it turned out they weren't that far apart).

What I was saying was that the balance for this one is way off, in difficulty to breed. Here the Thordama's could have been tough and strong, rather then strong and one of two morphs, thus it gave Symurghs an easy win, since you only need to level them, rather then breeding for a specific requirement. OR if say Symurghs needed Gracefulness (grandeur) and high Cleverness/Cunning, as then you'd need to breed for Gracefulness, like with Thordamas and Morphs, thus my complaint about the bar beingg set too high for Thordamas.

Ps. I agree, the stories are well written, and I probably wouldn't be able to do as well in a life-time of revising.

I agree with the others this time the specifics for the Thordamas was WAY too specific and won't work on their favor :/

But I also love to see these lore-related quests, They give more immersion to the whole BK world. What you could try to do, Nightingale, is finding another way to implement them? Like instead of using the Quest system, have us use the Explore system [ with the help of that new feature that counts how many explores/items collected ] each pet has to have these pet battles. Interchange between the quests and the explores so the users won't be bored of them too fast :)  

That's just a rough idea too, but its a suggestion you could try to mold. I also would love some follow-up events from the previous ones that happened [ even the ones from before I joined ]

All of these quests are very well written. Sylvaniiel and Lamarqueisdead, you are both very tallented quest writers. 

I just want to win an exhibition. I never won. The closest I got was 26th on the last day.

I don't spend thousands of silver on breeding and getting perfect pets so, I know that's why I don't win. Oh well!

Once again, great job on the quests!! And.... can we have another exhibition?

@Sakreeno -- The previous two exhibitions were mainly about breeding, as long as they had  a good amount of wins in the arena, and were breed a number of times, you could have gotten to 5th place, as long as they are related :P. That's pretty much how I won the Cockatrice one, got around 1XX points or so, and since they were all related, and had entered around 4 females, I got a +110% bonus, or so. (Though I was trying to breed for the 'prefect' pet, I'm still a long way.)

Hmm, I'm not too sure how your suggest would play out, Skylinne. (Especially confused on "each pet has to have these pet battles", wouldn't the arena be better for this? -- And just got an exravagant idea, where depending on the 'competetion, such as now, maybe use the arena, and counting wins and/or loses instead :P

I do love the quest events, it mixes things up- and in some scenarios adds to the lore of BK. I really like having more background (especially when players can help make it!) to the game. 

That being said, I agree with Sakreeno- the exhibitions seem to favor people who are very diverse and have well rounded and established pets. A lot seems luck, and the rest seems like just rewarding the users who have acheived this (which is quite hard for a new or not as active user- unless the event is tailored to you). 

I think it would be very nice to hold an exhibition where your rank can actually significantly change through the course of a week. Right now you can put your pets in and maybe only change a few spots. Things take into account the entirety of the pets existance (usually) or very specific traits that you simply cannot breed for in a week.

They can be quite hard and specific. It seems many of the same people are winning (I myself have only placed once, though I consider myself to have good pets (maybe it is because I specialized in unicorns and wasn't very broad) *secretly wants one that takes all battles ever into account though*

I think it would be wonderful to have exhibitions that take into account things that only happen in the week of the event- like battles, arena wins, explores, most clay found, or purple glob monsters fought, or so forth- But to make these more interesting maybe only open it up to a species or two. 

@Wireath

I noticed my wordin was confusing indeed xD I tried to say to use the item counters each pet has { mobs beaten/loses/items collected } to do the events instead of the quest system :b
 The arena could be another one to be implemented. While I myself am not deep into it, I can totally see it working too. TBH I like these written events better than exhibitions just because the events give you some extra lore info, but I always try to join both xD