Wartune Texas Hold'em minigame

Whenever a new game event is added to Wartune, you have to consider, does it worth the time? Does it worth the money? I will try to help you there.

First of all, you can read my opinion about the pokergame here. I'm especially angry about this feature, because I know making a working poker client requires a LOT OF work. If they devote this amount of work somewhere else, it could have been enough to undo all the nerfs, listen to the players suggestions and implement them, get rid of the lag and the bugs. Still, "we have to cook with what we have."

We have 2 very important questions here:
How much points can you get for your balens?
What can you buy for your points?

How much points you get for your balens
I made a table for you about 2 players, Joe and Jim playing poker. They don't make it too complicated, each turn they bet 100 chips, then pass the whole river and reveal their cards. Joe is more luckier though, so at the end, Jim loses all his money.

As you see, both of them had 500 chips (worth 500 balens). At the end, Jim lost all, so he effectively transformed his 500 balen into 262 points. On the other hand, Joe retained his original funds, even increased it a bit, and have won 262 points as well. If he is good, he can play even 3-4 similar rounds before losing his chips. So how much point you can get for your balens will vary greatly: it can be as low as 25%, and as high as 300-500%, depending on your luck and poker skill.

Please note something about poker. If you win in a particular match, it's only like 10% skill, and 90% luck. But if you play a lot of matches, on the long term, this 10% skill adds up, so after 1000 match, a better player will always beat the weaker one. And for this reason, unless you are an experienced poker player, I do not recommend playing this game. Because you will get 25-50% points for your balens, and not 100-300%.

I played on pokerstars for about 9 months. My goal was not as much as winning money, but achieving glory. I wanted to win a big tournament. One time I was playing a multi-round series of events. Each round, 2/3 of the players were eliminated, and the rest got to the next round. The first round cost only 10 cents. But if you made all rounds (like 10), you won an entry to a tournament where the registration fee was 10000 USD, and the total prize was several millions of dollars. The event lasted for almost a day. With incredible luck (and of course, focused play), I made it to the very final round... and I lost my last chips 10 seconds before the tournament ended and the winners were announced. So I was 10 seconds away from playing in a million-dollar mega-tournament. After that, I lost my interest in the game and stopped. When I cashed out, I got 400 USD more than what I spent. But my actual winning were like 3400, just pokerstars took 3000 as rake in the many many thousand games I played. And I think I was good, I read poker books, and I win many smaller tournaments. So be prepared, unless you are a real poker shark, convering your balens 1:1 to points will remain a dream.

What to buy for your points
Let's see the reward shop! This is always the best part of every Wartune event :)

As a rule of thumb, don't spend balen on items which you can either get for free in large number, or you will max it out in the foreseeable future.
Eudaemon warpatch crystal, resist and resist reduce: fall in both category (I don't even understand why the event chest are also filled with this crap).
Moon dust, moon rock, divinity stone: during events, you can buy 100 for 10 chests (which you can get for free). So I wouldn't spend time and money to get these either.
Green, blue, purple, gold flame, book of wisdom: you can buy these in the shop for about the same price. So why waste time on playing poker to achieve the same (or worse).

The blood of zeus is a free item, like most other items on this page. Even the red copper, you can get enough eventually from bounty targets. Golden sand, you need 25 to give +1 to your eudaemons item. So for 30 each, it's ridiculously expensive for a few fake BR. I think not even whales buy this :)

Well-refined stone, you can get it for free only from chaos war shop. So this is a patience factor, I keep buying it since 3 chaos wars, I think I need 2 more and equipment of my main eudaemon is refined enough. Dragon blood stone, this is a cash only item, but it's not more expensive via direct sales. Of the rest, tenacity mark seems a good item, but it's ridiculously overpriced as well, the rest is junk.

Gift of god and Compliment of god are still hard-to-get items. You can get 100 gift of god for 100, and compliment for 200 chests in events. Even if you have to buy these chests (27 balen with discount coupon), one gift will cost you 27 balens, and one compliment 54 balens. So you can get a slight discount here only if you are a true poker star and get 200% points for your chips. 
The rest, moonlight, glint, golden holy water, gold is plain junk.

Conclusion
So it seems even the cash-only items, you better just buy them from the balen shop directly, rather than play here in poker shop and get them for points. Since the poker shop has nothing worthwhile, playing this game is not useful either. Even if you have the balens.

If I have made this shop, I would have given much better prices on items, to draw players in. Also, I would have added some really unique stuff, like dark&light emblem, loki seal, empire truncheons, mounts (where is the unique poker mount??). Filling up the slots with fate stones, sack of gold and rough stones was really unnecessary.

If you liked my analysis, please consider visiting my Odin kickstarter project :)

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The Wartune gem exploit

Lately, the Wartune developers make more and more critical mistakes, exploits are more common, sadly. While the average player is always happy when they find some small glitches, major exploits can be the death to any game if not corrected quickly.

I remember Everquest 2, a major mmorpg title. A guy found an exploit where he could duplicate and make unlimited of one specific item, and started generating unlimited platinum by selling it. He made a vendor on each server, and soon, he was selling the platinum for real money via game currency brokers. By the time the exploit was discovered, he made a million dollar and bought a sport car, and the game's economy was in ruins, nothing could be done about it. 

Wartune had some major exploits lately, but they were either not known widely and corrected quickly, or were not making big havoc. The shadow soul exploit was the first very heavy exploit. Players could get unlimited beast souls, and as such, could buy all mounts from the mount shop, worth several thousands dollars. Although the bug was corrected, the exploited mounts were never removed. So effectively, a guild (or several?) got balens worth like 3-5000 USD value for free. That problem was silenced, never mentioned again.

But the current exploit, the gem exploit is much worse, a true game-breaker. Players could make unlimited gems, including resist, resist reduce, eudaemon and divinity soul gems. I'm not sure how this worked, but someone on the forum said you just had to sort your treasure inventory, do a refresh and your gems duplicated. Just imagine, a player with all lvl 12 resist reduce crystals, all divinity souls lvl 12 (for multiple sylphs), etc. or a player making a truckload of extra gems and selling them for billons of gold. This is an advantage you can never catch up with. 

I don't like useless mourning, I rather try to come up with constructive ideas. I was thinking what would I do if  i were a developer.

1.) Players say only a complete rollback would solve the problem. Normally, this would be the best course, but now, 6 days has passed. The loss for all players would be tremendous. I can't imagine a compensation which would compensate for that (ok, I can, but we wont get it).

2.) They should check the logs and see who exploited. But I seriously doubt this is possible. They have some logs, but its quite poor, and if the exploit worked the above way, prolly they don't even see it.

Fortunately, there is a good solution,and relatively easy to implement.

Write a program routine which counts gem for a player. Each level one gem 1 point, level two 3-4 points, level three 9-16 points etc. Count ALL gems, in inventory, in guild vault, in mail, in sockets. After this routine is ready, compare this gem value for all players in the current database, and in the backup of the database made before the patch (they certainly made a patch at that point).
If a player has more than 20% gain in gem values in this 6 days (but at least 1000 points to exclude newbies starting this week), then do rollback for THAT character. So those who exploited, will lose everything they gained in the past 6 days, that would be sufficient punishment. Don't worry this will catch those too who made billions of gold, since they surely kept some of the gems. It will not catch those who just made a few gems, but 99% of the players are greedy, so it will be pretty accurate.

This is THE solution, possible to implement. I hope someone from Wartune developers read it.

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Wartune patch 5.2 analysis

First of all, I would like to thank again those who donated to my Odin kickstarter project. Although we are still far from the goal, the kind words of support felt really good, I see the work I did in these past 2 years were not completely vain.

I wrote a long article about the patch changes, which I think positive, and which I think negative. Please comment if you think I missed something or you have a different opinion!

Positive changes

Treasure inventory

This is the best thing in the new patch. 5 extra pages for gems, inventory problems solved forever, hopefully. Yes, it costs 2500 bound balens, but it's a one-time price, and you can earn at least 4-5000 bound balen per month without recharge (method described in the hint sheet of this article for donators), so this is affordable to anyone. They also added a dimension essence inventory too, but unfortunately, it is bugged, the dimension essences are in your inventory still, so this addition is just a useless visual show right now, hopefully they will correct it.

Devotion rewards

A fix fashion core is a nice reward, and you don't have to fumble with the wheel rolling, thats a small positive change.

Tatoo and henna

A new feature which requires little time and gives extra BR is always welcome. However, in this case, the BR gain seems so neglectable, and maxed so fast, it will be probably a feature which wont keep us excited for long. When you have gathered 100 henna (you can earn 150 per every 10 hour from the henna lab, and if you like, you can plunder 20-25 more daily from other players), you can create a random henna. Like everything in this game, this is completely random lottery, both the stats you get, and their amount. So it mostly resembles to refine, with the difference that with every stat increase, you get a decrease as well. Actually, you can lose more than you gain, so the only useful tatoo is the one where the negative stat is charisma. So all you have to do, click a slot, make a henna, if the negative stat is charisma, and better than the previous stat, insert it. If you max out everything, your BR might increase even by 500, whoa! Of course there will be an expert tatoo but that's for the future (and for balens for sure).

New spirit convenant functions

Spirit covenant was useless since a long time. The only feature I used lately was power of healing, but I purchased it separately. With the fishing nerf, even lord of time lost most of its charm. The current additions, detecting wild boss, and one-click farm can save you a lot of time, however. The world boss function I consider useless, since our WB dies in 1-2 rounds, and if I do it manually, I earn twice as much gold as in afk. Anyway, I think spirit convenant is useful now, just make sure you buy it from hot sales, with the 200 balen discount coupon for 1099.

New VIP functions

Besides increasing the weekly VIP reward, the only new VIP function I found is that they decrease gem conversion cost for VIPs. This means when you use your 1-hour VIP card (precious now, since you can't fish more!) you not only do guild blessing, VIP reward claim, sylph arena and adding dimensions, but you have to time your gem conversions. Still, this small addition is not something which could make anyone subscribe for VIP.

Eudaemon skill system simplified

In itself, this is a good change, you can choose which skills to improve, and neglect the useless ones. You need 640 skill books to improve one skill from lvl 4 to 5. With 72 different skills, it meant you needed 46,080 skill books to get a level 5 skill after level 4. Thats 921 days, and 23 billion gold. I bet not even the devs made that math :D So, this would be all good - if they didn't remove the skill books from the guild shop.

Check info of players from different server

This one was always possible in the past (battlegrounds and other places), so making this available again is not a new addition, just a bugfix which took them a loooong time :)

Negative changes

Sylph arena and normal arena hot icons removed

Game time increased, now you have to run in the city to these NPCs, an unnecessary, bad change.

Eudaemon skill books removed from guild shop

This is a massive nerf, you can no longer buy eudaemon skills for gold. I will never understand their love for nerfing, taking away from players.

Bounty targets reward nerf

Rewards have been decreased in the eudaemon arena. Since they removed rewards for making lvl 3 and lvl 4 gems, the amount you earned in eudaemon arena was no longer enough to claim all rewards during gem synthesis event. The situation will even get worse. A completely unnecessary and senseless nerf to those who can't beat the top opponents.

Resist crystal replacement

Previously, you could replace resist crystals with one click, now you have to remove first then add a new one. Extends game time, this is probably just a bug, not intentional nerf.

Sylph expedition reward adjustment

I see no extra reward here, if there was a change here, something got removed or amount decreased.

Guild blessing

Apart from the new graphics, I see new change whatsoever, the items are the same crap, xp books, seeds, the only useful item is still the bound balen.

New eudaemon: Panther lord

I'm not sure if the game developers noticed, but a player needs, and can use only ONE eudaemon. The only places where you have a minor use for 3 more is eudaemon arena and bounty targets. So adding a SEVENTH eudaemon to the game is no use to any, unless it has some unbalanced powers (to be nerfed later) like wind ranger. More eudaemon would mean just more skill books needed to max out skills, fortunately they changed the system and this is no more problem.

Texas Hold'em

Although we haven't seen this mini-game added, the forum patch message gives a good description, so we have a clear vision what this is going to be. First of all, I put this into the negative category, because:

1.) poker has NOTHING to do with this game. Period.

2.) if it gives any reasonable reward, then this is yet another thing which can increase game time.

3.) this is just another „buy stuff for balens” mini-shop, camouflaged so no one can really see how much they are paying for specific good (which, as such, will be certainly overpriced).

4.) making a complete poker game takes a lot of time. This amount of time could have been enough to resolve ALL problems we have right now.

5.) this is truly an online poker, where you pay money, win money, lose money. The only real difference to real poker is that you are not allowed to withdraw your winnings, you must spend it on virtual goods. I don't have to be a lawyer to know that this kind of activity would require a strict government licence, special taxes, and strict control to ensure no cheating happens from the side of the owner. And as such, by adding such an event without a licence, they risk shutting down the entire game, which would hurt all of us the worst way.

About the game system itself, you play poker, and from each pot, they take 20% rake (insanely high, compared to any poker site!) For all rakes you paid, you get points, which you can exchange for items in a point shop. We yet have to see the prices of items, but all I can say in advance, unless you have good experience in online poker, don't even try this.

Summary: my overall feeling of this patch is positive. I'm very happy about the treasure inventory. Of course, like with every patch, it would be even better if they don't do any unnecessary nerf, but we are used to those, sadly.

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The Odin kickstart project

Dear Readers, Fellow Wartune Players,

I am updating this blog since 2 years now, published 170 articles. I created it originally because I saw people are literally wasting their balens, their money. I wanted to help, to give strategy advices to build your character more efficently, using less balens. I hope you enjoyed my articles, found many of them useful, and could save some money too.

I was a big Wartune fan for a long time, I enjoyed all its aspects, all the unique ways to advance my character. I admit, I was always a competitor, I always wanted to be first. I was proud I could keep up with the bigger spenders, and I could became first eventually, ovetaking people who spent 5-20 times more than me. Lags, bugs, even nerfs could not make me give up on Wartune. But now we got a lethal merge. We got merged with a much older cluster of servers, with some really heavyweight competitors, and catching up seems hopeless. 

I could have a chance still, if i could buy an Odin. But that seems quite out of reach. I live in Hungary, Center Europe, average income here is like 20% of what people make in the US and Western Europe. In Wartune terms, I didn't spend much, but it was already more than I could afford. Now, before Christmas, my 10 years old car broke down, and the repair cost is quite horrible. For the next 6 months, any recharge for Wartune is out of reach for me, so Odin is hopeless. 

You see, in the past 2 years, I never had paid advertisements on my site, I never asked for donation, I did all this only for hobby. But now I decided to put up a donation button, and ask, if you liked my blog, if you enjoyed my articles, please consider for a moment to help this truly weird kickstarter project. I know, this is not about saving Earth, or saving the dolphins, its just about buying a few fancy pixels for me for Christmas. Still, if it succeed, I can promise that I will continue playing, and will continue this blog. Also, I have prepared a special article, with a ton of hints and advices. These hints I can't publish on the blog, because I'm afraid then these last opportunities would disappear from the game as well. And some hints, they are just not useful anymore if everyone knows them, like what I discovered recently abount the new resist system. I'm happy to share this article with anyone who donates at least 20 USD. Also I promise, if we can get together an Odin, the top donator can choose it's name :) So here it is:

Please make sure to include the email where you want the article sent too (and allow me some time to send it). I also added a contact me button to the bottom right of this page. Thank you very much!

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Poseidon, the master of healing

Triton - called later Poseidon, and even later Frigga - is a very special sylph in Wartune. For a long time, healing - and especially group healing - was an exclusive skill for mages. Since Triton, any class can be a great healer. Actually, a decent Triton can heal even more than an mage :) This article I dedicate to this special sylph.

Since the introduction of sylph arena, I was saying to myself: in any fantasy game, a team needs a healer to have the upper hand. So I made a strong Triton, and I could beat teams with a stronger main sylph than mine. Healing is cool - as long, as you can heal more than your opponent damages you. As damage increased, Triton got weaker and now I'm less of a Triton/Poseidon fan - but it's still cool in some situations.

Poseidon in team PVE

Poseidon was a great support sylph in team situations earlier. But with the last major patch, most pve challenges were degraded to child's play. You simply don't need healing, you just burn down monsters. Even in EF hell, you better off just having the proper resist and burning the opponents down. The only exception where Poseidon is still useful is Tower of Kings. Before the eudaemons were added, ToK was a rush of chaos runes and stuns. Now its slower, having an aoe heal each round is more important, so we use Poseidons there. I see many complaints about ToK lately, but we can do each day all 5 rooms with this strategy, aoe, heal, aoe heal (and ofc, the usual chaos and stun).
Sylph expedition also worth mentioning here. Unfortunately, Poseidon is useful only at later stages, but there, monsters hit real hard. So you need a Poseidon who can survive the massive aoes. If you have such, it can be tremendous help. My 135K BR Triton is not good enough to be useful and help me through stage 39.

Poseidon in single PVE
In any situation, where you face some monsters alone, Poseidon is a pretty poor choice. Wartune PVE is about damage dealt, if you aren't fast enough, the monster gets berserk, and you are dead. You can't heal your opponent to death. Even in old sky trials, I did the water resist stages with a different sylph. A Hades can give you the heals you needed in Purgatory etc.

Poseidon in single PVP
I see more and more people using Poseidon in Battleground, especially knights. The logic must be, people don't have water resist, and healing is handy. I can just repeat myself: you can't heal your opponent to death. Surely, you can extend the duel's duration to 5-6 minutes, but if you are weaker, you will lose at the end, even if you healed yourself to full 10 times. The only thing you achieved is to waste your time. Normally, you can finish a BG duel in 1-2 minutes. If you are stronger, you will win with a damage dealing sylph. If you are weaker, you lose anyway. So effectively, you stripped yourself of 600-1500 honor points.
So why Poseidon is not good in single pvp? First, it's subject to chaos. Second, nowadays everyone have at least 1-2 water resist stones equipped, so you are far from dealing +60% damage, it's rather +-10%. Third, Poseidon is not a premium sylph like light and dark. Maxed out, it's attack is far below of those. Fourth, he is good at healing - but as such, bad at dealing damage. Most sylphs have at least 3 good damage sylph, Poseidon has only 2.
So do a favor to the gamer community, and put aside your Poseidon for CW. Please, even neglect it even for CW. Because in CW still damage counts, not healing.
And this is true even for Frigga. No joking, but I beat Frigga in Class Wars with my puny Hades. If you cough up 600 USD, an Odin is much better - even if ppl have some more resist vs it.

Poseidon in team PVP

This is where Poseidon shows its true power. One Poseidon is a must for your team, but 2 is cool too. Damage dealt in team PVP is massive, you must heal even (and especially) during sylph phase. Also stunning multiple opponents with one spell is quite useful too. Frigga is even more deadly, with the group shield, but you must be a real rich guy to spend not once, but twice the 600 bucks - because your first merged sylph should be Odin.
Poseion (or rather, Frigga) is a real killer if the ToK opponents have it. Playing against that is especially difficult. Try stun when he is sylphing, and if your stun is not targetting it (you see which opponent you are targeting by the red circles below the opponent), you can sylph instead and try stun again (or if you do ToK with multiple characters, can try to stun with the other too). Also it is a good idea to use 2 or more Medusa (or evolved version) to drain their awakening points. Third trick is wait for it's heal, and then time all your aoe afterwards.
But all in all, it would be much more civilized if the ToK denizens unequip their Frigga before logging off for the night :)

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Warning about the current Wartune event

Hey guys, I wanted to give you a warning about the current Wartune events. The current event, mount refining, and also the new event tomorrow, divinity soul synthesis is awarding "gourmet chest". However, this gourmet chest is NOT the chest you can exchange for rewards. This is just a matrjoska chest, which gives either a piggy chest (from previous event) or a cornucopia chest (current event). The problem with this, the piggy chest is utterly useless. There is no exchange for it, and about the contents, the mount is now impossble to get, the cloth, you either got the complete set earlier, or you will get it later for cloth shards; but hoping to get one piece is not a good idea.

We get used to these matrjoska chests in the past months (a bad idea from designers, imho) but fortunately, they were mostly only in the shop; hot events rewarded the actual chest. But not this time. Look at the mount refining event. For 100 refine, you get a grand total of 6 chests - which is actually only 3, because the other 3 is useless. And divinity soul synthesis, you can burn a whole month's earnings to get one chest - with 50% chance :)

So my recommendation is, ignore these events, and save your resources, mount hoof, divinity souls etc. I admire the creativity of the game designers. I didn't suppose these events can be nerfed further, but seemingly, it is possible :) Wartune is back to iron age again after a few months of golden age (I refer here to chest rewards). We know a golden age will come again, so be patient, and hoard, hoard, hoard :)

Also it looks like we got another silent nerf today: gold no longer in Dragon invasion. I see they try to remove gold desperately from the game, I just don't understand, why. Gold is not something people buy for balens. But we need a LOT. For astrals, for dimension chests, for eud skill chests, for mythic enchance, for holy forge... Removing gold serves really no other purpose but to piss off players. Personally, I don't care anymore, I'm just glad I can play 20 minutes less each day :)

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Wartune server merges

A few years ago, I played another Chinese game, Business Tycoon online. At the beginning, they were launching new servers quite often, like in Wartune. Then, as time passed, and people quit, servers got abandoned. People were complaining that they have no competition etc, but nothing happened, and all servers got abandoned eventually. When I started playing Wartune, it amazed me that they had solutions to so many problems other games had. For example, for the above problem, they had server merge.

In the first year, we were always excited when a server merge came. How will the power balance shift? How can we play together with the new players? How will guilds change? Merge also brought some events and rewards, and a recharge event, where you could get gift packs for rewards - nonexistent at that time. Still, even at that time, after each merge, a lot of players have quit. The reason was simple. For many players, one of the main goal is to have as high ranking as possible. Either in BR, or honor, our mounts... or all. You spend time, effort, money to climb up the ranking lists. And merge kills your efforts, if you were in top 20, you might end up in top 100. If you were top 3, you might even miss top10. If you were first, you might lose that title too.

We were guessing how merges are decided in Wartune. And it seems player activity has nothing to do with it. Simply, they either do it randomly, or it is based on total spendings. The last merge we had - over a year ago - was a real catastrophe. We had a very alive server, with 3 big guilds. We got merged with a similarly overpopulated server. After the merge, a lot of players quit. Still no clue why Wartune did it. And now it's happening again. We still have a lot of players, and still we get a merge.

While I agree that when a server's population gets low, a server is necessary, I believe that merging 2 active server is a deadly blow to the players. Just think of it: WB will die faster, you get half gold. You prolly lose ranking in sylph expedition, you lose divinity soul shards. The new people might not be so tolerant about the no-plunder agreement you had on your server since long. Twice more people will rush for the lonely Atoll boss pop. Monsters in the Wilds are harder to find. People who could participate in Chaos Wars, can no longer do it. Guild battle is again a painful struggle, and half of the people will get less rewards. People will lose titles. And since the cross-server mpd team finder, people don't even need partners to do mpd together from their own server.

So all in all, a server merge is very, very bad for all players. I know, again, a lot of players will quit. In Doomlord, there are multiple servers too. But there, when the idea of merging came up, there was a vote for each territory. Some players agreed to the merge, and some not. Where people did not want it, they didn't do it. I wonder, why R2Games is unable to do such a simple thing as a vote? Ask players what they want? I know that never happened in Wartune and never will. Still, each time, I'm frustrated over their ignorance. 

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