Players fought 6 hours to slay 9.5 Million Hitpoint Bush

This post is in honor of the absolutely #$@&%$! crazy players who killed a 9,500,000+ HP bush in Yulgar's Inn.

In all of gaming history, I am not sure there is any other gamers who gets to claim they spent 6 hours slaying a festive holiday shrub. This is one of the most bizarre and memorable tales of AdventureQuest 3D. As an arm-chair Loremaster, I feel it is my duty to report what these brave crazy players did in Yulgar's Inn last night... and what others are doing right now. To the players who did this... we salute you (and every monster in the game fears you).

It happened on a cold snowy night... following a Live Event

We held an impromptu live event in Yulgar's Inn. If you have never been to one of these before... they are unscripted events inspired where a Game Master (a dev) tells a story and spawns monsters. Occasionally the players participating will earn a treasure chest to be spawned which drops a Live Event Coin. Which of course is followed by people standing on the bag, and my subsequent march into the developer room to bump up the priority on that "collect loot" hotkey & button. Live Event coins do not have a lot of use now, but in the future, as our live event system becomes bigger, better, & more interactive (and more frequent) it will be easy to common to get them with a lot more interesting uses.

This is really a story about bush murder

Not players murdering a bush... it is a revenge tale from when the bush, murdered them!

Since The Frost Moglin town of Frostvale & snowball fighting is opening for all players tomorrow, I thought it would be fun to do a ice monster themed event. Blizzy, the adorable blue frost Moglin showed up at the inn. The storm and monsters assaulting town forced their way in, and the players fought to protect the inn from the invaders. Snowmen of ever increasing size followed by frozen ninjas. The ninjas were dispatched pretty quickly, but Phrozen (one of the Frostlorn's 3 generals) re-animated them into undead frost skeletons. Realizing she was outmatched, Phrozen feigned a truce with the players. She offered a peace gift of a beautiful, ornamented, holiday bush. Which, of course, the players immediately attacked. But alas, the bush was cursed! Every player who touched (or even looked at it) died. That bush was the only monster in the entire live event to rack up enough player KO's to level up.

Phrozen was ultimately defeated by the heroes and pushed back to the Frozen north. We will all certainly see her and the other two Frostlorn Generals soon enough. But there was hunger for vengence against that vile holiday bush.... (Ok, probably not, but history is written by the winners. And that is you.)

Many players reported not being able to get the reward chest. So braving the waifu aggro I would certainly get for being extra late, I stayed at the lab, notified players on Twitter, and logged back in to spawn another one.

While I was there, I thought it would be interesting to spawn another Holiday Bush to see what would happen. Would people attack it? Would they think twice? A few people instantly attacked without even thinking. Several more hesitated... then finally thought to themselves "Oh bloody heck!" and jumped in. Soon, the entire Inn was FILLED TO THE BRIM with holiday bushes... including one with 9.5 Million Hitpoints O_O

They did the math... the estimate was it would take 11 hours to kill the bush (Named "Dummy1"). A few things they did not know. This bush is actually the test dummy we use when testing weapons. Not sure why Oishii and Rabblefroth picked a bush, but I do not judge. It does not attack back, and has a lot of resistance. Second I had NO IDEA that it would have that many hitpoints. When asked if it dropped something, I said no. Repeatedly. But the true believers could not be swayed. Honestly, I wish I would have thought to put something on that bush-- had I known how many HP it had. But then again, some memories are are more valuable than a rare. "SHUT UP ARTIX! I WANT A RARE!" OK, rares are nice too. It is not like I knew we were going to be fighting any bushes... I was lucky to find it when looking up a few monsters for the event 5 minutes before it started. These things are pretty unscripted.

One thing is for certain... it is not often a group of players gets a post written about them for slaying a single monster. This post is about you. If you hit that thing, let it be known so that your glory lives on for all time in the comment section below.

Also, you should probably know...

THERE IS ANOTHER BUSH WITH EVEN MORE HITPOINTS!

At the same time the 9.5 Million HP bush was spawned... an even higher level bush was spawn outside the bathroom. It is in the 1st instance of Yulgar's Inn right now. I was logged in all day watching people fight it on my side monitor while I worked. This thing has so many HP it may not be possible to even kill it before the servers go down for tomorrow's Frostvale release. But if you do.... going to make you all a Holiday Bush Slayer tunic with a picture of the Bush on it.