Hi folks,

At the upcoming Howling (about 9 hours from the time of this post) the month will officially roll over to December and the stockings promo will begin. The full details will go up as usual right after the Howling in another post, but as we are making some major changes to the stockings promo this year, I wanted to post in advance to give everyone the information early without making one giant, unwieldy news post.

If you don't want to read the full details, the basic TL;DR is stockings have been remade completely in how they handle prizes to give more consistent value.

After reviewing the logs for stockings from 2020, I was very unhappy about the average returns, so we've rebuilt them entirely from the ground up. Under the old system, higher tiers of stockings gave extra prize rolls, but these extra rolls still drew from the entire table of options. This meant that even at the highest price point, there was still a very high likelihood of rolling far below the equivalent value in credits and receiving lower returns than you would get from simply buying credits outright. Needless to say, this is not an acceptable standard.

We've done away with that system and now, each tier of stocking is assigned a minimum credit value that will always be met and will often be exceeded, made up of one or more prizes from that tier's list of options. At minimum, these returns will always be at least as good as a 30% credit sale (almost always better), scaling up towards a 45% or 50% bonus for the higher tiers - as a baseline.

THIS EFFECTIVELY MEANS THAT STOCKINGS ARE NOW MUCH MORE CONSISTENT IN VALUE.

I'll have more details on the specific values and the stocking contents when the time comes, but here is a breakdown of some other changes to stockings aimed at making them far more worthwhile:

- Gold and Platinum stockings now act as if you opened two stockings from their equivalent tier, giving double the prizes.
* e.g If you open a golden grand stocking, you would get two grand stockings worth of prizes totalling (at least) double the credit worth of one stocking of that tier.

- Stockings now reward organisation credits when purchased. These scale with the tier of stocking.

- Every 150 stockings opened will trigger a global prize where one of the next 50 stockings to be opened will contain a bonus of 500 credits on top of its other prizes.

- Filler prizes such as obsidian ink, grimstim pills, Underhalls torches and such no longer count towards a stocking's value and will only ever be included as extras.

- I have instated some bad luck protection that will ensure you can only roll prizes like styles, minipets, and such once per stocking.
* This eliminates the possibility of filling an entire stocking with the same low level item.

In addition to these changes, we have also completely reworked how the stocking raffle works. Instead of being tied wholly to gold and platinum stockings, there will now be one global raffle with 8 prizes drawn on January 1st.

Stocking purchases automatically enter you into the raffle on a scaling basis (Festive = 1 "ticket", Fancy = 2 "tickets", Grand = 6 "tickets", Extravagant = 20 "tickets"), and all stocking purchases award one "decorative gift voucher" per stocking bought. These can only be redeemed by someone other than the owner, and provide one raffle entry to whoever you gift them to.

This allows you to gift stockings freely without feeling as though you are missing out on raffle entries in the process, and also allows everyone to gift away raffle entries without giving up their own!

My next post at the Howling will have a full breakdown of the stocking values and their contents for this year. I apologise for the long post(s), but with how poor this promo was in the past, it needed a lot of love to bring it up to par. I think we have hit that mark!

HELP STOCKINGS will be updated after the Howling arrives with all of the new information!

Penned by my hand on Falsday, the 12th of Arios, in the year 499 MA.
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