Part of the staff's April Fool's Day 2014 humor involved implementing The Bazaar -- or at least a bizarre version of the zone. It could be accessed by hailing this shady-looking mob either in Athica A or Southern Newport:
When hailed, he would spout the following dialogue:
If the player clicked the pink text, he or she would be magically whisked away to The Bazaar! Upon entry, the player would be surrounded by tons of NPCs, some with rather funny names, who were all standing around the various auction areas. (My personal favorite is the big, armored Ogre named Cramberry in the fourth picture down!)
That last picture is of the auctionhouse, and if you look closely in the background you may see a Gnome NPC named Jehk with a funny hat on. Look again at the helmet he is wearing. Have you ever seen that helmet model before? Most likely not! That's because, for reasons completely unknown to me, Gnome seems to be the one and only pre-Luclin race to have been assigned a fifth helm designation:
Here is a view of the mysterious Gnome helm up-close:
As you can see, it seems the texture is either unfinished or very poorly executed. Its shape can still clearly be made out, though, and it seems to have been the early stages of a unique hat for Gnomes that was to be evocative of the stereotypical garden Gnome stocking cap. Very interesting... at least for me.
The most surprising thing to me about this find is that whoever coded this particular NPC actually went out of his or her way to set this Gnome's helm as texture 04 in the first place!
Moving on, the best part of the Dalayan Bazaar Simulator was actually to be found in the chat bar, which constantly yielded endless spam of NPC auctions about randomly generated item names! Here is an excerpt from my log of the zone spanning a mere thirty seconds or so:
[See next post. I'm unable to post the log here due to a 10,000 character limit on the new forum!]
Can't wait to see what is whipped up next year!
When hailed, he would spout the following dialogue:
If the player clicked the pink text, he or she would be magically whisked away to The Bazaar! Upon entry, the player would be surrounded by tons of NPCs, some with rather funny names, who were all standing around the various auction areas. (My personal favorite is the big, armored Ogre named Cramberry in the fourth picture down!)
That last picture is of the auctionhouse, and if you look closely in the background you may see a Gnome NPC named Jehk with a funny hat on. Look again at the helmet he is wearing. Have you ever seen that helmet model before? Most likely not! That's because, for reasons completely unknown to me, Gnome seems to be the one and only pre-Luclin race to have been assigned a fifth helm designation:
Code:
00 = bald
01 = leather hat
02 = chain helm
03 = plate helm
04 = mysterious Gnome helmHere is a view of the mysterious Gnome helm up-close:
As you can see, it seems the texture is either unfinished or very poorly executed. Its shape can still clearly be made out, though, and it seems to have been the early stages of a unique hat for Gnomes that was to be evocative of the stereotypical garden Gnome stocking cap. Very interesting... at least for me.
The most surprising thing to me about this find is that whoever coded this particular NPC actually went out of his or her way to set this Gnome's helm as texture 04 in the first place!Moving on, the best part of the Dalayan Bazaar Simulator was actually to be found in the chat bar, which constantly yielded endless spam of NPC auctions about randomly generated item names! Here is an excerpt from my log of the zone spanning a mere thirty seconds or so:
[See next post. I'm unable to post the log here due to a 10,000 character limit on the new forum!]
Can't wait to see what is whipped up next year!
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