Gilded Raging

A surprise Golden Week event goes live in The Secret World, but a mistake by the developers causes some fuming about reward cooldowns.

Samsu Nasiru, the Solar Metal guardian of Gaia

On the last day of August, the servers for The Secret World went down for what seemed like a regular hotfix patch. When the game came back online – surprise! – a Golden Week was now in effect.

Golden Week is an in-game promotion that happens a couple of times throughout the year, usually to fill the gap between other large events such as Halloween and Christmas. During the week, the Gilded Rage event occurs. Large angry golden golems appear in every zone in The Secret World that need to be destroyed. It’s a continuation of the story from the Guardians of Gaia anniversary event and uses the same mechanics.

There’s one mechanic that isn’t usually the same as the anniversary golems though – the cooldown for rewards – there isn’t supposed to be one.

Seething Silver

Usually, there’s no cooldown for the Gilded Rage golems. You defeat one, get awarded your loot bag and then can immediately go and find another one to kill and get more loot bags. But this time, after you beat a golem, the reward becomes unavailable for two hours. You are free to kill as many golems as you wish, but don’t get any new loot or experience from them until two hours have passed.

Some people are understandably upset. It makes some of the rewards unobtainable or at least unrealistic to acquire within the limited timeframe of a week. For example, the Glitzy Jinn pet requires 80 Gambler’s Mark tokens. You get one token if you defeat a golem with “gold level” participation , that is, if you were actively playing and not mostly AFK for the golem battle. It’s frustrating if you get there late, and don’t have enough time to participate in the fight because you only get “silver level” participation – you still get a loot bag, but no Gambler’s Mark and you still have to wait two hours to try again.

With this restrictive cooldown, you’d need to do every golem theoretically possible during the week by logging in every two hours, every day without sleep and without going to work in order to have any remote chance of getting 80 Gambler’s Marks. It’s unlikely.

The game developers at Funcom have confirmed that this was not intended. However, they’ve decided not to fix it this time. There’s only a few days left of the event and the time it would take to create a fix, test it and bring the game offline for patching wouldn’t be worth it.

Silver lining

Despite this awkwardness, I’m actually not raging about it. Gilded Rage is a repeating event. It’s happened before, so I already have all of the “old” loot (clothing, pets, etc) from the golems . The only brand new items are Museum of the Occult pieces that are unique to this event – lunar and solar shards required to upgrade museum displays. Fortunately for me, both of those shards popped out of the RNG loot bags I’ve managed to get so far.

There are also some recoloured items available only for Gambler’s Marks, such as a black version of the Elvis jumpsuit. They aren’t new, but I didn’t choose to get them last time the event ran. The Elvis jumpsuit is only 20 marks, realistic to acquire, so that’s my goal for this week. The Glitzy Jinn will have to wait for a future repeat.

Golden opportunity

Along with the Gilded Rage event and golden golems, there are also glitzy/gambling themed items on sale in the Item Store – an RNG loot grab bag called the High Roller’s Valise (and bulk version called the Bag of Lady Luck). I went through all the obsessive collection of every item available from those bags in previous events, so this time I can just ignore it and enjoy the rest of the event.

Also in the Item Store, you find massively “discounted” pay-to-bling items such as a gold suit, gold goth metal outfit, a golden motorbike and this time, an all new Gilded Unicorn! Outside of Golden Week, these items are still on sale, but at outrageous prices no sane person would buy – around $200 worth of Funcom points each. During Golden Week, these get 90% discounts bringing them in-line in value with similar items. I’ve always wondered if it was some kind of homage to Eve Online’s $80 monocle…

Anyway, the unicorn was just too fabulous to resist! But well played, Funcom. I’d already blown my allotment of bonus points for this month on the retro 80s bag that launched a few weeks ago. Literally, just an hour before the patch I bought some more Retro Bags that gave me junk duplicates of things I already had. So I splashed out and bought some more Funcom points for the unicorn.

Gilded Unicorn mount in The Secret World
Friendship is magic

What I like about the unicorn is how it’s way more exciting looking than a regular horse mount (with a shimering rainbow sheen mane), and even has a glittering gallop sprint boost ability making it functionally useful. Of course, I immediately went to Agartha to pose with my lovely new mount. It was hilarious to see the place filled with golden unicorns. I even got to appear in an animated GIF posted by The Secret World on Twitter.

Just one more…

While people grudingly have to deal with the two hour cooldown, I’ve found that it has stopped people going grind crazy and farming these things. It’s reminiscent of the Whispering Tide event where the portal to the Flappy raid would only open every three hours. Or course, the Whispering Tide event went on for several months giving people enough time to get some loot.

At the time of writing, it’s four days into the event and I have 16 Gambler’s Marks. Only a few more to go for the Elvis jumpsuit.

My obsessive compulsiveness to fit as many golems into my gameplay as I can has kicked in. Even though it’s past midnight and there’s 90 more minutes left on my cooldown, perhaps I can stay awake and wait for just one more golem…

Author: Galactrix

Totally into various games and MMOs and previously appeared on podcasts. Noob blogger.

2 thoughts on “Gilded Raging”

  1. I’ve got… 4 Marks so far? And I’ve been playing any time I can spare between work and home. So, yeah, I feel that anger a bit. However, I’m also trying to get the Doomboard, which I may or may not realistically be able to get. 3 challenges per day… it’s also a pretty tough. Especially if I can’t play for a few days. Ah well… at least some players get to enjoy stuff. 😛

    1. Our group in Noobmares have been doing some of the extra weekly challenges together to pad out the challenge count, for example earlier today we did three world bosses we’d saved up to get the weekly lair boss challenge done. If you see me on, send a tell and maybe we can group up for stuff? My character’s called Exceeder ?

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