Hobnanigans
Besides being one of the hardest words in the lotro vocabulary to repeat a few times when you’re doing your standard dwarf weekend activities. It’s also the name of the whack-your-chicken festival that for the better part of the last few years is held on the first weekend of the month.
Besides certain quests its also your main source for chickens as a freep. This critters casual will focus on the game itself and the barterable rewards. Mostly focussing on the cosmetic pet, the source of George, chickens.
The game
During a 10 minute game two teams of either 3 or 6 will use a golf like stick to hit a chicken in a direction. If that direction is the opposing teams goal you will score a point. The team with the most points after 10 will get 15 barter tokens per person and the other team 5.
The players gets 3 kind of skills with different strength and cooldowns. Use the shortest skill to “interrupt” an opponents harder, but longer cd/induction to make him waste his cooldowns. You will also get a short stun and a speedboost skill. The correct timing and direction of your skills be your main source of tactic and advantage. But a 10 minute game is long and hard to keep focused with your whole team.
History of the game
Back in the First age of lotro in 2007 there was a summer solstice festival (Summer festival to most) that had the first party where you got to hit your chicken in the enemies goal. It was buggy, horrible and quickly discontinued. In 2014 the game got a revamp and was launched in the state its still being run monthly to this date.
Hobnanigans league
In may of 2016 there was the first Hobnanigans 3 vs 3 league held. On the 4th of June they will hold their 2nd event. Grab your 2 friends or sign up for a free for all group and compete for the honour and glory. They are also open to expanding the event to other servers. For contact, website and to sign up check the below central topic on the lotro forums.
https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?617797-LANDROVAL-Hobnanigans-Chicken-League-OPEN
Barter rewards
The game itself has a staggering amount of barterable rewards. A lot of the standard festival stuff like emotes, housing objects, consumables and pets. But most are obviously chicken related. Even the cosmetic pets are fully chicken related. All the rewards come in different tiers of chicken. The weirder the chicken, the pricier the tier. Plenty of eggscelent stuff. Just make sure you look if its a consumable item or permant one.
For a full list and pictures of the different barter ill refer you to this wiki page
https://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Hobnanigans
The chickens themselves
There are 6 different chickens to play with. With a common, rare token or barter coins, that can be won through the games, you can get them from the barter NPC during the festival. If you’ve done the Chicken session play quests in sandson farm. You’re familiar with quite a few of them. George and companions are quite the (same) lookers as the cosmetic pets. Can’t get enough of them, but got to craft or quest on boring character. Get yourself a chicken cosmetic pet. Either by winning the barter currencies or for a hefty price in the chicken exchange options for gold.
The white chicken (token) is fairly common. The red chicken is spotted for trade a bit less, but the other 4 quite rare. They are the Orange Wyandotte, blackfoot, scrapper and a dorking chicken. 5 out of the 6 chickens and their animations can be seen in the video below. A better quality and with the missing chicken will be available on a late time.
The next paragraphs will focus on the shadowy side of the chicken barter game. The grind it involves and way people avoid the grind through brute force. Either with copious amount of gold or other means.
Is it fun?
The game itself is a really fun activity for a kin event. You can play versus other kin mates or hope you can get a few people that wont go afk. Most of the game will be done in the 3 vs 3 mode. The 6 vs 6 are a complete mess. Think of your junior football brother all going for the ball at the same time. The game itself has a surprising amount of strategy to it when you can get the right devotion and people at the same time.
Outside of pre-made groups or set times its hard to get a good game going. Given the long games, 6 player starter requirement and the ridiculous amount of games needed for the special rewards it attracts a few less active players. They are in it for the completionist or gold.
Chicken tiers (barter prices)
Your most basic white chicken is your standard gym membership or 1 door sedan. Its simple, it does the job and is pretty cheap. For 150 tokens you can get your own chicken pet. After that it goes up quickly to the red chicken (George) at 720. After that it quickly becomes a real grind at 1440, 1800 and 2160 tokens. These are for your non-consumable chicken pets that will stay with you or till you trade them away. Housing items, emotes and cosmetics are far cheaper. But the ratios remain for anything involving the chicken tiers.
The higher tiers are far too high for any normal process to acquire. A single pet can take you around 30 hours of 10 minute games where you win/lose 50%. Pets are fun, but a housing item that only a few people will see for that time. You might as well start raiding.
Chicken barter economy
The blessing and curse in this game, the tokens are tradable. Or as most will go able to be sold for gold. Just a hand full of players on a server will have the means in time, gold or desire to get a single pet. Let alone all. Tokens go from 0,8 to 2 gold per piece (on Evernight). Making the higher chickens or tokens a real gold mine. Most of these tokens are gained by a few persons multiboxing
Multiboxing is the act of running multiple lotro clients on the same system through different f2p accounts. With additional software you could have those clients follow your main character around. For example while he does deeds in the shire for turbine points. To get them 2-3-4 times as fast as normal. Those same tricks can be used to run your own 3 vs 3 games by yourself. That would be 45 win and 15 tokens from the lost characters.
These people can be considered the goldsellers of chickens. It’s a grey area. Turbine has stated that multiboxing itself isn’t illegal, but it certainly is frowned upon by a part of the community. But if you want to remain your sanity there is hardly a way to avoid them if you want to get 8000 tokens for all pets.
Personal barter story.
The chickens were by far the longest and hardest pets to get “cheaply”. My tokens were gotten during 6 months. Sniping small amount of tokens on the ah of people that didn’t use them. Or by people offloading larger amount of tokens that were looking for quick cash.
Nearly all my tokens were traded for with gold I made through converting my marks, stars of merits and high rank tomes from Big battles optimally to gold. But that’s for another guide another time.
Don’t buy during the festival when everyone is looking for them. Sunday night or the Monday after the festival are great times to find bargains. Impatient people looking to sell a few thousands tokens or ah bids that were set too low, but with a high buyout. A single trade involved 3500 tokens of a person selling 1000 on /world. Contact the person and haggle a bit. Bulk, Bulk and Bulk. They will be equally glad to offload such a large amount in a single trade. Don’t spend 2 gold a piece if you need 5000 of them.
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