October 19, 2018

The Wheel of Doom Returns Next Week

10th Anniversary Special Feature Revival

Five years ago, we launched the Wheels of Doom and Destiny - one of the game's most popular features, where you can buy Tickets to spin the wheel and get prizes. Every spin rewards you with gold, a Treasure Potion to spend in the Wheel of Doom merge shop and a chance to get a bonus equippable item.

In 2014, we had to remove the Wheel of Doom due to a pretty bad exploit; it looked like irrevocable DOOM had taken the Wheels down. But Fortune smiled upon us and, after a few binary incantations and gear recalibrations, we're excited to announce...

The Wheel of Doom returns next week as we continue our month-long 10th anniversary celebration!

Wheel of Doom Details

• Talk to Swaggy, the Treasure Hunting Moglin (/join wheel)
• Buy Spin Tickets for 200 ACs ($1 USD)
• Each spin rewards you with at least $1 worth of in-game content. This includes: 10,000 gold, an EXP Boost, a Treasure Potion, plus a chance for an Awesome, Epic, Legendary, or Artifact bonus item.
• Treasure Potions can be used in the Wheel of Doom merge shop to unlock additional gear.
• EXP boosts can be traded in the merge shop for other boosts.

Legacy Spin Tickets and Treasure Potions

• If you still have Spin Tickets or the Stack Spin Tickets, we will automatically exchange those for the same amount of new Single Spin Tickets next week
• If you still have Treasure Potions, you will be able to use these in the Wheel of Doom merge shop starting next week

Bonus Items

Each time you spin the Wheel of Doom, in addition to the gold, EXP boost, and Treasure Potion you receive, you'll have a chance to get a bonus prize. These equippable items include Doom versions of some of the game's earliest "Unassigned" rarity items and many items created exclusively for the Wheel. We'll continue adding new sets to the Wheel of Doom's reward table and merge shop in the coming months.

Bonus items include:

• Epic Item of Donated Awesomeness
• Doom Naval Commander
• Doom Red Star Sword
• Doom Golden Centurion
• MechaJouster Class
• and more!

Epic Item of Donated Awesomeness

The Epic Item of Donated Awesomeness will drop from the Wheel of Doom. With this item, you can write in to Player Support and claim items harvested mostly from deleted and abandoned accounts - and sometimes by your fellow generous heroes. If you get this item from the Wheel of Doom, you can write in to Player Support and request almost any item in the game*. If one is available, they will add it to your account.

* Exceptions include staff personal items, custom weapon contest prizes, etc

Drop Rates for the Wheel of Doom bonus items

You can tell what an item's drop rate is by checking its item rarity in the description.

• Awesome: 100% (the Fortune Ticket for the merge shop)
• Impossible: .1 - 1%
• Legendary: 2% - 19%
• Epic: 20%+

Wheel of Doom Changes

• During its initial return, free spins have been removed. We are currently investigating a potential exploit dealing with free items. Once we have more information on the issue and are able to take the necessary action to resolve it, 
  we'll look at returning the free daily spins for members and free monthly spins for all players.
• Stack Spins have been removed to better help all our heroes monitor their Wheel spin activity.

* The Wheel of Doom will return permanently, barring any unforeseen fires, floods, Flash exploits, or codestorms that rock the digital world.

Return of the Wheel of Doom: a tale that'll make your head spin

Earlier this month, we had hordes of players asking for the Wheel of Doom to come back, to help celebrate our 10th anniversary. We know that many of our players joined after the Wheel was removed, and we felt your pain. Based on the investigations and fixes we did back in 2014, it didn't look like a return would be possible until AQW:Mobile, and that's what we announced earlier this month.

But if we were ever going to bring back the Wheel of Doom to the web vesion of AQWorlds, the 10th anniversary was the time to do it. (Plus, the team loves a challenge, and we hate disappointing you guys.) So after looking at how much progress Yorumi has made to the game, and with the changes Warlic's brought to the table, I sat back down and wondered if it COULD be possible. That's when we pulled in the programmers and Cemaros - our lead bug tester - into a group chat. We asked them a very powerful question...

"What do we need to do to bring back the Wheel of Doom back this year?" The answer they gave after early investigation was... "The exploit still exists. We MUST FIX THE EXPLOIT!" The next logical question was, "What do we need to do, make, or find for you to move forward?"