Updated as of 8/1/2017, thanks to everyone for the new information
Bug type: Text Errors leading to Functionality Issues/Missing Monster Types
Brief bug summary:
With the monster collection event going on right now (and after participating in a previous thread related to bugged monster collection), I've been sifting through my collection list to see what I should aim for along with the event monsters. I've found several monsters that seem to be entirely uncollectable for one reason or another. If anyone can confirm that they have collected these monsters, I'd be curious to know about it. These monsters include:
Zakum1 (Listed under El Nath, Page 3, Row 5, Column 4, this entry refers to a version of Zakum that cannot be fought through normal gameplay anymore. This entry is decidedly broken and CANNOT be collected, and hasn't been available for at least year as far as I can tell)
Seductive Violent Primitive Boar (Listed under Ludus Lake, Page 3, Row 2, Column 2, Elite Monsters no longer spawn with the prefix Seductive. Apparently it was replaced with the "Charming" prefix. However, I cannot confirm if killing a Charming elite version of this monster can collect it yet, more testing required. Ideally, this would just be changed outright to Charming to avoid any future confusion)
KO Chief Qualm Guardian (Listed under Temple of Time, Page 1, Row 2, Column 4, See above, same case with the KO elite monster prefix, which was apparently folded into the "Overwhelming" prefix. As before, more testing required to see if an "Overwhelming Chief Qualm Guardian" counts for the Monster Collection)
Seductive Chief Oblivion Guardian (Listed under Temple of Time, Page 1, Row 3, Column 4, see above)
KO Steel Xenoroid EX (Listed under Edelstein, Page 2, Row 4, Column 3, see above)
Seductive Alloy Xenoroid DX (Listed under Edelstein, Page 2, Row 5, Column 2, see above)
Magic-resistant Commanding Possibly-Evil Seal (Listed under Near Victoria, Page 1, Row 5, Column 1, may in fact be possible at this time. According to AlexF, he has collected this very monster recently. More testing is required, but this is promising. Even still, as with the Seductive and KO prefixes, it would be ideal if the text was corrected to "Magic Resistant Commanding Possibly-Evil Seal" (punctuation and capitalization exact) once and for all)
Charismatic Ripe Wolfruit (Listed under Arcane River, Page 1, Row 5, Column 4, this prefix does not exist and I can find no evidence that it ever has. It remains uncertain what prefix it is supposed to have (possibly "Charming"?), or whether any of the existing prefixes will allow it to be collected. Much the same as the Seductive, KO, and Magic Resistant monsters above, this should be corrected to any currently available prefix for clarity's sake. Additionally, there are those that have collected this monster. By all evidence, this occurred during the time period most Elites were bugged to display ??? as their prefix, and the Monster Collection happened to display the same for the Wolfruit. Unless you have collected this monster AFTER these issues had been fixed, please don't make a note of it)
Reindeer (Listed under El Nath, Page 3, Row 1, Column 2, this enemy shares an exact name with a different monster found in Mu Lung (under Mu Lung Garden, Page 1, Row 2, Column 1). There is suspicion that this is causing an error where the Lion King Castle monster cannot be collected itself)
More details:
The Monster Collection has been understood by most to rely on exact-name matches between creatures killed and what is listed in the Monster Collection itself. This works normally in most cases, but some oddities tend to happen by the nature of this design, and a lack of foresight in naming certain monsters. For example, it is known that Magnus can be collected in FriendStory during the scene where you hit gym teacher Magnus with soccer balls because the two share a name. It is known that the Chief Cygnus Knights (Mihile, Oz, Eckhart, Hawkeye, and Irena) can be collected during certain events where they appear in different forms (in my case, I collected half of them during Sengoku High runs), again because they happen to share the same exact name. And perhaps in the oddest version, during the Tangyoon's Kitchen party quest, you can summon a creature named Snowman that resembles the kind you might make in winter, and killing enough of these may give credit for collecting the yeti-like Snowman normally found in El Nath instead (happened to me). These are all weird quirks, but each one of these monsters can be collected through normal means as well.
The problem is, each monster listed above does not currently appear in normal gameplay with the exact name shown in the Monster Collection, leading to suspicion that they are currently impossible to collect by any means short of using a Monsterbloom, an item so rare I'm only aware of 6 of them being available from the recent Party Punk Monster event. AlexF, further in this thread, has stated that most of these should be collectible because the monster names need not match exactly what is visible to the player to allow collection, due to the system apparently matching background hidden text strings that we wouldn't normally see instead. As an example, he states that he has collected the Magic-resistant Commanding Possibly-Evil Seal even when the visible name in the Monster Collection was off a bit, which is very hopeful. For the time being however, I must remain skeptical until I can confirm these entries myself, or have sufficient evidence from others as well. All evidence I've been able to see so far continues to support the basic monster name == monster collection name theory, as noted in the above paragraph. Even the oddest monster typo I could find in the list/game, "Mithril mutae", spelled exactly as such with 2 spaces and a lower-case M on the second word, out of formatting with all other monsters I've seen, still has the names match both in gameplay and in the Collection, and I've been able to collect it that way. Once again, further testing may confirm AlexF's claims on the nature of the system, but I will leave the list intact until otherwise noted.
Wall of Text preamble out of the way, I'll go in more depth on the trouble with each monster.
For Zakum1(sic), this entry refers to the old version of Zakum, before he received a revamp to the current version in-game. Before, Zakum had 3 distinct forms named Zakum1, Zakum2, and Zakum3. With the revamp to the boss, these have all been folded into a single enemy with one life bar, simply named "Zakum". I have read posts dating back as far as September 2016 noting this problem, and I believe that this version remains completely impossible to collect at this time.
Next, Elites with the KO and Seductive prefixes. These prefixes no longer spawn in normal gameplay, apparently having been converted/merged with "Overwhelming" and "Charming" respectively. However, it is uncertain if killing the correct elites with these prefixes will actually give a chance to collect the monster or if this remains broken. I am currently testing elite kills on Steel Xenoroid EXs and keeping track of how many of each prefix I kill for testing purposes. Further updates as I make progress.
The Magic-resistant Commanding Possibly-Evil Seal may be working at the moment. As I noted above, AlexF says he's collected this one even with the name in the collection not matching exactly (should read as "Magic Resistant Commanding Possibly-Evil Seal"). Until I or others can confirm collecting this monster right now, I will leave this one listed for now.
The Ripe Wolfruit elite is an odd case. There was a period where most elite's prefixes were displaying as ??? due to some text error. It just so happened that this monster was listed in the Collection as ??? Ripe Wolfruit, and it appears that numerous people collected this one during that time frame, because the names would therefore match exactly. Both issues have since been corrected, but the monster is now listed with a non-existent "Charismatic" prefix. This makes it uncertain what, if any, prefix will actually allow the monster to be collected. I suspect it was meant to be Charming, but so far, testing hasn't borne any results for me. Further updates in the future.
Finally, the Reindeer is an especially interesting case. Rather than having an improper name, it's actually the name of two different monsters. This gives it the opposite problem from what I stated the in the first paragraph. Rather than multiple monsters being useful for collecting a single entry, it's been reported that both entries can't be collected because killing the Reindeer found in the Lion King's Castle instead provides collection credit for the one in Mu Lung. I intend to test this on a fresh server where I haven't already collected the Mu Lung Reindeer, but if the system works as expected, this is the sort of thing that could potentially happen.
I believe that is all of the potentially impossible-to-collect monsters in-game at this time. I will continue to update this report as I gather more data. I appreciate everyone who has provided their own information and pointed me toward other issues I hadn't noticed myself. If anyone has any other problem monsters, or can confirm having collected any of the listed monsters at any time AFTER this was originally posted, it would be a huge help.
Comments
For Zakum1, that was the name of phase 1 of old Zakum. Updated Zakum is just "Zakum" now, so Nexon will have to change the name of the old "Zakum1" to "Zakum" for it to work. So currently it is in fact impossible.
For KO/Seductive/Transformative elites, those were the old prefixes. The new prefixes are Overwhelming (so 2 Overwhelming types), Charming, and Master of Disguise.
Fantasy Theme World is returning on July 19th, actually, after checking the WZ files.
An addendum to this list:
Reindeer in Lion King's Castle shares a name with a mob in Mu Lung, and that is the one to get registered. An easy solution to this would be to change the name of the Lion King's Castle (and its other iterations), maybe to "Snow Reindeer" or something.
Ah, this is good info, thank you. If you did indeed get the evil seal elite, with the text as displayed, recently, that gets my hopes up.
I assume that applies to other elites with the KO and Seductive prefixes having their background strings match up with the updated prefixes PirateIzzy mentioned? And presumably the Ripe Wolfruit has a viable prefix in there as well? What of Zakum, listed as Zakum1? I've killed 100s of Zakums at this point with no collection, which I imagine is well possible with RNG, but confirmation would be appreciated that he's functional.
At any rate, if all of these monsters can in fact be collected right now, great! Perhaps it could be forwarded to fix what is displayed in the Monster Collection itself as a text error? If, say, Seductive Violent Primitive Boar was written as Charming Violent Primitive Boar, it'd be easier for completionists to know what to aim for, and be less likely to post extraneous bug reports.
Huh, that's a weird one. I have the Mu Lung Reindeer collected, but not the Lion King one yet. I'll have to grind out a few thousand kills there to see if it can in fact be collected. Thanks for the heads up on that and the elite prefix changes.
Did you actually collect it from the monster itself? Or was it from a Monsterbloom?
My friend has been doing zakum for at least 2 years now for all 40 character slots every single day and hasn't gotten it..
Is this supposed to be a mission impossible ? lol
Would love some screenshots if you've ever gotten it
Yep, apparently the Monster Collection is looking for the old iteration of Zakum, when the phases were more distinct and individually numbered, rather than the current version, so this one is straight up busted. Hilla shouldn't be a problem right now though, I've managed to collect her silver-haired form and regular hilla isn't currently in the collection.
I'd actually like confirmation on that. If it was collected via Monsterbloom, that kind of defeats the point.
That'd be all well and good if there was a regular source of Monsterblooms available, but to my knowledge the only ones we could get so far are the 6 that came from the Monster Collection event going on right now. That's definitely not enough to ensure collection of impossible monsters, because the blooms randomly select one uncollected monster to add. There's a lot of party quest only monsters, monsters spawned by bosses, and elites that are too easy to out-level that I'm unlikely to be able to collect through normal play so I'm going to have to rely on Monsterblooms for them anyway, so I've got a few dozen monsters that the item will have to choose from. Not to mention the monsterbloom might give me a chest instead of adding to my collection, so that's even less reliable. I'm hoping there will be more monsterblooms released in the future with events or whatever, but that's a lot of waiting time.
Ultimately, the point is to make it so the game system functional as it's designed to be, rather than having to rely on items that work around the system.
Also, Fantasy Theme World was just revamped and reopened, so I'm gonna go ahead and mark that off the list in my first post, pending attempts to collect those monsters.
Except you can still get Hilla. Zakum is different though, haven't heard anyone ever getting that
And I think LKC's Reindeer mob should be renamed, maybe to "Snow Reindeer", to fix the issue with the Mu Lung Reindeer.
Also, I can confirm that elite Homunscullo IS possible, but like you said, super rare. I've even seen an elite Lyka in Temple of Time.
Before or after the name was changed to Charismatic?
I've been able to collect the "Mithril mutae" from regular mobbing in Magatia. The name is a bit wonky compared to all other monster naming conventions in-game (2 spaces between words, second word starts with lower-case instead of capital), but it does match what's in the Collection. More of a slightly ugly text error that could use some correction for consistency's sake someday. I think there was another similar monster that had an oddly formatted name that matched collection vs map, but I'm not finding it skimming through the list casually at the moment.
Still haven't taken the time to test the LKC vs Mu Lung Reindeer yet myself. I intend to go kill the LKC reindeers on a server I haven't collected either on yet and see which pops up first, just haven't got around to it.
Ok, thank you for clarifying further. Once again, that's a confidence booster for that particular one at least. It would still be nice to see the text error fixed someday though, for consistency as above.
I still need to test the KO and Seductive prefix situation, I intend to take my main character and go after the KO Steel Xenoroid EX. If what PirateIzzy says is true and KO was folded into Overwhelming, it should be easy enough to collect. I've been keeping tally of what prefixes I get while attempted to collect a Dry Swollen Stump Axe (~309 elites spawned, 6 Dry Debilitating, 0 plain Dry. RIP) and it appears the most common prefixes are Magic Resistant, Shadowy, Sticky, Powerful, and of course, Overwhelming. This should make it fairly easy to see if that type of elite is collectible as is. I'll keep a similar running tally in my attempts to collect the Xenoroid; if the stats get too high without a collection occurring, there may be a problem. Will report back later with results.
Incidentally, the currently least common Elite Prefix I've had is Gassy. Just in case anyone cares.
Awesome, thank you! As to the other entries, should I create a separate report thread for each enemy as you suggested LittleMissRamen do for the Reindeer, or leave it all collated in here? I know this thread is maybe a bit too...wordy for a simple report to forward, but I made it mostly to gather all the data in one spot and get info from other players. I didn't want to spam up the Bug Report forum if it could be avoided, but if that's the preferred method, I'll get right to it.