Genesis Forums

Feel free to post your praise, thoughts, and opinions about the 2018 Scavenger Hunt here. What was good and what could we have done better? We'll take notes for next Scavenger Hunt.

The best part, in my mind, is the hints for commoner items.
Instead of battling and camping rare item, the hunt is made harder by having to solve clues.
Perhaps we would have worker harder on the last clues, if we werent frustrated by trying to get the items we knew of, but couldn't get because of spawn times.

Team size is good, i would not mind more being allowed, but it seemed than many were quite happy about this size.

The ghost hinting at placing added a bit of excitement as you could never trust your opposition in how many they claimed to have located.

It was a very good event.

EDIT:Only part i could wish be changed is the seemingly obligatory need to place items in a "restricted area". It could be nice to have an event that just leaves out Minas Morgul, Vingaard Keep, Minas Tirith and Imladris.



Ideas for next time could be:
Basing the hunt on locations instead of items - This will negate both problems with 1/arma and rare spawns, and give wizards less whining about the status on the items(sorry for my part of asking "are you sure this item works?")

example---
Each player gets a wand.
Using wand at correct place gives full points
Using wand at correct item gives %points, but will be replaced by full points if location is used.
To prevent people running to all locations and using wand, either give penalty points pr wrong location wanded, or have charges on the wand. Like 5 charges, then it needs 30-45 minutes to recharge, or something like that.

The hint part should surely stay in my humble opinion. Bad puns FTW

Wizard availability/attendance during the event was a very big plus. Cudos on that.

Alisa

Alisa wrote: example---
Each player gets a wand.
Using wand at correct place gives full points
Using wand at correct item gives %points, but will be replaced by full points if location is used.
To prevent people running to all locations and using wand, either give penalty points pr wrong location wanded, or have charges on the wand. Like 5 charges, then it needs 30-45 minutes to recharge, or something like that.

Let's not forget that there are many areas in Genesis where no evil players are allowed to enter under any pretense (costume, no costume, etc) so that's maybe not such a great idea.

ZZ has a point, but there's something to this wand idea... I'm thinking of RL scavenger hunts I've done where you find items or locations and then take a photo of your team there. It could be cool to look for objects and also places in Genesis (and maybe mobs?!).

The format of this was really fun. I liked the clues and the ghost was great.

I think the length of the event was a bit much for the really active/competitive players, but I imagine it gave more casual players a chance to participate.

Zugzug wrote: Let's not forget that there are many areas in Genesis where no evil players are allowed to enter under any pretense (costume, no costume, etc) so that's maybe not such a great idea.

Then to stand a chance you would have to team with a player of opposite align. The Great Reconcilation Event!
There would have to be some kind of handicap for neutrals though.

I'm not so sure, if adding rare spawn items to the scavenger hunt list is such a good idea. For example the molten dagger. If a big sized player decides to camp the item, while his teammate runs around and collects all other items, then it creates unnecessary frustration/tention. One way would be to gang up on the big player, but I believe the idea behind such events is not escalting violence and creating conflict.

So my suggestion is to add only common items.

I also think that the list wasn't newbie friendly. Did any newbies manage to find the oliphaunt's tusk? Perhaps create a shorter list for newbies without items like the tusk, onyx wand, etc.

Thanks for the feedback so far.

The align thing is something me and Shanoga discussed a lot. Overall, Genesis has very few areas goodies can't visit (do we even have any at all?) but quite a few evils, or certain (often evil) races, can't visit. We could decide to not have any items in such areas, although then the event gets a bit easier since all those areas are removed from the game. It's also kind of easy to miss one area that has some sort of restriction for a certain guild or race that we didn't think of, which of course is likely to upset players because they were promised no such areas. Doing that would also remove the need to interact with other players in order to get some items, which I think is a good thing.

The problem, if it is a problem, is that only evil players need to interact with other players to get items from restricted areas. However, while evils can't visit some areas, they usually do not have the same limitations on what they can kill, like many goodies do. So, in that regard you have a benefit if you are evil in a Scavenger Hunt, since it's easier for you to just kill random things and try various items, while someone getting heavily penalized when killing something good of course must think both once or twice, or ask someone else to do it for them. So, perhaps it's kind of balanced overall with both goodies and evils having some drawbacks?

Being a neutral myth human if of course always the best in most events, simply due to the way the alignment and combat system currently works in Genesis, but that's kind of hard to get around without seriously limiting the event too.

About rare spawns, that was also something we discussed, and again there's no clear way that feels like the best here. I've also received some mixed feedback on this, while some players found the camping thing and rare spawns boring while some others thoughts it was fun strategic part of the event.

In this event, the majority of items were common, but we decided to have some really hard ones too, either with a very hard clue, or with a rare items, since we honestly did not know how easy or hard this event would be. We did not want to risk having lots of teams with 100 items tied at the top, and it was hard to anticipate how difficult our clues would be when 100 people simultaneously are trying to solve them. When we read through the clues and tried to solve each others clues (me and Varian made 50 each) they felt really hard, but with so many people working at the same time, around 90% were solved the first day(!).

Considering that the top teams solved almost all clues I am glad we had some rare spawn items, otherwise we might have ended up with a big tie. However, I do get that it can be frustrating too. There are really two ways I can think of here. Either we keep some rare items and simply let that be part of the event, or we stick to common items but increase the difficulty level of the clues. Doing that would risk making it too hard though, and might make people give up. I am not sure which way is better. Common items and harder clues, or rare items with easier clues?

Alisa's idea that you simply need to find a specific room and take a selfie of you being there is kind of interesting too. Although that's almost another event, but could be an interesting spin-off to think about. But then, like Zugzug pointed out, we must be very careful to make sure all locations in the event can be visited by all players. Not sure if it can be called a Scavenger Hunt though! It's more like the Amazing Race..?:)

Rincon wrote: I also think that the list wasn't newbie friendly. Did any newbies manage to find the oliphaunt's tusk? Perhaps create a shorter list for newbies without items like the tusk, onyx wand, etc.

Yeah also something we talked about. I think the Scavenger Hunt is probably the hardest event we have for newbies, simply due to the fact that you need a lot of Genesis knowledge to be successful. And if you have a lot of Genesis knowledge, you're probably a fairly big player too. We considered only having items anyone could get regardless of size, but when hunting for items to put on the list I felt it put such a big restriction on which items could be included. There are so many areas that aren't suitable for small players so doing that did not feel like a good idea.

We haven't discussed having two different lists though, as you suggested, which might be something to consider for the future. Some previous Scavenger Hunts have had a special "Junior" class though, where everyone under a certain mortal size compete in their own class, but the list is the same. However, in previous events the number of small players participating has also been very small. Last time I ran a Scavenger Hunt we couldn't even fill up all reward-positions, which ended up with some newbies who put in very little effort still got a reward just because there were so few junior participants. That's why I decided to not have that class during this event. Even if we had a special list for them I am not sure how many we would be able to attract? And I am not so sure we even should try to attract newbies to events? It might just add to their overall confusion and have the opposite effect? We have many newbie friendly events, like collecting eggshells, butterflies, turkeys, etc, but we rarely attract many newbies to them either, despite attempts to have newbie-specific classes and similar. And those who end up winning those are usually old player seconds anyway...

So... yeah I haven't figured out how to attract newbies to events, or even if that is something we should try to do. Perhaps events _should_ be something for players who have been around for a bit and learned a thing or two?

A scavenger hunt of this sort inherently relies on having a vast knowledge base of Genesis content. It is not at all designed for newbies, nor should it be, in my opinion.

G.