Tag: vast horizons

Around the Realms in Twenty ^MORE Questions

by Tharius

Not so long ago I posted about Ceir’s Twenty Questions standing semi-quest.  It’s been a bit of a mind twister that requires a lot of luck but has some strategy to it as well.

This round of Twenty Questions will go to Aimeric unless I’m mistaken, he, Klaatu and I were all teleporting at the same time and it turns out with the same guess in mind.  The disadvantage I had was that I had posted the last question and had to wait until one of them posted before I could take a guess.

One of the tricks to this is to ask questions that narrow the field of possibilities down without completely giving it away to the other people who are guessing.  In this round I had it down to 2 possibilities, both of which fit the criteria.  I like to go and find the item in game to verify that the database I’ve looked at has the stats correct.  I could find a fairly obscure broom in Dunhill but couldn’t get the squirrel’s tail in Wyvern’s Tower to pop so I went with the broom as my first guess.  As I say, a lot of strategy and a lot of luck need to come together to win this thing and congrats to Aimeric.  It’s nice to be there at the finish line even if you fall a little short.

So teleporting around looking for one room is in an of itself stunningly boring.  Many times it took up to 4 hours of non-stop zombie eating triggers to find the room.  Sometimes it was the 4th candy.  Welcome to RNG.  To make it more interesting I’ve been spending some time investigating the puzzles inside Vast Horizons.  There are a lot of spots that seem disconnected; isolated rooms that feel like they are there for the purpose of theme.  Some of them might be and others might in fact hold clues to other rooms, it’s certainly far from cut and dry.  Some of the zones are clearly mini areas with small puzzles.  For example finding the butterfly wing within the lighthouse or the golden buckle in the well.  Many of these items have fairly high values set on them so some may be there to defray the cost of teleporting while others clearly interact with other parts of the area.

This time through I’ve managed to take out Jimmy da Fence a couple of times and come away with Jimminator!s, worked up a pile of radiant garnets, shy emeralds, stirring spoons and rays of the sun.  I’ve also become motivated to try coming through on a pre-avatar character and try some of the puzzles that aren’t open to avatars.  In addition I think trying some other races will open up some of the puzzles I can’t access.  When you can’t squeeze your large frame any further down a corridor it’s a clue that there’s something else to be done.

I want to thank everyone who worked on Vast Horizons.  It’s a fun, strange area that by and large gives clues when you’re doing something wrong.  Unlike other builders who expect us to dream up the solution to the puzzle out of the ether and pick the one correct race, class, gender and alignment out of the 1,638 possible combinations (double that if it’s a clear pre-av/avatar only puzzle … the math gets too hard for morning coffee to figure out if it’s a specific unknown level).  The puzzles are challenging and open to a huge range of players with luck of the draw becoming the great equalizer.  Sure you know the room.  Sure you know the solution.  Can you get there next?

Happy adventuring!

Around the Realms in Twenty Questions

by Tharius

A new Vast Horizon feature, for the regular readers of Ceirana’s Window to the World is a new noteboard for a game of 20 Questions.  For those not familiar with the game the basic idea is that the host will pick something and you have 20 questions to figure it out with your guesses at the answer counting towards the 20 questions.  For this incarnation the question has to be a yes/no question.

I managed to figure out the first mob (yay) was Weeping Willow in The Keep of Mahn-Tor by a process of elimination.  A couple hours of running around looking at mobs and maps.  All in all it was pretty fun, I encourage you to look for it the next time you’re out telescanning.

Some hints for players:

  • keep your questions simple… yeah you want to get the most out of it but if it doesn’t give you info in both the yes and no it’s not so good (example: is it a male? Good!  is it a male or a horse? Bad! a male dragon isn’t a horse, of course!)
  • try to use your question to narrow the field … we had every mob in Realms to pick from, narrowing it to non-male non-humanoids who wore no equipment and were aff sanc or who could cast it made the list so much more manageable
  • be specific: the question “Is it in the Forgotten Woods Geo?” could mean the area that when you type where you see the Forgotten Woods or it could mean any of the areas IN the Forgotten Woods
  • don’t be too specific: asking a question that applies only to a very narrow field of choices doesn’t help.  If you get a yes then you’re golden, but it’s more likely you’ll get a no.  “Does it have brown hair?” is perhaps not as good as “Does it have hair?”

Ok … happy adventuring.