Thursday, December 30, 2010

Christmas Quest bug / feature and other reasons you hate TMW

When I came back to The Mana World after a 11 month absence I tried to think of the reason I left in the first place, but couldn't. And then I started working on the Christmas quest and understood why people leave TMW. In the screenshot above I've circled "I've Collected all the White Boxes" part of the Christmas quest. One problem, the last box didn't show up in my stash, so I couldn't complete the quest and get my "rare" item. When I went to town to mention this bug, and it is a bug, not a feature. Others said, "you can't give away boxes." So let me get this right, if you're generous to someone else you get punished. I gave away my very first white box, which means I collected all the white boxes, spent hours of work, for nothing... but of course I could buy a white box from someone for 100,000k. 

But could I? As the gm on Auldsbel I gave a bunch of boxes to a player while in the ice caverns and he couldn't complete the quest. 

I understand the thought behind this quest, because when the Halloween Quest was on I saw lots of people botting to collect sweets, it really wasn't fair to those who collected sweets with only one player. However, I would rather suffer people multi-botting than have a NPC script that punishes players for giving to other players. You don't take away from the large amount of players who play honestly to punish a few that are cheating the system. 

I was so furious last night that I really considered just leaving TMW altogether. Who wouldn't be furious, it took hours to complete, only to discover it can't be completed. My wife was pretty mad at me because I spent so much time trying to cram the quest in to our time, all that for nothing... I'm sure I'm not the only player in that kind of boat with other responsibilities.

I'll update any progress on the Christmas quest, but so far it's a bust for me, not a good quest at all.

2 comments:

  1. Ouch, that's really bad! I hope the makers of the quest will read this so that they can fix it, or at least keep this in mind for future quests...

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  2. It was frustrating, but I did get my reward in the end by paying 100,000 instead of the single white present I gave away. I'm just glad I didn't give away 3 or 4 white presents...

    A few people offered to help out in different ways. That's the GREAT thing about the server - there are lots of helpful people. But I would feel bad for someone who gave away lots of gifts and didn't have a big stash of cash.

    The other thing to note about that quest was that I was only able to give 2000gp per chat. It really wasn't bad, not compared to collecting all the presents and then finding out I couldn't get the last one, but it did take a little bit of time to give the 100k gp.

    Overall I actually enjoyed it more than the halloween quest, I think because the halloween quest took so long... but the end of this one was a lot more frustrating...

    But the result was a sweet Top Hat!

    Thanks to BC, Kage, Mrgrey, Prsm, and everyone else who helped/suggested things to do.

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