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.

Warlord Plate Armor and Leather Gloves

Tarq finally collected enough iron ingots and coal for Warlord Plate with the last 10 coal coming from Prsm. I also exchanged a 8 lice filled hats for Leather Gloves (+4% def) which mountain snakes drop on a really rare occasion. You might think it was a bit of a lop-sided trade, the lice filled hats are part of a new quest that begins in the hospital (the result is the green ranger outfit you see on Mr. H. Solo sitting beside Tarq in the screenshot), but the monsters you need to kill for these hats are simpler to kill than mountain snakes. And while I can kill mountain snakes fairly easily one on one, I still fall victim when they group attack, so the trade was worth it for me.

 I spent a bit of time this morning hunting mogguns and they no longer do 10+ damage, it's all 1's as long as I don't get attacked by 4 or 5. Now that I can handly 3 or 4 mogguns at a time it's time to go after the coal for other helmets.

Hello=) world and the case of the dying skulls

With 55 Dex and a similar amount of Strength I'm still very much toast against Fire and Poison Skulls. For the last number of levels I found fighting skulls quite frustrating, I seemed to miss them almost all the time, and if I got a pot shot or two in I ended up only getting between 250 - 500 experience per skull, hardly worth the amount of iron potions and healing items I was consuming... That was until the magic users switched from using Lightning to summoning maggots. The maggots would swarm the skulls doing minor damage allowing the fighters like me to swoop in and do some better damage, the result between 2000 and 4500 experience per skull, a remarkable difference! I'm not sure what the magic users were getting for experience, but I sure appreciated the amount of experience I was getting from the skull kills and the fact that the maggot distraction seemed to allow my fighter to hit more often.

Both Hello=) and Jim Morrison helped out a great deal.

Gak's Sweet Rewards

Gak is now doling out rewards for the sweets given to him, but don't be hasty in cashing in... there are quite a few rewards and the price of the rewards is fairly high. Gak isn't fond of marshmallows, so each marshmallow earns you one credit. Other sweets earn you more credits (how many I missed, so don't you miss it). My guess is that it was only 2 credits for each of the other sweets. The rewards are as follows:

• 9000 credits - Opera Mask
• 7000 credits - Jester Mask
• 4500 credits - Witch's Hat
• 2500 credits - Goblin Mask
• 800 credits - Guy Fawkes Mask
• 500 credits - Scissors
• 200 credits - Shock Sweet
• 1 credit - Bone Arrow

In the screenshot below Cody is wearing the Jester Mask and I, Tarq, are wearing the Goblin Mask. I didn't quite have enough to also buy the Guy Fawkes Mask and you cannot go back and give Gak more sweets for credits. Once his stomach drops, that's it. I also was a little shy of the Scissors, which allow you to change your hair style without seeing the barber. The shock sweet changes your hair colour to white. I picked up one of these.

Giant Cave Maggot(s) - Iten quest

One of the lower-level quests in Tulimshar is to kill 1 of 2 Giant Cave Maggots. Both maggots don't always spawn. I've been up and down looking when people spawned the giant maggots and often it's only one. If you've already done the quest you cannot respawn the giant cave maggots. I mentioned this quest before, but never got a good screenshot of the maggots, just the "iten" they drop.

The giant cave maggots look very similar to giant maggots with a slight colour difference. Don't let this fool you, they are stronger - though at my current level (62) not even close to a match. Rumour has it that the Halloween event has interrupted this quest and that the cave maggots currently are not dropping the iten. Not sure if this is true or not, but I've killed quite a few spawned by other players and seen nothing.

In other news, still trudging along towards 75 iron ore and 150+ coal for the warlord plate, but it's slow going. Gold seems to be accumulating a little easier, and in the brief time I spent in the northern Hurnscald mines I turned up another Ruby - nice.

I mentioned in a forum post that at my current level there's a lag in action. I'm still too weak to battle skeletons (even 1 on 1) but I've finished all the non-magic quests right up until the "Letter"/50 bones part of the quest. Taking the letter was easy, but bones are expensive and skeletons, even 1 on 1, seem to critical my butt. Naturally I've been upping my "Luck" stat lately hoping it might help not only with skeletons, but other monsters to come.

Iron Ingots for Warlord Plate

Warlord Plate is expensive: 100k plus 15 Iron Ingots (150 coal + 75 Iron Ore) plus another 30 coal for a whopping 180 coal, 75 iron ore and 100,000 gp. If we buy coal at an average of 2,000gp/coal it would cost 360,000 gp (without even getting iron ore which averages more per unit). Finding coal can be a pain. I spent an hour killing Mogguns (which drop coal) and in that hour collected 12 coal. If we say that 12 is an average per hour it would take 15 hours of game play to collect enough coal for the armour. Again we'd then need to hunt for iron ore. So what's a player to do? 6 hours and 180,000gp just to get coal, but the problem is then getting the money.

I spent about 15 minutes hunting red slimes this evening and came up with about 6,000gp worth of items I sold. The problem is that for the most part I was alone. A couple of players dropped by and killed a few slimes, but I had at least 10 of those 15 minutes alone. If more players drop in when you're hunting red slimes the chances of getting a higher amount of money goes down. But let's assume it's 3:30am in the morning and few people are about. If we spent an hour it would translate into 24,000 (4 x 15 = 60 minutes, 4 x 6000 = 24,000) gold pieces. To make 360,000 we'd have to hunt for 15 hours (360,000/24,000).

Either way, collecting the coal, or collecting the money, it's going to take an average of 15 hours to get the coal.

Manaplus 4144 Client

Up to this point I've resisted trying the 4144 manaplus client, but Nard convinced me to give it a try this morning and I found it quite interesting. The auto-target and attack feature is really nice, especially when I came across it by accident (hitting x instead of z). I like the stats it keeps and shows (amount of damage done to a monster).

Nard and I spent a bit of time killing yellow slimes this morning. 

The big news for this Tarq character is that thanks to the assistance of Wayne I managed to brew monster oil and make my Setzer! I also reached level 61. I pumped the points into vitality to take on the mogguns. To this point I haven't put a lot of points into Luck, but it looks like I should be. It may be the point where the other stats are starting to cost too much for the time it takes to level.

Next item goal is the Warlord Plate. Funny enough though I still haven't completed the Noah troupe mask quest. I suppose I should finish it before my next level. I'm also thinking about collecting items for when I become a mage... though the warlord plate will keep me busy enough at a cost of 75 iron ore and over 150 coal... I may end up buying a bunch of coal.