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    Your Elvenar Team

Scavenger Hunt Concepts

Katwick

Cartographer
My concern is that "Neighborhood Visits" have devolved into a clickfest. About the only thing we know about our Fellowship and Neighborhood Cities is which buffs they want.

I'd much rather have an interesting incentive to look at a variety of cities, especially the pretty ones.

I'm proposing a Scavenger Hunt Event that lists 60 findable buildings:
  • Each level would show the name and the graphic of Event Target Building, with nine linkable chests, one for each city type.
  • There's no need to restrict the hunt to just Fellows and Neighbors, as any city in your world can be reached by searching the ranking list
  • Only one city would be needed for the rarest buildings. Different LEVELS could be required for the more common buildings
    • I'd actually prefer an alogrithmic mix of buildings that existed at the START of the event. Note that the roster is necessarily unique to each world
    • Somebody may luck out and be able to post their own city, if they already have, or can quickly add, the Event Target Building
  • If you can find a city with several required items, or if somebody builds an Event City, so much the better. If somebody adds/levels a qualifying building DURING the event, that's fine
  • An Custom Chat Chain could be created in any case, using tools that already exist, but perhaps linking a chest could automatically add you to the chat group.
  • The first person to discover a qualified city would post the city name on the associated city type chest and thereby create a clickable link for subsequent use. They would also be rewarded the full value of the chest
(Substantially revised on 1/7/23)
 
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Katwick

Cartographer
Who would administer this, and what is the "significant bonus" you are thinking about?
It would be a formal InnoGames designed event, similar to the current Winter Event.

The discovery incentive could be similar to the current Royal items, or perhaps a free version thereof. It could be anything from a related building "teleported" into your Summons space, all the way to the initial release of a brand new building.
 
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defiantoneks

Well-Known Member
um, wouldnt there be a distinct disadvantage to all the people stuck with inactive "dead" coin cities? that would potentially drastically reduce the places to look. yes?
 

Katwick

Cartographer
um, wouldnt there be a distinct disadvantage to all the people stuck with inactive "dead" coin cities? that would potentially drastically reduce the places to look. yes?
If you've actually been looking at the cities of your Neighbors and Fellows, then of course you'll have a head start.

But every city in your entire world can be visited at any time by searching in the Ranking List. And yes you can already click on the buildings in any visited city. You'll get Banner that indicates the building name, and the level if it has one.
 
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SoggyShorts

Mathematician par Excellence
This an interesting idea with a few issues that would need to be addressed
1. Timezones. Players online would have a pretty distinct advantage over those still sleeping when the event starts.​
2. Load times. I know loading the cities of other players can be painful now, would it be worse if thousands of players were doing it at the same time? (I don't know which end causes the lag)​
3. There are at least a few players who can use a script to search for a specific building (like how elvenstats updates your whole FS with a click)​
sorry to bring only problems with no offered solutions, I'll keep thinking on it
 

Katwick

Cartographer
This an interesting idea with a few issues that would need to be addressed
1. Timezones. Players online would have a pretty distinct advantage over those still sleeping when the event starts.​
Vary the start times, or release the event list piecemeal.
2. Load times. I know loading the cities of other players can be painful now, would it be worse if thousands of players were doing it at the same time? (I don't know which end causes the lag)​
You can only visit one city at a time, and the information is pretty basic if the building graphics are already in your buffer. The event buildings should probably be downloaded (into your cache) when you first open the event, in any case, so that you can see what you're trying to find when you actually visit the cities.
3. There are at least a few players who can use a script to search for a specific building (like how elvenstats updates your whole FS with a click)​
Special permission is required to use the application interface. The best most of us can do is to look at the browser debug.

I'm more concerned about ElvenStats and ElvenArchitect getting hammered, but any serious competitor will have already downloaded and printed the data for some likely cities before the event starts.
 
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StarLoad

Well-Known Member
Just playing devil's advocate here but
1. Would this not favor long-time players that have the advantage of knowing what the bldgs look like, or if part of a set to know what it looks like at a glance? Like the moonstone Library set for an obvious one.
2. If it was on a delayed start some would be at a disadvantage based on time-zone, work requirements, and many other things that would make it unfair.
3. There would need to be a specific way to determine if a bldg existed in a city or do you expect the mods to go hunt and verify every answer? and what if a player deletes a bldg to fool the game?
4. Would the bldgs have to be obscure and not like a fire chicken that many have?
5. I can't see INNO doing an event that is not game or theme based nor one as complex as this would seem to be

I am sure there are more issues I have not thought of at this point.

Ed
 

Lady Dastardly

Well-Known Member
But every city in your entire world can be visited at any time by searching in the Ranking List. And yes you can already click on the buildings in any visited city. You'll get Banner that indicates the building name, and the level if it has one.
This is not true for mobile players. You can only* visit your discovered neighbors, FS members, any player with a top 50 ranking, and if you are lower than 50th yourself, the 2 players ranked higher and the 2 ranked lower than you. You cannot see the rest of the rankings, and you cannot click directly on a city on the world map of any undiscovered neighbor. This makes the goldmine issue noted by @defiantoneks even more serious.

Also, mobile players can only see the level of buildings from the build menu. You cannot see the chapter or evolution level of any event/evolving bldgs. You can't even see the Ch. level of magic residences or workshops.

I may be misunderstanding. but most of the in game functionality required to run this type of event (world event chat, clickable links, etc) currently does not exist and would require a massive amount of work to execute. Granted, those may be desirable additions to the overall UI (and have been requested before), but I think we are unlikely to get them in service of such an event.

Personally, this event idea is not at all compelling to me, and sounds like extremely tedious busy work. I do appreciate new ideas, just not my cup of tea.

*edited to add that yes, you can visit if you know the name of a player and do a search for them in the ranking tab
 
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Katwick

Cartographer
Just playing devil's advocate here but
1. Would this not favor long-time players that have the advantage of knowing what the bldgs look like, or if part of a set to know what it looks like at a glance? Like the moonstone Library set for an obvious one.
Certainly, but caching the building graphics when you first open the event, or even displaying each graphic when you click for details, would ease the pain.
2. If it was on a delayed start some would be at a disadvantage based on time-zone, work requirements, and many other things that would make it unfair.
Vary the start time each week/month or, probably better, release the event buildings a few at a time during the first 36 hours of the event.
3. There would need to be a specific way to determine if a bldg existed in a city or do you expect the mods to go hunt and verify every answer? and what if a player deletes a bldg to fool the game?
I don't think the selection criteria needs to be anything fancy. Pick a random building+level in a random city, and verify that it's not already on the event list, until you have 60 or so unique building+level event items that therefore exist in at least one city in that world. I'm assuming that each world will be quite different.

Chat, and the world forums, could get pretty lively when somebody finds a rare building thst everybody is looking for.

If somebody used one of my rare buildings, and then asked me to delete it so they could win, I'd tell them to take a hike.
4. Would the bldgs have to be obscure and not like a fire chicken that many have?
Quite the contrary; too rare would be a problem.
5. I can't see INNO doing an event that is not game or theme based nor one as complex as this would seem to be
Remember when we actually had to visit a city to find something to buff? This is a miniature version of a game feature that has already been coded for the most part. But visiting 200 cities per day, and looking for something to buff, was simply too tedious.

From InnoGames' point of view, I'd suggest that they'd be quite happy to get a lot more mileage out of features that already exist.

When did you last actually admire 10 cities in a single day? This would be Peaches and Cream for recruiting, or for finding a more appropriate Fellowship.
I am sure there are more issues I have not thought of at this point.

Ed
 

Katwick

Cartographer
Not in the mobile app. You can only visit cities you have discovered.
There's a list under the mobile portrait that already has a partial list of cities in rank order, plus a field for naming any other city that you want to visit.

You could use that list, but it might be advantageous to allow users to simply click on the city names that are already on their map.
 

Katwick

Cartographer
This is not true for mobile players. You can only visit your discovered neighbors, FS members, any player with a top 50 ranking, and if you are lower than 50th yourself, the 2 players ranked higher and the 2 ranked lower than you.
Screenshot_20230105_002430_Elvenar.jpg

Eve1 is nowhere near my city, she's not ranked near me, nor is she in the top 50.
Screenshot_20230105_004446_Elvenar.jpg
 
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Lady Dastardly

Well-Known Member
You did a player search for Eve. It is true that you can visit them if you search for their name, but of course you need to *know* their name to search for it in the first place. So a mobile player is supposed to go to the world map and randomly pick the name of an undiscovered neighbor, then go back to the city screen and open the ranking tab so that they can type the neighbor's name into search, and then visit the city to find out if it holds whatever building they are trying to find. If it's not, they get to repeat the whole process over and over again...for 60 different buildings. It currently takes my tablet anywhere from 20 to 30 seconds to load another player's city. None of that sounds like my idea of a good time, or has anything to do with the actual game. At least the current event quests are things that you do during the course of regular play. Nothing turns me off faster than when a game doesn't respect my time.

An elixir manufactory is from the build menu. I did say you could see the levels on those.
 

elvenbee

Well-Known Member
@Lady Dastardly ,
On mobile, I just have to type any 3 letters and a whole list of names comes up. I can visit them all.
Then you have to take into account that we have to just start typing random letters into the search to find names. I'm fine with Neighborly visits the way they are. This would take up a ton of time and I already know some of our FS players log on literally to only reset their factories and do neighborly help sometimes.
 

Katwick

Cartographer
Suggested Event Format
The world map uses a diagonal 27 cell tessellation.
  • Vertically, every 3rd city has identical boosts
  • Diagionally, upper left to lower right, every 3rd cell has identical resources/boosts
20220722_185929.jpg

I'm suggesting that we could use a presentation format similar to The Spire, except that each of the 10 stages would have 6 target buildings that would have to be found in sequence, plus a Mystery Chest. To ensure that the event isn't time zone sensitive, an additional stage (a door) would automatically opened every 6 hours.

Each Target Building would be associated with 9 chests, one chest for each type of city: Marble thru Gems. There would be two very different activities:
  1. Find a city that HAS the (randomly selected) Target Building, enter the city name on the related chest type, and thereby create a clickable link to that city
  2. Click on the previously defined chest that best suits your needs, which would open the selected city centered on the Target Building, and then click on the Target Building. (Take some time to poke around a bit, as you might be able use that city to discover subsequent targets.)
Each chest would contain prizes that are very similar to the tournament prizes for the sector immediately above the indicated city, with values that increase just as they do when you progess through first 60 sectors for the related Tournament, plus a modest chance to win an event Sorcery Token for a chapter appropriate instance of the Target Building.

IDENTIFYING a city would earn the contents of the related chest. The first identified chest would earn the 6 star Tournament prize and the last 4 identified chests would earn the 1 star Tournament prize, plus a modest chance to win a chapter/boost appropriate major event Sorcery Token for a Building of the same type as the Target Building

Subsequent players would be awarded a random item from their selected chest/city, plus a modest chance to win a chapter/boost appropriate evolution/upgrade minor event Sorcery token, when they found and clicked on the Target Building.

Claiming one chest for each Target Building would be free, for each player, but Diamonds or enough event Sorcery tokens would be required to claim more than one of the nine chests.

Subsequently clicking on any (or all) of the linked chests would yield one modest prize per level, and would allow you to move to the next level

There are two subtle points:
  1. An Event Targeted City should be temporarily "Discovered" for any player who arrives through an event chest, so that visitor buffs can be applied (for Coins) and returned (for both Coins and Supplies). If it's technically feasible it would be nice to continue swapping buffs, by using the regular notification dropdown lists, until either party drops the ball and breaks the chain. Note that this would ease the pain of being surrounded by Goldmines.
  2. Although most of a city's manufacturing buildings should be of only the boosted type, all nine city types will always have an associated chest, even though an unboosted high level Manufactory may be difficult or impossible to find.
The folks who are familiar with the cities in their own Neighborhood would have a distinct discovery advantage, but that familiarity is actually the point of the whole event.

(Lightly edited on 1/7/23)
 
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ajqtrz

Chef - loquacious Old Dog
In essence this is a dual layer scavenger hunt. You first have to find a city with a desired building in it, then go to that city and search it for the building. A bit complex and time consuming if you ask me.

Making it a single layer scavenger hunt would make it a lot easier. In that case just opening the city would be enough to have a pop-up congratulating you, and awarding the building. There would be a number of buildings per each round, and no doubt a forum thread announcing which buildings are in which cities. If done right the forum announcement could and would give the mobile players the needed info to get to that city.

So the contest starts and on day one everybody is looking for ANY city that has a specialty building in it. Once found by somebody, it's posted and everybody who wants that building can then go there and claim it.
Day 2, ditto. And so on.

It isn't actually necessary to load every city. Let's say we just go to the world view, open the city list and work our way through it in the normal manner. Since most of us don't do that daily, it may be we will during the event and probably increase the "visiting" load of the servers by about 3. (Since I estimate based upon my limited experience that we visit about 1/3 of our neighbors on average per day). In any case, it could be that when you "hit" the right city it loads (Then if you wanted the dual level scavenger hut you'd have to find the building in that city, which would not be too much of a load since it would be cached and could even be cached locally).

So somebody finds the city and posts it in the forum then everybody goes there and either automatically gets the building or has to find it. In any case, maybe the first X number of people to find the city get a bonus reward as well...but only if they post it in the forum.

In addition, perhaps the placing of the item in the city is randomized so that it may or may not show up when you search your neighbors or fellowship and thus, there is no advantage to being up early since you have to search for it after it is posted...at a time you don't know AND if you search too early....too bad.

And, perhaps it expires after X days?

In any case, I do think the basic idea is sound as long as it doesn't get too complex. And advantages might be :

1) Some people would actually visit all their neighbors instead of only the sub-set of those who have visited them.
2) If there was a bonus for posting in the forum first we might see more people in the forum
3) Fosters a better spirit of cooperation as the more players who do all their neighbors the more likely it will be found by somebody. And once it's found, everybody wins!

So it's really a community scavenger hunt (first layer) and an individual scavenger hunt (second layer), if desired by the devs.

At least that's my take on keeping it more simple.

AJ
 

Katwick

Cartographer
Making it a single layer scavenger hunt would make it a lot easier. In that case just opening the city would be enough to have a pop-up congratulating you, and awarding the building
We sort of have that already:
  1. 90% of the effort is about FINDING a qualifying city. And it's NOT a blind search; the most productive approach would be to search the cities that you've long since discovered in your local neighborhood, with a focus on the likely cities on the related boost diagonal. You'd enter the found city name to LINK the event chest, THEN ...
  2. 10% of the effort is about clicking on the centered building (simple and fast to avoid a boring clickfest) and, while you're there anyway, poking around a bit for some good ideas and an intuition about where to look for subsequent target buildings.
Folks put a tremendous amount of effort into laying out a pretty, functional city, and it seems a pity that only the owner ever sees it.
 
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