04:27 ST
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[EVENT] Kerric's Magnificent Caravan (July 19th - Aug 2nd)
Glaive We haven’t had any reports of issues with the memory game in the Hidden Door marker besides this one. The card should flip over when you click on it! I will bring it up with glitch to see if he has any ideas about what could be going on. If you have extensions installed, it may be worth disabling them temporarily to see if one of them could be interacting strangely with the game.
Posted 07/21/20
Myla Oof, thanks Myla. I didn’t know which extension was interfering so I turned all of them off. It worked after I did that and refreshed the page.
Posted 07/21/20
Glaive Yay, glad to hear it!! 8)
Posted 07/21/20
PSA for anyone else struggling to submit your finished adventure: it looks like the permalink you submit has to be from one of your own posts and not Boney’s!
Posted 07/21/20
Oh yes, confirming that is the case! We put a check in to make sure players submit their own posts, but forgot that most people will just try to permalink to the first post, which would be a bone monster post for adventures.
Posted 07/21/20

Also as a note for anyone who has submitted something, but had it rejected:

For Set for Adventure: Almost every case is because of a broken image link or a link directly to the puddle (which just shows me a blank forever coat).

For Trapped! the adventure, almost every case is because the three sentence requirement wasn’t met (players submit the finished adventure with blank posts or one sentence posts).

You can resubmit links after you’ve fixed the issue, and if you have questions about why it was rejected, feel free to reach out to Crow, Dove, or me!

Posted 07/21/20
Note about the Whodunnit challenge:

One of the statements in the logic puzzle is incorrect: “The canvas backpack does not contain the blue lunchbox.”

Glitch is in a meeting at the moment so he can’t fix it, but we’ll get it fixed soon!

Edit: Whodunnit has been updated

Posted 07/21/20, edited 07/21/20
The City of Mirage

You have reached your destination! Below is some additional information about this event.

Event currency
Today your caravan reaches Mirage, a beautiful city hidden away in the desert. You’ll meet Balaar, a merchant who hangs near the gate of the city to trade with travelers who are able to make the tough journey. Balaar will make quick work of the scarabs you’ve collected on your way here, and will exchange them for a number of different prizes. On July 26th at 12 PM Server Time, Balaar will see that you’re running low on scarabs and offer to sell you up to 7 scarabs for gems at a price of 3 gems for 1 scarab.

Myla note:

This is a test run of offering a limited amount of event currency through gems. We are trying this out for a couple of reasons: one is that we consistently get feedback from players that they weren’t able to get as many prizes as they wanted because of a lack of time and/or interest in a particular event style. We would like to see if this addition helps that group of players. The other reason we’re giving this a try is in the hopes of raising event-related revenue: currently running a large event like this one results in an overall net loss of between $1500 and $2000, and in particular given the current situation we’re hoping to offset some of this. We are hoping that this addition will be a win-win in terms of boosting accessibility to event prizes, and supporting our large events. We kept our usual calibration methods for determining the amount of prize currency you can earn through playing the event, so any prize currency bought through gems are extra on top of what is normally available. We will be doing a feedback form after this event to see how this affects player satisfaction, market prices, among other metrics to see if we should continue doing this in the future, and if we need to change anything about the method.


Activities
All the activities for the event are now unlocked, and players have until Aug 2 at 12:01 PM Server Time to finish the activities! Remember that if manually submitted submissions are rejected, you can fix whatever the issue was and resubmit. Feel free to reach out to Crow, Dove, or me if you have any questions about what needs to be fixed. Helping each other out with tasks by offering clues and spoilers is fine, just remember to put them in spoiler tags so that players can choose to look or scroll past! <3 We hope you are all having fun with this event!


Credits and Thank Yous
Crow: Crow did a massive amount of planning, writing, graphics-creation (including the title image and the journal pages) for this event! Crow is really the backbone of our ability to put out these large events.
Dove: Dove also helps out and fills in gaps where needed! Dove put together the logic puzzle activity.
Prose: Prose put together the wonderful adventure!
Loon: Loon offered some misc. help, like helping to make the Echoing Oasis example.
glitch: Glitch put together the hub and the new submission/grading interface (which has made manual grading and tracking so much nicer)! He helped us reskin some of our activities (e.g. Gemble, Shuffle Puzzle), got old activities dusted off an up and running again (e.g. the maze), and made a whole new game, and has been troubleshooting bugs.
King: King made the beautiful banner!
Eluii: Eluii made the reskinned version of Gemble!
Loon, Eluii, Plasma, priz, Rhyme, Myla: This is our event prize-making team who made the event equippable items and the event coats.

It takes a lot of time and energy to put these events together, and our staff team’s willingness to invest themselves into these events again and again is invaluable.

Posted 07/22/20, edited 07/22/20
I think after the third time playing an adventure-style event, I can confidently say this has surpassed my enjoyment of all other event types! I think it balances lore, puzzle challenges, and creativity in an engaging way. It was weird to admit to myself that I enjoy it more than click events, but maybe it’s because I find I’d rather grind in a video game than a pet site. Open World and RPGs get my attention in that regard, and overall I come back here to push myself to expand my art or writing skills over collecting everything like I originally did years ago. A heartfelt thanks to staff that continues to pour love into the site. Your care for the evolution of the website and community always shows! ♥
Posted 07/22/20, edited 07/22/20
Are there more items coming in Baalar’s Bazaar in the future? Myla?
Posted 07/23/20

ComicLudwig
There won’t be any more items added to Baalar’s Bazaar - what’s in there now are all of the prizes for this particular event.

Posted 07/23/20
Crow yay that’s really great!
Posted 07/23/20
King, Myla, is the Dunewalker‘s mask and other decorations toggle-able? Thx!

That is, if it was toggle-able, could you sent a toggles-off version? Thx very much!

Posted 07/23/20, edited 07/23/20
ComicLudwig Hello ^^ you can see the version of Dunewalker with all its toggles off here. I hope that helps :)
Posted 07/23/20
King oh that’s cute!
Posted 07/23/20

I really liked this event! I have to begrudgingly admit I enjoyed the semi-play at your own pace speed a lot more than I thought I would. The activities released in a day seemed (for the most part) like a good amount of activities - enough to get me through the day feeling like I’d accomplished something, not enough to make me feel overwhelmed, and leaving me very excited for the next day’s tasks. The only time I felt differently was on the first day when we only had the one, fairly quick activity to do; that was too few for my tastes.

My favorite activity was the Echoing Oasis one; that was a super fun game and I was kind of sad we could only participate once! I very much enjoyed the clue scavenger hunt, too, until I got to the last big riddle and I had to start banging my (dense) head against it.

I am perpetually in the group of people who’s unhappy with how many event items I can get over the course of these events where points are more scarce, because I like having one of every item and then usually one or more of the coats, and then there’s always been one or more items I wanted to get several copies of. Being able to buy scarabs directly with gems will help this feeling for me and I like it as a change, especially since the event point prices mean I can still get most of the things I want with what I’ve earned!

Thank you so much to everyone on staff who helped put this together; this has been one of my favorite events ever!

I wanted to write up my thoughts now while they’re fresh in my mind so I don’t forget them by the time the feedback form goes up :D;;;

Posted 07/23/20
one quick question! i noticed the ‘scarab’ item (an equippable one, not the currency) in the item database, and apparently, quite a few of them exist. however, they’re not in the event shop. how do you get those? because, like. i want. i care them.
Posted 07/23/20

Primarina
They sometimes drop from the Minesweeper game!

Posted 07/23/20
Status: currently having a huge problem with Echo Oasis.

I planned to write a description, but I think there’s absolutely no opportunity to do so? Opportunities was always being occupied? Almost every time I saw someone posting “claimed” in the threads to post written descriptions (tho at the start I’m far too inconsiderate that I didn’t claim cuz I’ve no idea how to describe that art in thread B).


Myla here’s a suggestion: post a/some new thread(s).


But I think that it’s better anyway. Thx.


Thx Crow!

Posted 07/24/20, edited 07/28/20
My last clue is “extra extra read all about it” And I’ve looked in so many places, but I just can’t find the last thing. Any help would be appreciated! :’)
Posted 07/24/20

Hecate

...here’s a guess: there’s a news page in the community dropdown menu that might be it?
Posted 07/24/20
Purr I’m so mad, I’d looked there but I scrolled down after you linked and squinted really close to my phone and spotted it, so thank you! Ahaha it was driving me mad
Posted 07/24/20
omg rip :‘D I’m glad you found it!
Posted 07/24/20
I’m totally lost on the order of directions for the 2nd part of Safe Passage… Can’t even figure out how the poem-y text is supposed to be relevant. Anyone have any hints?
Posted 07/24/20

Luminary

Check out the first letters of each word and search for directions.
Posted 07/24/20
Seems like much of the suggestions came from this thread: New Site Games Maybe. It’ll be great if the games can be regulated.
Posted 07/25/20

I mentioned in passing that I had had a ton of fun solving my Safe Passage clues using only the information directly referenced by the challenge. Here’s how I did it :)

The challenge references Professor Sprocket. His profile looks like this:

I also used a website called OneLook which lets you do wildcard dictionary searches, e.g. searching for fe?t would return all the words that match F-E-[single letter]-T, i.e. “feat”, “feet”, “felt”, etc.

My clues were:

I started by inferring that the sign on Sprocket’s lab door says “KEEP OUT!” based on the repeated second and third letter, and based on what one might expect to see on Sprocket’s lab door. From there, I could decode it this far:

Step 1
???e ?o??? ??o? t?e ?o??e?e??
t??t ?o?? o? ??? ?o??
??e??t ??e?e ??e??t ?? ?ue
tu????? o? t?e ?e??o??
e?t?? e?t?? ?e?? ??? ??out ?t

So far so good, lets start making up names for these letters to help keep track of them, then do some searches.

  • sideways-curly-H: based on “t?e” (clue 1 word 4), is probably either H or I
  • sweaty-4: based on “o?” (clue 2 word 3) is probably either F, K, N, R, or X
  • farting-JP: based on “o?” (clue 4 word 2) is probably either F, K, N, R or X
  • b-with-a-dot: based on “?ue” (clue 3 word 5) is probably either C, D, or H
  • hungry-bird: based on “?t” (clue 5 word 6), is probably either A or I

Now lets try to use some of those.

  • righty-A is probably either A or L:
    • Second clue, first word is four letters: T, sideways-curly-H, righty-A, T
    • Assuming sideways-curly-H is h: TH?T, so righty-A would need to be A
    • Assuming sideways-curly-H is i: TI?T, so righty-A would need to be L
  • q’ish-backwards-R can only be B:
    • Fifth clue, fifth word is five letters: righty-A, q’ish-backwards-R, O, U, T
    • Assuming righty-A is A: A?OUT, so q’ish-backwards-R would need to be B
    • Assuming righty-A is L: L?OUT, which doesn’t come up with anything
    • This also tells us that righty-A needs to be A

So now we’ve learned:

  • Since hungry-bird was either A or I, but righty-A is A, hungry-bird has to be I
  • Since sideways-curly-H was either H or I, but hungry-bird is I, sideways-curly-H has to be H
  • Since righty-A was either A or L, but “L?OUT” had no matches, righty-A needs to be B

Lets use them!

Step 2
?i?e ?o??? ??o? the ?o??e?e??
that ?o?? o? ?i? ?o??
??e?it ?he?e ??e?it i? ?ue
tu??i?? o? the ?ea?o??
e?t?a e?t?a ?ea? a?? about it

sweaty-4 feels like a good next target. Lets see what we can find:

Fifth clue, third word is four letters: sweaty-4, E, A, b-with-a-dot. We know sweaty-4 is (f, k, n, r, x) and b-with-a-dot is (c, d). There aren’t that many combinations, so lets just write them out and see what we get:
feac, fead, keac, kead, neak, nead, reac, read, xeac, xead

The only reasonable word here is “read”, so we learn:

  • sweaty-4 is R
  • b-with-a-dot is D

Not bad progress! Lets plug them in and see where we are.

Step 3
?i?e ?ord? ?ro? the ?or?ere??
that ?ord or ?i? ?ord
?redit ?here ?redit i? due
tur?i?? o? the ?ea?o??
e?tra e?tra read a?? about it

Lets see what else we can find now.

  • lefty-A has to be X (based on the last clue, “e?tra” really only has one possibility)
  • cursive-cf is probably either G or M
    • First clue, third word is four letters: farting-JP, R, O, cursive-cf
    • Assuming farting-JP is F: FRO?, so cursive-cf would need to be G or M
    • Assuming farting-JP is K: KRO?, which comes up with nothing
    • Assuming farting-JP is N: NRO?, which also comes up with nothing
    • This also tells us that farting-JP is F
  • sweating-P is probably either N or S
    • Third clue, fourth word is two letters: I, sweating-P
      • “I?” comes up with only N, S, T; but T is already taken, so sweating-P can only be N or S
  • Cf’ is probably either C, F, or W
    • First clue, second word is five letters: Cf’, O, R, D, sweating-P
      • Assuming sweating-P is N: ?ORDN, which comes up with nothing
      • Assuming sweating-P is S: ?ORDS, which comes up with C, F, or W
      • Also, we learn that sweating-P has to be S
        • (wait, what? Clue 2 word 4 is “DIS”?)
    • mountainside-cup can only be C
      • Third clue, first word is six letters: mountainside-cup, R, E, D, I, T
      • The only result for “?REDIT” is “credit”

Ahhh that “DIS” word was basically a play on “Discord”. Well, we have some good progress here. We learned:

  • lefty-A is X
  • farting-JP is F
  • sweating-P is S
  • mountainside-cup is C

Lets plug them in!

Step 4
?ise ?ords fro? the sorceress
that cord or dis cord
credit ?here credit is due
tur?i?? of the seaso?s
extra extra read a?? about it

At this point, it becomes pretty easy to fill in a few blanks:

  • “?ise” only really works with “wise” and “rise”, and since it’s the same letter as “?ords”, “wise words” makes sense but “rise rords” doesn’t. So we have our W
  • “seaso?s” really only works with N, which also gives us “turnin?”. In turn, that only really works with “turning”
  • From context:
    • “Wise words fro? the sorceress” is probably not referring to frogs
    • “Extra extra read a?? about it” is pretty clearly L

 

And there we have it!

Wise words from the sorceress
that cord or dis cord
credit where credit is due
turning of the seasons
extra extra read all about it
Posted 07/25/20, edited 07/25/20

Hi, I need some event help please!

-Discovery Dig
I think this could be right, but which is the last artifact? Do I guess or is there a definite answer?

 

-Is there a good guide for Mastermind?
How do I guess which colour it is?

-Safe Passage
I got the clue “turning of the seasons”, any idea what it might be?

Posted 07/27/20

Marina

The mine in the last two unmarked squares is in the bottom square, so you should dig the top one - a couple of your other flagged squares are actually safe, though!


Circled spaces should be safe.

Posted 07/27/20
Stanari

Okay, thank you, it looks now like this, but it didn`t say it is solved, so there must be tile left? Or do I need to click anything to finish?

Posted 07/27/20
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