Talk:Unofficial quest solutions

From Discworld MUD Wiki
Jump to: navigation, search

Some research into Maintainer of the Balance needed?

There might be a bug or maybe the Maintainer of the Balance quest is based on guild levels or just random chance? But I have gotten the quest after only putting in one or two crystals.

See below where only one crystal satisfied the quest, I am a level 95 ninja:

take satchel from store
You get a medium satchel from a pocket in an embroidered canvas backpack.
take crystals from satchel
You get two black crystals and three white crystals from a pocket in a medium
satchel.
i
You are unburdened (11%) by:
Wearing : a pair of black soft-soled boots, a ruby-studded sword belt, an
          embroidered canvas backpack, a black bandana, a golden lemur, a ninja
          mask, a brown belt, a decorative black sash, a blackened canteen and a
          pair of leather-strap gloves.
(under) : a yellow stone ring.
Carrying: two black crystals, three white crystals, a medium satchel and a large
          black towel.
Your purse contains only moths.
put crystal on altar
You put one of the white crystals on the low altar.
The white crystal ignites in a flash, rapidly burning away to nothing but the
merest trace of grey ash.
A warm voice speaks in your head, saying: Thank you for aiding in the
maintenance of the balance.
You have completed the quest Maintainer of the Balance, in which you visited
justice to the extremes (120000 xp).
A Creator Collector Card appears in your inventory with a flash.
You feel very much more energetic.
l card
This is a Creator Collector Card.  It has a plain black border around
the edge and a small picture of Thorgal on it.
Sketched out in a chalk outline, Thorgal has been drawn by one of those Nac Mac
Feegles.  Wearing a silly kilt and making some sort of gesture, this Nac Mac
Feegle seems to have gotten a good likeness of Thorgal.

Wrathe 19:46, 6 January 2022 (ET)

beam.to/lawks

I've finished transferring over the old beam.to/quests content, so now is a good time for anyone that gets the urge to add more solutions or fix existing ones as needed.

Spoilerised quest solutions

Anyone think it would be worthwhile to spoilerize the solutions (but not the quest titles) on these pages? I'm thinking of a template... I guess it would specify white font and white background, so that you'd highlight the text to view it. --Ilde 23:02, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Sounds like a plan. I tried to create a hidden template from the Wiki was first started, but it lacked some base code, should be possible now with the additions Drakkos implemented. Rehevkor 23:41, 19 July 2009 (UTC)
Awesome, I got it to work. Highlight to see the spoiler. --Ilde 06:21, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Separate quest pages

Would it be a good idea to start making seperate pages for individual quests? That way they can simply be searched up rather than having to click through the categories and scroll around, and more detailed information can be added without clogging up the list style pages. -- Menouthis 21:46, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Hm. Maybe... there are an awful lot of them, though. Seems like a big job. --Ilde 23:59, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
I doubt Wikipedia ever adopted that attitude! :-P -- Menouthis 00:16, 8 August 2009 (UTC)
 :P Wikipedia has a lot more users! Still... we could make a nice header template for them, a spoiler warning thing. (I think we should do that and keep the "hidden text" feature. Otherwise people could stumble onto the page and accidentally get spoiled; that wouldn't be nice. I mean, just looking at the "random page" feature--we've only got 648 articles, and with a few hundred quest articles you'd have a largish chance of landing on one from that.) And they could be categorized in a much nicer way, too, instead of all this redundancy there is currently.
For a header... something like this, maybe:
This is a quest solution page. It contains spoilers.
Easy enough to put that in a template. I mention it because if we do separate them all out, it'd be easier to put it in at the start than to go back and add it to all of them. --Ilde 02:46, 8 August 2009 (UTC)
I would very much like to start separating all quests onto their own pages. Perhaps we should start a work crew and divvy up the task. -Taepha 07:43, 12 August 2009 (UTC)
In regards to the spoiler warning, I actually don't think it's necessary to do that at all. Anyone reading a quest article here rather than on the official website will be looking for the full solution anyway, and even if not, it's fairly easy to see a section titled 'Solution' and stop reading there. - Menouthis 10:08, 12 August 2009 (UTC)
I'd just like to have something that makes it obvious--even if someone got to the page through the "random page" thing and hasn't seen a quest page before--what it is.
"...it's fairly easy to see a section titled 'Solution' and stop reading there." Not if you tend to glance over the whole page before reading it (unless specifically trying to do otherwise), and there's not so much non-solution information about quests that the section would be under the fold. That's why I like the hidden text--it means you have to intend to see it, to see it. --Ilde 18:54, 12 August 2009 (UTC)
I'm quite happy with a little spoiler warning up the top: I find it unobtrusive, and potentially helpful (even as a skimmer). However, I am not a fan of 'highlight to read' white text. It's meaningless to anyone with a screenreader and it can be very difficult to read for everyone else. For instance, in Safari on my Mac, it's a very pale blue highlight around white text, and white on medium blue, as it is most other places, isn't exactly easy on the eyes either.
Frankly, there do not appear to be any good solutions for hiding spoilers in a wiki. I think people can probably figure out that it's a spoiler before they read the whole solution, myself. Otherwise, some sort of javascript/css hide script (which has its own browser support drawbacks, and again isn't necessarily terribly useful to screenreaders) would be preferable. -Taepha 06:00, 13 August 2009 (UTC)
I'd heard about the screenreader issue, but I've never heard of a solution that does work for those. Though it seems like a textual warning that comes before everything else might be acceptable if they read things linearly.
I didn't realize different browsers treated it so differently, though. In all the ones I've used it's always been two high-contrast colours. :(
which has its own browser support drawbacks Argh, yes, let's not do that; I hate sites that do "fancy" things that make them not work at all and/or make my computer beg for mercy.
We could use whitespace--push the solution downwards so it's not the first thing you see. That's a bit ugly, though, especially if there's nothing to fill it with (we could make a quest infobox, but there's not much non-spoilery that we could actually put in it).
Of course, I guess we could just take the "random page" link off of the navbar, since offhand that's the only way I can think of that someone would happen upon a quest page accidentally.
--Ilde 06:53, 13 August 2009 (UTC)
I think this is too much debate over something that doesn't need to be done. Wikipedia don't spoilerize their plot summaries. If 'X is a quest ...' and the ==Solution== heading isn't enough for someone to realize there may be spoilers, they must be monumentally stupid :-P
You keep mentioning a solution heading/section. But, there's not much information about a quest that isn't the solution, or part of it. What are you picturing a quest page looking like--what other sections would there be? --Ilde 21:54, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

New hidden text thing

I made a new hidden text thing that I think could replace the current Hidden template:

Click to hide text Click to read text
Here is some hidden text.

Here is a second line of hidden text.

I used the multiinfoboxes as a base for it, and it seems to work well even when there are many on the same page.

Here it is with some visible text specified:

Click to hide text Click to read text
Visible text goes here.
Hidden text goes here.

Suggestions? I'm hoping this will play nicely with screen readers, and not suck in any browser... obviously I don't want to actually replace it without being sure it won't just make the text disappear into a black hole for some users.

--Ilde 03:06, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

Any updates on this? A lot of us still really, really dislike the highlight to read aspect of the current quest solutions. The click-to-view solution here looks very nice and clean, but I know I'd even settle just for sufficient white space - especially if there was an included warning at the top in large colour text saying 'WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW, CONTINUE AT YOUR OWN RISK'.
If people still ignored all of that and got spoiled, it's not really anyone's fault but their own.
--Helaena 12:57, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
There was more talk about this in Talk:Main_Page#Quest_pages, some liked the highlighting.
We could go ahead and make individual pages in normal text with big spoilers on top for each quests and include those as hidden on the list pages. I could do probably do that during the holidays if I get enough time.
--Frazyl 08:22, 10 December 2013 (UTC)
Sounds like a good plan to me - I'm not exactly positive how you'd write those templates up, but I'd be happy to help once there are some examples I can copypasta.
--Helaena 10:57, 11 December 2013 (UTC)