How I Spent My Vacation: Elfing

It is incredibly poor form for an MMO developer to make negative statements about an MMO.

Some of this may sound as though I am doing that.

However, just to be clear: I am enjoying this game as I have enjoyed few others.

As it is meant to be a humorous game, pointing-out funny things about it is not intended to be criticism.

There’s no way of saying anything about the game without illuminating one fact in particular. So rather than appearing to be sarcastic, or blind, I’ll just be direct: The English translation is completely terrible.

For me, that is a great deal of the game’s charm, and personally I hope they don’t ever fix it.

Ok? Ok!

I’ve been playing since the previous beta period. To get into that, I had to post an email address to a public forum, requesting a beta-key be emailed to it. On the one hand, that’s weird. On the other hand, it erased a sense of obligation to provide beta-tester feedback.

Now it’s in open beta, which means you can play without sacrificing an email address to the spam gods.

Since it’s a free-to-play, buy-stuff-if-you-want-to game, this makes the beta pretty much the same as just playing it.

Apart from the localization-issue (i.e. that whomever did it doesn’t know much English, nor that very well), I really haven’t encountered any bugs or incomplete content (er… to level 11, which means the newbie training area seems complete).

They even did in-game holiday events and such, so I haven’t a clue what the beta is testing at this point.

Like any other MMO, after creating a character and strating the game, I was plopped into a town with a quest to talk to the nearest NPC.
Unlike any other MMO, the NPC was completely unrecognizable to me as such, even despite holding a massive GUIDE flag, playing a horn and being twice the size of all other NPCs.

I suppose the developers might read that and think, “Geez! What do we have to do to make it more obvious which NPC you should talk to?!” (if they knew English I mean, which they don’t).

Oh man, nothing at all. My bad, there! (I’d reply if they did, in flawless Mandarin).

The first order of business for any newbie in any MMO is to go kill 5 rats, dogs, or the like.

Here it’s Flame Red Lip Monsters.
One of the coolest features is the local map, and auto-pathing to whatever you right-click. It essentially provides a menu-view of the town, without replacing the town with a menu.

I right-clicked on the exit there, it drew the dotted-red path and my little guy began walking. After closing this map-window, my little guy continued walking.
The specific exit-point is a little glowing teleporter doodad, which zoned me to Setting sun prarie, home of the dreaded Flame Red Lip Monsters.

I was greeted by a nurse.

A wet nurse.
Feel free to lookup the term wet nurse, if you aren’t laughing hysterically at this point.

As I was in no need of… her… yet… I wandered on to find my Lip Monsters.

Suddenly - swoosh-swish - I was in combat. Unfortunately, not with a Lip Monster, but with something far more frightening.

It was a Fart Drillmaster.
In that first fight, I learned how to attack, how to order my pet to attack, that I had a pet, that combat occurred in an off-map combat-screen, and that monster encounters happened the way they do in a lot of console RPGs, rather than the way they happen in a lot of MMOs.

I think my character also gained a level of experience, as did my pet Fluffy Mouse.

It wasn’t long before also learning that a lot of monsters have pets, too.
They were no match for me and my Fluffy Mouse.

With every victory, we gained xp. I also gained potential, and Fluffy Mouse gained discipline.

Sometimes we also found a trophy.
I know you’re wondering what a trophy is, because you don’t know, right? All you need to do is to read the description:
Other times, the only trophy we really needed was a thanks.
Per the norm, quest loot was considerably more appealing. I hope I never need to use my Imperial plus-calcium potato!
All the quests that I completed were all of the kill 5 of this, kill 10 of that, collect 4 of these by killing 4 or more of those sorts, excluding quests sending me from one NPC to another. Stock MMO quests.

One other quest some might consider an exception, was the become-a-soldier-quest itself, after killing 7 of something, being required to swear that my little guy would fight to the death for the Imaginary Goddess.

But most people wouldn’t consider that an exception, and would instead say, “What now? I didn’t really read it.” Stock MMO players.

Radically not stock-MMO, there’s an in-game quest database, organized by zone under each of the tabs, listing every quest by title and level, along with the location, text task, reward, and - if part of a series - the prior and following quest.
I find myself wondering if they are genius enough to have intended it to be available in the live game, smart enough to leave it accessible in the live game, or if it’s strictly a beta-test tool.

If it’s not just for beta… well then, daaaaaaaamn…

I went from a mere level one newbie, with a speed of 5,540…
… to a level 11 soldier with the slightly lower speed of 5262.
Keep in mind, I accomplished this without figuring out what Speed meant.

If that’s some kind of +5k bug, you’d think it’d have an obvious impact on, for example, anything being able to kill me. Not so!
At level 10, there were four professions to choose from, but I already had my mind made-up. Mis-remembering a conversation with an NPC earlier, I thought he’d said soldiers instead of guards, and I was determined to be an Elf of quality and courage.
Screenshots don’t lie though, do they? Guards, he’d said. Oh. Well, I wanted to pick soldier anyway.

My best friend, Fluffy Mouse, was a soldier, after all.
I found the career tutor of the soldier, Chief of 790,000 Imperial Armies, to see if I could become a soldier myself.

At the time, this is what he told me about soldiers.
I love that.

As of today, he says something else.
I can only hope that he actually says both, and that one was not a replacement for the other… That is comedy genius, right there.

Another side to all that comedy is discovered in reading the Lone Wanderer’s description of the Rover class.
Maybe I am an idiot, but when I read that, then the description of soldier made sense to me… whereas before it had not. Though I don’t think of soldiers in the real world this way, in game-terms I have the term fastened to mercenary, thoughtless, uniformed followers - typically up to no good.

But no, man… soldiers. I hope Elf Online doesn’t localize the original idea away.

Another impressive feature I’ll mention is this button.
With just a click…
Bam! Baby mode. I know, right? Why hasn’t anyone else thought of that?

And finally, you have to be impressed with this ingenious anti-cheat system (that is, anti-bot or anti-macro).

About once an hour, a window like this pops-up, assumes focus, and demands you address prior to doing anything else in the game:
‘Anything apart from typing in world-chat, that is, asking what in the hell that means. Depending on the time of day, you might receive numerous answers. All of them will be different, and all will be wrong.

Finally, you’ll just pick something.

Then the next window will open:
You’ll see four icons, none of which were in the first window, except sometimes. Inquiring in world-chat won’t give you as many choices for how to handle it this time, but any you do get will be completely different than the previous explanations, and will also all be wrong.

You’ll have to pick one sooner or later!

You might see this:
Rock on!

Otherwise, you’ll get a system message informing you that you will be logged out in 60 seconds, and that you should just logout right now.

For informational purposes, I will say that I chose the third icon both times in the above test, without knowing why I did, nor having so much as a hypothesis to put to the test.

Does this mean if you pick a shirt the first time then you should pick the shirt the second time? Does it mean you play ‘one of these things is not like the other’, and select ‘the one which does not belong’ (as they used to say on Sesame Street to teach kids that differences democratically determine deportation designations)?

Is the second window is merely a second chance, which I have a 75% chance of seeing, while overall there’s a [insert math] chance of passing the challenge frequently enough that everyone imagines their solution to be working?

I have no freaking idea. I suspect there are three things for one slot, one thing for another, and you should choose the one thing… and likewise suspect you won’t know which slot some of the things you see might belong in.

Bottom line is, humans are much closer to solving this puzzle than any computer a cheater would use against it. Maybe IBM’s research division could build a bigger, bluer computer, or NASA could convince their alien spacecraft SI to work on it. Maybe Google could figure out a way to get more cranial rats within a 10-foot ’server cube’. One of those could potentially solve it more quickly than the average Human.

But I just know there’s got to be some severely specially-abled mental giant out there, so incredibly more brilliant than anyone else, we declared him mentally disabled at a very young age and locked him away. A modern-day Kim Peek, if you will, whom we could impose upon long enough to provide us with the answer.

Sure, to ask for an explanation as well would be much too ostentatious, but with the what, we could work on the why at our leisure, and from both ends of the problem. We could even utilize idle CPU time with distributed computing to crack it, if we weren’t all gamers.

Wait. Isn’t Kim Peek the modern-day Kim Peek? Let’s just ask him.

Wait again. While typing the above brilliant bit of prose, I responded to two more challenges… and yeah, you just pick the one thing that is not like the other things.

200 golden coins, two clicks.

I wonder if that could be automated…

By on Jeff Freeman on Mythical Blog.