It would be awesome if the HINT system would be extended into Lolliprin, at the very least. The syntaxes needed for this stuff are not at all obvious, especially with what you're told you're supposed to do with the items. I made an alt, and I'm trying to do the Fink side of it, but I keep getting hung up on syntaxes. You get a jar you're told to fill with lava, but when you make it to the lava pool, and try to FILL JAR WITH LAVA, you're told the jar can't be filled with anything. You're supposed to drop it into the pool instead, but that's so not intuitive at all. Later, you get a pouch you're supposed to fill with stink fish. So, you get stink fish, and when you try to fill them, or even put the fish into the pouch, you're told that the Gods have not designed the pouch to be filled with anything. Wtfh.

So, I'm thinking it would be quite helpful if if the HINT thing would say "try this other command instead" or whatever. Instead of just being told that you can't actually do what you're told to do with these items.

Has any true newbie ever completed these quests without help?

I did, but I am awesome.

Yeah, I'll second that, actually. If you truly were a newbie without any help whatsoever, I'm quite impressed.

I mean, I'm just really bad at quests anyway, and I'm ok with that. Finding the right syntax for quest items seems to be 90% of the challenge to them here, at least for me. However, the idea of quests that are supposedly aimed at newbies, that instruct you to do one thing, and then simply tell you that it cannot be done (without any clue whatsoever to what you're ACTUALLY supposed to do with them), seems counterproductive.

I did my honors quests a long time ago (2007?) and hopped through the same hoops. I guess nothing has changed. Whenever I got stuck with syntax I would ask someone who had completed it before or a Guide and they would sometimes be able to help. Back then Lusternia did not have CONFIG AUTOMAP ON, key denizens like Mother Mucka and Finko could be slain and the honors quests were all the rage so the challenge was getting from point to point quickly (I wrote down all the directions XD) before your item decayed or other newbies took something you needed.

The one thing that I did struggle with was the trebuchet. I had the sling or whatever it was prepped, very people had helped the finks and I must have failed a dozen times before I finally figured it out. It was mostly trial and error. At that point I was worried about reaching circle 20 and getting the boot.

This. Bolded for emphasis. Right now, this is pretty much a necessary part of completing the quests (for anyone who hasn't played before, and doesn't yet realize you need to try a bunch of random stuff that isn't hinted at), or so it seems to me. My question is why? Should not newbie quests, by their very nature, be able to be completed by the newbie, without any outside help? So that any newbie who puts their mind to it can work it out alone, and not just the rarest, most astute of them? What if nobody's around who has the knowledge, or the patience, to help?

Then you're basically out of luck.

I'm fiercely independent IRL and IG but with the latest Earth Day event one lesson I've learned is to ask for help if you're struggling. You're not doing anyone a favor by suffering in silence and Lusternia is a multiplayer game so you should interact with people. You're not stupid or cheating or anything of the sort, the quest is probably badly designed. You could even poke me, my memory might be a little fuzzy but the answer is there...... somewhere.

Right now, yes. But does it have to be so? Surely the Guides are asked by at least some of the newbies, and I'd be highly surprised if there weren't a few issues that keep popping up for a great many of them. Why shouldn't those things have HINTS to clarify them? I'm sure there's more than just the FILL stuff I ran into. I haven't even tried the Gnome side since a year and a half ago, but I remember getting pretty frustrated back then, too.

And I didn't raise the point so that I, personally, can figure out the quests. I tried to get my boyfriend to start playing the other day, and he quit, because he said that the quests "didn't make sense". I made this alt specifically to try those quests to see what he meant, since it's been so long since I tried that I really didn't even remember any more. When I was a newbie, I just gave up, and went to see what else Lusternia had to offer. My boyfriend didn't, and is now wholly uninterested with what he calls a "poorly designed game". How many others don't?

One of the selling points of this game is


What the Caverns are doing now is teaching pure Newbies that actually, quests don't require "logic and deduction", they require luck at trying random syntaxes that may or may not work, and can only be discovered for sure by having somebody tell that to you. I think that extending the HINTS beyond "Turn the crank to open the Portal", with a bit of advice for what to do in the later parts of the quests, could go a long way.

The Newton quest, honestly, is a bit too convoluted anyway, considering how they're supposed to start

I thought I was ubercool when I got Fartokan's catapult to fire once, and I was convinced that was the honors quest.

Nope.

edit: that was on my third character.

Whenever people ask "What now?" on the newbie channels, and especially when they ask something about Newton's, I always try to drop the hint of where the quests start by mentioning something along the lines of "Sometimes even the most innocuous of objects has a grand purpose. Nowhere is this more true than in Newton Caverns." (I really should alias that or something...) It's not something specific to Lusternia, really. MUDs are notorious for making you play Guess the Verb/Noun. Really, Lusternia tends to reuse the same verbs a lot, too, so it even avoids that particular trope.

I'll admit, though, that the Newton's quest starting points aren't immediately obvious. At the same time, the Guides are pretty good about making it known that they're willing to help, even if the newbie's City isn't or can't for whatever reason. (For the record, the gnome side starts with a skein of thread, and ends with a blessed cluster of crystals. (Which can be a pain even when you DO know how to get them and get up and down.))

The very first honours quest I did in any IRE game was the Gnome one. I know Gleip managed to solve both with minimal assistance from me. In both instances, syntaxes were the hardest part, and it is one of the main flaws of the newbie quests. I agree on a hint system for syntaxes on the novice quests.

I could swear there were hints for some of this stuff - I was a newbie to Lusternia and did both sides, so somehow I muddled through it. I swear I remember there being some hints that were displayed. I do recall that the biggest trouble was that I didn't realize there was an extensive quest chain (never had seen questing like this before, and it took me a few days of honorsing people to realize how the system worked) until I was like...level 19, so I had to keep losing influencing battles because I kept getting booted out of Newton.

Whats fun is that the guides aren't even told how to do the honors quests (at least not when I was guiding). I made an alt and muddled through all the newton honors quests, with some help from random people I met in Newton, and some knowledge about minor parts of newton (where things are, how to get gloves, etc). Then I put all the quest info in a txt file and gave it to a bunch of other guides so they'd be able to help too.

I have to agree though, it is pretty silly that the primary challenge of some quests is trying to guess the syntax. Doesn't seem like a lot of fun to me.

It would be nice if the syntax for various quest actions were made more flexible. As it is, you often have to guess at the exact syntax used by the quest designer, which is more annoying and frustrating than challenging and fun.

I actually never got to do the fink and gnome honors quests, because I leveled up too quickly and was banned from Lolliprin before I could finish everything there.

I've just done both the gnomes and the finks, and they weren't especially difficult. The main troubles were the stinkfish (made me lose the fink honours quest once) and the rock hogs (made me lose the gnomes twice). Mainly because I either couldn't find them or couldn't get them to drop the required items before mine decayed.

The jar thing wasn't that hard to do (I'd already done the balls, so I guessed that'd be how to do it), and I honestly suspect a very efficient person could do both at once.

I can, however, see how people can have trouble with certain parts. I was especially puzzled with getting the trebutchet down (remember how to open the Iron Portal, guys?) but I got through that before my things decayed.

I can't wait to do the rest of the honours quests. Are they any real difficulty?

(Oh, but I have to say the money you get is very lacking off the quests.)