Those, plus the arbitrariness of item resets, are what make quests so unfun.

Except you were. If he asks for help, then it's obvious that what was provided by the NPC wasn't intuitive enough for him to attempt that specific syntax. So saying "just do what he tells you to do" makes you appear condescending and arrogant. If you want to hint, try something much more helpful such as, assuming it is true "the syntax you need is directly said by the mob".

Edit: Removed. I don't feel like getting banzored.

It made me laugh and cheered me up a little when it was there though and for that I you.

I. at least, initially interpreted that as "dig", not actually "POKE X WITH Y" (a syntax which, AFAIK, is never used anywhere else).

I didn't even know poke took "with" as an argument.

Only in very specific circumstances; they've added this in for the very newest quests which tends to be 1) Buggy, 2) Difficult to figure out syntax wise, and 3) Inconsistent (they're all with different commands). There's even a quest where you have to use "with object" in two entirely different commands, and one of them isn't even the one he tells you!

It just makes the quests harder for no real reason, heh.

Yeah, man. Completely crazy. I have no idea how someone is supposed to crack that code.

And since I missed this post earlier - yeah, both the default item reset arb-ness AND the fact that other people can (accidentally or otherwise) screw it up for you so easily, especially if the quest is also in a bashing area, AND the fact that they're so often buggy as hell and it's not easy to figure out whether a quest is buggy or not, especially when the admin don't know either, and consequently you have no way of knowing if you're doing the correct method or what you're doing wrong if you're not.

I'm not sure why I keep trying to do the Newton quest on my alt (several attempts so far, but the widgets are on an insane reset time or something), maybe it's some kind of childhood trauma for me. They're victims of all of this crap except the buggy part, and I'm not even sure about that last part.

The bugginess is the only one that really annoys me ever.

What. More hidden syntaxes for quests?

I completed both of the newton quests with my first character, whose name I can't even remember now (he was a nihilist, iirc), so unless they've somehow become bugged recently (I completed one side with Cern when he was still newton material, but couldn't remember the other side before I hit 20) I don't think they're bugged. I actually found those quests not to be so bad.

Honestly, raising Night and that dang tower of hanoi piece were much more difficult for me. That could be because it took me a good while to realize it was a tower of hanoi puzzle, though.

This. I don't interpret being told to use a shovel to find spices with poking things with a shovel as opposed to, oh, I don't know, digging with it.

Thanks to Arath for the e-support though and Rika for helping my floundering, quest-retarded self <3.

Syntax hunting is the third biggest problem I have with quests. Second is the item resetting. The first is definitely the amount of bugs that there are. The worst thing about these bugs is that you don't know if you are just an idiot and missed something or if it is genuinely bugged. Then there are cases where you BUG things and are 99.99% certain that you've done everything correctly just for the generic "Not a bug" response. I know at least two quests where I've asked a lot of people and all of them agree that it is bugged, but apparently we're all just doing it wrong.

The resetting items, annoying syntax hunts, and purported bugs have pretty much convinced me not to bother with quests unless they offer a needed reward.

This is coming from a person who's solved Infocom text games and Sierra On-Line parser adventure games without any hints. I love puzzle-solving, but it has to be done well.

You know what I like best?

The bugs where they exist for 3 weeks (stopping you from killing Zenobia), where everyone is experiencing it exist because everyone is turning in Kepherans and getting no bloated sharks. Ever. With hundreds of kephs being turned in every day.

Then, after about three weeks, get told, "Not a bug, we're getting bloated sharks just fine. Don't know what you're talking about." Go down, turn in 1 kephera, and there's a bloated shark.

At least that got fixed.

Hey. It could be worse. You could be forced through an event to do a quest that is so bugged, it can't be done even through luck, which has been reported as such many many times and is always dismissed due to a lack of information.

How does one roleplay a reincarnation? As in how does one speak of previously being one race and now being another? Like if you were a trill and reincarnted as a human. How do you refer to how you miss flying and such. Does one just offhandedly remark that they chose to reincarnate? Just curious before I go around saying something.

Some people play up that the reincarnation is that they misremembered and got mixed up in the Portal of Fates, and are getting the error corrected. Most people just say they reincarnated so they can have a 16 int and 4500 health or whatever, because that's how most people play.