The Primary Generator is at 1063 motes.
The Guardian Drachou is at 4505 butterflies.

There has to be a reason why there is such a huge discrepancy. Please, simplify or make the Hallifax power quest a LOT more spammable and reduce the power from 4 back to 2 in line with the rest of the orgs. There should be no reason why that if Hallifax had a power quest anything as easy as any of the other orgs, we wouldn't have at least 3000 motes by now. The point is just that the Generator quest is not appealing to anybody and the extra power we get from each sphere just isn't worth the trouble. In the time I take to kill enough mobs for a single sphere, I could just go to Air and gather 4/5 times the power.

EDIT: Hey, I said more than I thought I would.
EDIT2: Seems like things have changed since I came back.

Not commenting on the difficulty of the quests, but I would like to point out that power gain from those things caps out at 1k for Magnagora/Celest.

My esteemed colleagues and myself have discussed the power quests of the organizations of the Basin of Life and have reached these conclusions:

1) The difficulty of the quests are - Glomdoring < Serenwilde < New Celest < Gaudiguch <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< Magnagora <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<ad infinitum<< Hallifax.

2) The Magnagora and Hallifax quests are the most amazing in terms of flavor and style. However, after a while it gets a bit tedious. This is especially seen in Hallifax's, where you have to go visit a million mobs and use vnumbers most of the time. Not to mention memorizing color combination, if you don't want to keep referring back to a help file.

3) Hallifax will be screwed easily if/when their supermobs get destroyed by Gaudiguch, since it's hard to upkeep their nexus guardian (Generator).

4) Most people would not be inclined to do the tedious quest if they have the alternative (Cosmic empowering, or Elemental hunting) which all yield more power anyways.

That is all.

At a glance, you're using the wrong symbols. Glomdoring's difficulty is not greater than Hallifax's.

Gaudiguch's quest was adjusted slightly (or so I'm told) so that it would be less difficult for newbies. For a new player it might be a little difficult, but obviously it isn't so tedious that people aren't doing it.

I agree entirely that Hallifax has earned the award of "most tedious power quest" by a mile. While it's nice that Hallifax gets 4 power per sphere, anyone looking for actual power in efficiently or in large quantities will hunt Air or skip the spheres and get the crystals from the nexus world.

I approve of this message.

I bumped the amount of charges you get per attempt (from 1 to 2) when I glanced yesterday morning and saw how low Hallifax was. Seems like that was an oversight on our part.

We'll see if more changes are needed.

I think the biggest problem with the Hallifax power quest is that the returns for the person completing the quest are greatly diminished compared to the other quests so it appears tedious and not worth the effort. Heck, I was able to go from level 2 to 50 in a matter of hours completing New Celest's not to mention the amount of karma recieved. For the same amount of time and effort as the Hallifax quest, I could complete the Glomdoring postules (Does that still exist?) and make 1500 gold.

And I think I am rambling, so I think there should be an increase to the rewards the person completing the quest recieves. Its nice Hallifax benefits from more power than any of the other quests but there is no incentive for a player to do it.

The importance of spammability should never be understated. Hallifax's power quest is either impossible or very, very difficult to spam, and takes a long time. This, along with the required use of vnumbers, makes it just too much trouble. Thus the generator's protection field thingy being at one-fifth power as compared with the dracou's four-fifths or more.

Hm. I took a peek and it wasn't giving the proper amount of xp/gold, so I've increased it. It should be a bit more than you get per supplicant.

I'm going to add a tracker for the quest, so I can see how often it gets done, how often it can be done, etc. Then we can look at it with a bit more objective information, and Est can make a call on how best to fix it.

I've gotta say, I graduated the collegium on Xaakin without doing the power quest, because when I first started reading on it, I just kind of sat there going "... wut?"

The help file about it helped, but having to wander all over creation in that Gods blessed labyrinth of a city just doesn't do it any favors. Plus, what was said earlier, memorizing the colors. I mean, I know my colors, but... pleh. ><

I did it for my collegium test, and I probably won't ever do it again, to be perfectly, bluntly honest. Though the joules do give nice xp at Xaak's level. >.>

Alright, good to hear I'm not the only one who thinks that thing is vastly intimidating. I went to do it, started to read what exactly I had to do, then decided to go do something else. Here I thought I was just stupid/lazy. Although in reflection, the fact that it is both hard and tedious doesn't necessarily preclude the possibility of me being retarded..... Quick, somebody offer me a can of duster and ask me if I'm Walking on Sunshine.

I think all that needs to be changed is getting joules to repopulate in the Transphenortex Grid a bit faster, without removing spheres from your inventory. I actually enjoy doing the quest and it's great while you are waiting on other things to repopulate. My only issue is that I can fly through about 5 or 6 spheres and then it's usually heliotrope that causes the problem by requiring 2 blue spheres and almost all my yellow and blacks go to waste as you get bored waiting for joules to repop.

To avoid using the specific ID numbers I found that if you hunt all the joules, drop them all at the generator, pick them up in the order that you will need them for the generator's colour and then you can spam GIVE SPHERE TO SHUFI etc without having to check the ID code for each sphere.
EDIT: Careful if it's a Research Lab B one though, then you will need to check the ID code once!

People having problems with vnumbers? As in finding rooms? All I can say is that Hallifax is actually really easy to navigate so just get lost a few times and don't rely on a speedwalker.

Lastly echoing Colour Notes also helps, I have it set up so that if I type in the needed colour, the Research Lab and spheres required pop up. Saves me checking the Generator scroll!

It's intimidating, yea, and as a new player, it'd be a little perplexing at first, but it isn't impossible. Spammability is key, I agree, but I also want to make sure that the intricacy of the quest is left intact.

It's part of Hallifax's raison d'etre for its quests to be intrinsically complicated. Have you ever tried to read the description of the different Matrixes (matrices?)? Tried to travel through the continuum?

So. Heed my warning! We (Hallifax purists) like things "complicated." Maybe clean up the amount of different colors there are and designate one or two research scientists tops, along with Shofi, to mix the colors?

It seems a little disingenuous to suggest that anyone who likes the complication factor for what is pretty darn close to a newbie quest anywhere other than Up To Eleven isn't a "Hallifax purist." I'm trying to think of the term for that. I think it's No True Scotsman, but I'm not sure.

That all said, I agree for most quests. The generator-empowering quests are complicated, and rightfully so. But the power quest is an extremely important lynchpin of Hallifax's conflict capabilities -as well as- a quest that is supposed to be a key part of a newbie's advancement and experience. Quite frankly, it's unsuitable for that. Most people are doing it exactly the number of times they have to and, after that, doing it very rarely if at all. This is a sub-optimal circumstance, and one in which finicky RP (and not the Supernals-said-so type, either) might just have to give way in the interest of a better game.

the spammable quest, and the personal incentive are the two big things.

I can do the Celest power quest from top to bottom in 15 minutes. It's not hard, but it's not worth as much as the halli quest in power or motes, and I'd do Celest's ten times out of ten against ours. Ours even isn't that complicated, it's -tedious-, it takes too much thought for a reward that, in the minds of its users isn't worth it.

I had to put it into aeromancer advancement requirements for people to do it -at all-

Yes, thank you. I wasn't being facetious at all. Good of you to set me straight.

I also offered up a suggestion for de-complicating things. By condensing the quest, we can still keep the structural integrity of it intact without having to overhaul it completely. Eventru's quick fixes tell me that They Who Code don't really want to consider a rewrite, but if we're calling it finicky RP, then... well, shame on you, Eventru! Shame!

Without accidentally triggering the woe of actual Hallifax purists again, I'll clarify the intentions behind my last post: what can we do with what we have?

I think the best change would being able to target a specific colour, and give a specific colour to Shufi/researches instead of having to look up the id. "GIVE RED TO SHUFI. GIVE BLUE TO SHUFI" This along with upping the spawn rate of joules like what Dorcha said would really help imo.

I think Someone (from the top of my head I think Eventru, but this might be wrong) said it wasn't possible to do that and compared them to essence (which apparently can't be targetted by darkessence, lightessence etc). I'll see if I can find the thread/post that says so...

Ah, there we go:




Oh, and the thread is this one.

Here is the current order, according to our helpfile.



(Chateruse isn't used, perhaps that ought to be changed?)

The various joule used to create a full round of spheres would be

red 11
blue 11
yellow 9
white 6
black 2

Adding chateruse to the list would make it

red 11
blue 12
yellow 11
white 6
black 2

Here's a list if you wanna do your own math.


The current spawns of joule is 5 yellow, red and blue, and 3 black and white.

My suggestion is to change the joule spawns so that you can always create one exact round (either with or without including Chateruse as a goal in itself). Perhaps a little change to require more blacks and less white while you're at it. Columbine isn't much of a colour. Make it require a black instead and call it "pearl".