fastest bugger ideas

Big Red Kitty has called for a gnaked gnome race – if you’re interested, go play. Me, I got an idea while reading some of the comments about pushing it to a ‘world tour’ race.

Rallies.

OK, here’s how a rally works. You go to various points, you get something to indicate you were at the point, and when you’ve gotten to all the points you go to the finish line. Fastest time with all the points found wins. There are a lot of variations, and I’ll list a few. You can have everyone start at once, or you can have individual starts with independent timing. You can have a cut off time, and the person who crosses the line with the most points before the time ends is the winner. You can have a fixed penalty time for each item missing, which also creates the “one more, or go home” strategy question. Yes, a scavenger hunt is indeed a type of rally, just ‘get this stuff’ instead of ‘go to these points’. OK, you’ve got a handle on the idea (if you didn’t before), it’s time to get some details.

Now the tricky part of the rally is proving the points. Oh, it’s easy when it’s only a handful of friends, but when someone like BRK calls a race the number of participants could easily go to the hundreds. So, let’s examine mechanisms.

Screenprints are great – but I don’t know too many people who want to receive and judge potentially thousands of screenprints. This is supposed to be fun, and the rewards are probably going to be restricted to bragging rights. So… no thank you.

If you’ve got some friends to help run, a workable solution is for each friend to have several stacks of a cheap, unique item. Then the ‘rally mark’ comes by opening a trade window and getting one of these. If doing this, a macro to speed trades is essential. (hmmm, I may have an idea for that script post that’s frustrating me. Anyway…) An alternate is to have the friend saying something over and over and over. This means anyone in ‘hearing’ range gets the message, which means you don’t have to get quite as close.

In addition to having a number of friends willing to help, you have to hope they aren’t interrupted – family, work, disconnect, lag… you see the problem.

So with all these, I had me an idea. However, in return for sharing I want you all to contribute more of… sorry. All around Azeroth (and the Outland) there are places you can get unique items, some of which are BOP, but which require no prerequisite beyond, maybe, a little cash. Some examples – call this the beginning of the list:

Holy Spring Water – BoP, found in Stranglethorn. You don’t need the quest to get it, though you do need to deal with at least one naga guard.

Lots and lots of food and drink that’s only sold in one place – from Deeprun Rat Kebobs through Junglevine Wine to Cenarion Spirits – not to mention various goods only available at Darkmoon Faire or during holidays and other events.

OK, you see the idea. I’m looking for suggestions for rally point markers. The best are, in my opinion, those that are BoP (like the Holy Spring Water) – that helps reduce some of the “party cheats” where a group goes to various places and piles their various goods on one member who gets credit. And ideally we’ll get enough to allow two advantages. First, that nobody is likely to stockpile ALL of these on an announced server, and second that a rally organizer can tailor the selection to the rally – level, faction, places to go, and maybe even time of the day/year.

The key things is that even if a hundred gnaked gnomes descend on the location at nearly the same time (assuming they can get there) the rally mark is available to them all – first click, first serve, but no other limits.

~ by Kirk on January 24, 2008.