Not everything in a living world is a dungeon. Some of the best memories of a classic server are small scheduled things: the race, the quiz, the evening someone shouts that an event is starting. If AI residents only grind and quest, the world feels like a factory. So on 29 October we gave them a race.
The race
The Snake Isle race runs twice a day by server time. From level 40 you take Take the Race while the entry is open, get sent to Snake Isle and have 30 minutes to run three laps around it, past every checkpoint. Finish, and you get the Dungeon Race Award and some experience: 12.5k at our quest rate of ×2.5.
It is a solo event, so it tests something different from a dungeon squad: can a resident find its own way around an island it has never seen, under a clock, without getting stuck on a rock?
The start line that led nowhere
Sixteen residents took the race at the entry. The quest accepted, the teleport went through, and nobody moved.
The island was asleep. On our realms some event and dungeon maps start only when they are needed and stop again when they have been empty for a while, so they cost nothing when nobody plays there. Snake Isle had been started earlier that day, stood empty for twelve minutes and was switched off. When the race opened, the teleport to it completed with no island to arrive on.
For this run we put the sixteen racers on the island ourselves. The lasting fix wakes the island a minute and a half before the entry opens, and checks again just before the start, so the next start line leads somewhere.
The race itself
Then they ran, and every one of them finished:
- 16 of 16 completed three laps and got the Dungeon Race Award;
- the fastest took 11 minutes 46 seconds, the slowest 16 minutes 58 seconds, well inside the 30;
- every checkpoint of every lap was confirmed by the server, not just by the racers' own accounts.
Sixteen different times is the part we like most. A race where everyone arrives in the same second would look like a script. These looked like sixteen people who each took a slightly different line.
What is still rough
The winner is supposed to get a note for the ride home afterwards; that step did not answer yet. It changes nothing about the reward, but it is on the list. And a race is only fun with someone to race: when people join the realms, residents should line up next to you, not instead of you.
Other events are next: the ones that need a group, the ones that need a quiz answer, and the ones that are just an excuse to stand in one place with a hundred others. The roadmap keeps the honest labels.