The Ultimate Timegoldgearsink

Another Test has been unlocked in Egypt. This one is known as the Test of the Vigil.

Unlike the Obelisk Test, Vigil seems mostly a cooperative affair, with smaller, subtler opportunities to be selfish (er, self-interested). It is also extremely cunning design.

Ever played one of those parlour games at wedding dinner parties where they ask tables to engage in a cooperative scavenger hunt to find 8 pairs of socks, a blue belt, a yellow hairband and what not?

Code it in and you essentially have the Vigil test, also known as the all-voracious sacrificial fire, the muncher of hoarded stockpiles, and one of the best ways to get a group of people locked into mass hysteria "wasting" supplies with crazy grins on their faces, hyperventilating on occasion.

Initially, I took advantage of the Vigil to get the precursor test - Initiation into Worship - done. This test shows its poor legacy design. There are no in-game hints about what you need to do, besides a list of its requirements, and the game directs you to a website guide for clearer instructions 'because they have not had time to code it in yet.'

Except by now, the website guide doesn't exist anymore. Passing along the instructions for the Worship Initiation has fallen squarely into the players' hands, so we all end up having to 'check the wiki' to get proper directions.

First, one needs to have a partner. This is all very well if you game with a spouse, or I suppose, can afford a 'mule' aka second account. For cheapskate but game-serious newbies, this means a tedious hunt for someone who doesn't sound like a moron, who can find their way around without extreme handholding, and who hasn't done the initiation yet, and wants to do it NOW, with you.

Urgh.

I'd actually given it up as a bad forced-socializing idea. Except to participate in a Vigil, you need to have done the initiation beforehand. And the leader of the Vigil was doing all the advertisement over regional chat for me. When I'd logged on at noon my time and learned about it, there wasn't much anyone else on, obviously.

12 hours later though, there was an erudite-sounding newbie on the region chat who wanted to help out with the vigil. A quick /info on him showed he was only an Initiate of Five. Aha. This very much suggested he hadn't completed yet, as the two hardest are Worship and Thought. I sent him a chat and sure enough, he hadn't.

Whee. Partner obtained. The next obstacle was obtaining two hard-to-get materials, a small diamond and a drop of camel milk. None of those would be obtainable the regular way, so it was down to 'networking' aka asking everyone I could think of - my guildies (from two guilds), the leader of the Vigil who also happened to be a GM and a guildleader of the south part of the region's home guild, my neighbours, etc.

Personally, I found this rather annoying, to be dependent on someone else's largesse. But sometimes, you just have to swallow your pride, wait for them to respond in eon-slow time, and smile and say thank you.

The rest was a bunch of collecting other materials from my plentiful stash (yay for being a packrat, more on this later), and rehearsal and discussion of the route with fellow newbie. This made things a little more challenging than say, me tagging along with a veteran, but fortunately, fellow newbie was erudite and we managed to communicate without resorting to sign language or 'u follow wat i do, kk?'

We managed to muddle through the whole thing, with only a minor technical hitch at the beginning, and nothing wasted, thanks to our paranoid preparation beforehand. One's experience, pleasant or otherwise, is truly dependent on a good choice of partner. Some time later, we stood as proud Initiates into Worship.

Now we were ready to get sucked up into Vigil frenzy.

Passing the simple test aka Principles simply meant that you made one 'sacrifice.'

See, the person who starts the vigil gets to do all the grunt work of constructing the big Sacrificial Fire. After that, the big kahuna of a Fire will tell you, in intervals that start off at an hour apiece and get shorter and shorter, his shopping list of materials he wants to burn up and suck down into the electronic void. Bringing it the correct amount nets you one sacrifice.

This is, of course, really easy when it decides that it wants 1 slate shovel, or 31 onions (grown 5 apiece) or 122 bricks (made quite rapidly), but a little less fun when it decides to ask for rare materials like 5 Medium Emeralds or materials in bulk (1009 rotten flax, 784 water in jugs).

And it is quite all random. Actually, it seems to have a table of things to request - a certain number of common materials, some uncommon, some rare, etc, and random rolls some number for each, but essentially, we're at its mercy.

To pass the actual Test (with a capital T), one has to be one of 21 people per week with the highest Vigil score. This score is equals to the number of sacrifices you made x the number of people who participated in the same Vigil. And the score from various Vigils all add up.

Again, we have the crazy social dilemma situation that ATITD is so good at.

Teamwork is crucial for a Vigil. Obviously. With no leader, you're going to have people willy nilly hurling things into the fire, preferably the easiest things first, all overlapping effort, competing with each other for the most sacrifices, and the hard ones that get left behind will kill everybody once its timer runs out.

Oh, did I mention you can generally take slightly over an hour to fulfill each request? Otherwise, the fire dies and the Vigil ends. No more sacrifice. No more points.

So you need a leader who has some means of organizing people, plus people you can (relatively) trust. In this case, most of us were all residents of the same region, asked to join the same guild for joint communication chat, so there was quite a strong drive towards cooperation.

The leader basically assigned each person one sacrifice to achieve and made sure everyone had a sacrifice in before starting the next 'round' of sacrifices. A big warehouse of extra stockpiled materials also helped, along with equipment everyone could use to produce more materials.

Still, there is the opportunity to be self-interested if you really wanted to risk the consequences of everyone getting angry at you. You could try and jump the queue and chuck easy stuff in without the leader noticing. Me, I refrained, but I suspected another chap was doing so from time to time. I think the leader knew/suspected, because shortly, she sent this person out to collect limestone - a greatly time-tedious errand that keeps one far far away from the fire.

There came a point in the Vigil when we could barely keep up with the rare materials. We were fast running out of all stockpiles of gems and fish, which necessitated people with 'connections' begging/bribing/trading for them with their friends in other regions. The leader announced that she was going to use her fast teleport ability to try and shuttle the crucial stuff over before the time limit expired, and pretty much gave carte blanche to forget the queue and dump in whatever else was possible, because we all didn't know if she was going to make it in time.

So the few of us self-interested folk remaining cheerfully indulged in a little free-for-all fire dumping to grab some extra points.

Oh, we did narrowly scrape by. About two times. Before the rest of the requests were just impossible to attain. I'd given up by then and was making my excuses to leave. (5am, y'know?) I suspect they came to the same conclusion shortly after.

The rest of the self-interest comes from the others in Egypt. If you don't stand to gain from this Vigil, it's actually in your best interest to keep your stuff for a Vigil you can attend. Either that, or take advantage of the high demand situation desperate people locked in a Vigil get into to trade things at over-average to ludicrous prices (depending on how badly the Vigil-ers want to continue...)

Strangely enough, I quite enjoyed the whole experience. It's nice to work in unison as a team, each doing what they can do best (I do great growing veggies, papyrus, other things, some other people mine or grow flax, yadda yadda) towards a greater goal. The time limit just makes it more game-like and adds adrenaline and urgency. It gives a good leader opportunity to get people organized.

And ultimately, it's a mad, crazy scavenger hunt that really tests all your resources and networks to the maximum. Stockpiles, equipment to make the materials, connections to people with more stockpiles, etc.

Hilariously, it all goes up in smoke. For points, and the hope of maybe passing the Test. IF your vigil was long enough and you got enough points. Sure, yeahright.