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Victoria Quest Speedrun: Introduction

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by NoChorus, May 30, 2022.

  1. NoChorus
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    NoChorus Red Snail

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    Mar 24, 2020
    Male
    2:34 AM
    Bandit
    Welcome to my thread of Victoria Quest Speedrun, yet another dumb way to play MapleLegends for extremely bored people. It all started one day when I was asking random people for Garnet ores at KPQ on my newly made character. Naturally someone asked what do I need the ores for, and of course I replied it's for a quest. They seemed intrigued and further asked if the quest is worthwhile. The answer is sadly no. 20 Slime Bubbles, 1 Garnet, 20 Pig Heads, and a bunch of miscellaneous mob drops spread out 3 different towns for a +50HP Pig Headband. Nonetheless, I still planned to do it. In fact I completed, or was on the way to complete, every single quest I came across. I mean who doesn't want to click on random lightbulbs just for the sake of it? However, that person seemed quite impressed by my completionistic view and commented something along the line of "Are you trying to speedrun all the quests from scratch?" Clearly I wasn't at the time. Besides, that person obviously had not considered the time scale it would take to complete ALL quests. But the concept is still very interesting, at least to the quest lovers like me. Therefore months later, here I am making this post.

    Fleshing out the speedrun in my mind turned out to be surprisingly fun and I want to share this thought journey with you. Here's a disclaimer that I have never participated in any kind of video game speedrunning, casual or serious. Suggestions to improvements are very welcome.

    The appeal is simple. Complete a set of quests, likely low-level and as comprehensive as possible, from the very moment of creating the character. Now, it sounds very attractive to simply pick up and complete all the quests that pop up, but there are a bunch of caveats that either drag the speedrun over for literal days or feel like cheating. I will address them as followed.

    First thing that came to my mind is: How should I cut the quest list down to a reasonable size and still have fun doing them? An easy solution is to filter them by region and the required level. The region restriction is for some obscure quests around the map like Ludibrium or Aqua Road. They have level requirements close to Lv. 10 and some even none. Including those quests feels very wrong since you'd have to take a ship or two just to talk to some NPCs or kill some mobs that has nothing to do with the rest of the speedrun, or even climbing down Eos Tower and talk to more NPCs while collecting 10 unstackable etc.'s. You get the point. By far Victoria is the best choice of region. It's the first place you arrive after Maple Island. The quests fit a new character's capability and are intertwined so it makes routing interesting. Some quests are quick grabs. Some are questlines that ask you to run back and forth between towns. Sometimes you would skip collecting a mob drop for now in order to accept another quest later that requires the same mob's kill count. Sometimes the quest requires you to straight up farm the same mob for 1hr+. Also personally I find Victoria quests the most enjoyable due to nostalgia.

    Sadly, this isn't the end of the region problem. There exist plenty of cross-region quests, a lot of which start in Victoria. Eventually I decided to cut them all out for the same reason. It feels wrong to require the speedrunners to take multiple ships at the very end of the run. If done competitively you'd have to time the starting to line up with a ship's departure. It's clearly asking too much for such a silly, light-hearted idea.

    Here comes a seemingly innocent question: How do you define the region of Victoria? Well, some places are obviously NOT Victoria, for example Orbis, Mu Lung, Ariant, ... but what about Amoria? NLC? World Travel? And to some extent Florina Beach? I could've consulted the opinions of the people doing Victoria-lock. It's a self-restricting way of playing the game that doesn't allow the character to leave Victoria, similar to Islander. But instead I went on deciding it myself. After all this is my speedrun. My solution is to simply open the quest tab. If the quest is under the Victoria tab, then it's considered Victoria. So Amoria and Florina Beach (duh) are inside Victoria. NLC is under Masteria so it's outside Victoria. And each World Tour is its own thing, outside Victoria. Also Taipei 101 (AKA Kerning Square for y'all GMS folks) is under Taiwan, outside Victoria.

    Let's talk about the other restriction next, level. For convenience, I will explain the Maple Island technicalities first. Obviously, your character will be created on Maple Island, but the quests to speedrun are in Victoria. Now, if you're thinking of rushing to Victoria ASAP, skipping the bad EXP/effort ratio quests and paying 150 mesos to Shanks for the ship, I'm honestly disappointed with you. The whole point of the speedrun is to *complete all quests (*: as many as possible while being interesting). No quest will be skipped. Some might be unfortunately excluded due to unfortunate situations, but none should be straight-up skipped. The Maple Island quests are all required to be done in principle. Really the speedrun should be named Maple Island & Victoria Quest Speedrun, but it's lengthy and wordy so I cut it short to just Victoria Quest Speedrun, or VQS if you will. On the other hand, we can make Maple Island Quest Speedrun its own thing (MIQS?). We need to draw the line somewhere, so why not draw it elegantly along the already self-contained region of Maple Island? It would be way shorter and possibly less interesting, but I think it's still a well-rounded idea.

    So we've established that the quest list can be as short as only Maple Island quests. But how long can it go? The only way to find out is to try it out, and so I (yet again) made a new character to do more quests. Spoilers ahead. The first meaningful cut-off point in Victoria is actually as low as Lv. 10. The next would be Lv. 15. Then Lv. 20. And then Lv. 23. And then Lv. 25. And then Lv. 30. Most quests in Victoria come in 5-Lv. intervals. The outliers are not significant enough to make them their own sections, except Lv. 21~23 which is a spread of short-and-sweet quests and two monstrous grind quests. More on that later. This means the speedrun would have multiple versions, or multiple leaderboards (if they ever fill up).

    After these finicky details being addressed, it is time to bring up the elephant in the room. What if I just ask for my guildies or multi-client to genesis all the mobs i need? Or what if I made a godly snowboard and transfer it through storage along with 13 ATT gloves, 20 ACC eye, 22 DEX robe, and 20 speed & jump shoes? (Apologies if my numbers are off.) Obviously that makes the whole speedrun pointless. Therefore the rules (I made up just now) say your character CANNOT in any point of the speedrun:
    1. Join a party
    2. Trade with anyone
    3. Enter Free Market
    4. Pick up any item that doesn't drop from a mob you kill/an object you break
    5. Kill any mob while another player is in the same map with you
    For less of a game-breaking reason but just equality in general,

    6. Enter Cash Shop
    7. Use any gachapon ticket (You can still pick them up and use them after the speedrun)
    8. If an event is ongoing, exchange anything from the event NPC (You can still pick up event points/drops as long as they do nothing before you exchange them)

    Point 5 is to prevent marginal abuse of maps that spawn multiple types of mobs where only one specific is the one you want. Another player could still help out without partying with the speedrunner by cleaning out the unwanted mobs. Point 6 + 8 effectively ban the usage of pets, NX purchased or event. Basically I think NX should not in any way shape or form affect the speedrun because I don't want anyone to commit outside resources into it. The most significant possible NX usages would probably be pets, teleport rocks, and inventory expansions. What I envisioned is a speedrun where you manage mesos between pot usages and NPC equip purchases (yes this might be a thing) and prepare multiple town scrolls, not just nearest town, for the optimal routing. Point 7 is an odd one. At first I thought it's cool to let speedrunners roll for equips or scrolls they might somehow be able to use to their advantage, until I rolled some "Sap of Ancient Tree" on my test character. If you don't know what it is, it's a rare drop ("Use" tier) from Dark Axe Stumps that buffs your magic attack. One of the quests requires 20 of those. So yeah. You have to save the tickets up after the run is done. Similar drops include "Weighted Earrings", normally only obtainable from Wild Boars or Zombie Mushrooms. I farmed one on my test character at over 800 wild boar teeth, plus almost 200 charms of the undead.

    There are still two problems I cannot think of any solution from a ruleset. First one is the skill Echo of Heroes and similarly GM buffs. GM buffs are less of an issue since FM is banned and you cannot enter any party quest either. But if the rule straight out says you cannot accept an Echo buff, people could snipe your promising run with that. They can invalidate your run by running up to you and cast an Echo. I doubt this would ever happen but in principle it would be a bad rule to flat-out ban Echo's. Alternatively we could pretend that I didn't think of this at all and let people bring their friends to Echo themselves 24/7. Looks way more reasonable to me.

    The second problem is the event EXP buff. We can either ban all runs during events or just accept that runs during events will have an edge on the rest. I'm leaning towards the latter.

    Now we have the framework in mind, I started compile the "official" quest list for the speedrun. Here's the Google Sheets: Link. It is about 98% finished, not including community feedbacks. You don't have to click it if you're not interested enough. I will talk about the list below. The interesting parts, anyway.

    But before that, here's a thing I want you to know: Questlines (my definition here) are special quest sequences that not only are in the pre-requisite relationships but also take up the same slot in the quest tab. A questline has its own name while each of its individual quests has their own name, too. The questline name refers to the entire sequence of quests it contains, and it doesn't have its own contents (i.e. requirements & rewards). In the sheets I group the questlines together as a drop-down list. Note that a questline can be a pre-requisite of other quests, meaning you have to complete all the quests in the questline in order to start the following quest(s). End of insignificant details.

    Let's start from Maple Island. I listed all the quests in the order of encountering them in a typical play-through. Everything on Maple Island is dandy and included in the list except one: Yoona's Quiz on Shopping. You need to buy an etc. from Cash Shop for 1 meso. The fix could go either way: Exclude the quest from the list, or change Rule 6 to "You cannot spend any cash, donor, vote, or however you obtained them." I don't have any strong feelings toward either. Interestingly, the final quest, Bigg's Story on Victoria Island, can only be completed in Victoria. This means a Maple Island Quest Speedrun actually ends in Victoria. Feels like a nice way to wrap up.

    The next thing we're looking at is the very top portion of the Victoria Quest List. I order the quests in the same order it would appear in the quest tab. By default the quests show up in the order of their required Lv. If it's a questline, the required Lv. of the first quest in the sequence is used. Starting off we have 3 quests without any Lv. requirement. Unfortunately, 2 of them are problematic to be included in the list: "The Wandering Alchemist Eurek's New Skill" and "Introduction to Monster Book". The former is the quest for the Legendary Spirit skill. You might think the Red Whip is the reason I excluded it, and you'd be partially right. In Victoria, you can only obtain Red Whips from either Zombie Lupins or Wraiths, both are impossible for a newly-made character to kill. Red Whips do drop from Cows in Shanghai, but asking the speedrunner to leave Victoria to complete a quest is against the principle we've established. Moreover, the quest also blatantly asks for one million mesos. One million is not a lot for normal players, but it's a different story before you get to mid-game and start farming higher-level mobs. Either one of these reasons would single-handedly reject the case. And then there's the Monster Book Ring. It's simply ridiculous to include it in the list. (In case you didn't click on the quest list, the third quest without a Lv. requirement is the Amoria quest that gives you a random haircut. It's very easy and is included in the list.)

    And then we arrive at the Lv. 10 milestone. I want us to first take a look at a special subset of quests, Job quests. These quests are in their own category. Unlike normal quests which are nicely classified by their regions, Job quests are scattered around the world map. As far as I know, there are only 3 kinds of Job quests: tutorial quests, mount quests, and 4th job skill quests. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) For obvious reasons, mount quests and 4th job skill quests are out of the scope for our speedrun. The trouble maker here is the tutorial quests. These are the quests you start from Olaf at Lith Harbor and finish at your respective 1st Job advance instructor. In a normal play-through, players are most likely to work on these quests right after getting their 1st Job. I am very inclined to include these quests in the list even though they are technically in conflict with the framework we have. First of all, they are neither Victoria quests nor Maple Island quests. Secondly, the contents of the quests depend on which 1st Job you choose, which is not very helpful of making impartial judgements between different routes. It also begs the question of "What happens if you stay as a beginner?" I am under the impression that the less restrictive the rules are, the more creative ways speedrunners can come up with to entertain the speedrun. Therefore I do not wish to force every run to complete 1st Job just for the sake of a handful of more quests to be done. After giving it some thoughts, I propose that the tutorial quests must be done if you choose to get any 1st Job advancement, but can be skipped if you stay as a beginner. It gives a little more reason to why you would want to stay as a beginner. It could even become its own sub-category, for example VQS Lv. 10 Beginner.

    I am quite satisfied with this decision, but it implies that a VQS Lv. 10 is not literally Lv. 10, because the tutorial quests actually have increasing Lv. requirements up to Lv. 13 (Lv. 11 if you choose Magician). This is nothing more than tiny inaccurate wordings and you can brush it off. Or maybe we can call it VQS Lv. 13 since there are no other quests in Victoria with Lv. requirement between Lv. 11 and Lv. 14.

    The next issue I ran into is the hidden quests. By definition, these quests do not appear in the quest tab until you satisfy some requirements. Most of them should obviously be cut out: pet quests, eraser quests, marriage quests, etc. But for some reason I cannot fathom, Neckson made some random normal quests hidden. The one we're looking at is "The Lost Letter". You have to pick up a piece of letter from the trash can at Nautilus, talk to Murihat who's next to you, run over to Athena Pierce in Henesys, then back to Kyrin at Nautilus. Thematically I should, and I probably will, include this quest in the list. The only problem is that there is no way to know if there are any more hidden quests like this. Maybe I will do some research about this. If anyone knows of other hidden quests within Victoria please let me know. Much appreciated.

    When you hit Lv. 15, you can get your hands on your very first jump quest. Jump quests are still quests. In the case like "John's Pink Flower Basket" where it's clearly within Victoria, it should thus be included in the lists. However, some people absolutely hate jump quests, and I understand that. On the other side of the spectrum, there are people who love jump quests so much they just repeatedly time their jump quests for fun. Therefore I think jump quests deserve a sub-category treatment. If you want to skip jump quests, you can do so in a separated leader board, like VQS Lv. 20 NJQ (No Jump Quests). By the way, my stance is to include jump quests in normal runs.

    At Lv. 20, we have our first area boss quest, Mano in this case. Area bosses are kind of like transportation ships except they are way worse since you cannot even time them. Normal players would casually hunt area bosses for cards and/or scrolls, so it is purely luck whether you find a boss or not. Either that or the runner would get a separate character to secure the boss spawn for the run, which is also against my philosophy here. Including these quests would be outrageous.

    Then here comes Lv. 23. The two hellish grinds I touched upon earlier. Both of these I've talked about in other contexts, actually. You may have guessed, yes. These are indeed "Mrs. Ming Ming's Second Worry" and "Progress on Fossil Research". "Mrs. Ming Ming's Second Worry" is the notorious 1 Garnet and 20 Pig Heads (plus extra), and "Progress on Fossil Research" is the Weighted Earrings that banned gachapons (together with Sap of Ancient Tree). In my testing, I didn't manage to finish any one of these quests in a single grind session and had to take breaks. This had me thinking that maybe we can allow several timer pauses at character log-off. Not just for the long-hour grinds but just in general for convenience. Sometimes the server just refuses to work and the mob would tank over 5 times its HP. I don't see why not allow speedrunners to come back after the server is stable.

    The rest of the list is honestly nothing out of the ordinary. We have a lot of cross-regional quests that got cut, a bargain version of "Mrs. Ming Ming's Second Worry" i.e. "Mr. Wetbottom's Secret Book", and the rest is as simple as a breeze. That is until you're at Lv. 35 and gets reminded of the never-ending Cursed Doll hell. But let's be serious, nobody would ever get that far. (Or would they? *Vsauce music plays*)

    There is one final issue I would like to clarify regarding the repeatable quests. In the scope of this speedrun, only 2 sets of repeatable quests are present: The Sleepywoods' "Wanted" sign quests, and "Arwen and the Glass Shoes". The sign quests are quite straight-forward to rule out. The first time of each quest that requires 99 mobs are included. For the second time and beyond when it changes to 999 mobs, these quests are excluded. However, "Arwen and the Glass Shoes" didn't get this "first completion" treatment. It starts as a repeatable and stays as a repeatable. For consistency, I suggest bypassing this quest completely rather than having to do it once.

    And there you have it. The first draft of the Victoria Quest Speedrun rulings. It will most likely be run by me and myself only. I can't even promise to post a complete recorded run for, like ever. I am fully aware that a speedrun needs a lively community to support it and therefore I am not expect anything to pop out from this post other than some replies. I hope you had fun reading it, because I certainly did while writing. That being said, theory crafting and routing for this speedrun is even more fun and I won't spoil that for you.

    Here's the URL for the quest list at a much more convenient place:
    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nwW4Bk6AfU0vHvoDquMnA2upoiERbAqnQ70l3T_uRAQ/edit?usp=sharing
     
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