[SECRET HUNT] This makes me so happy! I can barely believe it

Community General Discussion
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I’m writing this to show my appreciation to Josh and his team who made this amazing secret hunt and for Blizzard to see how much we love this content and want to see more of it in the future.

This WoW expansion during the 20th anniversary it finally happened! Through despair and hope and years of grasping for possible straws, thinking they’d lead us to a possible big secret, we finally got a secret to sink our teeth into.
A glimpse of hope lit up in me when ‘Secrets of Azeroth’ was introduced back in Dragonflight and I could see some new life blown into the ‘Secret Finding’ discord.
Even though this was much appreciated, a lot of us felt like there was too little thinking, which didn’t make it much of a challenge; it was more similar to questing.

With that said, it was still very engaging and fun. I think it was a great way to introduce this part of the game to all those players who hadn’t yet discovered the joy of travelling around solving puzzles.
But to a lot of us, it didn’t feel meaty enough given that We had been long itching to stumble upon a juicy secret to solve together as a whole community using our different thinking and skill sets to solve tricky riddles and puzzles.

Despite the previous secret hunts being unforgettably epic, we’re talking ‘Lucid Nightmare’, ‘Waist of Time’, ‘The Hivemind’, ‘Baa’l’, etc. This time you’ve really outdone yourselves!
I believe I can speak for a lot of the people engaged when I say that no one expected a secret this big, intricate and thorough. It’s very smart and well made, and the story of Ratts binds it all together perfectly.

I greatly appreciate the trouble you’ve gone through to prevent bruteforcing and how you’ve given us a fair chance to figure things out instead of having to cache sniff or other dirty tricks to be able to solve the riddles.
It’s especially fun that we got to revisit old unsolved mysteries.
Impressive how much you’ve ackomplished within a short amount of time and limited budget, I can only imagine what you could cook together given more of everything.

See, we haven’t even fully solved it yet, but I already long for more and feel melancholic for this to (probably) end soon.

Please, dear Mr. Blizzard Sir, give Josh and his team more missions like this; they are truly amazing.

World of Warcraft, thank you, unironically, for once again making me sit and stare at a circle of seagulls jumping up and down for hours and hours.

Thank you once again for making our minds boggle, wearing our Starry-Eye Goggle while we try to feed Hek the hungry Hornswoggle.

And lastly, a big thanks to Josh for being so active on Discord and answering all our questions about muffins, cats and what you’ll have for dinner.

Much love.

Sincerly,

The Detective Fellowship of Azeroth

9 Likes
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I liked it up until the pyres. They went full on insane from there on in and I’m just not into that.

If they can keep it to normal levels, I’m all for more secret finding stuff.
But please, nothing like those pyres again.

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I nope’d out on it fairly quickly.

I struggle a bit with these secrets, because it quickly becomes clear that these secrets aren’t made so that any individual player can solve them by themselves in a reasonable amount of time – or any time for that matter.
It is made for a community who wants to work together to collectively solve an intricate puzzle by sharing findings and exchanging ideas.
Fair enough.

But it does mean that unless you’re part of some Discord channel community and are there when the puzzling is going on, then the game experience is pretty lame.

What basically happens is that you try a bit by yourself and quickly realize that you’re stuck and you’re not getting anywhere and you’re pouring a lot of time into something without knowing if you’re getting hotter or colder, and so eventually you just throw in the towel and go to Wowhead or YouTube for a step-by-step guide on what to do.

And that’s lame. There’s no gameplay experience in brainlessly following a guide that tells you to go here, click that, go there, press this.
And I would wager that for 99,99% of players, that is what these secret hunting experiences devolves to – brainlessly following a guide.
And because the rewards tend to be somewhat lucrative, then everyone basically goes through these brainless guides.

So I can’t say I’m a fan. I don’t like to follow a guide, and I don’t like to run around aimlessly like a headless chicken because I’m stuck. And I don’t like that you can’t get a real hint or choose a difficulty or something to actually make the experience doable for the individual player. And I don’t like that the rewards are fairly lucrative so that you’re stuck between a choice of following a brainless guide or missing out on a cool thing.

I appreciate that Blizzard makes something for a very specific niche sub-community of players and that they really appreciate these secret hunts for what they are, but I don’t like what the experience entails for everyone else - myself included. It is absolutely lame from start to finish. And I always find myself nope’ing out.

5 Likes
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It was fine, till you had to do pet battles. I nope’d out on that one.

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Its really badly designed. Far too obtuse. No point making something like this only 1% of the player base will be able to complete without a guide. I think its a complete waste of resources. Blizz should be spending elsewhere.

Its not even clever, it ends up boiling down to people just randomly trying stuff.

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Those who decipher these have some amazing knowledge about the game.
But you’re right, btw I think you said a lot with that 1%.
But from the 7th orb, even the guide is not enough (at least for me). Another mount that will never exist(for me ofc). They should rather focus on the current content because it is a 0, this expansion does not even hit half of the DF.
Max is ahead of it in terms of errors/bugs.

2 Likes
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agreed .i just went through the torture to get the armor sets with bronze coins and once that was achieved i have not gone to any more of these puzzles .

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I am loving all of it. I am glad they are also including all aspects of the game such as pet battles, that I never ever touch. To do this activity once in a blue moon does not bother me. I hope they have included a few more dungeons, possibly even a raid and some PvP into the equation. I think it’s important to get people out of their comfort zones and to touch on some of the other activities of the game.

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Torture?
Why do people play games that they don’t like?
Boggles my mind.

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Glad to hear you enjoyed it!
Personally I heared it expects you to have secret battle pets and play WoW’s pokemon at home minigame so I’m afraid this one is not for me
I have enjoyed secrets in the past tho, abyss mindworm was cool and so was the jellyvoidfish mount, baa’l etc
Looking forward to new secrets that don’t lean on battlepets, don’t mind that there is one that does mind you
I don’t mind the pet part of the battle pets, just despise the battle part

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the point flew over your head .

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Yeah right, like stating something in a comment but meaning something else makes sense.

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WoW has a lot of aspects one might not like, for a lot of people its the world events that they seem to frontload all the coins on
You can play wow without touching a world event ever
Not liking one aspect of the game doesn’t constitute not liking all of the game
Codex of chromie is slop for example, you can say that without claiming all of the game is.

For me its the battle pets, are you going to imply I hate the game because I don’t like the worst version of pokemon ever invented?

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Yes of course, I haven’t tried pet battles either, I grew out of Pokémon pretty quickly as a child.
Though ”torture” is a harsh word, for me, that’s like hearing someone say they hate something.