Weekend Challenge: MMO Poetry Scrabble (with a prize)!

Riddles and quizzes, I love them to death. Naturally, there aren’t nearly enough about our favorite hobby-pastime-passion MMOs. I also love poetry quite a bit although I will not pretend that you’ll find anything in this post but primitive rhyme at best – and hopefully to your entertainment.

It’s been too long since my last MMO quiz challenges and it’s really getting difficult now; difficult to come up with something fresh that is genre-wide (because it’s no fun basing everything on only one MMO), interesting and most importantly: hard enough for this audience. Yep, you are just too good at guessing these! Alas, I’ll give it another try.

The Rules

This third MMO weekend challenge on MMO Gypsy is called “Poetry Scrabble”. Further down, you will find ten wildly mixed up scrabble words in no particular order which each correspond to a quick four-line rhyme. Of course your job will be the following: find the correct answer to each rhyme below and then spot your answer among the scrabble words! This means, delivered solutions in the comment section should look like this: “A2 (scrabble word), B9 (scrabble word), C6 (scrabble word) etc.” You should give the solved (arranged) scrabble word with each answer in brackets.

Some pointers: all ten rhymes refer to a key/solution word from popular mainstream MMORPGs only (no korean oddballs or the like). At first, I considered giving away the MMOs…but where’s the fun in that? Answers may range from simple names to specific game features and notorious personae. Anything goes. Also, I am totally cheating; like with the first rebus quiz, reading between the lines is required!

The Winner & Prize
(UPDATE: This quiz has already been solved. You can of course still take it for your own enjoyment but might want to ignore spoilers in the comment section.)

As always, I will not acknowledge any solutions in the comment section before the first person has guessed all ten correctly. I would therefore not advise posting an unfinished list unless you’re happy to help someone else out. The first person to guess everything correctly will be declared winner and, besides getting to call himself a true MMO scholar, be awarded a prize! That’s a first and I’m happy to add this as little give-away. Maybe the picture on the right gives you an idea on what it may be (you will need a Steam account). Now, nuff said – good luck quizzers and a happy weekend to everybody!

 

The Rhymes
A) Flying islands, guild halls,
– many names for home.
But bartenders can be found
in one alone.
B) “The king is dead,
all hail the king!”
No really – rains killed him.
(How embarrassing!)
C) Three furs of a kind,
ruled by one mind.
A few were quite smitten
before they got bitten.
D) He left the door open,
pissed his boss to the core.
When forty beat his eight,
the big house left the floor.
E) Not a hunter or warlock,
yet commander of pets.
Booksmart and ready
with stuns, blinds (no nets).
F) Some people sing to please
but not this tease.
The ban hammer never fell,
some griefing’s done too well.
G) No place for newbs
up in space. Beware –
you’ll find no mercy
and no space police there.
H) Exotic roulette;
the house will always win.
You know it and yet
you throw another one in.
I) No single player game
despite starting quite alone
in a tor and age
with a tea before.
J) A guild or kinship
by different name.
To elvaan and galka
it’s all the same.

 

The Scrabbles
     

  1. STROBILDIHR
  2. FOCANGEONA
  3. NYSFA
  4. SGBLEGRINBI
  5. ESILLNHKL
  6. RYFIMOTCSEG
  7. INEDSMONI
  8. OJRODOAMM
  9. CUNSELL
  10. ARMORTEELS

14 comments

    1. Muaha, this was of course the intention! πŸ˜›
      Alas, judging from Jeromai’s performance, I have to once more consider making these much harder in the future…argh.

  1. Evil quiz. Very evil.

    My best guess, and I’m still not precisely sure on one of those which MMO you’re referring to:

    A7 – DIMENSION
    B1 – LORD BRITISH
    C4 – GIBBERLINGS
    D8 – MAJORDOMO
    E10 – LOREMASTER
    F3 – FANSY
    G9 – NULLSEC
    H6 – MYSTIC FORGE
    I2 – AGE OF CONAN
    J5 – LINKSHELL

    – Jeromai

    1. Now wait. it took a shabby 2.5hours for someone to come up with all the correct answers?? I don’t even…HOW??? πŸ˜€

      Besides that obvious congratulations are in order (you did it, wahey!), you have to explain for the rest of us how you did it! Anywhere you struggled? Which one were you still unsure about?

      Really, well done! πŸ™‚ I’m very happy for you to be the winner. since I don’t detect a way to contact you on your own blog, would you prefer to contact me per mail for your prize? (I have a contact form up in the blog header menu). Let me know! and I hope you didn’t play Borderlands 2 yet, hehe! ^^

    2. *laugh* I got up with one hour to go before needing to leave for the gym, and ended up spending half of that on your very fiendish quiz. I wanted the “true MMO scholar” title though, so that was plenty motivation! πŸ™‚

      As for how I did it, I started plugging in the scrambled words into an anagram solver… before realizing that a good many of them were -not- working since they weren’t English dictionary words per se. Cue one admiring curse at your evilness.

      I did get “dimension” out of it, and went on a wild goose Google chase with “Sith Lord Irb?” “Sith Lord Rib?” and muttered further about me not playing common mainstream MMOs.

      Since that didn’t work, it was down to manual unscrambling via text file and riddle solving. Gibberlings and loremaster, I knew offhand. Googling elvaan and galka got me Final Fantasy, and their name for guilds is linkshell. G was obviously an Eve Online reference, so nullsec.

      I led me to think about SWTOR, but it didn’t fit the riddle, and TOR-T-AGE was reminiscent of you-know-which-MMO.

      H led me on another wild goose chase googling up gambling games and roulette in SWTOR and Star Trek Online, but the reference to ‘exotic’ and ‘throwing things in’ eventually clued me that it was a game much closer to home.

      The two historical MMO griefer references were much trickier. Googling “rain killed king mmo” eventually led me to an article on Rainz and Ultima Online and the old story I’ve heard of Lord British getting pwned by a player at an event.

      That in turn led to thinking about “singing” = bard, and of course, there was a griefer bard in Everquest way back when. Another Google check confirmed his name.

      D I suspected was a WoW reference to a 40-man raid boss in Molten Core, but I never raided in WoW, lol. So by slow elimination of other words and Google-checking, Majordomo sounded about right.

      And that brings us back lastly to A and dimension, which was -probably- a reference to Rift’s home dimensions, but I honestly don’t know if bartenders can only be found in one of them. πŸ™‚ Or it could be an EQ2 guild hall reference of some kind, another MMO I barely played, so was foggy about that too.

      I’ll contact you. I haven’t played BL2 yet so chalk up yet another to-do on my expanding Steam list. Woot!

      And thank you tons for the fun quiz and riddles. I love this sort of trivia stuff.

      – Jeromai

    3. Haha, very well and cunningly done indeed, that’s how it’s meant to be played. I am still baffled it only took you this long though. so basically you took erm “half an hour before going to the gym” – OUCH! πŸ˜›

      I was very weary of anagram solvers; that’s why I actually made sure the keywords would be mostly impossible to find this way. you may find Dimension but that alone is still not enough to guide you towards A).
      at the same time the scrabble words are a safe way to make sure no answers but the correct ones can come up (one or two of the rhymes could potentially fit more than one MMO….maybe) – without already spoiling everything from the start. I did give this lots of thought, but of course there will always be tiny loopholes for smart quizzers to find. πŸ™‚

      Again, big gratz and the title of true MMO scholar is well-deserved!
      Check your email!

  2. As usual I’m no good at these due to not playing enough different MMOs, but I’m proud to say that I knew the answer to D) before I even saw the scrabble words. πŸ˜€

    At least I got D8 – Majordomo and G9 – Nullsec.

    1. Haha, well I don’t think I would’ve guessed all of them myself to be honest. Dimension and Nullsec were born out of a little research.

      And Domo is the first rhyme of the lot I created; it was so easy and sorta convinced me to create another nine. which then proved….not quite as easy lol.

    1. Getting AoC is rather impressive – I felt it was the most evil of the bunch. I was chuckling so hard when making the ‘tortage’ wordplay. of course it wasn’t nearly as hard to solve as I thought, pfft. πŸ˜‰

      (I DO really create these quizzes for my own fun, can you tell??)

  3. I got no more than these. πŸ™
    D8 Majordomo
    J5 Linkshell
    G9 Nullsec
    F3 Fansy
    H6 Mystic Forge
    Having googled Jeromai’s answers, I am convinced that I stood no chance. Though I should have gotten Loremaster.

    That’s a good prize you’re giving away (at least based on what I know of the bit of the first that I’ve played).

    1. It’s still a fairly new game and Burns enjoyed it a ton – so yeah, I hope so! πŸ™‚

      I picked Loremaster intentionally for LOTRO as it’s the class I am playing myself. Love it (proper CC class omg!).

  4. As this quiz has been solved by Jeromai further up, once more the confirmed list of correct answers with some added comments from me. for everyone else who participated and maybe didn’t find all of them, some short explanations could be interesting.

    <---Quiz Solutions--->

    A7 – DIMENSION
    I was looking for a specific name of player housing; in this case from RIFT. Dimensions were recently introduced in RIFT and happen to feature a bartender NPC (for more info check google).

    B1 – LORD BRITISH
    Maybe one of the most infamous moments in MMO history, when Lord British, aka UO creator Richard Garriot was killed during an online appearance as (not-so-invulnerable) GM. the player to commit the deed was ‘Rainz’. He got banned shortly after.

    C4 – GIBBERLINGS
    A playable race in Allods where the player actually controls a group of three furry rodent creatures. They look cute but fight like everyone else.

    D8 – MAJORDOMO
    Second last boss in WoW’s first raid instance ever – Molten Core. All raiders will remember the long Rangnaros reprimand when Domo fails to fend off the invaders. Those were the times.

    E10 – LOREMASTER
    Playable class in LOTRO. Master crowd controller while also being able to summon pet companions. The Loremaster’s icon is a book.

    F3 – FANSY
    Infamous bard from Everquest. Managed to terrorize an entire area on his server as lowlevel character for many weeks, while never officially violating pvp server rules.

    G9 – NULLSEC
    Everyhing-goes zone in Eve Online. Not your first stop as a newcomer.

    H6 – MYSTIC FORGE
    A gambler’s bane in GW2; this forge will allow players to combine different items for a random chance of upgrade. drop rates for real upgrades are of course not very high.

    I2 – AGE OF CONAN
    This MMO is somewhat known for starting off as a single-player mission up to level 20, where new players will play through their personal story beginnings in the town of ‘Tortage’. the wordplay in the rhyme (“in a TOR and AGE with a ‘T’ before) gives you Tortage when guessed correctly.

    J5 – LINKSHELL
    The name for guilds in FFXI Online. One of my first MMOs and home of elvaan and galka.

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