Madpea's Dark Dimension Hunt - too hard for me

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you'll know that I like Madpea hunts a lot and regularly present them here. Their latest hunt "Dark Dimension" started at October 6 and will run until November 10. For the first time ever I started a Madpea hunt, played it for the first few locations and lost my interest. It is now more than three weeks since I have stopped hunting and I couldn't motivate myself to come back.

Well, it's not the fault of the hunt story, which is really good as far as I have seen it. The winner of a MadPea writing contest has had their creation come alive in the hands of the MadPea Crew: Telestoi Weissmann.

An old prison island has been converted into a corporate haven of shops, boutiques and corrupt clubs. From the construction team to the sales force, more and more people are mysteriously vanishing daily. The 'Blue Sky Corporation' is desperate as tales of a 'black monster' are leaking through the rumor mill. They have hired you to get the island back in order - but a secret lurks in the darkness.

I would have really liked to experience the story myself. But two problems stopped me: the lag in some of the hunt locations and the difficulty level of the hunt item hiding places. A lot of Second Life creators seem to ignore the fact that a hudge amount of 1024x1024 textures at one place will bring the Second Life platform to its knees. There are more and more shops that have thousands of such textures creating huge lag in the region and bringing framerates to the bottom end - even with only one or two avatars on the sim. Imagine these places with dozens of hunters... it is lag hell. Madpea really have to consider not only the performance of their own sim but also the performance of the hunting places: can they really take the additional traffic of a hunt? It is not fun crashing all the time at some hunt locations.


Even worse for my personal motivation than the performance issues was the difficulty level of the hunt itself. The hunt item is a white ghost face that turns invisible for several seconds before appearing again. If you cam through a room, your chances of missing it are good because it might just be invisible when you look at its actual place. What makes things worse is that many creators reduced the size of the hunt item to the size of a golf ball. Have fun searching such a tiny object! Well, all these issues wouldn't be frustrating enough to stop me if the little hunt stories revealed actually hints pointing to possible hiding places. But often the funny little introductory stories have absolutely nothing to do with that hiding place (or I and my friends were not able to grasp it). Maybe it is fun for some people to run through a huge megastore, with no valuable clue given by the storyline, searching for a white object of the size of a golf ball that happens to turn invisible all the time. Unfortunately it doesn't entertain me. 

I have many friends that usually play Madpea hunts. Some did start the Dark Dimension hunt together with me. They also never finished and others didn't even start after hearing our opinion. This is certainly a pity because I have no doubt that the story is great as always. I do hope that the next hunts will get easier again because I enjoy the stories that Madpea creates. I will not experience this one though.