A simple looking question — how many tasks are in the game — gets different answers on different sites, and the spread reaches a hundred. We went through our own database and worked out where the disagreement comes from. The short answer Our catalogue currently holds 580 current tasks . But before c
A simple-looking question — how many tasks are in the game — gets different answers on different sites, and the spread reaches a hundred. We went through our own database and worked out where the disagreement comes from.
Our catalogue currently holds 580 current tasks. But before comparing that with someone else's number, it is worth understanding what each of us is counting.
There are several reasons, all of them boring and all of them important:
This is a story of its own, and it shows nicely why numbers deserve careful trust.
Part of our database held some tasks twice. The pairs differed by exactly one thing: the case of a letter in the English name — "BP depot" and "BP Depot". To a human they are the same thing; to a string comparison they are two records. The second copy was always a stub: no experience, no links to other tasks, referenced by nobody.
Those stubs are what produced the "half the quests give no reward" effect readers complained about. After the cleanup we had 572 instead of 655.
Later we found four more — and those were not caught by name at all. They were caught by content: the same trader, the same objectives, different names. "Postman Pat" and "Postman Pat - Part 1" were one and the same task. After that pass and the subsequent additions the catalogue settled at its current 580.
The least obvious conclusion: comparing task sets by name is useless — Russian or English. Names diverge between sources more than you would expect:
There is no match in either direction, and any "compare the list of names" check produces dozens of differences that do not exist. We twice got beautiful, convincing and completely wrong answers that way — first "98 tasks missing", then "87". The real number of discrepancies turned out to be three.
The only reliable key is the English name taken from the interlanguage link on the Russian wiki page. Only that ties the same record across different databases.
The practical advice is simple: do not compare total task counts between sites, compare specific tasks. If you have a quest in the game and it is not on a site, that is a fact you can act on. If two sites show different totals, that is almost always a difference in what is being counted, not evidence that somebody lost something.
If you find a task missing here, the catalogue page has a "Suggest a correction" button. Verified additions go into the database with the contributor credited.