The Ultimate Guide to World Challenges

Now, I’m sure you’re thinking, “Oh, boy, here we go again with another get-rich-quick Times article. These things never work for me!” Have patience, my fellow Neopian: this guide doesn’t require you to master seven zillion games and sell your soul to Sloth (with all due respect, sir, please don’t smite me!): it merely requires you to play one game. That’s it. One game, and (best case scenario), you’ve got a paintbrush by the end of the month.

Let’s start with the basics. When you click on your favorite game from the games room, just below the “click here to play” box, there’s a special little button labeled “World Challenges.” This is your key to a happier, fancier Neopet—or, at least a little more cash in the bank. Click on it during the second half of the hour and check the scores. You should be checking the list around the :35 or :40 minute mark of whatever hour you’re currently in. Under the “Hour’s HS” column, see if your scores at that game are close to or better than those scores; if so, you’re ready to sign up! If not, check other games you’re good at playing until you find one that really measures up. At the top of the next hour, and I DO mean the top, go back to this world challenge area and click “Enter the challenge” at the top of the page. It costs 100 NP to enter, so make sure you have just a handful of points out of the bank. Don’t worry—you’ll be making it all back (and then some!)

Once you’ve entered, quickly launch the game and play it. Play it as hard as you can, but as quickly as you can. Depending on the game, you should be taking anywhere from a minute or two (Usuki Frenzy) to 20 or 30 minutes (Hubrid’s Hero Heist). Once you have a really good score, send it. If you don’t do well, e.g. you’re playing Pterattack II and you bomb out after three minutes, DO NOT SEND YOUR SCORE. This point is crucial. Every score you send will count either for or against you. A not-very-good score will keep you from winning.

Once you send a score, refresh the world challenge page. There should be a line that says your score has not been added to your total. If this line doesn’t appear, your score has been added to your tally. If you scroll down, you should find your name on the list. The system randomly pairs you with another Neopets player, and if your score is better than theirs, you get a point. If theirs is better than yours, you lose a point. If you’ve got a Tally of 1, you’re doing well so far. Depending on the game, you might want to sit tight here; games that take longer to play may not have winners with more than 1 as their tally. Look for the horizontal line on the world challenge chart. You want to be above this line! If you are below this line, you won’t win. If you’re playing a shorter game, you might want to continue playing for more points—for games such as Meerca Chase, winners generally have between 1 and 6 or 7 as their tally. If you’re not sure what your score should be, monitor the world challenge page while you go do something else, refreshing every so often to make sure you’re still above the line.

Those are the basics for World Challenges. Some general tips:

If you’re above the winner line, don’t send any more scores. I cannot emphasize this enough. Why risk losing just to have a higher tally? Don’t waste your chance!

Only enter one world challenge at a time. Some people enter many; these people have been playing for a while. Just concentrate on one.

Don’t send every score—just send scores that are good ones for you.

If you’re playing a world challenge, you can send more than three scores. You won’t earn any points after the first three of the day, but your scores will still count toward your tally.

So what happens when you’re not winning by tally? All is not lost—there are two other ways to win at a world challenge! The first way, and the one the author of this article rarely wins for, is Hour’s HS. You can reorder the list from tally to Hour’s HS by clicking on that heading on the chart. This will put the list in order by highest individual score sent in an hour. The players with the highest scores sent for the hour above the winner’s line also are winners, even if they’re different people from the people winning by tally. However, your tally is still important: If you have -6 and you send a score 200 points higher than everyone, you still will not win. There is a stipulation that your tally must be 0 or greater. This proviso is more applicable to the final way to win world challenges: the Score Totals.

The last column on the World Challenge chart is labeled score totals. This is the category through which the author of this article wins most of his world challenges. Simply put, the more scores you send, the higher your score total is. This is simply a sum of all scores sent by the player for the hour. For example, if you won with a score of 60 and lost with a score of 40, your tally would be 0, which is really a bummer when the person that beat you only sends one score and still wins by tally. If that person beat your score of 40 with a 75, way better than your highest score, you would still win at the end of the challenge, because 60+40=100, which is your total score. If the other player only sends their one score, your total of 100 beats that player’s total of 75. Again, your tally must still be 0 or greater, so you can’t just send a bazillion low scores—that’s not fair to the players who are really trying.

So what happens at the end of the hour? If you’re above the winner’s line for any category, you’ll get a Neomail notification that a World Challenge piece has been added to your inventory and you’ve earned a portion of the hour’s jackpot. The World Challenge piece is your ticket to a well-fed bank account—or possibly a rare item or two! If you collect all 20, you can cash them in for a random rare item. Or, you can sell the pieces as you earn them—currently, pieces sell for between 6,000 and 30,000 neopoints! Not bad for an hour’s work! Beware if you decide to cash your pieces in: once you’ve turned them in, you can’t work on that world challenge map again until you’ve completed the next two maps! Each map has better prizes than the one previous, so don’t worry if you don’t get the best item the first time you cash in your pieces. So far, I’ve gotten a split paint brush and a mystery island paint brush; who knows what you’ll get unless you try! Have fun!