Questing Mania, or How to Survive the Quest NeoBoard

If you cancelled your quest... bad! Go sit in the corner! Er, not really. You can listen up anyway, since you might get another that you want to keep.

Most of the users on Neopets will advise you to keep the quests you get, since (usually) the rewards outweigh the inconvenience of not being able to use the Shop Wizard. However, if it’s an Earth Faerie quest for an item over 200 NP, I’d say to cancel it; all the Earth Faerie does is make one of your pets Bloated and restores lost hit points.

If it’s not an earth faerie quest, you can save thousands of NP on training by completing the quest. There are a few ways to do this. All of them concern actually giving the Faerie the item, of course; it would be silly to think otherwise. I’ll rate them 1-5 on ease, speed of completing the quest, and time taken away from your daily life (okay, so those last two are pretty similar, but pretend they aren’t, okay? Thanks.) One is lowest, five is highest. On time taken away from your daily life, five is the smallest amount taken away, while five is the largest.

If your Safety Deposit Box is large (for example, if you’re going for the Pack Rat avatar), then by all means search part of the item name to see if you already have the item. If you do, you can just give it to the Faerie, then, when you can use the Shop Wizard again, buy another one to restore your SDB to its usual size.

Ease: 5. It’s pretty easy to just go to your Safety Deposit Box and find the item.

Speed of completing the quest: 5. Find the item, go back to the Quests page, give it to the nice faerie.

Time taken away from your life: 4. It doesn’t take long, but it takes longer than cancelling the quest, I’ll admit.

If you don’t have a large SDB (or if you don’t have the item in it) then you’ll need to purchase it. There are a couple of ways to do this as well:

If you have a gallery account or other account, you can log onto that one and search the Shop Wizard for the item. When you find it, just copy-paste the first few usernames into a word processing program, log back into the account with the quest, and find those user’s shop, utilizing the Search function on the yellow sidebar.

Ease: 3. It’s a hassle to log in and out and in and out.

Speed of completing the quest: 3-4. Pretty fast (if you’re a quick typer to log in and out swiftly) but if you’re slow, or you have a slow Internet connection, it can go down to 3.

Time taken away from your life: 3-4. Same reasons as above in Speed of Completing.

And finally, if you don’t have an alternate account, well, there’s always the Quest NeoBoard, which I’ll go more in-depth about in a bit. For now I’ll just rate it.

Ease: 4. Pretty easy to just sail over to the NeoBoards and post.

Speed of Completing the Quest: 2-5. It depends on a lot of things, really.

Time taken away from your life: Varies. 2-5.

All right, so now we’ve got the basic overview. Personally, I use the Quest NeoBoard most of the time, and I’ve spent a bit of time there, helping out and being helped. Some helpful hints for if you want to post on the Quest NeoBoard:

Make sure you aren’t posting on the NeoQuest I & II NeoBoard! Though this might seem obvious, quite a few people mistake it for the Quest board and post about Uber Faerie Quests.

Don’t post on the Quest Neoboard for Illusen’s Quests, Jhudora’s Quests, Esophagor Quests, Edna Quests, or Brain Tree Quests. Most of these allow you to use the Shop Wizard, but have a time limit. On the subject of Brain Tree Quests, you have to feed the Esophagor twice to get the answer. There’s usually a board (unless no one’s bumped it up lately) on the Quest Neoboard saying “Brain Tree asking about dead people? Feed Esophagor twice!” that’s quite helpful.

Don’t start your own board saying “Please help me find this item”. Sure, someone will probably come and help after a while, but most of the people who like to help make their own boards—which comes in with the next pointer.

There will probably be at least one and most likely more than five boards saying “Fast free Quest Help” on the first page of the Quests NeoBoard. Which one you use is entirely up to you. If you want to find the absolute lowest price, look for one that says it will give you the lowest price-- though that’s not always the best idea. It takes longer to search through several pages for the best results than to simply copy-paste the first four results on the first page. Myself, I like to look for whichever one is just starting out, with not too many posts, because if a board goes into the 30s, then the boardmaker is probably swamped with requests. Trust me. I’ve been there. Anyway, pick a board.

Make sure the owner of the board you’ve picked hasn’t left. Messages such as “g2g” or “be right back” are hints, except when followed by a message saying “back”. Usually such messages will be at the bottom of the board, since others see them, too.

Post! Be polite; no one likes rude people. Something along the lines of “Could you look up (name of item), please? Thanks!” works quite well.

It’s probably a good idea to not ask the board owner to Neomail you with the results. He or she is probably getting several requests at the same time, and it’s probably all he or she can do to keep up with them. However, see the “Giving Back” section for guidelines about answering such requests.

Wait. It might take thirty seconds; it might take two minutes. It depends on the number of requests the board owner is getting (you could be the only one; there could be five other people posting at pretty much the same time), the speed of the board owner’s Internet connection, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

When the board owner posts with the results, it’s always a good idea to thank them. You can either do this by posting “Thanks!”, by Neomailing them with the same thing, or by giving them a small item, though the last one isn’t very common.

Giving back

Okay, so this is a cheesy title, but it works. Giving back is when you give back to the community, in this case the Quest Neoboard. After having completed your quest, you can give back by creating your own “Fast free quest help” board. The wording is entirely up to you.

Some hints for making your own board:

Be polite to people! They won’t use your service if you’re rude.

Find the results as quickly as possible. I like to keep two windows open: one on my board to see the next request and post the results, and one on the Shop Wizard. It’s easier than having to go back and forth on just one window, and faster as well.

While one page loads, use another. If you’ve got two requests and you’ve just copy-pasted the results of the first into the post box, copy the other and search for that on the Shop Wizard while you post the results of the first request.

Don’t bump your own board up. Be patient; there are a lot of people with quests, and only so many helpers. Someone will come if you wait.

If you have to go, post on your board. Otherwise, people will think that you’re still there and wait forever to hear the results. Well, maybe not forever. But for a while.

If people say “Thank you!”, it’s a nice idea to say “No problem ^^” or something similar. But if you’re swamped with requests, don’t bother. They’ll understand.

If someone posts and requests that you Neomail their results to them, it really depends. You have the option of either: posting the results and hoping they see them; ignoring their request or saying that you can’t Neomail them right now, sorry; or Neomailing them. I’ve only had a few requests for Neomail in my time as a helper, so I haven’t had much experience with them, but the times that I have had requests for that particular service, I’ve done it. Those have all been times when I’d gotten done with the other requests and had no more coming in, so I had a bit of free time where I could zip over to their userlookup and Neomail the results.

So there you have it. Hints on quests and giving back, and all that jazz.

Happy questing, and I hope to see you on the Quest Neoboard sometime soon! =D