The Great Spring Creature Feature: Introducing Accuracy Happy Hours
Welcome, welcome, welcome to the first quest for missing cryptids! Our beastie of the day is the Mer-Unicorn, a particularly elusive underwater creature, hard to spot without the sharpest senses. Generally found within the fantastically deep Mariana Trench, it tends to swim so quickly that it rarely appears as more than a shimmery, glittery flash in the corner of one’s eye… before it strikes. Indeed, this search will not be without peril.
There will be two organized expeditions to gather the many Mer-Unicorn specimens that have escaped, both on Friday, 3/20. One will run from 2:00 to 4:00 PM and the other from 10:00 to 11:59 PM (both times EDT). You may notice that one of these times would overlap with your normal Happy Hour; you would not be wrong. But Happy Hour is not going away. You will, in fact, have double opportunities to earn your usual bonus points. However, to capture the Mer-Unicorns, HQ is introducing a brand new challenge variety, the Accuracy Happy Hour.
Don’t worry. Your accuracy isn’t going to be judged on how well you can play tough stuff like Evil Cubes. When you take part in an Accuracy Happy Hour, you play cells of your choice as you would during any Happy Hour, but behind the scenes, admins will also measure the accuracy of your traces. Therefore, the trick is to balance your desire for points with that accuracy; play too fast and your accuracy may suffer, but don’t play too slow either!
If you participate in either of the available Accuracy Happy Hours (and in fact, you can do both, we’ll just count your best one), as said, you will receive typical Happy Hour points. But depending on how your accuracy fares:
80% accuracy – You successfully capture a baby Mer-Unicorn!
90% accuracy – You successfully capture an adult Mer-Unicorn!
95% accuracy – You successfully capture the exceptionally rare, possibly radioactive Rainbow Mer-Unicorn!
Badges will be given to all of those who make these achievements. Furthermore, extra point bonuses will be added to your baseline Happy Hour earnings, as follows:
1st Place Accuracy – 10,000 point bonus
2nd Place Accuracy – 8,000 point bonus
3rd Place Accuracy – 6,000 point bonus
Anyone else with 95% – 5,000 point bonus
Anyone else with 90% – 3,000 point bonus
Anyone else with 80% – 2,000 point bonus
Under 80% but played at least 20 cubes – 1,000 point bonus
Please remember that these bonuses are non-cumulative; first place accuracy gets a flat 10,000 points, for example.
Swag: Based on their accuracy, the top 5 players will each win an EyeWire poster.
Mentors: You are still allowed to mentor people during these time windows. Please just use your best judgment as to whether someone is asking you for basic newbie help vs. trying to have you boost their accuracy on cube after cube.
Scythes: Please avoid scything during these time windows. Even though accuracy for this will be retroactively calculated, we would prefer to go with accuracy based on pure gameplay and avoid accuracy inflation caused by scything your own or others’ cubes.
Go forth! Your prize awaits you!