The Halloween 2020 tasks from Thomas and Johnny proved to be a new experience for our game design team.
Our plan was to create a series of tasks that would be completely different from anything you’ve seen in War Robots so far. The new tasks were designed to encourage discussion and collaboration within the War Robots community.
The task chain was anything but simple to complete. It called for a very unusual approach – to see the task requirements you had to solve a riddle or a cipher first.
Task 1
Name: Thomas and Johnny's Band
Description: https://www.facebook.com/warrobots/posts/1865591956915431
We posted the answer in our social media. The post contained a dialogue between Thomas and Johnny which explained the requirements for the task.
Requirements: Deploy a Destrier and win the match
Task 2
Name: Thomas: Let's go back to the beginning
Description: The Humans will be replaced with robots on the battlefield.
This task nods to one of the early War Robots trailers which contained the phrase from the description. Leo first appeared in that trailer.
The trailer link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-pEXhtnW9g
Requirements: Deploy a Leo
Task 3
Name: Johnny: It's better to look to the future
Description: Your future is whatever you make it
This one quotes Emmett Lathrop "Doc" Brown from the iconic Back to the Future. A great movie by the way!
Requirements: Deploy a Doc
Task 4
Name: Thomas: I love poetry
Description: I fought in a battle on one of Earth’s peninsulas once. There was a river nearby. Its name is consonant with the name of my favorite poet, who has a poem about one robot.
The fight on a peninsula on Earth refers to the Rome map. There is a river named Po in Northern Italy. And “Po” sounds very similar to Edgar Allan Poe’s surname. You’ve probably read his poem “The Raven”.
Requirements: Deal 666 points of damage within one match when piloting Raven
Task 5
Name: Johnny: I hate poetry
Description: In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious.
This quote is from War and Peace. You’ve heard of it, right?
Requirements: Deal 666 points of damage within one match when piloting Natasha
Task 6
Name: Thomas: Let's remember the past
Description: Divine intervention once saved Japan from the Mongols. Let Kadze come this time, but without thunder.
It is believed that the ancient Japanese gods Fujin (the deity of wind) and Raijin (the deity of thunder) saved Japan from Mongol invasion by summoning a massive storm. First quadruped robots in War Robots are named after those deities.
Requirements: Deal 666 points of damage within one match when piloting Fujin
Task 7
Name: Johnny: We sort of wanted to do music here.
Description: It all started with a gold finger, but for the fifth time it ended with this robot.
A musical riddle! “Stalker” is the name of the last song in the fifth album of Goldfinger band.
Requirements: Deal 666 points of damage within one match when piloting Stalker
Task 8
Name: We already liked you terribly. But we have the opposite day.
Description: TanBag
In this task you had to look for similar words. Also this task offered the first reward in the series – Atomizer.
Tan = Cos (tangent and cosine)
Bag = Sack (¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
Requirements: Deal 666 points of damage within one match when piloting Cossack
Task 9
Name: Thomas: Production or tour
Description: I would like to fly from Cordoba to Winona
To fly from Cordoba to Winona you would need to visit the airports of the two cities. The airport in Cordoba has the code “COR”, the code of the airport in Winona is “ONA”. And “production” refers to Workshop.
Requirements: Produce 6 packs of Corona components
Task 10
Name: Johnny: Production or tour
Description: BG.GEQ -O.EIGB, EB.DFDG M.CIFH, D0.IYG -GD.0ZB, EI.IVF J.GCCF
The cipher from the description works this way. You replace each letter with the number that corresponds to its position in the latin alphabet: B = 2, G = 7, etc.
The resulting numbers are the coordinates. If you google the numbers, you will see buildings shaped as letters “W”, “A”, “S” and “P”.
Requirements: Produce 6 packs of Wasp components
Task 11
Name: Et tu, Johnny
Description: Mxollot
To complete this task, you had to use the Caesar cipher. It’s one of the most ancient known ciphers. The idea is simple – to encode a word you use letters several positions up or down the alphabet from the original letter. In this case it was six positions up and the encoded word was “Griffin”.
Requirements: Capture 1 beacon with Griffin
Task 12
Name: Johnny: I forgot to switch the language
Description: Пфкуер
It’s the word “Gareth” typed with Russian keyboard. Why Johnny uses a Russian keyboard is another story.
Requirements: Capture 1 beacon with Gareth
Task 13
Name: Thomas: What are these numbers?
Description: 1011101120112021104110212031102140111031101130211011102110214011
If you divide this code into groups of four numbers, you may notice that the second number in each group is 0 and the fourth is 1. The first and the third number in a group represent how name 0s or 1s should be in your resulting number. For example, 2031 would decode as 00111. This way you can translate the number from the description into a binary code, which in turn translates into the name of a robot in each online translation tool.
Requirements: Deal 6666 points of damage within one match when piloting Rogatka
Task 14
Name: TIME-TIME-TIME
Description: -9+9-7-12+1-0
Each time zone has an alphabetical abbreviation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_zone_abbreviations
The zones from the task description build into a robot’s name.
Requirements: Deal 66666 points of damage within one match when piloting Vityaz
Task 15
Name: Thomas and Johnny: We’ve found someone else to join our band. Someone as serious as a stone.
Description: You can still claim your reward. You already have all the information you need. Well, you had.
If you take a look at gold rewards for Thomas’s tasks and convert the numbers into latin letters (as in task 10), you will get “Gepard”. The same method yields “Beacon” for Johnny’s tasks. This final task offered Gauss cannon as a reward.
Requirements: Capture 2 beacons within one match when piloting Gepard in Beacon Rush mode
These were the Halloween mystery tasks. Those of you who completed the task chain unlocked a secret video with a preview of the following event in War Robots. You’ve probably seen it already in the community posts on Reddit, Facebook, Forum or Discord.
Fun fact: the task descriptions were published by the game data miners (those pesky hacking enthusiasts) before the event began. However, they interpreted it wrong. One of the popular opinions stated that “Special prize in: X” is a part of the task chain, which is incorrect – the phrase refers to special deliveries.
