h3110 [2493776] —
Original article
Read H3110's rundown of how the community came together to figure out the secret requirements of Chedburn's "Nice" merit.
Every Tuesday the Torn Patch List is released via the Announcements forum, revealing all of the latest changes Chedburn and his staff have made to Torn over the past week. Towards the end of this list, a new Honor bar is revealed, along with the requirements you must meet to achieve it. For example, last week we had Going Postal, which you could earn by defeating a company co-worker.
On Tuesday the 14th of July the merit ‘Nice’ was added, and on this occasion, the description was a little more vague than usual, as it consisted of nothing more than a single word:
Pictured: Uhh, thanks Chedburn.
The Torn community wanted to find out how they could achieve this merit immediately, and the beginnings of a forum mega-thread quickly spawned. Everyone had their opinion, and some people were scared that this was just a randomly generated honor, with ORAN quoted as saying “I’m just here praying that this is a free merit Tuesday and not rng f*ck you over Tuesday.”
After two days, Cooksie’s thread already had 638 posts, which showed that the community was determined to find out the trigger for this merit. The word Nice is often associated with the numbers 69 and 420 on the internet, so ideas related to this soon started coming out left and right - and this was before we'd even seen what the honor bar looked like! Here are the community's initial suggestions as to how Nice might be triggered.
- Smoke 69 weed/Have weed on 4/20
- Get a lot of likes on a post (this idea got 125 likes)
- Give something to someone as a ‘Nice’ gesture
- Give something to someone age 69
- RNG merit
- Hold a high quality item
- Vote 20 people a 10 in Mr/Ms Torn
- Bust people from jail
- Send $69 to someone
- Reach lvl 69
- 69 friends
- Be around for Crimes 2.0
At this point, with no further clues to be had, some people gave up and spammed the thread with ‘Nice’. Then we had our first breakthrough. A player by the name of Tre posted that they were the first to get the honor, and they soon posted a picture of what the honor bar looks like.
Pictured: Our first sighting of someone who had received the merit
As you can see, the honor bar is pretty standard for a merit of this nature, given that it depicts weed and a pair of sunglasses - a drawing of a 69 might've been too much for a PG-13 game. But the real clue was in Tre's info dump from the activity log, as it shows he trained a stat and got it to 420,169.48, which hinted that the trigger for Nice lay in our stats.
Every one of Tre's Battle Stats was 420k so that led people to believe that one or more of your Strength, Speed, Defense and Dexterity must begin with 420 or 69 in order to trigger the merit. However, it was soon realised that this achievement would prove impossible for players with high-level stats in the billions, so we moved on to two competing theories.
- Train a stat until it contains 420 or 69 (1,420,588)
- Train a stat until it contains 420 and a 69 (288,142,069)
Both of these theories were quickly disproven by AiR who had a 420 and two 69’s in one of their stats. Thankfully, the merit hunters received another clue when Cookedandbombd became our second citizen to declare they had received the merit. When we compared his stats to Tre's, we realised that they both had the numbers 420 and 69 within one stat, but they were separated by one random digit. Was this the secret requirement?
On Yata (an external website that helps you track awards and chains etc.), the merit was placed in ‘other gym’, confirming that the Nice trigger was indeed stat-related, and we weren't wasting our time on a red herring. Soon, everyone was training their stats and trying to hit the “nice numbers”, with everyone competing to become the first to positively identify the trigger mechanism for this merit. This mass testing led to some outlandish theories indeed, such as Quarantino’s extremely mathematical suggestion below:
Pictured: Quarantino’s very mathematical idea.
A few people started to stray from the idea that the merit was related to Gym Stats, with Drug Cooldown and Addiction figures also mooted. Tre denied that he was in cooldown or under addiction, so that was those ideas out of the window. Then came our third Nice player, Vladar, who received the merit while possessing the following Battle Stat:
Vladar: 506,694,202.86
This seems to indicate that we're on the right track with regards to the requirement for the numbers 69 and 420. Once more, the two figures are separated by a single digit, making us even more certain that we had cracked the case. Then the fourth Nice receiver came along, Anima, and their stats poured cold water on all our existing theories.
Anima: 472,206,969.88
Anima had two 69’s but not a 420. Interesting. Further intrigue was to be found in Anima's other Battle Stats, as they each had a 420 in them. For the time being, many of our testers thought a 69 was needed in one stat and a 420 in another.
Pictured: Sterling trying to test our newest theory
We really started to motor when Sterling, 2020's Mr Torn runner-up, decided to make a spreadsheet showing which stats worked and which didn’t. At first, it seemed like the requirements might be somewhat randomised given that Sterling's data indicated that having one instance in every stat seemed like it should work.
Then our fifth receiver came along, Ahab, to tell us that he had three stats with 420 and one stat with two 69’s in - exactly the same as Anima. This proved that the requirement for Nice wasn’t random and that you had to meet a certain threshold to receive the merit. IDK then suggested that you might need five “nice numbers” to get the merit, but Kuro replied to say that he had five 69’s but no merit.
Indent pointed out that the existing evidence proved that 420 was also necessary, and it was the combination of these two suggestions which eventually proved correct. Once you get to page 29 of the thread, you can see many people saying they have received the merit. So how do you get it?
Nice: Achieve five instances of 69 or 420 in your Battle Stats, with each of the two appearing at least once.
If you're wondering how to do this, a good guide can be found here in the Tutorials and Guides section. In all, it took the Torn community roughly two days to solve this merit using teamwork, and it seemed like most people enjoyed figuring out this mystery. Everyone who put time into testing ideas deserves our thanks for all the time they spent.
We should also thank Chedburn for creating this fun little puzzle for us all. I have it on good authority that he wanted to keep the Nice triggering mechanism secret for a while, but the work of the players put paid to this ambition within a matter of days. Will Chedburn add more merits like this? A lot of people hope so, as the work everyone put in to solve this puzzle really brought the community together for the betterment of others.
Only time will tell whether we get more mathematical merits like this. Let's hope the amusement Chedburn gained from watching us struggle will prompt him to create a few more of these merit mysteries in future.
Pictured: Ched laughing at an entire community debating how to get 69 and 420.
On Tuesday the 14th of July the merit ‘Nice’ was added, and on this occasion, the description was a little more vague than usual, as it consisted of nothing more than a single word:
Pictured: Uhh, thanks Chedburn.
The Torn community wanted to find out how they could achieve this merit immediately, and the beginnings of a forum mega-thread quickly spawned. Everyone had their opinion, and some people were scared that this was just a randomly generated honor, with ORAN quoted as saying “I’m just here praying that this is a free merit Tuesday and not rng f*ck you over Tuesday.”
After two days, Cooksie’s thread already had 638 posts, which showed that the community was determined to find out the trigger for this merit. The word Nice is often associated with the numbers 69 and 420 on the internet, so ideas related to this soon started coming out left and right - and this was before we'd even seen what the honor bar looked like! Here are the community's initial suggestions as to how Nice might be triggered.
- Smoke 69 weed/Have weed on 4/20
- Get a lot of likes on a post (this idea got 125 likes)
- Give something to someone as a ‘Nice’ gesture
- Give something to someone age 69
- RNG merit
- Hold a high quality item
- Vote 20 people a 10 in Mr/Ms Torn
- Bust people from jail
- Send $69 to someone
- Reach lvl 69
- 69 friends
- Be around for Crimes 2.0
At this point, with no further clues to be had, some people gave up and spammed the thread with ‘Nice’. Then we had our first breakthrough. A player by the name of Tre posted that they were the first to get the honor, and they soon posted a picture of what the honor bar looks like.
Pictured: Our first sighting of someone who had received the merit
As you can see, the honor bar is pretty standard for a merit of this nature, given that it depicts weed and a pair of sunglasses - a drawing of a 69 might've been too much for a PG-13 game. But the real clue was in Tre's info dump from the activity log, as it shows he trained a stat and got it to 420,169.48, which hinted that the trigger for Nice lay in our stats.
Every one of Tre's Battle Stats was 420k so that led people to believe that one or more of your Strength, Speed, Defense and Dexterity must begin with 420 or 69 in order to trigger the merit. However, it was soon realised that this achievement would prove impossible for players with high-level stats in the billions, so we moved on to two competing theories.
- Train a stat until it contains 420 or 69 (1,420,588)
- Train a stat until it contains 420 and a 69 (288,142,069)
Both of these theories were quickly disproven by AiR who had a 420 and two 69’s in one of their stats. Thankfully, the merit hunters received another clue when Cookedandbombd became our second citizen to declare they had received the merit. When we compared his stats to Tre's, we realised that they both had the numbers 420 and 69 within one stat, but they were separated by one random digit. Was this the secret requirement?
On Yata (an external website that helps you track awards and chains etc.), the merit was placed in ‘other gym’, confirming that the Nice trigger was indeed stat-related, and we weren't wasting our time on a red herring. Soon, everyone was training their stats and trying to hit the “nice numbers”, with everyone competing to become the first to positively identify the trigger mechanism for this merit. This mass testing led to some outlandish theories indeed, such as Quarantino’s extremely mathematical suggestion below:
Pictured: Quarantino’s very mathematical idea.
A few people started to stray from the idea that the merit was related to Gym Stats, with Drug Cooldown and Addiction figures also mooted. Tre denied that he was in cooldown or under addiction, so that was those ideas out of the window. Then came our third Nice player, Vladar, who received the merit while possessing the following Battle Stat:
Vladar: 506,694,202.86
This seems to indicate that we're on the right track with regards to the requirement for the numbers 69 and 420. Once more, the two figures are separated by a single digit, making us even more certain that we had cracked the case. Then the fourth Nice receiver came along, Anima, and their stats poured cold water on all our existing theories.
Anima: 472,206,969.88
Anima had two 69’s but not a 420. Interesting. Further intrigue was to be found in Anima's other Battle Stats, as they each had a 420 in them. For the time being, many of our testers thought a 69 was needed in one stat and a 420 in another.
Pictured: Sterling trying to test our newest theory
We really started to motor when Sterling, 2020's Mr Torn runner-up, decided to make a spreadsheet showing which stats worked and which didn’t. At first, it seemed like the requirements might be somewhat randomised given that Sterling's data indicated that having one instance in every stat seemed like it should work.
Then our fifth receiver came along, Ahab, to tell us that he had three stats with 420 and one stat with two 69’s in - exactly the same as Anima. This proved that the requirement for Nice wasn’t random and that you had to meet a certain threshold to receive the merit. IDK then suggested that you might need five “nice numbers” to get the merit, but Kuro replied to say that he had five 69’s but no merit.
Indent pointed out that the existing evidence proved that 420 was also necessary, and it was the combination of these two suggestions which eventually proved correct. Once you get to page 29 of the thread, you can see many people saying they have received the merit. So how do you get it?
Nice: Achieve five instances of 69 or 420 in your Battle Stats, with each of the two appearing at least once.
If you're wondering how to do this, a good guide can be found here in the Tutorials and Guides section. In all, it took the Torn community roughly two days to solve this merit using teamwork, and it seemed like most people enjoyed figuring out this mystery. Everyone who put time into testing ideas deserves our thanks for all the time they spent.
We should also thank Chedburn for creating this fun little puzzle for us all. I have it on good authority that he wanted to keep the Nice triggering mechanism secret for a while, but the work of the players put paid to this ambition within a matter of days. Will Chedburn add more merits like this? A lot of people hope so, as the work everyone put in to solve this puzzle really brought the community together for the betterment of others.
Only time will tell whether we get more mathematical merits like this. Let's hope the amusement Chedburn gained from watching us struggle will prompt him to create a few more of these merit mysteries in future.
Pictured: Ched laughing at an entire community debating how to get 69 and 420.
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