Well... seeing as how I'm sort of responsible for this, I feel like I should weigh in >_<
Even though there's a lot of negative stuff going on in this thread, there is a sick twisted sense of pride in seeing people talk about something I made ^_^
Anyway, I certainly wasn't trying to alienate anyone or do anything shameful. We've never had a graduation-themed event, but we have had a back to school event.
When I was given the basic concept for the graduation event, I wanted to make sure it was clearly different from the back to school quests. I thought of these mini-quests as something of a back to school/G-Learning parody. We wanted to see more people in some of the lower level maps so we had to give them a nice reason and something fun to do.
You may notice each quest has something about it that discourages players from just going "click click click, AOE AOE AOE DONE."
The last thing I wanted was for a bunch of 220s to completely obliterate all the monsters in noob zones - so I had some punishing troll mechanics to prevent that
(I actually thought I'd get some complaints on the Dalping quest - because if you AoE there, you will never finish the quest
)
I also made sure that (for the most part) I wasn't having players kill too many monsters that were needed for the lowbie quests.
I wanted the math problem to make people think, but I didn't intend it to be unsolvable. I must admit, I felt bad I had to format the question that way! It probably would have been more clear to everyone if I could have used the actual square and square root symbols as well as expressing the PEMDAS problem as a big-ol fraction. But, ROSE currently can't process certain special characters - so I tried to write it as best (correctly) as I could.
One thing that makes ROSE special is the community, and I had hoped that if anyone got stuck, the community could help each other out, "hey where do I dig up the answers for the history test?" or "what's the answer to the math problem?"
I also knew that Google would happen, and that at some point any tricky parts would be outlined in the forums. I like the idea of people really experiencing the content, but it's also cool to see people helping each other out!
What's not cool is seeing the name calling and what have you - so let's avoid that shall we ^_^