Hello Bombers. The fine folks here at Whiskey Media have thrown together a new feature for you to play around with this weekend. Cue drum roll... The Quest System. 

Quests are essentially an achievement system for the site with an XP / Leveling component. A lot of them are based on actions you've come to enjoy such as starting your blog or posting on the boards, but a good portion of them are based on more goofy scavenger hunt tasks like finding a bunch of famous game personalities on the site. The even stupider ones we've dreamed up have you completing quests for completing games in our X360, Steam and WoW tracking. Pretty meta huh? Hopefully it should be fairly familiar to anyone who plays games but it's  also crazy weird because hell -- this is a freaking web site.

As you'd imagine we've adjusted some of the UI on the site to show off the new chrome. You'll notice there is now an XP bar across the bottom of the page and that we've moved a lot of your profile stuff down there as well. Crusty curmudgeons out there should note that if you think all this is a  little ridiculous and hey -- "you just come here for the videos" -- you're free to hide the XP bar and avoid quests altogether. Remember, this is Whiskey Media and we take pride in "not pissing off the Internet since 2007."

As with any new system there are bound to be bugs and weirdness from time to time. Please report any such problems in the Bug Reporting forum where Whiskey's newest engineer Josh Yanchar (NeoShodan) will be on hand to take all comers. Before you comment though please know the following about the Quest System:

1. Quests are not retroactive. You'll need to initiate a new action to earn them, but in most cases it will tally up your previous work if you had any. So if you edit and save a previous list for example, you should earn that quest without having to create a new one. Wiki edits are the exception.
2. The notifications for Javascript actions (like writing a comment) will only happen after you view a new page. We're working on better instant gratification, but for now know that some quests might lag behind a page-view or two.
3. Achievement S-Rank quests will be awarded the next time your achievements get run. There is no need to re-add your accounts.
4. This is supposed to be fun! Please don't post spoilers on the forums. You're welcome to give people vague hints, but we'd like to try to not spoil things for everyone.

Now that you know the basics it's time for this tutorial to end! A good place to start is the Rat page. We'll be adding new quests weekly into the system and expect a lot more different types of quests to be introduced shortly. We'll also be adding a passive XP system to things like forum posts, comments, wiki edits and the like but for right now we just wanted to take it easy and see how everything goes before concentrating too much on point values. As a lot of you know already, we didn't do such a great job with points the first time around with the wiki system, so we're gonna take our time trying to figure out the best way to take it on. We will retroactively award XP based on wiki submissions though once we make that switch so you old timers don't worry about losing your place on the leader boards.

Oh. One last thing. If you're wondering where all the goofy artwork came from, look no further than Giant Bomb's own Kat Smith (Turbo_Toaster) who's been having to make some regular silly out of the team's stupid clues and pun-based titles since way back in October.