The Uncrackable Egg

Last year, the HT team invited all of Hattrick to participate in a great Easter egg hunt. Users could search all the nooks and crannies of the web site for colorful eggs of all sizes. The hunt itself was innocent enough, but surrounding matters quickly caused an uproar in the HT community.

It all started on the 15th of April 2022. It was a Friday, and I logged in to Hattrick in order to set up my match orders for the weekend. At first, it all felt like business as usual. I was just going to log in, set the match orders, maybe go to the forums for a quick visit, and then log out and go about with my day. However, there was something different about the web site. I noticed something strange about the Hattrick logo in the top left corner. There was a small egg on the dot of the "i", and out of curiosity, I clicked it. At first, nothing happened. So I thought: "hmm, that's weird". But then, suddenly a notification pinged. "Achievement unlocked: Easter Egg Hunt". I clicked it, and discovered that there was indeed an achievement. For finding one egg I had achieved rank 5, and I noticed in order to complete the achievement entry and get rank 1, I simply had to find a total of five eggs. "Easy enough" I thought to myself, "I'll get this done this afternoon!". Egg-citedly, I embarked on my Easter egg journey, and soon enough, my egg basket contained four eggs. Some of them were hiding in plain sight, but there were a few hidden in trickier spots. However, it would all come to a brutal full-stop here. I looked far and wide, searched high and low, but no more eggs. At this point I had been searching for over an hour, and decided it was time to take a break from the egg hunt. After all, Easter weekend was only beginning, and there was plenty of time to continue the search tomorrow.

The collector in me was intrigued. I just had to catch 'em all. After all, this could be the only opportunity to get this niche little achievement, like the now deleted "non-spender" achievement. So the next day, I had one clear goal in mind. I was going to find that final egg. I looked in all the places that I had forgotten about looking in the day before, but no eggs in sight. I checked the pages that I already had visited, nada. I started to get an increasingly bad feeling about this. This "quick" in-and-out operation had started taking way longer than I originally anticipated, and I started thinking about going to the forums for help. Surely there would be others there in the same situation as me, or if not, I could always start a thread about it myself. At first, I stayed away from the forums, because the thrilling part of any hunt is of course the part when you are looking for whatever you're hunting, not the part where you already have it. But after a while, I persuaded myself into going on the forums for help. After all, I didn't want to spend most of my Easter holiday looking for some silly, virtual eggs in an online football manager simulator; that would be ridiculous, right?

I found a thread on the global forum called "(Spoilers) Easter Eggs" with at the time around 3-400 posts. And people were outraged. I was far from the only one having trouble with my egg search. People posted about where they had found their eggs, and one thing that was clear from the very beginning, is that it wasn't the same for everyone. It seemed like those pesky eggs enjoyed hiding in different places for everyone, forcing you to skim through the entire web site, even if you knew all the egg locations. "Okay, fair enough", "Now that I have a list of places to go through, this will be done in a breeze!" I remember thinking. Oh, how wrong I would be, because this was far from over. It was only the beginning.

There were endless theories on what was the cause of this worldwide egg shortage. Maybe there was a cap on the amount of eggs you could find in a single day. Maybe some of the eggs only appeared at certain times of the day? Perhaps one would have to wait for the stars to align and form the word "EGG" in the sky, then recite the entire Hattrick manual backwards, count to ten, and the final egg would pop up. No one knew. But a few people reported that they had found their fifth egg after some more searching, igniting hope for the struggling remaining hunters. I continued my search courageously, and was determined not to give in before I found it. Minutes turned into hours, then hours turned into days. Not before long, Easter Day itself was nearing it's end, with no egg in sight. Many users had already given in at this point, which in all fairness probably was the wiser decision. But a few users were still set on filling their baskets to the very top, myself included. These hardcore Easter egg hunters continued their hunt until Easter was getting dim and distant. But to no avail. I never found that fifth egg.

Hattrick statistics show that as of writing this article, there's 201,000 active HT managers. The achievement statistics show that 3% of all managers have the achievement entry for finding at least one of the eggs, meaning there's at the very least 6,030 managers who actively participated in this hunt. Additionally, the statistics show us that less than 1% have the achievement entry for finding all five of the eggs. If we're being very generous, that would mean that at most 2,010 managed to complete their egg hunts. However, due to the fact that the entry for finding at least four of the eggs also shows a less than 1% achievement rate, the actual number is probably way less than 2,010 users. This means that less than a third of every participant in this hunt managed to find all five eggs needed to finish the hunt. Who's the evil mastermind behind this? Is this the work of Bob? Stefan Åkergren? Or maybe it is the infamous "server guy" I remember hearing horror stories about in my early Hattrick days. Regardless of the identity of this mysterious supervillain, I'm sure they're sitting in their secret lair somewhere, laughing menacingly.

One year has passed. Still no answers. No fulfillment. It's all just a gruesome nightmare. This whole year, I haven't been able to look at an egg IRL and not get reminded of these horrifying events that traumatized us last Easter. So I beg of you, dear almighty HT gods: spare us for more suffering. All we want is to find that glorious final Easter egg, so we can complete our "Easter Egg Hunt" achievement entries and put them to their eternal rest. That would be egg-cellent, thank you.

#FreeTheEgg

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