Long Live the PlexKing (Until Monday)

Every Monday at midnight, UTC, because royalty is international, the throne in PlexQuest’s Throne Room becomes vacant.

Nobody abdicates. Nobody is overthrown. There’s no tense scene with a dagger. The calendar simply clears its throat, everyone’s week XP drops back to zero, and the kingdom goes back to being up for grabs.

So, who takes it?

First, what is this kingdom?

PlexQuest runs a game called Plex Monarchy: daily SQL challenges played in a place called the Keep. Quests come on a cartridge, a set of daily quests. The one in the slot right now, Clearstone Receivables & Payables, holds five quests over five days, and a new day opens every morning. Join late and you can still work back through the days you missed. It’s free for signed-in members who subscribe to the LucidPlexus newsletter. One email, and you’re through the Gates.

Back to the throne, then. How do you win it? Speed? Brains? Bribing the judge?

The judge, for the record, is called the Steward, and he cannot be bribed. He doesn’t mark your style, either. He checks your result: any allowed query that returns the right rows wins, however elegant or however ugly. We find that oddly comforting.

The candle, the lives and the one free thing

Reading a quest costs nothing. You can stare at it for as long as you like. The moment you make your first move, a RUN, a hint or a submit, a candle lights, and it burns for somewhere between ten and twenty-five minutes depending on the quest.

Then come the lives. On this cartridge you get five or six per quest, and every graded SUBMIT spends one, including the one that wins. A submit the Steward refuses before grading, say a forbidden word or an answer typed in as values, costs nothing. He’s strict, not petty.

The maths of a good win

Here’s how the XP works. Each quest is worth a set amount; the clean wins on the current cartridge pay between 100 and 225. Buy the lantern (the hint) and you lose a chunk, 20 to 35 depending on the quest. Every wrong submit costs another 10 to 15. And there’s a floor: however messy the win, you always keep at least a quarter of the quest’s XP. Winning always pays something.

Look at that chart for a second and the strategy writes itself. The lantern hurts. Wrong submits hurt. The candle only ends the quest if you let it. And there’s one button that never costs you a life or a single point of XP.

RUN is free.

Use it like it’s free. Run the query, look at the rows, run it again, and only submit when you’d bet your crown on it. The players at the top of the board aren’t necessarily the fastest typists. They’re the ones who stopped paying for their mistakes.

There’s one wrinkle, though. Equal XP is settled by who got there first: the player whose last XP of the week came earlier ranks higher. So patience wins the throne, and punctuality keeps it.

Crowns, titles and the emperor problem

When the week closes on Sunday at 23:59 UTC, its places are written down for good. First place is PLEXKING, with a crown on their record. Second is PLEXHEIR, third PLEXROYAL, and the three of them are that week’s Plexnerds. Everyone else is a CHALLENGER, which is honestly the best title in any game: it means you’re still in it.

Hold the throne two weeks running and you become PLEXEMPEROR, with a ×N beside your name for your longest run. It’s kept forever. Your profile shows your record, your XP, your titles and your quests won. It never shows your queries, so nobody will ever know how many times you forgot a GROUP BY. We certainly won’t tell.

The empty-throne problem

One last rule, and it’s the one we keep thinking about. A week in which nobody scores has no king at all, and it breaks every streak on the board.

Which means that in a quiet week, the crown doesn’t go to the best player. It goes to whoever turns up and wins a quest.

So what really takes a throne: the best query, or just showing up?