Silent Tower just wouldn't be the same without the puzzles and it's unique way of offering people a way, albeit a complicated one, of making substantial progress alone.

I think Scar got it as close to right as you can. Hell is massive, yet the majority of groups basically act like tourists and follow the same path to the same key mobs for the same elite gear. While this suits those who simply want to form a potent group and get the equipment, there is more to Hell to be figured out if you're willing to actually explore.

One of my major gripes about Hell is it's lack of updates. I absolutely understand why it doesn't receive any attention, I just wish it did anyway. By attention, I mean in the form of modernization. CF, from a mechanics point of view, can do a lot more than it could the last time Scar worked on it, I would imagine. I'm sure if Scar were involved right now, there is a lot of code-support available to make Hell do some very cool stuff it couldn't do way back when.

Either way, what makes Hell fun is that it has ridiculous gear and some extremely useful objects that PK-oriented characters tend to gun for, but it's also a place you can explore, albeit not always solo (for many of us) just to learn new things and solve a few puzzles.

My suggestion would be to model New Silent Tower off the same principle. The great thing about Silent Tower is that there is already an amazing story behind it, and I'm sure you have even more material surrounding it that we don't know about. While some people are only going to come to Silent Tower for the equipment and other useful features, others will come to learn about that background and solve the puzzles, even if the reward isn't the equipment any more. Tweak the area such that 90% of the groups who go there travel the same path 90% of the time to kill the same 10 mobs, while still incorporating the puzzle aspect for those who desire it. Perhaps the puzzles simply need to be changed so that their reward is solving them and not something so appealing to “power gamers”.

As long as Silent Tower has such vexing puzzles and logic guarding some of the best equipment in the game, people are going to cheat to get past the puzzles and to the equipment as quickly as possible. While “that douche bag” had compiled a lot of information about the area and posted it publicly, he's definitely not the only one sharing. I'd bet dollars to ####ing doughnuts that most of the people posting under this thread have had chats with their pals about Silent Tower and it's puzzles, even if they don't say so. Almost everyone talks, at least a little bit, at some point. Even if it's tit-for-tat, eventually it snowballs into common knowledge. Even keeping it IC doesn't work, it just slows it down. I've seen a few players babble on and on about solutions to Silent Tower completely in-character simply because they wanted someone to be their meat shield, wanted wand info, wanted to show everyone else how much of a bad ass their were, etc.

I think the bottom line is that you and Zulg are right. Silent Tower doesn't belong in today's CF, but we love it so much we'd rather have Not-Quite-Silent-Tower than no Silent Tower at all. Regardless, the Silent Tower we've enjoyed in the past isn't coming back, and while what you come up with may be amazing and enjoyable and more fun than before, it won't replace The Silent Tower as we knew it.