Is PoP flagging truly an intended bottleneck to the Artisan Aug?

Your right, EQ is a booming game, adding loads of new players every month. And your right, I have no right to ask that a quest for one of the best augs in the game, not be locked behind a 10years ago raid progression that there is no current way to bypass. I will just shut up and wait however many months or years it takes to find all the PoP raids untouched. Thank you for straightening me out.

I think the best thing for you to do might be step away from the pc before your head explodes like in those jet blue commercials. Your very upset over something trivial. The mobs have been up for like 12 years so there has been ample opportunity to get flagged and there will be more opportunities.

Wow, so. You have designated this issue as trivial. What gives you the right? The mobs have been up for 12 years with 0 reason to go kill them, go figure I didn't go solo them just to do it. You don't know when i can play, what mobs I need, when they will be up, all you know is that i will "have more opportunities?" Why in the world would your opinion on these things matter.

The topic is, was this done intentionaly. I'm answering it, no it was not. You disagree? post some proof. The only reason to keep it as is, would be to make things unecessarily tedious for people, and drive people to not do it. Lower it 24 hr spawns. Lower it to 12hr spawns. Whatever, but 3.5 days is stupid.

I still don't get the fact that people are so upset. There is countless hours of farming and tedious stuff to do while your waiting for spawns. Start looking up the recipes and seeing what you will need. I guarntee you'll find that the bottle neck isn't really the PoP progression. Outside of a couple servers the populations are so low that there isn't much competition for them anyways. Now you can post some angry response about I don't have the right and I don't know you but I am right and your just hiding behind an excuse instead of talking initiative and making something happen while you wait on those spawns.

Traditionally, timesinks have been added to gameplay because the game does not have enough content to keep the playerbase happy for years.
Is everquest really still in that state, we have 22 expansions now, plenty of content to play...
Why not just reduce ALL timesinks older than x years, its not like people will complete all the old stuff in days anyway...

When i say "timesink", i mean pointless waiting, such as lockouts and respawn timers for old raidmobs...

You want to talk about a timesink/bottleneck/roadblock in this quest, let's talk about the golanda nut, shall we?

Out of all the drops and forages needed for the various tradeskill tasks, this little bastard is the only one that's NO DROP. That's right, unless your baker is druid or ranger, you're stuck trying to get a rare forage with a forage skill of 50.

If there were other no drop items, I wouldn't complain; I'd just say that's part of the quest and muddle through. But out of ALL the crap you have to collect for the recipes, having only ONE being no drop? I don't know...that seems like it should be changed so that it's tradeable like everything else. Having a no drop item in a massive quest like this that seems built on cooperation just seems odd to me.

I was talking more about the game in general, than this quest specifically actually, I mean COMPLETELY remove ALL timesinks in EVERY expansion where you get autogranted AAs(and earlier), the artisan quest/pop-flagging is fine in itself, apart from the obsolete timesinks.

Think about it: the reason people people don't do old raids nowadays(even those that can be singlegrouped) while levelling up, is because of the timesinks.
Im proposing an alternative gearing path to defiant-stuff through the game, that encourages abit more exploring and fighting in old zones, and experiencing content you would otherwise miss.
if the acquisition of old raid gear could keep up with levelling speed in the low-end-game, would that really be a bad thing?

nah, you hit the nail on the head. You said most of the servers population is already so low, there isn't much competition. Because guess what, pointless tedium isn't something you pay for, its something you get payed for. Anyway, keep on not getting it.

Eh, to me the incredibly untuned respawn timers is actually quite the similar to the arbitrary currency-to-play requirements in mobile games. There just isn't an option to buy tokens too lower the respawn timer.

Obviously, games need some mechanics to slow down progression to have balanced pacing. But there's a big difference between having rare drops and having to spawn nameds and people being able to time and instantly kill extra-long, ultra trivial, timed spawns.

Sometimes things just don't past the smell test. The flagging process in the context of it being 2016 where POP progression is otherwise 100% worthless, 100% trivial, with respawn timers tuned to a decade ago is an artificial roadblock.

Artificial or not it's not the huge roadblock people are making it out to be.

This is why we cannot have nice things.

Best augment in the game is released, requires some work and patience, and there are still complainers cause they won't have it done by August 1...

I don't really post much on here... or at all. But Mistatk - I think you are making a bigger deal out of this than it is.

Yeah, there is a 3 day respawn - but there are a ton of other npcs you need to kill, plus some events that can be done at any time (PoN hedge maze). Not to mention there is an -ton of other tradeskill stuff you can do in your down time. It's the best aug in the game by far, does not require a raid force to obtain, is not a limited time offer, and you can buy all 12 of the seals if you wanted to. Waiting 3 days for a rare mob kill isn't asking much. If it we needed to loot something off the mobs - sure, I would say that its kind of rough for a trivial fight. As far as it being intended? PoP was regarded as one of the best expansions. So having a throwback in there and keeping the flagging relevant is kind of nice. Yes, it will slow me down, but no more than golems did when doing my SK epic 1.0

In terms of people screwing each other over - I am in Ring of Valor on bristlebane. Our raid competitors on the server are Reckless Ascension, Fu World Order, and Circle of Legends. Not only is everyone of us working together and announcing in general chat when mobs are up, but we've been sending tells back and forth to each other to make sure we know a mob is up in case they didn't see general chat. People aren't trying to screw each other over, they are just trying to finish the quest. If anything, it is bringing people together.

There are things that devs have gotten wrong in the past. This isn't one of them. It's a great quest. If they removed the flagging then people would complain about it being too easy. Damned if it's too easy, damned if its too hard.

So it's not a big deal but removing it would make the quest too easy. Huh.

Flag requirements for many of the PoP zones were removed when PoP was less than a year old. All the flags were removed a few years after that. Seems silly that they're still required for this quest. It's been like 270-ish years in Norrath time. I think knowledge of the Planes has been pretty well disseminated by now.

game is called Ever-quest not lame nowquest.

I don't see what the issue is
get your flagging started and camp your mobs like any other mob in the game and when you camped mob pop you can be a A**8888E on your server or start a raid and get it killed helping others get their kills.
http://samanna.net/eq.progression/prog.pop.shtml

I am working on the CT server attempting to complete the PoP flagging on one of my alts. There are at least 2 others that have posted in this thread that they are also on the CT server and also working towards completing the PoP flagging and you seem to want to ignore their comments that they ARE offering the chance to get the flag to the general channel and in public channels. Send me a tell in game and if I am on and find a mob up I will send you a tell as well to let you know so you can come get your flag. Your comments and effort would be MUCH better spent trying to create a thread asking for information and coordination on your server for people to help each other out instead of just bashing and complaining and at the end of the day, you have nothing accomplished.

There is so much that is being taken out of the game, dumbing it down, and making it easy mode like a Staples commercial that I am happy to see that this is still in the game.

I do not think it was intended to be the bottleneck but that probably wasn't in really considered too much when they put this quest in.

Pfffff... Aug. 1? If I don't have it by July 31 I'm cancelling my 200 accounts.

I know you're being sarcastic, but this is exactly what you should do.

The aug is unbelievable. And it's available to ALL players (group, raid, casual, even whiners).

Remember epics? Those took months, even years for some players to achieve.

I think you should be happy that the aug exists, you have the ability to attain it without having to get into a top raid guild, so buckle down, pipe down, and get to work.

Excellent point. You don't even have to raid - if you recall Shawl 3.0, to get the "best"* version, you needed a raid drop. None of that for this mess.

*best by a small margin but still, it fits the point.

So, if a new quest were added, similarly awesome reward. The quest consists of nothing more than staring at a black screen for 100 hours (non-consecutive, but including some randomized afk check), it would be a great quest?

I remember a time long long long ago (last month) when people couldn't be arsed to do pop-flagging because it was too easy/ no challenge etc.