A few ideas for the lore - perhaps shorten the quest text and add in a phrase that says "I believe I've seen this book called XXX which could give you more information if you're interested" and then move a lot of it to the placeable books which you can buy from a vendor.
Elegist, a huge problem about the lore is that only the person doing the hailing can see the text from the NPCs. Everyone else sees nothing. I particularly like Everquest lore, but when most of my other group just wants to get the mission over with, I don't get to see anything because someone else is doing the hailing, or they don't want to wait on me while I read.
Crystilla's idea is good. Another idea would be to have when you hail them (just one time needed instead of multiple) have the NPC say something like: Questy McGuy tells you, "Thank you for helping. Why I need your help is a [long story], if you have the time to hear it." Then you just click on or tell him "long story" and he goes into the lore. And each paragraph of the lore can have an additional [continue] if you want to break it up because it is so long.
There is precedence for NPCs being annoyed by being repeatedly hailed too. A giant in Plane of Storms will tell you to quit hailing him so much and will eventually ignore you if you keep doing it. You have to zone or camp to be able to talk to him again.
The issue with other people not seeing the text in missions has been fixed for the upcoming patch. The original intent was also to have some of the lore split off into books or optional dialogue trees, but time constraints and other considerations led to the format you see now. As I mentioned, hopefully more can be done to lessen time it takes to get through dialogues, and we'll consider different options.
EQ has lore these days? Okay... a tad sarcastic as I know some people really do enjoy it. The book idea would be nice since everyone could get it if they want and you could add it to your house library or something.
I was the last person in my launch group to get my forages done. I had to stay out in the static zone while they got started on the group mission. I complained and whined in chats, /gu, and vent. Then yaaaaaayyyy when I finally got it done. That kind of stuff is part of the fun to me. FINALLY getting a pita thing done. I like the book idea too. That way the people that don't care can delete straight away and those who do....it would be nice to have a library in your house or whatever. If lore books were made for all parts of the game from the start, that's something I would sink time into collecting. Why not, I have a whole year to do time sink-y stuff.
The book could go on your cursor or in your bag. Then you could decide whether you wanted to read it, or save it, or delete it. Just please, please, please, make sure to write in the item description of said book something like, "This book is from QuestXYZ. You may safely destroy it at any time as it is not needed for anything. It contains lore about the quest that you may find interesting".
Please fix the 'opposite' case too: when several people doing solo quests are talking to the same npc, everybody in the vicinity of that npc sees everybody else's text. It's impossible to read the lore even if you want to, you just get spammed to death and everything gets scrolled and mixed up. Please make the text given by the npc for a solo task visible only to the person doing the task.
I really like the book idea. I don't think either of the two popular EQ fan sites have a writeup for all the lore, and I'd like to read it so I have more of an idea of what is going on. It's neat to see the original crew (aka, the group of heroes on the cover of the game) involved again. By the way, Elegist, when exactly do the events of TDS occur? I remember one conversation mentioning the battle in Bloody Kithicor happening recently, and of course that feels like forever ago to us since Seeds of Destruction was 2008/2009.
Plus, books take up space and you guys love charging through the nose for bigger bags...or maybe a book keyring we could pay to enlarge.
You had to be doing something else wrong then. Four boxed (plus tank and healer merc) at 102/101 100% group gear and got no death + time challenge on first try without even trying for it. I even made the mistake of zoning out when I hailed too quick and got the leave text thinking I needed to hail FV from outside to complete.
On the foraging: If you do this quest before they take out the foraging, tie the forage skill to one of your movement keys. That way you can skill it up without even really noticing (besides all the pods of water and crap you will end up picking up) before you get to this task. That's how I skilled this up when preparing to do the druid epic. As far as the hailing, I love lore and I get why you guys did that. However, if I am in a group and we all have to do hails and I want to read the lore and whatnot I am SOL because the 4 other people in my group are spamming hails and making my stupid window scroll uncontrollably.
I like the new hailing system. Entirely too much of EverQuest's writing gets entirely too skipped by entirely too many of EverQuest's players, imo. It just isn't that long to devote to finding out why you're doing what you're doing. 90 whole seconds? You could have been volunteering at the soup kitchen in that ninety seconds! oh, you just meant you could have been casting a nuke in a video game? Right, sorry. Also, ran the forages on three characters, two together and another one separately. Didn't trouble me.
I wouldn't mind if the foraging was kept in place, if you had a 100% success rate if you were foraging in the right spot. Ground spawns are a good solution too, it was nice to have something different to do in a quest even if it was minor.
Please don't put books on our cursors. That would be worse than dealing with hails since then I'd be deleting books all day.
