Just allow people to hail the mobs as fast as they want. People WHO want the lore will do slowly, people WHO dont, will do fast. Personally I do fast, because I dont care about the lore. What do bothers me that it takes so long time to do the hails, making it harder to do the time trials. I cannot see how you can think that this could save people time, when you put artificial delay into the hails. Here you do have the "Cinema" screnes that cannot be speeded up. The effect is the direct the opposite that you say you intended.
Why I'm helping Firiona Vie instead of killing her, if you kill her you fail the first event and can't access any other raid in the expansion. Why I'm killing the invaders instead of the Qeynos guards I've been killing for over a decade, if you kill the Qeynos guards you fail the first event and can only access one other raid in the expansion and best of luck beating PoWar in RoF gear. Why I killed High Priest Syltetzalvek, because I'm obsessed with lore and am greatly offended by an in game NPC asking questions based on the Earth calendar instead of the Norrathian one: http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/54766 oh ya and I don't want to spend the year farming ToV so I need to kill him/her/it no matter what. The raiding game has the depth of choices of a first person shooter. Killing someone's children in The Queen's Decree is an offensive concept if I thought of EQ as anything except a video game. Humanizing NPCs that you are required to kill to progress in the game is a terrible thing to do. The grouping game has some element of choice simply based on the relatively small penalties for only consuming a fraction of the content and if you can bend from your lore preferences enough to do the group mission that mirrors Queen's Decree once and write your own fanfic about how your group drugged you and once the effects wore off you were mortified by what you had done you can even face no penalty. Here is some lore: Ren Daiyan was still just a boy when he took the lives of seven men while guarding an imperial magistrate of Kitai. That moment on a lonely road changed his life in entirely unexpected ways, sending him into the forests of Kitai among the outlaws. From there he emerges years later, and his life changes again, dramatically, as he moves toward the court and emperor while war approaches Kitai from the north. Lin Shan is the daughter of a scholar, his beloved only child. Educated by him in ways young women never are, gifted as a songwriter and calligrapher, she finds herself living a life suspended between two worlds. Her intelligence captivates an emperor and alienates the women at court. But when her father's life is endangered by the savage politics of the day, Shan must act in ways no woman ever has. In an empire divided by bitter factions circling an exquisitely cultured emperor who loves his gardens and his art far more than the burdens of governing, dramatic events on the northern steppe alter the balance of power in the world, leading, under the river of stars, to events no one could have foretold. If you want to learn more read River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay, if you want to play a video game and get loot play EverQuest. While some poor sap in your group hails some mob 21 times read a page or two of Kay's work and be vastly more entertained and then go back to killing some mobs in EQ.
EverQuest is taking after the Game of Thrones: no matter which characters you like or dislike, they will all get killed sooner or later.
Just wondering the point of all this? I know for myself and everyone else I have talked to not read the scripts anyways, especially in timed trials where you need a lot of hails, just slows us down and frustrates us.
I just read the book then place them on bookcases in my house to store them. Groundspawns>forage anyday.
Asked a bunch of friends, and none of them reads the text.. Not in old and not in new. In the old the only thing that was interesting was if there was something that should be said. And the fact was that in the OLD, it was a LOT better, as you were not overwhelmed with text that really did not mean anything. While in new, there lots of text that could just as well be tossed out into a garbage can.
How about making the book part of the reward for the quest? This reward contains all of the following: Experience AA Experience Book of QuestXYZ Lore Or you could even make two choices, one reward just the XP, the other reward XP plus book.
It was already stated why they didn't do this originally: If it's being fixed then this thread = pointless... oh wait... this thread was about foraging and had nothing to do with hails
https://forums.station.sony.com/eq/...ths-lore-guide-1-the-history-of-norrath.2959/ Why would learning the lore be a reward? Just stick the books in the PoK library for 1cp each. Learn why Norrath is saved hundreds of times a year on servers like Antonius Bayle and ignore that Trakanon is still around even though the lore states Norrath will be lost unless brave adventurers do something which never happens on Trakanon.
why not have it create a journal entry in your quest journal thing that hasnt been used for 10 years now? people that care can read it, people that dont can skip though it. no books, no new items, just a txt file and updating script (which it seems they will update the script anyways)
The foraging thing was slightly annoying at worst. Kill some mobs between forages for xp. What's that, you maxed out on gribble before brother island? Oh well.
GOT jokes aside, Lanys won't die. Even though we play goodie two shoes in EQ now, EQ used to focus more on the good-neutral-evil conflict, and Lanys represents the evil part of that just as much as Firiona represents the good.
Here is what I find humorous about this entire "forage" controversy. Long ago, forage was a restricted ability. Only certain classes had it. There was a vocal group of people that wanted it shared out to all classes. Eventually, they succeeded and the ability was given to everyone (and as it usually is, most of the more vocal proponents have since left the game). Now, if there is an ability that all classes share, it is fair game to include it into any quest that is available to all classes. In short, it isn't surprising that foraging was involved in the partisan/mercenary tasks in this expansion. It was a part of a task in SoD and it will eventually become a part of a task in some future expansion. Back then, forage tables were zone wide. That is to say, if you needed to forage acorns, you did not need to be under an oak tree to get them. You could move out into the desert of a zone, where nothing grows, and have the same chance to get acorns as you did under the oak. Anywhere in the zone worked to get your acorns. Now, I don't know if there was a code change that allows for multiple forage tables in a zone, or the Dev's used a brute force approach to the Brother Island forages and just overrode the forage command, but either way, they had to put in a little extra work to get the quest forages to work the way that they do. I am somewhat surprises that they would entertain changing the forages to ground spawns considering.
Forage was added as an AA skill capped at 50. Something a large percentage of the player base never wasted AAs on. Now these players are required to purchase the AA ability and then skill up until they get the needed items. This only took my wizard 2hr 45mins. Of course now that the quest is becoming common knowledge folks are taking steps to mitigate the pain but still.....why would you put in a quest that required a large percentage of your player base to buy and unwanted AA that they will never use again? There really isn't any way around it....horrid design
I I really don't think you can say 'a large percentage of the player base never purchased forage AA'. There is no evidence for or against this. If you raided, odds were you purchased it (at least one raid required foraging drops in the Underfoot expansion). If you were a tradeskiller, you had a decent chance of purchasing it as well.
It's included in the auto-grant AAs. So if you're 100+ and in TDS during this early release time, you can literally get it for 0 AAs.
There are a lot of things "a large percentage of the player base" dislikes: fighting underwater, fighting on uneven ground, endless mob clearing, travel of any sort other than ports, etc., etc., etc. As for the AA cost: Well, when I am spending 25 AA's on an upgrade that is a mathematical increase but damned near impossible to parse the difference, 3 AA's (at most, you can get it for free) that I can actually see the results of seems like nothing (even if I don't care).
