Cactus rethread

Everyone is complaining how hard it is now. I have not done it post patch so I cannot comment and have to believe everyone's comments.

However, do not be so nieve that a change had to happen. The mission pre patch was embarrassingly easy and a joke. Did not hear too much complaining during that time when everyone was getting easy VP keys and currency and spells and items. There has to be some challenge playing this game.

I am 6'5" and I like the challenge of going to the park and playing pick up basketball against people similar skilled to me. It is a challenge. What isn't a challenge is playing basketball against elementary school kids on a ten foot rim. And Cactus mission pre patch was playing basketball against elementary school kids.

The devs most likely swung the difficulty too far. I would hope that we, as players, can calmly and rationally explain this to them so they can change it. I am sure devs don't listen to rants and rage fits...

What they should have done was have adds spawn at certain health intervals of boss and lock when 2 adds up. Keep everything else the same.

While I don't disagree, why are we being asked to repeat the same 4 Heroic Missions over and over again for type 5 augs? Why are there no Heroic Adventure choices at all? Turning this mission into a complete chore is not completely helpful.

So let's get this straight: this patch removed Raid effects from the VP mission - but now we have Raid damage happening in the opening Hero mission in the expac? This needs to be tuned.

I feel like this was a direct retaliation from the devs to the player base for playing the game in a way they didn’t intend. It’s like a DM in D&D almost killing the group for challenging him. He feels like he’s god and needs to teach the players a lesson.

The devs fail to realize, or fail to care, that the reason this mission was exploited so heavily is because of their own laziness. How can you be surprised that a mission that gives a good reward for 1 named and a few adds can be completed quickly?

There was no kill component, no loot requirements, no checkpoint goals at all other than the main fight. It was painfully obvious that this mission could be exploited. I’m not saying the exploiters should be off the hook, but come on. If I stock my fridge with booze and then let my teenage kids have a party while I’m out of town. Isn’t it on me a little if underage drinking goes on?

I get it, you’ve said from the beginning “your in our world now”. This is your game and we have to play by your rules. But please understand, we need a game that is entertaining with attainable goals for both raiders and casual players. If players aren’t being entertained they will leave and you will lose money.

Please fix this at some point. What we need immediately is communication from you Let us know that it was overused and you will be fixing it, or let us know that it’s working as intended and let the ones that aren’t enjoying themselves move on.

The lack of communication is the worst thing about all of this.

Thank you for your post and humility in admitting a mistake, instead of hiding.

Now if qe can get a response on the HA screw up. I may forgive this patch.

Absor,
I know I'm not the only one who very much appreciates you posting, taking responsibility, and admitting there are issues with the fix, and explaining why the fix was made in the first place.

One thing I would note, is that the "fix" even after some tuning down of the lowering of HPs and DPS of the encounter, really aren't going to fix the "...so easy as to be thromped in a few minutes" problem that was the reason for it in the first place.

I know its not as easy as adjusting HPs/DPS, but it seems like the right fix would be to involve more steps in the task to stretch out the time to completion. Even after the current changes (and the proposed fix to the fix changes you mention), its still going to be only minutes to complete once people have the new strategy down. So why not add in some kill count steps, which could stretch the people farming to 20+ minutes, and for the average group doing for the first time to 60+ minutes.

I don't think there would be any VALID complaints in that situation, and especially if they are just kill count steps, who would complain about grinding a reasonable amount of mobs before the final fight.

Just saying... I get the reasoning, it just seems the fixes already applied, and those proposed for the next fix, aren't really fixing the problem the Devs have with it, or the players, which goes back to the initial design of the event itself. Its a DPS check/NPC mob control check, with no steps that draw it out, even in its currently overtuned state.

And again, thank you for taking responsibility and communicating whats going on. Can't say enough how much that helps while this is being worked out.

-Dart

Absor you lost some % of subs with this patch, however small. You could get them back and maybe a few others with a triple exp weekend starting tomorrow with your patch fix. Do the right thing

So when can we expect this to be patched? A server down tomorrow for that would not be a bad thing.

Lol, you don't reward the kind of behavior exhibited by most of the people in this thread. The game is better off without players like the above poster trying to extort it.

I want more people playing, any kind of loss by bad patches should be fixed with some minor gift for the trouble. To see my friends immediately return is a good thing

There was feedback in the beta threads about how easy this was. I don't recall any dev response to it. Why not tune these things during beta when people are actively giving honest feedback? When the devs should be able to find willing participants to test your changes and help tune it.

During beta, I saw Ngreth actively participating in threads, Prathun responding to various questions, Aristo providing status updates (not responding to people though) and the rest of the design team seemed completely disengaged from any sort of beta participation (dedicated raid tuning with invited guilds is a one-off in my mind). As usual, a lot of good, valid feedback was dismissed, the issues pointed out went live, and the usual over reaction from the dev team ensued.

It reminds me of my first week working in software development having a manger show me a graph of the cost to fix a bug versus when the bug is found in the development life cycle. DBG seems to be habitually pushing these things off to the expensive part of that graph.

Oh Absor, I totally agree, but you do see what I'm saying right? Even now, if you know the strat to win, its not taking much more than 10 mins to win (EDIT: if you know how, and group is capable), so I'm trying hard, and failing to figure out how this "fixes" anything at all, unless 10 mins is fine, whereas 5-10 minutes wasn't...

There were missions in EoK and TBM that were in the 5 minute or less range. I don't see that as a problem. It gives people something to quickly do. I think a balance of quick and easy and more difficult and involved is good. It gives different types of people an opportunity to have something to do and complete. The balance could be made up for in the rewards. The really easy one could have a smaller chest (or lower the odds of each reward slot having an item) and less currency than the harder, more involved ones. Balance it on the reward side.

While I enjoy having challenging content, I know there is a good part of the player base that can't do it or doesn't enjoy it. There's no reason to cater to only one end of the spectrum in a game like EQ. We have multiple zones and multiple missions. That provides opportunity to mix and match.

A lot of missions across a lot of expansions can be done relatively quickly (<5 min). In recent memory:

• Two Sides of the Shield (Caverns of Endless Song)
• Anashti Sul (Crypt of Sul)
• Grummus (Plane of Health)
• Grannus (Crypt of Decay)
• Summoning of Droga (Droga)
• Atrebe's Vault (Chardok)

The longest part of a lot of these was waiting for a mechanic - mobs to chat, move around, spawn, etc. Even Cactiikii has the growing animation that slows things down a bit.
<5 minutes isn't necessarily bad.

Guys' don't get it twisted, I'm NOT saying it should be longer.

I'm saying if the reasoning for the changes was the short amount of time required to receive the loot pinata at the end, and the fixes were supposed to address that. Then they really aren't addressing the problem, and after all the messing with the event, retuning, etc. we're still back at the same point.

So if the purpose of messing with the event is to not allow 5-10 minute farming of the chest between lockout timers, then its not achieving that, and we might end up with more and more fixes to the fixes to the fixes.

I just want to say thanks to Absor for acknowledging this and working on a fix, dealing with the amount of complaining and piggybacking in this thread can't be fun. I've had a lot of fun in RoS, I did get my butt kicked by this retuned version though so looking forward to the fix!

Thanks again,

So when can we expect a fix?

If I were Absor, I'd want this on Test first to avoid any further tuning down the road. I wouldn't expect this until Feb patch tbh. It may not make players happy in this moment but neither would the fix not really being a fix.