Not sure you guys understand the situation.... You don't have any choice but to advance the individual quest stats. That's part of the reward for all quest types, to advance that particular quest type. Your responses make it sound like you think people are >choosing< to advance these stats. The best you could do is to perfectly balance all quest types, which would then delay that advance as much as possible, but eventually, they will advance.
I understand leveling up, is not a "choice" in overseer...it is forced upon you. I am just not used to thinking leveling up, as accepting a handicap. In traditional mmorpgs, leveling up means you gain access to greater rewards and more difficult quests. But in overseer, leveling up means "gaining" access to the same rewards as a level 1, but are forced to get them through more difficult quests to earn them. Is that really the intention? Its almost the opposite concept of everquest in general... For example: for recovery they could arrange it so the the duration of a recovery-quest was (7h - recoverylevel) so that with recoverylevel at max. you could have your missing char back in 2 hours rather than 6 hours(counting from quest-rotation-time). Or that your trade-level(and diplomacy-level) directly corresponded to the number of dispenser-fragments you got rewarded(on a non-crit), meaning 5 fragments at maxlevel.
You have to decide what you want to do.you can go after rewards or you can build your agents. but not both. The reason I say this is because if you focus on one type of reward you will level that quest type to the point you will not have the required agents to be able to start it. The other option is to build your agent pool and not care about the rewards until you have the agents you need. To do this you will want to do as many of the 6 hour tasks as possible. Do as many different types of quest as possible. Also try and get as high of % on success as you can. Also when you see a recruit task you Need to do them 1st. Recruit task give you the most agents. Critical success also give you extra agents. You can use coin to Buy agents from the Vendor. You do not need double of your agents. and once you get to the Icon level it wont let you use more then one at a time so it best to get into the habit of upgrading any doubles you get.
I've been doing Overseer for exp, the rewards from that do increase the higher the level the same can be said for tradeskill items, they increase the higher the level either by amount per item or additional items. I do a mix of all types of quests and all of mine are now level 2 or higher, I do 6 hours during the day IF I know I can log in shortly after my 6 hour timer is up, or 12 hours if it will be longer before I can log in again. Overnight depends on when I do it and what time I plan on logging on in the morning. I did a lot of research in the beginning for Conflagrent ore/silks/pelts so that is maxed so I don't have to do any more 24 hour quests unless I am unable to play for over a day. I do recruitment quests when they come up, I convert my duplicates as soon as I am able, I have round 103 agents now. While I am unable to do some of the higher quests there is always a lot that I can do.
That is the extra reward for collection option when leveling up, it's just not what most people selecting the collection item want. You get both coins and a collection frag when you select that option. The amount of coins you get in addition to the collection frag is what is scaling. They did that intentionally so collection items wouldn't flood the servers. Now that they are No Trade collection items, I don't see any harm in making the reward more fragments and less/no coins. Whether or not they will actually do that, I don't know. But as others have said, the XP rewards go up, the TS items increase, and so forth.
That's my entire point...leveling the stats is f'ing useless because it doesn't mean anything. You get virtually no benefit from having a level 5 in a stat as opposed to only having level 1. It's a game mechanic that serves ABSOLUTELY no purpose, yet is forced on players. It's crap-poor design.
As I just said above.. All of the rewards with the exception of the collection frags increase as you level (You get more coins along with the collection frag for that reward). This was an intentional decision, if all you want from Overseer is Collection Items then yes, leveling makes it harder. For many other players who are using it for more than just collection items, they are seeing an increase in rewards as they level.
An easy way to tell them apart is their job level. If they have say Artisan 3 it's probably Iconic, if they only have Artisan 2 it's not Iconic. The agent list separates them as well, the non-iconic's will be the bottom one's in the list of greens with the Iconics at the top.
My husband had noticed the greens were separated by rank 3 and 2's but we never made a connection to any iconic tag or not.
If only there was an icon or something they could put on the agent itself... Doing conversions is a pita. scanning though the list of 60-100 common agents to get the duplicates is just stupid design, why could duplicates not be at the front of the list ? Then the amount of real estate use by the window itself with massive blank spaces, someone needs to go on a course with user interface design or just read a book on do and don't. Then we come by selecting traits, click the drop down box or click each agent, which is easier, Well both methods suck, why not click the trait required and have the agents highlighted and no clear button for the drop down boxes to reset .. wow So much fail in that window and design.
The game design is there to make you have to do a little work. if it was just a single click to select the best party / quest then it wouldn't be a time sink. It wouldn't take any 'work'. It would be just clicking the reward me I want free stuff.
You are equating tedium with work, after a while the effort to get small rewards is not worthwhile for the person doing the work anymore and they stop doing it. As the system is currently I would think its lifespan is measured in months not years.
This is true of all of EQ. After a while the tedium of raiding/xping/etc vs the rewards ... Hopefully they scale the XP rewards in such a way that this will continue to have some value
