Proposed Overseer changes

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Fian, Jul 31, 2020.

  1. Fian Augur

    As far as I can tell, I now have all the cards in the game. Having played overseer extensively, I have noticed that it seems that there is a "perfect" agent for each quest. Other agents may have overlapping traits that can allow them to also match the traits required, but it seems like for each quest, the developer had a particular agent in mind when they made the trait requirements. With that in mind, here are my proposed changes.

    1. Quests are too "top heavy". Elite agents are in demand everywhere, and you run out of those too quickly. My proposal is only to design agent requirements based on elite if they are the first requirement for the quest. Aka, don't put elite agent traits in a common agent slot. This also applies to rare, etc. Trait requirements should match the rarity of the slot they are filling.
    2. The trait requirements should be based on an agent whose primary job is that job. If you have an agent that is spy 5 and marauder 3, don't make that agent the ideal match for a marauder job.
    3. Add a filter that only shows the agents whose primary job matches the job you are filling. It would make it easier to find the correct agent (assuming number 2 is followed above).

    It should also be noted that agent recovery quests are pretty buggy. I can't get the quest when my agent has 72 hours left, when I can get the quest it may take more time to run the quest than just letting the timer expire (keep in mind that not everyone is going to launch the quest immediately after quests switch at 6am in the morning), and even if I do run the quest, sometimes the agent in question isn't rescued. It would probably be better if the game just gave you a clicky that would allow you to select the desired agent, and reduce their capture time by x amount. Having different capture types like discredited also adds a layer of complexity that should probably be removed.
  2. Buster_Shruggs Augur



    I utilize Overseer for xp rewards for alts I usually don't play too much.
    I like your observations. While leveling up certain tiers after I had maxed out others, I noticed using Elites in low level quests would actually turn out failures even when the odds were in favor of completion 88%+. Overseer certainly isn't perfect, but I think it was a good addition to the game. While I like your ideas, I hope they prioritize other aspects of the game before Overseer when it comes to updates!
  3. Fian Augur

    One more thing I would like to see changed, although this one is unlikely. I hate when they make tradeable currencies (in this case heirloom) where you can be expected to trade 10s of thousands, and item cap per stack is 1000. It would be better to have reduced Overseer currency by a factor of 10 so it trades easier between char (and of course if you drop currency, you would also drop prices). Ironically, raid currency which is not tradeable is much more balanced.
    Nennius likes this.
  4. Andarriel Everquest player since 2000

    yea be nice if it was increased to 10k stack size.

    Andarriel
  5. Jhenna_BB Proudly Prestigious Pointed Purveyor of Pincusions

    If you're going to restrict rare and elite overseer use as heavily as you are (IE single use), we could use new agents - like double the rares and elites we have now. Requiring 5 or 6 agents per mission is too many rolls for incapacitation each day. I had 34 incapacitated agents earlier this week. I'm usually hovering at around 15 incapacitated overseers - I only select quests once per day. I couldn't do certain quests because all 4 choices you can pick were incapacitated and unavailable for certain steps. I have all overseers, I shouldn't be incapable of doing an "easy" quest.

    The OP makes great suggestions. Just saying.
  6. Yinla Ye Ol' Dragon

    They need to fix the bugs already in Overseer before they make anymore changes.
  7. Iven Antonius Bayle

    The whole Overseer is a bug and I wonder why there is a test server if the players on the life servers are the testers. It sure does safe DBG alot money if they can outsource this to the players and let them work for free. Alot players will never pay money for All Access because of this and other disharmonies.

    The biggest problem that occured with Overseer is that Overseer has replaced EverQuest. Per account and day its easily possible to waste one hour of time for Overseer. This does add up drastically for boxers. Most people box at least two accounts and alot have more accounts. The time spend on Overseer is lost for playing EverQuest. And there are also the annoying and repetitive daily quests from Franklin Teek and the other guy beside him that come next. All this is against immersion, creativity and a classic EverQuest experience. The majority of players are now just logging in to play Overseer and then run out of time to do anything else.

    There should be done something to reduce the time being spend on Overseer drastically.
    • Reduce the amount of missions from 3 and 5 to 2 and 3 (free+silver accounts / All Access) and increase the reward amount per mission to compensate this.
    • Reduce the number of agent slots in the missions. It should cap at 4 agent slots.
    • Speed up the agent conversion process as this is laggy like hell.
    • Finally fix the cache problem that does make new started missions disappear after zoning and camping and randomly reappearing sometimes after many hours.
  8. Fian Augur

    If the goal is to make overseer faster, it would be nice to show in some way all your agents that match at least one trait in the agent slot.
  9. Chopin.Xegony Augur

    Why did they get rid of the Legends of Norrath card game just to introduce another mini game now? Legends of Norrath was a lot more fun to play.
    Leigo and Nadisia like this.
  10. Ibadan Kun'Tirel Augur

    Overseer oddity: Clockwork VIIX is a gnome, and not a clockwork, but the image looks like a complete clockwork. And can't be used to fulfill the clockwork missions.
    dreadlord likes this.
  11. Fian Augur

    Yeah, I have noticed that as well.
  12. Stephen51 Augur

    As the currency is shared across the account on a server by server basis, could it not be shared a bit like Loyalty tokens? (Loyalty tokens are shared across account and servers). This would negate the need to transfer currency from character to character.
    Vrinda and Yinla like this.
  13. dreadlord Augur

    My No1 request would be to make the collectibles tradeable
    (yes, I still have hundreds clogging up my bank in the unlikely event it happens)

    2 Fix the bugs, especially the disappearing quests. I'm getting RSI from redoing them again and again when they disappear

    3. Let us do lower level quests. As the OP says (and especially when you've 'lost' the best quests), it's hard to do useful things with a small number of agents. Why not let a lvl 5 do a lvl 2 quest (for the much smaller reward)?

    4. If you want to increase usage, throw in some rare quests - ie 'specials' that have much better rewards or unusual rewards or take longer or something

    5. Give us something useful to spend currency on - there's nothing at all useful to me (or my alts) at the moment

    Also: success/failure/incapacitation seems to bear no relation to the % chance of success. It should. If my quest has a 99% chance of success (ie my party has the ideal profile), it's nonsensical that 3/5 should be incapacitated
  14. Nadisia Augur

    Yeah, at least LoN, was a ... game.
    Overseer? Hmmm, not really, it's just a brainless buggy clickfest (and its UI is pretty horrible)
  15. Riou EQResource


    LoN required a separate full time dev team, it also flopped in the end because it was too complicated to get and keep a casual playerbase, which is the general problem SOE at the time had, if it was more like Hearthstone (more simplified Magic) it would possibly still be a thing today
  16. Yinla Ye Ol' Dragon

    It is a gnome disguised as a clockwork, read the lore on it. :)

    Top 10 wants for overseer

    1. Fix the vanishing quests
    2. Fix the agents not synicing between agents window and quest window
    3. Put an icon on quest types, so you can see what they are without having to open each quest
    4. Add AA as a quest reward
    5. Add older expansions as tradeskill rewards
    6. Add more tabs to sort by, pretty annoying when the quest requires 5 different traits yet you can only sort for 1. UI could seriously use a lot of improvements, parts of it is cluttered while others is just dead space.
    7. Let me choose the level of quests I want to do. currently have all agents (including Fippy) all skills are at 4 or max and I am mainly getting Grey quests, I get maybe 2 green ones per rotation. I have seen 1 blue in the last month and purples seem non existant since I got all my agents and nearly maxed in all.
    8. Remove the no trade from Collectables in all forms.
    9. Make the vendor sortable, currently there are so many ornaments on there you miss the other stuff
    10. Put something useful and unique on the on the overseer vendor.
  17. OlavSkullcrusher Augur

    Yinla is correct about this. I missed it when I first saw it too.

    But the problem is that at least one quest has Clockwork as a bonus along with two other traits that Clockwork VIIX satisfies, yet none of the actual clockwork agents really work for that quest. Meaning, that when the bonus traits for those quests were set up, the person setting up the quest also made the mistake of assuming that he was a clockwork. Level 5 Military - Courage for Kirathas has a slot for a Spy with Clockwork, Enchanter, Cautious as bonus traits. However, none of the actual clockwork agents are enchanters and the only Spy among them is not Cautious either. Therefore, it is impossible to satisfy all of the bonuses for that slot in that quest.

    This is an example of how there are currently two categories of problems with Overseer. Bugs and design flaws.

    The bugs are things that simply don't work correctly, like the missing quests or the "0" time incapacity problem. Then there are the errors like this that mean someone got a detail wrong and players get confused and can't take full advantage of what they have like they should. That can be frustrating also, especially this long after it went live.

    But there are also design flaws that are make things take too long (user interface) or even have poor risk vs reward, like how a Level 2 Common Trade quest gives the same number of collection dispenser fragments as a Level 5 Rare Trade quest, even though you need to use higher level agents for the latter and they have a higher chance of being incapacitated and for longer and it costs a LOT more DBC to rush the recovery of higher level agents.

    So, yeah. There's a fair amount that needs improvement.
    Ibadan Kun'Tirel and dreadlord like this.
  18. Rayzen Elder

    How about adding LoN prizes as rewards. Make them "No Trade" of course, so ppl don't try farming for plat. Example; "Dragorn War Mask" 100,000 Overseer Trachiderms. As ppl have mentioned though, there are more important aspects of this that can be addressed first. Just adding an idea.
    Velisaris_MS and Jhenna_BB like this.
  19. OlavSkullcrusher Augur

    Adding my feedback to previous suggestions:

    From Fian (OP) - I agree that all three of his points are significant problems. This is especially the case for lvl 4 and 5 quests. There are too many quests at those levels that you can't get to 90%+ on without using basically all rare and elite agents. That should not be true for 'common' or even 'uncommon' quests. Only the rare and elite quests should take so many rare and elite agents to get a decent success chance on. All others should have more options to fill with common and uncommon agents.

    I also agree that passing tradeable and/or heirloom currencies that you need many thousands is a problem. If it takes 60k+ overseer tetradrachm to buy something, it has got to stack to more than 1000 to be able to transfer it to other characters. If the game is limited to stacks of 1000, then please scale the currency down or something. Or use Stephen51's suggestion and make it an account based currency like Loyalty Tokens.

    From Iven - regarding the time it takes to use Overseer - Collecting rewards for 5 finished quests, doing any conversions you can, and setting up another 5 quests should not take 15+ minutes. 5 minutes would be more like it.

    Suggestions for reducing the time it takes:
    • Defaults -
      • the reward window should have the the last reward you chose for that type of quest already selected, so you can just hit claim right away. If you picked the tradeskill items from The Burning Lands last time you did a Harvest quest, let that be one click to claim it again.
      • When hitting 'select agent', have the job for that slot already chosen in the drop down menu so that you don't have to do it. If you can't make choosing multiple traits to filter the agents in that selection a thing, then have the first of the bonuses already chosen as well.
      • For conversion quests, the simple thing would be to default sort the agents by how many copies of them you have. That would save a huge amount of time on that.
    • I second Yinla's #3 - Icons for quest types along with the quest title
    Also from Yinla:
    4. AA as a quest reward - I'd like that as well. If regular xp and merc AA xp are options, I don't see why AA xp isn't.
    5. More tradeskill rewards from older content. Oh yeah, most definitely. I'd do all Research, crafting, and harvesting quests if I could choose LDoN items. I took my 91 ranger, 115 ranger, and 110 druid with their foraging AAs through an LDoN adventure. I foraged until the timer was down to about 10 minutes, then killed everything and still only got 4 gargoyle granites.
    7. Quest levels - either allow us to do lower level quests or fix the broken risk vs reward for the higher level quests. (See my above post)
    8. No trade collectibles - I don't see why using multiple accounts and giving all of the shinnies I get to one of my accounts is a bad thing. Maybe I get why they didn't want the Overseer collectibles to end up in the bazaar directly, but it still competes with it.
    10. More unique options on Overseer vendor - yup.
    For myself, I would add that recovery quests need work still too. I would do away with the quests being for specific types of incapacitation, and I would make them always be there, like the conversion quests.
    Jhenna_BB likes this.
  20. Jhenna_BB Proudly Prestigious Pointed Purveyor of Pincusions

    It's a shame that I can only like a post once.

    Honestly, I wouldn't mind this being a "for collector's only" type feature where it is no trade were it ever to happen. That seems to be the kind of route the Devs are taking with Overseer.