We Will Remember You

I know more than one person that has this already in place.

People said that to about Fire Beetle eyes back on phinny lol

It isn't worth it when the wine quest is there and the merchant is beside the quest giver. I did a test the other day and 4 stacks of wine took my druid to level 5.01 from zero exp. On the rat ear quest 4 stacks took an enchanter to 5.77 from zero exp. So the exp is very close. Sure 77% of a level doesn't seem close, but that was level five. The gap just gets smaller and smaller. At level 13 or so 4 stacks of rat ears were worth 30% of a level. I didn't wine someone up that high because I didn't have a toon that needed it.

As far as I can tell, the biggest difference between rat ears and wine isn't the small exp difference, it is the fact that wine costs six times as much as rat ears. With max CHR rat ears were 10pp for a stack of 1k to turn in. A 1k stack of wine costs 60pp. Doing some math here is what ears cost per level range:

Level 5 - 40pp
Level 7 - 80pp
Level 10 - 280pp
Level 13 - 640pp
Level 15 - 1,000pp
Level 18 - 1,760pp
Level 20 - 2,440pp

I have no data for any higher levels because I was losing my mind buying rat ears and porting back. However, I did do one more turn in after l dinged 20 because I had four stacks left and that made 248 stacks. Four stacks of rat ears at level 20 moved the exp bar from 20.02838 to 20.13004. So you are looking at roughly 10% of the level for 4 stacks of ears. That sounds great, but that was also stack 248. Bags only hold so much. That also means 40 stacks to hit level 21. My max bag held 40 stacks and buying it took forever and made my wrist hurt from clicking. I'm sure there are ways to speed some stuff up and some people will automate the buying, but to me it just is silly to do past the initial filling up of your bags. If you are getting 10% of a level for a turn in at level 20, I would imagine it is only 2-5% at level 30. Why not just kill mobs when a single mob is worth 1-2%?

Honestly, I think wine quests being in the game are a good compromise. They will let people quickly jump past the annoying levels on their second and third alts. Since they are six times more expensive, they will also suck a lot of plat out of the system for anyone that uses them. I'll test it for sure once servers are up and I decide what box I want next, but at minimum you are looking at 14,640pp to get to level 20. Probably more as there is a slight exp difference. I also need to test the evil vs good versions and see if one gives more exp. The evil one doesn't have any negative faction hits that I know of, where as both rat ears and the good version of wine quest did. However, the good version has the vendor literally right across from the quest giver, while the evil version just has the vendor in the same zone.

Agree 100% the fix they could have used was to just limit quest experience on the newbie quests (server max level * x%).

Level 50, maybe limit to 20
Level 60, limit to 40
Level 65, limit to 50
Etc...

The key is definitely to be able to automate this type of stuff. After this patch was announced... the next morning you could see 8 or 9 lvl 10-15 druids controlled by 1 person, sitting in qeynos hills. What does 1 person need with 9 druids? Who knows... but apparently turning rat ears in for this person was extremely easy. On top of the gang of druids that were over the hill from this NPC, you'd see random lvl 30s walk up to turn ears in also. This was at 3am so it's safe to say it was not just a group of random people and there happen to be 9 people who wanted alt druids. No, it was the same race. All holding 2 steins and casting minor heal to skill up. They were doppelgangers and the same 1 chanter was charming it for all the lvl 20-30 evil race toons that would just randomly appear back at the NPC and start handing in and then run off and disappear into the night.

Um....sticking a 30 minute lockout timer on this quest wouldn't have solved all this?

Just saying.

Thread didn't age all that great.

Why do they hate us so much?

I just came here to say that I stopped playing Everquest because of this "fix" I just read about.

Been playing since 1999.

Now I'm playing WOW HC and it's AMAZE. It's what Everquest wishes it was.

BALANCED R FuN GaMeS aM i RiTe?

Me too.

Not really related to this particular quest but it does bring up fond memories of the game...pre quest exp nerf...

Bring back quest exp for the 25th...
Quests should be nice chunks of exp as well. They nerfed that a long time ago and i would love to see it brought back to normal quest exp...outside of a few people like our rat ear and wine friends it really wasn't game breaking to get a couple AA or 20% regular exp for epic completion and decent exp for other quests....