19th Anniversary: Dreadspire Time Sink

YEY another ban wagon, i am SO ON IT this time around. Tell me as much as you want i will ALWAYS do things the easy way, how about you guys learn to make missions or test them maybe. BAN AWAY!!!
PS: i can't do raiding scaled missions (you did give good hints that would help, but will you do it on every over tuned mission from now on?)

So are we saying that you cant guess early at all? You need to collect all the pieces first? The way the NPC responded that wasn't obvious. Like say you use eye of zomm to look around a room and find a ground spawn that's obviously not the one you want. It's an exploit to not clear the room and collect it for the update as the quests stands today?

Sounds like what they're thinking.

It's fairly obvious if you go through the quest normally in that Melion doesn't give you the room options until you've handed in all five clues.

Of course if you've done the quest before and know what the trigger phrases are, you'd need to be curious/mischievous enough to try it out and /say that text before getting to that point.

So Drunkard's Stein and several other items are going to fall into this "exploit" also right? Because people sure are not completing the tasks / missions or whatever once they get what they were after.

Maybe these bonuses should be only available at the very end? Might be a lot better design.

Yeah.. At least when it had to do with unlocking a chest it was obvious. This one did seemed like you were allowed to do just enough to guess right. Granted maybe eye of zomm and vision spells should be disabled to make it harder. And I sure didn't read the quest text very closely. I went by the eqresource summary lol. Oh well.

He responds to hails right away. It's not too strange to hail npcs an extra time to make sure you didn't miss something.

Hey DB, hell of a way to celebrate 19th year with drama and Ban Wagon hehehehe

Oh, does he respond to hails with the room options even before turning in the clues? When I did it, soon as the quest told me to give him five clues, I went and got those five clues.

Hey, the way this is going, less I apparently know about this, the better

Funny part is 2st Devs post in this thread was AFTER people were talking about this so called exploit and yet he did not say anything and went for his weekends off. WTG!!!

Other issues noted:

Able to bring more than 6 into the zone.
Basically you are able to have a merc for each toon in the zone if not grouped.
That could easily be exploited as well.

So let me get this straight. You created a buggy anniversary quest with minimal testing. You gave players no indication of how to get the bonus reward; we're supposed to figure it out for ourselves. You used the Heroic Adventure system which has always allowed quest steps to be completed out of order and there is significant precedent for anniversary bonus items being able to be gained without even having the task let alone doing all the steps.

And now people might get suspended for this ? If you consider it an exploit, fine. Fix it, it's your fault it's so apparently up. But suspending people for this would be stupid. How the hell are players supposed to know what you consider exploiting for a bonus that there is zero indication in game about how to achieve? We aren't mind readers, and this one really wasn't obvious.

The bonus isn't rewarded by finishing the mission, it's rewarded by correctly guessing the murderer/room. If you want people to finish the mission, it's on you to put the bonus reward (which is different from the mission reward) at the end of the mission. The mission reward is 50-odd AAs and Commemorative coins, which is exactly what you get if you run the mission without doing the bonus properly. There's no precedent for people to assume that the bonus reward should somehow be tied to the end of the mission just because you feel like it.

Fix your mistake, but don't suspend people for it.

I hope beside reducing number of trash, you ALSO reduce their hit powers 42k hitters are way too much. Look at the other mission on hit powers, its the right difficulty.

So, not knowing that you couldnt do things out of order even though after doing the hail AND getting jumped by an npc that you have to kill or it kills you AND the turn in item shows up on your cursor (didn't loot or anything) and somehow we are supposed to know it wasn't intended to be able to be done early?

If players are going to be suspended for the easy way, then Norrath is going to be quite empty when that happens. I am going on a limb, but I am going to guess 90% of all the augments that have been obtained were done via the easy way. At minimum.

Aw, come on now. I was feeling so proud of myself for figuring it out.

That would really surprise me, after Cactusgate. I know most of my circle were very wary of the whole thing, and personally I've done the mission a number of times for folks, each way doing the mission in full. I'm not saying I agree or disagree with whatever happens, I'm just saying if anyone wasn't wary of it, your risk tolerance is alot higher then mine.

You guys do what you think is right regarding bans. But getting a bonus item from a task without completing the task is not the same as bypassing lockouts for actual quest rewards. Better think long and hard about suspending or banning this time around. This definition also just made it clear that bypassing mission completion for collection items is an exploit. As you are getting a collection reward be it AA, bags, other items by skipping or only doing some of a mission or task and then leaving it before completion.

Everything else aside, I really did enjoy having a chance to practice my once l33t pulling monk skills, underused and under appreciated for a decade or more. That little library crammed with hurtful critters was most fun pulling I've had in some time.

Haha yea we guessed the enchanted right after turning in the food, and then had to kill him. We thought we screwed up the task, so we just guessed the ballroom, and then got the berry paste. We thought that we screwed up, I guess I’ll turn in my berry paste now that I know that’s the reward turn in item. I’ll guess I’ll wait for my ban. Thanks for the fun.