Is PoP flagging truly an intended bottleneck to the Artisan Aug?

Or the people who completed PoP progression at some point in the last 15 years?

PoJ Trial
PoN Hedge
PoS Askrs

All of those can be done solo any time.

HoH Trials
Carprin
ToSR 5 Minis
BoT Tower Key
Saryrn Tower Key
Xanamech Flag

All of those can be skipped as they aren't actually required for progession. In addition the 4 EP Gods are not required for Aid Grimel as the 7th one only requires Fire access.

So all you really need to kill is:

MB
TZ
VZ
RZtW
Agnarr
LMM
AD
KoS
Saryrn
Grummus
Bertox
Terris

The notion that you need to be unemployed to complete this, or that playing 85 hours a week (wtf?) is insufficient to complete this is laughable. Just talk to some of the other nerds you run into who are camping these spawns, form up a channel and alert each other when stuff pops. Give people some time to get there and crush the events. The more you get flagged together the less likely the mobs will be down because people are killing them 1-by-1.

Since people are behaving like children I'll do the typical old-man "in my day story". I missed one raid due to work, Carprin. Not even required for progression, just a key to lower CoD. Because of that, and because this was before 85/15 rules I was unable to get the Bertox flag, and before they added the out-of-order flagging system, it meant I couldn't get the flags for KoS and Saryrn, and therefore EPs. I wasn't able to raid EPs and Time (which was the vast majority of our raid nights) for 4 months until a back flag run was done because I missed one PoP flag.

You can't complete 1 quest rewarding 1 augment because you missed a flag that you'll have another shot at in 3 days. Cry me a river.

No one cares what we did 15 years ago. MMO's have changed and so has Everquest. No one is ever going to sit on line for 24 hours to get Ragefire like so many of us did in support of our Cleric friends and guildmates. Those times have past.

Requiring the flags from mobs with 12 hour variation in spawn time is ludicrous. The tradeskilling is supposed to be what is rewarded from the quality of this aug. Not sitting around waiting on grey con 15 year old "raid mobs".

Get off your high horses and quite frankly I'll pass on the cry me a river sell to not changing the requirements. It's idiotic at best and elitist.

What you're whining about above is what you'd need to do to get the aug in a couple of weeks.
Have you even considered the fact that there are items in the game designed to take casual players months to attain?

Also, I haven't shared my account info with anyone, only camped 1 or 2 pop named mobs on the weekends for more than a few hours at a time, and got this done in a few weeks. Like I, and several people have said: start a /popflag channel on your server, and get a team going to get this done. I missed several mobs, and had to watch the timers to get them the second, or even third time they spawned. Also, I bugged out Rallos Zek on one kill, which took almost 2 weeks to get fixed.

Bugs happen. You will miss spawns. This may take you a couple of months. This is also one of, if not the best aug in the game, that can be attained by ANYONE in the game.

I'm so sick of the whimpering. It can be done. Do it, or don't.

It's part of the quest. A full run through the content of a single expansion.

I mention what the past was to put some perspective on the people complaining about not being able to complete a single quest. All it is doing is preventing you from acquiring one item. It isn't as though not completing this quest prevents you from accessing or beating content, or prevents you from progressing.

The fact that people are posting about canceling their accounts because they haven't been able to complete a quest in less than a months time is the only idiotic thing happening here.

Sure you could just flag every single target with a multi-day spawn at this point to be a 2 hour respawn or something. But that would take developer time, and likely cause issues with the TLP servers which tend to be a cash cow lately so you may as well strap in and do what Arcainos suggests. Talk to other people doing the quest and work together. You know, like an MMO.

There's nothing hard about getting old world boss respawn if you really want it. It just requires some organisation / knowledge. If you can't do that very simple thing, too bad, the aug isn't for you.

I knew this was coming. It always happens. In this case it's particularly funny because of the kneejerk reaction. It looks like you were wanting to quit, or already did, and just wanted a convenient excuse.

I think it's absurd that these kills are requirements for this Aug.

I'm not going to quit or throw a tantrum. I just simply refuse to bother with it at this point.

Having people break scripts or solo kill old raids in the middle of the night and early morning isn't worth my time.

The Aug is excellent in quality, but the requirements are a complete joke.

Just put in effort, jeez

What I love about the put in effort people, is they were horrible before, and now they are just going to be horrible with a fancy aug. I already know people lining up timing to come in after wednesdays patch and try kill all the gods rq, and no, i dont mean after they wait for a bunch of other people. This is a horrible, terrible concept and idea, and the people who like that, it is a reflection on them, that this is their idea of hard work that is fun. Make something about it require fighting stuff your level, like a current content mpg group trial, then you can talk about how it just takes skill or hard work to do it. Camping 3.5 day respawns to 1 hit kill them and walk away? lol. yeah, just takes a high degree of skill and effort to learn to do that.

As opposed to 3-boxing with 3 mercs and killing some stupid group content? Sounds super challenging...

It's not supposed to be a challenge in the way of a difficult mechanic or RNG driven fight.

It's supposed to reward players for long term investment. Think of it like a Veteran AA for tradeskillers in augment form. It rewards those who saw it worth their while to max their trophies, and it rewards long term players who did the Solstice, Aid Grimel or Erons when they were current (or afterwards just for completionism).

Not every single quest is for every single person.

I honestly love the idea behind it and I'm just getting started in this quest. I hope Dzarn can tie in more old quest chains to be merged together to more modern rewards after some more effort put in. Breakdown in Communication, TSS Augment / Charm, DoDH Resist Mask... There are plenty of quests to pick from that could be merged up and made into some great quests. Plus all of the old progression chains of quests and missions people now skip out on because of the level bypass.

An upgraded BiC? My god. I don't think we deserve such a thing.

Ugggh. Please no. I'm fine with tying lore in to older quest lines. Perhaps make people that enjoy going back and doing ancient, beyond trivial content aware of things they may not be aware of. But, please, please, please, implement new quests around current content. I'm more than happy if they're made difficult and rip mercs to shreds. Require coordination that most boxers cannot handle. Add farming time syncs in current content if desired. Something designed for level 105s should actually require a full group/raid of 105s to accomplish.

It's a lot easier for unnamed lone wolf developers to make new quests that borrow heavily from older content than to do it from new content. I'd call the Artisan's Prize a nice happy Bob Ross bonus, not really content. But definitely 1000% appreciated.

The content we get, we get in microexpansions like TBM.

Adjusting the spawn times on these ancient spawns ( that no longer matter in game, have items that are no longer used because they are far underpowered, and offer no other purpose but for lore) is the only solution that would fix any bottlenecking or issues. There is no logical reason to keep these 12+ year old mobs from spawning faster. They have done it in the past before reducing spawn times by 50% because the bottlenecking was causing grief. Now is the time to do away with these spawn times. 4-6 hours or 12 hours.. is completely reasonable change and can be implemented in a simple patch (the last time they changed spawn times they forgot a ton of mobs and so they did a patch in less than 2 days to fix it because its a simple change) this would not require any additional programing or dev work. No need to instance every friggen zone like some people want. It doesnt hand items to people for free as they still have to camp and kill the mobs. All it does it increase the amount of chances to see a mob. Instead of 3-4 times every 2 weeks the mobs will be up 80 times... that would also make the progression servers have a much level playing field as it would give some minor guilds and groups chance to possible kill targets that some guilds keep locked down permanetly.. Its a win win for everyone with no actuall downside (no one can give a legitamet downside for it).. simple solutions are the best... no need to overthink this and get devs to waste time reworking quests or creating whole new scripts and zones for isntances... Just increase spawn times and be done with it.

The downside is the loot flood that creates on Progression servers where these targets aren't trivial and their loot isn't useless. I think you're extremely mistaken to think that quickened spawn times would lead to smaller guilds having access to the targets. It would just be the larger guilds killing them more frequently. Especially at a 12 hour respawn like you suggested. 4 hours would probably open up some avenues but meh, certain things would still got locked down by the largest guilds I'm sure.

They would have to have a separate spawn table for normal and progression servers.

If you take out the progression servers from consideration I can't think of much downsides, but seeing as that's where they focus a lot of their attention I wouldn't bank on it.

Honestly by the time any of these changes could be discussed or implemented by the Devs you could've just coordinated with other people you saw doing the quests and completed your flagging though.

how exactly would the flood of loot hurt anyone? Right now you have single groups of people boxing the targets down and exploiting Krono market... would reducing the items cost in the market really hurt the progression servers that are already seeing a market that has been wiped by the krono market surge? I really dont believe it will affect them what so ever. Having guilds that already are fighting and locking spawns down be able to get their alts and characters geared faster would eventually open the spawns up to others quicker. especially with 4-6 hour spawn time. Again I see no downside to the actual market or the economy ingame as they are already messed up with Kronos. The increase in spawn time would be more benefitial to players needing flags/epics or just who want to have fun killing targets they may not see normally if nothing changes. its not a free handout as this still requires people to gather to kill targets.. it just lets more players have the chance to try.

Well you're talking more generally reducing all spawn times, I was thinking about PoP progression gods which is what this thread is about. Which has almost 0 tradeable loot to be sold for Krono, which is much easier than selling loot rights to no drops.... But Phinigel has raid instancing, so if you want to see the content that avenue is available to you, so I don't follow that train of logic.

But the rarity of drops, by virtue of longer Respawn times, keeps people interested and continuing raiding.

The reason guilds on normal servers continue raiding is because even though they get raid currency, it takes a long time to gear up everyone in your guild. If they could bypass the typical (what is it now? 5.5 day lockout?) and instead just do raids every day or every 2 hours they'd gear out quickly and people would quit with nothing to strive for. Some people would want to gear Alts, some wouldn't care and would quit.

Or just remove the flag requirements from the quests.

Having completed pop progression on multiple characters at the time but having since main changed I find myself sitting now waiting for my last needed NPC, these NPCs can have their scripts very easily bugged or broken by the high levels of dps in todays game. The scripts simply are not designed for todays game, and while I will continue to sit and wait and pursue my pop flags I'm urging the developers not to link current expansion chase items to old flagging in the future.

I do applaud AB server on creating a channel to help get as many through the flagging process as possible, across all guilds. I personally just don't think the flagging has any place in this quest.

Which scripts required for progession are bugging out due to high DPS?

The only ones that come to mind as being possibilities are Rallos Zek before he ports into the pit, and Vallon Zek during the splits... PoEarth stone ring can bug but that isn't required for progession. Everything else is just a straight kill.