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

Don't ever understand why people won't work together to make the best situation. If you find it up, tell your guild, tell your rival guild, tell /general, work together, give everyone an hour to assemble, kill it, hail your mob, and let everyone know the death timestamp. You do this a few times, I'd bet others would be willing to invite you to come to their mob kill party.

Instead its rush in, hey mobs up, 2 people kill it, its down for 20 days.

Good point Xorsazis.

I've been working with a few people from other guilds (your guild too actually) to try to make this happen so we make the best of it. Seems to be working fairly well so far.

I'll shoot you a tell if I see some mobs up this week, feel free to do the same.

Very good point and exactly how it should be occurring.

In my opinion a lot of folks are on here complaining about just ONE of the multitude of bottlenecks in this quest. Let me know if you can farm 5 iridescent scales, 4 pyrilien flames, 4 murkglider bloods, an essence of discord just to name a few of the drops. In the time it takes to get planes flagged.
Let's not forget all the stuff that you can prefarm for the aid grimel quest while waiting.

Bottom line if you were not a pack rat tradesiller before this quest you are a LONG way from completion even if you are flagged

this 100 times over and oh lest we forget FORAGING for things that are needed , cuz we all know how leet the foraging skills on most melee classes are.....

Keep in mind that the precursor to this quest was put in like a week before the start of an event that would break it. MM revamp had been breaking Epic Request since it was put in. So yeah, I don't think it's at all unlikely that something could be overlooked.

For the record, I don't care if they change it or not. And no, I'm not flagged.

I think everyone needs to take another look at the stats of the aug. It's arguably the best all/all item in the game. We probably have several months before we even HEAR about a new expansion.

If it was easy to get this, it wouldn't feel like much of an accomplishment when you finally do, so why not sit back and enjoy the ride.

Once the race to kill PoP mobs relaxes a bit, and all of the rare items are on the bazaar, this will be much easier.

I like the concept that PoP flagging is required, but think it'd be cool if the alternate access stuff counted towards it.

Currently a big problem with AFK (usually pet classes) and advloot with rare drops like this.

There is not much entertaining about running around old content one shotting everything. It's an exercise in tedium, nothing more. Yes, the reward is great. I'm sure a lot of people will do it for the aug. I'm also guessing most that do will hate every moment of doing so.

I fail to see how this is different from anything with tradeskills involved.
I wonder how many threads there were during PoP, when the earring was the best anyone could get, and it was still only open to those planes flagged. This is really the same arguement. Unerlootitem01 is only obtainable by a small portion of the community, until the initial rush dies down

Most people despise tradeskills. Mind numbingly boring. I know there are those that do enjoy them. They really should have been left as a secondary game in the game for those that enjoy the intricacies of the recipes and/or the merchanting side of being a tradeskiller.

Including maxing of tradeskills and trophies in quests not related to tradeskilling just screams of a lack of creativity by the designer. It's either a sadistic choice to see how much boredom you can push the player base to accept for a shiny reward, or someone thinking, "hey, this game aspect is under used and a good time sink, it would be neat to use it". All the use of tradeskills in quests has accomplished is to devalue the skill for those that truly enjoy it (more competition/fewer people needing your services) and to bore many of the rest of us to death.

I'm not arguing either way on the inclusion of flagging and tradeskills in this quest chain. Merely stating that such things are not fun. I, like many others, will trudge through it because I take pride in doing everything I can to maximize my character. Our player base would be a great study for a psychology doctorate thesis.

Aside from the 3 required quests... you can buy any of the seals from any person that actually enjoys tradeskills, so it actually increased their value IMO. Additionally, the one "quest" has items that are all completely tradeable too (Cabbage). Ultimately, it's not nearly as horrible as half the people here are making it seem. All it sounds like is people are mad they didn't finish the aug as fast as some of those who were dedicated to solving the quest and working on it before it went completely public.

ps. No one is forcing anyone to do the aug quest line. Also - in perspective, it will probably be one of the best augs till EQ shuts down. Soooo... maybe keep that in perspective when complaining about it being a timesink? For the past 5 months people were complaining they had nothing to do since TBM was so small. Now people are complaining they have too much to do because the quest is too big. /boggle

It's a reward for doing TS's for so long

If it truly was, the seals woudn't be tradeable

My experience is, it's a reward, that people are getting, that haven't tradeskilled in their life.

Technically you have to have one 7/7 trophy in order to get the quest IIRC. So the notion that "you have never tradeskilled in your life" is a tad misleading.

However I do agree that the seals should have been no drop to really make it challenging and time consuming. Maybe not include alchemy/poison/tinkering as one of the seals... or create some "seal" that those not able to do the above three can make that is the equivalent. Maybe use brewing skill and combine rogue poison component drops to make a drinkable poison to give to a NPC...

The entire point of this series of quests has been cooperation. Figuring out the class events for the new ornaments was a collaborative effort. Figuring out where the riddle groundspawns were hiding was a collaborative effort. Figuring out the undiscovered tradeskill recipes was a collaborative effort. The final quest is designed to require help from other people, since you need Artisan Seals for Alchemy, Poisoncrafting, and Tinkering. No single character can possibly do this entire thing solo. As a single person, maybe, if you absolutely insist on being stubborn and wasting your time. Even now with some people having claimed their own Artisan's Prize, they're still helping others by making more Seals and providing information.

The fact that old Planar Progression is bottlenecking people only comes as a surprise because you're supposed to be cooperating, just like you've done for the rest of the tasks. You probably ought to set up a channel on your server, announced in General, so anybody working on PoP progression can join it, make a rallying call when a boss or event is up, and be able to find out when a spawn is due. Anybody that isn't cooperating isn't just slowing everybody else down, they are holding themselves back.

There is a big difference between something that requires effort while being a time sink and something that is just a time sink. I'm not complaining about anything requiring time. Was commenting on things that take time that are also trivial beyond belief. Or things like tradeskills that are either farming trivial trash or sitting around clicking buttons every so often (at least they improved that to a degree).

Designing a timesink for level 105 players should have required doing things that require level 105ish characters. We all like rewards and this is definitely a very nice one. No complaint there. More stuff to do. Great. Unexpected additional content in the middle of summer. Even better. Lots of good stuff from the dev team on this.

I'm sorry but there's a difference between active and passive gameplay. Forcing PoP progression on a quest can be bottlenecked to an extreme. Look at all the old world raid mobs that are still on lockdown for whatever reason. The same thing can happen on this quest.

I'm sure many wouldn't mind a long haul grind if they were actually doing something - killing, farming, granding, etc - rather than /sit stare at a wall for a bit until a mob spawn between them and that wall then killing it in 3 seconds. The worst part is that person could potentially sit there for hours and hours or days and days and not see the mob spawn because they have no idea when it was killed previously.

Tell me, how does one have the capability to sit in a single spot for 100 hours straight without needing to do other things like uhhh eat, do their job (or are we to assume everyone that plays EQ has 15+ hours a day to play without any other obligations?), exercise, spend time with family/friends, etc?

You can get it with Fishing at 200. Does that count as tradeskilling?