Stop doing recruitment quests. Retire duplicate Iconic agents, and non-iconic down to 4 or 5 (or 2-3 is relatively safe as well)
Bypassing the recruitment quests may not stop the flow as new recruits can arrive as quest rewards. Not sure how pre-pop works for the upgrade quests. If it grabs all the duplicate iconic agents then the highest count common, that would be great. That would greatly reduce the number of buttons I need to mindless click. Has to be one of the most boring tasks in EQ
Hmmm, maybe if some of the common agents just suffered a colorful death during their mission. As for the other bad outcomes, I never bother with the recovery missions at this point. I assume, I could be blocked in some mission requiring an out of play iconic, but I have not really observed any reduction in success or blocked quests.
As for multiple uses of a common agent, I believe there have been cases where I used the same non-iconic agent on the same quest.
How much difference does it really make to have lots of dups of the agents which can be duped (Common and regular Uncommon)? It's probably a good idea to have 2 of each, but how much does it really help to have 5, 10 or more of them? Does having lots of dups have a big increase on the chance for success and crits over just having 2 dups?
It doesn't help anything. It causes lag. People are asking for a way to STOP getting new agents on crit successes.
Yeah, but when we have these discussions, some people say they keep large number of dups intentionally. Maybe their desired number is 5 or 10 dups or whatever. They want to keep their dups at that level and not get anymore. I'm not sure I see the point of keeping that many dups intentionally. I could see 2 or maybe 3, but I'm not really seeing the benefit of going above that. However, maybe there's some benefit to keeping 5 or 10 dups that I'm not aware of and could make it worth it to deal with the lag from that many dups.
Do some of you even Overseer? I haven't done a recruit mission outside a limited time only event to get to new Overseers in years. They pile up on the crit rewards.
Love ya bro, mean it but let's put this on the Devs to fix this not move it to punish players with no control over the lag.
I am always amazed how on EQ forums, there are always a number of people who just have to disagree. This is an easy one, and yet people still want to say there isn't a problem.
Add a toggle "Auto-Convert Common/Uncommon/Rare" that automatically converts agents when you have 4+.
The simplest solution is to have any rewarded agents checked against the agents you have. If you have 2 of that agent, the agent is automatically converted to "The shade of a common hero" or whatever rank the hero that is being forced into being a shade is. Shades would not used for anything other than conversion, would be completely ignored in the process of any task in overseer that is not a conversion and eliminate the lag caused by processing your agents. When you do conversions, shades always populate as the first on the list as heroes to be converted. If you wanted to get real crazy, if the player has 3+ shades, only display shades on the conversion and stop the process of displaying agents to convert. While mass convert is needed, it ultimately doesn't solve the problem completely, as we would eventually have an abundance of legendary heroes. Using a shade that is not processed except when retiring agents could resolve the lag. Also, since we can only use 1 legendary hero at a time, legendaries can be limited to 1 each instead of 2 or more.
Not really the simplest solution. The simplest is this: 1. Allow players to turn off agent rewards for critical success. 2. Allow players to set a cap on the number of common agents that they want. Beyond that cap, agent is destroyed.
One option to deal with the dups would be to have crits reward Overseer Agent Packs rather than actual agents. The agent pack is the item that can be redeemed for 3 common agents. Because you get 3 agents in the reward, they'd need to be rewarded in only 1/3rd of the crits. You'd still get all the other crit bonuses. So overall the number of common agents you'd get is the same, but you would end up with stacks of agent packs in your inventory rather than piles of duped agents. You could redeem the packs if you needed the agents, or destroy the packs if you didn't.
Yeah and the real fix is to put a cap on the number. Any time you allow software to do unlimited anything it's only a matter of time before you run into problems. Even if they can get it to perform a bit better it's just pushing the problem off.
Once you have all agents there is no reason to convert agents. A way to stop getting more agents would be nice a nice reward for converting agents after all are maxed would be nicer, 1 AA per elite echo maybe.
The reason to keep extras of the regular common and uncommon is because you can use more than one at a time and you can use them while duplicates are incapacitated. So, if you play like I do (I have a tendency to focus on a particular goal (exp, collection items or tradeskill items)) focusing on Trade/Diplomacy/Exploration in pursuit of the collection items or if I'm trying to do lots of crafting/harvesting/research - the same quests come up quite regularly. Having dups in the agents commonly used in those quests those categories allows me to keep choosing the type of quest I happen to be wanting to focus on at the moment and keep the success rate high. I target keeping no more than 4 common and no more than 3 uncommon. I keep uncommon iconic, rare and elite at 1. Also, yes, though someone has reported that auto-select on the conversions doesn't always choose agents with duplication - I play overseer every single day, twice a day on four accounts and I keep up with my conversions - I have never experienced a problem using auto-select on conversion quests. My agents always appear to be sorted by quantity and it always takes from the first three agents listed on the screen. I have never lost a random agent I didn't expect to convert. Do I think this could be designed in a better way or the lag fixed? Sure, but you're being offered a solution while we wait to see when and if the devs do something else to try to relieve this issue. Do what many of us have already done - load up overseer and start doing conversion quests while you're watching a movie. Once you get a couple Commons done, you can start doing common, uncommon at the same time, then you can add in rare, and then elite, etc. so you can get through them all. Is it painful - absolutely. Is it worth it to no longer experience frustrating lag? Only you can decide which is worse - spending a few hours cleaning up your agents or suffering every time you try to open overseer to play. Many of the armchair dev suggestions seem like they could inhibit the intended nature of way Overseer is supposed to work. I'm not sure they are good ideas IF this game is intended to continue to expand.
Most everyone knows that conversions get rid of dups and give you the higher level agents, but conversions are also good for getting extra quest exp. One of the rewards from elite retirement is XP for a quest category. So if you are focusing just on some of the quest categories, you can use the retirement XP to boost up the categories you don't do. Or help accelerate your advancement in the categories you are doing. For example, if you primarily do the 12 hour quests, the 6 and 24 hour quest lines will be far behind. By converting the crit common agents and retiring the elites, you can fill up 6 and 24 hour quest lines while you just do 12 hour quests. I'm pretty sure (but not positive) that XP bonus holidays also boosts the retirement bonus XP. So it may be worth it to save up your elite agent echos and claim your rewards during the XP bonus periods. If you're not maxed in agents or not maxed in the quest lines, be sure to do the conversions if you want to max those out quicker.
But that's the whole point...once your're maxed on everything, getting more agents literally serves no purpose. And they've already shown that new agents are only going to be gained via the seasonal stuff, so again, having extra agents is utterly pointless. They need to give us the option to delete common agents, just like higher rank agents have the option to retire them. Let's be honest...it's the proliferation of COMMON agents that's the problem here, not the other ranks of agents.
