So, one benefit of the whole Heroic Adventure kerfluffle is that the development team has indicated that they want to reward players who do a variety of content as opposed to repeating the easiest HAs. I thought this might be a good time to make some suggestions for these rewards. The first thing that came to mind was something like the Vanquisher raid achievements that let you buy chase items. For example, right now I can see Bloodstained Shoulders, Ring of Revenge and a couple of other things on the raid vendor in ETWK, for 1200 medals each. That's a lot of medals, but it means that I can eventually buy them, and I earned the right to buy them through jumping through specific raid hoops with my guild. It would be really cool, in my opinion, if similar chase items in the group game could be tied to group accomplishments Being able to unlock, say, the Splinter of Potency or Bixie Conjurer's Stone for 6000 Medals of Valor after completing all the ETWK or BWF heroic adventures, or unlocking mission-only loot (again, for a ridiculous number of MoVs) after completing Challenger achievements. It'd give people a reason to break out of their comfort zone, without being a total loot giveaway. Does that seem nuts? Does anyone else have suggestions as to the sorts of rewards you'd like to see for people exploring the group game a little more fully?
I have a wild and crazy idea, if you complete Rings of Fire, Burn Out, A Guide Beyond the Rift and The Journey Home you should give players an additional reward. This would motivate players to do those things instead of only doing Gribble. Or even more insane, what if the only way to get an aug was as a random reward for completing The Fall of Lord Bayle? Or if mission only is too restrictive could make something like maybe a hp/mana click that you could get as a random reward for completing Fear Not or by killing a named mob in Evantil. If someone kills a lot of different named mobs maybe give them a big bag. Completely off the deep end but if you could even put an item in the low level version of Freeing an Elder, another in the normal version of Confronting a Traitor and another one to make it a little simpler to obtain put it in all Bloodmoon Keep instances and years later these items would still be desirable. Or how about illusion quests, if you could complete a quest line and be able to turn into an Orc and Iksar that would be really cool and fun. Maybe permanent character bonuses, like what if you had 6 missions and doing them raised your resist caps or a far more complex set of missions granted your character various bonuses for completing both group and what was raid content at the time but has been groupable and even soloable for awhile. Or forget the raiding part, what if newer content just gave your character permanent bonuses only for doing group content. What if you put a mob in PoK and he changed what places to go every 18 months or so for the best XP reward for killing a small number of mobs. Well maybe he should change more often than once every 18 months to promote variety but the principle seems like a good starting point. But since EverQuest would never do anything like that there is no reason to ever do anything except Gribble the most rewarding content in the game and once you max Level/AA in Gribble you retire since what would be the point of doing anything else now that you've won EQ?
Bless your heart, you've listed a frightening number of things that people can do to improve their characters that isn't chaining Gribble missions. There's a ton more stuff in a similar vein, of course, and I'd be glad to give you some suggestions if you ever have a rainy Sunday afternoon to fill. What I was hoping for, though, was suggestions for the developers on how to provide incentive for doing a varitey of heroic adventures, since they've said that they're looking at improving the rewards for doing those and I thought if we all brainstormed something a little more exciting than "this mission gives 10% more currency this week!" they might actually consider it.
The main problem is that the Dev's don't have clear view of what they actually want to achieve in relation to the heroic adventures. They've just taken a stab with the 6hour lockout without thinking through the ramifications. And of course the players don't like to be told how to play. It's ironic that TDS launched with this lockout in place. The zone it copied from The Buried Sea, also had missions that gave it rewards - Orux. The team way back then realised that people would just do the easiest ones so they put in VARIABLE rewards depending on the number of times each mission was done. The max was 80 orux and the low was around 8 orux. It's market economy at it's best and it worked. Elidroth has said that they will have a lockout time on heroics. They seem to think that Heroic adventures are equivalent to a mission, which they are not. They don't reward a chest at the end. The question they need to ask themselves is do they want new/fresh people able to catch up in terms of gear relatively quickly in Heroic adventures so that they are then able to use that new gear to progress further into other areas of CoTF and TDS. To me it's a no brainer.
