So I've hardly been playing EQII at all since ToV was released and with the release of AoM I've been catching up on things. For days now I've been endlessly questing to finish the ToV / Age's End timelines and today I hit the big finale with the Age's End quest! Happy with SoE's decicion with "Play it your way" I enter the zone, eager to see how things end out and all possible cinematics. Instead I am met with a "Play it our way". What do I talk about? The fact as soon as the action starts, I am insta-killed by a x 2 mob. I was like "Woah, maybe I just need to avoid these mobs and focus on completing my quest and follow the objectives." After attacking a crystal, realizing it's health doesn't even budge, I am starting to get a bad feeling and upon checking with players online, it shows that the entire SOLO signature line I've followed up to here suddenly ends in an Epic zone designed for 2 players. Do I like raids? Yes. Do I like grouping? Yes. Do I like questing? Absolutely! Do I like it combined? NO!!!!!!!!!!! The reason? People rarely read the quests and just spam the NPCs to progress. When you quest alone you have all the time in the world to read the quest journal, talk to NPCs, read NPC chats with each other and so on. I have prepared now to see the ending of this saga playing out in my own pace but here that dream was shattered more than Luclin ever was. I know how the future will be from here on. Even if I do find a group to do this zone with after an hour or two of LFG in the chat, I will end up with people who don't care about the lore and just want the raid over with. This means that I will miss out on all of the dialogue in this epic battle to end the Age's End prophecy I've been into since the start of this game. Great way to finish a ten year old quest by letting all your group members skip through the dialogue for you and blaze through the quest so miss out on half the content. What happened to the "Play it your way" and "We will not force players to group and let them play their playstyle" we were promised? Will there ever be a solo version of this zone coming out? I am in this game because I like the lore and questing, and forcing me to lose these elements because other people want to blaze through stuff rather than read has made me both sad, angry and disappointed. This was NOT how I imagined the end of this timeline. In grouped questing, there will always be people losing out because one person always takes the lead with advancing the quests... Worst is, I decided to buy Altar of Malice this morning to celebrate that I'm done with the ToV expansion. Now I realize I shouldn't have bought it... Because it won't surprise me if the questline in that expansion ends in a raid with impaired questing elements as well... I am extremely disappointed in SoE now... This is NOT "my way" to play... My way to play is to actually read the NPC talks and my quest journal and care about the lore... Which I am not able to do now, in this most important part of this quest line.
Uh.... that epic ending is soooo ez I don't it multiple times with casters.. tanks.. scouts.... solo with just a merc you just have to know how to read...
"Play your way" doesn't mean all content is accessible. It just means you can do some of the content solo if you choose to. If it were to be assumed otherwise, players would be attempting to solo heroic zones because there is a quest in the zone? The ages end finale could have easily been x4 raid content seeing as how huge of an even it really was but they went with an x2 version that has both easy and hard mode and honestly the easy mode is really easy. The AoM signature quest is soloable all the way through but I would suggest the help of a merc. The last step of the quests requires you to fight and defeat 3 x2 mobs but you are given some added abilities to overcome the challenge.
The problem isn't the difficulty, but the fact that people will breeze through the zone to get it done if I ever find a group to do it and then I will miss out on all of the dialogues and quest journal entries of the quest...
I feel your pain. I finally managed to get into a raid for this, cleared it, and then we had a power outage in my neighborhood. I thought, np, since fighting is done, I'll just log back in tomorrow and finish the script. Imagine my glee when I found out that you must finish the script in the same instance or the instance is reset. yay.
I wish huge storyline events like this could be made available in different ways, with appropriate rewards for each. From hard x4 raids down to solo or even crafting versions. The real reward is seeing Norrath's history play out anyway, and that shouldn't be restricted to any subset of players (raiders). I like that they tried to compromise a bit by making it x2 instead of x4, but even that is out of reach for some. I got in a couple pick-up raids that never went anywhere, and now it seems 99% of players have moved on. So I get to read about what happened instead, yay.
they could have easily made a heroic version but a bunch of people complained that didn't make it epic enough, seriously a load of well you know, you can look around and find charaters of our level of power lucanic knights anyone? qeyno's royal guard? etc that could have posed as act groups for the setting. i dont think it was about how epic it was it was about "i want this to 100% be a raid so those others can't run this or if they do they'll probably die." storylines should never be locked behind group content we should be able to read the story and get tibits from all sorts of play, witnessing may be restricted in some parts to adventuring but that doesn't mean we can't have those battles replayed in bard songs and ingame books.
Yeah, you're already not 100% of the raid force anyway, even with a full 2 groups. And you don't end up killing Kerafyrm anyway, like a lot of people were expecting. They could have done a lot of things. Look at the group tradeskill mission Emergency Portal Repairs. The story is that there's a raid that has nearly wiped, and you're there to help them get back up and running. In the TSO storyline you help the Ethernauts in their fight against Anashti Sul, even though you don't take her on yourself. Stuff like this could have been done just to get as many people involved as possible. Events like AE should be able all of Norrath coming together and bringing their own strengths to help out.
The Age's End storyline has been running since the launch of the game 10 years ago. For most of those years, you needed a full 24 players to get the story. Now, almost the entire story can be experienced solo. Now that the level cap has been raised, it's theoretical you can do the x2 story with just 2-4 players.
The full slogan from the launch of Free-to-Play is "Free to play your way", which means you decide how much you'd like to pay to play. You can certainly play how you like, but be aware of limitations in the less social styles.
SOE is no help in this regard. One guild I'm in once could routinely field three raid forces at a time, drawn from hundreds of accounts. Now, sometimes two people log in at some time on the same day, others days none log in. The other guild wasn't quite that large before, but I seem to be the only remnant. If they expect raiding for the storyline, they should have merc raid forces for hire, ones set up to deal with raid mob scripts.
Prismatic (original release, sets up Nagafen and introduces Prismatic Dragons) Peacock Club (DoF, introduces Anashti Sul) Claymore (KoS, introduces Enoxus, teases Theer) Swords of Destiny (EoF, introduces Aeteok, teases the Rune of Sunder) Ethernauts (TSO, void invasion of Anashti'Sul) Epic Repercussions (SF, Kerfyrm tricks us into developing the enervation spell) In Search of Lucan (SF, defeat Theer and introduce Kerfyrm, who enervates the swords) The Fallen Swords (DoV, introduce Yelinak, defeat Rallos Zek to re-empower the swords) Withered Lands/Skyshrine (DoV, formation of the New Combine, introduce Jorlak and Lendiniara) Chains of Eternity (Introduction to Ethernere) Cobalt Scar (DoV, discover the Tear of Veeshan, death of Yelinak, dissolution of New Combine) Falling Tears (ToV, recover Tear of Veeshan, destroy the Nexus Core) Age's End (ToV, ally with Theer, defeat Kerfyrm, rebuild Luclin) That should basically cover it.
One thing the devs could do is to add a feature into the game that forces all players in a group who are on a quest to do the objectives before it advances for everyone in the group. Meaning that the quest doesn't update until everyone has spoken with the NPCs for example, which is isually the biggest stress problem since it contains a lot of dialogue. Then, when that has been done by EVERYONE on the quest, THEN the quest should update. That would remove this "stress click click click I miss everything now" issue and force stressing players to wait until lore people are done with reading their NPC bubbles. Also the people on the quests don't have to miss out on anything by having it this way...
