Unneccesary timesinks....

Can we please be rid of the unneccesary time sinks involved in doing the various factions, having to wait a day between a single quest forcing a 2 week wait to do faction for one group or another, and the ridiculous wait from finishing the SF timeline to doing the SF crafter epic??
They may have made sense to someone when the stuff was current content, something about dragging the content out to make it last longer, but we already have plenty of that with apprentices and the mara daily instances, which still need some updating on the merchant for something a little more current to purchase from them.
I personally just feel like we should have the option to grind the factions till our eyes bleed in one sitting should we feel so inclined rather then be forced into an artificial drawing out of one quest per day for weeks or just simply waiting.

I completely agree with the OP's sentiments here.

There are times I'd just like to grind out some stuff on my crafter, but it seems everything else left to do is artificially gated by this 1/day, 1/12 hour 1/component of time barrier.

So instead, I have something I can spend 5 minutes a day doing, when I'd much rather spend my downtime on it as I have that downtime.

I understand the arguement for having things to entice me to log in daily, but this gate is really just encouraging me not to bother at all with tradeskilling, which only serves to lower my total overall engagement with the game.

This, a million times over.

There are some things for which this is still probably appropriate. Tradeskill Apprentices comes to mind, otherwise we could just grind out potions and reactants.

But for the rest, yah. There were a lot of gates in there to make sure not everyone got X on launch day, no matter how hard they tried. Launch day was two years ago, and everyone has X. No need to pace everyone out an additional two weeks from when they start.

The SF Faction, the original Gryphon quest, Mara instances...

While I agree with most of what you posted, Ynnek, I think certain things should have a daily requirement, but have a grinding alternative.

For example, although it wasn't like this during the original introduction of the RoK Artisan epic, there are now two ways to get Bathezid's faction. #1) Do the daily tradeskill quest, which nets about 2K faction for each one. #2) Grind the Bathezid's writs, which give 750 faction / writ. I think the Mara quests should be similar: Leave the Mara instances as they are, but add in some lower faction value writs that can be done ad nauseam. Likewise, they should give every thing that has a daily quest for faction a grinding alternative. That way, the ones that like the big gains can do those, and the ones that want to grind until they are blue in the face can do those. And the ones in between can do a mix of both.

I don't see them spending time revisiting a lot of that old content to make it breeze by quicker. What's the rush, anyway?

I mentioned the Mara instances because they, generally speaking, take long enough as to not be a source of undue advancement. Especially since most folks are doing them solo.

And if 6 people want to get together, and grind out a few instances back to back, well - getting six people together to craft all evening is enough of an achievement these days, more power to em... Or, put it on parity with the adventuring instances - drop the timer to 1:30 so they can be done, but not abused.

But each source of timesink would need to be independently evaluated. Which of course, nobody's going to do, so that pretty much kills the idea right there...

Sometimes I'd like to spend 60-90 mins being a better tradeskiller.

SoE decided that this content should be doled out to me 5 mins at a time over 2 weeks instead.

I don't even agree with the at launch arguement. I personally think these things should have just required alot more work so you couldn't max them all in a day without an artificial time barrier.

That would've been ideal, but the popular opinion at the time was the grinds were excessive and the 14 day process is what they came up with. The question is what kind of process is worth the devs spending their time on? Again, we can forget about fixing past issues. What's a good way to go in the future?

there already are writs for the mara faction in the same building you get the daily and weekly

Well, i also don´t like to wait for things to happen.... surely. I don´t like timesinks, too. But those quests stated do have a reason why they have a delay of one day oO
Maybe, they don´t have anything to do for this day?
I mean, it´s a game and it´s not called 1-2-3 done

It is a compramise between casual and hardcore playstyles. Devs don't want these faction requirements to be met in a single day. If they did a writ-style quest system (simplest to impliment) that mean they can average it to 6-10 quests per hour. If they wanted to make sure that you can't faction out the crafter in less than 48 hours that means 48 x 10 quests = 480 quests because *somebody* will set up a program to do it. More reasonably your looking at 24 hours = 240 quests.

Or you can put in a timer and let them quest more casually. This benifits the "casual crafter" more, and also those who have "crafting armies" of 9 max level crafters. When I was doing my shawl I had all 5 of my max level crafters done on the same day because it was only one short quest a day.

From a dev perspective the timer seems very reasonable. From a producer perspective going back and changing the old content doesn't seem very valuable. The same dev time could be used to recolor and texture 2 or 3 items (or a lot more) and would probably bring more joy to the EQ2 universe than changing these quests would produce. Or am I wrong about this and there are a lot of you that won't do the shawl because of the timer?

I did shawl once....and frankly...the one quest a day is too much, if I can sit there and grind 10K here 10K there as I feel an inclination to go craft, thats one thing, but <<O ****, did I do my daily? wait...what toons did I do it on? do I still need it on this one??>> that annoys me, and depletes enjoyment from the game. Odds are, all my crafters will eventually, some day, have the shawl, when I finally get OCD and completionist enough about it, I'm working on the pack pony for all of them at my leisure, sure I put it off for weeks at a time, but when I do work on it, I can do more then one quest today if I have the patience for it, and I'm not artificially gated from completing my objective.
As for no assignments for the day, well, ok, I'll be back in an hour or so, one GAME day, to help with the next days task, still more reasonable then 24 hours.

Grinds are excessive to who, exactly? Because if someone wants to spend 2 weeks doing the faction, they certainly have the option to even if there isn't a cap on how many times you can do the repeatable per day. It's people like me who would rather sit down, get it done, and never have to think about it that are being punished.

I've said this before to countless guildies, and I'll say it again:

Dailies. Are. Ridiculous. It is more annoying to me to have to log in and do a 5 minute quest once a day than it is to log in, grind it out, and wipe my hands of it. If people want to treat grinds like dailies, nothing is stopping them. Dailies are a stupid formula to gain faction. I've yet to see a solid argument on how dailies are better than just the regular old grind. At least with the grind, with unlimited repeatables, you aren't shutting out one type of playstyle.

But sometimes (not every timesink makes sense...) it does make sense and goes par with the story... take as example a crafting task..... if the npc doesn´t have any to do for today? sounds logic, ok, suffering, but logic ^^

problem with that, then it should atleast be doable every hour seeing as one game day=1 hour RL, your logic is failing.

Uh, got me, but i dont care about, since i dont care to wait till i get something done... if it´s worth to me doing it, then it must not be done in a hurry or asap. There is the word ever, not faster inside of the name of the game ^^
But then again, we can write as much as we want, about it, it will not change anything

Theres also the name of the game everQUEST...but its really all about grinding and questing is the largest wasted effort in the game, for all things grinding is more efficient and has better rewards...but lets not nitpick...

To me, that's an enforcement issue that shouldn't be allowed to impact design decisions.

To me, an ideal system is one where its not just a simple faction grind, but instead you earn currency to purchase recipes. 2-3 hours of some form of crafting exercise would amount to enough tokens to buy a single recipe. I very much liked the crafting instances and that sort of stuff where I could get it done myself, but I could get it done faster working as a team.

I just really, really, don't like, 2-5 mins and your done for the day, come back tomorrow mate.

You've probably seen a solid argument. You just won't accept the fact that it not only saves time, but it puts a little more value on the time spent to implement it. That's the great problem of developing an MMO. They spend months working on these things and people are done are done with it in a day. Somewhere along the line, someone got creative and came up with better time sinks. At some point, they decided it just wasn't worth the time to even do dailies, because those are gone too. I don't count the TA. That's just a slot machine game and it was gone once the Skyshrine TAs came around. It's not about doing more work. It's about having you hang around longer. If adventurers could get all they wanted in a day, the game would shut down in no time.