Public Quest ‘Participation’ Detector Snags Genuine Effort

Written by Feldon on . Posted in Commentary, DGC Wants Feedback, Grouping, Itemization, Raiding

Let’s Be Honest…

Public Quests completed even at the highest “x4 raid” level demand neither the coordination nor the discipline of any of the raid content in the last 3 expansions. Storm Gorge requires a little more focus than Ring War, but generally speaking, 24-40 players standing in the right place, killing the right mobs, in the right order, stand to inherit a wagonload of Legendary gear with Yellow adornment slots, all without such challenges as timing AOEs, switching to an Off-Tank, agro-juggling, or any complex strategy. The biggest enemy encountered is usually Server Lag.

Public Quests offer a speedy alternate route to gearing up for players who largely skipped Sentinel’s Fate, are gearing up alts, or just aren’t interested in more solo questing (although as we found, the Othmir questline writing, structure, and payoff are all above average and keep the obvious time sinks to a minimum).

So what’s to stop players from logging in alts, parking them near the scene of a Public Quest, and going to get a coffee while their toon “earns” amazing gear? Apparently not enough. While we have taken issue with certain players who spend an awful lot of time critiquing how others play the game and all the ways in which those methods are unfair or unbalancing, even we would be foolish to defend standing around AFK in a Public Quest all while earning Legendary or Fabled gear. We believe its in everyone’s interest that your favored MMO have a long-term plan besides “More dungeons and more lootz in the next Game Update!” Gameplay that allows leapfrogging most of the content progression is disruptive for the game. Velious has got to last us the next year, and as robust as the Game Updates may end up being, the end of the treadmill should never be visible.

With the nerf bat swinging pretty hard in the past 2 weeks, knocking some 60% off the Critical Mitigation of Public Quest gear sets for Fighters and closer to 40% for Scouts, Mages, and Priests, not to mention the removal of Fabled transmutables, some feel that the honeymoon is over and there remains little point to Public Quests. But even with these changes, Public Quest gear remains an excellent launch point into Velious’ merciless instances. They are a step up from the Othmir quest gear and open the door with yellow adornment slots (thus giving you something to burn up all those extra Marks of Manaar from Odus on).

Even without the gear, Instant AA (about 8-12% depending) totems, Deity sacrifice items, and most importantly — Velium Cloudy Jewels — remain valuable and inventive rewards to these accessible events. Those Velium Cloudy Jewels are hot ticket items as they can be pawned into any Velious faction, especially the elusive Thurgadin who have chosen not to offer any daily faction quests outside of dungeon crawls. The other three factions (Othmir, Snowfang, and Ry’Gorr) aren’t much less stingy, each offering just 2-3 daily (18 hours) faction quests. [See our Velious: A Continent Divided by Faction article]

And even with the PQ armor getting knocked down in effectiveness (and no doubt keeping Customer Service QUITE busy with petitions as players ask for all their old Sentinel’s Fate gear back), Public Quests still offer that rare chance to acquire a Fabled Weapon, Fabled Chestpiece, or choice of Yellow or Red Adornment. Now, these are RARE, not on smart loot, and of course subject to EQ2’s evil “Random” Number Generator (perhaps some day EQ2 will consider a truly random number generator), as EQ2’s own Domino discovered after spending a couple of weeks to finally earn a nice fabled Scout weapon for her dirge.

Away From Keyboard?

During Beta, Public Quest head honcho Windslasher indicated that a certain degree of participation was required in Public Quests to unlock certain degrees of reward. In response to continued concerns since the launch of Velious that players have been reaping the rewards of Public Quests while AFK (Away from Keyboard), Windslasher has added some additional detection code and a participation threshhold. So far, the feedback seems to be mixed.

Many players are now receiving the message “You are not entitled to any rewards.” despite being active participants in the Public Quest from beginning-to-end. Players provided detailed explanations of how they participated, and it was not limited to healers who were getting “counted absent”.

Windslasher responded:

I’ve discovered another issue [regarding the participation filter] and I’m fixing it along with the upcoming lag optimizations.

and:

The people who went through the whole SG fight, defeated Goredeth Maulhammer and got Pulsating instead of Humming were probably right on the cusp of getting full credit. So my anti-afk tweaks went just a tiny bit too far. I will fix it.

The next big update for Storm Gorge will restructure the event to reduce lag significantly, and I think the improved playability will solve this problem too.

and as for how Public Quests are playing out on PvP servers:

If you’re just PvPing to the exclusion of all else, then you won’t get credit because you’re not participating. But a mix of pvp and pve fighting is fine.

Generally whichever side’s winning will tend to be better off loot-wise, but if you’re tough and sneaky you can get the best loot even when the whole place is camped by hostiles. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but it sounds really fun…

What are your thoughts? What have your experiences been since Thursday’s changes?

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