I've had a number of people asking me about quest curios.

I'm sure a lot of time went into these things, but they're just not designed in a way that is meant to be fun for players to pursue. Their implementation, frankly, is horrid; they appear to be designed specifically to be torture for people with OCD / a need to complete things, and to not even be pursued by anyone else. Given a lack of other people working on it, it just adds more burden to those completionists, who find themselves shouldering the entire burden.

Some further details of my experiences with them thus far:

Personally, I have generated over 200 quest-curio-pieces, and received a whopping 3 rare pieces. My rate of generating rares is less than 1.5%.
Supposedly the rate is 5%, so I'll use that for the main math to follow in this post.

Now, the main premise we are told over and over is that you are supposed to trade to complete your curios. For trading purposes, you're going to want to generate 4 rare pieces (you'll get duplicates, but you can trade your duplicate for someone else's rare you need, assuming others are also working on it).

At a 5% chance, you need to generate 80 curio pieces (note: at my rate, you need to generate 267 curio pieces to acquire 4 rares...) in order to have pieces for trading to others. Of course you will not have complete curios at this point, you will instead have many duplicate pieces. If you keep doing it past 80, the odds greatly increase that every piece you generate will be a duplicate of one you have instead of a piece you need.

The Waystation quest nets you 12 curio pieces per complete round. You can do a complete round in an hour and a half to two hours if you're hustling, with practice. 7 rounds, 14 hours of concentrated, may (if you're lucky) get you enough pieces to trade to others.

Now, this is where quest curios start to fall apart. It expects that not only you, but also other people, are grinding the same quest in order to generate pieces for trading. This is not possible. Quests are, by their nature, one-at-a-time things. They require killing NPCs for which there is a respawn time, they require waiting for items to repop, and so on.

Essentially: If you're doing the quest, you're blocking out the people who need to be doing it so you can trade with them. If you're not doing the quest, you're not generating pieces for yourself.

Thus, there was already frustration and concern voiced with the setup for the Waystation quest itself. You can only get the pieces by yourself or someone else grinding it, and the time invested grows to a significant extent.

Now, we have a second set of quest curios.

I was told, directly, that the "Waystation quest curio pieces are extremely generous". Comparison: Doing 2 hours of the Waystation quest will net you 12 curio pieces. Doing 10 hours of the Icewynd quests, earning 3 honour lines, earns 6.. Further, two of those are only received after killing 4 extremely strong mobs that you have to get a group together to slay. You also cannot even start working on them again until someone else undoes your work and rewinds the quest a ways.

Now, there is apparently a step on the Ice Angel curio side that gives you a curio piece when you receive an item (instead of when you hand it in), so you can just let it decay and collect it again- but on the Forsaken side, that isn't even a possibility. If you want to work on the Forsaken pieces, you're grinding for hours for essentially no progress.

6 pieces. A full weekend of work. Steps that aren't repeatable, so you can't even repeatedly generate them (on one side at least).

I'm just left feeling like the entire design of these is not to make players enjoy their time in Lusternia, but instead to drive some of your more dedicated players into... well, being much less dedicated.

Solutions include:
1) A way to focus the pieces generated so as to increase the odds of getting pieces you're looking for (focus down to only generate pieces from a specific set within the quest collection, for example). Then you're generating from a pool of 10 instead of 40.
2) For the sake of all that is (un)holy, increase the rate of curio gain in the Icewynd quest chains. Every single blessed step should be generating pieces. Instead, it seems to be steps picked at random, leading to a complete breakdown in terms of equality between one side and the other.
3) I don't even know how to address the "quest" part of it where only one person can be doing it at a time... that's an inherent part of Lusternia's quest mechanism, but it makes interaction with curio generation frustrating.

But, in the end, these systems do need an overhaul or they're going to languish.

Personally, I'm done with the Icewynd chains. I got into it to complete the cycle, which I've done now. I'll admit there was some curiosity on my part as to the curios as well, but... *expletive deleted*. 6 pieces for my entire weekend? That is so not designed to draw someone in.

And a further note; that's 6 pieces when ~300 will have to be generated in order to ensure that there are enough in the system (either generated by me, or amongst various other people) for trading, to complete them. That's a small subset of the population doing the quests fifty times. :( Ugh.

When the Icewynd curio quests were implemented, I imagined the curio generation would be similar to what Eventru suggested in a post earlier in the other thread (1 for each small step, possibly 10+ pieces throughout the process of one honour line). From what Xenthos has seen on the Forsaken side, that's far from true. No one has done the Ice Angel side fully to know how many curios, but the small parts Ushaara and I have done hold more accurately to that sentiment. Even then the curio piece generation is incredibly low.

1. Hours invested : one curio piece ratio is too high, as said by Xenthos, due to few steps awarding curios.
2. Granting curios to steps that advance the quest line and epic cycle, and then not awarding curios to reverse that cycle. -> No one wants to spend several hours grinding to do the counter quest (for no reward) just so they can spend several more hours to grind another few curio pieces. Curio quests are going to be, by their nature of randomised pieces of a collection, are going to be a grindfest. It is near impossible to do that when the cycle is so long, and when necessary steps to counterquest so the cycle can continue aren't rewarded at all. This increases the time invested to curio piece generation ratio significantly.
- Advancing one side's quest requires you to get enemied to the other side, making it impractical to be dabbling on both sides of the cycle.
- You can grind Ice Angel curio pieces currently if the cycle is at -one- particular stage. And even then, working at it full-time only gives you 3 pieces in 4 hours. If someone wants to advance the quest, then this is not an option.
3. Icewynd is far from bug-free, too...

It feels like steps should be giving boxes of curios instead of single curios.

I could see quest curios working if you got a random quest curio from doing pretty much any quest. That would seemingly generate enough curios to have a healthy trading population, and lessen the monotony of grinding the same quests over and over and over.

I'm not really going to get into the Icewynd set - I'm pretty ambivalent on whether or not it should be easier to get curios. I'm fine with some curio collections being nigh impossible to complete. I know what I'd said - and in some aspects it's true, but not to the degree I'd alluded to. Ultimately at that point, it was simply a thought. It was decided to go another way. I don't know if we'll be adding more or not to that quest series, it's not really my call. You do get a curio piece during the counter quest - though the counters are easier. There is a way to get more curio pieces in the Icewynd, but it'll be up to you to figure it out.

I will say we do have plans for future sets that span multiple quest lines - IE there may be a 'Light' set that you get pieces for raising Marilynth, freeing the souls of Malacoda, helping the orphans, Project Eternity. We've had those plans since the beginning. We'll probably be adding a few more sets at the end of the month.

I won't say there won't be changes (or that there will be) but I think we'll see them once we see where things are.

Know we aren't ignoring you though. As we said, it's a test thing.

I also wouldn't really mind if people had suggestions on new curio types (ie not magic etc). Maybe Est would be interested in adding them for quest sets to make them more rewarding (they needn't be crazy powerful though).