Now, I don't firsthand know about the epic quests besides Serenwilde's. However, I've noticed a few 'trends' that seem to be appearing out of the others.

Now, the Seren epic quest can only be done once every 32 hours or so, and requires exacting timing to get right. So, I guess my question to the admins/players, is:
Should epic quests be:
---hard to do the setup quests for (partially because of how fast you have to/can do them) and easier on the 'quests' themselves (The Serenwilde Method), or

---very long but (relatively) easy to set up, and hard to do the final three quests (The Celest Method).

I think that all the epic quests should be balanced around one of these two methods, and that all the epic quests should have similar time requirements.

Personally, I'm in favor of #2, because it lets people feel like they're accomplishing something as they go along. It's incredibly annoying to start Seren's, only to get to the next step and realize that you need to do a two-hour quest to advance, and then fail, and have to do the several hours of setup again, only to discover another step that you have to do in advance. Also, I'd rather not have to find three-hour blocks of time to have any shot at all when it comes to completing the epic quest (or help somebody with the same).

Also, on that note, perhaps the Celest epic quest could track how many beacons you light (as opposed to who lights the final beacon)? That way, multiple people could work on it at the same time (another discussion entirely, but the Wayfaire did this, and people (myself included) seemed to like it).

Thoughts?

Problem with this is that when you actually need to raise a Star (or Necromentate, for Mag) to rebuild your shield, it would be much harder, as the one person would have to hand in all pearls/animals.

My understanding is that we are not looking at Epic Quests at this time.

Also, re: Czigany-esque questing, I think that's decidedly unfair - it's an honour within your org, your orgmates should be able to help you get it, I'd think!

And it's easy to say, 'Czigany does it!', but I can't express how difficult something like that is to design!

Lord Eventru, Bearer of Bad News

The Celest one seems built for Cziany-ing, if I understand it right- you could just make a counter that counts the number of times somebody lights a beacon, and award an honor every nine.

Right? Or would it be more complicated than that to code?

When ever we ask the Admin to code something and they say its complicated I picture something like this:



"Would you like some more?"

Having done the Serenwilde epic quest I can say without a doubt that if you are failing, it is all you not the quest. Serenwilde's quest is simple. Hell every step gives you instructions for the next step. The Spear is simple, retardedly simple, and you can have any number of people help you with any of the steps or heck even do it all for you while You are off and all you ever have to do is show up on the full moon and do the very simple last step.

There is no step which is two hours, I could do the whole Spear quest from start to finish in an hour. The moonglory is 15 minutes tops. The only hard part about it all is waking yourself up at odd hours for the full moon. Serenwilde's shortage of epic item holders is certainly not because the quest is hard or has 2 - 3 hour steps.

Protip: You have an 8 hour window to do one of the quests.

I'm talking about Tosha, not the Moonglory.

EDIT: Which is probably faster as an ascendant than as a cir. 82.

Tosha is fast even at 82, since you can... take friends, and have friends running all over getting the corpses. Plus you can pre-prep tosha at your liesure so all you have to do, come time, is go talk to Quettle. Just make sure your friends don't hit the hunters. Also, again, you can have someone do it all for you.

Sounds easy, doesn't it? Unfortunately it's not so easy - the way it's written is it uses the exact same mechanics as the raising the star quest. And it certainly wouldn't be fair to change that quest, so things would need to change greatly. Whereas right now there's about one difference between them (a global variable is set to one value instead of another, and instead of lighting the Star it calls Altaira down for a prophesy). Instead, I would need to add checks in at every stage - if the variable is this, it adds to this variable, otherwise, it tracks it on this person's personal variable. Realize that's also nine (instead of one) variables (and also, the beacons only accept one pearl each, that would have to change) per person. That's now nine variables (at least, though I'd probably need to use ten) per person that are being used forever. This also makes things much more difficult to track.

To be fair, it would need to be extended to every org - at a glance, if I were to draft a proposal for this sort of change, it'd also include the portions of the Serenwilde Quest all need to be completed by the same person to get the spear and the moonglory fruit and the moonstone, the same person would have to feed all of the animals and turn in the brains for Mag, etc etc for Glomdoring. And regarding Celest's, the Spire would be changed so the quester had to put in all of the squid, retrieve the seahorse, retrieve the pearl, etc. Realize, this ALSO means that the quests will all need to be drastically rewritten so that multiple people can do the quests simultaneously.

At a guess, it could probably get done in a month, month and a half of constant work. A month that's not being spent on coding or areas or events, for something that I couldn't justify arguing a change for even if it wouldn't take so long. They're designed to be an affirmation of one person's love/devotion to their org, and it's designed so that your friends can help you.

Ultimately, it's Estarra's decision if we go this route, and not mine. But as you can see, there's a lot more to it than just 'tracking by person'.

And as a note, the Wayfaire is a monster - whereas a normal quest would have, say, 12 tickets per section (so, 60? total), the Wayfaire has roughly 250 tickets (so that it (hopefully) never runs out on people), a hundred crystal balls for Vadoma, etc. There's more to it than just variables there, too - there's a monstrous amount of resources being used there. For an area like the Wayfaire, for it to run smoothly, we have to expect large amounts of players doing each quest simultaneously - and so we need to create replicas for every player that might be doing it.

There's just soooo much more to it than you might realize!

Wow, that does sound like a lot of work... Thanks for explaining it to us, though!

Just a quick question here...

He used the Hand of Tzaraziko, freeing the Lost City of Gaudiguch from time.

Is that line correct? (for Kalin) I would think the wording might be changed slightly as I was under the impression that those specific lines for Halli/Gaudi were one-off's. Also... artifact shortname please!

That is kinda odd.

It's probably the belt Scuchi was wearing. I think Cririk's was a medallion or necklace of sorts.

Yep, it's a Mandala.

Woops, that would be a bug. It's corrected though. Yes, Saaga/Kialkarkea are the only ones with those honours, and only ones who ever will! Lucky ducks!

Come to Hallifax and do our Epic Quest. Then you will realize how easy you have it.