No one said they needed to be. The initiate and sphere quest are completely different, with the spheres being way more complex and frustrating. The entity/crystal quests however ARE the same and should be balanced around this fact.

It is entirely unfair for one side to have an easier method of growth (both mechanically with things like this power quest and in appeal with things like pyromancy trumping aeromancy). This is especially true for two organisations which are in their period of development. As shown by Glomdoring, if an org doesn't develop well during its infancy, there will be consequences that could take a long time to be repaired.

Being unique is one thing. Being bugged to heck is another entirely

Bugs I can understand, that's something beyond administrative control at some level, it's not like they want to do the epic quest to figure out if it works without a hitch.

But skillsets need to be tested extensively. What exactly is our "kill" setup, really? If the guilds were released together (guilds being warriors, mages, and guardians), and there was a specific role for each guild, then yes, I could forgive pyros obliterating aeros, but they weren't, so I can't. We were released -alone- and expected to compete!

You think that they don't test things out on a test server? I have no idea myself, but it's what I'd want to do if I were a developer.

Oh, i know they do. I also know they don't do every single thing, because that is inefficient.

Someone should have upped the number of crystals when there were additional critters added to the plane, at each sphere. It's probably my oversight - I kind of had a lot on my plate and such.

I've added enough to bring it up to the same level (44 - one for each cosmic entity).

Nothing's 'equal', though we do try to be fair wherever possible. I can look at making the generator a bit more predictable (it really is already, but maybe the pattern's just too broad, or no one's really tried to map it out.

With or without a pattern, we're still always wasting spheres.

Which harkens back to my original idea

I got alabaster three times in a row when i did the 150... that doesn't look like a pattern to me...

Side note: I really appreciate all your work that you have done! Hallifax is excellent even though there are a few bugs and what not.

It really should go without saying that both cities are amazing feats of imagination and planning, it's the inequality I am seeing that's throwing me off.

Yes, we love it, but we need it to be more...fair, I guess is the word

Thanks!

If there is a pattern, then it is not immediately apparent, and you would probably need an uninterrupted string of spheres to work out what it is. I don't know if anyone has the time or inclination to hoard every joule for a few hours and record every sphere that comes up, but maybe Eventru is hinting that that is the solution.

The problem is working out when the pattern repeats. Is it every 50 spheres? Every 200? If so, getting a single, consistent set of data points could be close to impossible, but still might be worth looking at.

I don't think it's even possible to get alabaster three times in a row, but I'll look. If it is, it won't be anymore.

And I know Hallifax is buggy, unfortunately I was very rushed at the end, so there wasn't as much testing as one normally prefers. Hopefully with the collegiums in, the quest is at least a bit more comprehensible.

I think, despite the complaints, it's overall gone very well - I realize the power quest is a bit more painful than the others, but it also gives more power each time it's done than the others, and also has a slightly higher repetition (ie you can get more spheres than you can get sacraments).

I won't deny, though, Gaudiguch had a lot more time for testing and playing around than Hallifax did. Alas, deadlines needed to be met!

If only we could have seen the forum angst had you guys just released one city for a few months!

More seriously though do you have any kind of data tracking enabled? You could see if the average time to complete adding X power was similar between various groups. If you collect it over a week or so it would clearly show if there was a large disparity. If you tracked how long each step in a quest took as well you could see where the bottleneck was.

Heck I would be collecting stats on all kinds of things like this. Exp/hour in each area, deaths/hour, players/hour, quests completed, doman gropes/hour, etc

Thing is that it's not just about the flat power gain from doing this quest. It's so painful that it's turning people off doing it at all. Every X RL hours or so (just over a day, I think), we're getting power from our guardians based on however many motes we have. Our motes have grown very, very slowly, even falling on some days because we're not adding enough. This is primarily because it's so painful that few people are doing it.

On the repetition thing, the combination of spheres required to make the colours we need never seem to work in our favour. At best, we could get maybe five in one run. At worst, we only get one sphere. I usually get three or four each run.

Basically, we'd rather have it made less complicated/annoying by increasing the actual number of spheres we can put in each run and having the power gain reduced to be on par with the others.

I've made the list completely non-random (though it may take a few runs to get it to clear and reset properly). Appropriately, joule respawn's been made to happen less often by quite a bit. I'll keep an eye out.

Not the point. It doesn't matter if we could do it over and over. It'd still be annoyingly painful.

Ev, thanks for listening, but here's the basic problem.

We have to basically do far more steps than any other org, for something that is highly essential, especially in heavy conflict, and in passive power gen. I know you guys hate hearing this because of everything on your plate, but The power quest is just gonna be prohibitively tedious until it gets looked at seriously