Questing in this game is a mirror to what made Black Friday shopping so ugly an experience (if you didn’t get to be Joe unemployed or on 2 weeks of vacation). Want to see humanity at its worst? Force humans to fight over a scarce resource. What a great way to make a community experience feel toxic.
-Mob respawns are ridiculously slow in reference to how many players there are. I was here in 2004 - it’s never been this bad - and never 2 weeks into the game. This could be tweaked. Five minutes respawns for 2 Brutes and 1 Mystic at a Redridge camp (this is just one tiny example), while 8-12 players are roaming over that same camp for a tag, is just ridiculous.
-Exp is further diminished by grouping, and people bail as soon as they get X widget drops, which further makes the game feel like a solo experience. Why invite if you have to work twice as long to get the widgets? In the end, everyone pretty much solos unless it’s a kill X mobs quest - leaving most people still standing around waiting. Not fun. Easily fixable.
-Players are rewarded for having the sense to build dungeon cleave groups, or to buy gold online so they can sit their toons in Maraudon for 8 gold a run (hi Shobek and others). This of course negates the leveling community experience. But who can blame them when the game itself doesn’t seem concerned with what I just detailed?
Fixes:
Would it really hurt the developers to tweak mob spawn rates? At least for the first month of release? Could they allow for items to drop for each player, and not just 1 at a time - if even for 1 month? Of course not, just like rewarding groups to GROUP, instead of solo, to further build community. There are obvious ways to do that.
This fix will never happen, and my post will be forgotten along with countless others. I suppose that’s kind of the curse of this game design’s mentality.
Moving on - but it shouldn’t have to be this way.