When was the last time you felt an accomplishment in EQ?Follow

On the weekend, I "heroiced" a Rogue on one of my servers as I find a Rogue is the best char for farming MQ'able items for my other chars (Hide/Sneak). I started on his epic 1.0 (which I have done many times before) and ran into a bottleneck at the pick pocketing of the parchment from the DE Rogue Guildmaster. I have spent many hours a day since Sunday to no avail. I got the Dwarf parchment within ~30 minutes, but no luck on the DE item. This is decidedly NOT fun. It is so annoying that if it doesn't happen either today or tomorrow, then I'll set it aside and forget about it.

This brings me to the topic of this post. In my EQ "career", I have felt little sense of satisfaction when completing epics or long quests. It is more a sense of relief that the whole mess is over with.....FINALLY.....

Way back in 2006 (I think it was) my then guild defected en-masse to WoW. One of the main causes was a general dissatisfaction with the annoying time sink that was EQ. I went with them, but soon tired of the "easiness" of WoW. While there, I ran into only one, yes, only one annoying time sink. It was a mount quest for an Alliance char in a zone I can no longer remember (snowy zone). It was long and tedious and resulted in a mount that was noticeably inferior to the Horde quest mount which was the result of a much, much easier quest. My guild is still in WoW. I often exchange emails with a few and to a person they will not consider returning to EQ. I can understand their thinking given my fondness for quests and the almost painful experience they are in EQ.

Some of you are working on the Artisan quest, and I applaud your ability to focus on something like this. Do you think you will feel a sense of accomplishment on it's completion, or "Thank God that's over....."?

What you guys are both saying, in essence, is that if some accomplishment is too easy, completing it gives you NO sense of accomplishment. If an accomplishment is too hard, any sense of accomplishment is erased by the sense of relief arising from getting it over, finally.

In other words, EQ just can't please you, no way, no how!

Completing a long hard quest or task, can't you feel BOTH a substantial sense of accomplishment AND relief that it's finally over? The last "big" achievement I completed was to kill every named mob in the RoF expansion, the so-called "Hunter" achievement. This expansion is so easy for a level 105 that the challenge was more finding all the named mobs up because killing them was close to trivial. While it was a bit of a grind in spots, I did enjoy exploring all those interesting zones, finding where the nameds spawned, strategizing how to kill them solo, without boxing or even summoning a merc. I don't even remember what was the final reward was: probably a 16-slot bag, which was uber back then but which now I probably destroyed for lack of storage space for it. But I did experience both those emotions: satisfaction at getting it done and somewhat of a relief at completing it. When I moved on to the next xpac's Hunter achievement, I noticed right away that those mobs would be close to impossible to solo. Which now means having to drag along at least my warrior for tanking, which makes running around all over the place less fun and that's when I switched to the Artisan Quest.

Don't take this the wrong way but you both seem to be examples of the old axiom: "There's no pleasing some people." :)

Edited, Sep 21st 2016 2:16pm by Sippin

My brother and I duoed the majority of my original chanter's 1.0 in an era & level range that most of the people we talked to said we wouldn't get far. We did do creative things (fair bit of intentional death on my part to be corpse dragged by his necro, etc.). We also did Tower of Frozen Shadow undergeard/underlevelled/undermanned and those 2 things standout as big accomplishments.

I did chanter 1.0 in a prog guild at level 55 a while back, was very much a shooting down cans routine. Glad to have it, not near the accomplishment. My necro did 1.0 at level 75... cool for the quest aspect, but pretty trivial.

I think time to do something can fuel accomplishment, as long as the time taken isn't just programmed-in waiting (for nothing, just the wait). I would take a hard to kill NPC over a spawns every 6 days with 2% chance of having your drop NPC any day. I would rather have to kill 100 NPC in 100 different places (or talk to them) than have to sit at the same camp (ever again) for 16 hours waiting on a 28 minute respawn chance of the named with a small % chance of the drop.

This! Spending days and days simply clicking the Pick Pockets button is neither difficult nor easy, just infinitely annoying.....

I still feel that surge of satisfaction after crawling an old dungeon or dinging 200 alchemy on my Shaman. Battling dark- blue raid bosses for a cool two hand sword for my decidedly L55 retro-ranger still rings the pleasure center bell in my head. Yeah, it's the silly little things that make me happy. Quests feel like chores to me; the quest journal is more workload in-box drudgery than freebooting daily diary or Captain Kirk's captains log.



sword forge https://youtu.be/ypAAsmgVmhk?t=73

Edited, Sep 24th 2016 2:15pm by Trappin