Last Friday, Turbine put up a small patch which was supposed to increases server stability, but it also put the Hero quest back in the game. And now many players are back to the races.
I did enjoy the race for like a week, I will be honest, but I’m over it. Grinding is just so boring, yeah it is cool to have a group of nine people sitting around fighting stuff, but you don’t really talk or interact during this time, and in the meantime you are just passing up all the content that Turbine created in the first place 10 years ago.
I find this trend puzzling because it isn’t just the high end content that people missed I hope. I think there is a lot of good stuff to be had, plenty of quests to participate in, and lots of locations to explore.
I think one particular example of this is where people are grinding. People essentially grind in the places they always have… Fets at 20, Buruns at 25, Whitebay at 30, Nep at 35, and Gevoth at 40. This is in particular frustrating when people complain that Fets isn’t as good as it used to be because the incursion quest was nerfed a bit before the game was brought down. Meanwhile Knorr tends to be better with the exp and tends to have better loot than their mainland equivalent but nobody hunts there at all.
Why is this? Well I think largely because Knorr was launched just a few months before the game was taken down and players were already at level 50 by and large. Instead of starting a new character, many players instead went out to level there big characters since the level cap had been raised.
We can see similar issues with the new classes that were added in the expansion. Need a debuffer? Everyone asks for a Claw Bearer or a Sorcerer but the Hieromancer is usually forgotten and often just as good. To this day, I don’t know whether a Templar is a good tank or a DPS character or just a shoddy class altogether because I very rarely see them, and haven’t had the opportunity to really group with them post level 40. This has prompted me to go and make a Templar because they look really cool and it is unfortunate that there aren’t many around.
The one nice thing about Hero Quest being broken was that over the last couple of weeks as more people started hitting the level 50 cap. Players had decided to slow down and concentrate on questing and exploring a little bit more. You started to see more Empyreon and Drudge characters being made, and you saw a surge and crafting. This all has gone to the wayside as people want to be the first to be anything and even finding a decent Gevoth group at level 40 is difficult at times because everyone is power leveling above 50 now.
It’s a shame really. I really like the idea of a progression server where they slowly launch new content. There are about 15 to 20 content updates from when the game was live that they could easily spread over two years of the game without needing to invest real money into hiring a development team to support the game. Meanwhile it would by and large slow down people’s progression. If people knew there wouldn’t be a level 51 for a year, they might be more inclined to enjoy the world as it is.
I realize this isn’t perfect, people always want to have the first 50. But it would be nice to try.