Mischief in Paradise?

Yesterday after an hour of OOCing “LFG” I finally got a group to the main sewer system below the tarantian noble district. Was a great group too. Everyone knew their jobs and took care of em too. Only problem was that the higher level players that had skipped the quests before were now coming back there to finish them as the mobs could no longer harm them. So the bosses we were supposed to kill were dead most of the time.

I already disliked going to the sewers even before this party since the place is always full of people and I definitely prefer wide open outdoor spaces over the dark, narrow sewers. Also my computer gets completely jammed sometimes and so far it has happened only in the main sewer system every time I’ve been there and so it happened again and of course; before we had actually managed to achieve anything, thanks to the higher level players camping the bosses. That would have been fine if it was just that, but when I logged back in I couldn’t see the party list and wasn’t able to participate in looting. I asked the partyleader to reinvite me in the party, but when trying to get reinvited I got hit by the so called “party bug” and couldn’t be invited in to the group again.

I pretty much tried everything possible to get it working again, but nothing helped. So there I was unable to join the group and forced to leave the whole place without having achieved anything because of a bug. This was the first time I was really affected by bugs during my whole time playing AoC and I gotta admit I felt really frustrated and had to log out for a while to keep my cool. Now I think I understand the people who skip the whole place and wait for the mobs to get gray so they can do it solo. No matter how much fun grouping is, the place is horrible and should definitely be turned in to a group instance instead of the shared dungeon it is at the moment.

Later when I logged in I picked up a quest to go to thunder river which was a new area for me. You can get there through the Poitain gathering zone and the place is populated with level 60+ mobs. I picked up some red quests and had a blast doing them as they were really challenging at around level 59~. It almost felt like making up after a fight with a good old friend, after the negative sewer experience. I think I’m starting to develope a healthy love hate relationship with this game/Funcom. ^^

Status Report

My barbarian is level 63 currently as I write this and I’m getting to experience the “lack of content” first hand. It’s not as bad as the forum whiners make it out to be. I still find quests on pretty much every single level. Red quests, sure, but that just gives it a bit of an added challenge and makes it that much more fun. I have had to grind some on the last few levels to fill the xp bar that the quests didn’t fill, but I find that understandable as I did skip a majority of the sewer quests.

About the Grinding

To understand my point of view with grinding you have to know a little bit about my MMO history and about Lineage 2 in particular, which is the game I played for the longest period of time and still have my loyalties at. L2 is often nicknamed “Grindage 2″ and for a reason too.

I played L2 for over three years. Tried out the retail servers, but that wasn’t my thing with all the bots, dual boxing and ebaying going around. So I ended up playing on the so called ‘private servers’ for the majority of my L2 career, because on private servers botting and dual boxing are actually monitored and banned.

Lineage 2 is basically a continuous grind from level 1 to 80. Sure; you got class transfer quests at 20, 35, 37 and 40, 76, but they are done with the “lets get these over with so we can get on with the grind” -mentality. The quest rewards in L2 are not even worth mentioning because they are just pure crap.

The question in L2 is not how fast you will reach the max level. The question is IF you will ever reach the max level since most people just never make it there. And if you reach the max level how do you get rewarded? With more grind of course. You’ll get to add a subclass to your character (you can actually add a subclass on 75 already and when your subclass reaches 75 you’ll be given another, up to 3 subclasses) and redo the levels 40 – 80 with another class. Yay. o/

The higher you get the slower the xp flows in. At mid levels (low 40’s) on retail rates you’ll be getting about 0.05% per mob of the total amount of xp needed to reach the next level, and the XP given by mobs and the amount needed to level up don’t increase proportionally like in AoC. And at any time another player can come along and just pk you which will make you lose around 4% of the total xp needed to reach the next level.

So when people come to AoC from WoW all spoiled with quests (Yes I did try WoW and it just didn’t click for me) and whine about the lack of quests, having to grind some and getting ganked (with no real death penalties?) I just can’t help laughing. Those who played L2 know what I’m talking about and those who didn’t will never fully understand what we’ve been through. ^^

Just read through what I’ve written so far and one has to wonder why did I stand the grind for three whole years. I have to say it was probably because the game was so goddamn pretty and during those three years I forged a numerous amount of friendships that will last for a lifetime. Also the game was challenging and there was ALWAYS something to do when you logged in game.

I just hope I will be able to look back on Age of Conan in three years, with the same kind of warm memories, as I do on Lineage 2 now.

This rant is something that has been building up in me for quite a while now and it just had to come out. Sorry for the extensive L2 description but I found it relevant to the matter. ^^

- Odefi