An Unfortunate Oversight

You know what could use another pass in EverQuest II? Okay, okay, it's a long list, I'll give you that, but I'm talking about the Overseer feature. It's the classic example of a really useful and rewarding part of the game that hides its virtues beneath layer after layer of obfuscation and awkwardness, all for no good reason I can see.

When the mechanic was added with the Blood of Luclin expansion back in 2019 it wasn't particularly well received but it's hung around and now regular players seem to be quite at home with it. Once you know how to pull the levers, it spits out all kinds of useful things, including some that even very well-set-up characters can use. 

On the forums you'll sometimes see experienced players recommending Overseer as a way for new or returning players to gear up and get themselves back into the swing of things. Mostly that's not for the gear itself, although a solo player could do a lot worse, but for the many useful boosts and buffs that drop from Overseer reward chests like leaves in the fall, some of which can reduce the numerous grinds considerably.

Well, eventually. And that's the problem. There's plenty in those chests worth having but it's mostly in the bonus chests from the high-quality Missions, the ones that take fifteen or twenty hours to complete. And you don't get those by wishing for them.

No, you have to  work at it. Really plug away. Day after day after day. All the while getting mostly crap you don't want. Crap you can't imagine anyone wants.

Guess what happens? People give up. They look at what they're getting and they think "Sod this for a game of tin soldiers" and they pack it in and look for something else to do. And then, when they can't find anything better and come to the forums complaining that no-one wants them in groups because they don't have the gear or the spells or the stats and that good gear's too hard to get and stats and spells take too long and you have to have mercs and mounts and familiars and they all need to be leveled up as well and it takes fucking forever unless you throw money at the cash shop, which is OBVIOUSLY what they WANT you to do because the game is just Pay2Win now...

The Missions You Want

... and someone always comes into the thread and says "Well you need to do Overseer, don't you? Not for the gear because, yes, that's useless, but for the merc and familiar and research time reducers"" and the poor person who just picked up the game (Unlikely but it still happens once in a while.) or who just came back after years away (A lot more likely, happens all the time.) replies, usually in very bad humor, "I tried that and I didn't get any of the stuff you're talking about."

Well, of course they didn't. They most likely only gave it a few tries or maybe a week or two at most, which all anyone in their right mind would spend on it. And that's just not long enough.

Do you know how long it takes to start getting the good stuff out of Overseer? Bloody ages! And not only that but it's fiddly as hell. And not in the least intuitive.

I'm not going to go through the whole thing again. I did that back when it was new. The short version is that you start with just a couple of missions and they give the lowest rewards. You have to keep doing those over and over again until they drop some better missions. Then you do those and hope they drop better Missions again and so on, like that, until you have enough good missions, the green and purple ones or at the very least the yellow ones, which aren't great but will have to do for the time being, to fill all ten of your daily slots. 

Then you just pound and pound away at those until the drops start coming. Which they will. Eventually.

All of which is bad enough but there's another problem. Those two missions you get at the start? They take an hour to run and they have a half-hour cool-down. So you can't just log in, slot all your missions and forget about it until tomorrow, like you will be doing one day. Oh, no, nothing so restful.

The missions you'll put up with.

You either do just those two missions a day (Then three, four, five as you get more from the reward chests.) and accept the whole thing is going to take an even more insanely long time than you thought it would or, more likely, you steel yourself to having to log in multiple times a day for the first week or two, just so you can keep recycling your paltry pot of missions every time they come off cooldown. I mean, you weren't going to log in anyway to play, were you? No. Thought not.

And that process resets every time you level Overseer into a new Season, which you want to do because the best drops, the ones you might even use, are all in the current season (Season 7 as I write this, although if you believe Gemini, Google's AI assistant, it's still Season 6. I never believe Gemini so I checked and it's not.) 

Every Overseer Season has ten levels because everything in EQII has to have levels because we all love leveling so much. That's why they sell skip potions in the store. Only not for sodding Overseer or I'd be buying them!

Want to know how long it takes to go from Season 5 to Season 6? Because I can tell you. Three months. Three loooong months.

As I posted back at the end of February, I bought a tradeskill booster for my Necromancer to begin the long, slow process of converting her to be ready for the expansion due later in the year. Among the many things I needed to do was get her up to the current Overseer season. Fortunately, progress there is account-based, so all the work Conkers had done counted. Considerably less fortunately, he gave up on Overseer a couple of years back. I think I misunderstood something but at the time he'd gotten everything he wanted and I'd gotten fed up of the routine of logging in just to pick those ten missions every day, so I stopped.

The missions you get.

Well, that was a mistake, especially since I never got back on the horse, so when Mordita took over she was way behind. Since then I've been logging both of them in pretty much every day so they can tag-team the Overseer missions and just today Mordita handed in the quest that took her into Season 6. That's about three months solid grinding to get one Season done. Is it any wonder people don't stick it out?

There is some good news. Level 50 itself (It's like centuries - you're always one ahead in the numbers.) only took three Celestial missions from Season 5 to finish and I had those already done and waiting to hand in, which was just as well because as soon as you get the two starter missions for the new Season you lose access to all the missions from the previous one. (Well, you can go and "buy" them for no money from a vendor if you want to re-do  them for some reason but although those still get you the rewards, they don't give any experience. I tried that.)  

Sadly, as soon as you ding Overseer Level 51 it's back to minuscule xp for the two blue missions you've got. It's like chipping away at a glacier with a teaspoon. 

But it has to be done. The other good news is that although I'm still a season behind, I am now at least into a Season where loot is flagged for Level 130 (That's character level this time.) The gear's not going to upgrade anything I'm wearing (It wouldn't have upgraded the gear I took off to put on the gear I'm wearing...) but there's other stuff in there that's worth having, not least the crafting rares, the mercenaries and the ever-popular time-reducers.

How long it's going to be before I see any of those is another matter. I suspect it could be a while. With luck - or more likely with patience and persistence - I will be in Season 7 by the time the next expansion lands. At which point, no doubt, we'll be on to Season 8 and I'll have to start pushing the blasted stone up the hill again. 

And they wonder why it's so hard to get new and returning players to stick around...