I Wasn't In That Much Of A Hurry Anyway - Time-Gating In EQII's Rage of Cthurath Tradeskill Timeline

Rage of Cthurath is shaping up very nicely. Then again, almost all EverQuest II expansions do. I think I usually come here in December, singing their praises in the first few days and weeks, before wandering off to play with some shiny new toy in the New Year.

The whole way I play MMORPGs has completely changed over the last five years or so, though. Before, even including most of my time in Guild Wars 2 (Which was hardly overburdened with the expansions while I was there, let's be honest.), a new expansion for my current game generally meant I'd be doing little or nothing else until I'd at least finished the storyline and quite possibly for several months after.

Now, I don't even seem to be able to stick at it until the end of the main story quest. I do finish in the end but sometimes it takes two or three goes, separated by weeks or even months, usually when I'm off playing other games. Last year, if I'm remembering correctly, it was Spring by the time I wrapped things up on the first character. 

Or maybe I'm imagining that. It's a bit fuzzy when you take multiple characters through the same content. Perhaps I did finish the Signature Timeline on my Berserker before I moved on to something else. I'm pretty sure I would at least have finished the Tradeskill line, if only because those always take a fraction of the time the Adventure ones need. 

[Hi! I'm the Inventory Full Fact Checker. I'd just like to jump in here and say that, actually, that's not quite correct. More to the point, it's totally wrong. As this post confirms, the Berserker (Whose name is Conkers so why not call him that?) didn't get around to completing the Tradeskill Signature Questline for last year's expansion, Scars of Destruction, until nearly the end of January. January 24th to be precise. And let's face it, precision is what I'm here for...)

Okay. Fine! Thank you for your service. Now bugger off. 

But that post is very helpful in making the point I was about to make, namely that this year, in keeping with the loophole-closing I was talking about only on Friday, someone at Darkpaw obviously cottoned on to the way people like to race through the crafting timeline just so they can get flying in all the new zones, before going back and doing the Adventure timeline on the same character. Being able to fly for that makes it so much faster and easier. It totally makes sense to do it that way round.

Only two problems with that plan this year. For one, I forgot to do it that way around. I was so eager to see how my necromancer would handle promotion to Expansion Lead, I never even gave a thought to the Tradeskill quests. I just slammed her into the first zone and started killing stuff to see how it went. 

And since it went really well, I kept on doing it. Right up until she dinged Level 131 yesterday, at which point I thought to myself, you know what? It would be really handy if my Sage, Barnabus, was high enough level to make Mordita's new spells for her as she was ready for them.

With that in mind, I swapped over yesterday and had him start on the Tradeskill line. It was exactly as expected. Some chatting, some sneaking, a lot of gathering and loads of crafting. All very entertaining and enjoyable. I was having a great time.

XP was rattling in, too. I thought about using an xp potion to speed things up even more but it hardly seemed worth it. It looked as though it might take about as long to do the whole tradeskill line as it had taken to do just the first zone as an Adventurer. I hadn't made my mind up whether to keep swapping between the two or to blitz through the crafting quests and get that finished first, when this happened: Problem #2.

That's the final part of Quest Four (Of Eight.) Halfway through the full questline. On paper, anyway. 

It took me about ninety minutes to get there. Maybe a couple of hours. I wasn't timing it. At that rate I'd have had it finished this evening. 

I will not have it finished this evening. I might not have it finished this week.

The final part of the fourth quest is very heavily time-gated. You have to "prove your worth" to the goat-folk of Yon Gorroth before you can get any further and boy, are they hard to impress. In the old days, you'd probably just have had to grind out some crafted item they wanted until your fingers bled, taking the same repeatable quests over and over again. Not any more.

Well, yes, still that, sort of... You still have to make them stuff they're too lazy/snotty to make for themselves, just so they can do you the favor of treating you like a hired hand rather than a potential criminal but now they're being a lot more controlling about it. And exploitative, too.

First, they want to charge you a fortune just for giving you the opportunity to work for them. Five hundred platinum pieces and a rare before they'll even consider giving you the work. Then they tell you it's going to take a full week, real time, before they're going to hand you the merit badge that lets everyone else know you're fit to be trusted with even more menial labor.

At this point you could just sit the week out, if you had the patience. The timer will tick down with no help from you. Feel free to log out and go play someone - or something - else for  few days. 

Is it just me or is that a bit of a risky mechanic for a genre that generally likes to keep people logging in every day? 

There is something you can do about it, assuming you'd quite like to play your character before this time next week. You can take a repeatable quest from the same guy and do that for an eight-hour reduction in waiting time. 

It's not obvious. If I hadn't had the walkthorugh on the wiki open, I would never have known. You have to Hail the goat to get him tell you there even is a repeatable quest. Who hails NPCs these days? Is it 2005 all over again? It's like they don't want you to know. 

Once you find out it's there, though, the quest only takes a few minutes. That's not so bad, is it? You could probably get the whole thing done in a couple of hours and be on your way to the next level and the end of the questline in no time. 

Yeah... nope. You can only take the repeatable quest once every three hours.  

Even if you were insane enough to stay up all day and all night, grabbing each opportunity as it came, it would take you a couple of days. Any normal person is only going to manage three or four of those time-cutting quests a day, if that. Maybe you'd get it finished in three or four days, assuming you played every day or at least remembered to log in every time the damn quest was up. 

Unsurprisingly, there's a thread complaining about it on the forums, hyperbolically entitled  The Tradeskill Timeline Sucks In This Expansion Like Never Before. Having played through every one of those Timelines I would  categorically deny that. There have been plenty of worse ones. 

Then again, I am a Crafter and an Adventurer. This doesn't critically affect my enjoyment. My immediate response was to make my mind up to carry on with the Adventure timeline and just do the repeatables as and when I think of it. I don't really care if it takes all week.

I might be a little more irritated if I only played a Crafter but I can guarantee that almost every player who does also has a whole stable of them, so it's not like they haven't got something else to do while they wait. Plus there's all that gathering to do if you want to have enough Rares to make anything worthwhile.

I really don't see what the rush is, anyway. The expansion is with us for a year. Does everyone really want to be done with it by Christmas? There are people in the thread speculating that someone might have "taken time off from work just do the TS signature quest" and now they're screwed, to which I'd say if they did then the problem probably lies more with that person's life choices than any flaws in quest design.

The upshot for me is that I'll get back to adventuring for now and shelve the plan to make spell upgrades as I go. So far there's no sign Mordita needs them and anyway. The way spell upgrades work in EQII now means even the Expert versions of the new tier that Barnabus could make for her probably won't be better than the researched versions she has of older ones. It's a very unintuitive process in some ways. Experts used to be the gold standard for casual soloing but now you mainly need them as a stage in a much longer upgrade path.

As for progress in the Adventure questline, Mordita can now fly in the opening zone and she's just arrived at the first solo instance in the second. I need a clear couple of hours when I can count on not being interrupted for that one, which isn't guaranteed to happen... ever.

If it's time gating your worried about, you should try living with a dog... 

(Oh, and in case you're wondering what the weird pictures of a fiery, disembodied hand are all about, that's the device you craft that allows high level crafters who don't have an equivalently elevated Adventure level to wander about the map in complete safety. It's slow but it gets the job done. Eventually. 

It's also a great way to take close-ups of mobs, something I hadn't realized until today. I may make more use of it for that.)