General Discussion

Originally posted by Terranah

PQ's are one of those things that make me scratch my head and ask, why didn't anyone else think of this?  I've played quite a few mmo's over the years and I can't recall having seen this feature before.

 

So far I think it's an awesome feature.  I love it.  I've gotten some good rewards from PQ's, both as drops and later when turning in rep to get the rally master rewards.

 

Another innovative feature, is the ability to click a tab by your avatar and a list then drops down of all groups in your region.  You can then self add yourself to a group.  That is so nice.  In other mmo's I hated to group because it took so long to get in a group, and I experienced many of the same problems grouping as the original poster.

 

And as far as T1 and T2, I think there are quite a few pve quests.  More than enough to keep me busy.  I find myself running scenarios a bit, then doing some pve quests which usually leads me across some PQ.  Then I do the pq for awhile, and then when I get tired of that, I do some rvr or just explore.  In short, I am loving this game.

 

It doesn't have the socially complex aspect of precu SWG, but in other areas WAR is so much fun.  Really, I have not had this much fun since precu SWG, and even then the fun was more spaced out.

Actually, I not scratching my head, but ArenaNet already mentioned right when they made the anouncement of Guild Wars 2 that they were going to incorperate that into the the gameplay I'm just curious as to how they are going to do this...FYI.  
 

Originally posted by ardohain

personally i find the PQ system depressing. there's never anyone around to be able to finish them and they're not solo'able. during open beta weekend when there were plenty of people to finish them, the casters couldn't be out dps'd so i'd finish the quest but never get any decent loot.

seems like a loose loose situation to me. i don't see why it's enjoyable to anyone simply because it's a different way of doing the same thing.

i have the same impression

in my career of 5 characters all to lvl 10-20 i did finish exactly 1 public quest and that was in headstart phase. most of the time there arent people around to do them.

dont get me wrong, i really love them and i think every next gen mmo should implement those but:

1. we need a better player pooling thrueout the servers for pq and szenarios. i suggest you instance pq just like szenarios but maybe hide the fact that its instanced a bit more. for example do them in a canyon, cave or otherwise narrow area where it doesnt feel strange if players "pop up". then make it possible that players from all servers can enter a pq. i would suggest that with szenarios as well to have a broader base of players to recruit from.

2. make some of them mandatory. like "this pass will open only if the pq is completed" 
this would create a bottleneck at certain levels and players have to work together to enter the next area

 Different people, different tastes.

However I agree completely with original poster and it is also my position. About PQ, they are not pefrect, but to my they are fun and mean distraction from regular questing which I really enjoy. In Mythic also succeeded in RvR camp, imo. I never liked PvP, this is the first time I enjoy. And scenarios are also great. Of course ... doing over and over same scenario for 99 times would not be interesting ... Like PQ, I would like to see also more scenarios per area.

So far War is great Game and for sure I will be subscribed for time. Only area that I really dislike is gathering and crafting.

Originally posted by Myrdek

I agree that PQs are a nice innovation but you don't seem to have reached the point where you realise that...

1- Their all the same except for the creatures to kill (huge grind first stage)

2- Most people won't be able to do 90% of them because their too hard, not enough population, no population balance across the game

3- The rewards are always the same so if you want to grind for a purple bag you'll get 10x the same green bag beforehand

Could not disagree more to points 1 and 2.

 It is only a huge grind for tier one if you are soloing it. There's a reason for that. It gives you a crack at getting influence gear without groups. A nice balance feature were i to experience the problem in point two were I not playing at 2AM. With a group it's a bit of frantic running around and  chance for me as a healer to work out who I'm gonna bother with as I see who runs to aid me when I heal-aggro before I need to worry about a boss-fight.

There's sometime been issues forming a group as people are so used to running around solo thanks to other MMO's which I normally solve by spam-inviting people. I rarely get turned down and if I do they go on my mental no-heals list. The only time I have issues getting a group for pq's are when i should have crashed but I'm finding this game so attractive... I occasionally find I'm a little tired for work first thing in the morning. But that's why the big man gave us coffee.

as to point 3, that's why they are listed as rare items. I'm not sure what you are expecting here? This isn't end-game raiding. to get the l33t items get to 40 and grind your renown. These are public quests with public rewards on both order and destro sides. Game balance dictates we have similarly good stuff more or less readily available. Otherwise you make the mistake (in my opinion) that occured in wow where the battlefield victory is dictated by gear rather than skill. WoW brought in tiering in arenas to try and balance for that. How would you suggest balancing levelling in WAR in a similar way if you want to bring in less rare epics?

PQs are a great idea and they sounded great when I heard about them.

However, it's no fun when you are playing order, we are far too few. When you start, even on day1, the starting area felt empty, only occasionally you meet people fighting in those PQs - in one area or the other. Let aside the fact that they are repetitive (Stage1 Kill 80/100 mobs -> Stage2 kill 4 champions -> Stage3 kill 1 hero), you meet 2 others with luck in one of the areas and with some more luck more people can join for the final part.

So much for the awesomeness of PQs...

If they hadn't made this many servers, the PQs would have been nice places which you visit, meet people to fight with, kill things and leave, and if you occasionally get a reward, it makes them even greater. But I am only level 5, I stil have a lot to see and hope they don't turn into grindfest

Originally posted by Lethality

PQ's are a good idea, but it's definitely "1.0" in implementation. There are massive inherent design flaws, mainly dealing with the fact that you are counting on other players to participate and if we've learned anything about MMOs this far is that you can't predict what players are going to want to do nor force them to do.

On many servers, even the high-pop ones., the PQ areas are dead in many cases. Therefore you can't complete them past the first stage. Sure, you can grind all the influence you want based on just the first stage... but is that really the intention of Mythic in the design of these things? No way.

So IMO at the moment, PQs are failing but that train of thought is a good one and I hope the find ways to improve it.

Totally agree, maybe they could change them so they scale with the number of people in the PQ area so one or two players had a chance to complete them...

i'm playing destruction and haven't finished a PQ yet. if there's more than just me, and it's rare there is more than just me, then the squishy dark elves try and time our deaths and running back from the spawn point to keep the boss agro'd. i can't say that i call this fun.

I personally am really enjoying the PQ's, though there are some of the out of the way ones that i rarley see people at. The one thing that i think needs to be addressed is the roll, or more specifically the contribution points added to the roll.

Case in point: I was heading into a new area and the first thing that i saw was a PQ. The people were taking down the 3rd stage boss so i figured i'd wait and continue my quests. One of my quest mobs happened to be next to the boss they were killing so after i dispatched the mob i decided to help them since it seemed they were struggling a bit. The boss was at about 25% health left when i started to attack. After the boss was downed i decided for laughs to see what my score would be on it. There were 6 people and my contribution was 6th out of 6 and that gave me +25 points. I happened to roll at 908 (or so cant remember exactly) and won first place prize.

Now while i was glad that i won a prize that i was able to use, it made me think of how unfair it was for something like that to happen expecially on the higer tier PQ's. You have 10 people working their butts off finishing while someone strolls by, hits the mob once, and then has a chance of getting 1st place. I think the higer contribution you have should equate to more. Exactly what i am not sure, maby have a larger roll score, or you have to contribute to at least 30% to qualify for a prize, or something to make it a bit more fair to those who did the most work.