Hello everyone!
First of all let me thank you for your patience in these first couple of weeks since launch! It has been bumpy some places and smooth other, but overall less bumpy than many of us feared! I would like to from a game-play political point of view comment on some of the issues players are currently struggling with:
With "camping" I mean:
passively waiting more than a some minutes in an area for an monster to appear or repeatedly doing a task that gives no reward over and over. Defining camping this way, I would like to state – This is unwanted gameplay! Saying it is unwanted does not mean there are
no situation where this type of behavior will ever be required! Situations can arise where this is a product of several minor imbalances or bugs, or the behavior of other players. It simply means that we want to limit it
as much as we can, and in fact, that we are working on doing this just now.
The patch last Friday should make it evident that we have reduced choke points, camping and senseless delays already. We are far from completely done with this overhaul, and in the following week(s) there will be several minor sized patches addressing these issues. Our goal is clear: to be able to remove these as soon as we can!
To make sure there will be fewer misunderstandings, let me give you a couple of examples (not including every nuance of this issue, naturally) of acceptable and unacceptable gameplay:
Acceptable
Spending time running around finding a monster that has some chance of dropping an item.
Unacceptable
Sitting in one spot waiting for a single monster that has a chance to drop something.
Acceptable
Spending some time finding many pieces of an item, then combining that with "trade skills".
Unacceptable
Spending a lot of time per piece, without any intermediate reward (like experience, other loot from the various monsters).
Acceptable
For essential items everyone needs: Learning which parts of the world holds which loot and monsters, having to explore.
Unacceptable
For essential items everyone needs: Having that item dropped by only one monster, with a long re-spawn time.
To what degree can you expect to solve quests in the Shadowlands without help? The rule of thumb one should think about goes like this:
1. From Nascence through Elysium all quests and missions should be soloable.
2. From Scheol through Adonis, many things should be soloable, but some things should also require you to cooperate in a team.
3. From Penumbra through Inferno some things should be soloable, like sub-aspects of quests, but many things will require a team, and some will require several teams.
This relates to quests and Shadowlands missions, but not all aspects of their missions. There should always be things you should be able to do alone, but with Shadowlands we want to encourage teaming up to succeed to a greater degree
Yours truly,
Gaute Godager
Anarchy Online Game Director
