So while we have another spot of downtime I got reminded of something I meant to post here but forgot about. A little while ago a friend of mine mentioned needing only the last 2 areas in the Neretva Canyons questline before he could do Area X. I brought a toon to help him, and thought it would be a good opportunity to grab an update on a dual-logged lower level alt of mine at the same time. We did E and F, and I went to hand the quests in on my alt.
It was then that I noticed the keycard half you get as a reward for completing Area F was a temporary item. I can't be certain of how long the timer was on it but I think I remember it being about 30 minutes. I hadn't started doing any of the Areas on my alt before this point, and had only brought it along because my friend was doing his last 2 Areas, so I didn't have the other half of the key that goes with the one from Area F. (Note that none of the other key halves I got subsequently from any other Area quests were temporary, this only seems to be the case for Area F.)
It dawned on me that if I didn't figure out which Area gave me the other half of the keycard before the timer on the temporary key half ran out, I might not be able to hand the 2 halves to the NPC for her to tradeskill into the complete key later. But I had no idea which Area would give me the other half and I couldn't find a guide that listed which key halves you get from which Area, and nobody in-game at the time seemed to know either. So it became necessary to use trial and error.
As you can probably guess, I didn't manage to find the Area that gave me the other half before the temporary half disappeared. :\ Sure enough, the NPC still wanted both halves of the key, which I couldn't give her. And so I had to petition. The GM (who I have to say handled the problem pleasantly quickly) spawned a replacement key half in my inventory which was not temporary, so I thought to ask whether my getting a temporary key was just a bug or whether the quest reward for Area F was always temporary. The GM wasn't sure, but when another friend of mine did Area F later they confirmed they also got a temporary key half for Area F while all the other Areas gave them permanent key halves.
So here's the problem: Currently, Areas A-F can be done independant of each other. You don't have to have done B before doing D, for example. This kind of leads people to think there's no consequence to doing them in any particular order... until they happen to do F before one of the others without realizing they'll get a temporary item as a reward...
Suggested solutions:
1) Make the Area F key permanent, just like all the other Area keycard halves. Then people could continue to do them in whichever order without bad surprises cropping up unexpectedly.
2) If the intention was for people to do Areas A-E before attempting F, then find a way of locking them out of doing Area F similarly to how people are prevented from doing Area X before doing Areas A-F.
Either way would help lesson both the potential for confusion and the need to petition over it.
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Originally Posted by Lazy
