Yesterday Medi and I tested out the new Help-A-Noob thingamajig that's given by Lehman in Varanas Class Hall. So the gist of it is you get a quest and he gives you one free ticket that allows you to start an Honor Party for 3 hours. Then you go and find some noobs and help them out with "certain quests" and you get spirit points.
So Medi was on a low level alt and I was on Medi (wink wink), and we killed a bunch of mobs. Nothing. Killed Amias. Zilch. Then we went into FA and did an entire run. Nada. I didn't notice any changes or messages or things dropping into my backpack. Did some googling and couldn't find much info about it so we were getting a bit frustrated.
Then Medi asked me to check out my screens to see if the points just showed up somewhere. Turned out to be a brilliant idea! On the C screen, under the stat listings on the left hand side it says how many Spirit Points you have. Turns out Medi had gotten one but we don't really know where from.
So I talked to Lehman again and found out how totally lame this thing is. You need to get 3 Spirit Points to trade for ONE stat point, like one point of Stam. Pffft. Not worth the time. You can only run FA so many times before you feel like lying down in one of the coffins and letting the zombies eat what's left of your brain!
I don't know if I think it's a great idea anyway. There are already lots of high levels who enjoy helping noobs without being rewarded, and that kind of selflessness is something I really like about RoM. I was helped by high levels when I was a lowbie, and I paid it forward as I "grew up".
But....instances at low levels are supposed to teach players how to group and use their skills and not just be a hand-holding exercise. Encouraging more high levels to help lowbies go through instances is not going to make better players. New players are going to be totally incompetant in groups. Kinda like what happens when people power level. The point of the game is to PLAY it!
Now go forth and be successful with it!
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So... it's a good thing the rewards are poor enough to discourage people from using the system? That's... one perverse bit of game design!
ReplyDeletePersonally, I've moved over to LOTRO as my alternate MMO from WoW, haven't logged in to RoM for two months or so. I think the last straw for me was while killing some creatures, ran into one that was an untagged elite... no difference in the nameplate or looks, but my spell only hit for maybe half the damage I was normally doing, and barely nudged his health bar instead of taking down by half...
Maybe it's just me, but things like that, and the system you're talking about here, make me think the game design is actively hostile to the players. Maybe they think it'll force people to buy more stuff from the store.
I guess I can see where Indy's frustration is coming from. It's tough to not know and to have something unpleasantly unexpected happen. When I first started my toon in Grimdal I had the same problem: Somehow a regular mob glitched and a lv5 boar can two shot me at lv15, lol! Thankfully it seems to have been fixed in one of the previous patches...
ReplyDeleteThen again, I kind of like that unexpected surprise. I'm not sure how it is on Osha, or if you have a toon on a pvp server, but at higher levels we have to slap "prevent hijack" on our good equipment so PKers don't look them off our bodies when we get ganked, and we run around with (sometimes) half our equipment on to prevent the other items we can't 'prevent hijack' from being PKed, lol.
Maybe it's just me though, but I like and got used to running around expecting to be jumped.
As for the honor system, I couldn't agree more. I don't mind paying it forward and helping newer players with harder elite bosses like Amias, Yuri and the "Nightmare Dream" quest up in Tagena - at our level, it shouldn't be hard to one-shot them. I am a firm believer in players learning their class the 'right' way - as in, no spoonfeeding!