My thoughts on the adventure selections. Forever ago... the true dark ages, the best XP adventure was Nords. It had a loot spot. And then the dawn of the new era, when FT's were introduced, they were all three-players - meaning one player generally ran them and two players tagged, although there are times someone runs a few sections and someone else finishes. This leads to a lot of interaction and differing styles of gameplay. You can swap slots, owe a LS to a friend or guildmate, sell the slots to buy other things (or more adventures). Then we got XXL, opening up to level 75. The best of the new content (Woodcutter, 1st, 2nd, 3rd and Wisdom) includes only one adventure with a loot spot, and it's not always easy to get a 2nd Thief to swap or owe. Excelsior content, from the individual ventures and EQ and coming MCC, are exclusively one-player. More and more the best and newest stuff is one-player.
Why is this important? In the events, a lot of less active players or "event players" come back to grab some key items, like an MMA, from the event shop. This would be a great time to feature multi-player adventures, as there is more activity period. Remind them of why they enjoyed not only the island-building game, but the social part with guilds, lurking in trade, etc.
So this advent was a fail, not because I didn't enjoy running a Traitors or three, or pounding out 5 ROTM's in an hour, but because my bursts of activity were all single player activities. Other than trying to find someone to "lend a hand" - I could have done this version of Easter entirely without visiting a forum, talking to a friend, sharing a loot spot or co-op.
The "fix" - put a few popular advents such as RB/BK or less common ones that will seem like new content to us higher-level players, because we can't remember the last time we ran them, like Dark Priests or Stealing from the Rich (I actually like this one) that have a loot spot in the event adventure selection. Put all the co-ops in it. All of them! Seriously, it's hard to get 2-3-4 players to commit to a co-op most of the time, but when activity peaks in an event, it's not only possible but could be profitable if the event resource (egg loot) effort was worth it. And please, put either one AB or FT with loot spots in the selection. Higher level players would love to run the events while also not putting off entirely their efforts to reach Pathfinder levels, etc. Have an achievement that requires us to run five co-ops, five scenarios, five single-player and five multi-player missions. Make the event feature the game.
Develop at least one Siege-style high level co-op, and make that an event adventure. By Siege-style, I mean both players can complete their side of the adventure at their own pace. I do not have to wait for player B to get to a certain point to kill the next camp. If I finish first, I ask him to close it out when he (or she) is done and then I go grab a drink, or yell at my teenagers, whatever. In fact, I would love to see a high-level coop with FT bandits (okay xp), AB bandits (good xp), and some of the stuff from ventures that you don't get to play very often (EQ or MCC bandits). I'd even be okay with using the Siege map for one of them, much like Motherly Love uses the Island of the Pirates map, so development would be easy (well, easier, if it was easy you'd make new maps all the time).
Anyway, that's my rant. I'm kinda in the down part of my settlers cycle, I raced a guildmate to level 72, since I hit that three months ago (a few days later than Kanks the jerk), I've barely gained 1/10 of a level... but I'm looking for a reason to motivate, I like the game still (most of the time) and do enjoy when Pathfinder asks me to do something different such as run a Nords or a Traitors or a co-op, but the most fun is when the mood grabs me to play FT's or swap seconds and guild chat is going strong with people playing the game. Funny thing is, by playing the game, just playing it for fun, you can usually get enough event resources to buy some of the good stuff and a lot of the smaller issues don't seem like as big a deal.
Enjoy...
KH
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Originally Posted by Ballinoutofcntrl
it was awesome.. Because even though co-ops had a chance of lower than traitors - it was the comradery and a guaranteed drop... plus we could knock off some odd achievements and side quests 