But that is the point of contention since so many complaints are about “noobs” not having all those things all while so many of the calls for people for raids/groups state openly they want people with AAs and EXP or they wont take them.
AAs should not be given out freely, they are Funcoms obvious draw to get people to subscribe since they give out a bonus to AA xp as well as allows time training of them (And the company needs the financial support) so that is the hurdle new players will always have to deal with, the EXP part is something that can only be gained by doing which new people require groups of people to help them with. Reading guides and watching videos only gives you a heads up which rarely translates into actually being able to do it well.
The gear boost merely places a new player at a level where they could at least hope to do a good amount of damage or healing so the group/raid isnt a total wipe while they are learning what to do.
Yes I agree, the AA part might be a “problem” for some people that don’t have that much time to play but nowdays compared to the old days it has become really easy to get the most important feats, obviously you need to spend the points on the right feats and don’t waste many if you don’t have premium but it’s really easy to find out which one you need to train first, there are many threads and even in my thread about the expansions I explained which feats are necessary to for all classes so you can do every dungeon with ease. Even asking in the global chat works completely fine to learn which feats to use.
The EXP part is really tricky, I wouldn’t really care about the stuff they post in global since most of these people probably don’t even know what AA EXP gear means, they just post it after their ad because everyone else does it, especially when it comes to things like Flame / Vortex / Palace HM, these tactics can be explained in 2 minutes since there is nothing really to do and even blue crafting gear is enough to tank / heal / dps there.
When it comes to harder dungeons you should know atleast the basics of a fight if you want to join a global group, I don’t really want to write an essay about a dungeon if I want to do a quick run when I don’t have time, that’s when guides come in handy since there are a lot of them online you can easily read up most strategies.
Also: I am aware of the fact that simply reading tactics does not equal having made real experience by being in the actual encounter BUT you can always tell the group leader that you carefully read the tactics and want to see the fight in action now, this often works and many group leaders will take you with them to let you try out what to do (that way I met someone who then continued to farm the Slithering Chaos dungeon with me for months because I let him try out and explained some details).
Best way to learn the dungeons is still being in a guild, people there will be more friendly since the global groups mostly aim for a quick dungeon run (that sometimes goes bad and wastes more time than a guild run a full explanation is given).
But still, giving out the good gear will NOT increase the helpfulness of a player. The best example is the saga server, my ToS still runs around in epic khitai gear (not even the optimal one) even though I could buy a full T4 set, however, I still manage to easily outheal and outDPS fully T4 geared Demos, sins, barbs, PoMs and BSes and so on simply because they never really learned their class by farming the RF. The gear doesn’t help them at all, nor would T6 weapons or even the T5 rune, if they don’t know how to play their class they will never be able to keep up with people who can control their character.
And here comes another problem that is caused by handing out the good gear: These people don’t even want to learn their character anymore because why should they? They can easily get this gear the way they play their character, I stopped counting how often I got insulted for telling a player how to be more effective like telling a ToS to sometimes use healing spells or debuffs instead of spamming Lightning Strike all the time (Yes that person got a full T4 gear from RF).
No, that is not the point of contention. What you need for RF isn’t AA, gear or skill, it’s knowledge. For example, I have the gear, AA¹, skill and knowledge to do RF as a guard, conq, BS, necro or barb. Give me a naked lvl80 ToS and I’ll be able to do RF as well, although I don’t have any skill with the class.
That knowledge is freely available on the internet, and people are willing to share it if needed. When I first entered T6 RF, I simply asked about tactics and 3 people answered me.
On the other hand, you have some² new players that just want to hit the bosses non-stop without thinking, and that refuse to do what needs to be done, or soldiers that refuse to tank the bosses when we need them to. AoC isn’t WoW, you just can’t run a raid solo after some time. Gear helps with survivability, that’s all.
Gods, I miss the old Zodiac fight.
¹ You don’t need much AAs to do RF, and it’s the same you need for HM dungeons.
² Some, not all. As always, it’s the visible minority.
Well one still has to wonder why it is that this thread seems to be showing an overwhelming amount of new players being on one side and non-new players being on the other with some of the few well thought out posts giving examples and suggestions being on the part of new players and almost all of the older players are just saying no, saying people want free stuff and stating that they just plain dont want to learn their classes.
So, who do we listen to here? The new people that are facing these things or old players that are not and who gets to decide who is correct?
As I stated before, I am not facing these issues but I see it happening and all it takes is for it to happen to a few to be true. And I do not seeing anyone in this thread that says new players are not facing this issue announce their guild names stating they will take in anyone having issues to help them out either.
And that says a lot about those claiming the community is accepting to new players. 165 posts and almost 4 months in, no group of people working together to help make the issue of the OP and those voicing concern disappear. For an old game with low player base and risks of the game closing down? if I compare this board to say, Ultima Online’s boards, ouch.
I do not agree at all, even I’m a new player, relatively new, I discovered the saga server very late, thanks to the funcom email and I wanted to try, I played years and years ago, in some raid T1 .
Here I was worried about not being able to complete the saga, my old friends, all disappeared, and I felt lonely.
Instead I here found a wonderful community that welcomed me with open arms and made me participate without any problem.
I entered, while leveling, in the Amazons guild, they are a small social community, RP and little else, some old dungeons but no HM, PvP or Raid.
I grew up slowly with them and I saw the old dungeons and made the purists.
Arrived at 80 my guild was not adapt for Saga, so I turned my attention to pugs and friends known and born on my way, out to my guild, because i choised to not left my guild.
Unfortunately I could only do a few HM dungeons (which I loved) because the RF were up and the activity was very little, but thanks to them I participated in all the raids of the Saga and completed my quest.
I have always met with willing veterans and enjoyed sharing their knowledge, and rarely have I met bad people and usually I have met bad people in the RF and not in the real raids.
They have not had any problems to indicate me where to read the tactics and also to explain them through vocal applications (Teamspeak and Discord) this has required a certain effort of course, but in the end I did it
soon i want add screenshots of my achievement, for now site not let me add links i dont know because.
I am free to play at the moment, i will become premium when we go back on Crom, you can see that I did not have a lot of AA and my gear was just T1, I was unlucky and I did not win anything in raids (I could buy the T4 chest but I never won a rare ) and I kept away from the RFs as much as possible, so I have a few relic IV, my gear is just full T1, cape T4/black dragon and neck T6, only item i had was belt T3 won in that same raid.
The issue of the OP is feedback for the Saga server. I personally will give that once the server is closed.
In this thread no new player asked for help. You can not know how many people PM to new players asking for help, the same as you can not see tells ingame when people ask question in global.
Who we should listen to is a good question. I would vote to not rely too much on people who do not know enough of a certain matter to be able to judge it. You would always listen to experts in real life, and take the words of noobs only as hints where to look for problems, but never as a solution to a problem - why not in a game? What you seem to forget is that veterans are raising alts all the time, facing the same things a new player does, and that veterans play with new players all the time.
Force and I are in a Saga guild where me and my fellow raid leaders have helped roughly 500 players to get their Saga quest done by offering all raids for it, and more. 50% of them are “newbies” (returning, never been to higher content than T2, or really new). I need to focus on the many different problems and questions new players have in their first raids and new encounters, so I almost exclusivly lead in my native language german. A few weeks ago I started to lead bilingual german/english, because guildies brought in new international players. It was awesome to see them thrive and expiriencing real raids for the first time. Your buddy Epicsomething turned my offer down to come to my raids - I did not know about your guild policy when I kindly made that offer. My guild, fellow raid leads and me are the lasts ones anyone can possibly accuse of not willing to help new people.
Every, EVERY veteran who posted in this thread did something to help the community and new players, in public and secretly. So please try to consider that most of us actually know what we are talking about, and that we come from a place of concern about the game AND new players. We saw what the rf in its current state and some other changes did to the game. Just take Saga: Thriving server, groups and low level raids popping up in global so fast the adds almost vanish befor you could read them…introduction of the rf…boooom…group and raid activity down to 10%. To see that was really hard, if you love the game.
Actual numbers are always better than vague sentences when you’re trying to do an analysis.
But to address your point, discussion was mostly civil and constructive, and mostly done between veterans. I guess we’re not that toxic
What was the answer again? ‘We don’t want your help because we know you’ll make a drama.’ Talk about a high horse.
We’re doing T4 tomorrow, PM me your char name and i’ll see if there’s room for you if you want to
By the way: I got a PM around 19h40 CET from a conq that was looking for a T3 Upper raid. He’s a new player, and he has a nice two-hander with blessings now.
Thank you very much, you are very kind, I already have my invitation in T4 with the nice guys who brought me today to do the T3, but I really appreciate it
There are few people in saga server that still needs to complete saga quest (mainly late comers and new players), however nowadays server is almost dead since most of the guilds and hardcore players are back to Crom. Raiding does not seem very likely, please give us some kind of help in order to complete saga quest, maybe via raid finder or something like that. We wanna stick to the game, please don’t let us alone in this final rush!
Thanks!
With this mindset everyone could have waited for the last week of saga and quickly rush a character to level 80, do a RF and get the quest done. If they wanna do another saga server they would need to introduce that again which would completely kill the server.
RF does not need more “power” than it already has. Getting the best weapons in the game shouldn’t be possible by simply doing RF which can be done if half of the raid is AFK.
There already was a lot of discussion about this, I am not going to argue even more about it, its a time limited event, there already were small bonuses like EXP modifier, second spec and so on, I havent heard about a challange that was made easier at the end (in the games I played). Also, Funcom wont make big changes anymore.
I really enjoyed coming back (last played in 2012) to play the saga server and I’ll be continuing after the merge to crom. The one thing that was disappointing though was as I was leveling I saw tons of groups going for all kinds of the level 80 6mans only to see those dip in favor of RF with it’s release on Saga. I enjoy raiding but there is nothing like the fun you can have with a small group of close friends running random 6mans. It’s easier to talk and development friendships with other gamers in 6mans than raids which is usually why most people stick to one game over another because their friends are playing it.
While I don’t think you can remove RF from the game without having something in it’s place. So what I always wish they would do would focus on making all the 6mans more viable. All lvl 80 dungeons even the old ones like Iron tower and xibaluku should provide some reward useful to all players. It’s sad that once you reach the next set of gear level dungeon blues, T1, T2, T3, khitai…you get fewer and fewer things that can help your character progress.
Perhaps a universal token system (leaving T5 and T6 out) where you get tokens for everything you do that can be converted into either rare relics, shards, Teir 1 thru T4 tokens. I know this is already somewhat in the game but it needs to go a little further to incorporate alot of the old content since new content won’t be coming.
Or daily dungeon quests where each quest is tired to a zone. For example, Complete all Aquilonia dungeons and you receive a box like what RF gives. I think this would be the best solution because even if tokens are added to all dungeons, ppl would just farm the most efficient. RF almost reminds me of the den of crowmen exploit farm. Nobody wanted to do it but everyone did because it was the fastest way to get gear.
Exactly, there needs to be a new incentive to do 6 man dungeons, RF really killed off the saga server when it was released, I liked running dungeons with all the fresh level 80 people.
Too bad Funcom didn’t listen about this problem to this day, many people already suggested what you said, things like adding Atlantean Shards to the loottable of unchained dungeons or adding additional daily challange quests that will reward you with Atlantean Shards so you can have an alternate way of getting the rings and gems.
I for one hope they simply disable RF on Saga if they ever think about creating a new saga server. I did only one RF on saga for the quest then never again.
why leave the game? It seems to me instead the best opportunity to stay, that weapon is not unique in Crom there is the same weapon, still waiting for you. You have your T4 gear from the RF, you have your T4 cape, you have your T6 necklace. You have all the need to get into a T6 raid and go get your weapon.
Last I checked a raid required 24 people, a raid finder required 24 people. So, if raid finder is no issue there’s obviously enough people, so my deduction is that people are missing out on Saga quest because they are too lazy to raid and that’s on themselves.
At some point people need to stop relying on veterans carrying them and actually take some of the advice and tactics that’s been given everywhere over the years, instead of using ineffective useless playstyles, not paying attention to tactics and replying with “I play my way” when given any kind of advice.
When you see people looking for dungeons, and see 5 other people looking for same dungeon, but no one wants to be the one making the group. Just want to be invited
look I’ve never understood if sometimes people are just stupid, blind or too much abuse of ignore and then to them the server seems deserted. I give you an example that I have often seen in global:
[GLOBAL][GUY1] LFM T3.5 need 1xDT 2xTOS 1xBS
[GLOBAL][GUY2] TOS looking for T3.5
and they ignore each other, without matches, even for hours
I am nearing the end of the Raid progression for my Saga character and I have thoroughly enjoyed the journey from Level 1 to the end. Starting over on a new server with nothing does breathe new life into the game, and this event helped pull back many lapsed players into Age of Conan.
What I would like to see next is a PvP-focused server, as has been already suggested. The PvP theme would make the Saga server a more community/Guild focused effort from beginning to end.
