The rush is back!

[dirtball]

Every VL game I've joined today, all the people want to do is go to keeper and leave. One said keeper is the easiest to kill to get totem? Seriously, they're all easy. I got a totem from King and Plothozz also. King dropped a Jacobs helm of cosmos. We're back to the silly make a map and leave it after 1 boss kill. Now everyone boots again just because they feel like it. Once again the fun has been destroyed because of a quest that gives pretty useless stuff if you already have the best stuff, and the people with the best stuff are the people rushing around to get it first? It can't be traded or worn for set bonus, it's not vanity armor, so why the excitement? This particular rush reminds me of a few months ago just before they nerfed the rush with Halloween campaign, and they figured out how to fix most rushes. People started playing together again, making friends, and enjoying the game. This was a step backwards.

[StompArtist]

Every VL game I've joined today, all the people want to do is go to keeper and leave. One said keeper is the easiest to kill to get totem? Seriously, they're all easy. I got a totem from King and Plothozz also. King dropped a Jacobs helm of cosmos. We're back to the silly make a map and leave it after 1 boss kill. Now everyone boots again just because they feel like it. Once again the fun has been destroyed because of a quest that gives pretty useless stuff if you already have the best stuff, and the people with the best stuff are the people rushing around to get it first? It can't be traded or worn for set bonus, it's not vanity armor, so why the excitement? This particular rush reminds me of a few months ago just before they nerfed the rush with Halloween campaign, and they figured out how to fix most rushes. People started playing together again, making friends, and enjoying the game. This was a step backwards.

I know a lot of people will disagree but I personnaly think that you should loose all drops in a level if it is not completely cleared.

[Lesrider]

Technically, this isn't a rush, so your title is misleading
You can't kill only keeper without clearing first, so the rush isn't back just because of this. Actually, the opposite is true -- those usually doing all bosses clear only one or two and rush the others. And this has always been an option. People can farm whatever boss they want. Why should they be forced to clear all of the VL bosses if they don't want to?

As for why people are doing it: the few runs I did last night, keeper almost always droppe ld 2 totems while other bosses dropped 1. So yes, it slid faster to do keeper. Is it boring? Yes. And if my party is ok will doing all bosses, I will do so, but if they just want to farm keeper for totems, fine with me too. I have all the equipment I need, so any ao3 farming I do now is for the totems and the chatting.

And again, create your own game if you dint like how others play. Why do people always want the devs to change things just to cater to their own personal preference of gameplay? Just host and when people join, tell then your plan. If they don't like it, let them leave. Really not that complicated.

[Cascade]

Um...You got a totem from the King and Plothozz? Lies? I'm pretty sure OL-Gurgox-and Keeper are the only ones that drop totems :P

[RedRyder]

Ily les. If you don't like peoples rules make your own game. We all payed for content like you, so why should we cater to your special needs? We have as much of a right to choose how we play as you do.

/dead

[Cascade]

The devs are sneaky and clever....Remember that.

[Lesrider]

Um...You got a totem from the King and Plothozz? Lies? I'm pretty sure OL-Gurgox-and Keeper are the only ones that drop totems :P

Haha good catch. I was so focused on everything else he said, I missed that part.

[Lesrider]

I know a lot of people will disagree but I personnaly think that you should loose all drops in a level if it is not completely cleared.

So if someone's doing VL and has trouble with OL, they shouldn't be allowed to farm plothozz? Seriously, where do people come up with these things?

[dirtball]

It's an MMO, which means more than one person playing at the same time. If you alienate many of the players because they always get booted or they don't get to experience the entire VL map because 3/4 of the team leaves after killing keeper, why would they want to keep playing. The few of us on these forums make up a tiny amount of the total players. Many of you are level 50 with the best gear on multiple characters, so your ideas of what's fun does not represent most of the players out there. If most players had the best gear prices would drop to nothing in CS. What I was saying is that this quest did not help with the rush problem. A quest that involves having to collect a certain number of totems from each boss would have got you your precious gear and allowed for map clearing in one shot. Yes, people would still get booted, but not as often. Booting level 50's because those with complete rift or cosmos sets is ridiculous. Tells me that they just want to kill keeper as fast as possible and start new map. I doubt that most people play PL to do just that.
PL has to cater to the masses now, they try to please us, but we are a very small group. I don't want them to cater to my needs, only the vast majority of players. Everyone complains about the Mynas generation, yet quests like this simply proliferate the attitude that "I need to get my stuff as fast as I can and screw everyone else." New players see this happening in AO3 and that;s how they learn to play. It's not the Mynas gen's fault, they were taught that by others. The noobs will do what we teach them to do...then we'll complain about theM?
The first night of the quests I did get totems from all bosses, played three VL maps and got ten totems.
Done my so called rant, I will reply on this no further.

[chrononh]

Oh please. This complaint/rant would have more merit if players are somehow limited only to games that are hosted by other players.

If there really are masses of players who believe as you do, then I doubt that you will have any trouble finding them by hosting your own game. They will all find refuge in your kind-hearted/refuse-to-boot-strangers/will-accept -anyone games. Meanwhile, those who want to play a certain way by just clearing the Keeper can play in peace without being told how greedy and noobish they are.

The anti-rushers have already won by nerfing the rush. But I guess they are not done telling the rest of us just how we are supposed to properly play the game.

[Lesrider]

Dirtball, I suppose you also want pvp players to go easy on you If you're not skilled enough?

Ugh, you know what. It's not worth it. Every post of yours is the same complaints. I'm done trying to explain.

[Fyrce]

If you can force people to play your game, why can't they force you to play theirs?

or maybe everyone just plays their game and if they find like-minded people, then good.

I would run more bosses, but I don't particularly care if I kill just one or two or three. I got most of my EQ, will pop or buy the last two I need or wait for prices to drop but it's my choice. I don't really need the Cosmos fishbowl anyways.

I hope everyone else is playing with friends or having fun or creating their own games to play their own way.

[Snakespeare]

I will try to show that the devs consider the rush to be an "exploit" and against the spirit of the game. I will give evidence and try to support what I am saying. I don't think this is my opinion, so much as my analysis of events I have witnessed.

AO1 Sandstorm had its drop rate nerfed. This is because people were rushing the boss to the right, an easy kill, then instantly remaking, causing a glut in level 40 pinks. At that time the devs' answer was to decrease the drop rate.

Hidden Passage (Grate outside Balefort) was a leecher's paradise. There were ways to stand completely out of the action and get pinks and XP. After the devs discovered that, they completely redesigned the floorplan and made it so Zyla didn't spawn in the center until after you killed her in the last room. The other thing they did was make the dudes with the big battleswords mini-stun you, and they added many of them to this map. That did stop a lot of rushing because, even a level 45 (at the time that was max) couldn't really get away from these stunning battlesword weilders.

Hidden Passage (under the Sarcophagus) was an AFK pink leecher's paradise, too. People were leaving their dead toons to leech pinks for hours. The devs nerfed that by adding a timeout of 5 minutes. After 5 minutes dead, anywhere, we no longer get drops.

Halloween Mansion was made into a two-tier map on the second day. That is because the dev who designed it was so excited to play it as an MMO (as opposed to his developing and testing) that he went home that night and jumped on the game. I am talking about Cinco. Every game he joined was a rush. He felt offended! Here he had done this work with various different new critters to slay and people were running right past all his hard work. I know this because he told it to several of us in PMs. He went into work the next day with one goal, to nerf the rush.

The devs told us when they nerfed Halloween Mansion that they intended to nerf the rush completely in 1.5. Then they did.

On the other hand, many of us players had been asking them to nerf the rush for half a year and they did not do it. Many points were rasied on both sides, with the pro-rush people generally agreeing on one point, that they paid for the game and wanted to play it however they want. The anti-rush people core argument was that it is cheating. But none of us ever thought about the people who work on the game, who went months without pay to get the game off the ground. It never occurred to any of us that the rush might actually be offensive to someone whose only reward for so long was a sense of pride.

I don't know what other conclusion to draw from all this other than what I said first, that the devs consider the rush to be an "exploit".

To my mind, it makes no sense to argue with the devs. They are like the umpires in baseball. Arguments are entertaining to the fans, but the umps always win.

What I would really like would be for a dev to tell us flat out whether they nerfed the rush to appease some complaints, or if they did it because they think it's an exploit. Then we could just drop it.

(Why the heck am I posting?!?! I am supposed to be staying away from controversial threads!) LOL!

[jonboy]

We need to sticky your post snake, then reference it everytime the rush is raised.

[Lesrider]

Ugh And I'm supposed to be avoiding your posts, Snake, but here I go anyway.

Dirtboy was not complaining so much about how the new quest was set up, but more about how people are playing. I can't sympathize with anyone who posts a rant about other people not playing the game the way he wants. Like I and countless others have pointed out, make your own d*** game!

Now, do i think it makes sense that the keeper drops more totems than the other bosses? No. If anyone should drop more it shou be OL, or they all drop the same. But Keeper is the only one I've gotten 2 at a time from. So you don't think I'm going to keep killing keeper rather then get 0-1 from the pots wasted on OL? Not saying that's all I do, bc I just did a few runs of all three with a team. But the point is, that is how the game is right now. So don't complain because people are taking advantage of it. Just ask the devs to make all bosses drop totems equally. That is something I could support. But telling people which bosses they can or cannot farm, that I don't agree with.

End of rant.

[Snakespeare]

...about how people are playing.

People are rushing. The thread title is "the rush is back". I feel I have adequately demonstrated that the devs do not think highly of rushing.

Can you give me any evidence to the contrary?

Now that the OP has pointed it out, it will get nerfed.

Don't kill the messenger.

[Lesrider]

They're not rushing keeper bc you have to clear to kill the first boss in VL. So again, what he's complaining about is not a rush, but just farming one boss in VL. And sincethey all have their own rooms, I don't think you can possibly expect people to absolutely always kill all bosses there. And if the devs truly wanted to get rid of rushing altogether, they should make more mobs necessary to be cleared in VL as well. And if they do that, I move on to other games. The only reason the rush crush was bearable was bc it didn't affect VL so much. Get rid of that and you and dirtball can play PL alone, I'm guessing.

[chrononh]

How is clearing on the way to the Keeper "rushing?" Or have we redefined rushing as not clearing every single bad guy in the map? So that leaving the snipers in ao3:2 is now rushing since after killing the Keeper, there are still 7 bad guys left? And leaving 7 in Captive Audience must also be rushing. And if you only kill OL, Gurg, Keeper and Mynas in Victory Lap, that is also rushing.

You see, people, it doesn't matter that P'lothox, or whatever the desert dude's name is, rarely drops anything good, you still have to waste your time killing him with everything else in the desert because if you don't, you are not amply rewarding the devs with the appreciation they deserve for their artistry and genius.

I honestly thought that the mere fact we spend most of our free time playing this game is enough demonstration of our appreciation, but apparently I am grossly mistaken.

[Lesrider]

Well said, Chron! Much better than the way I put it

[FluffNStuff]

"The Rush is Back" <---- Untrue, inflammatory title! The rush is not back! VL is a completely separate animal from the rest of AO3, and you still can't rush it. Snakes, you gave a good history lesson, but you did not go back far enough. If you did, then you would have realized what VL is. It started back in the Swamps days when there were a couple mini bosses at the beginning levels that were dropping elite loot. Now this created a problem because all the Swamps games being made at the time were just this one level, people would kill the first mini boss, and start a new level. Now this was a problem because it was INTERFERING with people who wanted to actually play through the levels as designed. So the solution was to 'nerf' the drops from the mini-bosses, but this created a problem for the farmer, so Cinco went about finding a solution:

Yes. A "Boss Crawl" dungeon or two. Farmer-friendly content.

Let's see what I can come up with

And the solution he game up with was the Bayou Boss Brawl. You were required to complete all of the Swamps as designed and then you got access to this area where you were free to farm as you like.
So now back to AO3 where we still have main levels, and we also have Victory Lap. The most important thing to remember is that when choosing a game, you have the OPTION to join a basic map, and the OPTION to join Victory Lap.