I expected to be doing my own write-up of the race today, but that is not to be. You see, dear reader, I was out on vacation all of last week, with my game playing time during the Race being limited to Sunday. And although I logged in on Sunday morning, raring to go, I did not end up making it through much of the Race, which was very disappointing, especially considering that I spent several hours working at it.
Here were a few things that tripped me up:
- “Bonus” quests weren’t actually optional. They were, in fact, how you obtained the item. I thought the items were in fixed locations, and the bonus quests just were an alternate way to get them at first, and thus I ran off after getting a bonus quest in an area swarming with others attempting to do it.
- Other players could sabotage your quest. I found this out on DK, while fighting off 4 baddies, when some jerk came up and repaired my droid, thus FUBAR’ing my quest. As I learned later, I could have abandoned the entire Race quest chain, backtracked to Nar Shadda and gotten it again without losing my progress to reset it. But at the time, how to go about resetting it (I abandoned it and went back to the area I picked up the droid hoping that would do it to no avail) was not obvious.
- Some quests required using an item, and a dozen people were already waiting to use the item. The droid race area was swarming with people battling it out to get the fastest click. The standing around and waiting got old after about 5 minutes for me.
- Looking for and looting boxes to procure random items was not appealing for me on a PvP server, alone. I had 2 or so guildies on at any given time, and friends who were interested in doing the Race had already done so at this point, leaving me to group up with strangers, which I did some. But for random items to loot, that would not have been a good strategy. And at some point it just seemed like a lot of time/effort/work and not so much fun. Which is why I didn’t just start over and try doing it on my PvE server. At the end of the day, I just don’t think that would have boosted my enjoyment.
And this is why despite having sunk a few hours into it, I logged out yesterday afternoon, without having completed the Race. And I’ll admit it: I was bummed out about it. I’m not a quitter. Or a slacker. But at the end of the day, I play these games to have fun. And this event just…wasn’t fun for me.
Was it just me? Was this some sort of post-vacation inability to get back into the swing of the game?
Let me know your thoughts on the event in the comments!
Inquisitor's Roadhouse 
I liked the event! The Rakghoul event was better, but it was still fun to have something new and unique to do in the game. I am on a PvE server so I didn’t have to deal with a lot of the hassle that a PvP server might cause with some of the quests.
I didn’t have trouble finding crates or completing quests. I rarely had to wait long to complete a quest either. A lot probably had to do with the time I logged on to play (which shouldn’t be necessary for something like this). While trying to finish the “race” quest I just invited 3 random people who were standing there to a group, thus increasing our odds of clicking and speeding things up for everyone. After grouping, we complete the quest in just a few minutes.
I ended up completing the event on two of my characters and did some of the quests on another character just to get a few more tokens. I got the Lobelot pet and the broken down speeder on one character. I also got the sandpeople gear that I’m going to use for a future alt once they make it Bind to Legacy (soon I hope).
Hopefully they’ll make some improvements to the next event to alleviate a lot of the problems that people had. They did take some feedback from the last event into account like having the vendor stay around for a week after the event is over.
I was definitely hoping to get the pet for at least my sorcerer, but the event just didn’t click with me yesterday (wanted to play solo or with friends, versus grouping up with folks I didn’t know at each stop of the way.) And with it ending on Tuesday, no time to really reconsider!
There are lots of folks selling Tokens for 1k-3k a piece…you could always just buy some to get the pet the vendor is selling! 🙂
I think I only have 43ish tokens so that would be super pricey!
I thought the one week time limit was quite dumb.
It was a bummer for me as that one week was almost entirely my out of town and offline vacation. Bad timing!
Poorly planned events like this are the reason I stopped playing Rift. The first event most people missed due to only a short event time (3 hours I think). For a game that is losing players and needs events to draw people back, this sounds like a way to drive even more people away.
The Rakghoul event was a lot of fun– was hoping this would have that same fun, minus my quest breaking issue w/the final spaceship piece mind you.
I hope they at least have some kind of ending to this event. The Rakghoul event just…disappeared!
Yeah and for rakghoul I was definitely expecting a finale.
Apparently Lost Island was supposed to kind of be the finale…but yeah, a more conclusive thing would be nice. It seems they are doing similar with this though for the upcoming Operation.
Ah interesting– I’ve yet to do that instance. (see also how my level 50’s guild is not so active)
The event only lasted a week, and everyone I asked about it said it wasn’t worth my time. Not gonna lie, I didn’t even log in to look at it.
I thought about poking you and Fyn yesterday to see if you wanted to log in and do it w/me, but figured you probably were otherwise engaged…
🙂
We’ve just been getting caught up on shows that we’ve missed during the renovation, really.
You’re not a grumpus, but I did have fun! I wasn’t around for the rakghoul event, so I don’t know how that compares, but I enjoyed how it seemed to revitalize activity on my server (The Shadowlands), and I liked the rewards. (Although… as a Scoundrel, I could only get the bowcaster for my companions; there wasn’t a blaster pistol flavor of it. I could have torn out the mods, but it was 170k credits just to rip one >.< Now I'm joking that Risha is better geared than I am).
'Course, I'm not on a PvP server, and I did most of the quests in a group with my husband, which probably affects my opinion. There were often waits to click on things, but nothing terrible; and when I was doing it by myself with an alt yesterday I hardly saw anyone at all. As for sabotage, I did see one jerk hanging out flagged on top of one of the places to click, but that was all.
Wow. We actually didn’t have too many race to click first things. Most of the time, everyone was in (surprisingly) very organized lines…on both factions. I was super surprised. Sometimes there’d be like one jerk, but in general, everything was okay.
As for the robot, I don’t know if the person was intentionally trying to screw you up, but I’ve seen a few people who have had their robot disappear (no mob would appear, the robot would just disappear and/or break down and not be fixable) and ended up clicking someone elses trying to just fix theirs (as the box would be blue again with the other person not finished yet). I mostly bring this up as because I helped a lot of people (Both before and after I finished mine) and the Robot should not be clickable to be repaired by anyone outside your group unless, due to the glitch of a mob not respawning, the game still thinks it’s a different group’s.
The boxes were my biggest complaint though. You could only get 105 Tokens of Enrichment minimum for doing all the quests (And the introduction was actually optional if you only planned to give it to the Chevin and/or didn’t care so that could bring you down to 65) when it costs 811 for -one- of everything. While I’ve seen people get about 30 or so on average while hunting for that one item that required you to find them in boxes, I also saw several people get all 6 right away. And between people needing to do it to find the item, people looking for the bed (because 250 Tokens and being the most expensive is just kind of crazy. I’m guessing it is because they expected people to find one before they got that much, but I can speak from experience (as can some other Pet Loving friends of mine) that it wasn’t that likely. One person had over 800 Tokens from boxes and still hadn’t seen one
And then there were people who’d get the Lobelot in like their first box. I’m just glad it wasn’t a different pet. v-v;
pet* obviously, I’m not awake yet 😛
The guy who clicked my robot seemed to have been following me specifically to do so…as he watched me fight 4 mobs then walked on wards
I completed it on three different characters and while it was interesting the first time around, I only did it two more times for experience and to get more tokens (I wanted both the pet and the entire Sand People uniform). My server had some really nice people and everyone typically lined up, which I thought was pretty neat (and super rare). I even got enough social points to be able to wear the Sand People uniform! But a lot of it was buggy and having to wait in line for things in the first place sort of dampened the fun. I basically either had to wait a few days or do off-peak hours to get stuff done. Ultimately, I’m glad I did all the quests at least once but it’s not an event I’ll miss.
Nod, this is what I have heard from must of the folks I know who completed it. I think I made the right choice for me to bow out on it yesterday.
I think you bring up valid points except the last one, if you join a PVP server you know this is bound to happen, and it’s not like it’s impossible to complete the event, as far as I know, there is only one item that is located on a contested area, there rest are on safe areas or your capital planet.
Also, whenever I see a bunch of people “waiting in line” to do the quest, I just invite them all to a group so we can complete the quest at once. I’m sorry guys if for some of you the quest was not spoonfed enough, but the tools to complete it were there. When did resourceful gamers became whiney customers that would rather complain instead of looking for a solution?
Not finding this to be enjoyable does not make me or anyone else a whiner. As for the pvp server aspect, the guild population issue combined with my timing as noted in the post are what made that annoying. Great that you loved it. I found the rakghoul event to be much more enjoyable.
I was planning to resubscribe at some point anyway, so I’d figured it might as well be for the forthcoming event. Unfortunately, I was busy this week. Oh well, money not spent.
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