...specifically loot in legendary quests. I just finished a legendary quest (Pirates) and it took me over an hour. Yay, a legendary quest and I did it all by myself! <-- AoE noob

I get my chests. Hopefully something I can use to beef up my units a little bit. This is what I got:

_____ Problem Jessep?

A quick check:
Silk cloth: 10g (can be sold for 210g in trade channel)
Spices: 9g (120g in trade channel)
Panhsi: 100g
Chiton of the Jackal: 172g (maybe useful for my Egypt civ)
Heavy leather sling: 86g

This legendary quest was a colossal disappointment. I can probably use the chiton and I'll keep the materials but the rest goes to the shop for a whooping 186g.

Now one of the problems is the frustration every player feels when he gets loot like this, the other is that at this pace I will probably have geared up my Greeks around 2025.

Seriously though, if you don't spend grinding quests for 8 hours a day it will take you forever to gear up a civ. If you want to sell new civs it might be a good idea to think of a way how players with a job (and money to spend) can get enough epic gear so that they can move on to a new civ when it becomes available.

If you are only balancing quests and loot with the top 100 players in mind, who have spend weeks farming Renegades back in the day, you will disappoint all the new players. Microsoft has plans to advertise AoEO once the worst bugs are fixed and Skirmish Hall is done.

Please make sure that you don't drive new players away with the horrible loot they will currently get for beating tough level 40 quests!

PS: And don't tell me that I just had bad luck. One player bought 100 level 40 chests in Moe's and made a video. This gives you an impression of how the loot tables look currently:



Yup, 95% vendor trash and the rest can vary a lot. You might spend 75,000g and get nothing you can really use.

Well, obviously you can further increase the disappointment:



100% vendor trash for a legendary quest. Not even epic materials this time.

I think I have reached a new low:



Legendary quests, the disappointment that keeps on giving...


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PS: I solo'd Legendary Renegades to keep things more interesting. I guess by now you can almost predict the outcome:




Are we having fun yet?

+1, do you guys think the average/typical player plays 20 hours a day at these loot tables to get geared this century?

From vast experience during beta and the full release, Id be looking at about 2 months to fully gear a civ playing 40 hours a week and ONLY using the most effective grinding methods. So for the average gamer, which apparently only plays 8 hours per week, it will take them about at least 5x more, or 10+ months. Civs will be coming out alot longer than that. One point to this is, if they want to promote civilization purchasing, they need to have a realistic gear acquisition rate for average gamers.

At the same time, I don't really care about gear anymore. Champion mode is here and it caters for a large amount of what I want. Now I just want replays and observer mode, skirmish hall, decent competitive coop quests (IE Norse Wars, DOTA types formats) and then some more civs.

That sounds a lot like a full time job Prawn. I have completely stopped playing AoEO. It was fun while it lasted, when Paceydre and I were playing Crete coop but we both moved on to other games.

I'm currently beta testing Super Monday Night Combat and I'm having a blast.

Unfortunately we are bound by a NDA and I can't go into more details but if you like shooters and DotA you want to keep an eye on SMNC. It will be true free to play and available on Steam. Release date is 'winter 2011/2012' or soon™.

This, except I'm a bit harsher so replace "gear" with "AoE:O".

It's great that they've finally released Champion mode, but without all that other content, it's still not worth playing. And did I mention there are too many damn good games out now?