Feedback:User/Morgaine/End the Duncan Closed Door Disaster

End the Duncan Closed Door Disaster
User	Morgaine
Categories	Player vs. Environment → Quests Player interaction → Chat system

Introduction

• The Zaishen Bounty quest for Duncan the Black has just finished, leaving behind it a trail of frustration, wasted time, and tarnished reputations for players who can't count up to 5 and/or are caught lying to their teams. That this is a disaster is not an overstatement --- it is probably the biggest single unintended disaster of design in the GW1 game mechanic. It did not take into account that people err, and sometimes lie.

Description of problem

• The Last Hierophant is a 5-part quest fought in the EotN elite dungeon Slaver's Exile, the 5th part of which entails killing Duncan the Black. The dungeon is reached by travelling from Umbral Grotto through Verdant Cascades and running into the dungeon portal. Once inside the dungeon, there is either an open portal to Duncan's zone or else a closed door blocking entrance to it --- the door is closed unless every team member has completed the preceding 4 parts of the quest by killing 4 bosses. Completing the first 4 parts draws lines through the names of the first 4 bosses in the quest log for The Last Hierophant, which is commonly referred to as being at "4/5".
• Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing whether all team members are at 4/5 until the team has run or fought its way to the dungeon and then sped over to Duncan's door. The sight of a closed door is so frustrating that it is very common for monks to quit at that point. It may have taken half an hour to assemble a team with the right skills for this elite zone, and it's all time and effort wasted and nothing achieved.
• To make matters worse, it is not possible to determine which players were not at 4/5, and the guilty parties almost never own up to being at fault. Sometimes the guilty party quits at that point, and the remaining players can exit the dungeon and reenter to prove that the remaining 7 were all at 4/5, but this is only barely helpful since the team is now down to 7/8 and needs to return to Umbral Grotto for an 8th, especially if it was a healer. And on obtaining the 8th, there is no guarantee that the same won't happen again.
• Unfortunately it is much more common that more than one player is not at 4/5 and yet they all insist that they are, so nothing can be determined about the truth and the team has to disband completely ... only to suffer the same thing again on the next attempt.
• It's beyond a disaster. I've been in teams that have gone through this process 5 or 6 times in a row, wasted 2-3 hours, only to finally disband in utter frustration at the futility of it.
• This game mechanic is BROKEN. It needs fixing. There are I believe 66 days to the next Duncan the Black (Zaishen quest). That should be the target date for a fix.

Concrete proposal

• I propose the following fix on the grounds of minimal developer time required:

Add a console text command:

"/duncan"

which writes to group chat a descriptive message such as:

"<player-name> has completed N/5 parts of The Last Hierophant"

• The above suggested fix requires no extra graphics, no buttons, no window alterations, no callbacks, and doesn't even have to be conditional on owning EotN. It merely needs to look up "The Last Hierophant" in the active quests list, and if present, identify the number of parts completed. It probably can't get any simpler than this. From my experience of 3D game client programming, it could probably be designed in an hour, implemented in 10 minutes, and QA'd in a day.

Benefits

• From the player's perspective, this would be phenomenal, since team members who do not meet the requirement for entering Duncan the Black's portal can be rejected immediately on joining the team while still in town. In fact, they can check themselves even before joining (let the command write to private chat if not in a team).
• Please please please do this. The frustration we suffered during the last 24 hours was just dreadful. It was not the mountain of fun that we expect from this great game.

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