The Disagreeable Dr Quarterfield and The Mortifyingly Cruel TF

[Tobogon]

Why, may I ask, was this ever created?

Not only does the majority of the missions take place in an area that already takes an exorbitant amount of time to travel through but of the nearly 500, or what seems like, missions 90% are kill all!

 Yes yes ... "defeat all"... but let's be honest ... after the first 5 "defeat all" missions you stop pulling your punches at the endless barrage of Rularuu, Nemesis, and Crey.

Then when you are sure it's a Nemesis plot to drive you crazy... after the 7th kill all in the same damn office building with the same damn mobs ... FINALLY something interesting happens...

You find yourself inexplicably running through Oranbega fighting CoT... 

I must have fallen asleep 20 missions back because .... W.T.F.??

I'm not going to spoil anything for people who have not done it...but after 48 hours of play that end fight left us speechless. 

The twist was well worth it and out of 8 we still managed to end it with 5... so... yeah

 

[Doomguide2005]

     The silver (okay maybe tin-plated 😜) lining is there's no AV or even EB to face along the way or even at the end (don't recall any EBs anyway, I know there's no AV).  For a Solo or duo of friends with Flyer/Teleport character(s) and or with many of p2w teleport powers and knowledge of the TF it's eminently doable even without a super tight endgame build. And 122 merits is nothing to sneeze at for the effort.

[Snarky]

Would you believe the original Devs created it so there would be a "extended play session" broken up over 2-5 sessions for a group of friends...?

[GastlyGibus]

A relic from the old days where the idea was to make content exorbitantly lengthy so you'd play longer. A lot of the old-school task forces were designed to be that way. That's the whole reason you don't get kicked from the team if you disconnect during a TF; they were meant to be tackled in multiple play sessions. It's the archaic mindset of subscription-based models, since the more time you spend playing, the longer you keep your subscription active.

 

However, @Doomguide2005 is 100% correct in that Dr. Q has no archvillains or even elite bosses, so pulling it off as a solo player is entirely doable, just tedious and boring. I've always wanted someone to go through and revamp the task force, much like they did with Positron or Sister Psyche, but considering the Shadow Shard was basically dead-on-arrival and abandoned due to how aggravating and obnoxious the zone was, it likely was deemed not worth the effort, and so it stands there, unchanged, as a relic of the past.

Edited September 4, 2023 by GastlyGibus

[lemming]

Is it freaking long?  Does it seem repetitive? Too many kill alls?  Yes.

 

Back in the day when we didn't have a bunch of mission teleport, etc... abilities and Recall Friend didn't come close to helping out there, it was terrible.  And took forever, and the memory remains.

 

I prefer it over Synapse. Takes about the same amount of time for more reward and if I want to solo it, I can without concern.

 

And that last bit where you hunt down the escapees isn't that big of a stretch, though for some reason, I think we used to hunt them in the sewers.

[Dona Eis Requiem]

I was one of those masochists that actually loved running this with friends back on live. Good times! 

[macskull]

At least these days if you bring a team where everyone's got Team Transporter and the like you can do the whole thing in 60-90 minutes, which is probably worth the time spent if it's the WST.

[ForeverLaxx]

3 hours ago, Snarky said:

Would you believe the original Devs created it so there would be a "extended play session" broken up over 2-5 sessions for a group of friends...?

As I recall, that was the original vision every TF was meant to fill. Dr. Q was just the most egregious about it and it's never been updated because no one really has reason to visit the Shadow Shard for anything other than screenshots outside of the times said TF is the WST.

[Hedgefund]

Here's another line item for "why Quaterfield sucks" - unspecified kill-alls.  The Wiki helps identify these at least but for a LOT of the "defeat boss and guards" missions if you run to the boss room and only defeat him and his guards, you won't see the "Exit mission" button.  That's just infuriating. 

 

Just so I can provide A positive - most of the named bosses are Monty Python characters.

[tidge]

21 minutes ago, Hedgefund said:

Just so I can provide A positive - most of the named bosses are Monty Python characters.

[A Cat]

5 hours ago, Doomguide2005 said:

     The silver (okay maybe tin-plated 😜) lining is there's no AV or even EB to face along the way or even at the end (don't recall any EBs anyway, I know there's no AV).  For a Solo or duo of friends with Flyer/Teleport character(s) and or with many of p2w teleport powers and knowledge of the TF it's eminently doable even without a super tight endgame build. And 122 merits is nothing to sneeze at for the effort.

Boss battles are the fun part though.

[Hyperstrike]

Yes.  The exorbitant time investment pre-Merits was nuts.

Most would play it once (or several times in shifts to complete) and get the badge.

Now, with Mission TP, Team Teleport, Mission Teleport, and a plethora (El Guapo: Do joo know what a plethora eez?)...

 

...of travel powers, the pain point of the TF (the time investment) is down to a far more reasonable  duration.

I've done one BEFORE these changes.  It took about 14 hours.
Now you can, if you're lazy, do it in under 3.

[Hyperstrike]

And sorry about the Three Amigos joke.
I was exposed to it at a formative time in my life...

[Doomguide2005]

2 hours ago, A Cat said:

Boss battles are the fun part though.

Yeah on my scrapper(s) an EB or AV can be fun ... on one of my not highly tweaked incarnated support characters it's going to be more iffy.

[UltraAlt]

10 hours ago, Tobogon said:

Why, may I ask, was this ever created?

 

Yeah, I know. It takes far too long to run that task force. I had thought that it was about 9 hours without team transport (I hear some of Quarterfield TF are run by making sure that everyone had as team teleport before starting the taskforce ... often with others on the team being willing to pick in to make sure everyone has it).

 

Positron was broken into two task forces.

 

I'm not sure how complicated the process is to break the task forces down into parts, but Quarterfield probably should be broken down into at least 3 or 4 parts.

 

Based on our community at this point, I'll bring it up again that I think most task forces should be limited to 30-90 minute average time length (Both Positrons and Yin can be done with 30-60 minutes even on XP teams). This could be done on any of the longer task forces by breaking them up into parts (and splitting the merit yield between parts).

 

Most of the task forces are great content. Content that is not played by many because it takes too long to run a majority of them.

 

Spoiler

.... but really ... to answer the question ... it was a time-sink for end-gamers.

 

 

Edited September 5, 2023 by UltraAlt

[Frozen Burn]

@Tobogon

 

Doing the Shard TFs is like opening up a time capsule - you're seeing/experiencing the history of the game.  The Shard TFs/Zones are the original game's endgame content.  Additionally, back in the early issues, the XP curve was also set very high in that it was damn difficult to get to 50 and the shard TFs were there to help - and to give a little story to the unique zones.  Many people would run out of content in PI and still not be lvl 50.  (That's why there was also a lot of PL farms too.)  Being "endgame content," it was also supposed to take multiple sessions or one lengthy one - as others have stated above.  

 

Now, the XP curve was fixed, we have new endgame content, so the TF does seem outdated.  But also with the new travel system and being able to port from zone to zone without manually going there, the TF can be done in under 2 hours - even solo.  My best time solo is 1:37 on my blaster.  I love when Dr. Q is the WST because I can solo it and rake in the merits for roughly 1:45 of time and not need a team, unlike most other TFs for the WST.  

[High_Beam]

18 hours ago, Snarky said:

Would you believe the original Devs created it so there would be a "extended play session" broken up over 2-5 sessions for a group of friends...?

Like a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, except without strange elf cosplay among those friends.

[Without_Pause]

16 hours ago, lemming said:

Back in the day when we didn't have a bunch of mission teleport, etc... abilities

And we paid a sub for that, and we liked it. 

[Hyperstrike]

27 minutes ago, Without_Pause said:

And we paid a sub for that, and we liked it. 

Through snow, uphill, BOTH WAYS!

And if you complained about it, someone would trot out and tell you about how they once killed Hamidon, solo, with nothing but a loose leaf notebook!

[Without_Pause]

36 minutes ago, Hyperstrike said:

Through snow, uphill, BOTH WAYS!

And if you complained about it, someone would trot out and tell you about how they once killed Hamidon, solo, with nothing but a loose leaf notebook!

Ah yes. LLN/regen. The true source of the first Regen nerf.

[cranebump]

44 minutes ago, Hyperstrike said:

Through snow, uphill, BOTH WAYS!

And if you complained about it, someone would trot out and tell you about how they once killed Hamidon, solo, with nothing but a loose leaf notebook!

You had a notebook? We had to bind our pages together with other pages. And the paper was sharper back then, so we cut ALL our fingers. And the paper was dipped in alcohol, so it burned to bind the papers to the papers. But we did it. And we were THANKFUL for it.:-)

Edited September 5, 2023 by cranebump

[Ironblade]

Well, no one is forced to do it.  Some people will do it once for the badge.  I'll run it occasionally.  The standard reward is 122 merits.  If I log in my 3 accounts and solo it when it's the weekly, that's a lot of merits.

[srmalloy]

21 hours ago, GastlyGibus said:

A relic from the old days where the idea was to make content exorbitantly lengthy so you'd play longer. A lot of the old-school task forces were designed to be that way.

Citadel is a prime example of this; you would think that with an AI's efficiency, he would have you take out the Council bases in IP, then move to Talos and finish things, but instead he has you jumping back and forth between IP and Talos, and before the ready availability of Team Teleport and Mission Teleporter (and the south tram station in IP), having missions in the extreme NW corner of IP, or on the west edge SW of Power Island, served only to drag out the time you spent getting to and from missions, rather than completing them. My memory is a bit vague on the details, but I seem to remember Jack making a comment about how TF teams would defeat open-world mobs as they traveled between missions to increase their experience... something that I don't remember ever seeing in practice.

[Without_Pause]

To be fair, street sweeping was more of a thing at one point. It certainly was for AoE based builds. 

[Hyperstrike]

2 hours ago, cranebump said:

You had a notebook? We had to bind our pages together with other pages. And the paper was sharper back then, so we cut ALL our fingers. And the paper was dipped in alcohol, so it burned to bind the papers to the papers. But we did it. And we were THANKFUL for it.:-)

Remind me never to ask you what happened to your bottom lip...