Some Ingame Arcs may be unable to be completed

NCSoft suggested I post this is the forums, hope it's the right place. I recently encountered an issue while completing a long in-game story arc. This was the Project: World Wide Red (45-50) arc from Crimson.

It's a very long Malta-related arc I'd been plugging away at for a while, enjoying the immersion in the story. At the end of the arc, there are two missions: one to capture Jack Firenze then the finale, a massive outdoor defeat all with the Kronos Titan.

However, and this is not flagged, the finale is timed and starts immediately upon the completion of the previous one.

For me, this came as a shock, and occured 20 minutes before the Friday maintenance (which is my local Friday 11PM, being in Australia).

There was absolutely no way to complete the mission succesfully. Even after commencing, then waiting, I had less than tem minutes before the timer ran out when I could log back in.

To me, this is a design flaw. I'd like to suggest that that missions (and especially arc finales!) not be auto-starting and timed without clear ingame notice to the player. If this occurs when the servers are about to go down, it's incredibly frustrating to see a 'mission fail' for no reason other than unthoughtful mission design. Other than that, the arc weas brilliant.

(And yes I went all out and defeated the Krons, thus getting "Master of Olympus". But I had no chance to succeed at the mission ICly, and no chance to bring a huge team of friends in for the fun and make an epic fun battle of it.)

Well, that's my two cents worth! I'd appreciate other players' feedback.

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� Taosin [Sydney, Australia]
Servers: Virtue, Justice, Exalted

The text below is from the Briefing given to you by Crimson before you accept the mission.

"$name, it's time to deal with Jack Firenze, aka Director 17 of the Malta Group. This won't be easy, and we know that he has another Kronos class Titan under his command. If he activates it, there might not be much time before it can cause a lot of damage. Gather your resources and block out some time. When you give me the go-ahead, it's on."

And from the clue when you defeat Firenze:

"After his defeat, Jack Firenze, aka Director 17 of the Malta Group, cursed you by saying:

'Where were you getting your information? Tell me! Who was helping you? How were you able to tear down so much, expose so much? You so-called heroes never understood. Now you've ruined it. I've already seen the news. they call us a criminal conspiracy in the intelligence community. They'll all search for us, try to weed us out just to protect their jobs. We would have brought a new era of peace and security through this war. We would have brought everyone freedom, freedom and democracy under our control.'

'But it's not over! Even if this is the end of me, I still have one card left to play. When I realized extraction wasn't coming, I activated my second Kronos Titan. it will crash right through the War Wall, and level this area of the city! Not even you can stop it! Ah-ha-ha-ha!!!' "


Notice the bolded part and especially the italicized portion. This is the same type of clues you've been given throughout your career as a hero when there is a chained timed mission. The clues are there, if you take the time to read them. This arc has been this way since it was introduced to the game, and there are other similar missions earlier in the game that use the same types of clues in the text that will tell you that a timed mission is coming.

IF this were the first time this type of mission chaining had been used, I could see how you might be confused by the wording, but it's not the first time unless you've skipped a lot of content. Actually, the only chained timed mission I can recall that DOESN'T give any verbal clues is from Tina Macintyre at the beginning of the Praetorian War story arc.

Over the last 5 years, a few chained timed missions have been pulled, or at least had been separated so that they aren't chained, due to complaints from players that didn't read the clues they were given during the mission offering. It's also why they started highlighting parts of the mission offering text in different colors to draw the players attention to things such as Forced Teaming missions, AV's, timed missions (the mission you are being offered, not a chained mission). I'm not sure if they've retroactively edited all of the missions' text to do this since they started coloring the text, since I haven't run a lot of the lower level missions in a while.

I think this is the first I've seen where someone complained about the timed mission in World Wide Red. There may have been some complaints, but none that I've seen. Usually, the only complaint I see is that we don't get to face MORE Kronos Titans than the few in this Arc.

I'm not sure why NCSoft suggested you post this in the forums, and I'm assuming it is the Customer Support team that suggested it. Apparently you communicated with someone that wasn't familiar with this series of missions.

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If the game spit out 20 dollar bills people would complain that they weren't sequentially numbered. If they were sequentially numbered people would complain that they weren't random enough.

Black Pebble is my new hero.