Is this bad luck, or bad design?

If you want to skip the story, scroll down to the TL;DR.

Ok, so I've been playing one of my characters a lot recently. My Burnt Matchstick fire/fire tanker. She was up to level 41 and I was ready for a break from AE missions. So I ran some tip missions, not to switch sides, just to get an alignment merit. Then I realized that you don't get one the first time around. Whatever, they were still interesting, and new content. But I decided that I wanted to do an actual story arc. Something interesting and fresh. I know! They recently updated the Tina Macintyre arc and that's level 40-44 range.

Ok, now let's see. I know it's not going to work but I try the direct approach first. She says I should go talk to Levantera. I figured that's just the generic "I'm not going to talk to you until you're introduced to me" line so I take the next step that I remember you need to do to get introduced to a contact. I run some radio missions. They're simple enough, the same ol' same ol', run a quick safeguard and I have three choices for contacts: Janet Kellum, Indigo, and Madeleine Casey. I go ahead and pick Janet Kellum and start running her missions. After one or two, I get another choice of contacts. I don't remember them exactly, but one of the choices in Crimson (or he might have been the only choice). Later on I realize this was an odd choice as he is a 45-50 contact and immediately goes into my inactive contacts tab.

I double check Paragonwiki.com and I see that Janet Kellum is one of the contacts that introduces Tina Macintyre, and I also notice that she has the Countess Crey arc. I've never fought Countess Crey before so I stick with her for a while. It takes me six or seven random missions before I get the one that starts the Countess Crey arc. And along the way, I get a lot of the horrible old style of missions (defeat 100 Crey, really?), and several maps that seemed to go on forever and ever and ever. I finally get to fight Countess Crey - in a rather anticlimactic battle I must say - and get to the next round of introductions. Still no Tina.

As a sidenote, shortly before getting to the Countess Crey mission I take a quick detour and finally cure those 20 Lost that have been sitting around for months and get myself into the Midnighter Club. Then I move on to one of the next contacts in range, Madeleine Casey and go fight some Carnies. Well, search for the three hostages on a large city map. After the first mission - which was a double train door mission - I get another choice of contacts: Angus McQueen and Indigo. Oh come on!

At this point, I'm starting to think there's something else going on here, so I decide to go become a member of the Vanguard as Tina suggested to me in the first place. While I'm going through these missions, I start talking in global chat about my plight. The first suggestion is that I have too many story arcs open. I check my active contacts tab and the only story arcs I have open at the time are Levantera and Jim Temblor. The next suggestion is maybe I have some other old contacts sitting there blocking her out.

So my first step is to autocomplete my Jim Temblor mission, which gets rid of his story arc and moves him to my inactive tab. That's a good step forward. I start going through some of my other old contacts and get introduced to more new contacts. But still no Tina. Then I get to Percy Winkley. I talk to him and he's got a mission for me, which I remember is a bunch of talky missions, so I decline. I also double check Montague Castenella to see if I hadn't fully completed his arc, even though the green book is gone. He wants me to go to Cimerora for more talky, which I still don't really want to do right now. Then I head back to RWZ to finish up Levantera's arc and notice that both Percy and Montague have little green books by them.

TL;DR I've been trying for about a week and a half, ran through probably 20 missions, including radios and regular contact missions (and a defeat 100 Crey mission in there), and I now have every available contact introduced to me except Tina Macintyre. Which is the only one I wanted to do in the first place.

Shouldn't there be an easier way to get the contacts that you want to do anymore?

Go talk to Imperious.

You also could try your luck at another Safeguard. They give a random max three contacts at a time in your level range.

Wiki

The Contact introduction tree is, in my opinion, a convoluted mess. It's a little better, redside, but not by much (Have to get Darla Mavis...then Psimon Omega, then Nate...If you outlevel them, too bad, yay! >_< )

I'd really rather it got sorted but, hey, I also know the record for ever revamping/fixing stuff around here...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

To reply to your original point, I'd say it's a little bad luck coupled with a little outdated design. I think "back in the day," it wasn't unreasonable to assume that folks who were looking to do their contacts' content were going to get their contacts introduced to them "up the chain," for lack of a better term (i.e. You'd have Tina as a contact b/c you'd been introduced by whichever 34-39 contact introduces her).

Fast-forward a few years and, with scanners, AE, Borea-give-me-a-Merit missions, tips, and anything else I missed, it's kind of easy to have gaps in that hand-off chain.

Bummer you got the runaround there. If it's any consolation, when all that foofaraw pushes you up past that arc, you can just go grab it as an Ouroboros Flashback.

Later on,
Gate

Oh, man, you're going to hate me.

I wanted to run Tina too, since I decided I wanted Portal Jockey on my level 43 scrapper.

I ran 5 radio missions, did the PI safeguard, and when I spoke to the detective, one of the contacts he offered me was Tina. Simple as that.

But I do agree that the design isn't great. It's often difficult to figure out where and how to be introduced to a particular contact.

update: I ran one more mission from my next contact: Angus McQueen, and finally got introduced to Tina.

Congratulations.

man why wouldn't you just do a couple of safeguards?

Ouroboros.

WARNING: I bold names.

It's one of those oddities with trying to do content as it comes as opposed to just doing it as a flashback. There's stories that seem to be "important" to the overall storyline that you may not ever see. I remember having a fair bit of difficulty when I was specifically looking for the Banished Pantheon storyarc.