Problem with Ancient Wardstone quest

[VoodooSkizzles]

I have looked all over for the NPCs Paula Becksten and Olaf Sternbrew to get the quest (Guardian) in Scarlet Gorge to get the Ascended Activate Wardstone ability. Everything says Paula should give the quest and be at Overwatch or right as you come in from Gloamwood, but I can't find em. Put a ticket in but no answer yet. Wat do? Plz halp! Thanks

[MoonfireSpam]

I'm preeeeeetty sure the Ancient Wardstones were essentially failed content that were later entirely removed from the game completely. The achievements associated with them were converted into 0 point Legacy Achievements.

The ancient wardstones and all the associated quests/npcs should not be available in the current version of Rift.

You were probably reading a (very) out of date guide.

[VoodooSkizzles]

Well that would explain why none of the NPCs are where they are supposed to be. Good thing I didn't waste a bunch of time running around looking for them...

Unfortunately this leads me back to figuring out what the last quest I need for the achievement is; sitting at 37/38 right now.

[arus2001]

There's a spider in a cave a little NW of the guardian port/camp that drops a quest item. Dunno if that's your culprit or not.

Personally, I was 37/38 in SG and wound up getting the last ding doing a fishing quest. So, that could help, too. Also might be an add-on out there like the carnage book that could tell you what you're lacking from the log. Honestly, I really wish we could get a Completed Quest tab.

[Luteuel]

so there is a quest where the named croc spawn location is, you protect some villagers from waves of undead.

there is another where a villager is surrounded by undead near a hole in the side of a hill (in the area of the perma fire rift on the guardian side).

don't know if these are guardian only quests though.


and the ancient wardstones were supposed to be hot spots for PVP because as a guardian you could activate it and then you would have quests to complete and as you completed more a rare vendor would spawn. but defiants could essentially do the same and so I had numerous battles there to destroy the defiant wardstone.

there was even a Boss NPC that would spawn if you could activate all the ancient wardstones for your side (defiants or Guardians).

it just never took hold as no one really world PVP'd and so Trion took it out of the game.

[Telnedra]

Yeah, it is too bad the Ancient Wardstones were taken out. Shortly before they were taken out, I had formed a guildie raid and we did the achieve where we had to have all 8 I think it was wardstones claimed for our side which in turn then generated a big zone boss.

I think it wouldn't hurt anything to put them back it, its content and even it ifs not used too much, you never know what could happen if you are running around flagged

[Redius]

Yeah, it is too bad the Ancient Wardstones were taken out. Shortly before they were taken out, I had formed a guildie raid and we did the achieve where we had to have all 8 I think it was wardstones claimed for our side which in turn then generated a big zone boss.

I think it wouldn't hurt anything to put them back it, its content and even it ifs not used too much, you never know what could happen if you are running around flagged

I enjoyed the SG event; was a blast if you could actually get all the wardstones turned on. Shame they got rid of it.

[MoonfireSpam]

Yeah, it is too bad the Ancient Wardstones were taken out. Shortly before they were taken out, I had formed a guildie raid and we did the achieve where we had to have all 8 I think it was wardstones claimed for our side which in turn then generated a big zone boss.

I think it wouldn't hurt anything to put them back it, its content and even it ifs not used too much, you never know what could happen if you are running around flagged

They were intended as world pvp content, and they had failed in their intended purpose spectacularly.

The various wardstones were meant to be pvp hotspots for the leveling zones, with the end boss being the motivational bonus.

I don't actually know why they bothered removing them, really. Seems to me there's plenty of content that few people ever participate in.

Its one of the very few instances where a working (mechanically) feature of a game was just excised for no real reason other than the part where it wasn't serving its intended function. (Going by that logic, they might want to take a good hard look at the carinval games =P They're -supposed- to be fun )

[Tacitus]

The main reason the wardstone quests were removed was not whether or not they worked (a few were notoriously buggy) or whether the content was being used or not (they were done heavily on an individual level, not so much as a nexus of open world pvp).

The BIG reason is that many, MANY players would see these quest givers out in the world, not know that they were anything other than normal quest givers, do the quest sometimes at a much later date, and then have no idea where the quest giver was to turn it in. They had not had to do the actual summoning of the NPC through the wardstone and did not know that such a step was needed. Or they would see the same NPC at a different wardstone and not understand why they were not able to turn in the quest they had.

It seems a minor point, but that minor point of confusion was the single biggest driver of player submitted bug reports/tickets in any zone that had Ancient Wardstones. Whether or not you want to consider it "user error/working as designed", the presentation was inarguably confusing and/or poor due to the numbers of reports we were getting. Sifting through all of those was a large drain of both developer time and CS time. For any one of these zones, player confusion about Ancient Wardstone content accounted for 60% or more of all player submitted bugs for content in that zone. That's a staggering number for such a minor amount of content.

So, if we wanted to keep the Ancient Wardstones, they would have needed a complete overhaul to make their clarity to the player better. But given that some were notoriously buggy anyway and that as previously noted, were not driving the type of interaction that had been hoped for, our choices were to either sink a lot of developer time into improving a system that didn't seem to be going in the direction we wanted anyway or cut it and spend those resources on something that might prove more interesting (like, say, Ember Isle).

[Kolfinna]

The system could definitely go back in with a few tweaks, I think. Having the ability to turn in quests without finding the quest-turney-iney person is a big step in that direction. And the big ol' quest-guidelines that now show up when you're near a Point of Interest would help, too. "Reclaim The Ancient Wardstone // > Use the Activate Wardstone ability to summon your faction's NPC"

Leaving aside the PvP aspect, it'd be great if you could cause a miniature zone event by having a team coordinated enough to fully level up every Wardstone in a zone. As it stands, zone events just kinda... happen. Putting a little bit of that control back in the players' hands would be great.

As for the special vendor, that's one of the niftier bits about Volan. You do all this work to down a colossus, and in addition to the normal rewards of planerite and stones, you get a vendor with a couple unique items and maybe some quests. It'll never be Guardian vs Defiant, but Ascended vs Invading Planar Creatures could have slightly more of an endgame than "Thanks ascended. Here's three Infinity Stones!"

[MoonfireSpam]

The system could definitely go back in with a few tweaks, I think. Having the ability to turn in quests without finding the quest-turney-iney person is a big step in that direction. And the big ol' quest-guidelines that now show up when you're near a Point of Interest would help, too. "Reclaim The Ancient Wardstone // > Use the Activate Wardstone ability to summon your faction's NPC"

Leaving aside the PvP aspect, it'd be great if you could cause a miniature zone event by having a team coordinated enough to fully level up every Wardstone in a zone. As it stands, zone events just kinda... happen. Putting a little bit of that control back in the players' hands would be great.

As for the special vendor, that's one of the niftier bits about Volan. You do all this work to down a colossus, and in addition to the normal rewards of planerite and stones, you get a vendor with a couple unique items and maybe some quests. It'll never be Guardian vs Defiant, but Ascended vs Invading Planar Creatures could have slightly more of an endgame than "Thanks ascended. Here's three Infinity Stones!"

Alot of the things you mentioned here are things that came into Rift at a much later date. They could update it with the auto-turnin like the Carnage quests, but it still begs the question of whether or not the time investment is worth it for the tiny bit of content that the a good portion of the players didn't even know existed back when the ancient wardstones were still around... mostly because it wasn't a great source of xp.