Please, dear God, please, remove the *expletives deleted* hints and pointers. I've spent, no lie, at *least* 80 hours in the last few weeks in 1 zone working primarily on 1 questline (because, contrary to popular belief, there is still exploring going on in the world).
After this time, with one other helping me explore, we make progress, but... the thing isn't doing the thing the way it should be doing the thing. So, we try more, figuring, hell, we're old and senile. Maybe we're remembering it wrong, or the pot was extra potent.
Nope. Turns out this questline has been disabled for something like 5 years, but... all the stuff for it is still in. It frustrates me that there was no standard path for this information to reach me... I had to ask around amongst all the people I knew who might be 'in the know' on such things. i.e. I had to fish for imm rumors, information which somehow trickles down from godshome into the ears of knowledgable players with good friends.
This is the traditional way for information to spread in this very tightly controlled data environment we've built around Arctic. However, I don't think it's ideal. At a minimum, some attempt should be taken to actually remove the details of any questline like the one to which I refer from the game if the line no longer benefits the game... as opposed to just disabling an acode which blocks it, or removing 1 item from the line so that while you can read about it, you can never make it work.
These solutions do little to inhibit the gameplay of the 'well-informed', as they generally already know about the de-linking. It only hurts those who are trying to produce original knowledge, learn something without just asking for a log, etc... the type of behavior we should probably be encouraging, not placing road blocks in front of.
Thank you for your time,
Jason
