Meteor In the Sky

That has always been a fairly big disappointment for me as well.

I feel like staff should regularly hide treasures around the desert with no RPT or plotline attached to them.

Just, reasons to regularly explore. They shouldn't be easy to find, but, they shouldn't require staff assistance either.

Now the only time you see a "quest to gather the treasure" is when it is part of a staff-ran RPT. That's not fun for me. Why? Because staff gets to determine who is going to find the treasure and determine who is going to get it.

Without staff being online and staff deciding, "Ok, I'm putting the treasure in for this group to find now.", the treasure is not actually "findable". A random explorer can go through the same cave two days earlier and find nothing, but when the "group that's supposed to find it" comes through, they will find it.

It's great for staff to have RPT's around going and finding "the thing" and doing "the stuff". I'm not saying stop that.

But, stop making that the ONLY way "the stuff" and "the things" can get into the hands of the playerbase.

I don't like that staff gets to decide who finds the long lost treasure EVERY SINGLE TIME, which is the way it is now.

The long lost treasure should be put out there from time to time, and if someone happens across it, well, there you go, enjoy.

Now the only way you find the treasure/discover the thing/uncover the stuff, is if a staffer up on top decides they like you enough to decide you are the one who it will be given to.

That's a shitty system.

Any time I see an announcement on the in-game boards for, "Oh, the mysterious meteor crash!", or "Word gets around that there's someone who needs the super rare thing that is rumored to be out in the desert somewhere.", I just roll my eyes and ignore it.

The only way I will ever find it is if I am part of the group that staff decides gets to find it, because we all know it actually isn't put into the game until the moment before the ones who are supposed to discover it get to that area.

It has always been done that way. It makes me not even want to take part when things get posted because I know it's impossible for me to go out and do it unless I'm part of the pre-determined group it is written for.

One of the worst/shitty/most obvious staff-power-game plots I ever saw like this was done by Halaster/The Plainsman. I was there and saw it happen watching over the shoulder of the player it happened to.

They were out on the salt flats and got a message like, "You see something shining in a pile of mek dung out of the corner of your eye.".

So they stopped and inspected it. They found something like, "The serpent-carved emerald.". It was a magical artifact staff had just given them. When held it increased your stamina by like 80 points.

Cool right?

Yeah, cool right up until The Plainsman used the whiran "Appear Before Me Instantly" spell about an hour later and took it from them.

Basically, Halaster loaded a special magic artifact into the game for his character, gave it to a weak PC that he knew he could take it from, and then teleported them instantly to his PC so his PC could have it.

That's an extreme example, but, that's the way things are still done to this day. The only way you get to find the magical artifact/the lost treasure/the undiscovered ruins, is if staff decides you are the one they want to discover them, end of story.

There really is no reason to explore or adventure unless you are part of the pre-written staff-driven plot they have running at the time.