How do you get to this point? I haven't been keeping total track of the Lost Grove updates and I don't know where, when, or how to do a lot of the things in the Lost Grove updates that I've recently seen.

You just keep playing at your own pace. Most of these announcements are for new things implemented, or the the next stage, and so forth, so unless you're with the lead pack of people (which I'm guessing by your level that youre not), you won't have access to these just yet.

Just keep playing and following the tasks set already, and when you finish one, the next stage/task will unlock, and you'll eventually reach these features.

If you have difficulty with a particular part, you can always ask the chat or the faq forum.

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=59301&page=1#10 Author: Zelly Time Posted: 3/27/2018 at 6:23 PM That would have been a much better implementation, Faeyla. Personally, I have zero drive to touch TLG myself anymore, due to the fact that pretty much every step of it is very much set up in the format of story-less, meaningless, grind task A to get equally uninteresting task B so that you can grind for C now, all with no real sense of why am I bothering to do this. What outcome do I get from it? Oh yeah, new grind tasks. None of which feel meaningful. Every day spent in the zone having zero sense of actual accomplishment. I've not fought the boss as i'm hearing over and over from those who have, that they don't feel a point to continuing anymore and any last shred of desire to continue with it has ended. Do I feel like anything is working together as a community like this zone was always advertised it would be? Nope. About 2-6 people complete 99% of the stages them-self, and the rest of us are told if we want things to be more meaningful feeling we should.. drop out and do it entirely by ourselves. Great options we are being offered there. Who needs a community event, right? It's just listed that way for show I guess. Just remember, Krin. It's only a grind if it isn't fun. But if you can't figure out how to make any of the steps remotely fun for anybody, even for the heavy players who haven't been expressing that doing 99% of the stages themselves has been fun either, then it is all a grind. It isn't about having a billion things for people to do. It is about having any of those billion things actually be funner than.. going next door, and playing some other game. This is the problem TLG has. Because I can think of a great deal of things more fulfilling feeling than any of this. I mean.. you want us to farm to unlock a quest log, now. That's pretty ridiculous.

The last stage that was completed w/ required progression (Stage 3), the top 2 players accounted for 9% of the stage progression. The top 6 players accounted for 17% of the stage progression. Players 10-60 all accounted for between ~1 and 2% per player. A total of 168 players contributed. It's actually rather spread out and a pretty typical spread for any type of player driven progression feature.

The goal of progressing is to unlock additional things. Ultimately, the goals are stronger pets, collect Themed Pets, collect Ferrikki and other pretty pets, and Avatar Items. Stronger pets are intended to make the collection of subsequent listed things easier - that is the perk and reward for putting forth the effort of obtaining stronger pets.

The Lost Grove is also still missing a lot of promised features that I am working on pushing out as quickly as I can. This includes more Themed Pets, the actual Avatar Items, Restricted Traits for Wild Themed, and more.

All in all, the Lost Grove is a zone - not a Festival. It already provides way more content and development than any other previous zone in Sylestia's existence and has way more to still be added. I am sorry if it hasn't been enjoyable to you thus far, but I can't imagine it has been less enjoyable to you than say, Garden of the Magnates, or Aryth's Spire... or even Astryl's Tranquility. None of those zones even have Themed Pets available to them. The Named function basically the same except they only can drop Avatar Items and nothing else of real non-gold value. And that is all AT offers. The other zones don't offer anything at all other than completing daily tasks for the Sanctuary.

That is what the Lost Grove should be compared to - not a Festival, as it is not a Festival.

The community is.. coming together to do what exactly here, Krin? It stopped having any follow-able story pretty shortly after poofing into existence. I find it extremely difficult to feel like a community effort to rise up and do something together when we are told oh FYI, go build your own barracks, every single one of you, now that you've worked together to clear away these bandits, so you can all rise up to work together to fight a boss! Wait.. why? Why are they all separate barracks? Cause reasons. Cause don't think about it too much. And that's about as far as the story went. I honestly expected a lot more effort to make any sort of immersion for something that is supposed to be the future of the game.

You say don't compare it to a Fest, and I am in fact not. I'm comparing it to what you like to compare it to. An MMO. An MMO is story driven. There's a sense of.. something actually being accomplished. What on earth are we even doing here? I don't know anymore. At one point Pylons were being disabled. What even were those?

Do you ever play an MMO and go 'Huh. I wonder why i'm even doing this quest? Are you one of those non-readers that just hits accept on the quest and waits for the quest log to tell you whose skull to bash, Krin? Cause then maybe this comparison makes more sense to you. Some of us actually read those quest blurbs. This is nothing like an MMO, and I don't get any of the satisfaction of continuing on the story at all from it.

I want what i'm doing to actually make any sense at all to me, if I am supposed to be looking at this like an MMO, and somehow, in some way, something i'm doing with my fellow Sylestians together. Why i'm doing any of this at all stopped being really explained pretty much the second we thinned out bandits cause bandits = bad.

I'm afraid that this first group of Lost Grove Themed was.. not exactly what many of us Themed collectors were hoping for. They're going to be valuable for being rare, but, i've heard a lot of people lament they wished they actually.. liked them. They're also so rare that the concept of going in there with the hopes of finding one doesn't really work, even for a stalwart themed collector. You have to already be there, and battling over and over again, for some drive beyond a themed, because you're not going to walk in, play a few minutes and find one.

Unfortunately, in this way, Sylestia has managed to become less 'For any play-style' than it has ever been in the past. It really takes hours upon hours of farming to get one of these themes, should you happen to like them (Some people do. Honestly this set is pretty polarizing i've noticed. People either love them or hate the entire set from the reactions I have noted). If you play the game solely for battling, you're kind of.. in luck.. maybe. Honestly i've seen several hardcore battlers really losing interest because of it. I thought they would be the ones most okay with LG. I think again, this is a lack of sense of achievement or progression that is causing that.

But for those of us more interested in Themed, it really isn't that great. Odds are not in our favor of even finding anything if we are routinely in there. For a breeder, being forced to play other players style of playing just to get the pets isn't thrilling, nor is 'Well you could buy them for really inflated prices from someone else, even though these themes are not super well received!'. As a Themed collector myself, this is all pretty disappointing. It just reinforces that Sylestia is very strongly designed to play to a certain play-style, which will always be rewarded in staves. Any other play-style, will just have to deal, since their own interests are second fiddle.

It is pretty hard to be excited about more highly rare to run into Themes, with new traits in the future, that I will have to play like a Heavy Battler if I ever want to find. It is pretty hard to be excited about Tasks that I will have to play like a Heavy Battler to even unlock the ability to reach via unlocking buildings that require heavy hours of battling put in.

Imagine playing a game, where you loved to battle, but you were told you had to breed maxed stats all by yourself before you could ever get to battle, Krin. Does that sound like a game that is considering your play-style much? Does it sound fun or easy to be excited that someday, after you've bred those max stats from scratch, that you might get a few battles in, before you have to go back to breeding for weeks? Maybe if I try getting you to see it from the opposite perspective, you might be able to understand.

I can honestly say I enjoyed Garden and Astryl's Tranquility more when they were new than I have enjoyed TLG. Those zones actually had stories, and a sense of why on earth you were there, and what you were fighting to do. Sure there wasn't a themed I might find once every 1-3 months or so as a casual battler, but quite honestly, even as a theme collector, i'd take the sense of actually accomplishing something over the rare occasional theme any old day.

I spend an hour in TLG, what have I done? Don't know. I spend 5 hours there? Doesn't feel any different than the one hour. It all feels really meaningless. Sure, there is a goal in front of me that is supposed to take me half a year, but considering that feels no closer if I go in today or do not, why go in today at all? There is no drive. No reason. No sense of purpose to be here. Just being told this is the future. And that I should like it, for some reason, because it is the only way to move forward. But.. what am I even moving forward for? If my play-style is being fully ignored in that future, I might as well stick to just logging off in between fests, like we've always done.

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=59301&page=2#12 Author: Wonderfulwander Time Posted: 3/27/2018 at 6:51 PM You just keep playing at your own pace. Most of these announcements are for new things implemented, or the the next stage, and so forth, so unless you're with the lead pack of people (which I'm guessing by your level that youre not), you won't have access to these just yet. Just keep playing and following the tasks set already, and when you finish one, the next stage/task will unlock, and you'll eventually reach these features. If you have difficulty with a particular part, you can always ask the chat or the faq forum.

Oh, okay. Thanks for clearing that up.

I'm personally enjoying each new implementation and love that there's so many different flavor maps and goals for each area. So if you've played one area for too long and want to mix things up you can just focus on a different area.

I've only built up two buildings so far even though I was initially roaming the The Lost Grove like crazy. And was wondering what we would be doing with the materials we didn't need to build anymore. And I'm happy the barracks tasks have been implemented to eat up the excess materials that wasn't needed anymore. And then being able to trade materials for traps and potions adds another flavor of fun instead of just selling everything to the shop and buying what you need, thinking about how much gold you should or shouldn't spend.

I've slowed down my playing a lot more since entering Zone 6 since I decided to switch to a cuter party to level their skills instead of just maining my high stat party. Which I should've stayed on Zone 4 to do that teehee ^.^ I'm really feeling the struggle which each max level rise, but it's a satisfying struggle. When my main team got all maxed out and gear up for Zone 4 the boss's seemed super easy to bulldoze over and now I'm getting an even stronger feeling of battle than when Zone 1 started.

I've reduced my map checking to every 4-6 hours now and feel content to casually play and glad that extra items that mobs drop are getting used with each new implementation. Like loose strings being tied up ^.^ Lots of little delights to enjoy along the way and super fun and exciting to keep seeing new and different content.

I completed both the weekly and the daily task yesterday. However, the daily task doesn't seem to have reset for today...? It still says it's already been completed.

Same here. The daily task for the Temple of Light has not reset yet, unfortunately.

I have to agree with Zelly. Which is weird because I usually don't tend to agree with that player much.
I have struggled to stay focused for 1- 2 weeks at a time, between stages, and during stages...there is very litte reward at all for the effort so far put in.
Im still wanting to find more stuff to upgrade more parts of the barracks, and that stuff is "coming later"--Always "coming later". Hard to stay awake during the day grinding. I've got to shorten my time here, its taking my attention away from my family. I do NOT want to have to grind 24 hours to get to where I need to be....honestly.


Leaderboard rewards? Not done. Blacksmith? Part finished, the rest not done. Portal? No indication at all when that's coming. Tasks--almost finished, but for what? once a day, once a week? They don't refresh on the hour like other tasks? And then to hear you have Spring fest coming in about a month.---Id like to see some of this donelong long before then, because I myself am burning out just grinding...and to reach cap on not one but two mats now and nothing else to use them on? Menders talismans, and branches, I'm not sure I could think of anything to trade those in for. Not exactly currency material. I know, huge to-do list, but only small amounts of updates occasionally. There have been several things you've already had planned, and gone past your personal 'deadline'.

Still 3-7 perfumes for one themed-not worth using in the LG.....Fests were better by far for themes. LG feels like more work, than fun at this point. And I don't think thats how you wanted it, but I could be wrong. A game is supposed to be fun to play, relaxing at times...not boringly grindy. It was a neat concept- building the barracks, finding themes, but again, story seemed hurried, rates are extremely low, too many mats, not enough things to do with them right now.

I'm having to leave LG and go to AG/SBO for tasks, because I could count on those--hourly. And they felt like part of the old story, perhaps even a tad nostalgic. And I've gone back to the Arena more than I'd like to, just so I wouldn't fall asleep at my laptop. xD

Overall, I feel the LG seemed hurried even in the few years you might have had planning. Its a good effort, and pretty, the current artwork is nice, however story, doesnt feel like 'a sylestian' story anymore to me, I don't know what would, but I miss jinxie, I miss the 'quick' quests, even if there were 50 of them to do to progress to another stage or whatever, id like that. This 1-2 weeks variable for /everyone/ to get it done...just feels not right...pressured even. I know its meant to take time to get thru..but summer is coming...Id honestly like to go outside during nice weather...not kept inside playing games....kids are growing up too fast.

Pretty sure after a while things will be ironed out, but it'll be awhile. RL getting in the way with you too I'd imagine.

All completed Tasks were reset for players including the Weekly Task.

Additionally, Tasks have now been added to the Trading Post.

Some miscellaneous issues were cleaned up/fixed on the backend as well.

Lastly, Mend Party from the Temple of Light was adjusted a bit. Players can now use it even if their Party is full Health. It also now restores Mana to full and resets all Cooldowns for your Party Pets when used.