I have reported all of these problems multiple times through support and directly to the Arkadia dev team. They responded immediately when I was the first one inside the instance discovering the issues (as usual, players are the real play testers). To be fair, they addressed and fixed all the technical and gameplay problems pretty quickly. That part was handled well. However, they completely ignored the loot.
After that, a couple more players went in and reported the same loot issues again. The devs did make an adjustment, and yes, they did change something. They spread the drops out more and made the later upgrade parts drop slightly more frequently. But this came at a huge cost. It now takes roughly three times longer to loot everything, and progression requires killing the boss, which around 99% of solo players are incapable of doing.
The mechanics of the instance itself are just terrible. It is clearly intended to be done in a party, but the party design makes no sense. Both players need to have access, mobs are not shared, and the drop rate does not change when grouped. On top of that, the entry fee is 12 Arkadia Daily Insignia. These are account-bound, so if you go as a team, one player has to cover the entire entry cost. Twelve insignia is not cheap either. It requires doing all Arkadia insignia dailies every day, including mining, crafting, and hunting, On TAXED land areas, just to maintain access to the instance every time.
The mobs inside are level 80 to 150+ and they hit extremely hard. They have a very wide damage spread and deal AOE damage, hence the team mentality.
The damage is wide spread and hard to cover
Now for the biggest issue: the loot. The mobs inside this instance drop exact copies of Arkoin vendor items. This is loot that is over 13 years old, originally released in 2013. They seriously thought it was a good idea to put 13-year-old, already worthless loot into a brand-new instance with level 100-150+ mobs. To put this into perspective, this loot is worse than what drops in IFN Personnel instances. Those mobs are roughly half the level, require half the effort to access, were added around 2015, and still drop better loot than Arkadia’s newest and hardest instance.
Overall, all the negative sentiment toward this quest chain is 100% legitimate. The armor progression, instance layout, entry mechanics, party design, drop rate, and loot choice all suck. It’s a real shame, because this quest chain could be. great, but it is completely devalued by copy-pasting terrible 13-year-old loot into what is supposed to be modern endgame content.(that rewards a best in slot armor)
Proceed with caution until addressed!
