I think it's helpful to discuss these things openly so everyone can get a better understanding of what we want and how we think.
Don't get me wrong, we like seeing players talk about things and working stuff out. In this case I just wanted it to be clear so that players don't get put off trying the quests. The aim was to make it less tedious.
I do understand the idea of feeling negative if you've completed something the hard way and then it's made easier for others later on. There are examples of other THF quests being made much easier following player feedback; one obvious example is another charm quest, in tov coincidentally, where the drop rate was increased some 9 years after it was created. Despite having completed that quest about 50 times the long way I was really happy it was changed. Mainly because I still had to do it another 12.
Making something drop faster is a request we have to weigh up carefully and this negative feeling is one factor we need to consider.
In this case, I feel the positives outweigh that particular negative. Mainly because the quest has only been about for a year and players only actually started doing it from October last year.
I could have just upped the rate. That would have been really easy. But instead I wanted the quest to pose a challenge.
And that's the other topic (some players just like tank and spank).
When designing this new content, I did so both as a player and designer. Historically, the advanced content on thf has needed to be ultra complicated in order to challenge those players who reached it. I believe that complexity is welcomed by some players (in some cases it is probably necessary). I personally enjoyed it up to a point and that point is what I've set out to avoid with this new content.
But there's no challenge in just upping the damage and hit points thresholds indefinitely, if that's all we did and nothing else. We could actually do this without any thought (eqemu supports automatic scaling). So I think some element of puzzle solving is fun but I think it needs to be logical and "readable"
We won't get it perfectly the first time and I'm happy to revisit the new events to make sure they're fun and not tedious. Tedium is absolutely the opposite of what I want so I want players to tell us if anything gets too frustrating.
We are also planning something following a new major mechanic peterigz is working on at the moment. We recognise that some players just like to plough through harder and harder content so we're going to introduce something that'll be perfect for that preference.
Puzzles aren't for everyone. I personally love them, particularly if they're logically written. My absolute favourite Everquest zone was actually in Eq2; Nektropos Castle was a group instance and the first half of the zone was a story with puzzles (think pulling candle sticks to open up hidden passages). Our group did that ourselves because there was no wiki at the time and it was the most fun I've had in this type of game. We definitely want to create something along those lines and have the perfect zones set aside for it.
But I know that's not for everyone. There will be things someone has to work out once before putting it on the wiki for others and maybe not everyone wants to do that. But it's been that way on THF for a long time now and I think it's a better server for it, personally.
But we'll work with you to improve things that maybe don't start out perfectly

Sometimes that might just be upping Bixt's drop rates, others it might be rewriting a quest or changing the fail routine for a puzzle.
We probably won't often just make things easier for solo mq2 players if it might make things far too easy for actual groups of players though

That might fall into a similar category of negative feeling you described above. But there's usually always a compromise and the best people to usually come up with ideas is the players so keep up the feedback.
I'll try to rewrite the red green fail routine today. I'll keep you posted.