Around this time last year, my brother and I discovered that the Strange Frequencies quest you used to get from Halston Balestrom after the completion of Dragonspyre leads to a dead end. After a few quick searches here on the message boards, we saw that Community Manager Sparck commented about the questline being discontinued.
For those unfamiliar with this quest, Strange Frequencies was originally the pre-quest to Celestia back in 2010 when the world was released. The quest (and subsequent quests up until Swimming with Stars) sent the Wizard on a journey across the Arc I worlds to collect pieces of the Stone of Mazzaroth in order to translate a mysterious message picked up by Professor Balestrom’s resonating omni-audio graph. Once we assemble the Stone, the message is revealed to be a distress call from Sir Thurston Plunkett of the Spiral Geographic Society, whose expedition in Celestia is under attack by the “Umbra Queen,” identified for now only as “Mor…” Following this revelation, the Wizard is sent to the Spiral Geographic Society Archives warehouse in Regent’s Square to recover the old Spiral Key to Celestia – this dungeon was one of the most prolific gauntlets of the early game and has remained one of our favorites for a decade. The Warehouse dungeon was challenging and introduced cheating bosses to the Spiral. In addition, the final battle culminates with the recitation of the Grand Prophecy for the first time.
Since Celestia’s release, the Strange Frequencies questline was relegated to a side quest, probably because the challenge proved too difficult for most wizards on their way to Arc II. However, there are many tools modern wizards have today that did not exist ten years ago to cope with cheating bosses like the ones in the Spiral Geographic Society Archives: for example, pet training and pet talents are much more advanced and wizards have access to much better gear at that level by way of Mount Olympus. Furthermore, the Dungeon Recall and Team Up features now exist which provide additional advantages to modern wizards. Given these aspects of the game that have changed since the release of Celestia in 2010, we believe that this quest is not overly difficult for the average wizard in 2021; not to mention that many boss strategies currently in the game rely much more heavily on intricate strategies (and quite frankly luck) for success!
Taking all these factors into account, we are confused as to why this quest was removed from the game entirely. We would love for the Strange Frequencies questline to be reinstated into the game so that new wizards can discover the story behind what happened in Celestia prior to the Wizard’s arrival. To the average player, the reasoning behind the removal of this quest is left ambiguous; a very common critique of Celestia in the community today is that the main storyline seems muddled and disjointed, issues which the Strange Frequencies pre-quest helped to ameliorate. My brother and I sent an email to Kingsisle support about this topic a few months back, only to get a generic response about utilizing community resources. Hence, we resurface this issue to the community now. Earlier in 2020, others noted (and mourned) the loss of the Strange Frequencies quest elsewhere on the message boards:
