Symbol of the Ducee Quest is finally complete after close to 14 years being unsolved. So why was it unsolved for so long?

Well, the quest giver was the Amalgamation of Spirit`s Honor in Halls of Honor. However this particular NPC:

1.) Was supposed to have a 1 in 10 chance of spawning at midnight game time. But... in reality he has a 1 in 10 chance of spawning ONLY on a server repop at midnight game time. However, just due to the way the script was written, a cycle seemed to be around 24 seconds short (based on another zonewide emote) which meant after approximiately 7 chances, he'd stop spawning because we'd be in hour 23, not 24 and break the script. (That's a bit of a guess, but I never saw him past the 7th attempt.) I never saw him twice before a server repop, so it's very possible him spawning would also break his spawn. This also means that when a server was brought back up but locked, that time is ticking away. If a server was up for 2-3 hours before it unlocks, you've lost multiple cycles of seeing him. He also despawns at 5am game time if he does spawn. So you have a total of 15 minutes to do what you need to do.

2.) Spawns in the very back of the undead room in HoH on top of another mob. This was the toughest part of the zone back in the day too. (Killing one mob spawned 2 more.) It's also mixed with a live mob in your path, so you couldn't really invis easily.

3.) Was put on Battalion of Marr faction so was KOS to anyone who's pretty much ever killed a single mob in Valor or HoH. Even if you could sneak and Hail, back in the day classes who could sneak didn't have blur, so after one Hail, you'd get aggro.

4.) Actually gives out another quest before giving out the Symbol of the Ducee quest.

5.) Requires higher than Amiable or higher faction in Battalion of Marr to complete the quests. Back in 2005, Rainbird (Dev at the time) "fixed" the quest by removing an erroneous requirement (which I assume was the first quest). However, GMs bypass faction when testing a quest and thus presumably missed this.

6.) Not 100% sure, but think it also required a item flag of sorts that was unobtainable, hence also breaking it that way.

I started this quest in mid June of this year. Today I finally finished it. (Was hoping to finish this earlier, but had to wait for patches to fix all the bugs.) I camped him for about three weeks without initially seeing him. I actually got lucky that Rathe was having all sorts of server issues because that's when I noticed he'd spawn only after a server restart. After almost a month, I finally got him to spawn when I was at my computer only to find out he gave that first quest and wouldn't accept the Symbols. (Keep in mind he's only up for 15 minutes.) So I collected the items, swapped to Test (since they patch more) waited a week to find him again, handed them to him, and... he handed them back. I eventually tried another toon he had indifferent Battalion of Marr faction, and he too handed them back. So I grabbed an Ornate Velium Pendant to bump my faction of Amiable... and he handed them back. So at this point the quest was fully broken.

Luckily, Dzarn is awesome, and he shed some light on the bugs I was having, worked his magic, and fixed the quest. (And in doing so, discovered the lack of Quest tag on 6,000 items.) Unfortunately, I had to wait for a few full patches for his fix to go live since we discovered one bug after another.
So after all that time, what's the reward? Prepare to be amazed my friends:


Considering it's PoP Era, that's not too shabby. On par with Elemental Raid quality loots.