News of the Winter's Moon
by Loral on December 04, 2004
We've had a slow couple of weeks on the EQ front. No doubt concern arises from the perceived drop in numbers and while we certainly cannot say what the future holds, it would be premature to follow in the same well-walked tread of picket sign wearing doomsday sayers.
A few factors all crashed together this year, more than any year previous that I can remember. Instead of a holiday season with one or two new games coming out, nearly six must-have hit games came out at once. In a discussion about EQ2 and its effect on some high end guilds, I heard guild leaders say that as much as they like the cross-game chat between EQ1 and EQ2, what they really need is cross-game chat to Half Life 2. Now that may not be the case for everyone, but that is my point. There isn't an easy conclusion to make about any of this.
I am an officer in a small guild built around helping the adventurers of Norrath. During our regular weekly events Healers United travels around Norrath to popular hunting spots to offer our healing, buffing, resurrection, advise and gameplay help to those who need it. Usually we had four to six people on during off hours and somewhere between fifteen and twenty during the core hours of 7pm to 1am EST. Since Thanksgiving, our numbers dropped closer to four to eight during prime time and one or two regular people on the off-hours.
Am I worried about this? Yes. What is my reaction to this worry? Recruit newer members. The game shifted for a lot of people in this time. Some guilds wait to see what happens after the holidays and that's a smart move. If a lot of folks really are playing Half Life 2, Halo 2, or Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, those games won't last forever and back to the doors of Anguish they will return. Some are no doubt playing EQ2 and Worlds of Warcraft but those games won't be for everyone either. Both are different enough from Everquest to turn away some long-time players of EQ.
I watch the larger guilds crash together and merge into new giant forms like huge floating balls of mercury. I see others simply fall under the weight of their own lofty goals, lack of interest, and stubbornness to open their doors to new members or alliances. The smarter leaders consider alliances with other individuals and organizations until they get a better feel for what sorts of numbers they require. Once they see a solid trend, for example always having about 32 people online instead of around 54, they should begin to recruit new members.
None of us know what the true statistics are. We only see what we see and we best react to what we know for fact. It won't surprise me if we see a return to EQ in January and it certainly won't surprise me to see a larger surge of returning players when SOE announces and releases the next expansion. At that point the new single-player games will be over, the shine of newer MMOGs will wear off, and people will fall where they have the most fun.
Over the last two weeks I balanced my time between both EQ and EQ2 and I noticed an interesting thing. I like EQ2 a lot and I have fun hunting with little Pavlen the foppy roguish swashbuckler as he spies for Qeynos and slays vile stinking gnolls but when I return as the Venerable Loral Ciriclight, 68th cleric of Tunare, I have no less fun than I did before. I still enjoy a heart-racing hunt in the Muramite Proving Grounds. I still enjoy talking and meeting with my friends. I still marvel at the look of Omens with its shiny skinned Dragorns and hideous glowing eyed Discordlings. I still have a lot of fun playing Everquest.
SOE needs to focus on a few things to keep Everquest strong. We need to see the world continue to change and shift. We need to see new features for both new and existing players. We need to continue to see new content meant to challenge and excite us and we need features to help us get together with friends and defeat these challenges. I don't see them slowing down at accomplishing this at all.
So what sorts of improvements are we likely to see soon? On December 15th a new patch will include a lot of new features that will help EQ continue to grow and evolve. Stormhammer, the server for the cultural elite, will receive two revamped zones, Mistmoore and Paw. The Everquest website includes descriptive lore about both Mistmoore and Splitpaw. What Splitpaw really needs is a nearby Wayfarer camp or Knowledge stone. Expect these zones to move to the proletariat servers in one to two months.
Both /autofire and /melody will move to the live servers. These two long awaited features, mainly for rangers and bards, help players play those two classes with a bit more ease matching the other classes. Positive changes to the way a player plays the game matter a lot more than any statistical change you might receive.
We should expect the task changes I heard about at the fan faire to move to the live servers in January. Expect thousands more tasks with new task-types including things like fishing and foraging. The more I look at the task system, the more I see the potential for an EQ2-like quest journal. If SOE added some class-specific tasks, group tasks, and some item rewards to the task interface they already have, they would have a really strong new system for both new and older players alike.
Perhaps the biggest change we will see comes with the new backflag solution. Ever since Planes of Power, backflagging has slowed down a lot of big guilds. Guilds would fight their way past Rallos Zek, through some of the elemental planes, and, for a variety of reasons, lose enough players that they needed to reflag new members in order to continue. This process, when you include Planes of Power and Gates of Discord flagging, might take up more time than actually hunting new content. SOE hopes to fix this with a new backflag solution.
Nearly every flagged zone allows 15% of a raid to be unflagged upon entering it. A small handful (perhaps two to six per zone-wide raid) of back-flag quest items drop per zone-wide raid. These items lead unflagged attendees of these raids through a single-group quest to receive a flag for that zone only. Now that raider is fully flagged for that zone. The 85/15 rule will be applied to Time and to Gates of Discord flagged zones.
This solution will help guilds and high-end raiding alliances with their backflag woes. As long as they have enough flagged people to get into and raid higher-tiered zones, they can help flag new members without sending most of their flagged members back to raid older content over and over.
This solution will not help single-group hunters who desire these flags, but my favorite statement at the fan faire sums up the solution to this very well: The best way to fix the flagging problem is not to have progressive flagged content ever again. In other words, expansions from Omens and on will hopefully only have a single flagged zone at the end of the expansion similar to Veeshan's Peaks, Sleeper's Tomb, Vex Thal, and Anguish.
Two new storyline entries whispered across the winds recently. These stories begin to build better connections from the old world to the wars in the strange lands of Kuua and Taelosia. I often complain that we have little understanding or in-game motivation to travel to these distant lands when threats such as the Rujarkian orcs, Mistmoore vampires, the horrors of Miragul the Lich, and the poisoned rivers of Guk pose much greater risks to our lands. These stories, along with a few in-game changes (perhaps Muramites in Greater Faydark, Toxx Woods, the Commonlands or Qeynos Hills) would do a lot towards tightening up the loose storyline that ties Norrath to Taelosia and Kuua.
Strange shapes loom on the horizon. While the doomsday heralds that plague New Tanaan's streets continue their cries to the gods of chaos about the end of days, I see a time for a new golden age. I see a time of great wars and great victories. I see lost friends returning home and new friends joining the ranks of the adventurers of Norrath. Most importantly, I still have fun every time I log in and I plan to do so for a long time to come.
Loral Ciriclight
6 December 2004
loral@loralciriclight.com
Comment Posted by: Redcloud on December 6, 2004 08:23 PM
Nice positive tone yet it doesn't adress the cost of transfering from one server to another. Since people won't wait months to reunite with more volatile players around other games, SoE needs to fix the cost now, not in 2 or 3 months when a lot more of the playerbase will have bled away from EQ1 and for many accounts from SoE in particular.
Comment Posted by: on December 6, 2004 09:14 PM
Unfortunately the players for the high end raid level guilds just aren't out there to recruit. We've merged with another guild seeing that as the only viable option. I sure hope it works. I see some people returning to eq, but not in the numbers that a raid guild requires.
Comment Posted by: Wombat on December 6, 2004 09:53 PM
I play off peak Quellious btw. Hmm last night one group in WoS. A couple of PL's in NC, that was it for OoW apart from some soloers in DS.
That was it, not fun at all. I play mellee classes, hybrids and pure Mellee, my main is 66 and second character 61. At that level you need groups to do anything. My 66 Pally can painfully solo POI ent if he has to, but it is very boring and I would rather log off than do it.
Eventually after /lfg and trying on the server pickup channel for an hour with no result (only one other - a monk /lfg) I got a kiting group in NC with a Guild Necro and a couple of others with my Rogue. Later I got a kiting group with a Ranger.
Why Kiting? Well you need a Tank Healer and Slower of some kind to do anything else, they also need to be adequate for WoS, RCoD etc as a 55 tank wont cut it.
So basically thats what we are down to, no raids, not even good groups and running behind a Necro or Druid for an evening. Basically 6-8 online from 20-30 online during our peak play.
Enquiries about joining from other servers have dried up, the cost of transfer isnt considered worthwhile for an uncertain future, or they have all gone to another game.
Transfers between accounts and servers has to be made cheaper (or free on targetted servers). People with scattered accounts want to consolidate and people on dead servers want to move.
This should be encouraged. I predict that like backflagging nothing will be done due to institutional inertia, until its too late. Even the Zeks arent getting consideration and they would have the clearest case.
Empty newbie zones show us the future, I had hoped we still had some good times ahead, with some rationalisation, but that looks like a hopeless dream now.
The second wave of departures will be after Xmas when people get all their new games in their stockings.
Wombat
Comment Posted by: on December 7, 2004 12:40 AM
I played a while a few days ago. My main is only 39 I have been playing a troll warrior for three years now. I play for factions. My troll can go into three good guy cities. Yeah but how cares.
What happen to bards, I use to like to group with a monk and bard when I could. So I mean the class balance issues killed the game along time ago I guess I did not see it? Like rouge skills are really weird now. I started with a rouge to play with a LAN party. I quit playing the rogue when they nerfed some the sneak hide pick pocket combo with mobs. I never thought back stab was a that great? Well as far as features and stories in game, who cares any more when Verant left the show there seem to no EQ lore keeper or chief master guild for the game story line? There should be? I am not sure if EQ was meant to be a puzzle game with some hunting? The hunting will not keep the game going. I use to like showing newbies around Halas and Qeynos. Now folks just want to hunt. Show me the mob. SOE could change the name of the game to EverHunter or MobQuest.
Some old world bugs where never fixxed. So who knows how much content is under used. I should of quit when Grobb was over run and everyone should have seen the problems with the game development them. EQ was a content driven game. Expantions should not delete old content. To bad I do not think you can save the game now. I personaly do not want to see any more expantions until the old world is de-bugged, restored. Grobb was a great city, Froglok suck. I would like to squezz all the dark elfs and make some whine out of that. END OF RANT.
Comment Posted by: Glamdrigg on December 7, 2004 03:42 AM
HEHEHE.....
From one troll warrior to another I didn't mind the sacking of our home city as far as an idea for story and lore goes. However, I do detest living with our dark point ear cousins like a bunch of refugees. The big problem with the froglok overthrow is that it hasn't gone anywhere. This could have been a great opportunity to do some fun stuff.
As a troll I'd like some payback. Give us a chance to take our home back. Lets see some war here. You want interesting content? How about mobs marching on each other. How about a storyline that is more cohesive. If you missed the event that showed the frogs marching on grobb then it was kinda crap to find yourself relocated. Nothing exciting or emersive about logging on one day to hear your hometown was sacked and there is no content being planned to follow up on it. Especially since POK is everyone's home town now anyway.
Anyway, off topic there. X-mas will be an indicator of population. Presents are now sitting under trees that when opened will spell lower player numbers for EQ. Wait and see if they come back. Guilds need to back off on strick critieria for members such as lvl requirments. They need the numbers so invite more players. Invest in lower to mid range players now. Its a rebuilding period for certain. If you can't get people to join for lack of interest or population that's one thing, but if you just dont want the work of schooling and training up lower lvl chars that's entirely different.
Heard rumors of servers being merged. Is this already happening?
I played an LDON yesterday and was surprise by the way it went. I have posted before about the increased FEAR factor in our little world esp:LDON, but this is rediculous. My alt is a 41 Pally and he has 141 magic resist when buffed. I got feared like crazy in there. And it was a norm lvl dungeon. SOE what are you doing? New expansions make older ones empty out enough, but to actually make old zones suck to play in will make them even emptier. I dont mind a challenge, but this has gone to the dogs.
On a positive note: I ran into an actual Newb the other day in pok. Lvl is not an indicator of a true Newb. We all know many are just peoples ALTs running around. But after talking to this guy for a bit it was plain to see he was a genuine newbie. Anyone who dosen't know what KEI stands for has not been around much. So welcome to the fight new dude. I hope its not over for you before it begins.
Wombat what server do you play on? From the tone of your post it sounds like you guys took a bigger hit then ours. Sorry to hear it. You are right on transfers. SOE, let people move around! You have to let people find their niche in the game again and settle into guilds and groups that work in these changing times. dont charge people extra because they want to stay and make the old game work. They've already paid their dues.
Well, I've def said enough. Thanx for listening.
Comment Posted by: Glamdrigg on December 7, 2004 03:48 AM
When are they gonna let non casters gate without potions?
Make it a quest for a once a day 10 sec cast gate item. Hell make it tough. Just let us all do it.
Okay siging off for real this time.
Comment Posted by: Glamdrigg on December 7, 2004 03:51 AM
Right...
Quellious...
Got it..
Woh need some coffee its late.
Comment Posted by: Pants on December 7, 2004 08:22 AM
One thing SOE could do to get players back to playing EQ is work on those top 10 lists that they themselves asked for last Spring, and by work on it I don't mean a few small issues addressed, I mean a serious effort. Why bother asking players for ideas, making promises and not following through on it? Is that good for customer relations? No.
Those changes would get people to return to EQ on a longer basis than yet another me-too expansion. Some people come back to check out those expansions for a month or 2, get bored with it and leave again. Actually making a serious effort to fix some class imbalances, broken AAs and overall fun factor would be a more permanent solution to keep interest.
This can help but nothing will return EQ to it's glory days though. The MMORPG market is saturated with more games than ever before and it's going to spread out subscribers over more games so that no game will ever really have a domination of the market. There are only a limited number of people who are willing to pay monthly fees to play games as it is and with all this competition it will be hard to repeat past successes. The only game I cna see doing this, at least for a short time is WoW once it's released in Europe and Asia. They could surpass 1 million susbscribers and rank up there with Lineage but I'm not so sure they can hold that for years. Perhaps they can if the raiding part of it is good though, otherwise the leveling pace is a bit fast. It's a great game that is way more fun than EQ to me but the playerbase right now consists of a lot of brats and losers that need to be ignored.
Comment Posted by: Kensol Stice on December 7, 2004 09:16 AM
I have a 64 Druid and a 51 Necro. I am still trying to learn and visit as many of the old zones as possible. I purchased GoD and I used my Druid to port a few people and groups there when it first came out but have never gone there to play. I have not purchased OOW and I have no plans to. Why put a new expansoin out there when there is so much to learn about the current game.
There are problems now that need fixing - traders still get timed out, lag in PoK this past week prevented me from playing, mobs that go poof at less than 20 percent health and Sony is talking about another expansion???
Comment Posted by: Amphitryon on December 7, 2004 11:39 AM
I think you have missed the point on why people are frustrated with EQ. They arent going to return hom simple because the 'shine' of the new games have worn off.
All EQ is about is raiding now, and players like me who want their game experience to be about things OTHER than raiding are very unhappy with EQ and EQ is not going to change for us. EQ is a raiding ONLY game now. It is of raiders, by raiders for raiders.
I dont care about back flagging, I personally loathe the PoP expansion. It is the epitomy of how casual players have been left behind. I dont want the uber loot, I want to explore, craft, and quest, without needing a raid to do so, and without having to go through the BS flagging process.
AS such I have left EQ behind for good because its NOT going to change for the non-raiders.
Might as well be called EverRaid
and dont even talk to me about LDON. SOme folks think that is the anser for casuals..yea right, a bland, featureless cookie cutter set of zones> once you do one zone in all the dungeons, you have seen them all and guess what to get anything you will have to do them, what, 1000 times each? Where is the adventure and exploration in that? ALl that proves is you have an Obsessive Compulsive DIsoirder.
No I think this new Exodus has ya worried. The weak fallback of "oh they will return when they get tired' isnt going to cut it this time (ever notice the sheer number of people who only log in for raids, every worry that they would think WTH, why do I pay 12 bucks a month for an account I only log in to once a week?
IF you like to raid and have all your activities revolve around raiding, then EQ is just peachy, but if you want more than that, EQ is dead, its more like undead.
Comment Posted by: Loral on December 7, 2004 01:08 PM
Pants, thank you for a much better issues-based comment =)
I think there is a much bigger market for MMOGs than has yet been tapped. I really think game consoles are the next big market for MMOGs. EQOA and FFX didn't have much of a chance to tap into it because of the cost of the games and of the extra hardware you needed. If next generation consoles can include a voice headset and a network connection so the only cost for the MMOG is the same as it is for a PC, I think there is a viable market for other MMOGs that won't drain customers away from existing ones.
I am no marketing or business guy but I think its a possible scenerio that WoW will get a lot of its users from the Warcraft / Diablo / Battle.net crowd. Their name and marketing are really good so who knows what their numbers could hit. If it's a fun game its a fun game.
Amphitryon, I agree with your general point but not with some of your specifics. I think EQ could do a lot for lower levels and mid-levels to make the game fun again. I think they could put in some alternative paths of progression beyond raiding. I would love to see SOE work on the low-level game so that people WANT to be level 20 again, not just hit 20 on their way to 50. Some basic things like a new quest interface, upgraded newbie armor, level 20 armor, level 40 armor, and even a low-level "epic-type" item quest would give lower levels a nice line of progression. New quests and events for low levelers might get some of the high level people to want to make a low level just to try it out. There's a lot of content that goes unused because people just hammer through the levels, how you get people to desire that content instead of just PLing their way to 65 is another question.
However, I don't agree with your direct statements. EQ isn't just about raiding. LDON, the expeditions in Omens, the task system and the 2000 new tasks they plan to bring out in January, Tipt, Vxed, the Ikkinz, and the MPG single-group trials are all available for single-group hunters. It may take you a long while to gear up to the point that you could go into the MPG trials without ever having raided before, but it can be done. I see a lot of creativity with high-end encounters, events, and quests. The epic 1.5s, the BiC quest, the MPG trials, and nearly all of the raids since Luclin have been unique and ran differently than typical hunting. What I want to see is that level of creativity for level 20 single group hunters.
What we're all really talking about here is fun. If a game is fun, its fun. The rest doesn't matter. EQ2's a good game because so far, while I care about level and equipment, I care more about encounters, events, and mostly quests. I had a lot of fun in Firemist Gully killing fields of undead nasties and destroying six evil totem things. When I was done with this event, I got a new primary hand item and enough experience to raise two levels, finish my class quest, and get a secondary hand item. I got levels and equipment, but it would have been a lot different if I did it killing two hundred rats. The events themselves were fun and thats what we need to see more of. If we care to help make EQ a better game (I know I do) we shouldn't worry about math or statistics we don't have. We should tell them whats fun and what isn't. We should tell them how to make EQ more friendly to our lives. We should tell them where we get stuck and what they can do to help us get in game, meet some folks, go on an adventure or event or raid or quest or whatever, and get out when we need to.
EQ1 has a lot of fun moments. I love the newbie armor quests. I love LDON hunts against bosses (even though they're too hard compared to collections and murder sprees). I love raids as long as they can get started, do the raid, and finish without a lot of downtime. I like crawling through dungeons. I like being pushed to my limits. I like seeing horrible nasty places or very beautiful places and learning the story behind them.
A big part of the problem with the way we, the community, work with SOE is that we focus on stuff that isn't important like bows vs swords, DPS comparisons, statistical numbers we don't have, and class balancing, and don't focus on what makes a game fun or not.
So here's an exercise. Describe your most fun and least fun moments in EQ. What did you enjoy the most and what did you enjoy the least.
For me, one of my favorite moments was hunting with a group from my guild against a vampire boss named Aviatis. We crawled through the dungeon, we killed his guards, we pulled him, he killed one of our tanks instantly and our shaman right after. We finally controlled him and killed him and celebrated our victory. It was the most fun battle I've had in a single group.
My worst moment was a bad Fear raid. We went in to rescue a smaller raid that had failed. We were all killed because of miscommunication and over 40 bodies were left there. It was Sunday night at around 1am. Most of the bodies at this point were unresssable. We begged and pleaded with another guild to come rescue us. They died too. Its 3am now. By 5am, we finally got the area cleared and got to what was now nearly 100 bodies before all crashing. I had to call in sick the next day at work.
That was a bad day.
Comment Posted by: Talaen on December 7, 2004 02:24 PM
Loral, I have had that exact same experience in Fear, several years ago. I find it interesting that Hate's revamps have made it ten times easier, yet Fear and Sky - both zones famous for 8-12 hour CRs and disastrous raid wipes - have never really been touched.
In terms of revitalizing the low to mid level game, what they need to do is one of two things - either take a page from EQ2's design and focus the low and mid level game completely on questing and adventure....or implement true low level raids for small raiding parties (12-18 people). If they're going to pitch EQ1 as the raid game, then it makes sense to start getting players into this activity early on, and not to make those players feel like they have to waste their time grinding through 50 levels just to do something fun.
As for single-group adventures....Firemyst Gulley in EQ2 is a great example for how LDON's in EQ1 should have been delivered. When you zone in, you don't know your objective - instead, you only know that the dwarves need help - what you have to do is revealed to you as you progress. Incorporate a dynamic quest system so that the actions required are different each time, and insure that the quest plotlines leave room for "sequels", and this sort of instanced zone is perfect for single-group hunters with only a few hours to play.
I agree with you that the correct way to "fix" EQ isn't to focus on mechanics, but to focus on content. Make the game as much fun to play as possible. In the first few years of the game, it was addicting because it was just plain fun to go out and fight and explore, not because we all wanted to level up so that we could go kill the boss. At some point, that got twisted, and now the end justifies the means. Whatever else happens, the key to long-term success will be to reverse that philosophy, and keep the game fun from beginning to end, rather than just at the end.
Comment Posted by: Quesci on December 7, 2004 02:28 PM
EQ Live Forum Thread
More than 200 people logged in to Tallon Zek and more than 300 joined in channels two days ago to discuss a merger between TZ and Vallon Zek servers. I have not seen a log of the discussion, but I am told that a Sony representative was to be there. Both of these servers have been hard hit by the lower populations.
I understand that they are special rules servers, and many of the people who REALLY want PvP will have moved on to a game that truly supports PvP. I also know that the issue is not directly related to the slew of new games, as they have been complaining about declining populations for a while.
Nevertheless, it is interesting that this comes up now. Does anyone have more information about what went down at the meeting?
Comment Posted by: Quesci on December 7, 2004 02:29 PM
Well, I thought I could post a URL with HTML. Guess not. That forum thread is:
http://eqforums.station.sony.com/eq/board/message?board.id=Veterans&message.id=47719
Comment Posted by: Teremar on December 7, 2004 02:59 PM
My most fun moments in EQ: controlling crazy crowds in Mistmoore, Old Seb, and old Hate. Soon two out of three of those zones will be gone, at least as places for fun CC. What's worse is that the new zones have no crowds to control. LDoN was close, but that trend hasn't continued at all.
Sorry Loral, but much as you'd like to you can't divorce fun from class issues. Wrecking some aspect of a class takes the fun out of playing the game for the people who loved that aspect of the class they chose.
If what a ranger has fun doing is shooting his bow, bow DPS vs. sword DPS has a direct impact on whether they have fun playing their class.
If an enchanter (like me) loves to control crowds with mez, whether mezzing is viable at my level has a direct impact on whether I have fun. Since it is not viable and I'm not having fun, I'm currently playing WoW. To borrow a line from SOE (yes, that others have borrowed before)...
Cancel EQ account at end of month: Currently being evaluated, no change planned at this time.
Comment Posted by: Loral on December 7, 2004 04:10 PM
Does anyone else see the irony that vast amounts of people want to complain about how few people play on the Zeks? If they really don't have the people, how could they even have a discussion of that scale?
Talaen, I bring this up to SOE a lot and some of them and a lot of the higher-end raiders don't want Fear touched. It is a trial by fire they say. It never did make sense to me but if we see some form of cross-zone CR, that fixes it in my book and I have gotten SOE to nibble at that idea.
SOE will never label EQ the "raider's game". Thats a bullet in the head for them. There's raiding in EQ2 so why not call that a raider's game too? I agree that there should be more 12 and 18 person events for lower and mid-levelers to give people a taste of the raiders game. I'd also like to see more instanced pre-elemental 18 to 24 person events at the higher levels to help smaller raiding organizations gear up without competition from other groups.
Comment Posted by: Solistic on December 7, 2004 06:50 PM
Talaen and Loral, kinda think it is funny. I have been to Fear 3 times, each time on my Bard. First time was over a year ago. I was the Sacrificial Bard each time. I was buffed and buffed and told to enter and run and run, I would pull as much of zone to wall and die. LOL then I would get rezzed back after they were in place. Had a lot of fun each time.
Comment Posted by: Pants on December 7, 2004 08:28 PM
Oh I love the Plane of Fear. I never liked Hate much, old way or new but there is something special about Fear. That's one of my biggest gripes about EQ. All the best content is the old content, original EQ, Kunark, Velious. I have been highly disappointed with everything since. I did like LDoN for awhile because it was a fresh new idea but like has been said many times, it gets old doing the same exact missions and maps over and over.
My most fun moments in EQ all come from 1999-2001. Running from Freeport to Qeynos without SoW. Hunting in the Karanas (my favorite zones in EQ). Watching all the trains in Blackburrow and trying to avoid getting caught up in them, which I know might sound not fun but in a way it is. Hunting in places City of Mist and Kurn's Tower, more awesome zones. Exploring Velious for the first time in awe (one of the most beautifully done artwork expansions ever).
My least fun moment in EQ revolve around later times in the game. Being in a raiding guild where greed rules and noone cares about anything or anyone but themselves. When I reached level 65 I felt a lot of air went out of the game for me. How easy it was to die in PoP, one of the ugliest, most horrible expansions ever.
I would say the best work SOE has done in recent years are not the expansions but the free zones they added. Sol C, Veksar, Chardok B are great zones and a throwback to the old days. Some of the revamps I didn't particularly care for. I think they ruined Cazic Thule and while Hate is easier now it still doesn't appeal to me. There's something wrong with that zone IMO.
I think it woul dbe in SOE's best interest to not come out with an expansion till the end of 2005 and spend the next 6-8 months going back and working on class issues, fixing bugs, fixing broken abilities/AAs, fixing broken quests, and revamp the loot tables on old zones to make them more attractive, after all these are the best zones in EQ for artwork and creativity.
Comment Posted by: Eclat on December 7, 2004 11:14 PM
How's this for a simple idea:
Make aa's available at lvl 20. When going through the lower lvls they just FLY by and there is SO much to see and do. By allowing people to do alternate advancement much earlier, they could spend more time in their 20's and 30's and effectively spread out the content of the game. People would not be so anxious to get to fifty any more. But who's talking anyways? I don't really play EQlive anymore (not RL friendly)- I play EQ2 now and love it. I have to say though, EQ will always have a place in my heart and I wish it well for it is and always will be one of (if not THE) best video games ever.
By the way, great articles Loral. You know I love your stuff. I hear you've got a top-notch editor too :)
Comment Posted by: Merkava on December 8, 2004 02:01 AM
One of the things I really had fun with was being a Monster Player Character on Test. Does anyone remember that?
For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, it goes like this:
A few years ago on Test, the added a feature that let players play as monsters. At the character select screen, there was a little button that said "monster" in the corner. Selecting would log you in and place you in a random monster in a newbie. It was usually something like a rat, snake or beetle, though once I did get a level 14 Kerran Awrat in Kerra Isle. It was a lot of run running around North Qeynos as a gnoll pup. Sometimes gangs of monsters would team together and battle it out with groups of newbies. The GMs even occasionally had events in North Qeynos were there was an all out war between level 1-5 PCs and swarms of MPCs.
I don't remember how long ago it was, exactly. I do know that it was sometime before the Cazic revamp, as I remember being a level 7 lizardman warrior there.
There was talk of them adding it to PvP servers, but it looks like that never happened, my guess is because it really messed up newbie zones. However, if they had a special MPC server, I'm sure quite a few people would go drop by there to play a monster every now and then. I know I would.
It would be even better if they made some way to save your progress as a monster. For example, it would always start you out at level one, but keep track of how much xp you gianed (yes, MPCs could gain xp and levels.) so that when you logged in later, you could continue advancing that monster, or a different monster with the same amount of xp.
But I'm really just dreaming. Does anyone else remember MPCs, or is it just me?
Comment Posted by: Merkava on December 8, 2004 02:04 AM
Newbie zone, rather. I should really check these things for typos first.
Another thought for PvP is some sort of guild based PvP. A server where all the guilds are constantly at war with each other. That might have some interesting results. You wouldn't have to worry about calling off a raid because someone else is after your mob, for example.
Raider: Boss, someone else is killing Cazic. Are we going to call off the raid?
Leader: We aren't calling off anything. In fact, we just found a new raid target. Let's see how well they do against Cazic when my wizzies manaburn their clerics.
Or something like that.
Comment Posted by: Rosecutter on December 8, 2004 03:42 AM
Merkava, What your talkign about was refered to as Project M! I agree it was great fun and I feedback now and again to have it reinstated. It did not go live because of the reasons you stated, gangs of player mobs would gather and make the newbie zones far more dificult (how would you like to try kiting a mob that knows if they stand still, you will be right back for them to smack).
Comment Posted by: Redcloud on December 8, 2004 05:43 AM
Project M was a lot of fun. Pity they pulled it. Apparently people were griefing too many newbies with it (what can you possibly do with a green mob but go kill a newbie...)
Most of my best memories are pre-kunark:
The magic of the first day in Kelethin. The trees, the darkness, the unknown. The beauty of the spells. The newbies, me included, falling from the trees like cherries. (A real feel of danger. No pampering). That was the first of many more with Naga,Vox, insane CRs in Fear, trains in Hate, wipes in Sky. There was no safety net. Little to no group buffs. The players were weak and in dangerous world. That is how it should be.
The only worst time I recall is Absor being a tool at talking about class balance when POP has tipped it by giving abilities to some while shutting down others. Come to think of it, the worst time or experience is with SoE PR or sweeping changes with little to no regard to class roles and general game health. Lots of inexperienced and reckless people worked on POP/GoD it seems.
Comment Posted by: Aethn on December 8, 2004 07:56 AM
If they added Housing, Status and Rankings to EQ1 like they have in EQ2, I would reinstate all my EQ1 accounts in an instant and never quit again.
Comment Posted by: Talaen on December 8, 2004 09:52 AM
I agree 100% with Pants's latest post :)
As for Fear, I actually like the challenge of Fear. The last few years, It got to be a pain to get anyone to go there with me though - unless they had an epic drop, they just didn't want to go.
It just confuses me how Hate, which used to be 70% of the difficulty of Fear, can get revamped what....three times and become so easy that you can single-group most of it in the 50s? And Fear and Sky are not touched. It's like deciding that 1/4 of the beige carpet in your living room is worn and needs replacing, so you go out and replace that part of the carpet with new blue carpet - but the rest is still beige. It just doesn't fit together right in my mind.
My most favorite moments in EQ were the early days - really pre-Velious. The first time I crossed Timorous Deep on the Maiden's Voyage. Heck, the first time I crossed the Butcherblock Mountains to go to Kaladim. The first time I joined 35 other players and charged Lord Nagafen in his lair. I really enjoyed the game much more when the world was very BIG and very dangerous, and every part of it was an adventure in itself.
Comment Posted by: Solistic on December 8, 2004 10:44 AM
Loral, you mentioned a Wayfarer Camp or PoK Book near Splitpawe. I certainly hope not. South Karana still has the feel of huge vast and unknown to it. To put a "Freeway" off ramp in the middle would destroy the whole feeling of the zone.
Comment Posted by: Loral on December 8, 2004 11:04 AM
Solistic, I'd agree to that if the value of Paw and perhaps Gorge of King Xorbb were increased to make up for the travel time. I too like the feeling of traveling across large expanses of wilderness but you cannot get people to go to old-world dungeons in far away places if there isn't a reason greater than the convenient dungeons in newer expansions.
Comment Posted by: Teremar on December 8, 2004 12:57 PM
I've always thought that the big mistake with Project M was that they put you in the newbie zones. Especially since at that point there were actual newbies in the newbie zones.
But a 60+ grinding group would probably welcome a fight against an intelligent mob. And could get help if the mobs started ganging up on them. A major brawl in WoS, say, with real people controlling all sides, would be something to see.
This would have to be a rare occurence though--everything in EQ is designed around the stupidity of the mobs.
Comment Posted by: Talaen on December 8, 2004 01:37 PM
Project M in higher zones would certainly be a great way to point out the many tactics that players and groups use that really exploit the shortcomings of the current mob AI.
Fighting an enemy that fights even semi-intelligently is a far, far greater challenge than simply having to knock down a few thousand more hit points, or take harder hits.
I remember reading about one person's experience with project M when it was on test - he ended up as a fire beetle. He talked about jumping up and down in front of a player to try and scare the player off, but it didn't work. It was great to read about people just having fun with the game like that.
Comment Posted by: on December 8, 2004 03:22 PM
Possibly the simplist way to prevent mass greifing of newbies is to limit only 1 or 2 'project M' players to a zone.
Comment Posted by: short on December 8, 2004 03:28 PM
I would have to disagree with you Loral, because I have seen 4 of the top 5 guilds just about vanish. The number 1 guild lost 60% of their members to EQ2 and WoW. I myself have been asked several times to quit EQ1 to join my 17 EQ1 friends on WoW. I have been lucky and our guild seems to be able to get about 30 to 40 on during Raids when we used to turn away members when we hit the max of 54. I have seen at least 20 members give their farwell posts on guild servers and cancel their accounts. This is not a fad and it may increase some but at least 50% of most servers have left EQ1 for good. We have had open apps for several months and it is a sad situation as we get very few apps. I have had 6 of 8 ranger friend quit over the Bow to sword issue as well and they are all playing Coh or Wow with 2 playing EQ2. I dont even remember the last time I saw a GM on? This is just another sore point with people including myself. I love EQ and been playing it for 4+ years since 1999 with at least 6 charters 67+. I can no longer even lvl my alts when I get bored unless I bot 4 in the group. So please dont ignore the sad state of the game at this point when it comes to players and getting groups. LOL 300 people on a server is sad, I would think that is very very low as I can remember when I saw 140 in just one zone.
Just my .02 cents.
--Short
Comment Posted by: Foobie on December 8, 2004 04:19 PM
Our small guild fo 35 somewhat active people 3 months ago is down to 2 active and they are going to go buy WoW to join most of others who left, I'm going to get a copy of WoW as well. Nothing I can do until this flood of other games passes, logging in and having no one to talk to or nothing to do except pickup groups is very annoying. I hope WoW is worth the money.
Comment Posted by: Kinladar on December 8, 2004 04:20 PM
Loral,
The Developers did in fact state when EQ2 was being designed, that EQ1 was more with a raiding style in mind, while EQ2, was more for the casual crowd, and based on seeing both games, in beta, and live, I beleive it.
I'll have to find those quotes, cause some came from the top brass in EQ1 managment.
Loral, the problem with EQ, is people want to be proud of thier characters. They want to have some power. At the same time, not everyone has the time to invest 1000's of hours into one character to make it to that level. I am close to 400 days played on my ranger, he's in the top 10 on Rodcet, and during that time I have made a ton of friends, and have said good bye to many as well.
EQ is more based on raiding for the best gear, and character progression. Raiding gets you into zones in some cases, and also gets you the best gear.
I just dis agree with the concept of having to farm the same mobs, over and over and over and over again to gear your guild up, so they can beat the next level, then start the farming all over again.
That's not good content design, that's piss poor managment, and just cookie cuttering in the steps.
WoW allows alot of different options, good gear from quests that do not take a 50 man raid to complete, as well as good random drops from mobs in zones.
EQ used to be like that, not quite as in depth, but you could quest for alot of armor, and also get alot of other things done without needing that gigantic raid.
Also, spells. Original, Kunark, Velious, and Luclin, and PoP had at least the vast majority of spells as droppable, and total quested, and no drop spells made the game alot less fun.
WoW again gets kudos for making spells, and skills for the most part, purchaseable, with a few quested from what I have seen so far.
SoE tried to put in place artificial controls to destroy soloists, and spell sellers.
They did that well, and destroyed some of the basic tenets that kept the game alive.
Comment Posted by: Proto on December 8, 2004 06:06 PM
EQ was done with Velious
Comment Posted by: Horzek on December 8, 2004 06:53 PM
Each night when I am on my home I am thinking about what I want to do and where I want to go. Am I thinking about my EQ characters? No, Im not. I am thinking about my reincarnation into WoW. I have not yet had to stand around with my LFG posted all night hoping I can get something for some camp or the other.
I have not logged into EQ since the last time there was a server issue with WoW. Right now I can not imagine why I would want to sit in PoK either waiting for raid to be called or looking for a group. As a 68 cleric groups are not too hard for me and yet I still sometimes have to wait up to an hour. My son in law quit playing after many days of LFG as a rogue. The game has lost its charm and attraction to me.
I still have issues with the difficulty of class defining spells being so hard to come by. The GoD spells were insulting in how hard they were to come by and now with OOW and the improvement there I still find that I have had enough. I had to wait and farm the bazaar to get most of my 60-65 cleric spells, especially HoV which I define as a crucial cleric spell. I feel the same way about the new cleric buffs spells. I am sick of knowing that they are out there but not for me unless I either pay a fortune in bazaar or have an amazing run of luck in WoS or an instance somewhere. I have probably had 20 rolls on runes so far and won maybe 2. This is not what I call fun.
Tonight I will have fun, I just dont know where. It may be in any number of places and I have no idea if I will be grouping with anyone or not. It doesnt matter a great deal. I just know its gonna be fun and not a waste of half my evening trying to get something going.
On a change of subject I consider ldon to be broke now. The last one I tried to do the mobs were way too hard for the group we used, at least as tough as the old Hard Ldons and yet it was called Normal. Yes, we were all 66 and higher, but there was no warning until we actually zoned in and began noticing that the mobs were hitting us very hard and had a heck of a lot more hps than they should have. It turned out to be a complete waste of our time and another ldon loss in the pile. Once I thought Ldon was the finese addition to EQ. That was a while ago and nothing has changed but me. The ldon camps now are a ghost town.
After all this time I am very seriously considering cancelling my account billing. There is no way I am going to consider another addition purchase. I may still log in from time to time to visit with my remaining eq friends but an awful lot of them are in WoW with me.
It is a bit sad to say this because I have invested a lot of myself into the EQ envirionment. I was on Quellious for a good while when Loral was still killing rats so he could make patchwork shirts. It was one heck of a neat server, Even with Loral there.
Good thing you have a good site here with some informative discussions because lately this has been my remaining tie with the EQ experience. Thanks for that.
Comment Posted by: Glamdrigg on December 9, 2004 03:56 AM
An earlier post complains of the effect the exodus has had on his guild numbers. He then goes on to say they are excepting apps for entry into their guild. Anyone else see the problem here?
Loosen UP!!!
It is a sad fact that many guilders are so wrapped up in their uber status that they would rather merge with other high lvl guilds then put the work into bringing up lower lvl players to their high status. Even sadder that they would rather quit the game entirely then rebuild.
Raiders often like to claim that they are the true community builders in EQ. Now is the time to prove it. Instead of dissolving your guilds you could at least try to bring in these low to mid lvl players. Maybe Fennin Ro is just lucky so far, I still see the numbers there for this to be feesible.
If you dont have the numbers on your server that is one thing. But, if you are just too fixed in your ways i.e. too lazy to rebuild your guild that is an entirely different set of problems.
This smacks of the same problems that come from players not wanting to play in pick up groups. Hell, in the beginning the game was nothing but. If you dont bother to play with strangers on-line you will never develop the community you say you desire.
Good Luck Recruiting!
Comment Posted by: Redcloud on December 9, 2004 08:16 AM
Glamdrigg, often guilds just don't find suitable material. That's all. That starts and ends there.
Merging is a very risky business. Most guild rather recruit on their own than risk much bigger losses with a merge. Let alone the differences in running both guilds.
Guilds are permanently in rebuilding mode to some extent. There isn't such thing as not bringing up to their level recruits. Or that would be soon-to-be-dead guild doing that. Recruits have been brought up to speed all the time, for the past 5+ years, everywhere.
Please explain to me what "lower level" players would do there if they don't have the time, inclination nor social skill to fit in.
Because at the moment that's really the only reason why they wouldn't be picked up in any guild as far as I'm aware of.
The only other explanation I could see to what you describe is the dumping down of the requirements by SoE to actually be succesful as a guild. Little to no competition, instances, mudflation, zerg tactics, sheer luck. But any long standing active guild would have to adapt and be anything but lazy. At least some of the people within or it just collapses from its sheer weight.
If your definition of pick-up group is doing dangerous things with people you know nothing about, then yes, people refrain from taking unnecessary risks. That's in the nature of people not to be masochistic just to please a complete stranger. It's also called self preservation. You can find snob tools out there as well as people just not wanting to CR again with random joe_01 that might or might not be geared well enough or act like a newbie. You just don't know.
I've done MPG trials with pick-up groups and haven't succeeded in one yet. It was fun trying though and I don't mind either when I'm in the mood for it and know that I have plenty of time to deal with a CR if need be.
Comment Posted by: Loral on December 9, 2004 08:26 AM
Those people that I know and trust now were people I met in pickup hunts and raids. You cannot meet tomorrow's trusted companions if you aren't willing to meet new people today. I agree with Glamdrigg. People have to be less picky with their groups and guild raids these days. It may not last, we may see people come back after the holidays or most likely with the next expansion, but if we want to have fun in the mean time, consider grabbing up a few folks you don't know and trying out something fun.
Comment Posted by: Redcloud on December 9, 2004 09:57 AM
Then you didn't meet new people within your guild nor in other raiding guilds. Trusted and competent companion often come from there too depending of your playstyle. You won't if you aren't willing to consider those people either. People are less picky if they wish to put up with the added risk. Otherwise they can do other things like playing WoW outside raid hours if they can't find guild groups or aren't in a mood for pick-up groups. After the holidays, WoW should open up for Europe and even less people will be on EQ1 when that happens. That would push back of at least another month any increase of EQ1 population. Noone can predict if they'll have any interest for the next expansion if they found better things to do elsewhere. Picking up random people is half the road. The other half is making it an experience one may wish to repeat.
Comment Posted by: Talaen on December 9, 2004 10:00 AM
You're right that people need to be less picky and more open to meeting new people. But we're talking about a culture change, and that's going to take a long while and a lot of pain.
This problem has crossed over into EQ2 and, I'd imagine, into WoW as well. For whatever reason, a lot of people that "grew up" in EQ1 came to have a very great amount of distrust for random groups and strangers. I think in the beginning it was about player skill - let's face it, player skill was a very big factor in the early days of EQ. The game had a steep learning curve. But over the years, many guilds became clannish and isolationist, only grouping with each other, or with people they trusted. Sure, they might meet new people or get new recruits - but it was usually through someone they already knew. This sort of xenophobia became a big part of the culture of EQ - I have no way to prove it, but I'm willing to bet that anywhere from 30-50% of players simply refused to do pickup raids, and anywhere from 20-40% refused to do random groups with their main.
I can't speak for all other guilds, but most guilds I knew of in EQ1 either used an application system or a sponsorship/invitation system for recruiting. Even before the new games came out, guild recruiting was becoming progressively more difficult if you weren't part of a "famous" guild on your server. People didn't generally come looking for your guild, and your guild members weren't going out and meeting potential recruits. Instead they were usually grouping with each other.
Now I am fighting this leftover stigma in EQ2. I brought a lot of great guild members over from EQ1 and they are enjoying the game much more - mostly, I think, because they don't feel like they have to make a gigantic time commitment to go have some fun. But they're still unwilling, almost afraid to group with random people. I managed to pull some friends from SWG and a few people we met in EQ2 into the guild, and slowly they are helping to change that, but it's a fight.
Regardless of how right or wrong this attitude is, there were things about EQ1 and its player base that created this culture. Guilds still in EQ1 are now faced with an even tougher battle than the expatriates who are now in other games have.
Comment Posted by: Teremar on December 9, 2004 11:29 AM
Just lowering standards isn't going to help the raiding guilds too much. I'm reasonably confident most people can learn to raid. And given time you can flag them, gear them up, etc.
But most of the poeple who want to raid and can raid...do raid. So the high-end raiding guilds can recruit people from the lower-end raiding guilds, but you can't increase the pool of raiders too much. You can try, but the people you get are likely to have low attendance. Which means you need more people in the guild to get an acceptable raiding force, which means more people to flag and gear, which means dramatically slower progress.
Raiding is a whole different play-style, even life-style. Just lowering standards isn't going to make people switch to it.
But I heartily agree with the more general point that you can't make new friends without meeting new people.
Comment Posted by: Glamdrigg on December 10, 2004 03:51 AM
Thanx for the feedback thus far,
It sounds to me that many of the objections to lowering guild recruitment standards stem for laziness. Now I know that might seem like a strong word, but I'm not sure how else to phrase it.
I understand the frustration of leveling, gearing, and teaching fellow players the ropes. It is slow! But, I am inclined to think back to a few earlier threads that expressed a "stop and smell the flowers" philosophy to playing. Guild leadership is hard work. I sure dont want the job, but if you accept that role you should be willing to also take on that set responsibilities.
I remember joining my first guild as a lvl 20 ranger 4yrs ago. The leadership of that guild spent the majority of their play time helping the lower level members. This is what a guild is in my opinion. It's an army, a UNION! For all you scabs out there, you wont know what a UNION is. Get a job and you'll find out real quick.
Guilds build communities through social interaction, player assistance to include teaching the newer generations. The skill level of newer recruits is directly tied to the amount of time the guild leadership invests in that player. Simple!
From the lofty perch of an uber raiding culture, one needs to stop and ask: Where did all the raiders come from? They didn't enter Norrath with the uber gear and raid level knowledge at there birth.
This is for you Redcloud: Where did your time, inclination, and social skills come from? Obviously you love this game. Else you wouldn't be posting on a discussion site about it at 8:16 am. The culture rift between raiders and casual gamers is a ridiculous one to begin with since we are talking about a virtual world here. However, I know many players who remain independent of guilds for the very attitude that can be read between the lines in some of these posts. They either are self concious of their own lack of knowledge and are afraid to ask seasoned players for fear of ROOKIE hazing and ridicule, or they are not considered at all and therefore do not gain access to that grand world of wich you so proudly speak.
Teremar: What's wrong with slower progress. One of the reasons people complain about EQ is that they have burnt through all of the content so fast that they have missed the trees for the forest, or the forest for the tress ( i dont know trees).
Invest in these players. It takes work. But the reward exceeds the effort. And after all the game is not called ever-raid. The real point is questing with other players, hence its online status. If we just want to play with people we know and trust we can play PS2/XBOX.
Comment Posted by: Glamdrigg on December 10, 2004 04:05 AM
This might not have been so clear before so I'll try to clear up a point. I was not advocating the dumbing down of raid content. I was merely referring to the players out there without guilds: the ones Redcloud refers to as unsuitable material.
Another quick note: It seems to me that some raid guilds dont want to do the busy work of investing time in a player. They want "lower" guilds to do this so that they can player steal. This seems inherently corrupt.
Okay I've blown enough steam for now. Look forward to the feedback. Nice give and take here. I really enjoy this site.
Comment Posted by: Pants on December 10, 2004 06:14 AM
Talaen really hit the nail on the head as for why this attitude against trusting strangers exists. It is ingrained into the culture, into the heads of many MMORPG veterans. From playing something brand new like WoW it stands out even more than if you try to observe it in EQ. There is a big gap between vets and the many players who are new to MMORPGs (B.net kiddies as many call them). In fact I would call it a high level of disdain and I even am part of it myself unfortunately. You could call it laziness, self preservation, experience or whatever for the reasons it exists, because everyone has a different reason for the attitude.
For me it's because of bad experiences grouping with total idiots in EQ (though it wasn't that frequent in EQ) and more recently CoH (where it was much more frequent). I don't mean idiots because they are inexperienced and don't know what to do, but because when you tell them they are making a mistake and suggest a new way to do things they either ignore you or argue with you, even though they or the whole group have already died because of the mistake. It is the unwillingness or inability to listen that makes me distrust people like that. Sometimes though it's just the pure adolescent attitude they exhibit as soon as they join the group. You know the ones to whom everything is "gay" or they swear every other word for some inexplicable reason. I can say from just watching the General Chat channel in WoW that this is a huge problem. There seems to be a large base of people like this so because of this I am extremely reluctant to ever do a pickup group. Despite that I have tried it about 5 times. One of the times was OK. The others consisted of people ninja looting every single mob as soon as it dropped, people running off on their own getting themselves killed and then blaming the rest of the group. One guy was trying to purposely train the group, I say trying because as long as you don't hit a mob in WoW once it kills the person it runs back to it's spawn spot back at full health and ignores any attempts to agro it till it's back (they must've known players would try to train others to have built this system in). So now I don't bother with pickup groups. At least I have family to play with though.
Now I know that people will never meet new friends if they carry this attitude around with them but can you blame them? If someone has had multiple bad experiences of course they will be reluctant to trust strangers, it's human nature. I think in newer games at least people will more willingly group with strangers since the death penalities aren't so harsh and because everyone is on the same level. In old games like EQ though elitism can be rampant sometimes and people may be too set in their ways to change. Add to that the long wait and pain in the butt dying can be if you don't have a cleric, or in older non-graveyard zones the nasty CRs that can happen, and it's no wonder people want to group only with people they can rely on. Again it's human nature. It is too bad it's this way but you can't force people to change.
Comment Posted by: Loral on December 10, 2004 08:08 AM
I think EQ2's group experience debt system hurts social grouping. Last night I logged in to relax and play some EQ2. I joined a guild group in Stormhold and almost immediately we all died. That was five deaths worth of experience debt within 10 minutes of logging on, nearly 10% of a level. When someone in a group dies, we all pay for it anyway. It slows us down. It forces us to handle it via resurrection and rebuffing. It prevents us from killing mobs as quickly until that person has recovered. I hear stories all over about people who join groups only to suffer experience debt without even seeing the group yet.
Experience debt from group member's deaths should be removed. It makes people want to solo. I soloed the rest of the night last night. Group exp debt might completely get rid of pickup groups. I hear people all over saying that they'll be a lot more picky.
Comment Posted by: Redcloud on December 10, 2004 09:18 AM
Glamdrigg, it's no frustration to level with, gear or teach new players and be taught. I can't speak for everyone but I know I still enjoy it. That is the essence of the game for some. Learn, experience new things. That's not the problem I think. Slow isn't really the problem either but rather the dullness of the process depending of the stage you are in the game. Omens is a lot better in that regard.
There's only so much dullness you can put up with before quitting the game. That simple.
I suppose you haven't been guildleader to think that they somehow don't take on a set responsabilities. If anything they might more often than not have too many. What it boils down to is that everyone, guildleader, raidleaders, officers, just pay for a game to be fun. If 99% of their time is purely administrative, you can be sure that they'll just drop either their role or the game at some point. There's a limit to what one can ask to a fellow gamer for his own sake. If one expects to leave the tedium to others, then of course it won't work.
I disagree on the skill level of recruit being tied to leadership time with them. A) GLs don't play all classes. B) They have a guild to run. It's they responsability to create the right environment to foster cooperation and trust. It's not of being a recruit's nanny.
Taking interest in the player doesn't equate to training them. Other people are often better suited to do so if need be.
My time, inclination and social skill or lack thereof come from experiencing first hand the qualities and the limits of the players around me and mine.
I disagree about the culture thing. We probably have the same to some extent. But there really are different playstyles. Simply they don't mix well. Once you aknowledge the differences and know exactly who wants that, there's a lot less missconceptions and prejudices, Which is probably why this gamer experience or maturity will spill over the games to come, for a reason.
People that like LDON do exactly that, play a console game online p). Kidding. Again, it never will be an issue to invest in new people as long as they are willing to do their share. It boils down to that and volatile part-time gamers just have different priorities that won't make that happen.
BTW there isn't one size fit all guild. There are as many playstyles as guilds out there. I just a matter to find the one fitting you. What won't fit one may very well fit another. There's no good or bad. Just differences.
Conversely the lower you are in the food chain, the less demanding it should be. If you have higher expectations from the game, you end up either being frustrated or at some point look for another place to go. In the workplace people do that all the time and it's no shock to anyone. You can think it's a matter of trust and loyalty and end up whining how the world is unfair or be pragmatic and aknowledge that that's how people act and get over it. People will do their best interest if you don't give them a good reason not to. It starts and ends there. I bet that this subject may last generations to come P).
Comment Posted by: Loral on December 10, 2004 10:03 AM
My skills improved a lot with LDON. Instead of sitting around waiting for mobs to show up in camp we had to drive hard and fast to succeed. Every ounce of power that I had had to get used. I learned how to manage mana so that the last beast used my last ounce of energy. I want more of that.
Comment Posted by: Teremar on December 10, 2004 10:59 AM
The problem with slower progress as a guild is that it really means doing the same thing more times before being able to move on.
Suppose you're used to having 100 people in your guild in order to get a raiding force of 54. But now you have to lower your standards, inviting people who have less time or less desire to raid. So now it takes 200 people to get the same raiding force. You now have to do everything twice as many times in order to get everyone flagged and geared.
Doing something the first time is a thrill. The second or third time might still be fun. But eventually it just gets to be a drag. A raiding guild that is forced to slow down because it lowered its standards doesn't start seeing the forest through the trees; they are stuck seeing the same few trees over and over again.
And for the record: I am emphatically NOT a raider. This isn't about elitism. Could I learn to play in a raiding guild? Sure. But I can only raid MAYBE twice a week (and I'm not sure I'd want to raid even that often) and I'm well aware that that would make me a liability to a serious raiding guild.
Someone like me and someone who can and wants to raid nearly every day simply do not belong in the same guild. If we were, one or both of us would end up extremely frustrated. And this isn't just theory--I suspect every family guild has dealt with the issue of people who play more and then grow frustrated with their guild's lack of progress. Creating more situations like that isn't going to help anyone.
Comment Posted by: Talaen on December 10, 2004 12:40 PM
Very good points by all.
Redcloud's right - there are different playstyles. I have friends in both EQ1 and EQ2 who are the greatest people, but I simply couldn't play the way they do. It would frustrate me to no end and completely kill the game, and it would do the same to them if they were forced to play my way.
Guilds are just a mechanism for getting other people together who have similar goals in the game. It's not perfect, but you can't expect it to be, since none of us really completely know each other's minds, and sometimes as players we may not even know what we really want, or what we want from the game might change over time.
As a guild leader I have to be conscious of that, and there are times when after talking with a prospective recruit, i'll tell them that I really think they'd be better off with a different kind of guild, because we just can't provide what they say they're looking for.
Guild recruiting is really a two step process. The first step is simply meeting people. You can go about this different ways, whether you use /ooc, post on message boards, look for people yourself, or simply rely on your reputation to generate applications. This part of the process is where the culture problems I referenced above occur most. You have to have a way to keep people in the pipeline no matter what guild you're in.
The other side of it is truly evaluating whether someone is going to fit in or not. Raiding guilds, by the nature of what they do, demand more time and commitment than many players are willing to devote. Likewise, so-called family guilds may simply not do enough for more driven or ambitious players. This isn't anyone's fault, just human nature.
The challenge that guilds are all faced with now is that the population of prospective recruits has dropped dramatically. This means that everyone is being forced to reevaluate how and why they do things. This is hard for players, because most players were already playing the way they liked, and now they're being forced to potentially change that through no fault of their own.
Some guilds are going to be able to adjust and overcome this, and other guilds are going to fail because of it. It's unfortunate, but there's not really any magic formula to prevent it - it's too late for that. The best that can be hoped for is that SOE recognizes this is a potential cause for even more player attrition, and takes action to help take some of the pressure off of their players. Whether that means retuning content, or consolidating servers, or even fixing long-standing bugs and issues, that's what they need to do.
For our part as players and guilds, we just need to look objectively at what we do and see if it's possible to adapt to the new situation. If it is, and we can still enjoy the game, then great. If not, maybe it's time to move on.
Comment Posted by: Solistic on December 10, 2004 01:05 PM
You are right I learned some important things from LDON's. But I remember in order to get my LDON armor locked-in for my cleric, I had to marathon the LDONS. Once I had it locked in I felt now I can go anywhere. Well now my Warrior (whom I play just as much) Needs to get his locked in. After hundreds of North Ro adventures, most of them named the same as the one before, I am dreading doing the same thing for my Warrior. It becomes the Same-o Same-o "Yawn". Re-runs of old TV shows. There should have been, never have been, much content in LDONs.
Comment Posted by: Agripa on December 10, 2004 03:50 PM
Distrust is easy to come by in EQ. Because of the way the game works, griefing in various ways including KSing, training, and ninja looting all reward any player who keeps his mouth shut and does not say anything in game that a /report can record. This places a high value in someone's reputation and that is easier earned as a guild member then as an outside player who you have less reason to interact with. This problem affects the PvE servers much more severely then the PvP servers since new players are easily misled by the SOE Play Nice rules which are enforced so poorly that they actually only serve to place the players who obey them at a disadvantage.
Members in uberguilds naturally have less stake in how they are seen by players under them and are in a position to take advantage of any situations that arise. Do you really think these lower level players are going to forget these incidents? Most of them left long ago for less predatory games. Look at the number of players under level 60 on any of the older servers and you will find them almost non-existent. The recruiting pool of up and coming players is gone and I never expect it to come back. New players will buy the game, create a character, and, um, solo to 60?
The uberguilds themselves are caught in a catch 22 since if they accept recruits that require blackflagging, they themselves are subject to desertions where their older more powerful members leave to join rival guilds who do not backflag and instead focus on progression.
A lot of the EQ2 design seems to be aimed at preventing these problems in the first place which has a side effect of placing much stricter limits on player interaction. If all I can do is chat with others until we are grouped and can not buff, heal, or aid them in any way, does that even make it a MMPRPG instead of just a graphical chat system?
The original Everquest designers really should have read up on earlier MMPOGs as all of these problems have been faced before and the solutions are well documented. They managed to reinvent the wheel and repeat a doomed history in one shot.
Please excuse me if the formatting in my post is screwed up. The preview command does not seem to be working correctly.
Comment Posted by: Horzek on December 10, 2004 04:04 PM
When the LDON first came out I was taking a little break from EQ while looking over SWG. It was the LDON experience that brought me fully back to EQ and got my SWG account cancelled.
For the first time, I could have nice equipment if I was willing to put in the time and effort. I spent days on end hitting the various LDON zones and taking pickup groups as necessary if my guild was not needing me. It was nice because even if you did not win a new toy, you still mananaged to add a few points and each attempt put you just that much closer to your goal of a new BP or aug or what ever you needed.
I also liked the way you were able to improve your over all stats as you completed more LDONS in a particular camp. Last I looked I had a very nice adventure stone.
The downfall of LDON was that eventually it got to be very cookie cutter and one might say boring. There are only so many times you can do the same thing over and over and over. There came a point where I had looted nearly every single name drop item in all the LDON camps with the exception of some of the hards and I had at least two bags full of unused LDON augs in the bank that no one else wanted.
It has been about 15 months now since LDON came out and there has been very little done to them since. I did very much appreciate the ability to trade back in equipment I out grew. That was a good step in my opinion.
One thing about my LDON experiences was that I did a LOT of pickup group runs. I started as a 62 cleric and in short order found myself at 65 with the AA points mounting up. In that time I found that as a cleric I grew up a lot. I found that it was a whole new game once I started building out the 65 cleric aa ladder. Fortunately and you will pardon me if I seem a bit proud, as a good cleric I could make a lot of difference in the success or failure of a LDON run. I am sure my skills were a part of it but I very seldom found myself in a bad LDON group. Quite often I found out that we had a good enough group to stay for another two or even three more runs. I made a lot of friends and even ended up in a new guild after I seemed to find myself being asked to join forming parties again and again.
Now that the LDON has dried up I miss what I found there. I had another taste of it briefly during the beginnings of OOW when I was often asked to join groups in WoS or even MPG on occasion. It was kind of neat to work with some of the top tanks on my server and see what they were up to.
I have enjoyed the comments here on the guild issues, raid verus family. I have been in both and you have stimulated my thinking. Thanks.
Comment Posted by: short on December 10, 2004 04:14 PM
Glamdrigg, I do 90% of all my groups are with pickup people. My guild has had recruitment open for months way before OOW or Wow or EQ2 opened. WE have never turned anyone out and have given all that have applied at least a chance for a min of 30days. We strive to be polite in all aspects. I, for one, almost never get groups with my own guild even though I play a cleric. I have done at least 18 MPG trials with pickup groups and not a single 1 with a guild group so far and won 3 different MPG trials with these pickup groups. Since EQ2, Wow, Halflife and such I cannot get get a pickup group alot of the time. I was even in a group in WOS that was the only group in the Zone. People just dont want to log on as it is not fun lfg all the time and when people dont log on they dont app as well. Not that we are picky, we just are not getting any apps. I like to raid but the constant farming is not very social when everything has to be on queue or you wipe. Just because your in a group doesnt make it social if people dont talk. I find more conversation with pickup groups than I do on some Raids. EQ has taken a hugh hit, plain and simple. SOE is responsable for their constant nerfing of classes and soloing along with forgetting about the non raiding players. I wish I could solo on occasion just because some days I just dont feel like dealing with outhers gripes and such. So dont think jsut because some people are in Uber guilds or such that they are picky. Most of us are not. We are just as fed up with crap as a casual player. No one likes LFG and that is just part of the game now. It is sad
Comment Posted by: on December 10, 2004 06:07 PM
This is has probably been one of the best (if not the best) series of comments since the opening of mobhunter 2.0...
Comment Posted by: Utziel on December 11, 2004 01:33 AM
I find on my server that if just sit there with your LFG on u get few invites. However, if you start the group and do some tells you can get a group pretty quickly. If some people used the time that they use to complain about lack of groups, on getting those groups together I think you will find people are willing and HAPPY to join you.
Comment Posted by: Glamdrigg on December 11, 2004 03:42 AM
Well, this thread is certainly a comment on the times we play in. Thanks for all the responses to my guild issues post. I don't always agree with what I hear here, but I always learn something new, and that is worthwhile. Since I have started reading and posting on this site I have felt my game experience grow even more rich, so I thank you all for these little chats esps: Loral, and yes even Redcloud heheheh.
Redcloud, I can find a lot of common ground with you on your post of 12/10. I have always diverged from you though in respect to LDON and agree whole heartedly with Loral's 12/10 post on that issue. I do agree that guilds should serve the interests of the members of that guild: raiders to raiders etc. I also agree that being another player's nanny can be as enjoyable as a beating with a rubber hose. However, (and this is a crucial point I think) times have changed. GLs dont need to wet nurse new recruits. Ideally the guild would invite enough new blood to support both high end raiding for its uber members and lower end schooling for its up and comings. The word I believe is DELEGATION. Guilds dont train recruits by standing over there shoulders. They train them by keeping the guild chat filter moving back and forth, by giving directions, hooking players up with other players. This is called investing in the future. Perhaps if more of this had been done in the past our guilds today wouldn't be feeling the crunch they are now. My current guild is doing pretty well. We have basic class balance and enough members at high and lower levels so as to provide most players a hook up if they look for it. We have suffered on the raiding end of things with the exodus. But our momentum is still a forward one.
I'll concede that there are players out there who I don't know what the hell they're thinking when they are playing. I play a lot of pickup groups when not with my guild brothers and sisters, and out of all of them I have had a few experiences that I would rate as bad. Clerics trying to tank and running out of mana, players who crowd the puller, groups that fall apart mid-LDON. But I have to stress that these are a minor percent of my pick up group experience. Overall I have found great groups with good balance and skill. The key to a pick up group is getting the rules straight before embarking. Making sure everyone knows their job. Who is looting, who is pulling, who is tanking, etc. from the outset. And on those rare occassions that a group goes sour I can then remember that bad player on my filter list and not group with them again. Simple.
I dont blame people for being gun shy, or for sitting back in their comfort zone. But the fact of the matter is: we are playing in a different time. The pressure is on us now to either make this work or sink our servers. SOE can do all it wants to keep us playing by adding new content and fixing the old, but the numbers are going to be smaller now. Come out of your shells and take a look around, send some tells, if you can't get a group by just putting your name on the LFG list then try to make a group. I am always amazed how fast I get a group going when I start sending tells, after waiting forever on /LFG with no invites. Human nature working again here.
Good Hunting All...
Comment Posted by: Redcloud on December 11, 2004 09:08 AM
Glamdrigg, times have gone just a lot worse. But the need of recruiting was always there.
There isn't such thing as lower end schooling unless I missunderstood the concept. Recruits just get trained on the go trying to do the less harm possible with sponsor or class mates helping them in the process. That is also why you can't exceed a too large number of recruits at the same time or your chances to wipe go up exponentially.
Delegation always happened to some extent. It depends of the guild style mostly. Same with socializing with new and old members. You can't exceed your raid size by "doing more in the past". You can't recruit more than you can fit in a raid. People leave in waves. When a guild hits a brick wall. When a new MMO comes out. Etc. There's only so much that you can plan ahead and moreover guild mates themselves may very well not agree in doing dull activities when there is no compelling reason to it. Remember that you can decide only so much without the majority of a guild backing you up.
You see, your minor percent of pick-up groups going wrong seems to be a major one for a number of people. I don't know why it's minor for you and major for others but evidently it has a large impact. Planning the roles is a pretty straightforward process. That is rarely the problem. Those people you met and that acted responsibly make their own reputation and chances are that you'll invite them again in pick-up groups. Then again, it won't be pick-up afterall since you actually know the person beforehand which nullifies the whole point about meeting new people and goes back to what I was saying, which is that you add a small risk to a group or a raid, one at a time.
People already start groups on their own when they know how and have a clue on what to do next and take charge. They go out of their way to make things happen. At least I know a number of them. Other people just hate to do so. Then again, people found another way to get things started. They box one of the holy trinity almost on a daily basis when they can. All the more if they aren't one of those classes. More often than not, they take less risks by boxing than by pick-up a random player they know nothing about. Let alone the gear. If you want to fight something, I'd suggest that you fight that.
Comment Posted by: Pants on December 13, 2004 06:41 AM
"I think EQ2's group experience debt system hurts social grouping...
Experience debt from group member's deaths should be removed. It makes people want to solo. I soloed the rest of the night last night. Group exp debt might completely get rid of pickup groups. I hear people all over saying that they'll be a lot more picky."
Boy is that true. I don't understand what they were thinking when they added this feature into EQ2 which is supposed to be a more casual friendly version EQ. I imagine that pickup groups will eventually be unheard of in EQ2 if this remains.
This is one of the 4 main reasons I'm not playing EQ2 after trying it in beta. One other being I don't like the trade skill system with it's "needle of death" idea of taking damage and possibly even dying doing trades. Another being that I refuse to upgrade my computer just so I can turn some graphics features on and have it still be playable. Yeah sure it looks great and is built for the future but I don't have the money nor inclination to build a whole new computer to play one game, especially when WoW runs at 30 FPS on my current machine without turning down anything except clipping distance slightly. The last reason being I simply don't trust SOE. They have taken in EQ a perfectly good game that was fun, creative and balanced for both casual and more hardcore gamers and turned it into some kind of screwed up "chase the carrot" race to uberdom revolving mainly around raiders. The gap now between a raider and non raider in gear/stats is so huge that it completely dwarfs anything in the past. We can thank poor decisions on the direction of the game in expansions like PoP and GoD for that. Also the mindless and poorly tested nerfs, which turn out to be big mistakes and aren't reversed have been bad for class balance in EQ. I'm afraid that someday EQ2 will turn out the same way and I don't feel like investing a lot time to realize that.
In any case the death penality system in EQ2 has to go unless they want the game being populated by nothing but elitists and the rest of the peons who will never group together or have anything to do with eachother.
Comment Posted by: Katahn on December 13, 2004 04:23 PM
Everyone has a differant idea of fun, and what works and doesn't. EQ1's problem is old blood leaving and not a lot of new blood coming in. Unless something has changed dramatically in the low level (say sub-40) game life as a new player in EQ is very lonely. That is not a healthy sign. When the roots are rotted, the tree is going to die, regardless of how old and grand.
EverQuests expansions have made the world geographically larger, but have largely been building at the top in terms of adventure zones. Yes PoP gave us the Plane of Knowledge for all levels, but the first adventure zones were 46+, Velious they were 30+, GoD were honestly 65+ (I don't care what the mobs conned, it was lethal at first!), and OoW is high level as well.
LoY was an extension, levels 30-60 roughly, and amounted to a series of zones to hunt in. It lacked the lore and backstory of Kunark or Velious. LDoN was 20-65, but as we all know got rather repetitive and despite being a great concept got dropped entirely too fast.
So what's left? That's the problem. Empty newbie zones do not attract new players. Content that is never updated (not just made higher level) is not interesting to replay. A lack of vision and tuning of group desirability within a primary role embitters classes out of favor in their role and inspires class warfare and that bitterness can be felt when talking to some people.
EQ1 in its current state is in trouble. I've run into more people in EQ2 that I saw on various forums swear they would "never ever ever" play it that I have to laugh. The newer players are going to see EQ1 and EQ2 and think EQ2 is what they should get because its "the newest game" and the MMO community as seen on the net forums like this is bitter, neither is good.
Classes need to be assigned roles in groups and all the classes that share a given role need to do so with equal effectivness if differant means.
Mandatory grouping for progression needs to go away. Period. It should be possible for all classes to solo and then for grouping to be more lucrative and rewarding.
Expansions should not just be at the top end. Old content should not be allowed to go stale. While it may be decried, never underestimate the importance of story and lore consistency and connections.
Quests need to be overhauled, and badly, and maybe the revised tasks will do that.
The tutorial zone was a fantastic addition, more content like that in terms of zones that have a definite story line and end-goal, would be cool. Truly dynamic LDoNs are possible, where the rewards come not from points that the player tracks, but that either don't exist or the system tracks and mocks up to look like a "random drop". These, in turn, need to be connected in a meaningful way to the rest of the game.
The battle the developers face is in doing the good things in the face of code that is very old, and likely hacked to Hate and back with updates.
Katahn
((ps, Not a huge fan of shared xp debt here, but what I've noticed is that people tend to be very intolerant of stupid people unwilling to learn. Also, debt automatically reduces when you are logged off, is far preferable than xp loss IMHO, and as far as mitigating it through priest resurrections, we've both been clerics long enough to know the hell that causes.
Unmitigated deaths, except through time off, would disproportionately hurt high-risk classes like main tanks. What needs to change is that debt mitigation from shard retrieval needs to be shared and xp debt should only apply on player death where xp earning occurs on mob death.))
Comment Posted by: Beewell on December 13, 2004 06:23 PM
Just wanted to say how much I enjoy reading your articles Loral. Have found a lot of excitement of late and progress in new zones that are not seeing much use. Harbingers...Rcod....Expedtions all have great value. Try spawning an expedtion with a 70 and three ppl just killing for experience...without a tank! (works but man oh man talk about blood pressure rising!) Hollar in game time Loral "we'll talk" and please keep the artticles coming!!
Comment Posted by: Glamdrigg on December 14, 2004 04:00 AM
Well, if anything comes of the numbers crunch its strange bedfellows. I was playing my alt a 42 Pally today and ended up in an all pally group. I have never been the main healer as a pally before, but it sure was spicey. We threw down fairly well considering.
I think we have hit the wall on this guild chat. Same planet different worlds. That's okay. Just different.
I have always been in guilds that dont just raid full on. Full on raiders guilds often RAID these guilds for those who want to move into hard core raiding, and so, much of the leveling up has been done already by the time they get to you. Perhaps this is why we are not connecting on this issue. Different play styles. That used to be the beauty of this game. You could play how you wanted and find your niche. It will be harder and harder to do this as time passes. For both of us.
Here's a survey to answer: Who would like SOE to hold of on further exansions for a while? How long should they wait? What should be in the next one?
Comment Posted by: Redcloud on December 14, 2004 04:25 AM
In the next expansion I would like SoE to give new players a reason to chose EQ1 over EQ2 or WoW.
EQ2 seem to be the part time player paradise with a straight jacket. Let's say EQ2 would be for the 10 hours a week gamer at a maximum.
EQ1 for the 10+ hours a week gamer. More one groubable / raidable content. No straight jacket. No invisible walls to prevent you from falling from a bridge. No safeguards. EQ2 would be the arcade version of the real thing, EQ1. EQ1 would remain the world where you can die at level one falling off from kelethin. They should stick to that and make EQ1 more immersive and unforgiving in a sensible way. Not just punitive as GoD was.
Comment Posted by: Glamdrigg on December 14, 2004 07:07 AM
As a EQ player I squeeze just in over your 10 plus hours per week. I guild, do lots of single group action, and an occassional larger event or raid.
I'd like to see them tie things together better between the old and new worlds. I'd like to our mains have a reason to visit the old content. I dont want to have old content errased mind you. But, I would like to see it relate more directly to the new zones we play in.
Here's an idea: How about giving characters an actual reason to return to their home cities. Do some interesting alterations to factions. With POK and the bazaar faction penalties dont hurt anymore. How about giving players a role in shaping their race/class/factions standing in the world. Make us defend our factions. Or choose new ones for a reason.
Even better these changes could be done via patch and not expansion. I know....dream away. Sigh...
Comment Posted by: Loral on December 14, 2004 11:07 AM
Some good questions:
"Here's a survey to answer: Who would like SOE to hold of on further exansions for a while? How long should they wait? What should be in the next one?"
I want new expansions every six months. It adds a lot of excitement into the game and every expansion helps bring new players in, lost players return, and current players get a lot of fun. Even GoD brought in a lot of new people.
If they hold off on expansions more people are going to leave. I don't want bugs any more than anyone else, but I also recognize that holding off an expansion to "fix bugs" isn't going to get us anywhere. There are always bugs.
I do think SOE needs to put in features into EQ1 that make it desireable over EQ2. That's a tall order. New races always seem to help without hurting class balance (egads, I said it!). How about a Taelosian Elf race? I love those little guys.
Content is always key, but content isn't just new zones, ite new stories, new adventures, new quests, and new expeditions. EQ1 needs to embrace quests and tasks and expeditions like EQ2 embraced the quest journal. We should always have drive and motivation to go places other than to just walk around and see it.
Comment Posted by: on December 14, 2004 11:59 AM
[ New races always seem to help without hurting class balance (egads, I said it!). ]
hahahahahahahah
breath
hahahhahahahahahhaha
breath
now I KNOW your on crack.
Comment Posted by: Daehron on December 14, 2004 12:45 PM
I think SOE and the EQLive team in particular in needs to have a massive re-evaluation of its business / operating model.
I have played EQ for 4 years, and signed up for CoH when friends played it for a few months.
I have to say, I am very impressed with the NCSoft team running CoH is able to maintain their systems, have decent CS, patch / bug fix code, and release regular *free* expansions that include new features, new quests, new zones, etc etc etc, for the same price that SoE charges per month.
But SoE desperately needs $40 per account per quarter in addition to the $13 per account it gets per month in order to come close to the level of service that NCSoft provides.
SOE needs to purge some dead wood from its payroll, streamline its operations, to get competitive again.
Expansions don't need to be 20+ zones in size. They could add 1-3 zones every 3-5 months, and introduce new features that are integrated into *all* existing content.
Imagine LDoN style 'adventure points', GoD Tribute and OoW tasks all integrated with each other and with existing content.
Quest givers can give quests to kill xx Deathfist Orcs in West Commonlands, or Dar Ghoul Wizards in Lower Guk, or assassinate the Coterie Lord, Vin Drizule in Tenebrous Mountains (a named spawn triggered by the group zoning into TM), or collect xx vampyre fangs in the new Mistmoore, or a quest like the 'protect the scout' events in Griming forest, or maybe a 'Kill the Owlbear denmother {or whoever the named bear is in Hollowshade when the bears own the zone}, completion of the quest and returning to the quest giver earns you faction / favor, adventure points, and XP.
EQLive has all the pieces that EQ2, WoW and other games have. They need to ****INTEGRATE**** features together!
That and upgrading the graphics, EQLive just plain thucks in comparison to newer games. They have done a lot of work revising / rebuilding code over the past few years. They can do a lot of stuff now they could not before (item database limits removed, triggered spawns / chests {epic quests for example}, instanced zones, character flags, story book, etc etc.
My biggest gripe with the EQLive design team is their refusal to integrate all the features they have developed.
Expansions do not need to be all about 30+ new zones, including 15+ instanced zones (which are really just 5 mini-mazes with 3 different 'skins').
Heck, you don't need to create new items either, add existing items into rewards tables as appropriate. The Wayfarer's AP awards are allegedly items 'they found on their adventures,' heh, why can't we find the same items? Imagine being able to buy a BoC for an appropriate amount of adventure points. (AoW is one groupable now, and the Vindi BP is comparable to a Royal Attendant BP -- fully decked out, so why not 6k AP for a BP? esp since you can get AP for quests that don't force you to do LDoN instances...)
They could dedicate the next 'expansion team' funds to a new 'integration project team' that works on thse objetives. The cost recovery could be handled as a one time increase in monthly access charges. I would pay $3-$5 more per month for free expansions and an integrated development process.
Comment Posted by: Loral on December 14, 2004 03:21 PM
I like your ideas about integrating tasks, quests, adventures, expeditions, and even perhaps some raid content into a single quest-journal like thing. Thats sort of what EQ2 did and I think it works a lot nicer than all of the separate systems.
I do think commercial expansions are important both to give us current players new shiny things to play with and also to get the game back out on the shelf twice a year to bring in new players.
What's wrong with new races?
Comment Posted by: Katahn on December 14, 2004 04:09 PM
New content is all fine well and good, but absolutely should not be disproportionately dedicated to a set level range and include features/game enhancements for all level ranges. Optimally it shouldn't be for a subset of levels in terms of adventuring zones in the first place, and game enhancements or "quality of life" improvements should be a part of the basic service.
I also believe that new zones should not require the expansion to enter and explore, nor should quest content be offlimits to anyone that isn't offlimits outside of them purchasing the expansion. Each expansion should include the basic game, and be purchasable as an option for the account.
"But if you have access to everything, why pay for it? What's the motivation?"
New expansions can introduce optional new starting cities, variant races, new or variant classes, differant societies of existing races, and so on. With content that is for all levels that logically includes appropriate newbie-through-epic adventure zones too.
Ruins of Kunark illustrates this point, minus the fact you had to purchase the expansion to get it. Legacy of Ykesha illustrates the point that anyone (who wasn't KOS or could avoid being killed by NPCs) could zone into the "new" Froglok city of Gukta.
Velious could have added the Coldain Dwarves as a new playable race, with appropriate adventuring zones out "the other side" before one needed to venture into the Great Divide. It might have included a variant race of Ogres that lived among the giants of Kael Drakkel. Perhaps either had a slightly modified class list, maybe the Kael ogres could be literal paladins to Rallos Zek instead of or in addition to being shadow knights? The Coldain dwarves might have added shaman to their list of allowed classes, or possibly wizard or magician to reflect the fact that those spells were available there. Gnomes might be given the chance to start out in the settlement of gnomish pirates in Iceclad.
With Shadows of Luclin, perhaps Shadowhaven, Katta Castelum, and/or Sanctus Seru could have become alternate starting cities. Perhaps instead of retrofitting beastlords into the existing starting cities they could intially be available to trolls, ogres, iksar, and barbarians that started from a Luclin city.
This effectively allows a new race or class to be a perk to those who bought the expansion, they get to start there and if the race or class only starts in the new or updated content then they get to be it. If a quest is for natives of a city only, and no way exists for non-natives to get access to it, then its a perk for those who paid for it, while allowing for it to expand the world.
Fixing the tradeskill system and engine, quest engine, clearing out old quests, graphical and engine updates of any sort. These things are what I expect from a monthly fee, not as add-ons to get me to buy content I'm not interested in. Expanded bank space was the primary reason people bought LoYkesha, and why it was among the top-selling expansion/extension for EQ.
The reason for not restricting zone access or fundamental game changes like level caps or AA, is so one can afford to integrate an expansion fully into preceeding expansions and not necessarily just into the original EQ world. Its also to not harm a sense of immersiveness at not being able to journey to the new and distant land...
Comment Posted by: Teremar on December 14, 2004 04:27 PM
New races are an awful lot of work. A new high-quality model, plus new graphics for all the armor sets. And then the whole reason they don't mess up balance much is because they don't matter much.
So it's not that I'd object to seeing them, it just seems like an awful lot of work for a gimmick. There was a regular plague of frogloks right when LoY came out, but how many people are playing them now? I remember some people in my guild starting a froglok day to play their brand new frogloks--I think most of them had quit the game within a couple of months. The new race may have kept them in the game for a very brief period, but the mere fact that they were so willing to put aside their previous chars was a warning sign that their interest had waned.
If I were SOE I'd be taking a very close look at the core of the game: fighting mobs in groups. SOE has been in reactive mode, just trying to fix some of the unintended consequences of their continuous ramping up of mob DPS. Time to start thinking about how they really want things to work. Major goals should be reducing LFG time and just plain making it more fun.
EQ has always been very good at having goals for people to work towards, but I feel like the amount of fun I have working towards those goals (mostly fighting mobs in groups) has declined significantly. That's why WoW was able to suck me in so easily--the combat is just plain more fun.
Comment Posted by: Daehron on December 14, 2004 04:36 PM
{What's wrong with new races?}
Nothing, per se.
But I would vastly prefer them to integrate their various and sundry quest / task / faction / tribute / flag / raid system, revise / update / breathe new life into old content.
Adding more player races now would complicate the revision / repair of the existing content.
SOE has had the "Progression means we don't touch old content" mindset for too long.
Initially, they were impeded by the original code. But they have reworked / rewritten so much of the original code, those impediments are gone.
Now the only thing keeping the EQLive team from making EQ's quest system as immersive, and interactive as EQ2 and WoW and CoH's is the direction and dedication of upper management.
Smedley needs to see that, and change how EQLive team (esp the marketers) operate. Forego and expansion or 2, announce a price increase 6months ahead, coupled with a commitment to a new integration/invigoration initiative, and a one time 'catch up' provision (a one time $20 charge to enable all prior expansions).
My suggestions are all predicated on changing how they handle expansions. Every expansion is an expansion of Classic EQ. Expansions do not build upon each other. The only exceptions are the Epic quests. The original Epics, and the new 1.5 and 2.0 epics do require access to several expansions. They need to stop developing expansions in isolation, it has become much to burdensome and is an extreme liability moving forward.
Comment Posted by: on December 14, 2004 05:00 PM
I disagree completely about new expansions requiring access to old content.
Up until recently, with the introduction of epics 1.5/2.0 especially, each expansion was pretty much an option, to which the user was able to CHOSE which content they wanted and not have to purchase anything other than the base product + expansion(s) of their choosing.
With the new epics, people now have to go back and purchase every single expansion if they wish to complete their new epic.
Now, if OOW had included in the price, access to every expansion thus released, I would have no problems with that.
However, OOW is like every expansion before it, an island unto it's own (excepting epics).
This is just one of the behaviors that will continue to drive players away.
If I was a new player that bought an OOW box, leveled up and realized that unless I go back and buy 7 expansions worth of obsolete content that I do not even need (other than for epics), I would be extremely irate.
If they plan to continue the path of cross-expansion content, they damn well better include access to all previous content with the purchase of the content which requires such access to old/obsolete content.
Otherwise, well, sooner or later you won't have any customers left to F over.
Comment Posted by: Pants on December 14, 2004 10:14 PM
"I want new expansions every six months. It adds a lot of excitement into the game and every expansion helps bring new players in, lost players return, and current players get a lot of fun. Even GoD brought in a lot of new people."
This is simply not true anymore, based on SOE's own reported numbers. Around the time LDoN came out according to their own numbers EQ peeked around 470,000 subscriptions. As of the 5th Anniversary which was just a few weeks after GoD came out EQ subscriptions were down to around 420,000. Who knows what they are now since they haven't released any updated numbers in months but from observations made by many people, including yourself in this article, there are way less people in the game right now. Now of course that doesn't mean they all quit, it just means people aren't playing, but at least some must have, therefore any people OOW brought in didn't last very long. Like I said new expansions will bring a lot of people back to check them out but they don't seem to stay back long. As for new people joining EQ now just because of a new expansion I highly doubt that and unless you show me some proof of it I won't. After all at the rate SOE comes out with expansions, if your statement about it brining back out people as well as new ones into EQ was true, EQ would still be climbing in subscriptions and at least be over 500,000, which reported numbers show not to be the case.
Comment Posted by: SFG on December 15, 2004 03:31 AM
Not going to go nuts here, but basically EQ1 is screwed because of marketing issues. My full post is here:
http://eqforums.station.sony.com/eq/board/message?board.id=Veterans&message.id=47110
abstract:
EQ2 being marketed as EQ2 is going to kill EQ1 due to the fact that new players won't bite on an older game when a brand-new one is available.
Solution: Re-release EQ1 under a different name.
Sounds stupid, but from a marketing standpoint not only would it work, but short of shutting down EQ2 its the only viable option.
SFG
Comment Posted by: Redcloud on December 15, 2004 04:52 AM
"If they hold off on expansions more people are going to leave. I don't want bugs any more than anyone else, but I also recognize that holding off an expansion to "fix bugs" isn't going to get us anywhere. There are always bugs."
This is the worst reasonning about development, ever...
This is the very reason people quit in frustration.
This is why people don't trust SoE and praise Blizzard.
/rant on
That specific mindset will be SoE's undoing (I hope) and I wish those who think like that in there to get kicked in the nuts for shoving unfinished and unbalanced bugged content as if we were some mindless drones. I can only hope for some hefty commercial pay back from the competitors to put that down their throat.
I like most of what the devs did in Omens and I praise Smed for postponing it and provide the quality of expansion we had this time. Yet it shouldn't be only when they felt the heat coming.
/ranf off
Someone mentionned the ramping up of DPS. It's an ever growing problem that is getting out of hand. At a raid level, you need a cleric in each group and a full CH rotation. That's 9 for groups and in theory 4 to 9 in rotation. That easily 10 to 14 on a regular basis. Add the unavoidable number of warriors to it and you have often 20 slots taken by 2 classes. Now I'd love to hear SoE explain how people are supposed to raid with a quarter of the raid made of a single class and the 14 other classes coming after warriors trying to fit in. Let alone the fact that playing a cleric doesn't seem THAT fun to have a quarter of the playerbase in love with it.
SoE needs to come up with other ways to increase difficulty that sheer dps. That to me is the reason number one of the survival or not of EQ1. If SoE finds a way to expand the game that doesn't stricly stick to that trend.
Comment Posted by: Pants on December 15, 2004 06:09 AM
If numbers for EQ are truly drastically down, and stay that way after a few months they are probably going to cut back on their dev staff anyway. This will mean less frequent expansions or worse quality ones if they try to maintain the 6 month deal. It will also mean a less likely chance old bugs will ever get addressed. I have no doubt that EQ will be around for years to come but I do have doubts on the quality of the game a few years from now. I think 3 years from now many glaring faults will dominate EQ and the only people left playing will be the diehards who for some unfathomable reason refuse to even try anything else, or who do but always have to compare everything to EQ which makes them come back since none of the other new games out there are really like EQ (thank God for variety).
I understand that many people are big fans of EQ and will defend it no matter what, and defend SOE no matter what they do but these people are starting to sound like idealists and irrational. I am a realist. Times change, games get old, better ones come out, companies stop supporting the games as much and people get tired of the old and move on. This isn't the end of the world but it will eventually happen to any game. It is at a slower pace in MMORPGs than other types of games but even they aren't immune.
Now if you ask me what SOE can do to keep people playing as long as possible I'll say don't stop making expansions but make them less frequently and make them bigger and better quality. Yes spend the time to go back and fix the big bugs, broken content and most importantly address every issue on every class top ten list. SOE themselves asked players to come up with these lists so why they have done so little on them is beyond me. This is one of the major factors that causes some people to quit in frustration. Some people have played their characters for 5 years only to see them become weaker due to poorly designed expansions that get harder and harder without a coresponding increase in power for that class, or worse yet badly planned and tested nerfs that do more harm than any good for class balance. These issues fruustrate players as well as the stonewalling on addressing them. At least put in some effort on it, say yes to some issues and then actually take action, or say no if the requests is more than SOE wants to do. This "currently being discussed" crap going on for 6 months straight only alienates the people who care about this and eventually angers them into quitting. The worst part is people who quit out of anger and frustration are less likely to come back to EQ, or play any other SOE product, than those who just quit out of burnout or RL issues. That is how to retain players as long as possible. Fix what exists now, provide better and more timely customer service, then come out with good expansions and stop giving people an excuse to leave.
Comment Posted by: Armarant on December 15, 2004 06:29 AM
"As for new people joining EQ now just because of a new expansion I highly doubt that and unless you show me some proof of it I won't"
I beleive that it is time for them to do a complete rework of the old world zones geometry wise.. release a new old world zone every month starting with the least in depth zone and working their way up releasing 1-2 every month.. and include stuff that EQ2 has to engage players such as player houseing and a upgraded task system//Quest Journal that allows you to get more then 1 task and has more indepth tasking..
I can hear the developers saying now "But it would take too much man hours to do this., and it would not be feasible" .. all I have to say is one thing.. cancel the next expansion and focus on a free expansion that updates the graphics thru the entire game and you will bring back alot of people.
P.s. <- is wondering what happened to the new character models that were rumoured for a late december release.
Comment Posted by: Pants on December 15, 2004 07:51 AM
Those are some good ideas. I wouldn't care about player housing myself but I know a lot of people would like to see it so that would be a good way to retain people. A graphics update would be a good way to attract new players though I'm not really sure if it'll work right with such an old game without really overhauling a lot of code, and past attempts have been dismal. I think they should probably outsource the graphic update job to some other company with better programming talent. Still these ideas would probably have a longer term impact on retaining subscription numbers as much as is possible with an aging game like EQ, rather than the method of hashing out endless expansions as often as possible which only retain interest for a month or two for many people, as well as continue to further inbalance some classes in relation to eachother and content.
Comment Posted by: Daehron on December 15, 2004 09:50 AM
/quote
I disagree completely about new expansions requiring access to old content.
...
If I was a new player that bought an OOW box, leveled up and realized that unless I go back and buy 7 expansions worth of obsolete content that I do not even need (other than for epics), I would be extremely irate.
/quote
Quick fact check - in order to get past lvl 50, you need Kunark, in order to get AA's you need Luclin, in order to get to 65 you need PoP, then you can get to 70 via OoW. Only expansions missing, Velious, LDoN, Ykesha, GoD. All are included in 'Platinum' for ~$30.
/quote
If they plan to continue the path of cross-expansion content, they damn well better include access to all previous content with the purchase of the content which requires such access to old/obsolete content.
/quote
That is **precisely** what I am arguing for. Inlcude all previous content in one new 'integration expansion' that gives players a chance to catch up with a $20-40 charge for all missing expansions, coupled with a monthly rate increase to cover costs of perpetual **FREE** integrated expansions.
Comment Posted by: Bolas on December 15, 2004 10:07 AM
*** Update Headlines ***
-----------------------------
* Backflagging
* Gates AA point refunding
* New Hot Spots
* Mistmoore
Backflagging *
-----------------------------
As you know, when a guild gains or loses members, they often find themselves dedicating a large amount of time re-playing content that they have long since completed in order to gain access to zones for newer members. During our Community Summit this last summer, and in many subsequent discussions, we have heard the recurring desire to find a way to ease the frustrations associated with this backflagging.
While the issue is not as simple as removing flags altogether (we feel flags are necessary for the zones they are currently attached to), we have looked into ways that we can reduce the frustrations of backflagging and feel that we have arrived at a fair and equitable solution, which is detailed below.
- A new implementation of the 85/15 rule has been introduced into Planes of Power zones including the Plane of Time. This should resolve the outstanding problems that occur from time to time with the current 85/15 implementation.
- The new 85/15 has also been introduced for the locked zones in Gates of Discord.
- An alternate means of flagging guild mates for locked content in Planes of Power and Gates of Discord has been implemented that will allow you to flag raid members for the zone you are in by completing raid content within that zone.
The implementation varies slightly from zone to zone to fit the story and nature of the zone, but in general will involve killing a raid target within that zone, looting an item, and completing a single group quest to change that item into a zone flag. This only applies to zones that don't already have a single group task or system to gain access.
AA Changes
-----------------------------
- Reduced the cost of many Gates AAs. Players will receive a refund equal to the difference on AAs that now have a lower cost. *
- Changed the monk AA Crippling Strike to an activated ability that does an eagle strike attack as well as a snare.
- Changed the monk AA Stunning Kick to an activated ability that does a round kick attack as well as a stun.
- Changed the monk AA Eye Gouge to an activated ability that does a tiger claw attack as well as reduces the targets offensive ability.
- Due to major changes in how these work, AA points for Crippling Strike, Stunning Kick, and Eye Gouge have been refunded.
- Reduced the reuse time of the Ranger AAs Frost Arrow and Flame Arrow to 3 minutes. *
- Hobble of Spirits will now stack with the Beastlord's proc buffs. *
- Fixed problem with the Beastlord AA Bestial Alignment where if you had maxed buffs this AA would not reset if it did not take.
- Duration enhancement focuses and AAs should now increase the duration of pet buffs.
- If your stored AA's go above 30, they will no longer be set to 30 when you zone. However, you should still not be able to gain more than 30 unless you get a refund, get the AA from a GM, or get an AA from a script. *
- Fixed an issue with Half Elf Paladins of Tunare and the Origin AA. *
- If your character was created before EQ started storing starting location data, when you log into the game you will now be prompted to choose your home city from a list of valid starting locations for your character. You will only need to do this once and once this has been set, it cannot be changed. This will correct the problems with the Origin AA not returning some characters to their expected home city.
Zone and NPC Changes
-----------------------------
- Hot Spots have been moved (level ranges are approximate): *
Shadeweaver’’s Thicket 1-30
Kurn’s Tower 10-25
Unrest 15-30
Crystal Caverns 25-35
Solusek’s Eye 25-45
Katta Castellum 30-60
Lower Guk 35-55
Nagafen’s Lair 40-55
Umbral Plains 50-60
- Respawn time for the bosses in Tacvi has been increased from 3 to 5 days.
- Some Tacvi loot has been upgraded. Bosses now drop more items per kill and some all new items have been added to the zone. *
- An alternate entrance into Tacvi has been added in Txevu that will allow guilds to bypass the Zun’Muram after they have defeated him at least once. Guilds that have previously defeated the Zun’Muram will need to do so at least once more before they can use the new entrance. *
- Gilipus of Ak`Anon has joined the Beta Neutral Faction. You will now be able to complete his quest without having to raise Gem Choppers Faction.
- The 3 Tormentors in the Jelvan event now share hatelist when idle or aggro. Anyone that is on one Tormentor's hatelist, but not on the other 2 Tormentor's hatelist will be added. This should make it difficult (if not impossible) to avoid AOEs.
- Modified the Warden Hanvar event, all guards should appear in their appointed places.
- Fixed a bug in Anguish that could make Warden Hanvar unkillable.
- Clicking on the door to Anguish while having the Seal: Mastery of All on your person will now prompt red text indicating your flag has been granted.
- The respawn of Globes of Discordant Energy are now tracked on the event timer for Anguish. The method for obtaining the Globes has not changed.
- The pile of stones that was used as a secondary zone between Dranik and Bloodfields has been removed. There is now an actual zoneline there.
- Plane of Justice - previously, you could not click the red teleports to leave the Seventh Hammer's room unless the Seventh Hammer was dead (or not up). This has been changed so you can leave the room as long as it is not aggro. If you click on a portal while he is aggro, you should get a message and remain in the room.
- Grennet Stormhand in North Qeynos is no longer a task master since he is part of a quest. His task master job has been taken over by Jorren Boxmover.
- Increased the maximum duration for all Labyrinth Trials from 1 hour to 2 hours. When an event is successfully completed, the instance will shut down in 30 minutes. If it is failed, the instance will shut down in 5 minutes.
- Changed the reclusive Girplan event in Bloodfields so that each NPC in the sequence stays up for 15 minutes instead of 3 minutes before depopping.
- Elemental NPCs are once again Charmable in Bastion of Thunder.
Epic Alterations
------