Results of Gnomish Curiosity
by Loral on February 21, 2005
For the past several weeks, since the release of the new Lavastorm, we've watched the progress of these little gnomes as they slowly carve their way into the northern rock of Lavastorm. Then on Tuesday night, with the help of a few enterprising adventurers, they broke through.
The release of Dragons marks the first time that players worked together on a quest to open up the new lands. This quest, only open for about two days, led players back to Ak'Anon, down into Kaladim, and hunting down rogue clockworks in Steamfont. On their return, the gnomes used the result to send in mechanical exploding spiders into the deepening caves. After a few dozen such quest turn-ins, the wall broke and revealed the Broodlands and Terranun, a lava dragon from the depths of Lavastorm, crawled up from his molten hole to eat adventures.
The release of Dragons, while not quite as brutal as the release of Gates of Discord, wasn't as smooth as the release of Omens. Due to the complexity of new systems, exploits were found and NPCs were wisked away to safe-houses as the SOE developers sniffed out the trails of dastardly criminals replicating new DoN crystals or using the guild vendors to duplicate gear.
A few bugs in the missions initially marred an otherwise strong new feature. A few players reported missing out on Mission rewards due to zoning while the reward was given. Until this gets fixed, make sure to stay in one place as a Mission reward is given.
No doubt complex systems like the new Mission system are bound to cause a few problems, even after beta testing. Nothing shines a light on bugs like multiplying your number of testers by one hundred.
A few players began to discover the power of some of the new Dragons of Norrath features. The bandoleer, for example, lets rogues macro the switching of daggers for optimal backstabs. Others have a new "get out of jail free" macro that switches them to their Overthere hammer if they think they are about to lose a battle. Though none of this is much different than keeping a bag open right next to inventory, the increased usability makes for very interesting combinations. The melees aren't the only ones having fun. Casters can set up macros to switch sets of hand-held focus gear depending on the spell they are about to cast.
As many players sat in their jacuzzis drinking Fizzlecutter and throwing wet towels at the gnome-in-the-wall in their Guild Hall, others began to uncover much of the mystery of the two Lavastorm camps and the work they have for us. Players already uncovered some interesting surprises. Faction rewards, for example, led one enterprising player to a new rewarded statistic-enhancing AA. Like the AAs given during the Muramite trials in Omens, these AAs are unlisted and no experience gain is required. Who knows how many of these hidden AAs are there and what other rewards will we find as our reputation grows with one of these two camps.
Some players speculate that these opposing factions will split players up between the two camps and make it even harder to find the group that you want. It seems SOE found a few ways to keep the camps opposing and rewarding to those loyal to each camp without harming groups.
Any character, regardless of their past alliances or religious choice, can join any camp by turning in tokens to the Wayfarers who whisper of your great deeds to the camp of your choice even though you would be slaughtered for entering the Hoard's camp. New solo tasks also let players earn faction with one camp or the other. I particularly enjoy the Wayfarer mercenaries and their desires to work both sides of the two opposing camps for their own gain.
The crystal mission rewards themselves, the commerce of DoN, can be traded and even sold in the bazaar. If you happened upon 150 ebon crystals you don't want, trade them for 150 light ones or cash them in. This will make for some interesting twists in the economy much the way Muramite runes effected the economy in Omens.
While the mission vendors currently took their carts elsewhere, the initial look at the rewards revealed a lot of powerful items. The vendors included focus gear up to level 5 for just about every focus type, hate-inducing gear for tanks, mana regeneration 2 and 3 augments, and armor with a base of 125 hitpoints and mana. Each piece of the highest end gear takes between seven to ten missions to acquire.
Between LDON, Omens, and Dragons of Norrath, it now appears that the gear available to a single-group hunter can take them all the way through Riftseekers, Ikkinz, Kodtaz, and the MPG trials. Equipment progress from level 1 to 70 seems much smoother now than it did during the reign of Planes of Power and gates of Discord.
The missions themselves stray far from the cookie cutter adventures of LDON. One particular mission, the recovery of the Dark Lady flower from Thundercrest Isle had my group discussing and puzzle solving as we carved through goblins, pumas, and ancient animated statues. Most certainly these missions will become well known and well understood in time, yet solving them the first time adds a lot of fun to what might otherwise be a simple experience or point grind.
On an unrelated note, we saw a particularly shrewd bit of marketing in Everquest 2. A new "/pizza" command opens up an external web browser and loads up the website for Pizza Hut. Slashdot, Boingboing, and even the more mainstream CNN all reported on the new feature putting millions of eyes all over the Everquest 2 logo. Certainly advertisement deals helped motivate this change, but the mainstream coverage of EQ2 alone made the feature well worth the cost of adding a URL to an in-game slash command. Even if they don't sell one single pizza, the attention to the feature make it well worth the cost.
As for the use of the feature or the implied push of advertising and how it will effect MMOs in the future, I will let you discuss amongst yourselves.
Loral Ciriclight
21 February 2005
loral@loralciriclight.com
Comment Posted by: Stylx on February 21, 2005 10:20 AM
[quote]Nothing shines a light on bugs like multiplying your number of testers by one hundred.
[/quote]
They only used two testers?
Comment Posted by: Bearage on February 21, 2005 11:32 AM
Bah Loral - say something you don't like about DoN - some of the flaws. Be more objective. Hell even the /pizza thing you like - shameless advertising on a game that people pay for..
Bearage
Comment Posted by: Loral on February 21, 2005 11:42 AM
Aparently not liking DoN is objective? Hmm.
Ok, I didn't like how we couldn't find the exit out during the Lavaspinner's collection mission last night. Thank Tunare a friend told me it was in the "Stonecluster" room, marked on the Mapfiend map. That was a bit frustrating.
I also don't recall saying I liked the "/pizza" thing. I thought it was pretty shrewd that adding in a slash command and a URL got them CNN coverage.
So rather than snipes and pointless negativity, how about we discuss the features we like or do not like with DON?
Comment Posted by: Melkor on February 21, 2005 01:27 PM
The Good:
Mission system, solo tasks, faction that matters, DRAGONS, and cutting down some of the gap between raiders and casuals.
The Bad: Mission merchants are missing, several classes will just plain have more trouble with the solo tasks than others, okay nothing bad about faction in my opinion, dragons will once again be privy to the raiding guilds, and the gap will be shortened, however widened at the same time by the new raid gear dropping (remains to be seen how big of a difference this might make).
The Beautiful: A QUEST JOURNAL!!! I shall make it my Squishy. More points based systems!!! (Yes, I love them, always have, always will ^_^; eheheheh)
The Ugly: ......The merchants are gone, way to go Sony... way to go. And now its time for the terms of my surrender, if Sony doesn't put the merchants back in and soon, this expansion is useless to me, I do not enjoy camps, I am horribly unlucky at rolls, and need before greed? That went out the window for most non-guild groups when just about EVERYTHING started costing 20k for the "junk drops". The need to explore? No thanks, I value my experience bar WAY too much at this point where a death can cost me several hours of work (When factoring in the lfg time)
ALSO, what in the bloody bleep bleep bleep is up with the Wayfarers?! I'd rather at level 66 STOP working for someone else and having them hand down the stuff they don't need to me, and so help me every time I see the words Morden Rasp I think about wrapping my hands around his NPC neck and it puts a smile on my face. Once again, the PC's are becoming a reactionary force to Morden Rasp's organization and it's discvories/ activities. NOT COOL.
Sorry for the rant, but the main selling point for me was missions, and watching my progress towards getting that next piece of gear... same way I got a maniacal grin on my face every time I could count the missions til my next piece of snot rag stuff in ldon >=D Knowing that I have the points, crystals, whatever, is not enough for me, I want a constant way to plan ahead for buying gear, fine, I can live without it, but at the moment it would be like saving up for a store that is "opening soon" without even knowing what exactly they sell.
Just out of idle curiousity however, what are slot 12 augs? =D must... have... MWAHAHAHAHA *cough cough* oooh tooh much smoking.
Beastlord pullin, head for the hills!
Comment Posted by: Loral on February 21, 2005 03:32 PM
There was some sort of shard duping exploit that required shards to shift to no drop and Adventure merchants to disappear until the exploit and its damage are fixed. They should return soon.
Slot 11 and 12, I believe, are special slots for the new Dragons cultural armor. Some of this armor has low stats until you put a very high stat symbol on it that boosts it to Elemental level.
Comment Posted by: Pants on February 22, 2005 01:32 AM
The /pizza thing is pretty funny. It seems like a good idea though if they are going to put advertising in EQ2 as a way to bring in extra money why not lower the subscription price a dollar or two a month also? I bet Pizza Hut paid good money to SOE for this. I kind of doubt it will sell many pizzas this way, after all you can't get much worse pizza than Pizza Hut's, and it probably won't bring many new subscribers to EQ2 just due to this, but it is a good way to get the Everquest name in the mainstream media on a positive note for once. Well at least it isn't a negative note about someone dying because of an EQ addiction or some people getting divorced over it LOL.
By the way Bearage you have to take this site with a grain of salt. It is mostly a pro-EQ website designed to promote the game in every article. You're not going to see many negative comments on much of anything and even if you do they'll be glossed over as a minor inconvenience or be blaming players for the problems in the game (like class balance issues are really all in people's heads and don't really exist). That's just Internet forums/websites in general, everyone has an opinion that is usually based on whatever agenda they have. Just read between the lines LOL.
Comment Posted by: Melkor on February 22, 2005 09:14 AM
Shards shifted to No Drop...? Does anyone know if this is a permanent or temporary thing for certain?
The only other question I have at this point (Somewhat rhetorical, in that I don't expect an answer) is this... Is this exploit going to cause Sony to raise the prices of the new gear?
God I hope not.
Beastlord pullin, head for the hills!
Comment Posted by: Redcloud on February 22, 2005 09:16 AM
The /pizza is a sad joke from bean counters to social handicaped geeks. Im sorry it's pathetic. Both ways.
DoN is ok so far. Doing the same mission over and over for faction is NOT fun because doing higher level content is either so un-intuitive or just takes entirely too long that it's just skipped. You do them once then stay AWAY of them. Until you get to do some specific content in the progression. Otherwise you just don't.
The faction bonus and the disc/spell level 69 is about the only benefit for raiders I know of. Gear isn't as far as I can tell. Maybe a couple of procs yes. Factioning takes entirely too much time to be fun considering that you might need to take the natively opposing faction due to lack of people in yours. I have no real use for the bandolier and the other potion gimmick at the moment so it doesn't mean much to me.
The guild hall teleport is handy. The guild hall instance doesn't remain active long enough though.
The mobs have too many HPs in 65+ zones to be fun or worthwhile. On the other hand DoN mobs don't hit too hard and that's a very big plus. Their dispelling activities should really get toned down not to become irritating.
The faction system isn't a guild choice but at an individual level. Which is an error in my opinion. You wan't everyone in the guild to help each other. Not split guilds in two.
Comment Posted by: Redcloud on February 22, 2005 10:02 AM
I read this:
"Posted by CAO- Lead Dev..
As many of you have pointed out, we originally added in some rules during beta to force players to kill an entire encounter to get quest updates. At the time, we thought of it as an exploit. Looking at the game as it is today we realized something important:
It'd just be more fun if we relaxed the rules.
The same thing happened with restrictions on many zones. We originally implemented long timers, group size restrictions and level requirements. But that turned out to be less fun than a more relaxed set of rules. So we changed it. Even now, we're looking at the access quest restrictions to see if it'd be more fun to relax some of them.
Sometimes, we'll keep rules in place to make sure we preserve challenge, long term value and prestige. Some quests in game will still require you to kill the whole encounter. Some zones will still keep their meaningful restrictions. But things that aren't fun will change.
Undoubtedly different people wiil have different ideas on what's fun and what's not. Occasionally updates will make the game harder or big things will change. But it will all be done with fun in mind.
We'll listen, we'll watch and we'll work hard to make sure that as many people as possible have fun for years to come in EQII.
"
And I had to chuckle for a good while since I allways hated the EQ2 vision of a pampered game with a straightjacket. Just MAYBE this isn't the way to produce fun content. Maybe. And points aren't fun either. Bean counters and point in-game lovers please go both to Sims and don't taint other games. Thank you.
/evil_me off
Comment Posted by: wombat on February 22, 2005 10:12 AM
Just as an aside... Sony has a Access account and you are supposed to be able to chat between EQ1 and EQ2, does anyone know how to do that? Does it require both games to be active or an access account to work?
And what do you type to do a /tell? Reason I am asking is that I am typing /tell EQ1."Server"."charactername" and nothing is happening. If you have access or both EQ1&2 accounts and want to log on when a raid is ready to EQ1 from EQ2 how can you do it if chat is down? Or am I using the wrong command?
If anyone can help please :)
Wombat
Comment Posted by: Loral on February 22, 2005 11:38 AM
To chat from EQ1 to EQ2 type:
[tell eq2.servername.playername
example: [tell eq2.antonia.pavlen hail
In EQ2 type /tell eq.servername.playername
example: /tell eq.quellious.loral hail
You can also join chat channels over on EQ2 from EQ1 but not the other way. Type:
[join eq2.servername.channel
and then
[1 hail to chat to that channel.
The whole "[" thing is a pain.
Melkor. Shards will return to droppable once they figure out and fix the whole shard duplication exploit.
Bearage, make sure to take the comments posted here with a grain of salt as well. Everyone has an agenda.
Comment Posted by: on February 22, 2005 11:42 AM
You have to use semi colon or left bracket I belive to send x-server tells.
; or [
Why? I don't know, I guess adding a new command was easier than using the old /boggle.
Comment Posted by: Wombat on February 22, 2005 08:12 PM
Thank you both for you comments, I am trying to keep in touch with my EQ1 mates :)
There arent many of them left.... :(
Wombat
Comment Posted by: Wombat on February 22, 2005 09:24 PM
Just a comment on DON, it appears that it is an overall plus from comments I have heard. However there was a side effect to its release.
It caused a number of people in my Guild (including me) not to renew their accounts and leave, perhaps earlier than they might have. Population issues and consequent poaching by shrinking raiding Guilds and lack of lowbies working their way up as replacements has lead to my old family Guild become severely less functional.
So people chose to leave rather than pay for an expansion they would have trouble using due to /lfg. As a Paladin in my last few days in EQ I got several tells for Rezzes, apparently so many clerics have left, Paladins have become popular for their 90% rez!
Has anyone noticed significant numbers returning due to DoN?
Wombat
Comment Posted by: Pants on February 22, 2005 11:35 PM
/yawn old schtick
Comment Posted by: Loral on February 23, 2005 07:59 AM
Many members of my guild returned since the release of Dragons of Norrath. I also found a couple of regular hunting groups to go on missions.
Comment Posted by: Redcloud on February 23, 2005 08:53 AM
Same here, a good number of people are on-line outside raids because of DoN progression. Groups are many and fast to make so far.
Difficulty is across the board out of whack but that's another subject.
Comment Posted by: Talaen on February 23, 2005 10:36 AM
On /pizza:
I have to agree that this is shrewd marketing on SOE's part. They got the name and logo and web site up everywhere basically for free because of it.
It's also pretty darned clever on pizza hut's part, and I wouldn't be surprised if soon you can order papa john's or domino's in WoW. Let's face it, the bread-and-butter players of these games (EQ2 and WoW especially) are pretty casual or time-restricted, and aren't really going to have a strong opinion about whether /pizza is evil. For them, it'll mean the husband and wife who play together three nights a week and on weekends (and there are a lot of those, I'm finding) will be able to just order a pizza instead of someone having to get up and go make dinner, or go find the phone to order something, or run out to pick something up. It's more convenient. Whether you like pizza hut's pizza or not, obviously some people do (or they wouldn't be in business), so they'll eventually get more customers out of this.
I personally don't mind the command being in-game because it's about the classiest way you can handle in-game advertising and we all knew that it was going to start cropping up. It's much better than seeing "brought to you by ...." on items or running past a food vendor with the McDonald's golden arches displayed right behind him. Having /pizza in doesn't harm the integrity of the game world, because it's strictly an /ooc kind of thing.
Dragons seems interesting. I really like the fact that they led up to release with a quest. They should have been doing that years ago. I'm not so thrilled that the Wayfarers are in it, but at least they're not quite as benevolent as they have appeared elsewhere now. I love the fact that factions matter again. Big plus. From the sounds of things, if they can fix the immediate bugs, they may have actually repaired some of the damage done to the game world's integrity by previous expansions with this - but time will tell.
I may pick the expansion up and log Tal back in and see how things are going on the Nameless one night. A lot of other players in the Claws are looking at it that way too. We're dedicated to EQ2 now, but of course there are some things that frustrate us there, and there are also some things we miss from EQ1. The biggest thing we all seem to miss is single-group instanced dungeons (like LDoNs, Gates and Omens instances, etc.). There's very few of these in EQ2 and none that you can really pick up and do at the drop of a hat. Sometimes you just wanna be able to do something fun with your group without having to deal with bunches of other players, and EQ2 really doesn't have a good way to do that, not yet. Of the single-group zones that exist, most are really just very small areas with 3-4 encounters in them. The others are epic, 2-3 hour quest-based zones. So it's one extreme or the other.
Another thing that bugs us about EQ2, oddly, is that the game just hands out exp to everyone. We shoot through levels before we even have time to experience a portion of the content available at that level. I'm sure a lot of people would look at us like we're crazy for saying this, but a lot of us older players kind of wish that experience gain wasn't quite so fast. It would give us more time to work on quests and such before the encounters become trivial. For most of us, turning off adventure experience really isn't an option either, though the ability exists. None of us want to stop advancing, and if we did we'd fall behind our friends and have to turn it back on, we just want things to go a little slower overall. At least in EQ1 you got to see a whole dungeon before you leveled completely past it, usually.
Led a pickup raid in EQ2 the other night. Much different than EQ1. Took a lot longer to get people together for it than it would have for a comparable mob in EQ1 (especially one that grants two nice quest rewards plus drops plus huge amounts of exp on defeat), but overall once we got going it was equivalent to the first time I charged Naggy as far as the thrill. We won, and pretty easily, but there's nothing like running into a room with a big, bad, hungry-looking mob rearing up ready to gobble you.
Anyway, I've heard rumblings that a lot of EQ1 people are dissatisfied with the simplicity and randomness of EQ2's raiding game. Nearly every raid target is either a random spawn or on a timer, meaning it's virtually impossible to plan a raid - it just has to happen. The guild instanced raids are pretty vanilla and boring, at least so far. Whether they'll change that in the future really depends on how much feedback they get, but in the short-term I wouldn't be surprised if some of the people who left EQ1 for EQ2 don't start trickling back in on a part-time basis to do a raid every week or two. That's one of the things you start to miss a little after a bit, even though you never really thought you would when you switched. Go figure.
Comment Posted by: on February 23, 2005 12:48 PM
re: /pizza
It's a straight up gimmick. Nothing has changed, if someone want to order pizza, they could have done so via several websites already.
I'm waiting for the progress bar message to change to: "Pizza Hut Pizza, the other white meat".
When that happens, it could just be the straw that breaks the camels back, so to speak.
Comment Posted by: Loral on February 23, 2005 03:53 PM
I like EQ2 but its hard for me to play two MMOGs and I still like EQ1. For me, the biggest problem in EQ2 is group experience debt. I hate inflicting it on others and I hate having it inflicted on me. It hurts pickup grouping for myself and for my guildmates who have nearly all kept a "group with guild members and friends only" mantra.
I was hoping that they would have simplified a lot of things in EQ2 but instead they seem more complex. Mobs have up to three different types of difficulty (con color, arrows up or down, "enraged"). The locked encounters and buff restrictions prevent people from helping eachother out with buffs, heals, or resses. I have three different modifiers of experience: base gain, vitality, and exp debt. Even my gear has con-rates on it. Its just all a bit complicated.
One thing that EQ2 is currently missing that is a great strength of EQ1 are group quests (call them missions or adventures or what-not, but quests is quests).
Many times in EQ2 I will begin a quest that a friend or group already has progressed in. Now we're out of synch and they have to wait for me. While they are working on me, another person joins at the beginning and now we wait again. The group members each work individually on their own quest but as a group we all aren't really working together on a single quest.
EQ2's a very strong game and I enjoy it a lot. It's not perfect, however, and there is still a lot in EQ1 that I want to do and love doing.
Comment Posted by: Loral on February 23, 2005 08:55 PM
In case you missed it, some servers are merging in March:
http://eqforums.station.sony.com/eq/board/message?board.id=Crier&message.id=84#M84
Comment Posted by: wombat on February 23, 2005 09:14 PM
Looks like they will test the waters with these two merges and see what happens. I must admit I thought we were going to see a 12 month inertia fest, but I was obviously wrong!
Off peak on my old server my Guild has reported no returns from DoN in fact several people left rather than buy the new expansion because of population issues, however obviously that experience isnt the same everywhere.
EQ2 seems to have problems at the higher end in terms of interesting tactical rather than zerg content. I am still at the lower end and levelling slowly, perhaps when I pick up spedd it will all zing by. I levelled slowly in EQ1 also as I hate grinding and I mix things up with trades. People who play in the fast lane will naturally go faster ;)
Wombat
Comment Posted by: Redcloud on February 24, 2005 05:49 AM
They caught the clue at last that 75USD for a transfer is a rip off? Can I say I just wish I had seen Smed face when he had to swallow that one after gloating about a milion UDS in transfers and name changes?
And give me a break with the /pizza thing. It has no business in game. The only good way to handle in-game advertising is NONE at all.
Comment Posted by: Loral on February 24, 2005 03:39 PM
/pizza put EQ2 into the Boston Globe today:
Comment Posted by: on February 24, 2005 05:03 PM
Ask not for whom the bell tolls it tolls for thee SoE.
Server merges LOL the beginning of the end of EQ ROFLMAO I love it and was dead on when I predicted it to my guild mates 6 months ago.
Comment Posted by: Solistic on February 24, 2005 05:25 PM
Hmmmm such a negative additude. We actually have had 3 new people join our guild since the start of DoN.
We posted on the Guild Lobby Board exactly what our guild is. A family guild that is extremely close and that raids rarely.
One of them had never been in a guild before. One was returning to EQ, and one was someone that got tired of the Raiding guilds. I think that is at least a slight improvement, and is a good omen to me.
Comment Posted by: wombat on February 24, 2005 07:00 PM
Server merges will extend EQ1's life considerably I think, as it takes the place of new players in keeping populations adequate.
Reducing transfer fees between accounts and servers will further help consolidation. Although I doubt this will happen soon, I have already been surprised by the announced mergers timetable.
If I had known about the beginning of server merges I may have delayed leaving EQ1, oh well too late now.
Wombat
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