Evil Agenda Report Card
by Loral on March 20, 2006
For every Everquest Fan Faire or guild summit I have attended, I have written up an Evil Agenda; a list of recommendations to SOE to help them improve Everquest. In today's article, we take a look back at the items of previous evil agendas to see where SOE has shined and where they have fallen away from the path. Using this, we can begin to formulate a new Spring 2006 Evil Agenda for the April 2006 Fan Faire. Please note, redundant evil agenda items were removed from this list.
Let us begin.
31 May 2004: Loral's Evil Agenda
Focus on single-group content. Grade: A
Since LDON, SOE has continued to add new single group content from levels 65 and above. Levels 20 to 50 have little other than LDON and Monster missions, however, taking the grade down to a B.
Offer easier corpse recovery in old world and GoD zones. Grade: A
The Dragons Guild Lobby corpse alters took care of this problem. Horrible corpse recovery is now mostly a dark memory.
Offer quest, adventure-point, or vendor alternatives for level 65 and GoD spells. Grade: C
Level 66+ spells have dropped in DoDH with increasing frequency, but I am not convinced that non-raiders have more access to spells. The quests and missions for spells in DON, DODH, and POR also help, but not for base class spells from 66 to 70.
Offer progressive content in 30 minutes or less. Grade: B
Monster missions offered great low time commitment content. The abstraction from actual play-characters, however, hurts their overall effectiveness. SOE should find a way to offer the same high-speed groups for actual play-characters.
Add higher-end equipment to LDON adventure merchants. Grade: D
We never saw any improvements to LDON gear and DON gear never reached the goals needed for single group hunters to progress. Gear situations improve every expansion but SOE continues to make single-group gear too low powered compared to the content that single group hunters can face.
Add more Lost Dungeon content including zones, adventure types, and rewards. Grade: A
DON, DODH, and POR all added some excellent single group missions with changing goals, good rewards, and new game play elements. The mission system lets Everquest lead the pack in group-friendly massive online RPGs.
21 October 2004: Evil Halloween Agenda
Add and Improve Quests. Grade: B
The expansion of the mission system and the task system since DON has added some excellent rewarding quests. The four arcstone quests are examples of excellent new quest content. The only thing lacking are sets of progressive quests for primary-slot armor which continues to only be randomly dropped. Using missions and monster missions as progressive quests also has a lot of potential.
Improve Grouping Options. Grade: B
The LFG tool, mission systems, monster missions, and global channels helps people find groups quickly but more could be done to centralize LFG areas. Why not have a huge cozy tavern where people can seek others for groups?
Focus on 90 minute events. Grade: B
Most missions and raids can be accomplished in under 90 minutes. Many monster missions can be done in under an hour. A few missions like the Cicero's Notebook mission and the Chamber Guardian mission seem to take far longer than they should for non-raiders with lower damage output.
Improve Encounter Variety. Grade: A
Some of the monsters in DODH show how encounters can vary for single-group hunters. POR took this further by adding unique game play elements to even basic zone population mobs. For example, the fire demons in arcstone will summon miniature versions of themselves to harass healers and the tangleroots will continually chain cast root spells that must be handled in order to defeat them. Encounter variety shakes up traditional button pushing and forces groups to change tactics depending on the mobs. Encounters like the five Spirit mobs in Arcstone give single-group hunters the feeling that raiders get facing big, powerful, and complicated beasts.
Make the Game Easier for New Players. Grade: B
The new tutorial, redefined interface, and Knowledge quests do a great job bringing players from level 1 to 10. From 11 on, however, corpse recovery is still complicated and hard to understand, groups are hard to find, and no clear progression path exists. Level 11 characters are released into a huge world without any clear idea where to go, who to meet, or what to do.
17 March 2005: Loral's Evil Agenda Spring 2005
Add new quests, tasks, missions, and mission vendors for levels 10 to 50. Grade: C
While scores of new missions exist for levels 65 and above, very few interesting or progressive missions have been added from levels 10 to 50. A clear line of missions from 10 to 50 with clear beneficial rewards help new players reach the higher levels without getting lost.
Add a tiered mission vendor loot system. Grade: C
SOE has tried a half dozen different loot systems and hasn't found the perfect sweet spot yet. DODH offered a wide variety of high-end items but only for a few slots. DON offered items for all slots but of limited power and with a system that reinforced bottom feeding off of the easiest mission. In POR, SOE goes back to the original loot systems from which the point systems originally broke away. SOE went full circle instead of evolving into a new system that offers all of the advantages of the older ones.
Continue to improve the Plane of Knowledge. Grade: D
The Plane of Knowledge grows older every day with no new improvements since its original release. It's time for Plane of Knowledge to be rebuilt in the style of the new Freeport.
1 June 2005: Evil Agenda, Las Vegas Summer 2005
Add a Mentor System. Grade: A
Spirit Shrouds and Monster Missions let players play together regardless of level, class, or equipment power. Characters earn experience and equipment based on the base level of their play character. While some worry that abstracting a player from their play-character could be dangerous, the base intent was met very well. Monster missions can bring friends together quickly, easily, and without concern for level, class, or equipment.
24 September 2005: Loral's Evil Agenda, September 2005
Further Improve Monster Missions. Grade: A
Prophecy of Ro introduced a new set of monster missions including the first monster raid and a progressive series of monster missions with an excellent augment as a reward.
Continue to Tie Future Expansions to Old World Lore. Grade: A
The uncovering and ascent of Mistmoore takes us back to the lore of the original expansions. Prophecy of Ro feels far more like Everquest than the far away lands in Gates of Discord and Omens of War.
Improve the Dynamics of Combat. Grade: A
Traps, spheres of influence, breakable objects, unique monster missions, unique scenarios inside regular instanced missions, and the newer creature abilities found in Prophecy of Ro all push to change combat styles from one encounter to the next.
Improve the 20 to 50 Game. Grade: D
While we have seen great changes in the game from level 60 and above, the 20 to 50 game continues to lag behind. Players seek out the fastest experience paths to reach the high levels and SOE does little to change that path. New missions, new evolving items, new quests, and greater experience rewards from group-based encounters could help build a progressive track for new players to follow. Right now, players are released into a wide open world with no clear idea where one should go to progress. Lower level groups are difficult to find and solo content is lacking at the lower levels.
Overall Evaluation
While many games offer expansions that simply introduce new content. SOE redefines itself with the release of each expansion. Entirely new gameplay options not only offer new variety into an old game but change the way the whole game is played. Players from the original, Kunark, Velious, and Luclin days would not recognize Everquest today. Missions and monster missions in particular have focused Everquest towards the important goal of getting players together, giving them a fun solid adventure, and rewarding them for their efforts.
The game is not perfect, however. Reviewing the recommendations from past years, we can clearly see a few gaps. The Plane of Knowledge, the hub of travel in Norrath, clearly shows its age. The existing player models are now almost five years old. Clunky, broken, and poorly performing; it is time SOE took another serious look at upgrading them. The level 10 to 60 game also needs serious work. While tracks of progression are clearly laid out from level 65 and above, newer players have no clear path for progression. They simply go where the experience flows best and grind until they get to the highest levels.
All of these things are fixable, although some; like new player models; are very expensive. As it has over the past two years, SOE can continue to redefine Everquest into a competitive and highly entertaining massive online game.
Prepare for next week we outline the Spring 2006 Evil Agenda.
Loral Ciriclight
20 March 2006
loral@loralciriclight.com
Comment Posted by: Redhenna on March 20, 2006 02:09 AM
"Most missions and raids can be accomplished in under 90 minutes. Many monster missions can be done in under an hour. A few missions like the Cicero's Notebook mission and the Chamber Guardian mission seem to take far longer than they should for non-raiders with lower damage output."--There is nothing wrong with having some content that takes longer than 90 minutes. In fact, I would argue that there is far too much of a focus on short time span content, to the detriment of the game.
"In POR, SOE goes back to the original loot systems from which the point systems originally broke away. SOE went full circle instead of evolving into a new system that offers all of the advantages of the older ones."--To my mind, the point system for loot is horrible. When doing one mission over and over again is more effective to gear up than progressing thru missions, something is wrong.
"Prophecy of Ro introduced a new set of monster missions including the first monster raid and a progressive series of monster missions with an excellent augment as a reward."--The idea of switching the reward away from exp, and to loot items is a slight improvement to MM's, but overall, MM's are still the hands down worst thing to happen to EQ, ever. The only approriate solution for MM's is to remove them from game, or make them strictly for fun, with no other reward. EQ should reward players for playing their characters, not reward players for NOT playing their character.
"Traps, spheres of influence, breakable objects, unique monster missions, unique scenarios inside regular instanced missions, and the newer creature abilities found in Prophecy of Ro all push to change combat styles from one encounter to the next."--I have never accused you of being an SoE puppet, but this statement comes close. Traps are basically unused, spheres of influence only thru aura's, which have not significant inpact on gameplay, breakable objects serve no purpose in EQ right now, except to mess up f8 targetting. Combat in EQ is the same as it has been(which is not a bad thing). The only positive in this direction is that EQ continues to use immagination to create interesting battles, and to get the most out of the EQ combat system.
"The level 10 to 60 game also needs serious work."--The last thing I will disagree with you on today. EQ can do everything in their power to improve the level 10 to 60 game, and it won't matter significantly. EQ is too old to have a real chance of drawing a significant number of new players. I suspect most new players EQ gets now are from people referred to EQ by their friends, and with some one to help them, new player experience to 60 is not bad. Using significant amounts of SoE's resources in an attempt to improve the game for almost no ine is not a good idea. SoE needs to focus mainly on retention of current players, which means focusing on 60 + content.
Despite the negative tone of this, it's not a bad article today. I just pointed out those area I disagreed, everything else is pretty right on.
Comment Posted by: Loral on March 20, 2006 06:26 AM
"To my mind, the point system for loot is horrible. When doing one mission over and over again is more effective to gear up than progressing thru missions, something is wrong."
I agree but I don't think the answer is to return to random dropped loot on named mobs. I think the loot system can be further defined to offer a bit of randomness with a bit of quest-rewarded loot and a bit of a tiered point system.
Bottom feeding off of one single mission is bad, no doubt, but there are other alternatives such as unlocking new tiers of loot based on sets of missions. What if Dragons of Norrath had a new tier of equipment above the base but that required players to defeat all of the Nest missions? Each power tier of loot could require defeating a set of missions.
I think the reward system in Depths of Darkhollow is also close but probably offered too much gear. If every set of completed missions offered up a nice class specific piece of armor it might have been more useful than offering up five generic neck items in two sets of missions.
The point I'm trying to make is that SOE has tried a bunch of different loot systems but in POR they went back to the same type of loot system we had when the game first came out. The other systems weren't ideal but they shouldn't just be tossed aside.
Comment Posted by: wormy on March 20, 2006 08:18 AM
SOE should make leveling 1 to 60 faster - EQ is in a state where the real game starts at 60 or even 65.
There must be a way to actually play the char and not some cheap MMs. But this requires some good thoughts and time to implement them... both things that SOE has thrown out of the window some years ago...
SOE needs to care more about their only good online game *eg*.
Comment Posted by: Percrucem on March 20, 2006 10:46 AM
"The point I'm trying to make is that SOE has tried a bunch of different loot systems but in POR they went back to the same type of loot system we had when the game first came out. The other systems weren't ideal but they shouldn't just be tossed aside."
Tossed aside? I think that's a little harsh. I know I may not be in the majority, but I still believe PoP was the best expansion in EQ (next to Kunark). It's not that SOE's saying "wow, our new loot system isn't working. Let's never do that again." What they did was continue on with what was working. Yes, it's the "old" loot system, but I don't remember them ever throwing it to the way side. DoD, DoN, and LDoN were fun and new ways to acquire loot, but they was always something random dropping off the nameds... who wants to know and plan their next full set of armor by reading Allakhazam and then doing missions where you know you'll get what you wanted. I think it destroys the re-playability (sweet, new word) of those missions. I personally don't ever want to do the Last Migration mission again. Why? Because I have everything I wanted from it and the risk is no longer worth the reward. They haven't thrown anything away, they're just creating more content that can be done multiple times with different results, spawning more people to "see what happens next." Sorry for the rant, but it just seems like otherwise you're reading the last few pages of the book before you start chapter 1.
Comment Posted by: sdfsdf on March 20, 2006 11:18 AM
If they make POK like freeport, that will be a step backwards.
Comment Posted by: Sithas on March 20, 2006 11:21 AM
Wow I can't believe people are still asking for faster leveling and better gear for non raiders. Leveling from 1 to 70 is so trivial now with hot zones, MMs (which I loathe), etc. I cant see how it can take someone more than a month of playing a few hours a week to get to 70 if they focus on leveling.
Now for gear, run through the DoD missions, then do the simple PoR missions in Arcstone and Relic and you have a near Time geared toon in a few weeks. The only class that this is not an option for is a tank class. They really have to progress in gear more slowly unless they are not the main tank on missions.
3 months of regular but not excessive play (I dont know, maybe 15 hours a week) and you can have a level 70 with near Time gear. I dont think thats too slow of a process. Considering its taken me 6 years to get that far. But I'm not going to complain about that anymore. Now I just take advantage of it. Admittedly you need a guild or at least a small group of friends that you can play with regularly but the game is designed for grouping.
I agree with Redhenna too about the loot systems (and everything else for that matter). I loved the way DoD is set up. Do a mission and move on to the next one. You can still repeat the ones you like to help out friends and for xp. More random drops would be nice as an added bonus.
Comment Posted by: Wolfkinder on March 20, 2006 11:27 AM
I think the last few expansions have shown a pretty decent variety on ways to gain upgrades. SOE with PoR appears to be going the more traditional route. However, I HIGHLY doubt this is the last expansion we'll have, and considering their record of making each expansion unique I'm would hazard a guess that the next one will have a different method of gaining gear.
I always wondered myself why they set up DoN to give points just by doing something like the Creator over and over again ad nauseum. They created a whole slew of missions for that expansion. They should have required some sort of mix for gaining crystals (you get exp either way so the exp people would play no matter what). I feel with the mission mix they should have done something more progressive to make people try out the different ones. Or maybe something that would have allowed an upgrade to a piece of gear for every set completed. (Sort of like the item for PoP that upgrades for each flag)
That's sorta one of the things about DoDH is they make a reason for you to do mission sets. I think Sony is finally figuring out that if you don't want everyone running to do the easiest grind for exp, you gotta give them incentive. Although, with MMs, they took two steps backwards.... (I'm impressed with the new Dain one though. I think they're learning what to do with these too)
--Wolfkinder
Comment Posted by: Quesci on March 20, 2006 02:17 PM
"Why not have a huge cozy tavern where people can seek others for groups?"
I like this idea, since my server can't seem to standardize on using the LFG tool or just /lfg on. Also, half the time people who have LFG on are looking for raid groups or only want groups in certain zones. As much as I hated the HHK monster mission, it sure was nice having a place to go where you got a group in under a minute.
A tavern would be awesome if buffs didn't decay inside. There could be rooms or tables for people who were looking for groups in certain places, while more general LFGs could just hang out at the bar.
Comment Posted by: sdfsdf on March 20, 2006 03:09 PM
Geee, why not simply make the guild lobby and POK pause buff timers like the guild hall /shrug
but then again, POK already serves as a 'huge cozy tavern'... if got any smaller or 'cozier' then I would avoid it even more than I already do.
Comment Posted by: Sunshadow on March 20, 2006 05:35 PM
While having a different loot system for every expansion is interesting, there really needs to be some way to link them. At the moment LDON points are on good in LDON, DON points only work in DON. Soon DoDH mission will be hard to do also due to the lack of interest.
There need to be some consious method built into each expansion that caters for when the expansion grows old. Examples could be like being able to trade Ldon points for DON crystals and vice versa or removing any flag/key requirements after 18 months also removing the 3 person requirement on old content as well.
Comment Posted by: Sithas on March 20, 2006 07:16 PM
"There need to be some consious method built into each expansion that caters for when the expansion grows old. Examples could be like being able to trade Ldon points for DON crystals and vice versa or removing any flag/key requirements after 18 months also removing the 3 person requirement on old content as well."
Good ideas all. I'd make the flag dropping a 2 year deal though.
Comment Posted by: Nolrog on March 20, 2006 08:07 PM
"Good ideas all. I'd make the flag dropping a 2 year deal though."
Think about how many idiots would be running thru Anguish right now if they did that.
Comment Posted by: Loral on March 20, 2006 09:00 PM
Flags != intelligence. I'm betting there are lots of idiots with Anguish flags already.
Comment Posted by: Simkine on March 21, 2006 07:31 AM
It was a big feat to get your VT flag back in the day but honestly, how many guilds farm VT for gear now? Or VP, ST, PoP Gods. Even wide open they'd be pretty empty - anyone who has raided VT knows, even at level 70 that zone is a pita to farm.
So what purpose is there to keep blocked content on rewards that hardly matter. Sure, there are a few decent items in those zones but hardly worth keeping in the bank for players who went through this content.
There's always this idea of "ubers vs casuals" where casuals somehow get the shaft expansion after expansion. Most of the complaining is from frustration of not being able to compete fairly because they're two steps behind and the next expansion raises the bar yet again.
I know a few "casuals" who play more than "ubers" and I think there are lots more who fall into this category. They can't catch up due lack of critical mass to beat the older content and be gear-capable for the next. The others who simply don't play enough or are motivated enough, open zones will do nothing for them anyway.
Make a server-wide quest that unlocks these zones and let people have a chance to gear up a little bit and see some neat stuff. They could make a server-wide quest that destroys the entire GoD expansion while they're at it =p
A zone like Anguish is instanced anyway and frankly any bazaar geared, 10AA peep would get a beatdown. Anyway, the 6 trials don't have to be beat by everyone since you can get willed in and get a key making it hardly exclusive.
Comment Posted by: sunshadow on March 21, 2006 04:29 PM
Again, I see people focused on todays game not looking at the futute or the past. Anguish will go the same way as NToV over time. However it will have even less visitors, why cause you need flags to get in. At some point people will stop doing the Flags and then the zone really dies because the new people coming up won't be able to get there because of the flags.
Another example is that next year the Fables will hit the moon, How many people are going to do the VT key to get the Fables inside,none probably. So the one chance this zone has of seeing a decent amount of traffic again will be stunted by the fact that few active characters have a key.
Comment Posted by: Armarant on March 23, 2006 05:46 AM
Sunshadow Wrote:Again, I see people focused on todays game not looking at the futute or the past. Anguish will go the same way as NToV over time. However it will have even less visitors, why cause you need flags to get in. At some point people will stop doing the Flags and then the zone really dies because the new people coming up won't be able to get there because of the flags.
Considering there are still people raiding thru the planes of power progression and into time. and probably still some guilds working on Luclin progression I dont think Anguish is going to go be abandoned anytime soon, most importantly should be noted is that there are alot of other places to get gear without turning to a place like vex thal, anguish, time, and all the other locked zones so I have yet to hear a compelling reason why these zones should be unlocked.
Comment Posted by: Armarant on March 23, 2006 05:51 AM
Simkine wrote:I know a few "casuals" who play more than "ubers" and I think there are lots more who fall into this category. They can't catch up due lack of critical mass to beat the older content and be gear-capable for the next. The others who simply don't play enough or are motivated enough, open zones will do nothing for them anyway.
Make a server-wide quest that unlocks these zones and let people have a chance to gear up a little bit and see some neat stuff. They could make a server-wide quest that destroys the entire GoD expansion while they're at it =p"
yet those "Casual" players were never motivated to join a raiding guild where they could get access to the content. as I mentioned in my last post there are plenty of places around the world where a "Casual"* player can get good items. they dont need to be compareing themselves to raiders when doing this either, raiding gear is a perk for joining a large organization of players and working your way thru to get the items. as long as the game is not heavily balanced toward raider gear I dont think it should matter to anyone casual or otherwise.
*Obviously the people he says are Casual are not casual in my definition.. Casual in my definiton is someone who plays 1~2 hours when they are on.
Comment Posted by: wormy on March 23, 2006 02:26 PM
----- Armarant -----
yet those "Casual" players were never motivated to join a raiding guild where they could get access to the content.
-----
You don't know what you're talking about!
Raid guilds REQUIRE their members to be online, many raiding guilds throw peoples out who have 'not enough' play time! Being in a raiding guild is HARD WORK.
There are a lot of players that play many hours, but not always during the required times.
Raid or die! That's EQ right now.
And btw, PoP killed a lot of guilds - required flags/keys, cock blocking/blowing of rare spawns. Yes, those where the good'ol days of grief.
And yes, only those with no RL enjoyed it.
Comment Posted by: sunshadow on March 23, 2006 04:32 PM
Really there is not need to get into a whole Raider Vs Casual debate over this. A very simple way is that once a zone gets under a certain level of usage it get unlocked. That way if people are still actively using these zones then they remain locked, if not then who cares if they are unlocked to allow casual players in (or more likely raids by smaller guilds). Just take a step back and apply some common sence to the situation.
Comment Posted by: sunshadow on March 23, 2006 04:39 PM
Something else I would like to see on the "Agenda" is how SOE are planning on handling the ever increasing zone count. This is a major factor in making grouping hard. The population is too spread out.
Comment Posted by: Armarant on March 23, 2006 07:34 PM
wormy wrote:You don't know what you're talking about! Raid guilds REQUIRE their members to be online, many raiding guilds throw peoples out who have 'not enough' play time! Being in a raiding guild is HARD WORK. There are a lot of players that play many hours, but not always during the required times.
....
and yet there are plenty of raiding guilds that raid at different times of the day. people are not just stuck to a US based guild for raiding. they are free to join a euro guild. a english guild.. or perhaps a guild that has flexible hours.
I know exactely what I am talking about.. not every guild starts raiding at the same time and ends at the same time. and just because you have the time played during odd hours doesnt give you the innate right to get the gear.
Comment Posted by: Loral on March 23, 2006 09:18 PM
"Something else I would like to see on the "Agenda" is how SOE are planning on handling the ever increasing zone count. This is a major factor in making grouping hard. The population is too spread out."
I think these are two separate things. I don't think SOE handling the increasing zone count will help make it easier for people to group. They can't shut off zones and they can't revamp them all. The best they can do is make clear areas where grouping is more productive and thus more plentiful.
Comment Posted by: Beggin on March 24, 2006 09:39 AM
You could remove all kunark, Velious, PoP, and GoD zones and do little to improve grouping - Practically no one uses these zones for anything but farming items or standing around.
Grouping comes about when areas can sustain it. Most recently that has been instanced monster missions. In the past it was Seb, Velks, Karnors, LDoN, DoN.
DoD zones didn't make make grouping friendly zones. PoR I dunno about but looks more like raid friendly zones.
Comment Posted by: wormy on March 24, 2006 10:30 AM
----- Armarant -----
and yet there are plenty of raiding guilds that raid at different times of the day. people are not just stuck to a US based guild for raiding. they are free to join a euro guild. a english guild.. or perhaps a guild that has flexible hours.
-----
You still don't get it - there are a lot of people out there that don't work 9 to 5 on 5 days a week, every week in the year.
So, you're (flawed) logic won't work.
Guilds with "flexible" hours need about 300 members to work, fixed time zone guilds need far less. They need just enough of the "Holy Trinity" to get the show running. But those needed classes stop playing because of their RL restrictions, or because they are thrown out due to not enough raid attendance.
And there may even be a language barrier for a lot of SOE customers, so changing guilds may not be an option.
And that's why many players left EQ for "better" games, games that suit their RL far better.
EQ is an old game with a very old logic behind it.
BTW, in the last dev chat someone asked a good question:
-----
Brannoc - *Doomy* What is EQ doing that will put it above other mmo's?
Raghnell - I think the question is always what are other mmos doing to catch up with EverQuest
-----
Raghnell doesn't get it, too *eg*
Comment Posted by: Rockvec on March 24, 2006 10:33 AM
"The best they can do is make clear areas where grouping is more productive and thus more plentiful."
I think there's some irony in you mentioning this and other people shouting for nerfs to Creator, MMs, and other "productive and thus more plentiful" types of content.
The opportunity for grouping is there, however any particular bit of content that becomes mainstream or too "productive" is instantly decried as needing a nerf.
In essence, on one side of player's mouths, they'll make the claim that there's not enough groups, however on the other side they'll call for a nerf to any content that is generating "too much" grouping.
As you stated Loral:
The best they can do is make clear areas where grouping is more productive and thus more plentiful.
SOE already does this, however when the loot is too good, or the XP too much, there's a nerf call. The unintended consequence of this results in the loss of acceptable or "productive" content.
No one is going to do content that is not productive.
My hats off to those who feel the need to dictate how these folks should be playing the game.
In my opinion if they want to run creators - let em.
If they want to do stupid MMs - let em.
I'm in a DP guild, I love raiding, I hate MMs, I hate Creator as well, but I guess I'm not as conceited as some other players on this board, and thus I don't have the petty jealousy that some of you have for anyone that might get ahead in particular content.
Comment Posted by: Loral on March 24, 2006 10:46 AM
I think SOE needs to take a deeper look into why monster missions and creator missions are so popular and make more content along those lines. Granted, the bottomfeeding off of the single most productive missions needs to be quelled but consider missions where your experience gain goes up with the variety of missions one undertakes? What about missions that offer excellent rewards up front but little on their second or third go?
Comment Posted by: Simkine on March 24, 2006 11:52 AM
I don't think it's that easy to make progressive rewards in a DoN-like environment. How many people maxed their LDoN charm? Instead of joining a group to equally share in the reward (points), you're trying to get people to do _your_ reward. Unless you have a very close knit group, this falls apart quickly.
I'd like to see it work, I personally did around 75% of the DoN missions and only did Creator maybe 5 times (3 of which where 3 man caster only groups). I just don't think that is how people play this game.
Comment Posted by: Nehtaniel on March 24, 2006 12:39 PM
"Traps, spheres of influence, breakable objects, unique monster missions, unique scenarios inside regular instanced missions, and the newer creature abilities found in Prophecy of Ro all push to change combat styles from one encounter to the next."
Do you truly believe that the new player traps system has been a success? Or that breakable objects serve any real purpose other than giving necros and sk's lifetap targets? Maybe if the breakable objects did something, they would have more of a purpose, but as it is right now, they're just something lying around. Also, considering that they can only be found in a couple zones its hardly a game changing occurance.
Comment Posted by: Wolfkinder on March 24, 2006 03:38 PM
Loral wrote: "What about missions that offer excellent rewards up front but little on their second or third go?"
Hell, everyone loves double exp. They should just make every mission you do double exp the first time you do it. So, with DoN, the first Creator you do is double exp. After that, it's just regular. With all the missions offered, people who really like that double exp will move through them all, thus at least not wasting content and avoiding "bottomfeeding."
I think the Dain missions are a good example of another way of tying missions together for a reward. Do MMs but make it so you do a series for a decent reward instead of pumping the same one for exp for 8 hours.
--Wolfkinder
Comment Posted by: sdfsdf on March 24, 2006 04:34 PM
EQ needs dynamic EXP mods for zones, missions, and mobs. Extra Exp for the first time mission completion is a good idea too.
Also, dynamic loot, so that the longer a mob has been alive, the better loot it drops (within its loot table).
Comment Posted by: none of on March 25, 2006 12:12 PM
so, from all this, i assume loral believes all advances in eq over the last few years, are because of him ? since its his "report card".
Comment Posted by: kanas on March 25, 2006 01:21 PM
none of wrote: "so, from all this, i assume loral believes all advances in eq over the last few years, are because of him ? since its his "report card"."
I do think Loral gets a big head sometimes. He has his place in the community, but EQ isnt what it is today because he has pressured sony or whatever to do so. I've been reading Loral's postings for years and I dont think he could take the credit for any changes in EQ, even tho he'd like to try.
Comment Posted by: Armarant on March 25, 2006 09:15 PM
none of wrote: "so, from all this, i assume loral believes all advances in eq over the last few years, are because of him ? since its his "report card"."
Kanas Wrote:I do think Loral gets a big head sometimes. He has his place in the community, but EQ isnt what it is today because he has pressured sony or whatever to do so. I've been reading Loral's postings for years and I dont think he could take the credit for any changes in EQ, even tho he'd like to try.
...
and you two are missing the reason why he posted this. from his past agendas he took the ideas and rated how sony has progressed since he brought the ideas before them.
he isnt saying he single handedly made them do any of this stuff, he is just pointing out what he thinks the state of the game is based on what he thinks the state of the game should be.
Comment Posted by: Loral on March 26, 2006 11:43 AM
I knew there was a certain amount of arrogance with an article like this. I certainly don't take credit for the obvious issues I bring up in Evil Agendas. I don't try to find obscure issues that no one else has brought up before - I try to bring up the issues that have been discussed so often that they get lost in the noise. I try to articulate what I believe to be the most important issues facing Everquest at the time of the writing.
It isn't about me, though. I don't take any credit for the changes that we've seen. I don't write Evil Agendas because I want to gain popularity. I want to see Everquest become a better game and the Evil Agendas are one tool I use to try to make that happen.
I've said it in the past but I am not important enough for anyone to care about. I am just a player who writes articles about a game. No one person, whether a fan, a writer, a board poster, a guild leader, or a developer is important. The issues are important and the feedback that gets the game changed is important.
If you disagree with the items on the Evil Agendas of the past or the one I plan to write this week, post some feedback about the items you don't care for or the items you think were missed. Better yet, write your own list of top issues and post it over on the EQ Live forums where developers actually read and consider what is posted. Each of us has a voice. Use it.
Comment Posted by: anon on March 26, 2006 04:07 PM
Loral, I just read your Caster's Realm article that you quote % of players levels. I have to say, that is a very misleading statistic to base anything on.
Take a look at any server and compare the 65-70 players online to ones 10-64.
In my own case, I have 8 characters on one account. One is my main, level 70. The other 7 range from 25-50 created over the years and abandoned after PoP. My one account shows only 12% of characters are over 50 in EQ!
A more accurate way to depict the playerbase would be to only choose the highest level character on active accounts.
Get Kytherea to spit that number out, then people can figure out where EQ needs to go.
Comment Posted by: Loral on March 26, 2006 05:37 PM
I had the following line in that same article:
"It is easy to argue the validity of these statistics, but even with a high margin of error, the fact remains the same. Most Everquest characters are not raiders."
I'm not convinced that doing a /who all at any given point in time on any given server is less of a useful statistic.
I agree that your idea for a statistic is better than the one given. I would rather have the percentage of active accounts with any character flagged for Anguish or Time to truely get a measure of raider to non-raider.
Comment Posted by: Armarant on March 26, 2006 09:03 PM
Loral Wrote:I'm not convinced that doing a /who all at any given point in time on any given server is less of a useful statistic.
I agree that your idea for a statistic is better han the one given. I would rather have the percentage of active accounts with any character flagged for Anguish or Time to truely get a measure of raider to non-raider.
-----------------------------------------
should also take into account ex-raiders .. people who have flags for Time and Anguish but dont actively raid there anymore. also percentage of people with Demiplane flags and percentage of people with the new Mistmoore flag..
I think that takeing a active poll of the community during peak and off peak hours is the best way. but it is not without its flaws, they should of course exclude all players who are set to trader mode in the bazaar.
I think it would also be a good idea to start encouraging more people to use the LFG tool. perhaps by giving you a reward to not group with the same people every day, I dont know what types of rewards these could be but they could work on a 24 hour basis and have the following requirements
1) your group must last at least a hour
2) your group must have at least 4 new people every time to be considered grouping with different people
3) you must group in a different zone every new group
the rewards could perhaps be stuff like 1 Charge of double experience after you had so many groups that you can /claim or perhaps some other consumeables that might improve your game play.
they could also have anti cheating measures.. so you dont just rotate out friends the computer would notice if the same people keep showing up each group just to try and fool it.
Comment Posted by: Richard Hinson on March 27, 2006 06:55 AM
Loral / Armarant,
You know the real offence here is not that you two are spending esoteric time wasting debating what is or is not the "best" way to do a head count.
The offence here is that SOE could easily provide you both and everyone else any number of simple tools to pull this data out of the live servers.
The EQPlayers.com data, flawed though it is could be used to do a quick scan using any of a dozen variables.
You could do a quick search for all players > level 10 with x flag(s) with a log in date > y. And there you go, the anguish flagged players that logged in during the last month.
The EQPlayers.com data is already aware of what characters are on what accounts. So you can already filter out the characters by account. i.e. if Johnny has an account with two character both angished flagged you could count him as two, or one, depending on how you wanted to do your count.
Need to do more? Then compare the EQPlayer.com account names vs. the billing names+address list. There, you can now filter out not just the characters per account, but accounts per players. i.e. Johnny may have two accounts, two angished flagged characters on one account, and one on another, you could count him as three or as one, depending on your search limits.
The net result is, yes, SOE could tell you in exact, bleeding detail exactly how many lard butt ridden day light phobic people are actually playing the game. At any level of play, by any number of parameters that would solve oh so many of these long haired short whitted arguements of casual vs. raider, hardcore vs. casual, trade mule vs. real, main vs. alt., blah blah friggen blah.
But rather than do that, they chose to give fluffed up crap numbers.
What is mind boggling about this is that you two, two otherwise intellegent people, are rather than screaming bloody murder at SOE for being a bunch of con artists, you sitting here debating what method to use to come up with numbers of your own.
Seriously Loral, when are you going to use the platform you have been givben and stand up and scream for some results??
Comment Posted by: Wolfkinder on March 27, 2006 11:08 AM
Richard Hinson does have a point regarding all this number quibbling. I was thinking the same thing myself. I might have phrased it more......diplomatically:) But it is a shame we have to guess at all of this and try and determine methods when Sony must have all of this information at their fingertips. It should be the simplest of programs that could break down flags, keys, number of x items, number of y spells, activity of a character. They should be able to print up a nice sized phonebook of data regarding all the questions every number grinder has had about EQ. But, instead, we do get fluff.
Why is that? And why does Sony not truly answer the question of raider versus casual? How many true raiders there are? How many true ACTIVE raiders there are? I don't know that I care all that much myself. I enjoy the game. Hell, I enjoy the debates about the game:) But it would give you guys that want to discuss these things more fully the proper facts instead of the guesswork we have now.
BTW, my conspiracy side believes this is why EQPlayers was so buggy when it came out (and still is). Strange that the one tool that could have gathered some of this information together has so many issues that my wizard still is shown with gear he could never wear in game and has never owned:) And don't give me that "update your character" stuff. Updating a character should update from past gear to gear you have now, not erase gear that never existed (and I enjoy people trying to figure out how he got such non-wizard garb)
--Wolfkinder
Comment Posted by: Teremar on March 27, 2006 10:07 PM
You're both assuming EQ stores its characters in a standard, general-purpose database that you can run queries against. That's certainly the case for more modern games, but I'm going to guess EQ's data structures are much more specialized. MMORPG designers didn't just casually shell out for Oracle licenses when EQ was first designed. The bugginess of EQPlayers is further evidence.
I'm not saying it can't be done--SOE has done such things in the past (Anyone remember "Fippy's Facts"?). But it's probably not as easy as writing up a simple SQL query and running it. So then you have to ask what SOE stands to gain by providing such information.
Comment Posted by: Simkine on March 28, 2006 05:52 AM
I wish I could dig up an old article about EQ's database but I can't find it.
However, this is interesting..
" Sony Online Entertainment Selects EnterpriseDB Database and Makes Strategic Investment; Leading Online Games Company Builds Scalable Infrastructure with Open Source Database, Makes Equity Investment in EnterpriseDB"
Comment Posted by: bleh on March 28, 2006 11:03 AM
dev's have said (repeatedly) that eq characters are stored in a flat text file, ergo one reason why it is difficult and error-prone to make changes.
Comment Posted by: anon on March 28, 2006 12:38 PM
"dev's have said (repeatedly) that eq characters are stored in a flat text file, ergo one reason why it is difficult and error-prone to make changes."
Joe Sixpack might believe that, but it is so obviously false. SOE programmers love to say how complicated and impossible things are and to their credit, or rather experiencing their patches, they probably believe that for good reason.
To any other programmer, this is bunk. If they want to argue that flat file manipulation is slower than a hierarchical or relational database, I'll agree with that. But don't go and make a fool out of yourself for saying it's more error prone or difficult. That is bull.
Comment Posted by: Loral on March 28, 2006 02:17 PM
I am no DBA but I have worked with RDBMS-backed websites and flat text systems. On systems with a large number of records, its very hard to do a lot of good data manipulation on data stored in flat text files. IO alone makes it error-prone and poorly performing.
Obviously I don't have any intimate knowledge of how the systems at SOE work so I won't even try to guess. I do know that primary character data are stored in text files as stated above.
I certainly don't subscribe to any conspiracy theories. There is certainly propriatary data SOE doesn't want the public to see such as the exact numbers of players.
Whenever they do give us a peek under the hood, as they did in Kytherea's Keepsakes, some jackass goes and writes a big-head article on Caster's Realm about how it proves that the Casuals should inherit the earth! No wonder they don't give us a lot of data.
I did ask Kytherea if she might run queries on the number of active accounts with Anguish flagged characters. Due to the complexity of the query, higher priorities, and the misuse of any information SOE seems to release, I wouldn't expect it any time soon.
Besides, in the grand scheme of things, it just doesn't matter. I used the statistics in the other article simply to say "there are a lot more non-raiders than raiders" which I still stand by even with a high margin of error.
Comment Posted by: Loral on March 28, 2006 02:19 PM
By the way - I will be working on the Spring 2006 Evil Agenda this week. If you have any items you think are high priorities, speak now. Either send me an email or post here. I won't guarentee that any of these will make it into my list, but I am certainly interested in what people think are the top five most important things on which SOE needs to work.
Comment Posted by: bleh on March 28, 2006 03:15 PM
dynamic exp/loot as per the post further above, would help make general exping/exploring much more 'fun' and interesting than sitting in the same spot(s) repeatedly killing the same mob(s) over and over again.
also, consolidation of the ldon/expedition/task/shared task windows would help streamline the UI and hopefully get some the stupid bugs fixed that cause people to lose quest progress (like for example getting kicked out of a task while the yes/no dialog is up, will cause you to 'quit' the wrong task).
Comment Posted by: Ogulbuk on March 28, 2006 04:04 PM
Bottom feeding missions for points... repetitively doing the same one over and over.... those things are issues indeed that prevent a real implementation of true useful items bought with points earned on any repeatable content.
I was talking with a friend the other day and thought of something that may help eliminate bottom feeding though. The idea came while talking about how EQ2 handles the new Achievement Points. Similar to AAs, but earned by doing things like exploration, the more you do the same thing the less benefit you see from it.
So there it hit me, how about the first time you do a mission, you get 100% point reward, the second time you start seeing less, lets say arbitrarily 90%, until you get to a messily 5% of the reward. "Restoring" you to max would involve doing other missions that may be harder. Also if you do the same two missions, and both are at 5% reward, they would not really give much boost to the other, yet if you do one mission that is at 100, it may boost your other missions by a 5% or so. You can also use time to restore the rewrd, so that a player that leaves for a month does not come back to find himself still being penalized against one mission.
This would lure/force people away from doing the easy stuff, and the easy stuff would self-nerf itself as you do it over and over.
Comment Posted by: Sunshadow on March 28, 2006 04:43 PM
Totally disagree with Ogulbuk, self nerfing content will kill the game. Rather SOe should look at what content people do constantly and ask themselves why? Once they onderstand the why then it may be that they should design more content along the same lines.
The creator was not "Bottem feeding" it just had the right elements in it to make it popular. If we go and nerf all the the popular things in the game, I am sure it will still be fun, NOT!!!!
Instead if there were 4 or 5 missions designed with the same "right elements" in them it removes the boredom that is generated from continually doing the same mission over and over again.
With regards to group content, most of the time if I'm LFG I get invited to join either a WoS, MPG or RSS group. Why are these zones "pickup group" popular still 2 years after their release.
Why don't groups form in the newer zones? Is the risk to high? are they a pain to get to? are the rewards still better in the old zones?Is the fact you can port to WoS a factor?
These are things which need to be addressed. Not nerf a popular model but rather "woohoo" something works well, how do I recreate it and expand on it, make it better.
Comment Posted by: bleh on March 28, 2006 04:49 PM
Wrong, people are if nothing else, relatively consistent.
We desire consistency, so we know what to expect.
They can (and probably have), designed multiple 'creators', yet players will settle on the one that provides the easiest/fastest/bestest exp, even if its only imaginary differences.
Comment Posted by: Hemdell on March 28, 2006 06:07 PM
" So there it hit me, how about the first time you do a mission, you get 100% point reward, the second time you start seeing less, lets say arbitrarily 90%, until you get to a messily 5% of the reward. "Restoring" you to max would involve doing other missions that may be harder."
That may be your idea of fun but it aint mine. What if I like doing certain missions or tasks over and over now you are going to tell me where and how I am going to play. NOT!!
The game has got to the point where everyone want to tell everyone else how to play the game. My God look at the message boards on the XP weekend people were complaining about not being able to raid due to people getting XP LOL. WOW!!!
The reason that people play in the same zones and do the same tasks is alittle about risk vs reward but I think its mostly about XP. Why am I going to fight in say Stoneroot when I get more bang for the buck in MPG or RSS. The only way to fix this is making all mobs of the same level worth the same amount of XP. If not then people will continue to gravitate to certain zones in the future.
Comment Posted by: Belgrath on March 29, 2006 03:17 AM
Why spout so much about LDON's and monster missions when it's obvious that the devs love to nerf every single one of em that becomes popular or fun! The list of nerfed Monster missions is huge, besides people in the raiding guilds DESPISE folks that leveled up using missions anyways, too little work for good gear and exp.
EQ is still Evergrind, if you dont have 400+ AA's amd be lvl 66+ and commit 25+ hours a week to playing to get to know how to play your class almost instinctively so that youre a well oiled cog in the guild raid machine, well your application is denied... Casuals in EQ will always be second class citizens in EQ because you have to work hard and long to be good in EQ.
Comment Posted by: Ogulbuk on March 29, 2006 11:56 AM
As Bleh just noted, its people wanting to do the most convenient thing due to wanting unpredictability. Im not noting for nerfing experience gain or dificulty either, but as some one noted, some one that has done every mission on a 20 mission arc should actually be awarded more reward than some one that did the easiest mission 20 times.
And there is the other point, yea, there may be a case where x or y mission are simply boring, but truth is most of the content in the game gets done over and over not because its fun, but because its easy, and the true first question if everyone is just doing one thing should be not "is it because its uber fun" but instead "is it because its too easy?" If it turns out its NOT too easy then you ask if its because its fun.
--------------------------
That may be your idea of fun but it aint mine. What if I like doing certain missions or tasks over and over now you are going to tell me where and how I am going to play. NOT!!
--------------------------
Then go for it and play it that way, but as I noted I dont think you should be rewared the same as some one that does every mission on an arc regardless of dificulty.
--------------------------
The reason that people play in the same zones and do the same tasks is alittle about risk vs reward but I think its mostly about XP.
--------------------------
I was not talking about XP, I was talking about things like LDON points, altough giving huge XP bonuses to zones where you have not hunted (against strong cons) and applying the reward mitigation to make it slowly scale down, would be way better than the HotSpots thing they did (are they still doing that?) to encourage hunting in unused areas. If you get a huge boost but it gets lower in the zone as you stay there, you do may start to think about going somewhere else, or just stay there and gain xp as you ever did before.
Comment Posted by: Wolfkinder on March 29, 2006 12:13 PM
I still believe in the conspiracy:) But here's a short list.
1). Some experience modifier that rewards a player for doing several different missions (I would not penalize someone for doing the same mission over and over, just offer incentive to try different ones. Maybe 50 percent more experience over the regular experience)
a). This would slow down bottom-feeding, since bottom-feeding is the result of doing the easiest thing for the most reward.
b). This would help people to actually find groups doing Different content rather than repeating the same thing over and over.
You really need incentive for doing different content. Sooner or later, everyone wants to do something aside from the most popular stuff. Extra exp would definitely help in attracting friends to do other tasks, quests, DoNs, zones, et cetera. They should have done this with the original MMs. It would have made for a much more interesting concept.
2). Quests that tie together for a nice spell/item. Dain comes to mind, as do the DoDH mission arcs. Oh, and make them fun:) Again, it's a matter of incentive.
3). More spells for wizards:)
4). More ways to tie older content with newer content. For instance, possibly tying LDON points to DoN points or making some sort of universal point transfer system.
5). Actually, one other thing. The quest system as stands kinda sux in terms of rewards. I really think they should reevaluate the experience someone gets for completing a quest, any quest, but specifically the one-time type of quests. Exp rewards for quests have never been an incentive, and they should be more of an incentive than sitting in one place for 10 hours grinding.
Selling points for most of these is simply this: Some people went through a lot of trouble to create some pretty great content that is for the most part ignored. Give people an incentive to try DIFFERENT things. Don't penalize the grinders. Don't take away any experience from them, but exploration and attempting NEW things should get some reward above and beyond the normal grind.
In the old days, people explored to find out where the good loot was, the good experience was. In these days of EQ websites which post all the information so quickly, 95 percent of content becomes abandoned as everyone finds out the easiest and fastest way to level. Give everyone a reason to still try this content 30 days after it's been released:)
--Wolfkinder
Comment Posted by: Erz on March 29, 2006 01:07 PM
giving double bonuses on certain missions... What's going to happen? As if it wasn't hard enough to get a DoDH going now because of what people already have done, wait till you get told "I already have double exp done on that zone, good luck."
At this point, I don't see anything that the developers would be willing to do to save Everquest. Can't update the engine/graphics to bring in the new blood. Can't shift the focus of raids and risk alienating the raiders. Can't give too much to the casual players without upseting the raiders.
EQ needs to decide where it's going - it's heading well done the path of UO. A game dominated by people holding on to their glory days by sustaining it with multiple accounts. Quite a lovely world
Comment Posted by: Ogulbuk on March 29, 2006 01:13 PM
_________________________________
1). Some experience modifier that rewards a player for doing several different missions (I would not penalize someone for doing the same mission over and over, just offer incentive to try different ones. Maybe 50 percent more experience over the regular experience)
________________________________
The net result is the same, but that sounds less flamative for sure.
You would have to give a HUGE bonus to missions that fades away the more you repeat it, and you would have to price reward items so high that only viable way to aquire them would be to do a variety of missions, not just repeating the same one over and over, even if its the hardest one there is.
Comment Posted by: bleh on March 29, 2006 01:17 PM
Give an AA for each 'one time completable' task.. the same way epic 1.5/2.0 were done.
Comment Posted by: Wolfkinder on March 29, 2006 04:18 PM
Not disagreeing with you, Ogulbuk. Just a variation of the same thing. Wouldn't mind seeing something like this implemented in ANY form.
Erz, as far as DoDH mission arcs, the fast exp'er/MM'er prolly ain't the group you're looking for anyways, although I could be wrong. I often am:) And also, if people tried new things instead of repeating the same old stuff over and over, you might get the more adventuresome people looking at DoDH who wouldn't otherwise. And, also, the extra experience would hold true for them too. It would be extra incentive for you to say to some friends, "Hey, if you haven't done this, help me out. You're going to get the extra Exp and maybe start your mission arc." Just a thought....
BTW, Loral just asked for a presentable list of things for Agenda. That's what I was providing -- was NOT in any way knocking anyone else's idea:)
--Wolfkinder
Comment Posted by: Teremar on March 30, 2006 03:11 PM
Just a basic bit of psychology: people are loss averse. Blizzard discovered this when they wanted to include an XP penalty for playing too much. Players screamed. So Blizzard put in a "rest" XP bonus instead, and that was fine. Same effect (people who play a little gain XP at a faster rate than those who play a lot) but the way it was presented made all the difference in how it was received.
Application here: give a bonus for doing a variety of missions, not a penalty for repeating a mission.
Comment Posted by: Skuz on March 31, 2006 03:14 AM
I would like to see mission arcs & quests have a combination of rewards, a "cursor" reward as in dodh so the less well geared member of a group can get something out of the mission, & a "arc completion" reward be it a spell/disc/item/aug, & further o that a "arc series" reward for completing multiple arcs, such as the dodh werewolf mask...
I think those kind of additions (maybe even with a bonus completion exp or aaxp reward) would act as a powerful incentive to get people from casuals to raiders to explore group content fully.
With the upgradeable augment idea you could feasibly create an aug that gets a bonus from each mission/arc/raid in an expansion as you complete it, giving an incentive to explore the whole expansion, both grouped & raided.
I would, like others before have posted, love to see all the missions/expeditions/tasks unified into one system, allowing you to gain points in any that can get you gear in any, open up the older content in this way would be a good idea i think.
I would like to see a better progression path for the 10-65 people too, or we risk newer players never reaching the higher levels.,i'd rather see good solo content developed for the low-mid level game (utilising the older zones) than see powerlevelling.
I think the rates of xp gain across expansions is also in need of a overhaul, the zone you go to hunt in shouldn't be about xp, it should be treasure hunting, adventuring, questing, exploration, xp serving as a primary motivation for picking one zone over another is hurting the game, by all means give a high xp mod in extremely difficult high risk zones, but there needs to be some amount of level playing field, currently the xp gains in some zones are way too high or too low considering the mobs that exist there. Perhaps zone xp is not the way to go, but mob xp, the more challenging & harder/slower to kill a mob the more xp it gives?
Aside from class issues that are better addressed elsewhere, I think the only other bug bear is itemisation & loot tables, to give an example my guild recently beat the Daosheen event, he dropped a barely above CoA augment, a shield with demiplane 2 focus & ..........Bazu stones! I mean seriously, demiplane tier 2+ level mob dropping bazu stones is insulting.
Comment Posted by: anonny on April 1, 2006 05:08 AM
With half of 65 level players Time flagged, and 65-75% of lvl 70 players Time flagged, it kinda shows how many people /ARE/ raiders.
Don't know percentage of alts/bots/etc, but the number of raiders grows constantly, after all, what else is there to progress to after being casual for a bit? Only way is up. Not like you see raiders going the other way, they usually burn out.
Comment Posted by: erz on April 1, 2006 03:39 PM
This may sound trivial, but as for suggestions - A simple UI 'accomplishment' screen seen only for you would be some motivation to get content done for a short interval anyway. Similiar to what most console games do (88% of the game complete,) a UI screen offering full display of what missions, arcs, tasks, flags, encounters and so forth have been defeated would be a novel but fun idea - similiar to badges collected in SW:G.
I absolutely agree with over-all arc awards, similar to the werewolf mask. Along with higher incentives for beating multiple missions. Of course, the risk becomes yet even further isolation from open exp zones like RSS as more people work in instances.
Honestly though, I login every day and log right back out, I just don't know why I keep playing this game - all my box accounts are canceled, my main lingers on. This game just feels like there's nothing left to aim for as a former hardcore raider turned into just a average player.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Email Mike at mike@mikeshea.net for more questions or comments.