Changes with the February Update: Developer Updates

did you seriously not figure this one out on your own?

I can't seem to find the answer to this, but those of us who have been working hard and have 5 or 6 thousand AAs, will the AAs that we have already spent be refunded to us to use elsewhere when the 4k aa points are awarded? If they are not, that is very disheartening, that so much time and work towards AAs that we earned are now worthless and just given

Actually, I am proud of anything I achieve whether it be by playing a game or influencing a change in local laws. Why? Because I actually DID something to be proud of! Now comes the "entitlement" generation, the "Gimme, gimme" gang who actually believes that, merely by breathing, they are entitled to a job, a car, clothes on their backs, a diploma, instantly obtaining whatever their little hearts desire, yet the very idea of actually working for same gives them the horrors!

I can only chuckle at the many erroneous assumptions you have made with regard to my game experience, but hey, whatever floats your boat.

As for new players having the same experience, you are correct, they won't. However, they would have had a chance to experience much of what the longer term players did EXCEPT that SoE has decided to toss 85% of its creation under the bus and is actively informing both new and returning and current players NOT to expend any time or effort into anything other than digging into their wallets! But hey, the whole idea is "easy, no work, just a couple bucks, and voila, you made it." Right?

There's an old saying. Give a man a fish, he eats for one day. TEACH a man to fish, he will never starve. SoE is handing out fish and charging for them, no less!

As for your "Let's be realistic....." just days ago, Smedley et al announced the robustness of the EverQuest staff and their plans to implement weekly and monthly events! In fact, he guaranteed it! More than one person has suggested various quest lines be added with a substantial boost made to the AA's earned doing same. So which is it? Either the staffing is anemic and Smedley is blowing smoke or staffing is robust and quite capable of creating quests, events, adjusting rewards...you know, the stuff that they are paid to do.

gcubed's response to Headshot only firing off of "Double Damage" shots, that that would only be acceptable only if A) Assassinate fired off of 1hb Backstabs and B) Decapitate only when the berserker has a shield equipped (instead of a 2h, lol) was an attempt to say that if you want one of them to "never" fire, then you should have the others fire "never" as well. In case people were not aware, at level 51 Rangers get an innate ability that doubles archery hits, as long as the target is not moving, AND not rooted. In other words, it does not occur when a ranger is out Headshotting.

As for the idea to exclude Salvage .. there is no reason to exclude it, per se. The various tradeskill Mastery AA's, I can see a reason to exclude, but not Salvage. All that Salvage does is, when you fail, gives you a chance at recovering materials instead of losing them. In practical terms, it allows a given set of materials go for more combines when you are failing those combines. Prepare 20 combines worth of materials, fail at two of them, but between those two failures, get a 21st combine due to salvaged materials. The drawback is that it becomes harder to prepare a given number of combines; you can prepare for that same 20 combines of some recipe, but if you fail two, your Salvage AA may wind up giving you two of one item back, one of another, and zero of a third, resulting in 18 successes and two incomplete combine-sets cluttering your inventory. Its a convenience factor there, nothing more. Keep it as part of the AA Christmas-in-February.

This part I saw and understand; this refers to the immediate future. My question is whether the aa xp bonus will be continued, or is there plans to phase it out after the grant.

they said no

Rogues don't swarm. Have any of you played one? At best we do 12-15 mobs once in 26 minutes at great personal risk, one wrong stun and you're dead. A level 95+ rogue literally has 3-4 zones in the entire game where they can go to gain decent AA from assassination. You guys are missing something here, killing mobs isn't causing the server issues. Pulling is, this is a pathing issue not a killing issue.

My old boss used to, every few years, find out who the negative/cancerous/bad attitude types in the company were and he, as he quoted, would "Trim the Fat."

Ideally everyone here that says they will cancel and quit will actually cancel and quit. .

It hasn't been said in explicit terms, but its pretty likely they will just leave the bonus at 4000 and not advance it any higher, at least for the foreseeable future since they are going to keep upping the auto grant every expansion cycle by one expansion's worth of AA. Conversely, it would take effort to remove it so I would expect it to remain the same. The whole bonus idea was basically an alternative to auto granting, it makes sense that now that they are getting their way with the auto grant that they would "support" the auto grant and discontinue raising the bonus.

In most RoF and CoF zones there are 4 ppl or less. There will be some in instances but not many.

In lvl 90 hotzones, there were less than 10 about an hour ago.

People still raid, but grouping is dead. So getting new ppl in those zones by giving them the AA to get there is probably a good idea.

Atm there is very little reason these zones were even made, I mean the newest zones are devout (sp) of players.

Often times I see 40+ people in the hot zones. The only other place with that many people is the guild lobby.

Umm ... if you only have that few, you have not been working hard?

Ok, I'll be serious. You DID get something from those AA's : you got to use them when others weren't able to because they did not have them yet.

Someone getting something after you, regardless of how hard or easy it was, does not invalidate the work and effort you put in to get it. The ease with which we get AA's now does not invalidate the time and effort it took (hours per AA point!!) back when Luclin first came along. So why would giving those AA's out to people lacking them now invalidate your work at getting them, when the ease of your "work" at getting them did not invalidate the work others spent back then?

Rather than looking at it like "OMG someone else is getting exactly the same AA's I've had the use of for years now" look at it this way "OMG they're giving me AA's I hadn't bought yet and I don't have to do anything for them but keep paying my subscription for one more month!"

I keep seeing this question asked, and I can't wrap my head around it. For the time you invested in those AA's, you got to use them from then till now, and for as long as you play. That's your reward, and that's why you earned them. You grouped with friends, guild mates, and new faces to earn them, and experienced content and now have cherished memories that the new players getting these AA's for free will not have. So you ask, what do I get for buying these AA's and not getting them for free? You got the EverQuest experience, and that can't be taken away, ever.

Piestro said: ↑

“2. We take player input into account, but design by democracy isn't a good policy.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Galaxies

Now this man is your boss ! - So which is it

And the path being taken here is the same path that was taken in other no longer available SOE titles

As I said in a previous post - I do not blame the Devs / GM's / CS for any of this - and feel sorry for all the AOE flack that is hitting you ( thank got you are nerfing the beams before someone uses them) It seems as if a decision has been made further up the ladder and you must do what has been specified.
As anyone who checks the URL will see JS gave assurances and denied evidence that other games might have been in trouble - until years later once the game was just a distant memory - then said "well yes we got it wrong".

A lot of the people speaking up here are the people who have been paying your wages for the last decade - and while I totally appreciate that new blood needs to come into the game to keep paying the wages, these players also have a massive amount of knowledge about the game - pity not to put it to full use when things are in a delicate state. I mean they very soon gained the knowledge of the game in ways you had not anticipated probably due to sheer numbers. More people working on something problematic will usually produce a faster / better resolution than less people (not always )

Now if the honest answer is something like "we have been told to do this" or "we don't have a budget to allow new coding so we cant do x,y or z" or "they have moved the developers to EQNext" - then hey I understand - Nothing can be done.

If you have less than 4,000 AA you gain them at an increased rate. Very increased at 0, less increased at 3000. It's a pretty linear fall off.

After a hiatus of about 1 year of MMO-Free gaming, I decided to reinvest some time and start over fresh in EverQuest because I was tired of being spoon fed by other games. Funny, 1-Month later the EQ team decides they want to hop on the spoon feeding bandwagon.*Sigh*

Why must you take the sense of accomplishment out of this game? It is definitely one of the few major aspects which kept this MMO going for all these years!!

(Unfortunately, with these changes - this may be my last month here once again.)

Those two are not mutually exclusive dude.

ryby2012 said: ↑

“Piestro, please refer to post #328 of this thread. Multiple other concerns have been addressed, but mine has been ignored for 15 pages. I'd like some kind of feedback on this.”

How is this different then a large amount of groups/raids other classes soloing a few mobs at once?

Simple math is how.