Grinding is boring. Mercs, clarity and haste in a bottle and mudflation of stats have killed the need for buffers and slowers, not to mention people in the group. Giving tanks fade killed the need for crowd control Giving tanks so much agro control now means people don't have to control their agro generation and play sloppy. You have to undo a LOT of this game to get back to old school. Are you ready to propose taking mercs out of the game?
EQ is grinding. Grinding is EQ. Any other thing should be in WOW. These days, people log in, do a couple of dailies and log out. Who created that mess?
That won't happen; but they can offer a classic style server that won't include them. Let people play the game they want to play, and you will draw customers back and keep more of those who continue to trickle away.
EQ is not only grinding, more than anything else it was adventure. You had the choice to grind in boring places, or you could make exp while exploring with a group (and killing mobs there). Big difference, and that's how it should be again. I hate dailys, in all games. So why would i do them in Eq, besides i don't play currently
Why do I play EQ.. 1. Nostalgia, I could be gone from EQ for a year or two, and come back. That EQ music during the login screens get me every time. There's just something special about this game, the way it looks, the way it sounds. Even when I'm not actively playing EQ I still login from time to time just to sit in Kelethin listening to the best music ingame. It just brings back memories, joy, tears, you name it. Nostalgia is EQ's best weapon in a fiercely competitive market. EQ team needs to utilize it better. You aren't going to attract new age gamers to EQ1, but you could easily attract ex-EQ players that would love to re-experience EQ. I've noticed EQ2 did a good job of utilizing that nostalgia, whether those were your ideas or not, I envy EQ2. The team there seems to know how to tickle the EQ fanbase. EQ2 relaunched Kunark, Velious, it even revisited the Veeshan lore. I mean are you kidding me? Where's EQ1's relaunch of Kunark? Velious? Those were some of the most exciting expansions EQ players can remember. For EQ1 to draw player back, and that really should be the goal rather than to draw modern gamers, EQ1 has to utilize nostalgia to their advantage and tickle the playerbase with nostalgia. That nostalgia itch is what gets me to resubscribe to EQ, heck I even bought 3 copies of TDS expansion and I don't even like TDS, but I had that nostalgia itch I couldn't scratch. I'll briefly bring up the progression servers because these servers are key to getting some ex-EQ players back. We all know the biggest chunk of EQ1 population existed between PoP and LDoN expansions. Those were the early days when EQ could brag about having 450k subscribers. These players have little interest in the current endgame, but they'd love to play the expansions that hooked them into EQ during the early days. You know that newbie rush feeling when creating a new character, and seeing lots of people around? Or that feeling knowing everybody else is as poor as you, so you trade your way up the chain, selling, dealing, bartering your way to wealth. Or knowing that everybody's wearing crappy newbie armor, and when someone gets a rare drop, everybody talks about it? These feelings can not be reproduced in the current EQ live environment. They can however, be reproduced to a certain degree with fresh timelocked progression servers. These days it's just a ghost town anymore outside of PoK and the latest expansion zones. Nostalgia, it draws the crowds, it's what have kept EQ alive all these years. Progression servers and relaunch of classic expansions will get people talking about EQ again. I've shared stories and memories during this round of prog servers with many that have been gone from EQ for over 10 years. Many of them end up becoming a regular subscriber on live servers. 2. Something to do. EQ have always been known to be the game where there's something to do. Be it farming for loot, leveling up AA points, crafting, doing dungeon runs, raiding, etc.. These days I play EQ strictly with my g/f and a friend or two. We form a small lil 3 player group that go around and find things we can do. When we quit in the past, it was always due to us hitting a wall. During SoD expansion, I pulled a friend who was brand new to EQ into the game. We had a great time, we played the full year SoD was out up until the release of Underfoot. That's when we hit a wall. SoD was an inclusive expansion accessible to everybody, everyone including our small group. We had plenty of progression to do, and they were doable, not overly time consuming or hard, but they were doable and enjoyable. When we progressed, we saw clear upgrades to our gear, and we saw a clear path to upgrading our mercs. There were things I could farm, named I could kill, goodies I could obtain. Where as Underfoot was this inclusive expansion where many likely died several times upon stepping into the expansion. It just wasn't fun at all, and our small group had a rough time with the expansion. So we left for a year, until House of Thule launched, which became an inclusive expansion once again with things we could do, loot we could farm, content we could enjoy. If you want players to stick around, don't create walls, don't make content exclusive. The elitist attitude in EQ died a long time ago, only the vocal few still support it. Most people today just want to have fun with the reduced amount of playtime available. This means people want to be able to play for a couple of hours, and feel they're progressing and accomplishing something. They want to bring their not so perfect group and be able to progress, get exp, and get loot. Expansion content are meant to be ingested by the players, and they should feel satisfied after playing through an expansion. We felt that way with SoD, and we created several alts as a result. Not the case with Underfoot, or the latest expansions like TDS. There was a time when we spent a lot of time farming and questing for illusions and pets. And when I say a lot of time, I really mean a lot of time spent ingame farming for illusions and pets. They were content, they were worth farming, they were fluff and fluff is a good thing in games. They were things to do. Unfortunately these days more and more things are put on the marketplace for sale instead of having them available ingame. So there's a lot less to do, a lot less to farm and quest for. What's left to farm these days are boring copy/paste items that really don't look much different, nor are the stats even worth spending the time farming. They're items with boring stats and boring effects, nothing worth talking about. The "fun" has been stripped slowly from the game, and this has to change. My g/f and I are what you would consider "core" gamers. We aren't softcore or casual, because we play a lot...and I mean 4-5 hours a night kind of a lot. We aren't hardcore, because we don't raid nor min/max, we don't care to be the best of the best anymore. Been there, done that, ran enough raid guilds I think we both are just burned out by the guild scene. The MMO genre is full of core gamers, we likely outnumber most other types of gamers out there. We play a lot, spend a lot of money, as long as you give us things to do. EQ used to be this game with infinite amount of things to do. It slowly became not that kind of game. Please talk to your newly assembled dev team, they really need to stop the yo-yo syndrome with expansions. Expansions like UF & TDS lose players. It's always harder to pull back players once you lose them. We should not have to plead and beg for fun, doable content for players with not so perfect groups. We should not have to plead and beg for fun and fluff content be added to the game once again. We should not have to beg to a point of being a nuisance for a fresh timelocked progression servers. All these things are no brainers that should've been perfectly doable within your powers and resources. You guys own the Everquest IP that jump started the whole MMORPG genre for crying out loud. Please act like it, and get back to running quality MMO's. Thanks for reading
New bazaar/barter system period. And one that doesn't hold your account hostage, so you can do other things within the game besides going into trader/buyer mode. Close to a 1,000,000 tradable items but we are restricted to buying and selling only 100 ? (within the system, yes i know you can buy more than 100 items through chat channels, etc) The Luclin bazaar system worked when there were few tradable items, but its way past time to revamp this. Plat sinks to stop the inflation of plat, or find some way to unrestrict the 2 million cap threshold on buying/selling to compensate for the inflation.
EQ forums, Daybreak forums, EQ facebook page, Daybreak facebook page, Twitter, Reddit. How many different forms of communication do we have to monitor in order to keep up with all of our EQ related news just because each GM has their own favorite?
1. I love questing so I would like to see more long quests added to the game that give really nice rewards for the effort. Aim for 1-2 with each expansion minimum. Questing hasn't really been a part of the game recently. Ideally each quest would have multiple intermediate steps so it feels like you are making progress throughout. I also want to see task rewards actually be rewarding. Most of the quests/tasks lately give a negligible amount of coin and exp and no other reward except a check mark on the achievement list. I would like to see quests/tasks award something nice at least the first time they are completed. I think it would be good to add type 3 augs as rewards for doing quests. 2. I like going back to finish older content that I may have skipped or been unable to complete when it was current. The exp changes introduced with the release of TDS make that much less appealing now. I would like to see the exp changes released with TDS reversed so that level 101+ players can get appropriate rewards for doing any content. 3. New content keeps the game interesting so I would like to see "new" content added regularly to the game throughout the year outside of expansion releases. This does not need to be on a fixed schedule and recycling old content throughout the year does not count. I think quarterly releases with new content/features or major holidays would be a good goal to start with. I look forward to more open communication regarding EQ. Be honest on expectations and avoid deceiving comments such as the new content released every week stupidity. We know things can change but don't make promises that aren't at least realistic.
Thanks all! Good stuff! It's also been good reading while my water heater leaked all over the garage today. I am learning a lot as the plumber attempts to rezz the ole thing.
I'm going to toss my hat in while we still have someone's attention. I'm an old school player, started in classic and enjoyed the older expansions more than anything that came later. I've played and ran progression guilds as well as played on every progression server. I'm not trying to relive the past, I did it while it was live, I just really enjoy that content and doing it again with new groups of people. For example, I get great pleasure out of teaching someone how to defeat a raid when they never did it before. My want list: 1) New progression server-- and other possibilities for alternate rule sets 1)High percent vote in order to move to the next expansion (maybe like 80%) 2)Multiple servers that stop at different points. Transfer up but never back 3)PvP progression server 4)PoP locked server 5) Classic Trilogy server Thank you for listening and I hope my ideas agree with you!
Ok, here's why I play EQ: I started this account back when Kunark was current. I have played on and off since then, sometimes taking a year or 2 off, sometimes playing for years at a stretch. It just depends on what else is going on in my life. I've never been a big forum poster. I've played a ranger, a necro, a mage, and a cleric to (what was, at the time) current content. For me, the thing that makes or breaks a game is a story. I love mechanics, and I'm good at figuring out what works, what doesn't work, and how to make things work BETTER. It's a numbers game. That being said, I'll still get bored if the story isn't compelling. EQ has come a long way in terms of being able to tell stories. The stories were always there, they were just harder to find for people who weren't used to text-based games. "What, you want me to find this NPC and hail them and say certain things to them and actually HAND THEM items?" I have enjoyed seeing the newer interfaces, which have allowed the stories to be easier to find, easier to follow, etc. The issue for me, and what makes things difficult for me to stay in this game sometimes, is that there are so many things that either always require a group to finish, or require you to significantly out-level the content to finish solo. I don't mind group content. I actually like group content. But I can't tell you how many times I've had week-long stretches where I wasn't able to continue with my character and their advancement through the story, because no one in guild was available to help out, and no one in general chat was looking for that content either. I understand this is a social game. I appreciate it, and I feel it's a very important aspect. But I get so frustrated when I can't continue because I can't find a group. I'll just resort to searching for an exp group, and that's fun too. But it doesn't catch my interest as much, and if it's all I can do, I eventually lose interest. If there was some way to allow advancement through the story without requiring a group all the time, you'd have one happy player on your hands. I'm not sure if this would take the form of scaling instances for anywhere between 1 player and 6 players, with reduced rewards for solo or smaller groups, or something like alternate quests you could do that would require more work on the part of the solo player (more traveling, more items collected, etc), but would end up advancing the story in the same way, or something else completely. I can already hear the players saying "just work on an alt" or "just learn how to box." All of those are fine options. It's just not what I want to do. I actually dislike boxing. I can't even give you a reason. I just don't like it. Playing alts is fun, and I still consider my necro my "main alt." But again, it's another thing that's just basically a time-filler when I'd rather be working on quests and story. Thanks for being so present in this thread Holly. It's actually very cool to see.
Would that be considered a rez, a patch or a bug fix? I think it would give us some insight into your perspective as a dev. /grin
PoP wasn't flawless. It wasn't even finished at the high end, IIRC. Uber guilds got to PoTime and found it broken and incomplete. I'm sure someone will add more, but I remember there being problems.
Realized too late to edit my post above, but let me say that I am not advocating for there to be a solo experience for an entire expansion's storyline. I understand that there needs to be activities that require groups. HA's, raids, etc. I just hate the... walls you smash into sometimes when no one else is working on the same thing you are and you're stuck.
PoP's progression had some serious issues (not the least of which being the absurdly abusable progression-blocking by rival guilds, e.g. in PoWater), and Time had its share of bugginess, but the expansion is still pretty undeniably a landmark in MMORPG endgame progression design. It used keying and intertwining flagging requirements in a way that time-released the endgame progression in an organic way, and encouraged people to really push their way through the tiers. I would argue that you can't really get the full "PoP feeling" again in a new content release without a full reboot of progression from level 1 though. PoP "felt good" because it was the logical conclusion to the open-world, gods-defying, dragon-slaying chaos that had been the level 50 to 60 raiding scene, had a rich lore, and was (broadly speaking) harder/rougher to fight within than anything that had preceded it, while not being just stupid-impossibly-overtuned-hard (most of the time, anyway). It was also scaled in such a way that continuing to raid previous expansions to gear up for the entry tier content was still something that family and casual-raiding guilds could and would do. (It did not instantly and totally obsolete everything from Luclin and before.) Part of why people clamor for a 65-capped or specifically PoP-capped server is that PoP is a logical endpoint for progression within EQ1 (and also the point where its lore forks from EQ2's). PoP also had a good deal of the modern systems-complexity we have ingame now while also avoiding much of the hotkey bloat we suffer today. Anyway, that's part of why I propose the idea of experimental, limited-run servers with different progression than we're accustomed to. In order for there to be an exciting conclusion to anything, there needs to be an exciting sense of progression and build-up before it, and it's hard to get that when the design space is as clogged up with "stuff" as it is today. For the record, I also heartily support the idea of progression-locked servers - even to the point of heartily suggesting forking the database and making small balance tweaks as necessary for each one. If I were drawing the cutoffs, I'd say make one for Classic+Kunark+Velious, one for PoP+Ykesha+LDoN, and one for GoD+OoW+DoN+DoDh+PoR. Beyond that point I'm less sure what to recommend. Making such servers limited-duration could be interesting as well. In general, I feel like EQ1's problem at this point isn't a lack of content; it's a lack of coherence and focus that makes experiencing the content in progression-meaningful ways impossible unless you are personally disciplined enough to self-impose challenges or join a progression-locked guild. Again, designing toward a forever-receding endgame is probably a nonsensical decision when reusing existing assets in fresh and creative ways has the potential to be both cheaper and faster from the development standpoint while not necessarily being any less fun for the players.
I was not talking about being flawless, or not being finished or any bugs. This has nothing to do with the bacis design. I was talking about the whole layout, the story, the adventure. I still have screenshot of us killing RZTW and remember how nerous and excited everyone was. It is clear that a expansion like that would have instances today. The magic this expansion had might be hard to reach, I also loved Kunark, Luclin and Velious, they all had their goods and bads.
Holly on a related note, you should have someone look at the recent issue with random suspensions without notification and without reason. Several people, myself included have had accounts suspended without notice totally at random without a reason behind it. Those of mine that were suspended were mostly not being used aside from a couple for buff purposes while I focused on this one and others. Since they weren't even logged in for 30+ days for the majority of the accounts, there was no way that I had any interactions in game to warrant a suspension and didn't do anything in game or on the forums to violate the EULA. I post from this account only and I talk 95% or more from this account only as it is my main. Please have someone take a look at this and fix those accounts that were suspended in error without us having to petition to get each one fixed.
