^ pretty much how I feel too sadly, been resubbed 2 weeks ago on one of my accounts and on the same page as you. not buying the new expansion and haven't resubbed my bard either. If I see fixes for the XP nerfs I'll probably change my mind. Until then...
EQ Devs please listen to these people. I personally have no intention of exp'ing in RoF. I did go back and finish off savior in a few RoF zones and will probably do more regardless of the nerf. A few more aa would have been nice but it doesn't matter to me. IT DOES matter to a lot of players. I totally get why the exp nerf was done but it was far too severe. There was no need for it to reduce exp for 101+ to basically nothing. I just can't see a justification for that. Reduce the nerf to something reasonable. Meet these people at least part way. Compromise. The nerf as it stands was way too severe and I suspect if you did a poll on this almost everyone who answered it would agree. As it stands now the nerf is an example of cutting off your nose to spite your face (no idea where that saying came from). Anyway... restore some of your nose
There is an idea. You guys said in the stream you wanted to start doing polls more often and being transparent. How about you poll this one? 1. Reverse the exp nerf completely 2. Keep the exp nerf in but lessen it 3. Keep the exp nerf exactly as it is and move on 4. Revamp the con system 5. I don't care.
We want the risk vs reward for all content to be correct. As mentioned during the stream, the team is looking again at this and reevaluating what we want to do. We do want to do polls. However, a poll like this doesn't need to occur. If you ask players if they want ANY content to give more XP in a poll, the answer will be heavily weighted towards yes.
Just a couple thoughts to ponder: If the vast majority of people seem to want the exp back the way it was, and you don't even need a poll to establish that.. shouldn't the company be leaning towards this? Holly kept saying in the stream that you guys want it to be fun.. want it be fun, want it to be fun... whose idea of fun are we aiming for? If my idea of fun is grinding to max AA /level in old content then exploring new content (which is balanced around the new levels anyway) why are we told "No that's not fun, this is what you will do because we want it to be fun." Secondly, isn't it a rather narrow view of your play base to believe that all of your players will simply vote for easy mode? Just reading the posts on these forums here will show you that many of us do not want easy mode in anyway. I can say for certain I didn't come to everquest and play for 15 years with multiple accounts to then turn around and say Make it like World of Warcraft! I don't want easy mode, as much as I want the game to remain more like it has been for the past decade and a half.. not retroactively changed for the new 5 levels to be a different experience. New content yes, New rule sets? Why? It's kind of like playing d&d as a level 20 ranger for 10 years and then DM saying oh, you don't get to roll a d20 for saving throws anymore.. everyone else does, but your level 20 and have fought goblins before.. you only get a d2 and both 1 and 2 yield a failure.
I went back to ROF to work on some collections I had missed a few days back. After killing for approx 1.5 hours, I earned 1 aa. I think I get that for about 2 mobs in TDS zones.
RvR in Rain of Fear is now seriously out of whack! NPCs in Heart of Fear are more challenging than CotF, yet in Heart of Fear you get no exp, how can this be correct? At level 101 these NPCs still con yellow. How can the team do anything but reverse the nert they put in to make RVR correct? Or are they going to reduce the difficulty of these NPCs to equal the exp they give and have them all con grey/green?
Roshen, what i find wrong about that is...how many people play Eq1 for risk vs. reward now? I cannot speak for others, but i would play for fun... the exp nerf is no fun, so it's no good. Just my opinion.
I think your player base isn't asking for more, they are asking what they had before. If you remove this short sighted nerf, you will see a huge boost in incremental income both in expansions purchased and renewed subs. No one is asking for easy mode, they are asking for what we have had for 15 years. The devs should have scaled TDS, instead of a nerf. Ruven
RIP some of my favorite kiting spots. Although there is a zone or two i can kite in still. The HA nerfs also killed my kiting spots .
Agree and disagree. Mage uber beam: most players not exploiting it wanted it gone. Ranger uber HS Alarans: most players not exploiting it wanted it gone Super swarmy knights: most players not doing it wanted it gone Gribbles uber spawn full xp weenies: most players not exploiting it wanted it gone Players will tend to want to take the most they can get and the easiest path of resistance, but they also want fair. What TDS has been and most CotF KILL xp is now are below what a lot have come to expect as fair. Also, RoF was a GREAT expansion, and we are only +5 levels of it... the two less well thought of expansions with what most feel is less than fair xp/kill as the only 2 places to xp due to the just introduced artificial barrier means that you can expect people to dislike it, with reasonability and even objectivity if you do the step back logic. If it simply is... xp needed to be slowed so people wouldn't outpace content so quick because lack of content presented and planned, then own that, but expect people to be of the opinion you artificially cut off content while simultaneous nerfing 'current' and introduce sub par new content... that yeah, some sort of reversal of trend would be in order. I am of the opinion RoF wasn't broke, nor were full XP HA kills... swarming and other things of mass killing were the issue and yes, had allowed people to crazy outpace the content production as far as xp goes. Nerf the exploitation / outlier not the normal enjoyable content. Mugsie
Oh yeah, and the kind of questions / polling we got were stuff like what do you want most in order: cash housing, cash armor graphics, other useless stuff we want to use as a la carte money maker that you don't want? You didn't give us an option for NONE OF THESE: please focus on balancing and creating core content. Same reasoning? Sorry if I am being cross, but to say you want feedback from polling but are dismissive of what players want when the core issues are ignored for short sighted budgetary issues is not cool. Maybe I am taking it the wrong way, but still, you want polling data, look at what the HF/housing interest level is versus any thread about 'fixing' xp. Mugsie
Did quit. Not just threatened, or thought about it, or ranted, simply quit. Why? I'm not done with RoF, if I got TDS, and leveled up, I would have to give up on all of RoF that I haven't completed yet, or go back and do it, with all the existing risk, for very little reward. Thats my biggest issue. Since I am in a raiding guild, if I simply chose NOT to buy TDS I would 1) not be able to continue progression raiding once we move on from CoTF and 2) fall behind the DPS curve as I'd be missing 5 levels + spells + skills vs everyone else. Now my alliance/guild is awesome in that they would let me raid as long as it was reasonable but *I* don't want to be a drag on them. I still say if you release new content to a MMO and people still play the old content... its not the old content thats broken; and shrinking the world down to just the new expansion is a very bad idea for a game who's biggest strength is the vastness of its world and play-styles. In the end though it is 'their" game; and we can either accept it, or go elsewhere. I chose the latter and funny enough, I'm mostly playing the game I left FOR Everquest back in 1999. Sure the GFX are laughable and the game play is as old as I am; but its still fun and the original dev's bought the game back and released it as open source (and login once a week to EQ just to run the lootbot for my guild heh)
I think a poll asking if they thought the RoF exp was reasonable would be fair. Unless you think most players will lie just to get the most experience possible.
The biggest glaring hole in the Risk vs. Reward claim is that RoF T3/T4 and CoTF T1 pose the same risk (some say RoF is riskier) and yet one gives drastically less reward at level 101+. But then you see, the actual reason RoF was nerfed instead of a mob level type nerf was because you guys saw everyone sitting with 2+ levels of banked experience and tried to extend a tiny, tedious expansion by nerfing those rewards (which didn't even work because you could just claim all your rewards under level 101). It's been said over and over again, you shouldn't force or care where people are playing in your game. If people want to choose the path of least resistance, that's on them. If you want to make the current content the most rewarding, do that by making the new content rewarding, not by obliterating past content. But we've been over this and it's clear the devs don't share the same opinion as what these boards would insinuate is the majority opinion. The devs can say it's for the long-term health of the game but they're very wrong in this experience nerfing case. It's only a negative for the players and when the player decides they've had enough of the stick with too few and far between carrots then they go find something else to spend their time/money on.
Another way to examine the 101 xp pigeon holing effect is to examine what the producer and developers should be looking for their product to do: 1. Keep paying subscribers by keeping the raid content interesting, challenging enough yet accessible enough. 2. Keep paying subscribers by keeping the group content interesting, challenging enough yet accessible enough. 3. Entice free to play players to become subscribers by keeping the group content interesting, challenging enough yet accessible enough. 4. Create and market a la carte content to supplement subscription income. You can debate order of 1/2 but really, its soooo much easier to keep a returning customer than produce a new one for any product and in a 15ish year old video game especially. Four... well... is a distant fourth and a disappointing amount of effort seems to go towards it Now... 3rd... Free to play players are artificially cordoned off from subscription players now. Across that line they see people hopping mad about xp. On this side, they are chilling in a great expansion with other ftp players... when they can get a group. The 101 barrier is killing conversions of ftp to sub. If there was a divide that people were like... oh wow, you need to get out of RoF and into this stuff... the gulf maybe could help... but as is... they hear... 'oh wow, we want to go back to RoF but we paid so we are out of luck' doesn't encourage people paying a recurring fee vs staying pat. Mugsie
It wasn't about risk versus reward. I think the Twitch chat alluded to it. Their stats showed not enough people using current expansions. It might not be a big jump to think that part of their performance review is how much of the player population uses a new expansion when they buy it. One of the metrics they need to abide by could be usage of the current expansion. If this wasn't the case then letting people play the way they want in the content they want shouldn't be as much of an issue with the exception of doing a couple HA missions over and over. They did state that even those players do that it may not end up being as much fun for them as doing a variety of HA. I am sorta on the fence with that I think they do have a point but maybe it also could mean that players would enjoy easier missions overall (I know the hardcore group doesn't want easier and not sure which way I go on that myself). But another way they could have gone is brought the really easy missions up some and the really hard ones down some. They were trying to provide content for raiders/hard core groups and casual groupers all at the same time. What they found was that pretty much everyone spent most of their times in the easier missions. Why they couldn't let people enjoy and continue doing RoF while getting reasonable (not the best exp but reasonable exp) is more of a mystery short of having people in the newest expansion was a metric they had to abide by. When they nerfed RoF exp it didn't take into account at all the risk versus reward that has been a cornerstone of EQ. Oh well I guess I am just repeating what has been said many times.... its just a bit upsetting that it has taken so many posts from so many people just to get them to look at this issue. P.S. even though they have said they will look at it I do think its valid to continue posting about it and keeping the pressure on. Doesn't hurt anything to do so. Might help.
You can take your "risk vs reward" and stick it where the sun doesn't shine. I paid for those zones and I expect them to work as when I bought them. My accounts remain unpaid until this nerf is reversed.
I'm not sure, but I suspect that the level 105's with maxed AA's and TDS gear can not only help sub 100's in RoF and lower but the right classes can pretty much faceroll all of that content while the sub 100's eat pizza and watch cat vidoes on youtube after hitting /autoattack
That brings up a good point people did pay for those zones with the expectation that decrease in exp would follow the historical pattern that has been in place over the last 15 years. The exp nerf effectively reduced the value of the RoF expansion in a manner that could not be predicted based on the last 15 years of the game. There could even be a legal case there for something like bait and switch I guess. People could have bought TDS with the expectation that they could still earn a reasonable amount of exp in RoF. That wouldn't apply to those that did not buy TDS though. Maybe the time between the expansion coming out and the NDA being lifted would have given everyone a chance to make an informed decision. Don't recall the timing on that. Just thinking out loud.
