Changes with the February Update: Developer Updates

This happened to me. I started eq2 from scratch and soloed to 40...then I got bored and stopped playing. Then I logged on my 85 toon with 5k AAs and started playing eq again. I am having a blast.

There is more to it than that.

While I'm not bothered about players getting AA granted, I am annoyed that a few years ago they nerfed exp on various missions and group tasks as they wanted players to play the game to get exp...granting 4K AA for just logging in on gold, is not playing the game. I also feel sorry for those who have recently got the AAs they will be granting in the freebie AAs.

I'm a little disappointed it may impact on the number of players in the lower level zones leveling up one of the new class/race combos, but on the upside I won't be fighting over the lower level camps. Everyone else can race to level 85 with 4K AA, I will be having a ball plodding through levels and AAs in lower content while I dream of the rest of CotF.

They can try and force us to level up as much as they like, but this old girl is doing things her own way.

It will significantly stop a lot of people from PLing.
it will significantly stop a lot of people from wanting to be PLd.
it will significantly stop a lot of people from pulling massive numbers of mobs.
And as a result, it will significantly reduce server lag, as intended

Think negatively all you want, but the above is accurate.

These are very viable ways to help behind the curve players to catch up. Adjust the experience curve more. Go back and adjust experience for previous expansion missions encouraging progression in them vice skipping due to little use. Have a journeyman book to give tasks which are designed to give gear and experience. Tune those task as needed.

Is it like being a player that never quit or left. No, it should not be. Is it doable...yes. Can the difficulty of the climb be tweaked in a way not to just give them things and make it more endurable even down right fun.....YES!

I will try an analogy to help convey the feeling: the housing market.

The housing market essentially crashed due to over extension, speculative buying without financial support. The responsible home owners bought within their affordability maintaining a safe market based on fair stable foundation. The long time subscribers maintained EQ in a stable money situation playing within their means, always funding the game for many years at a certain interest rate.

On the other side, gamers which left not supporting the game over the years are placed in that speculative side. The gamers tried the game out, left when they felt the itch for something better or just got bored. These speculative buyer/owners purchased above means and safe commitment driving house pricing falsely up. These changes in the market resulted in the speculative buyer not being able to sell his home for a quick profit or, maybe he could not even afford the house in the first place. These buyers/owners decided to cash out foreclosing, short selling leaving excessive debt on the banks holding the bad loans and creating a massive market correction. The banks(SOE) we're not completely victims here as they helped create this situation through improper loan approvals(bad or questionable developing decisions).

Did the market completely crash leaving bank after bank going bankrupt? The responsible, stable buyers honored their commitment to their loans(supporting EQ when many left for other choices) and did not pursue the same foreclosure walk away deals available. This kept a domino effect for happening which would have destroyed the financial system( EQ game killer). The market stabilized eventually which held super interest rates to encourage more buying. These buyers( returning players) who previously walked away could now purchase these same homes as the honest, hold your ground buyers for interest rates much lower saving thousands upon thousands of dollars in interest which the hold the market together buyers could not get expecting them to shoulder the burden of keeping it all together even though they would be paying thousands upon thousands of more dollars for the same homes( not getting anything for holding everything together).

The analogy is not a straight comparison but gets the meaning across. Those players who held it all together should not be expected to carry more of that burden( thousands upon thousands of play time hours to experiencing) to keep it all together. Do they have the same homes...yes. Does it ruin their home, sweet, homes...not necessarily. Is there a something just not right in this picture here...YES!

Note: The speculative buyers do not match to all cases of the returners or new gamers to the game in mind. They can generally if you consider most of the returners as players who left for so called greener pastures.

Additionally, in the home market, people could re- finance to lower interest rates and get a refund if you will while in game we can not.

Ryneis

While alchemists are still trying to find an effective way to turn lead into gold, SoE has found a way to turn silver into gold!

That is what the 4000 AA grant is really all about. For a new player, getting 1000 AA is NOT that easy at all. I myself have a bunch of toons sitting around level 70ish that I play when I have my account at silver. Since silver gets 1000 AA and at best the most on one of my toons is 400 aa, why bother subbing to gold when silver will do just fine.

Now however, when you gold sub, you can give such characters instant 4000 AA, which is great since someone like me can take those toons and start leveling up more. But that is not where magic happens, the real transmutation magic occurs when the month ends and I fall back to silver. Wait a sec, I now have more than 1000 AA silver limit. To make my playtime useful now I HAVE to sub to gold, because the silver sub isnt worth it anymore.

I even recall reading a post where a dev or cm stated that there are a lot of people who play F2P. So really, all this comes down to is just an effort to transition the vast majority of Silver memberships into Gold.

I have a fantastic idea. How about you grant every single gold subscribed account character 4k aa's, regardless of current count. This way my shaman and sk with 13k aa's each dont feel cheated out of all the freebies you guys are handling out?

Oh and update your servers and the game engine, those are real problems. How are you going to draw more players by making it easy when you cant even master global chat functions?

Yes, granting aa's does not fix the grouping problem, only makes it worse. But, they already announced heroic characters are coming. I think level 85 with about 4k aa's. Well, now you will just be buying a level 85 toon, everyone will have the aa's. Want a fix to no groups, make zones that require real groups to get into, a full group, do allow boxed groups. Make the drops better then zones that don't. Add to it a reason to get a person with low levels or aa's into your group, call it eq mentoring, your group as the mentors get more xp, more of something for having someone in your group that has less then 4k aa's or less then 10 levels from the group, so that they can be a big part of your group. Something...., but the fix to not having groups is making friends, taking in players that are less in levels and gear then you, getting to know them as you play, I have had many real friends from this game, I have no problems finding group because I will take that level 75 no aa person and let them come with me and talk with them while leveling. The fix in not in the code it is us, you probably won't take someone that is not 85 with at least 4k aa's. I take them all the time. The people that have stayed with the game are a lot of the people that like the solo game, as stated before the game has changed to make it easier for these people. Hard to get new people when the game is made easy, no reason to group when you can do it better and with less pain of grouping with new people, solo. So welcome the aa's and the solo players will be happy because they can now solo easier, I'm just waiting to see how the group just start coming for everyone.

If I am wrong I will be happy that I was wrong, because it will be a better game. It is coming, just some time to find out if they aa's are the fix or if they just water the game down more. It is coming.

To Tharrg:

I would like to respond to your statement.

"Currently you cannot buy a high level character...you have to level yourself"

I am sorry; but you are mistaken. Please go on-line and do a search. Enter "EQ Power Leveling".
There are many sites out there that will level a character from 1 to 100 or any number of levels
in between. That is of course; illegal, but the fact is, they exist so someone is using them. They will
also sell you any number of AA's or plat. Do you think that no one is doing this, (LOL)!

I am also sure that there are players in game that will Power Level. .

I think the changes may put some of these characters (the web site ones) out of business. I would love it.

I think the damage thing is out of order. Wave my wand and kill the zone! Ridiculous!

I think there should always be some chance of a toon dying in any encounter. A good one would be:
"My god! The battery went dead in my wand. What do I do now!

I hope the date for the changes isn't too far away. The complaints are becoming boring.

Please come back a few days after patch and let us know that all the pl sites have shut down and all the PL guys in game are gone.

You are so naïve.

They will adapt, they always have, and it will create even more lag, cause it will require they add a couple f2p boxed support toons outside of group in order to continue their regular pulls..

I believe he means they can't be pulled across a full zone, solves trains, and swarms.

Doesn't that already happen with the current leeshing coding? He needs to be a lot more specific.

LOL.... yeah these guys have been around for years... since Kunark ... people selling on e - bay and people selling on other sites. This is normal for all MMO's. So yes that is always true. But what I meant was in Game.. there is no Pay for levels option. You have to level yourself, you can not just buy a character. Heroic characters will be this of course...... but has anyone thought about this.....?

With Heroic Characters on the way... the new AA gift seems to be a way to keep players from Griping about how they have tons of alts and that now that people can buy level 85's that they should be compensated for having to delete those alts to get characters with AA's etc. In a way SOE has sidestepped that fall out and granted the AA's in a preemptive strike to curb the players who will get upset that they worked hard to get characters up and now it would be easyier to just buy the character outright. Think about it... go through the complaints now.. and alleviate the ones later......

What happens when you put a check in it like if 20 mobs are already going after him, just ignore him.

How are other games doing it and eq can't?

I mean they don't even have zone lines, per say.

Other games aren't running on underlying code that was written in 1996.

I am a recently returned player. I returned knowing that I should expect a grind after nearly twelve years away. I was actually shocked at how much easier it was to level and gain AA than when I quit.

I used to be in a top 2 guild (all servers) and my time commitment was compulsive. I now have other things in life and wanted to be more casual and just have something fun to do several hours a week.

Here are the things that I wish had been easier. Getting autogranted AA or level are not things that would have enticed me.

1. Finding what server my characters got moved to. I was from Mith Marr and there were apparently a couple merges of that player base.
2. A way to search for active players and what server they are now on. Would be nice to be able to search for a name and see if any characters on that account are active and on what server (with merges and easy transfers, people are scattered). Being able to find long lost friends would really make getting back in to the game enjoyable. Likewise providing a free server transfer for returning players (account inactive 1+ years) would help the transition back
3. Making older content more relevant. I was looking forward to seeing the expansions that came after I quit. Once I realized a level 30 mob drops better gear (defiant) than I could get camping a named or doing a quest in higher level zone, the sooner I lost interest in exploring and playing my way up. At that point, it became all about grinding so I could level up to where rewards existed.
4. Better resources for returning players. Maps, good zone connection information, what zones are targeted at what player levels, better AA descriptions, better alignment of spell lines over expansions. Being told that mercs existed! Being told that /1 is how to use "general". This is all stuff that you learn as expansions are released and group, but is a lot to absorb and google for. I think I spent the first several hours roaming around completely empty zones randomly killing a few mobs here and there trying to figure out what to do next.

Sorry no disrespect to Eq but it is called legacy code. The main code of EQ was designed a lot of years ago now and no doubt has been tweaked a lot since then. But once you start making major changes in old code then it is almost as easy to cause unpredicted errors as it is to improve something. And also the people you employ now would probably not even be familiar with the tools / coding methods that were employed all those years ago. - times move on and so does the skill set people learn at college.

I've had very mixed feelings about several aspects of these changes...but so far, I have to say the immediate result looks positive for a simple reason...

I have about a dozen RL friends who have played EQ at one point or other during the last 15 years (not counting the dozens of great people I've met online). Only 1 still plays. Of my guild and my one RL friend still playing..we're all going to keep playing even if some changes bother us.

However, I also have 2 old friends who when I told about this actually started talking about coming back...they didn't have an interest in grinding for months just to catch up...but the EQ return bug was strong enough that if they can catch up quickly they're up for coming back to hang once again.

It's very anecdotal (so are all the "I'm gonna quit" posts)...but so far it looks like a net +2 in my world and that answers a core question I had about the changes which was...Will this bring people back into the game?

I don't think it's going to radically change the long term up or down of EQ...the game is aging...but it isn't going to end the world...and it might...MIGHT....just create a small net positive. SO I'm moving into the support camp for AAs and I believe there has been some very positive movement on the melee front (regarding the changes to swarming)....

So thanks Devs for listening and for giving a complex issue some serious thought. No solution is 100% but I think this is now heading in a better direction.

Thanks for the reply, it means a lot, to just be heard.

"Nerf character movement", was sarcasm, I meant root everyone on server and they can stand around in pok and chat with each other...

I completely understand that the zone server has to keep track of every player and npc, Im just interested in finding a solution to this problem, yes it is cpu intensive, lets do something about it.

Does every npc have its own thread that just deals with its movement?
I know some npc paths are static others seem to be autogenerated, perhaps a array with pregenerated paths chosen by random would be better? (Im only talking about npc movement outside of a mob actually being aggroed now)

Anyway, if we can focus on the code for generating paths when the mob is agroed, whats so wrong with the first mob agroed being the pathleader? then let the rest of the mobs follow it? if it dies or is outrun by a faster mob let that mob take over the roll as path leader. If one gets stuck, just warp it over to pathleaders last known loc... Think tropical fish that all turn at the same time...
Ive looked at some code for generating shortest path from one city to the next for a gps system, and there are some nice ideas out there...
Look, maybe you guys have the best most powerful optimized code ever, and its impossible to improve on, if that's the case ill back off, but as a coder... I think there is always room for improvement, if someone says it cant be done... that's motivation enough to say, ill do it or die trying...