Heroic Adventure Changes on Test make it WORSE (Nerfed Again)

as long as the XP is the same for completing i dont mind i suppose. i dont do HA's in CoTF anymore i do them in TDS. i have been trying to farm the AC aug in caverns for a week w/o seeing the named once. i dont mind because its an easy HA and the xp has been pretty decent.

it sucks because lesson wont be as good.

im sure it does but does this xp nerf effect TDS HA's aswell? or just the CoTF ones people were flipping? like i said i dont care one way or the other but it does suck for those that didn't flip HA's to level

These changes look decent going forward. Woot! Random rares in HA'S again.

rares dropping in HA's again been confirmed somewhere? or are you just being hopeful due to the changes? lol

It's in the test notes yes. Not sure if TDS HA as well.

SOE booked a $60m loss from closing down FreeRealms, Vanguard, Wizardry, et al. earlier this year. Taklk about business acumen, FreeRealms topped out at 10 million players at one point - and even with that player base SOE couldn't figure out how to keep enough players interested to make a profit from it.

Meanwhile, no big discount on collector's editions (first time since they started collector's editions, IIRC), no bags with expansions (can't have anything that might cut into Marketplace sales), Test Server now has to buy the expansion (understand opinion is divided, but I'm willing to bet that the extra $10-20k in extra sales on Test this might get them is costing them a lot more than than in the long run in terms of goodwill), and a promotion in May selling a year subscription for $99 vice $119 - but that bills credit cards immediately, even if for accounts with 362 days of all-access left. (So SOE will charge over 11 months in advance for subscription renewals, while before it refused to bill pre-orders until day of release). Some of these might be ok, but in combination they just look like blatant penny-ante money grabs to goose the bottom line for the quarter. (The all-access discount, for example, simply pulled subscription dollars from later quarters into the first quarter of SOE's fiscal year.) Meanwhile, EQ keeps losing developers.

Seems like the bean-counters at SOE are just focused on the next quarter, or *maybe* thru the end of the fiscal year, and aren't setting an environment that facilitates good decisions for the developers.

Have to disagree with you there. Granted, i have several HAs that i've been doing from which i need either a collectible or a named for hunter, so i'm not losing any time/xp by staying and completing instances before moving to the next compared to just killing mobs while flipping instances.

20 million: http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/1...20-million-players-over-two-and-a-half-years/ Though I'm not sure if this was the highest, hehe. I think the problem was that Kids cant pay and they offered that lifetime subscription for pretty cheap, so I don't think many of those were paying customers.

HAs were great for doing lessons.. sad to see that ruined and not considered with the upcoming changes.

I don't think the main goal of FreeRealms was profitability, but a "get them hooked while they're young" strategy. Run at/slightly below cost, in the hopes they'd pick up one of the other titles when they outgrew FreeRealms.

All this reminds me of the biggest gripe people had with SWTOR. They pushed people in the direction they wanted and everyone was unhappy with a game on "rails". They lost a lot of subscribers.

Wow - 20 million and they couldn't figure out a way to make it work?

Though that explains why virtually every gamecard I saw had FreeRealms on it

Which strategy doesn't seem to have worked too well, with the $60m loss.I guess that they didn't have a real plan on how to get them to transition to the next product - or have a 'next product' ready at the right level. Kind of like some plans I've seen that have a slide in the middle saying 'And then a miracle occurs.'

The goal of any for-profit company is to make a profit...if that was their goal, which I highly doubt, they need to reevaluate people in upper management.

The people running Sony are not stupid. This isn't just about computer games and their profitability right now. I'm not an economist, but it is plain to see they are trying to restructure with an eye towards towards long term success, not short term gains. What that means down here in the trenches is we get screwed for now

True, you can move on to the next HA.

Different people prefer to do things different ways though. Maybe it's a carryover from doing camps for 13 years, but when I go hunting a specific mob, I prefer to keep camping that mob until a) it pops and we get the drop we are looking for, or b) it's time to log.

'Flipping' instances before final hail at least gave people the opportunity to keep hunting the desired mob while getting the normal mob EXP - like we've done in camps in static zones that have been standard for 15+ years. Losing experience and Marks of Valor by not doing the final hail? OK - don't see a real need for that foolishness, but if that is what SOE wants, at least I can camp the named and get the normal mob experience.

This change, though, now means that not only do I lose the original HA completion experience, I lose a big chunk of the mob experience too. Unless my group decides to run around from targeted HA to targeted HA, wasting time moving between different HA named 'camps'. Something that wouldn't have been necessary if named were in static zones - or in HAs either, at least up to next Wednesday's patch on live. (And meanwhile while the raw EXP may have been removed from the mobs and put in the quest completion reward, apparently as that is not being affected by the ZEM, the total exp for completing a quest - mobs + hail - is less than it was previously, if i am reading this thread right.)

And as for Absor's claiming that this is simply to 'even out' the mobs available to kill from HAs vice basepop respawn rates in static zones, I call horse hockey. I think the last time that I routinely had trouble finding a camp that repopped before my group ran out of mobs was Kunark. I understand that I'm not 'leet,' and likely there are some folks in the top 5% who do kill mobs so quickly that that is an issue (at least in SOE's mind) but there are also other, far less intrusive ways in which that could have been handled. Meanwhile the folks who potentially could kill at a rate fast enough fast enough for SOE to be concerned already have, by and large, hit 105.

So why the decision to "double down" on already unpopular nerfs? What was the original intent, again?

Oh, I can certainly see how corporation wide Sony is doing some pretty aggressive restructuring and looking to the long term.

And I can certainly see SOE doing some things in an attempt to position itself for the larger larger market available through the PS4, with the announcements this year that they are developing Planetside II and EQN for that platform. I'm surprised they weren't preparing to port them over sooner - though I am not familiar enough with hardware development to understand how far in advance of PS4's release they could have started that development, I would have thought that releasing a PS4 version of Planetside II virtually simultaneously with release of the console would have been the way to go.

With EQ, though - I just fail to see much logic in the direction they seem to have been pushing the game over the last 8-12 months.

I mean, I can see theoretically that they might want to recreate the '99-03 experience . . . on the other hand I have a kid in first grade now (I don't remember homework in first grade!), a wife, I don't have a band I can reliably group with starting at a set night for three-four hours every night and 10+ hours on the weekend, so I'd prefer the '08-'12 game now to the early one - '01 is not sustainable for me. I imagine that my situation is also pretty common for a lot of the player base, so if that is their logic, then it is hard to see that as having "an eye towards towards long term success" - not unless they really think they can attract more 'hard core' players back than more casual players that they are going to lose. And doing a stealth-dump of the experience nerfs into Beta just before design lock don't inspire a lot of confidence in how well thought out this all is. (Other interpretations are far more cynical.) Can they explain what they are trying to do overall? Or is it really true that the direction of the game is careening back and forth from month to month?

I'm OK with TDS as it is, even if it is short on content. All this other baggage coming along with it - and other changes over the past year - just have me wondering if I should keep plugging on in EQ, or simply pull the plug. I don't think I'm alone.

I feel like if there were no quests or progression in these new zones you'd call them "empty" or "just a random add on." I don't think there's any pleasing some ppl. what do you want the next expansion to be? a new continent with no quests, just a bunch of zones in each level between 106-110 with some dungeons? actually that doesn't sound too bad.... but why does it necessarily need no quests or progression? there was progression in basic eq, you had to go through permafrost, nagafen's lair, and kedge keep b4 you could go to the planes of sky/hate/fear..........

There was no such requirement. Level requirement, yes. Progression of any sort. No.

No one is saying no quests (or at least nearly no one). The objection is to forced quests. I don't even mind having the top couple zones locked behind a key quest or even progression. It's locking nearly the entire expansion behind a very linear list of quests I object to. I've already lost sync with my friends. One group logs in a couple hours earlier and got ahead of me that way. My later night friend travels a lot for work and is way behind me. That has left me in the middle boxing on my own. Considering how much like work progression feels, the last thing I want to do is ask friends to repeat what they did earlier in the evening to catch me up, just to have me fall behind again the next day.

I think it has to do with lack of resources and then being yanked around by how expansions are being rolled out. They are in reaction mode which isn't the best place to start your planning from. I think the next expansion will probably tell the tale on where EQ is on its guide path to sunset. Hopefully it is a strong showing.

I agree, they do have a lack of resources - a lack of resources made available to them by SOE for development, regardless of EQ's level of profitability. And I can only imagine the pit of despair in the devs' stomachs when they were told 'OK, you need to come up with a new expansion by October - but meanwhile keep rolling out additional content for COTF. And no, we aren't giving you squat for extra resources for this abbreviated development cycle.' I firmly believe that the content of TDS (or lack thereof) does not reflect the inherent skill of the developers, or what they see as a 'proper' or 'finished' expansion for EQ. I'm OK with TDS for that reason. (Or, rather, I wouldn't let the imperfections in TDS keep me from buying it.)

On the other hand, I would like to think that they would have a 'vision' of how the game should play and develop. Something where resourcing may impact the level to which they can implement the 'vision,' but not the vision itself. And seeing a lot of these changes over the last year, what they will spend limited dev time doing - and what they don't - and then these nerfs - and then doubling down on the nerfs (after the people who they would logically most want to slow are past them), I'm left feeling that either they have no vision (not good), they are shooting from the hip on some pretty significant changes to the game dynamic (also not good - why weren't the exp nerfs put in at the start of the Beta, if they were decisions painstakingly made?) - or else they are really determined to push the game in a specific direction regardless of feedback (again, not good).

I'm OK with TDS as it is - assuming that is is a one-off. It's the repeated application of the nerf bat with apparent ignorance of or disregard for the impact that I'm tired of.

To stop someone like me, and many others, from abusing the current scaling heroic adventure system for every expansion until the end of the game, a change had to be made. As far as I can tell, there were only three possible solutions here. You either

A) Nerf the xp from the Heroic mobs
B) Apply the lockout upon request similar to how the one-off raids function.
C) Ensure heroics from CoTF stop scaling after level 100.

There isn't a win/win here. They're simply fixing a situation that was never intended, but one that we became accustomed to. I agree with the change, regardless of how much I love pathetically quick and easy experience. Leveling to 105 took a matter of hours - the *best* experience should have always been in the new expansion. There simply is no way to compete with a Scouting Ahead beam group, regardless of how good the xp was built in TDS.

With that said, I'm glad to see the xp being scaled up in TDS. I hope they moved the bar far enough for the earlier zones. I didn't find a decent spot until Combine Dredge and non-partisan mobs in Thuliasaur.