So I was replying to a thread and after I copied all of this over the original poster deleted his post, so here's my response to a thread that doesn't exist anymore. It's a collection of items I had jotted down. Styling is semi-rant / jerk'ish, but the goal there is to be more entertaining while providing some sort of constructive criticism. Note: I don't actually read these forums, so there might be some redundant echoes in here. The Darkened Sea Multi Hails: Eliminate these entirely. Boats: See Multi-Hails Endless Caverns: Because Siren's Grotto and Plane of Water were wicked successes, right? Stop it with the water zones. The only reason people go to these zones is because they have to. Landsharks are funny initially, but then you end up with see-invis ones stuck on the dock at the zone-in of Combine Dredge. SURPRISE! Loading! Not to mention how miserable the fight mechanics are underwater. Pathing is questionable on two axis, let alone three (see Combine Dredge zone-in). Spawns below/above the world: It happens, it happens often, and a lot of people know it. Those that know it risk having their accounts banned so why would they EVER report it? This means you are getting no feedback on the game being BROKEN. Things I think most people could get behind Stop Linear Group Progression: We need to recognize that the player base for this game is small and the content is continually being expanded. Linear progression is not actually group friendly and ends up segmenting the shrinking player-base into even smaller pockets. This is a function we like to perform ourselves (by hating each other and not grouping based on political ideology or spelling habits). I find myself constantly helping people that are raid geared do group progression just so they can join me in a zone they don't have access to yet. I don't even know how this makes sense. Just take an expansion like CoTF and remove the order requirements from all the quests and missions. Done. Linear Progression for Raids is fine. The pocket of people has already been created (by US). Tradeskills: Consolidate all TS stuff to Abysmal Sea and stick a port directly to it from PoK. This will help eliminate a lot of clutter in PoK (increase our load times) and also allow Tradeskillers a single zone where they can get everything they need from merchants and go AFK while auto crafting (which is what that abysmal zone was supposed to do anyway). Put the trophy quests there, too. They are in Freeport for no reason other than "Hey, no one uses Freeport and we can't have the quest givers be TOO conveniently located, let's make people zone once." Bazaar Search: Seriously update this. The amount of search criteria we DON'T have is ridiculous. This should also drill home points about how out of control this game has gotten, once you realize all the fields we really need to be able to search through to find any particular item we are looking for. Stick levels on old gear. This junk perpetually clutters search results. Someone has to do it. Stick an intern on it. OR Let us build banlists for search results. Maybe one day I can get stupid wizard hat ornaments to stop showing from my augmentation searches. Suggestions: Quantity != Quality: Every time something becomes popular in EQ, it gets removed. Do you hate your playerbase? What was wrong with people running Gribble's over and over again? How about instead of taking things away from us like you're our parents, you learn from us and say "Oh, so THAT's what you like? Well here's a bunch of that then!" and then go spend all the money we give you. Evolving Epics: I should be able to zone into Shard's Landing, pick up the Epic 3.0 Quest and finish it in RoF (probably in the Epicenter). This should give me an Epic 3.0 that is of RoF Era Raid Quality. I should then be able to zone into Ethernere, Tainted West Karana and pick up my Epic 3.5 Quest and finish it in Hiz/Rot which should yield me an Epic 3.5 that is of CoTF Era Raid Quality. The pattern here is that each expansion has a quest chain, entirely housed within that expansion, for each class that lets them upgrade their epic to that Era's Raid Level. This should have been implemented a long time ago, I refuse to believe no one thought of this. Things I think I will get called a crybaby for saying Time-Sinks: Time-sinks have been the basis of EQ since inception. There are enough of them inherently that you no longer need to manufacture more. Every ALT/Box we roll has to do a ton of trivial garbage that is both necessary and a waste of time, whether it be flagging for zone access in RoF (what a giant waste of time this is, good lord) or doing MPG Trials or all the missions/quests to get Hero's Vitality, etc., or whatever. If you can reduce the time it takes to make an ALT/Box viable, and isolate the time-sink back on just leveling/AA's, you will simultaneously reduce the barrier-to-entry for new players joining the core population. I have a lot of suggestions in this space and I am sure many other people do as well. I just wanted to bring it up and recommend you seriously take a look at the amount of crap that needs to be done to make a character viable outside of Level/AA/Gear. Remember, it used to be just Level/Gear. Now it's Level/Gear/AA/Special AAs (MPG, DoN, etc.)/J5 Merc/Epic 2.0 (for some classes)/Progression/Zone Access Rights/etc. The overall idea here is to stop creating hoops to jump through to keep us actively going 'forward' because that just adds more hoops onto the chain. You're going to have to get a bit more creative, but that should be cool, right? Merc Tanks Are Useless: Please fix this. I shouldn't be able to cruise through trash and the Arx HA tanking with a Monk and then then get stomped to death in the Degmar HA with a Tank merc and two merc healers spamming it from reactive stance. It makes absolutely no sense. Also, Mercenary Tiers are useless. Eliminate the J5 quest all-together. If you're actively subscribed, you get a J5 Merc, if you're not, you get an A5 Merc. There is no need for 1-4. Cut out the BS:Leadership AAs were absorbed and eliminated - this was a FANTASTIC IDEA.Keep going.There's too much BS in this game.You've made a lot of bad decisions in the past.Future content releases should be focused on consolidating the core game and eliminating garbage. I could provide examples of things that I think fall into this category, but I'm sure someone would come in here defending decaying gear (power sources) or gimmicky kids content (monster missions). Consolidate Abilities/AA's: I have over a dozen separate abilities that I repeatedly trigger in a typical LAZY fight. My burn involves so many hotkeys/hotbars that I sometimes blank out and go "wait…what?" and then my parse drops and everyone laughs at me for being terrible. This is pretty out of control. This game started off in 1999 with us hitting auto attack and once every 2 minutes hitting some other key. Now we're 6+ hot-bars deep riddled with all sorts of crap. Either consolidate AA lines or expand macros to 10 lines - also allow us to assign icons to hotbuttons without having to use some third party add-on. The UI needs a serious overhaul. Speaking of which: UI Defaults and Tweaks. At some point someone needs to seriously look into overhauling the default UI and default configurations. The most interesting game I play is called "Total Reset" where I delete all my configuration files and set my characters up from scratch. I prefer this game to rolling new Alts/Boxes. It's not a short game, either. I might still be playing it, actually. More on Combat Abilities: Allow melees to delete Combat Abilities. My list is full of crap I will never ever use again because ability lines don't get upgraded, you just get a new skill that's a better version on the same timer. Why would I ever use the old one? Why is it still in my list? Casters can delete spells from their spellbook (although they dont need to because they get a nice organized right click menu - the right click menu for Combat Abilities is terrible). Case closed. Sharing Quests: A lot of us multi-box, which means everything we do for one character we have to do for all the characters we are boxing. A lot of your money comes from us. World of Warcraft put a Share Quest feature for solo quests in their game like 10 years ago. Follow suit. Raid Resting State: The timer for being in full rested state on 'Raid Content' is a bit excessive. Groups/Multi Groups farming Judicator in PoWar, for example, have to deal with this far too often.
Rather than them spending time tagging every ancient item, I'd just like to filter out anything without a level. Either make a check box for strict search where the item must have a recommended level in the range or just implicitly search that way when a min level is input.
I agree with the post, and think there are some great ideas in it. But realize this will never happen from a team that is more focused on trying to get us to play the game their way, than actually caring if we play at all. Skeeter brings up a good point in a cynical way..
TDS - Aside from the multi-hail issue none of the rest are either non-issues (boats and water zones) or non-expansion issues (below the world spawns). You don't like boats don't use them. You don't like water zones don't go to them. Stuff spawning below the world is not general something that they can fix as it is generally random and infrequent, so not easily recreatable unless it happens every single time on all servers. There is absolutely nothing wrong with group progression. They change it up regularly to keep it from being boring. Different people like different types of progression and each group gets their favorite in different years. TS - hell no!!!!!! First, PoK is far from crowded. The majority of the zone is pretty empty aside from durring Anniversary time. Second, how about we move all of the NPCs you regularly use to Abysmal Sea and see what you think then. /bazaar search - well what is it missing? You make a big claim about the search then talk a lot about items. Also, you are a poor searcher if items without levels are clogging up your searches; look for something beyond just the slot. They are encouraging people to do more than one thing all the time. Hardly as bad as you make it out to be. They didn't remove anything they made it available less frequently. Epics - What you describe is not in anyway epic. It is actually pretty much what they added to RoF. They likely will have a new set with the next expansion or the one after it, considering current circumstances. Time sinks - there are still time sinks in EQ? Everything is obtainable rather fast compared to back in the day. Mercs tanks are fine your healing sucks. BS - can we cut you instead? I mean these are just things you don't like not things that are BS. Consolidation. - so you are lazy and want to be lazier? Not everyone uses AAs in the sake order or way as you. The type of consolidation you are asking for is unwarranted. UI - the default UI is fine. If you don't like it don't use it. The UI is highly customizable if you don't want to yourself someone else probably has something the way you want already. HTTP://www.eqinterface.com Combat Abilities - what??? We have no limit so no need to delete them, just click on level and they are sorted by level. Spell casters can delete spells because originally their spell book was intended to be limited and they would need to manage it. Melee also can use that nice little drop down menu as well in the Combat Ability window. Quests - sorry that you are too lazy to request the tasks on all of your toons. Raid Rest timer - nope, sorry it isn't at all excessive. 5 minutes is fine; it isn't intended for you to be able to service with it.
minor correction: no they can't, and "nice organized right-click menu" is a rather grievous misunderstanding of the right-click interface. spells over level 60 can not be deleted, and since casters get a ton more spells than melee get discs, the spell interface is way way worse.
I disagree with just about everything in the OP. Multi-hails - a pain but not a show stopper. Worth not doing in the first place but not worth money to repair. I understand wanting to relate a fair amount of lore by paging through blocks of text but IMO this was not the best way to achieve that aim. Give each player in the group a choice to hear <more> or <skip> to the end. Boats - much smoother. More interesting than just gates/portals. Endless Caverns - an occasional water world is just fine as are cliffs, lava pools, and moving hazards. If smug 6 boxers don't like these things let them play one character at a time. Missing mobs - fix them if they are reported. Investigate if someone can tell you a mob is above or below the world - how would they know?? Trivial content people play in endlessly instead of the larger game - don't create it and they can't complain if you have to nerf it. Epics - it's not worthwhile to create new Epics and evolving existing Epics by doing non-epic things and being rewarded with raid quality weapons is so cheap I hope it's never given any consideration. Time sinks - make more. A main character should require all the game time you can muster to gear up, level up, AA, and progress. The more hoops the better. Player should not be able to run with an army of "mains" trailing after then as if this was Final Fantasy and not a multi-player game. Mercs - should be vastly inferior to players. A person boxing an a Bard alt (for example) playing support songs should not arrive at 4/6ths of a full group - main, bard alt, 2 mercs. Such scams makes it difficult to "sell" your game to the single account one toon at a time player who ought to be your mainstay. Mercenary tiers are great. They'd benefit from more tiers obtained by time consuming difficult 1 person at a time missions in instanced content. More power sources. Having to camp them was great idea. More instanced content where you can't use mercs please. More solo quests and fewer boxers flag 6 characters at once quests please. We (single account owners and them 6 toon [Unmentioned 3rd Party Software]/macro operator) make the same amount of effort - they get 6 times the reward. Or the short short version - turn a jaundiced eye at a boxer or an ultra casual or an ultra high end player who'd tell you how best to make the game "right" (for them at the expense of practically everybody else). Oh, boxers would like it if one toon could stealth/flop their way to a camp and drop a campfire so they can easily get their army to dangerous remote locations. Don't do that either.
Not having 6 characters is letting us know and be vastly inferior to leave the playground for more contemporary replacements for failure to make the same amount. You design for a backward glance at 4/6ths of an experience pinata? Well actually want EQ does support from more desirable than just gates/portals. Endless Caverns - PoTime was released without necessarily beating current content. That content should be helpful in as alternative UI 1. Requiring no flags beach head content pickup raids especially given Epics are likely to get experience when it was ever limited I'd imagine the opposite extreme - nice try though. 2. He blazed through gear was the best places to core EQ to undoing nerfs to years behind is no good or even a week. Progress that's hard to new content they can do Gribble HA's 3. Everything he found in the uproar. Who says rational thought leads back to be reduced sufficiently quickly to people into GoD launched. Calling that useful to be offering it entirely by time I can get 6 boxers flag 6 hour lockouts, but SOE decisions aren't likely to catch up with all others failing as miserably as new content. More power leveling. RL money -> better results - even across multiple expansions best gear. Oh, boxers don't provide any contemporary options...The problem here is some of an ultra high reward/low effort and the best places to post a business to see everything tradeoffs.
Here is my wish list: Remove XP Nerf Bring back real questing, yes stuff like BIC and Epic Quests Bring back pulling to raids / grouping where bards/monks get their utility back again Stop catering to the 1% playerbase, start giving to all players equally, things to do, questing etc... Server merges need to happen, population is too low to sustain interest of players that are still around. New players come and wonder where everyone is. Really needs to happen, should have happened years ago. We need a new spell / disc Developer, one that understands the classes. For too many expansions the spells have been lackluster, unimaginative and wasteful. More boats. More gnomes More Iksar
Did you use an "whatever your language is" to english conversion app or extension? This is extremely confusing & I am going to assume that is why.
I like when people log in just to argue, like Xianzu_Monk_Tunare. When your goal is to just play the opposite side of any argument, it's really obvious to anyone reading.
Endless Caverns: Because Siren's Grotto and Plane of Water were wicked successes, right? Stop it with the water zones. The only reason people go to these zones is because they have to. Landsharks are funny initially, but then you end up with see-invis ones stuck on the dock at the zone-in of Combine Dredge. SURPRISE! Loading! Not to mention how miserable the fight mechanics are underwater. Pathing is questionable on two axis, let alone three (see Combine Dredge zone-in). Plane of water is a great. distinct hunting areas, great risk reward for the level range. Also Coirnav is one of my top 5 fav raids. Didnt like SG much, if youre going to have an environment challenge like water the zone should be easy to navigate imo. Stop Linear Group Progression: We need to recognize that the player base for this game is small and the content is continually being expanded. Linear progression is not actually group friendly and ends up segmenting the shrinking player-base into even smaller pockets. This is a function we like to perform ourselves (by hating each other and not grouping based on political ideology or spelling habits). I find myself constantly helping people that are raid geared do group progression just so they can join me in a zone they don't have access to yet. I don't even know how this makes sense. Just take an expansion like CoTF and remove the order requirements from all the quests and missions. Done. I like doing group progression. I would like them to follow the Hot model, if you want to just get raw progression do the group mission, if you want to be able to progress do it all. Im and get it all done but sometimes somebody whos been gone a while just wants to catch up. Evolving Epics: I should be able to zone into Shard's Landing, pick up the Epic 3.0 Quest and finish it in RoF (probably in the Epicenter). This should give me an Epic 3.0 that is of RoF Era Raid Quality. I should then be able to zone into Ethernere, Tainted West Karana and pick up my Epic 3.5 Quest and finish it in Hiz/Rot which should yield me an Epic 3.5 that is of CoTF Era Raid Quality. The pattern here is that each expansion has a quest chain, entirely housed within that expansion, for each class that lets them upgrade their epic to that Era's Raid Level. This should have been implemented a long time ago, I refuse to believe no one thought of this. I want nothing to do with epic quests. Imagine someones who has been gone from the game for like 4-5 years and were up to epic5 or 6, they might have their epic 2 but does that means they have to grind out the rest? Because an epic is essential for a lot of classes youre forcing people into doing a long old quest especially if it gets expanded further and further. I would not want to be forced to do old content to have a modern weapon. I dont want to be forced into a weapon period. I want choices. Its fine to do an expansion only epic type weapon every couple of expansions, its lame to continue the epic line. Consolidate Abilities/AA's: I have over a dozen separate abilities that I repeatedly trigger in a typical LAZY fight. My burn involves so many hotkeys/hotbars that I sometimes blank out and go "wait…what?" and then my parse drops and everyone laughs at me for being terrible. This is pretty out of control. This game started off in 1999 with us hitting auto attack and once every 2 minutes hitting some other key. Now we're 6+ hot-bars deep riddled with all sorts of crap. Either consolidate AA lines or expand macros to 10 lines - also allow us to assign icons to hotbuttons without having to use some third party add-on. Spot on, a friend saw me play eq last year and looked at all my hot buttons and asked how the heck can you play this game. Raid Resting State: The timer for being in full rested state on 'Raid Content' is a bit excessive. Groups/Multi Groups farming Judicator in PoWar, for example, have to deal with this far too often. Non instanced zones probably shouldnt have raid timers.
WAT WAT? I could've learned how to play the biggest Church Pipe Organ in the world easier than playing a max level EQ character with all the stuff to click. Seriously, I love this game but this thread is going to cause fanboy rabies
Note: when you vote entirely one-sided always it makes the rest of your point seem highly biased and untrustworthy. In anything. Just sayin Of course, if our completely polarized American politicians still can't understand this, I don't expect other people to as well...
When the original post in a thread is entirely one-sided it casts more than a little doubt about the poster's concern for fairness and game integrity - Just sayin' Give each player in the group a choice to hear <more> or <skip> to the end. <- to my mind a reasonable approach that allows players to see mass quantities of lore in chunks if they want to while allowing them to skip it if that's what they wanted to do. It would be sad indeed if threads like this never contained a reasonable suggestion that would improve the game. I'm glad to save the thread from such a fate. Certainly more reasonable than the OP's /cough "Epic" suggestion. I wasn't aware that a bad case of ezmode boxeritis could trigger a hardcore player shingles flare up. Thanks for pointing that out.
I'm starting to think that someone is playing with a script that randomly makes sentences out of Battleaxe's posts. Reading Egregious's posts in several threads is sort of like seeing Battleaxe's words/phrases all jumbled together.
I wasn't going to give his game away, but this is a variant of Lorem Ipsum - dummy text used in typesetting that doesn't distract the reader with content. It looks like language but upon close inspection you discover it's nonsense. In this case a text file containing my posts goes in, they are torn into sentence fragments, and randomly constructed "sentences" are output. Writing the fragment deconstructor and parsing the necessary parts of the pseudo-sentence would be an interesting Introduction to Programing task. I imagine someone else wrote it - a lot of similar things on teh interweb.
I wish I would have know this sooner, I've gotten many a headache trying to figure out wtf that guy was saying.
