Is this perception wrong?

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Skuz, Dec 23, 2020.

  1. Zanarnar Augur

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    At least on the topic of "revisiting older expansions with new content" goes, I too don't see it as a bad thing. Its a chance to tell a new story in a familiar, and hopefully popular, setting. Lets be honest there are only so many lost continents there can possibly be before norrath is just one huge land mass.

    I honestly hope then change in ownership means a better awareness of Everquest. In turn hopefully that leads to more players, more funding, and a bigger team to work with. I'm still (honestly) surprised its as solid financially as it is.

    Last note, I too disagree that the EQ devs aren't passionate about the game. A game like this, as old as it is, as much a pain as these old tools and systems must be to work with... there has to be a level of passion for the world and game to still be here. A lifetime of work in some cases I'm sure.
  2. Yinla Ye Ol' Dragon

    I had this feeling when Holly took over being boss of EQ as well as EQ2, I think she cared more for EQ2 as that was what she knew.

    Jen on the other hand has always been EQ, so I'm hoping that things will soon swing back in EQs favour or at least be more balanced.

    I think they need to look at what EQ players get "free" at anniversary times and preorder times and try and even up the rewards a bit more. I don't know who makes the decissions on who gets what but it does seem EQ2 players get more freebies than EQ players and the EQ2 ones are usually more desirable.
    Skuz, Raptorjesus5 and Barton like this.
  3. MasterMagnus The Oracle of AllHigh


    A little off topic, but you know I'm going to go there.

    You might be surprised how much the player studio stuff still sells.

    My robes still sell hundreds of units in a couple of months (as near as I can tell). A fraction of what it was in the heyday.

    But they still sell regularly, real cash, free DPC gets me nothing. The best sellers were always when something new came out. Nothing new for years now, but still they sell.

    I've watched sales go up over the past two years as they brought back some players to the table.

    It's not 'more than the game' (if you mean $35). But at $12 for the hero forge, and $7.50 per robe, it is some MTX as you say.
  4. Fian Augur

    While some nostalgia is nice, Velious especially has been over done. How many different Crystal Caverns do we have now? I know there are at least 3. I think most players would view the inclusion of some recycled zones as a positive, but even then, it is better when the zone is much different like Scorched Woods, as opposed to having the exact same walls as the original zone. I will give you that Eastern Wastes was a good example of an old zone changed.

    I think most players are expecting/hoping that the next EQ expansion is set in Luclin. So reusing some Luclin zones would be a positive for nostalgia reasons, but that doesn't mean that all of the new zones need to be old zones.

    I think that for most players, story/lore is low on their list of what they are looking for when it comes to creativity. We are looking for game mechanics that are different. To toss out an example, where a static zone has multiple flag points and there are competing NPCs to control those points, and you can help one side or the other to control each flag, with special results if one faction or another controls all flags in a zone.

    My personal preference - while having some large zones is nice for kiters, etc, I also like smaller zones. The smaller zones where it is fun to have interesting quests that involve more than running to opposite ends of a large zone. Personally, TBM was a great zone for questing. Also, please design partisan quests assuming that they will be rerun, not run just once to get the achievement and then done. TBM did that by giving a currency reward for each quest completed. In ROS and later expansions, you tie currency gain to missions that require a full/standard group (tank/healer etc). Most of the time you can't run a quest (and even if you did, you can run all 4 in 2 hours, and then have to wait for a 6 hour timer) and players get bored.
    Ssdar, Jumbur, Skuz and 1 other person like this.
  5. Benito EQ player since 2001.

    Fair enough. And I think that is great news for content creators in EQ. I have no doubt marketplace does fairly well as players return and new players join. But I don't think marketplace items and features are frequent purchases for most players.

    Marketplace is much more limited in scope than say games which focus almost exclusively on cosmetics. I know you've mentioned playing Fortnite in the past. I suspect Fortnite and CoD have fairly large weekly or monthly microtransactions from their playerbase. For instance, Fortnite is currently selling 3 bundles (including a bundle featuring Captain Marvel/Black Panther and another bundle featuring Joker/Poison Ivy) where many of their players are likely making weekly purchases in the range of $10-$35.
  6. Raptorjesus5 Augur

    I hope this thread doesn't get too focused on the revisiting of Kunark/Velious in recent expansions after Absor's response to that piece because that was a relatively minor point of the OPs argument.
    Skuz likes this.
  7. MasterMagnus The Oracle of AllHigh


    Completely agree.

    So much more they could do with the marketplace here but don't.

    And oh yes I have, and continue to spend way too much on Fortnite skins (and backpacks, and dance emotes, ...).

    *edit*
    I will say. I consider myself a heavy purchaser on Fortnite and I only spend $10 for the 'season pass' (10 weeks or a little more), and I'll probably buy one or two things in the $5-$15 range during the season. Rarely a $20 skin if it's a 'must have'.

    FN just started a subscription model also $11/mo. New exclusive skin each month and in game currency also.

    They have fully embraced the cosmetic driven model, are having cross-over after cross-over with popular franchises, and I greatly enjoy it.
    Benito likes this.
  8. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    Hence the title of the thread was a question, you supplied some answers, you took time out of your day to provide a thoughtful response to my post, and I very much appreciate you taking time to do that.
    My perception was "recycled" content was very copy paste, it is just how it has appeared to me, that can be interpreted as developers being lazy, being very time efficient or as it has been made apparent by your response - just so good that all of the changes were hard to spot and they were easily missed.
    Since you have given me an insight into how these zones were done I have now been equipped with new information, where I would diverge from the view that these nostalgic zones were done to appeal to the players who like them I think what needs to be borne in mind is balance, by all means have some familiar zones in an expansion but if an expansion is doing only familiar zones and you get a couple of expansions of that it feels to some players that the team isn't really stretching much, it's why I felt the way that I did.

    I'm fine with some familiar places being revisited, Crystal Caverns with its 3 has certainly seen enough for a while though I think, but nostalgia expansions can also open up new places that still tie into the themes of the familiar zones, had ToV skipped CC and instead had a *new* Velious zone included I feel it would have been even better received, as an example. Had CoV had at least one new zone I feel it would have been a better expansion too.

    I think you may have misunderstood my intent here, what I intended to express was not that I thought the team lacked creativity, but that I felt it was being prevented from demonstrating it by business concerns or a lack of desire to see EQ remain vital, only paying lip-service to the players as a result & not delivering on a more inventive potential, opting for what looked to me to be an easier and less costly creative vision.

    I was also concerned that the developers were not enjoying creating content for EQ as much as they could due to clunky old systems and tools being difficult to work with and seeing how much better tools for other games, EQ 2 specifically, are would affect them.
    I don't just want EQ to be better for the players, I want it to be better for the team to actually work on too, a team of devs that has tools which make content creation as enjoyable as any other game & not as laborious as I know EQ's have been are going to be putting out the same high quality work, but they are going to have a better time doing so.

    I look forward to seeing some of those ideas in the future, I don't plan on playing any other MMO.

    Not egotistical at all, confident.
    I think both honouring existing lore while creating something new is entirely possible, and I don't think ripping it apart is in & of itself a bad thing it just depends how it is done and how big a departure is made.
    Case in point being Gates of Discord, and casting the in-era problems that expansion had to one side for a moment to focus on the positives, while at the time was often touted by detractors as too big a departure from EverQuest's "Dungeon's & Dragon's style" western fantasy roots I hold it up as a great creative example of branching out into unexpected territory, it was bold and very different to what had been done before but it also gave the game, the franchise even a whole new layer it could never have had without it and provided a whole new set of antagonists, lore opportunity & fuel for nightmares for years.

    Venting is almost always far more useful that bottling stuff up, especially when done as civilly as this was. Thank you for your response, I enjoyed reading it.

    A Merry Xmas to you & your family, the same for all of the rest of the team.

    May the worst day of 2021 be better than the the best day of 2020.
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  9. Benito EQ player since 2001.

    Yeah, I tend to buy the Battle Pass and rare skin bundles only but that put's me at probably $100 last year. I'm sure we could see many more sales on the sweat skins (cheap, battle skins).

    Fortnite is quite smart and tactical about their marketplace. They are secret but leak to improve sales. The subscription service on top of their current revenue model is very aggressive.

    I feel like EQ (and EQ2) could monetize cosmetics better. Could heritage crates be improved since suits (except for plate) are treated fairly poorly? Probably. They should introduce exclusive cosmetics (armor suits, illusions, mounts, items by content creators) as limited time bundles (perhaps 1 every 6 months due to development and coding limits). The way people are paying 8+ Krono for Sinister Clockwork armor, they may easily get $50 or more on future cosmetic bundles.
    MasterMagnus likes this.
  10. MasterMagnus The Oracle of AllHigh



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  11. Corwyhn Lionheart Guild Leader, Lions of the Heart

    I think it was more a matter of EQ2 being newer with newer tools that made it a lot easier to work with. Just a guess on my part but I think they get more bang for the buck with EQ2....love to hear someone in the know to comment on it.
    Skuz likes this.
  12. Yinla Ye Ol' Dragon

    It wasn't just in game stuff, she always seemed more comfortable talking about EQ2 compared to EQ1.
    Raptorjesus5, Marton and Skuz like this.
  13. Jhenna_BB Proudly Prestigious Pointed Purveyor of Pincusions

    In defense of Absor and the team, altering time lines and such has been done a bunch and starts to lose it's luster. See Seeds of Destruction and Reign of Fear lore. Maybe we're due again for that kind of thing, but I digress. How do you come up with an unknown area 27 expacs and 22 years in? The world is known at this point. Changes over the years in older areas makes too much sense when trying to keep the lore alive. Lore has always been a very important thing in this game. While there's some criticism that's warranted over how lore is told in game and unfinished story lines we've had in recent expansions, read the text while questing. The lore is still present.

    You'd need to employ planetary travel or some such to have new content that makes sense. That takes the Norrath out of EQ. I'd have very mixed feelings about that.
  14. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    There! expansion revealed: Everquest: The Dark Side of Drinal

    :p
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  15. ZenMaster formless, shapeless

    It felt like TBL lore was a happy medium. It was new and refreshing but paid homage to the original elemental planes. TBM lore was similar but felt more disjointed. People have suggested continuing the Plane of Mischief lore in a future expansion.
  16. Numiko Augur

    EQ is still using a 32 bit game engine, EQ2 uses a 64 bit game engine, that's the reason EQ2 always looks more "shiny" . they can do a lot more with the graphics that are just not possible to do here with the old engine it runs on.
    Xianzu_Monk_Tunare likes this.
  17. I_Love_My_Bandwidth Mercslayer

    My spidey sense tells me this is about to change. Many of the infrastructure upgrades/improvements taking place all point to long-haul investments - and the order in which they happen points to what is likely next. And my crystal ball tells me that a game engine upgrade is coming.

    I am excited for the future of EQ. :)
  18. Chaosflux Augur

    I hope you have a happy new year and merry christmas and I really hope our old and beloved friend [Mayong Mistmoore] makes a return in the future maybe involving something that requires us to return to Darkhollow. I havent seen him in along time and frankly I am sure he has missed me as much as I miss him.

    Tying up the Luclin/Plane of Shadows thing might be cool too.
  19. Yinla Ye Ol' Dragon

    Mayong has been done to death. He needs to be left alone.
    I'd also rather not see FV again unless they are going to let us kill her. There are lots of other NPCs who are in need of our help or have been causing trouble without going back to the same ones time and time again.

    Lots we can resist in Planes of Power and Luclin. But I really want to visit Drinal.

    I hope wherever they decide we go next expansion they give us at least one new zone.
    Skuz likes this.
  20. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    I could write another incredibly long post about that but I won't, I don't see that that as terribly difficult to do and could come up with a bunch of stories/scenarios to accompany & provide justification for such a thing that would be in keeping with the game, and the lore of the actual zones connected to such an area, I feel confident the team could do so as well & likely make a better job of it than I would.

    Yeah I totally get where you are coming from here, re-visited zones being affected by major in game events and plots does make a lot of sense, and the earlier poster giving Scorched woods as an example is relevant to that concept. I still think that an expansion that only contains revisited zones doesn't really scratch the "explorer itch" though, wanderlust is a major factor for many players of games that are built as worlds such as EQ is.

    EQ has many modes of travel, interplanetary travel is in fact already among its arsenal of stories & methods of exploration, it doesn't travel between worlds via spaceships but by way of magical teleportation, and doesn't even restrict itself to interplanetary travel but also explore different realms of existence such as the planes were. The Norrath is always in EQ because the players are that, and through them Norrath gets around a lot.