I don't expect anything but I will take issue with your logic. Underfoot was one of the most difficult expansions when it came out. Akin to GoD perhaps. And yet HoT was relatively easy, right on the heels of Underfoot. There's no reason they couldn't make an easier expansion but, like you, I doubt they will.
SoD before UF had a lot easier areas than SoF, SoF had numerous easier zones than TBS, etc. I don’t know what Yinla is even talking about.
ToV was a super easy expansion. Adding the ear part way through helped with content but the expansion itself was super easy.
Only 1 person in that thread suggested to stop making expansions. No reason to try to start drama about 1 dude.
It was literally the reason he made the thread though. That one person was the OP... Since you wanted to point to this thread when defending his point, I thought it was fair to ask. People can answer or not, it's their choice.
CoV - being made with the backdrop of a global pandemic necessitating a shift from working in the office to working from home and the fact the team lost 3 experienced devs was always going to be leaving the expansion a little short on depth, the art having been made earliest probably suffered the least but filling up an expansion with quests and content in general is time consuming and with a few new people on the team already at that point a struggle to fill it up well was very real. I know Pip did a lot of work on the quests for CoV and is very proud of what was able to be put in under the circumstances, so I think if we are being fair allowances should be made, while also accepting that it fell short of expectations for what an expansion should provide in terms of how much is there to do. I think getting CoV at all before December was maybe touch and go for a while there, and maybe a delay would have benefitted the expansion, but there are concerns around revenue there to take into account that complicate that being possible to do. I think so long as we see a bigger better deeper 2021 expansion players will in time forgive CoV being a fair bit shallower that what we usually get, we will have a bigger team this year at least to make that a more likely scenario and I hope EQ continues to grow in players & dev staff so that future expansions are better able to deliver what we want from the game.
Also, Adam Bell's wife was battling a form of cancer last year and having surgeries iirc.. so on top of everything else, his life away from work was fraught with stress and I'm sure made it difficult to focus on expanding COV.
Yeah, having watched my mum fight bowel cancer myself a few years back I can only send my best wishes to Adam & his wife for her recovery & recuperation, and yeah the stress was likely as hard to handle as most could imagine it being.
ToV was the easy expension, yet you found it hard. If you found that difficult and are looking for something easier your not going to find it. ToV came on the back of TBL which was the hard expansion. CoV is not much different to ToV, I'd do more on CoV if I wasn't sick of the ice and snow.
Only thing I ask in the new expansion is some colors other than light blue and white. I have been snow blind for 2 years now.
EQ has a lot of replay value. I'm no math wizard, but with 16 classes the only thing limiting people from trying a crap ton of options is their computing power, internet connection, and interest.
I found the named mobs in the T2 zones difficult, yes. I'm in group gear. I don't raid. I am probably one of the few. Even single-box players who don't raid group with raid-geared people. So in what way was ToV the easy expansion? Raids? Leveling? The group game?
Outside of Restless Ice and pulling FAAARRRRRRRRR too many mobs, you had about a 0% chance of dying. GD was swarmed day 1, TOFS Floor 2 was swarmed day 1, one namer in GD was broken and killed you fast, T1 raids were beaten within 30 minutes of release, getting 110-115 was completed way too fast thanks to the XP of the group missions (not complaining about this, that's a good things, quests should reward way more XP than grinding), only 1 mission was semi-difficult but once you figured it out you won in less than 5 minutes, it was a loot fiesta, and all of this could be done even in group gear. The hardest part about TOV was not falling asleep due to the easiness of the content.
As a non-raider, ToV gave me the most enjoyment out of this game I've had in years. For casual/group-geared, it was perfect. The missions were fun...I've never been able to say that about missions in any other expansion. It was the first (and only) expansion I've ever completely finished: progression, challenger, hunter, and collectibles. The only issue I had was the hell levels and being forced to do progression to level up. I still think it's awful design and hope they never do that again. CoV, from what I've done, seems to be just a cut & paste of ToV, only more tedious and more difficult for group-geared players. I haven't done any of the missions, and from all accounts I've read of them, they seem to suck. On Drinal, I never see anyone actually just doing the missions. All I ever see are boxers/raiders zerging the Zlandi mission and selling task adds. I've only finished progression in a couple of the zones, and I am thoroughly bored with it. I think a lot of it can be chalked up to the pandemic, which is understandable. I won't say the expansion is bad, but from what I've done and seen, I think that they pretty much phoned it in on CoV.
Dude, that guy was saying to stop expansions altogether. I don't condone that, what is the point of you putting words in my mouth? Stop looking for an enemy.
To me, HoT was harder. (I was a raider in both expansions). HoT did have the advantage of being a 4 tier expansion so much more content though. I did really enjoy HoT though. The variety of content/zones was fun.
HoT was widely regarded as the best grouping expansion, still is. The tuning of the group game was practically perfect & definitely more group friendly to non-standard group compositions. ToV was okay for more conventional groups but it was not so good for unconventional groups especially with some horrendous bugs in one or two quests that were still an issue on TLP and basically screwed any group that had no player tank. Worst by far for groups was Underfoot in my opinion, it was brutal. I've not tackled CoV quests myself so can't say how those fit into the bigger picture.
