Why is Darkpaw Hiding Important Stats from Players?

They other day I wanted to find out what my melee % critical chance for my EQ character was. I opened my character panel and could not find it. I was puzzled to say the least that this important stat was not available to players.

I started thinking of other important stats like the following:

% chance to crit spell
% chance to hit melee
% chance to block
% chance to parry

All of these are also unavailable to players. I'm sure there are many more as well. I compared the EQ2 panel and noticed that it does include a crit chance % as well as other details about crits as you can see in this graphic below:



It seems to me that the crit chance and stats like that are important stats to know. After all EQ is a game about upgrading your character via gear.

I don't see why an additional panel could not be included in the character stats panel that provides all of this useful information. Thanks for listening.

For Casters the Fury of Magic AA will tell you your base crit chance. Would it hurt to have it on the character screen? I suppose not, but the information is available in game.

Those values may be a function of your and the attacking/defending mob’s stats.

And when you run into a mob with 100% heroic strike through you'll wonder why these stats lie.

EQ2 is an easy mode game.

What makes these important stats?

Nothing is being hidden. You just need to do some work to figure out these types of variables.

Like… as a ranger I crit with my bow in PoP ~30% of the time and crit with melee weapons ~7% of the time. A parser can tell you that.

Would it be nice to see these types of factors in a display? Yes. But EQ2 is far more modern than EQ so some knowledge is more accessible to players through a display.

But if we’re going to start with ANYTHING - I would ask for effective AC to be completely unraveled first for display.

It's like saying gold is not hidden, you just have to find it by digging and sifting though hundreds of miles of square geography.

The chance of critical is a very important stat, far more important than CHARISMA which is essentially useless. But charisma gets listed? Give me a break.

It never ceases to amaze me how some hardcore players will go to such great lengths to make excuses for Darkpaw and the status quo. If players can't even get their crit chance state displayed in a game window with other stats, what makes you think that they'll listen to your other concerns?

Do you really think that CHARMISMA stat is more important for players to know than the CRIT CHANCE stat?

If not, why isn't charisma plainly visible but crit chance is hidden?

Why do other modern fantasy MMORPGs, even EQ2, display crit chance but EQ does not?

Maybe when they redesign the UI? What they show us stat wise is pretty old.

When did I say charisma is an important stat? There's nothing that says the stats that are shown are important, just like there's nothing that says the stats they DONT show (like crit chance) are important.

I expect cha is there because it's literally one of the basic stats a character has and has been in the UI for 2+ decades. Even though cha does nothing xd

The premise of this post has a tone of malevolent bad action by DPG. They are not hiding anything of value. This is an old- game and the minmax meta prevalent across RPGs objectively has no place in EQ.

I mean, that might be a little dramatic.

Or, and hear me out, like just download one of the parsers for EQ and it will provide you this information!

You're acting like finding crit chance is equivalent to looking for the holy grail. It's pretty simple.

Showing the current stats like crit damage, crit chance etc would be a nice QOL improvement to help non-spreadsheet folks understand their characters.

For those spreadsheet folks though, check this out: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...HwVyfEJef2VExE_vRfintt097s/edit#gid=932406264

No malevolent intent was intended. Things can be hidden by intent, negligence, or thoughtlessness. EQ is a work in progress. MMO conventions and quality of life improvements are added all the time.

I disagree. Knowing what your critical rate percentage is vital information for players. Kill monsters and loot their stuff so you can get better gear is a key GAME LOOP that every fantasy MMORPG follows. Not showing a player's crit rate erodes that fundamental loop because it impedes players ability to make an informed decision.

You should not have to parse logs or go to 3rd party websites to ascertain your melee crit chance and other important stats.

The "it's a 23 year old old game give the devs a break" rationale is a common fallacy used by white knights to excuse inaction by the devs.

Adding in chance to crit percentage and other important stats will not break EverQuest.

The original EQ never had weapon damage ratios. Many years later the devs added them in making it far easier for players to figure out if a weapon is worth upgrading and saving them valuable time by not having them needing to use a calculator.

Did that simple innovation of putting in a damage ratio value into a weapon info box have no place in EQ as well?

I understand the value of being an EQ purist. I played on P1999 for a few years and enjoyed the hardship, but this is official EQ. I came here because I appreciate the many quality of life enhancements that our glorious developers have added along the way. I hope they will continue to do so.

I imagine part of it how eq displays information. Such as how the game descriptions list ac then we have 450 posts that it says 48 ac but their ac only increases by 47.

If it gave a crit chance, of say 50 percent, then someone would get 49.99 and cry that it’s a lie and false advertisement!

Its not the end of the world to have a tiny bit of mystery left in the game

I think most adults understand that the "devs" are like other worker bees and do not control their time at work. It is not a fallacy to point out that this is a 23 year old game with a history of poor documentation that seems to make doing even "simple" things time consuming. Given the choice between duplicating something that is easily found elsewhere or doing almost anything else productive, I'll go with the latter.

Sure, it's a 23 year old game and that brings with it various challenges and inefficiencies that can hamper productivity of the developers. Players often bring up this point as a way to excuse devs not addressing long-standing issues. It sounds plausible, but I'm not convinced. I would like to hear the devs say this themselves.

Is a 23 year old game really preventing them from adding a few lines CHANCE TO CRIT stats for players to see?

If anyone seriously believes this, I have a bridge in Iceclad to sell them.

Then there's the other issue of devs being mindless worker bees that are told what to do at every step and have no agency or freedom at Darkpaw. I don't believe this either.

EverQuest is a work in progress, therefore it behooves the management at Darkpaw Games to insist that their devs keep up to date with quality of life improvements which makes the player experience more enjoyable. Dev time must and should be allotted for this important task.

Development work on EQ started in 1996. Development on WoW (a 19 year old game) started in 1999. That is a 3 year difference. But why is one codebase a horrible mess (and used as an excuse for inaction) and the other a rousing success?

Honestly what is showing your crit chance going to change? What decisions would you be making in game that would possibly changed based on that information?