Serious question here: what was/is the intent of adding this thing called Personas to EQ? Is something like it present in other games? I'm literally baffled about the intent and/or what this is supposed to fix/solve/etc. Thanks. P.S. I only play on TLPs, not high lvl live servers, if that makes a difference.
Simply put limiting persona swapping to fast camp zones has relegated this to an extremely limited use gimmick.
This is terrible. I got the least expensive for the level cap increase and I'm wondering if that's even of value
Like many others here, I’d love to see the ability to swap between personas made more open. Mostly a TLP player here, and i don’t think you need to let me swap personas in the middle of a raid/group, but having it be more accessible than its current state would be a huge win. ‘Safe zones’ around the world in locations that make sense and are accessible to many popular zones would be great.
I can kind of see the point of having TLPs limited to swapping limited to cities. That audience is looking for the classic experience. People on TLPs want characters to be limited in their abilities so that organic grouping opportunities are plentiful. If everyone can do everything themselves, then there's less need to group with other players. But that's not really the case on live. On live, people are already doing whatever they want with their endless accounts. Allowing live players to swap anywhere would probably be widely seen as a game enhancing change. It may reduce grouping opportunities on live, but that ship has sailed long ago. There's very little organic grouping on live these days. Players fire up their box armies to solo raids. I don't think allowing live players to swap anywhere would really change much about grouping interactions. In fact, it might help. If players could swap anywhere, there would be a stamped of live players leveling up their alts. Lower level zones would be filled with personas leveling up. Players in the 110+ grind would be leveling through world exp. There would be actual groups in high level zones from players leveling their personas. Certainly it would be a big gameplay change, but so was PoK, mercs, etc. and those changes made live servers viable much longer. Maybe they can consider having limited swap on TLPs and anywhere swap on live. That would be a way of making everybody happy.
It wouldn't have mattered, people might even be more annoyed watching an undesired feature take up so much resources while other issues like AA exp bonus on oakwynd, t3 augs or only two missions were ignored. At least when it was a mystery people could ignore those issues because they had higher hopes for personas.
half the player base is on live, half is on TLPs. They need a reason to sell the expansion to TLP players, so it has to have a feature that will be enabled on TLPs. You can see past expansions did this by including the Dragon Hoard and the Tradeskill Depot. For this new expansion they had a meeting, JChan said "Ok, guys, we need to include a new feature for the expansion, but it can't be fun. What do you have?" and someone said "what if we copied the job system from FFXIV but just made them like crappier versions of alts that no one has any reason to use?" and JChan said "Ship it!" It also leads to an obvious feature for the next expansion, some sort of new inventory management UI/keyring type feature so that when you have 10 personas you don't need to fill your backpacks with 10 sets of gear.
Personas seem ok. Prefer to DB just allow me to use multiple mercs at the same time. It can be done. Back when they were testing mercs, before I know what a merc was, they had GM/Guides/Testers playing with more than one merc.
Someone posted a comment noting that Personas were apparently similar to a feature in one of the FF's. That message was just deleted and since we can't delete our own messages here I'm assuming DP did it, which probably means it was true. Second best answer to my question above is the one that mentions the tradeskill depot and dragon hoard, both features I never use because I simply don't trust DP to build something like that and not have some nasty bugs. Like Duping for example. DP really needs to understand that a lot of people simply don't like the infinite inflation of mob HPs, heroic stats, and DPS. I quit live just about OOW or GoD and never went back. EQ is supposed to be a social game and TLPs are where the socialness happens.
I'd also love to know what the original vision was and what discoveries were made along the way to change the plan to what is now a feature with little attractive qualities. When I first heard about it, I envisioned situations where a group of people would go "All we need is a tank, who wants to switch to one?" I would much rather have to run off to a fast camp zone to switch, but not have to go through the pain of leveling the personas. I envisioned it as a way to solve problems for groups of people immediately. I would have accepted leveling personas if you could switch on the spot where you are. But what is being offered... well, I don't want to sound rude, but I just don't understand why you would choose to do it. It seems like an alt would actually be preferable.
see that's what i don't understand. All they do is hurt the solo player in getting places, or finally being able to get to a random group easily to have fun. anyone boxing or playing together will just either have 3 rogues or 1 rogue and 2 corpses, either as alts or as persona. And then drop a campfire. So it's only hurting those that needs it the most. Everyone else can already do this easily.
This is just a way of generating more in game micro transaction. They are not even trying very hard to hide it. ... Pay 1500 station cash for an alternate persona that can only be accessed from a fast camp or starting zone .. or just create a new character on your account .. yes there is some benefits but as you said that thing kinda kills the purpose of giving them more of our money
Wow, you guys are in need of a much better marketing department. This is two expansions in a row that significant resources were devoted toward a new feature that someone at DBG felt was needed to "sell" the expansion. The Tradeskill Depot is nothing more than more bank slots with extra steps. I am still trying to wrap my head around Personas and figure out a single thing they do better than an alt. You just dont understand your customers at all. What we want out of a new expansion are new spells/abilities that arent just an upgrade to something we already have. What we want are upgrades to effects on armor that havent been touched in years. What we want is to revisit mechanics/items/slots etc that were introduced in a previous expansion then allowed to rot on the vine all but forgotten. What we want isnt any new "feature". What we want is a fresh expansion that isnt a copy and paste from last years expansion. I have been very vocal about giving all the new devs hired time to get their feet wet before expecting to see results. Well, the grace period is over and its time to start producing quality expansions rather than the same lame thing over and over and apparently this time even less of it with more devs on the job.
The complaints of what they deliver and do not deliver are very much like what they deliver and do not deliver, repetitious and consistent. What people pay for is much more convincing than anything that could ever be posted here.
I'm thinking you don't do tradeskilling. The Tradeskill Depot is great if you do tradeskilling. Unfortunately, for non-tradeskillers it has little use. The ability to put many of my tradeskilling components in the Depot and have them automatically be used in recipes (assuming I've learned the recipe already) makes it much easier.
If they are going to make you grind mobs to get them above level 110 maybe they should reconsider the rule that chops mob exp in half in older content. At least that way you can AE light blues in otherwise empty zones for their exp.
If I could just pay for the new content (such as it is), without any of the bells and whistles, I would. Unfortunately, they lump all the crap together with the meaningful part of the expansion, meaning people who buy it for the content are forced to take the garbage as well.
