Hail Norrathians! It's been a few weeks, but we've finally finished responding to the questions we are able to from the Year of Darkpaw AMA thread. I've broken the posts down into the following sections. Art Code Code, continued Community Relations Customer Service Design-Content Design-Content, continued Design-System Design - System, continued Design - System, continued Design - System, continued Game Team - Everyone Game Team - Everyone, continued Game Team - Everyone, continued Leads Thank you all for participating!
Q: Would it be possible to bring back player made/designed items for a guild to pay to make their own livery for their whole group? Ngreth: This is something we will not do because of the possible liability and cost of such a program. Q: What happened to playermade items? Will this ever happen again? Ngreth: In the end it was not financially viable to continue the program. Q: Has any thought been given to updating character models? Panatellen: Yes. There have been discussions. Q: Will there ever be PC models 3.0 and armor ornamentations for PC models 1.0 ? Panatellen: Unlikely there will be both anytime soon. While there are ongoing conversations about player character model enhancements, each iteration requires its own unique wearables system. Given that there are approximately 100,000 Hero’s Forge pieces currently in-game, and it took more than a decade to reach that milestone to fit the current player characters, simultaneously retrofitting them to newer and older models represents a Herculean task. Q: Graphic updates. Some classic zones received a cosmetic make over years back (I'm thinking N & S Ro, Commonlands etc). Why was this not continued to all the early zones? How much do you estimate it would cost both in monetary and man hour terms? Panatellen: We are once again freshening up early zones as available human power and competing initiatives allow. Hopefully, we’ll get to many of them during this lifetime. The financial cost and labor commitment is, as you might suspect, “significant.” Q: What is the reason for the style change to cute and colorfull kids stuff for mounts, familiars, pet illusions, and ornamentations, that is going on since many years ? How does that concept fit to the fact that the majority of your customers is more than 40 years old ? Ngreth: There is a market for it. Jchan: We've found that these items tend to have a better reception over the long term for our game. Q: While redoing character models is an enormous can of worms, would it be possible to redo environmental textures? Many of the older zones have just a couple textures for the entire ground. Could things like that be changed to make the zones less.... 90s? Panatellen: Cracking open environments is also a sizeable can of worms. There isn’t an easy way to swap components in and out without a full-blown “rebuilding” effort. Generally speaking, additional tasks would be involved—UV manipulation, shader management/creation, material identifications--before any aesthetic gains could be realized. Q: Hero's forge only works for Luclin era models. Could ya'll make & sell a version of the hero's forge feature for people who only use the original character models? Panatellen: Unfortunately, Luclin-era models and the originals are more or less apples and oranges. Each would require its own wearable system or flavor of Hero’s Forge. Each would require its own by-hand fitting/skinning/management. Back to TOP.
Code Persona Questions Q: Are there any plans to further fine tune Personas, and possibly make them more useful, without so many down-sides? Niente: If you have specific feedback or ideas for personas, we’d love to hear them. Q: Can you make a way to delete personas without having to delete your character even if ya have to buy a deleter from market place? Niente: It’s possible we can add a way to delete personas in the future, but there is no ETA at this time. Q: Inventory Management - What are your plans for the inventory management nightmare that personas have caused? Q: Are there any plans to improve the storage of persona gear? Q: What is the plan for personas inventory to make it easier to manage? Niente: This is something we’d like to improve in the future. Q: EXP - Oakwynd EXP Alt rules for personas would be great. Do you have any plans to modify the rate Persona's gain exp? Niente: I believe the Oakwynd bonus now works on personas (personas contribute to the bonus and receive it). Ngreth: We do not plan on any additional exp for personas beyond bonus exp inherent in servers and bonuses. As for max-level personas counting as a separate “max level character” in the Legacy ruleset, I do not object. Q: With the need to med after switching persona, is the need for being in a fast camp zone still needed? Q: Do you expect to relax the restrictions on where one can change personas in the future? Niente: This was answered elsewhere (See: Can you explain your reasoning for personas only being allowed to be changed in citys and fast camp zones? below) Q: Can you explain your reasoning for personas only being allowed to be changed in citys and fast camp zones? Ngreth: Changing anywhere any time is too prone to abuse. Niente: In many cases, changing personas in any location could be for benign reasons (such as wanting to play the other class now, and being inconvenienced by running back). However, there are many situations that I think would fundamentally change the game in a negative way if players could change their persona anywhere. A small example would be, I want to run somewhere, I can become a bard and use double invis. Now there is no reason for me to use any other class’ invis or runspeed. Similarly, I could change into a rogue to bypass see invis NPCs, and change back from the rogue at will, without actually having to be a rogue at any other time, or deal with any drawbacks of any class. This goes in the direction of having class abilities shared with every other class in the game, which would be a very interesting special ruleset, but introducing that to the entire game without proper vetting would be extremely risky to the game’s integrity. Q: What are your future plans for Personas, either in rule changes or otherwise? Niente: These are not official plans, but things we may do in the future. I’d like to see UX improvements like inventory management, swapping personas with a hotkey or slash command, viewing EXP and AA in the persona tab, equipment sets displaying properly in the persona tab, being able to delete a persona. In the long term future, making swapping more performant (the primary bottleneck is reloading the UI). We have plans to add the ability to have a portion of a zone enable changing personas (for example, the inn in Laurion’s Inn) and to add a zone specific flag to enable changing personas. I do not have an ETA on these improvements. Q: Any word on when Hero AA's will be fixed on Personas? Niente: These should have been fixed in the February 2024 update. If you encounter further issues, please let us know on the bug forums and we’ll take care of it. Raids and Raiders Questions Q: What steps are planned for this year re: addressing raid lag? Q: Raid lag... when are you going to fix it? Niente: This year we’ve made several improvements in zone performance related to code optimization. In the February 2024 update, we turned over all remaining zone and world hardware that had not yet been upgraded (other hardware has recently been upgraded), so zone performance should have significantly improved. We will continue to work on optimizing zone performance specifically during high load situations like raid events, however, the complexity and care needed to make optimizations in EQ’s numerous complex systems (spells, melee, achievements, etc.) without breaking things means this is not something that can be fixed completely and in a short time period. Q: Are there any plans to make generic RAID banners to support pick up alliance raids ? Q: What is the best way to advocate for the creation or modifications of the current guild banner / portal to better support pick up / alliance raids? Ngreth: This is not a project we are against, and one we have considered, but it is also a much larger task than it seems up front. It has not made it to the top of our project lists. Q: Parsing is one of the best tools raiders have to either have a bit of fun or to optimise their performance, unfortunately there are numerous in-game issues with capturing a lot of other people's damage and/or healing, do you ever wish you could fix this or better introduce an in-game parser? Niente: We’d be happy to make improvements to how clients receive damage to improve parsing accuracy. Please let us know your requests. An in-game parser is something that would be very cool, but also a fairly large project for us to take on if it were to be as advanced and accurate as player-made parsers.If we were to add something like that, it would probably only have total damage/time. It is a potential future project for consideration, but not something we are working on this year. Q: So we have various ae's that are small to zone wide in raids ---- can we please make all damage done be players to be zone wide so all parcer's can pick up all damage - no matter where we have to go or run too? Niente: This is something we can investigate doing in the future. Q: In raid manager on the second tab there is a place to save notes. Is there (if not all ready) a way to have these notes saved locally so any time im in a raid if those same players are in it, their current notes would be listed by it? Niente: This is certainly possible to add, though it would be a somewhat low priority, as it can only be used by the raid leader and the raid notes tab is not commonly used. UI Questions Q: When will you fix the new UI to open bags in front of the Inventory window, the main reason your new UI has not been fully adopted by players? Niente: This specific problem is more complex than it seems. It is not simple to open multiple instances of the same window in the new UI engine (for example, the container window). This would need to be fixed before we can convert the container window and then you would have bags appear on top of the window. Q: Can we have an overlay on items in bags when you have the vendor/merchant window up that would tell you how much the vendor would pay for each item? Niente: This is a neat idea, but we don’t have plans for it at this time. Q: Has Daybreak considered adding an experience bar under the name/ hp/ mana/ end bar? Meeko: This feature is one of the first things that got me into custom UIs and coding. I think the addition of the percent into the experience message satisfies the need for this now. Not all experience types have that at this point, but it’s something on the list. Q: Could we have a way to better sort spells within the spell book itself? Meeko: But why when the spell bar (right-click menu) lets you see all your spells neatly sorted and categorized already? Q: Could we have a tab in inventory or stats which states a pet's HP, AC, Mana, Haste etc? Niente: This is a neat idea – in the past, features that are specific to pets often don’t get picked because only a few classes benefit. It’s something we can consider doing, I just don’t anticipate it happening any time soon. Maybe it could be part of a future pet inventory. Q: Why is everquest the only PC game that I can think of that doesn't have a gamma slider? Cairbrae: Microsoft does not recommend changing the display gamma settings. Microsoft has increasingly restricted DirectX gamma support over the years. DirectX gamma API is restricted to full screen exclusive display mode and cannot be used in windowed mode. In Windows 10 and 11, the default full screen mode is a borderless windowed mode that doesn’t allow gamma changes. Furthermore, DirectX gamma API requires display adapter and device driver support that is not always available. Every long-standing game must adapt to these system level changes. In the January 2024 update, we added the Enhance Vision option that works in both windowed and full screen modes. Enhance Vision is a rendering effect that increases the brightness of objects rendered in the game world. We also have a plan to implement a new gamma control option that is Windows 10 and 11 compliant. No ETA at this time. Q: Can we get a UI window to manage pet equipment slots? Why do we have to do it by command line? I love that, after 25 years, we finally have a way to see what our pets are wearing, but why can't it just be managed the same way as our own gear or the merc gear? Niente: Adding a pet inventory window has been a desired project in the past, but did not make this year’s schedule. I hope that the wonderful /pet inventory command Meeko added will suffice in the meantime! Meeko: The new pet commands took a few days worth of time to implement and I feel like they serve 80% of the use-case of pet inventory management. Adding a pet inventory window would likely take weeks or months of work to implement and only add a small amount of extra benefit. New features have to be weighed against each other for how beneficial they are and others have thus far won out. That’s not to say that it’s a bad or unwanted idea, but it just hasn’t happened yet. Q: Can we get a timer in the Fellowship window for the length of time before our campfire expires? Niente: This would be a nice thing to add (same for auras). It’s not something I’ve looked at before (in terms of how difficult it would be to implement). Q: i notice there is a modified and unmodified button on gear that can be used for charms, and also for power sources. I am wondering if there has been any talk about having a similar button that would allow us to be able to see a piece of gear with and without augs? Niente: This isn’t something that has been talked about recently but could be considered in the future. Q: i wanted to ask if there is anyone still available on the EQ team that would be able to help install a search bar on the real estate window? Niente: This is something we can consider doing in the future. Q: Is there a reason the Titles window (Shift-T) isn't available on the EQ button drop down list? Niente: As far as I know, no. This is something we can consider adding to the EQ button. Q: As regards Collectables, could you do an EQ2-style filter where you can filter on those not yet collected? Meeko: The way that the game knows if your character has collected an item isn’t straightforward. It’s why that label takes an extra second or two to appear when inspecting an item. However, I do think that surfacing that information in certain windows would be very helpful as I also don’t enjoy inspecting every one I come across to figure out if I have already collected it. Key Ring Questions Q: Could we please get a Key ring for weapon ornaments or allow these to be put in the Hero's Forge key ring? Niente: This is something we can consider adding in the future. Q: Can we get ordered key rings for food and drink where they are consumed in order? Niente: Improving how food and drink consumption works in EQ has been a project under consideration in the past. It’s possible a keyring might be the solution, but also may be something else. No ETA on that project at this time. Chat and Filters Questions Q: Can you Add a "hits-mode" option for nukes, dots, and heals Niente: It is possible to do, but I don’t anticipate this happening for a long time, if at all. Q: Can you reattach the spell emotes to their spells, so they can once again be filtered? Or give them their own separate filter? Niente: Spell emotes have their own filter, but it can’t currently be turned off. This is something we can consider adding. For now, if you want to filter them out I would send Spell Emotes to a tab you keep other spam messages in. Q: The battle spam has changed, it has to do with the auto attack. Before, I could clearly see the message in the main chat. Auto attack on. Now it's buried in the combat spam. If I have multiple targets the auto attack sometimes (but not always. Very weird and random) drops when I kill one and fight another. Can we just put it back the way it was? Niente: We have no current plans to change this. The auto attack on/off chat messages are part of the Melee Warnings chat filter. We have also periodically been asked to remove these messages. Q: Can we just get comma's in the game? Meeko: Working on it. It’s a slow process. Q: Will there ever be come options, so you can SAVE your chat settings for EACH char or even for ALL? Will there come options, so each char can have individual keys instead of all chars have to use the same ? Niente: Possibly, though it would be a sizeable enough change to be a project, and I don’t know that chat save options are popular enough to make the yearly schedule. Back to TOP.
Code, continued Follow Questions Q: Can we please get an improvement on /follow? And can we please stop designing tunnels and hallways and cliffs with obstacles put there specifically to frustrate folks that use /follow? Niente: Objects are not specifically put in the game to frustrate players using /follow. Ngreth: We will continue to make the game in a way that looks natural and is not all subway wide corridors with gently sloping curves and nothing but flat featureless terrain. As Niente said. We only consider what looks natural. We do not have an intent to make auto-follow problematic. Q: Would you please improve auto follow? Q: Any plans to make auto follow better? Like include the Y axis? Niente: There is a ticket to improve autofollow, but no ETA at this time. Other Questions Q: Fellowship Exp please fix this and explain how this works..... Its buggy when your toon is maxed aa and Exp. Seems like you have to kill your toon and lvl down? Niente: We need more details on this to address it – please let us know in the bug forums. Q: How difficult would it be to increase the blocked buff number above 40? Q: Can you Increase buff blocks? Niente: This is something we can consider, but no ETA at this time. Q: What language, host OS, and tools are EQ written in. If that's too secret for a current answer, how about a dated answer? Back in the late 90's/early 2k's I was told by a former Sony employee it was run on Windows NT boxes. Niente: EQ is mostly C++ and runs in Windows Server environments. Some of our internal tools use C#. We also use PostgreSQL, Perl, Jenkins, and a little bit of batch scripting. Q: Are you actively working on fixing the pet weapon bug, were the pets DPS gets greatly reduced if you give it proc weapons? And what is the ETA on this? Niente: It’s something we’d like to continue working on this year. Improvements have been made to pet melee processing, but the problem is not completely gone. Q: Any chance of seeing EQIM again or something like it (mobile presence)? Niente: Possibly, though chances are low. We don’t have a lot of mobile development experience on our team. Q: Would it be possible to have some sort of in-game notification for the 'Adventurer' perk's experience bonus? Niente: There are a lot of experience bonuses of various kinds, and it may become very redundant to see the bonus message for the perk. I think it would be cool to have experience messages link to something that shows more information if you click on them to see what benefits you have active. But we don’t have current plans for this. Q: Guild manager - Can we got a toggle to not include off line players who are in bazaar off line mode? Niente: This is something we can consider doing in the future. Q: Fellowship Vitality - Can we get an overhaul of how Vitality is gained and distributed? Niente: Vitality is very complicated and convoluted, and difficult to test because it is processed every 15 minutes. Usually when we have to work on it we change it to process more quickly. I suspect you will only see an explanation of Vitality if someone on the team takes an interest in explaining how it works, and it wont be a simple task. Q: Can you Add a command for /hidemodels familiars? Q: When will you give us the ability to hide familiars? Pretty please?? Niente: This is something we can consider for the future. I’ve created a ticket for it, but there is no ETA at this time. Q: Is it possible to increase the currency cap of 2 million platinum in the bazaar/barter? If it is not possible, how about consideration of a currency higher than platinum? Q: Are you actively working on increasing the max price in the bazaar to go over 2 mill. plat, and if so, how close/fare away are you from implementing it in game? Q: Could you raise the max barter price to something substantially higher then what it currently is? Niente:: This is something we can consider doing in the future. Q: Are there any plans to improve the advanced loot window and in doing so remove some of the bugs? Niente: There is a potential future project to make improvements to the Advanced Loot Window. If you have encountered specific bugs with Advanced Loot, please let us know in the bug forums. If you have ideas for how it can be improved, we’d love to hear them! Q: Are there any plans to implement some way that we can use items in the Depot while experimenting? Niente: I would love it if we added something like that. Q: Is there any chance that the in-game audio trigger system could get beefed up to handle regular expressions and parameterized matching and timers? Niente: It is certainly possible, but I think that the chance of this happening is fairly low mostly due to the common use of alternative (and much more feature-rich) software. Q: Also could we please get some way to see characters on a server without having to be subbed for TLPs? Maybe move the all access check to logging in to a character instead of server select? Niente: This is something we could possibly add in the future, but I have no ETA on that at this time. Q: What is get name based off when creating a character ? Meeko: Each race has a matrix of name components for the start, middle, and end of a name. The game randomly picks a set of each component and builds a name. It then checks if the name is valid and if not tries again until it eventually gets one. Q: Can we please copy the mentoring system from EQ2? Ngreth: EQ2 was created with that system in mind. We would pretty much have to redesign classes to make that happen in EQ. Q: Can we have an option to auto-sell grey vendor items when we hit up a vendor? Link Q: Could we get a "sell junk items" button at vendors? Q: Can we please get a "vendor trash" flag for items that aren't tradeskill items, and a "sell all trash" button? Niente: This is a potential future project that comes up for consideration regularly, but did not make this year’s schedule. Q: For the last 24 years I was able to log in full screen, when will we be able to once again log in full screen? Cairbrae: This is working internally. It’ll be released in a future update. No ETA at this time. Q: Could the team look at the longstanding bug where player helms will not show on old models unless they are taken off and put back on each time you zone? Niente: We have a ticket to look at this, but I am not sure when it will be fixed. Q: Can armor sets (suit of blahblah's blahblah chain) PLEASE have a preview WHOLE SET button? In General - could suits of armor collections get a) a full preview button and b) get a description if they are male or female suits? Niente: I think this would be pretty nice. It may be somewhat difficult to implement. It depends if Hero’s Forge sets have something internally that lets the game know they are all part of a set. Currently when you “open” a set, it offers you a reward set (not exactly the same). If that doesn’t exist, it will be a lot more work to change. Q: Can we have loot filters added to fishing and Forage? Niente: I made a ticket for this a while ago, but haven’t had time to do it yet. No ETA at this time. Q: could we have a feature in the bazaar that lets you sell a set of something lik Collections, defiant armour, tradeskill combines? Niente: I don’t think the work involved in adding a system that allows you to sell a set of items would be worth the time when you are already able to sell them individually. Selling tradeskill combines would be cool, though. We could consider it in the future. Q: What I would like to ask please, is could you code it that shrink only returns the pet to original size if the owner of the pet has not purchased tiny companion? Cairbrae: We’ll investigate this as it may be a spell stacking issue between SPA 89 (shrink) and SPA 298 (tiny companion). Q: Can you make a DPS meter and healing meter? Niente: We can consider adding something like a total damage/healing report per player after an NPC dies. An in-game parser would be a fairly large project, though it’s possible. Q: Can we geat a /mount mute/unmute command to silence the mounts? Niente: This is most likely possible to do, although I am not sure it would be used frequently enough to warrant the development time. Q: Why does EQ have to close when you switch from one Internet to another like say your phone hotspot to WiFi? JChan: EQ relies on a concept of continuously connected connections. When you switch your internet connections, for example between your phone hotspot to your local WiFi your IP address changes, when this happens, we longer "know" where you are and that "you" are you. Thus, we're not able to maintain the continuously connected connection. It's part security feature (so other people can't just say, I've changed my IP address this is me now and take over your character) and it's also a bit of a performance feature in that we don't constantly have to do a connection reestablish and full authentication each time the servers send you packets and each time the client sends packets to the servers. Q: Any chance you could move character titles (suffix and prefix) above and below their name and then make them smaller? Niente: It’s certainly possible, though we have no current plans to do so. Q: Can u add a trade skill button to use items in house Q: Can we get a button like (use personal depot), but for us to use housing trade skill stuff? Niente: We have no plans for something like this at this time. Q: Would you consider adding a bank for collectables similar to the tradeskill bank? Niente: I think this would be a nice thing to add. The current TS Depot is not super extensible so it would be a sizable project to add a collectible version. Q: When a magician performs a group call of the hero how does the game determine which direction each character will face when they land in the new location? Aristo: I believe you are simply facing the direction you were facing before. Niente: It looks like SPA 82 (Summon Player) doesn’t have special handling for player heading (at least not directly). If this is something players would like to be added, it could be done (face the same direction as the mage). Back to TOP.
Community Relations Q: Can we get a dislike button on the forum? Angeliana: Our current forum does not have this option. However, we are investigating a newer version of the forum that would allow this function. Q: Can we get a feedback/suggestion/request forum please? Q: Would you please consider creating a suggestions sub-forum? Angeliana: We will discuss this and see if this would be a viable option. Q: can we have an updated "/dancing in EverQuest" video? Angeliana: This is not possible at this time. Q: Can you add a dark mode theme to these forums? Angeliana: Our current forum does not have this option. However, we are investigating a newer version of the forum, which could possibly allow this function. Q: Could ya'll create an affiliate program for content creators? If they drive people to subscribe with an affiliate code, they could get some kind of kickback? Angeliana: We are currently working on a content creator program. Once everything is sorted out, we will create a post and open applications. Q: How do we provide positive feedback when we want to compliment the team at "Darkpaw Games" for doing something well? Is there a "tell us what we are doing right" or similar thread somewhere? If not is that something you would consider adding? Angeliana: What a great idea! I will check into available options, but for now, feel free to DM me on Discord, or PM me on the forums, and I will be sure to pass the kudos onto the game team! Back to TOP.
Customer Service Q: could you please streamline bot reporting? Something wholly in game would be preferred. A: This is something we can consider for the future. Q: Oh, and can we get a 3rd party program policy that is more definitive? A: No, we cannot define which programs are OK or which are not OK. We are only able to define certain actions such as unattended automated gameplay as against the rules. Since we do not control the development of third-party programs, when we list programs as OK, those programs could start to include aspects that are not OK and clearly break our rule against certain actions. Additionally, we do not list programs that are not OK as we do not want to increase attention to certain programs and drive new users to that program. Q: Would you consider player solutions to dealing with bots? A: It depends on the proposed solutions. There are some proposals that are unfeasible. Q: Are you interested in further clamping down on the use of third party automated play? If not is it because you consider the current level of policing sufficient or for some other reason? A: Yes, we are interested and continually work toward clamping down on illegal use of third-party programs. Due to privacy and security reasons, there tends to be a gap in perception between the actions being taken and what is purported. Back to TOP.
Design - Content Raid Questions Q: Can we get 10 man raids? Absor: This comes up every so often, usually about 40 or so person raids, which while feasible cause problems for some guilds and, frankly, we just don’t have time to do. But a 10-person raid isn’t really feasible at all. The mechanics of a raid usually can’t be done with so few people. Simple mechanics can translate down, don’t stand in the fire and things like that. However, complex mechanics often just can’t be accomplished without several groups. It's hard to even ask so few people to manage an off-tank situation. Things that might require a certain class, like charm or mez, are generally bad for small groups since they just may not have someone that can do that. Basically, what you are asking for are what we call missions. Maybe you’re asking for two-group missions? Those also have issues, in that it can be hard for folks to get two groups together. So... no ten person raids. Q: Would it be possible to make raids (maybe just T2 or T3?) more difficult at launch temporarily, and have a systematic way of doing so sort of like the guild banner buff, but in reverse? (i.e. a zonewide debuff, maybe not exactly like Uqua or Demiplane but a similar idea, maybe sort of like Mitigation of the Mighty) And then after a certain amount of time has passed, the debuff could be reduced or disabled? Absor: This is something that we have talked about several times. We have some ideas that might work pretty well, we just haven’t had time to delve too deeply into them, much less implement them. Q: Would it be possible to implement the scaling of a raid based on the number of players? Absor: Nope. EverQuest just doesn’t scale well. It’s easy enough to lower HP and things like that, but to make spells weaker requires entirely new spells most of the time. Essentially to scale a raid from 50 to 40 people will often require almost remaking the thing with new spells. If you get too few people mechanics stop being possible and would have to be rewritten or replaced. Sadly, back in the day nobody had the impressive foresight to plan for scaling. Laurion Song Questions Q: Are there any plans to add additional content in LS? In the form of additional hero missions, or tiered raids? Some of the doors in Laurion's Inn are not used so there is a possibility of extra content in the year? Absor: Probably not, at least not in the near future. The lore of the inn allows for all sorts of additional content. Theoretically, as more and more heroes enter the plane the inn would expand to accommodate their heroic moments. New floors would appear, more doors, more adventures. That possibility exists, but we don’t have plans to add to it at this time. Ngreth: To Absor’s point. We won’t be adding to Laurion’s Song as part of the expansion. But, we can use it for future events, or even a future expansion. Q: Was the number of missions in LS (2) just a product of the time available (lack of resources for more) or do you anticipate that being the new normal for expansions? We have not have a Tier 1 mission since the ToV expansion ... every mission since has been Tier 2. Is this on purpose or just a coincidence? Will we see any Tier 1 missions in future expansions? Absor: I have to accept a lot of the blame for the lack of missions in Laurion’s Song. We spent some time training people, and that cost us some production time. But also, I just fell behind. I wasn’t able to accommodate for the time spent training, though I had planned to. I apologize for that. Going forward we hope to return to similar volumes of content as we had in the last few years. Though, I must say, we are dedicating a lot of effort for the Year of Darkpaw events, and it will be a herculean effort from the team to do all that and maintain the old level of content. Ngreth: On the T1 vs T2 quandary, we actually base that on the story we are telling more than an intent to have more or less T1 vs T2. Q: Are there plans for a DPS race mission to be added to Laurion's Song in Timorous Falls or another zone? Absor: We don’t have plans to add content to Laurion’s Song. It often seems more useful to add more content to future content than to go back and add to older content, even such recent content. I’m not saying we never will, but we have no plans to at this time. Q: Could we get the amount of people that can be in Laurion's Inn increased? Ngreth: Sure. Old Zones Questions Q: Has there been any serious consideration for adding content to, or building upon, the original iteration of the game? Absor: I’m not super clear what you mean by this question, so I’ll do my best. Adding to old world content is sort of a lost cause. The reality for a game with 25 years under its belt is that we don’t have a lot of new people running through low level content. Adding a new quest to Freeport intended for folks just starting characters would be fun but would also mostly be wasted effort. As a smaller dev team we have to be practical with where we put our time and we want it to be useful to as many folks as we can manage. So, I wouldn’t expect to see new content in old zones other than in relation to things like anniversary content, which is aimed at being playable by the largest number of people. Anniversary content is often low level and does fit well in older zones. Ngreth: I will extend the comment to general “Holiday” events. These will vary, with some going for modern content and some older content, even as far back as the original EQ. If this is also a sideways ask for more content for time locked progression servers, there is the same sort of issue. For the most part, players rush through the content, so, if any, we should only add content at the various cap levels, not on the way to caps.That said, we do not have plans, at this time, to add more content to previous iterations of EQ outside of events. Q: When I am bored I often wander around old zones. Are there any plans to create reasons to revisit these zones? Absor: There are few reasons for a high-level character to visit old zones. We certainly can’t add high-level content to zones where new characters are expected to survive. Adding level-appropriate content isn’t likely to give you a reason to revisit the zone. Realistically, progression servers are the best way to scratch that itch for old content. Zieri: While it’s not high-level content, we try to work a few uncommonly accessed zones and areas into anniversary quests, which can often help those who are on Live as well as TLP. Ngreth: We also try and visit older zones with other events. Q: Many older zones are for the most part empty wastelands. Any plans to revamp these older zones in some way to bring them back into use? Absor: We could, and have, completely remade old zones and they would likely be just as empty. We need that content to allow folks to level up, so we can’t change the level. And I promise you more people would complain than would be happy if we went in and changed the actual content to be new. Folks like the nostalgia of the old zones. The most we might do is recreate the zone with new art and replace the old content in it. We’ve done this in Commonlands and other places. However, I don’t see us doing that in the future. It’s a lot of effort and doesn’t give people a reason to go there other than to look at the new art, then move on. Q: Im a nostalgia type person and I love the old original zones, our starting homes lands before Crescent Reach. Will you ever add anything at all that brings people back to those zones? Absor: In an effort to be fair, I’ve been answering every question I see. But, well, I’ve done this one a few times already. The short answer is no. Future Content Questions Q: There has been a very positive response to Laurion's Song story arc, style, and design. Will we see more diverse expansions in the future (e.g. The Burning Lands Part 2 and other ideas shared in the Lore Feedback thread)? Asbor: I suspect you’ll be pleasantly surprised with what we do next. That’s all I can say about that. Pip: I’m always daydreaming about different tales and fables we can tell in EverQuest. I have several plots set up to send the players in different directions depending on what we decide as a team to do. One of the beautiful things about working on EverQuest is that we have a lot of flexibility with what we want to do with the lore. Every year we have a new expansion that continues to build onto this wonderful world. This helps us adapt to what the team feels is the best direction for the story. Ngreth: We always strive to innovate in our story, and we are happy when people appreciate the tales we weave. We also try to bring back nostalgia, which was the reason we revised so many zones in new expansions. It was not “lazy revamps” but to bring back memories of when you were there before. Q: Underfoot is beloved for its difficulty, can there be some considerations from the dev team to align the next expansions raids to this kind of style of difficulty? Absor: Difficulty is a bit of a bugbear. It’s super hard to nail down, despite having done this for a while. Optimally we would have tier 1 be relatively easy and the tier 3 raids be pretty hard. However, sometimes a mechanic isn’t as difficult as I was hoping and I don’t notice it. Sometimes I am too easy with damage values. Beta testing does a lot to bring things into line, but in the end, as with everything, we don't know until the rubber hits the road. But, no, I don’t think we will ever bring the difficulty for all the raids back to Underfoot. I wouldn’t mind if tier 3 was close to that, but frankly Underfoot was pretty rough. I’m sure I’ll get feedback on my opinions during next beta. Q: Epic weapons- can there ever be considerations for maybe implementing a line of special quests for each class? Absor: Um... we already have a couple of these already. And we just don’t have the resources that the team had at the game’s peak. You have to realize that each of those epic quests took a designer months to make. My guess would be that epic 2.0, which I worked on, took something like 2+ person years of work. We can’t manage that these days. Ngreth: I would up Absor’s estimate to, at the minimum, 3+ person years. Actual epic quests are a huge endeavor. What is more possible is things like the long tradeskill quest or a similarly long quest line that will result in a class-specific weapon. But a long “epic” story for each individual class is not within our reach. And if we don’t have that, I don’t really want to call it an epic weapon and would prefer to stick with just “class-specific.” NOTE: I am not promising such a thing. In the short term, we do not have the resources for even a long-connected quest resulting in a class-specific weapon. But I am also not negating the idea, simply no promises. Q: In game Events- The Lanys in game event is one of the best events ever in Kithkor Forrest, is it a possibility to see significant in game events like this again? Absor: One time events like that, while super cool, aren’t in our future, I don’t think. It’s not the best use of our time to make something that only a small percentage of our players will ever be able to see. I understand and respect the idea behind these sorts of events. I have designed and created quite a few of them in the past. But the time spent on them is now lost to time. Q: Will we ever be able to travel to Drinal? Absor: Never say never... Pip: Why? It’s cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere, you're all alone, more or less. Q: is there any plan for offering in game quests to help with leveling persona's? Absor: I don’t know. /shrug. It’s not something I’ve thought about. I’ll think about it and see if that’s even a thing we can do. Pip: The idea for personas was to experience leveling up these other classes on the same character. There is a lot of Norrath out there ripe for a budding adventurer! Q: I was wondering if there are any plans in the future to bring a large expansion out, like Planes of Power. A completely new Zones, not rehashed, classes, races, epics? Absor: Reality prevents it. We will never have the team size we had for Planes of Power. I do want to point out, since I hear this often enough, that “rehashed” is a really poor term. Some folks treat a remake of an old zone like its lazy. It isn’t. It takes just as much effort to remake a zone as to make a new one. When we chose to revisit these places it’s to advance a story that might have been started when that zone was new. It seems a shame to restrict our story telling by not allowing ourselves to go back and extend that old lore. Q: Will there ever be a new set of epic weapons? Absor: Highly unlikely. The effort needed to make quests worthy of such items is huge. And if you were to ask some systems folks what some of their regrets about stuff done in the past, epics would probably be one of them. Making something super hard to get, something iconic like epic weapons, sort of forces us to make them very good. Such items end up being best in slot for an extremely long time and limit our ability to make new items for that slot (eliminate it, really). Design-wise such ultimate items are fine for a static game, but not of one like ours that keeps growing. As a storyteller, I love the idea. As a game designer, not so much. Q: Will there ever be a expansion that uses Zebuxxerokk as a... herald of changing a time line again? Plane of Time, The Void, and ? Absor: I have no idea. It’s not in the plans for the near future. And, well, we have done a lot of time travel stuff in EQ already. It’s a complicated thing to do in an MMO. Pip: Writing content for EverQuest has its advantages because I can read a question like that and think “Why not?” and then build from there. I can’t say what will happen in the future because spoilers! I can say that one of my favorite aspects of working on this game is being able to be there to shape its legacy. Q: Any plans on beefing up classic-pop? New quests? Raid item revamps? Group gear revamps? NEW RAIDS? New zones? Absor: Not really. As mentioned in another answer, adding content to the old world has limited value. It’s either too easy for most players because it fits in with the appropriate level for the old zone, or it is too hard because it is high level content in a low level zone. Q: Are we going to see less missions and Raids in coming expansions or was this year a one off with Laurion's Song? Absor: Hopefully last year was a one-off. If you are qualified and interested in helping us make stuff for the game: https://www.daybreakgames.com/careers?job=7030194002 Ngreth: The count of raids may stay at eight, But we do intend to bring the mission count back up to at least four. We will endeavor to get our raid count back up to nine, but I don’t want to overpromise this early in the development of what is coming next. Q: Will Mayong Mistmoore ever return? And can we get an illusion of such Demi Gods? Absor: Despite all my best efforts, I don’t doubt he will return. As for illusions... I don’t like illusions of unique beings in EverQuest, but I don’t make the items. Zieri: Rumor is if you say his name three times... Pip: I can fix him... Ngreth: “ever” and “never” are absolutes… I feel he has oversaturated the lore and taken up too prominent a position… at some point, I won’t feel that way… and his time may come again! Q: Rare mobs used to have unique abilities, some with some nasty AOEs. Is it possible to bring back some more interesting mobs for us to battle with? Absor: We have been talking about that just recently. It’s a hard thing to balance. Too interesting often means too hard. But we might be bringing them back. We’ll see. Pip: I’m working alongside Aristo to do this very thing. Q: can we get player input on creating expac and content? Absor: Well, we don’t take direct input on creative content. We certainly absorb comments in the same way all interesting stuff we read, or watch gets into the creative process. We seem to have a pretty good grasp on new ideas for new content. We also have the advantage of knowing what can and can’t be done and a pretty solid idea what will work for EverQuest. Also, I have no clue what our lawyers would think about taking work from unpaid customers. Pip: When expansions launch, we keep an eye out on the forums for feedback. Your feedback is taken to heart, and we use that to shape how to continue the story of EverQuest. You already help shape and influence the world of Norrath by simply offering your feedback. I thank you for that, by the way. I just ask that you continue to tell us what works and what doesn’t so we can give you the EverQuest you deserve. Back to TOP.
Design - Content, continued Bug Questions Q: Can we get the HAs fixed that were messed up years ago when the NPCs were updated to scale to higher levels than when they were introduced? Absor: I’d have to look into it. I admit that it’s not on my radar right now. So... I guess we have no current plans to look into it. JChan: If you have specific HAs that appear to be currently broken, please report them to https://everquest.com/bugs and we'll take a look at them when they bubble up to the top with top post likes. Q: Dranik instance named have been broken now for over a year, can we either get the named to spawn on instance creation or return them to spawning after x amount of mobs have been killed with the next respawn? Absor: Another of those things that I’d have to look into but isn’t on my radar. There is an existing ticket for it. I’ll boost it up and try to look at it, but no promises. Q: any plans to address the Hunter of Catacombs/Sewers of Dranik? Absor: This has a ticket and I’ve assigned it to myself to look into in the future. Q: Is this issue with named spawns ever going to be actually fixed it has been marked confirmed for over 16 months.?? https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/draniks-scar-named.285054/ Absor: As mentioned above, we have a ticket for it. I’ve added it to my sprint for next month. Assuming it doesn’t take too long to figure out, I’ll try to get it fixed. See, pester me three times in an AMA and I might actually hear what you are saying. Other Questions Q: Why does VXAHR still do Fling? Absor: I don’t know... Looking into that might be a major task. Anything from that era is going to be a messy task. It's probably not as simple as just removing the fling. It might be, but usually is not. Not that removing the ability would be that complicated, but I would want to see if I could preserve the mechanic. Changing old world stuff can be easy and can butcher the event, or hard and maintain the integrity of the event. That being said, I don’t have plans to look at it in the near future. I have created a ticket so that maybe I can look into it this year. Q: Can you guys remove the mobs that path around Shadeweaver's Tangle PoK port in? Absor: Maybe... I don’t want this AMA to be the place where I assign myself so many tasks that the expansion doesn’t ship. I’ll make a ticket and see what I can do. Q: Lower the number of group members for certain content form 3 to 2. I am not the target demographic for this game (I like to solo) and as such there are whole sections of the game I, a paying client, can not access. Alternatively the ability to have 2 mercenaries active, even if there is an in-game purchase for it, would also alleviate this problem. Is there any chance that either of these would be possible? Absor: Well, I hate to say this, but pretty much nobody will have access to all of the content in the game without playing with others. Should we also then open raids up to single players? Also you’d have to give me specific examples. This is something I might be willing to do for specific content, especially if that content was not necessarily meant to have such requirements. My short answer: no. Long answer: It depends. Q: Where is Bidl Frugrin? What has Carson McCabe done with Lumi Stergnon's High Guard Battlestaff? Absor: I have no clue what happened to Bidl. Looking in the database I find that he doesn’t exist. Maybe he never did? Who knows. Maybe Carson ate the staff? This one seems interesting to me, since it looks like an incomplete quest. I may dig into this further, but I suspect, like a lot of the old stuff, there is no documentation about what was planned. Q: would you ever bring back paladins of underfoot ? Absor: EverQuest is nothing if not a giant pile of questions? Another interesting probable dead end. It should be noted that there are at least five citizens of Norrath that would argue that the Paladins of Underfoot are not gone. Q: Any chance we could allow mercs into raids/DZ starting at say 8 expansions prior to current one? Absor: Probably never. The idea of 50 people an 50 mercs in a DZ is a nightmare. Q: Have you considered adding picks/instances of increased difficulty for zones, missions, and raids? Absor: Nope. It’s not as simple of a process as some might think. And, frankly, if you want harder content there are probably several expansions ahead of the one you are in that has exactly what you are looking for. Q: Can we possibly eliminate the need for 6 players for progression tasks in lower level zones? Absor: You’d have to give me specific examples. Generally, I am against fiddling with older content without a real good reason. Not that many people use that content, and if they do they out-level it pretty fast. I get the desire to do old content, especially if you are playing through it on a non-tlp server, or one that has advanced past that content. There might not be twelve people to do that content with. I just don’t have the time to review every task that has been put in the game, but we might be able to tackle a few if you have specifics. Budgeting time is probably one of the most important parts of my job. Q: When will the Darkpaw Clan join forces with the Splitpaw Clan to retake Splitpaw Lair and return Gnoll Supremacy to the fields of Karana and Lake Rathetear? Absor: There is a lot of animosity between all of those clans. Getting any two of them to work together is probably a disaster waiting to happen, if it isn’t just impossible. Wait, are you some anti-gnoll activist, trying to cause more conflict? I see you there. Q: Do you have plans to convert the flagging in PoP to achievements to alleviate confusion and issues on progression steps? Absor: I’m not sure there is enough time in the rest of my life to manage that. My brain no longer holds any of the complicated nightmare of PoP progression. I think it got pushed out so I could keep my sanity. That would certainly be a worthy task, one that I would love to make someone else do. But I just don’t know if we can dig out time for it. Ngreth: We have plans to add achievements that will, at least, make it easier to track. There is no ETA on this task. Q: Is there going to be an improvement on quality of life gameplay especially in the areas of water, broken quests, and solo content being actually solvable for characters at that level? Or just a clear path to being able to solo in new zones because playing in the new expansion practically takes raid gear from the previous expansion (maybe I’m just a baddie, but I’d like to be more social rather than trying to get best-in-slot from day 1). Absor: Water is always going to be what it is in EQ, there is no practical way to change that. Broken quests can be fixed as they are brought up, I certainly can’t tell you when all of them will be fixed. Solo content... that’s a whole bag of angry cats. As you know, we make the game with the group player in mind. That will always be the case. It’s a huge part of why people still play the game. Make friends and play games with them and you may have those friends for life. I don’t know that your assessment of the difficulty of new content is accurate. We do our best to tune that during beta, but frankly it can be challenging to get people with regular gear to join us and test stuff. I mostly deal with raid testing these days, but I do remember that if we wanted group stuff tested we had to set aside time to ask people to do it and to take direct feedback. Please, if you want to have a say about how our group content is tuned, jump into the next beta and post your findings on the forums. Q: can you reduce the size of the hitbox for candlesticks in the guild lobby and in the bazaar? Absor: Um... I dunno? I just ran around in the guild lobby and none of the candlesticks offended my sense of personal space. Q: Does Absor still SMASH? Absor: Mostly these days he creaks and moans. Smashing is a young man’s game. Q: Are there any plans to make LDoN moloable? Absor: Nope. I do my very best not to mess with old content unless it is explicitly broken. And, well, as we like to say, this is a group game. Q: Any chances of missions from LDON and lower be able to do them with 2 or 3 group members instead of 6? Absor: Nope. That isn’t something I see us doing, but then things change and I can’t say it will never happen. Q: Could you please revert the experience nerf that was applied to AOC instances on TLP servers in 2022? Ngreth: No. We made those changes intentionally. Q: Can you Sink all boats, fire all nexus scions, and replace them with translocators? Absor: After all the work so many designers, programmers, and artists have put into those things, I wouldn’t want to remove them now. Q: In 2016, the development team went back and enabled old models for goblins, skeletons, spectres, orcs, etc. in classic zones on TLP servers. I'm wondering if the team would consider doing a second pass to finish zones that were missed, such as Lavastorm? Absor: I little inside baseball here. That was not something that all of us wanted to do. It was controversial and, in the end, it became an executive decision to make those changes. I was on the side of using new models wherever we can. If we can make the game look better, we should. I don’t really want to have that argument again, though most of the folks involved are gone now. So for now I have to say that we have no plans to change any of that. Ngreth: This is not a task I believe we should spend our limited resources on. Q: Maps! Zone maps! Maybe make a quest for the maps of zones without maps? Could you also look into the "save map" option not saving after zoning or logging out? Absor: We make maps internally for all new zones. However, they are what we call “designer art”. They are bad, usually, and are only meant to make it easier to do things like make pathing for NPCs in the zone and to make sure we don’t just miss out of the way locations when placing NPCs. They are certainly not for public use. They would be embarrassing. And, well, we don’t have time to make actual good maps. You all make much better maps than we do. The only reason I can think of that your map might not save is if you downloaded it from somewhere and it is read only? If there is a bug you may want to post to the appropriate forums. I have never encountered such a bug myself and I’ve made a lot of crappy designer maps. That doesn’t mean a bug doesn’t exist, it just means that it might be real hard to reproduce and thus hard to fix. Pip: Try creating a new folder in your Maps folder named “Art Maps” and try it again. This is something that I have had issues with. I’m sorry for the inconvenience. Niente: If you’ve encountered issues with saving maps, please let us know in the bug forums and we’ll take a look. Q: Can you make such items as our epics etc so they can be earned by a solo character? Absor: No. I was told not to answer with just no, but I think this is the exception to the rule. Q: Can we please get a door from the Guild Lobby to the Bazaar? Absor: Unlikely. It’s not a super long run to get there, and it’s a fair chunk of design time to figure that out. Q: Can we please have a door to the Bazaar and another to the Plane of Knowledge that can be placed in houses or Guild Hall? Absor: Same answer as the one for the guild lobby to the bazaar. Not likely. Ngreth: Not to be a meanie and counter Absor, but I would not be against a Plane of Knowledge door. As for Bazaar, I am going to say no for now. Q: How do we get Prince Kyrmt Keroppi to spawn? What is the percentage for getting him to spawn? Q: Can the spawn rate for Gnoll hunters in Qeynos Hills be increased? Absor: Dang you! I made the mistake of seeing if I could figure this out real quick and lost way too much time trying to figure out how the Prince spawns. Unfortunately, I had to give up and get back to work. So, my answer is, I don’t know. Q: Regarding the current January Tower and the key quest ... Was us having to re-do the key quest every time the plan? or an oops ? Ngreth: The original plan was to have to get the key each time as a repeatable thing. But we agreed with player feedback and changed it. See, player feedback does matter. We don’t always agree, so not all feedback is used, but it is still valuable and does get change to happen sometimes. Q: Would it be possible to re-release some of the pre-expansion content from many moons ago, for 2 - 4 weeks a year? Absor: Not really. I worked on a lot of that stuff. Most of it is triggered either by date or by time until an expansion launch. It would be a lot of work to rewrite all that to trigger in other ways. Sorry. Q: Some older raids can be soloed. Others cannot be soloed due to mechanics. Any possibility of reducing the required number to get an instance on those that don't have the mechanics issues? Absor: I’m against it in general. I don’t like messing with older content unless it is neccessary. But I’m not the only one that makes these decisions. If you have specific raids in mind they could be discussed on a case-by-case basis. Q: How many new or returning players really want to do all the quests/missions to progress through, for example, The Darkened Sea or Empires of Kunark? Absor: I have no clue. Old EverQuest never did track data very well. It might be possible for some smart person to find out how many times a quest or mission has been done, but we would have no way of knowing, as far as I know, if that was a returning or new player or not. Q: Most of the player base seems to prefer the sandbox (Laurion's Song) versus the theme park (The Darkened Sea) approach so why flip flop between the two? Is it to try and satisfy different factions of players or does it depend on whom at Darkpaw is in charge of the expansion and the preference of that individual developer? Absor: Opinions on what progression should be like will change based on the designers involved and what we see as the desire of players. I don’t know that flip flop is the proper term though. We have pretty much been staying away from hard progression for years now. We use it when it makes sense to do so, like you might need to have obtained a key to open a door that isn’t normally open or something like that. But for the most part we no longer use expansion-wide progression. That doesn’t mean that this won’t change in the future. This game is made by people, and people have opinions. Ngreth: We will lean towards soft progression, but, if the story calls for it, we won’t shy away from hard progression. So the answer is: Depends. Q: During the 2013 Race and Class Combo Clash, where Wood Elf Beastlords ended up being the winner, what sort of planned lore did you guys have for the other options had they won? I'm particularly curious about Dark Elf Rangers and Dwarf Shadowknights. Would they have been traitors to their culture, or would they have simply made up an oddball sect of their society by being Innoruuk rangers and Brell SKs? What about Erudite Rogues, where would they have fit in? Absor: If I remember correctly, we didn’t. Nobody has the time to write any deep lore for something that might never be needed. I’m pretty sure we just made lore for the one that was picked. As for the two you mentioned... I would have hated to have to write lore for them. It might have been fun to figure out how in the world some dark elf, much less a lot of them, decided to like nature or whatever. I’m just glad it never came up. Q: Can we get a little insight into how ground spawns are determined? Absor: Ground-spawned collection items are generally done as two groups. Each will spawn in different areas of the zone. One group might spawn on the upper floors, one on the lower. Or one on the north side of the zone, one on the south. Whatever division makes sense. We have a script that spawns them that runs every minute or so on the zone. It is given a maximum number of items that can be up at once. If there are fewer than that in the zone, it will make one more, then wait another minute. We also assign one of these items to be rare, and it has about a six percent chance to spawn each time. Two will be uncommon, with about a ten percent chance to spawn. The rest spawn more commonly at about fourteen or so percent. Collection items that drop off NPCs are done in sort of the same way. We pick some portion of the population to drop them, hopefully based on something story related, otherwise we just make sure there are enough to drop them. And each has a chance to drop items similar to the chances for the ground spawns. Q: Do mobs actually get a bonus to avoid hits when fleeing, or does it just seem that way? Absor: I don’t think so? If it does it’s something buried deep in code that nobody has mentioned to me yet. Back to TOP.
Design - Systems Marketplace Questions Q: Can market place cut down on the micro transactions and make more of the offerings available by questing? Ngreth: At this time we will keep the balance we have where events often have cosmetic items, and the marketplace will have its own. Q: Could we get more familiars in marketplace please, especially pet illusion capable/metamorph ones? Ngreth: Our current intentions are that all future familiar items are metamorph wands. Q: Will we see a successor to the racial heritage crates? Ngreth: Yes. We have some very rough plans that are subject to change, but whatever we decide, we will have other Crates once we are done with all races for the racial heritage crates. Q: Will you ever be adding new weapon ornaments to the store? Ngreth: Yes. We already have added some for the Year of Darkpaw. As for outside of that, we have no immediate plans, but they are within the realm of what we do add to the marketplace. Q: Marketplace - Can we get the vaulted pet illusions, mounts, player illusions and clickies rotated out of the vault please? Ngreth: We can consider this. Q: There are a number of marketplace items that have since been removed and have yet to be cycled back in, can the Year of Darkpaw be the year alot of these old cosmetics come back up for sale? Q: Will you consider opening up the DB store to all it's non-holiday related items, ie metamorphs, nimbus', etc that have been absent for years? Ngreth: It is unlikely but possible. The vast majority of removed items were not selling... so bringing them back to not sell again clutters the marketplace unnecessarily. That said, it is something we can consider. Q: Can you please make more illusion items? Ngreth: These are limited simply because the options are limited. Q: Can we get the Collectible sets rotated in the marketplace, please? Ngreth: We are continuing to add new expansion pack ins. We do only offer them for a limited time. Q: Please can some of the older Store options be reviewed; things like Hero's Forge unlock being account wide and not per character, charge more DB fine and keep charging for the items, but make the option as a whole more affordable for what is a cosmetic feature? JChan: It's something we will review and take into consideration. Q: Is there a possibility of adding items that we have /claimed on one character to the marketplace/loyalty vendor/overseer vendor? Aristo: That's not possible, sorry. Q: Stick Figure illusion. Can we get one? Ngreth: At this time that is a full on/off in the ini file and not something we can apply individually. Q: How about a Shadowman illusion? Ngreth: We have decided against this. We do not want functional perfect invisibility against other players. Q: Can we get more illusions in the game? I main a rogue but Preferably all/all so more people can have fun with them? Would be nice to get a Fire Goblin illusion. I found a mask tonight on Mischief I've never seen before, this goblin icon inspired the idea of a fire goblin illusion, I don't think that exists in this game does it? Ngreth: These are limited simply because the options are limited. Q: Can you add more ornaments to the marketplace too, please? Also can you please fix the overseer weapon ornaments that are h2h/1hb only but marked as "1h usable" ? Ngreth: We will continue to add ornaments over time. Many are seasonal. As for the specific bug, we can research it and see what was intended. Q: Can you remove all of the completely garbage items from the legacy of norrath prize packs? Ngreth: At this time we have no plans to alter what is in the Legacy of Norrath prize packs. Will we ever get new illusions that allows you to Mount, we spend all this money on new illusions an mounts but we can’t use them together? Ngreth: There are currently limitations to what races have the animations necessary to ride mounts. Q: Could new items be brought to the daybreak store, such as mounts, ornaments and familiars? Ngreth: Yes. Q: As a fashionista I would like to know if there are any plans in the future to give women players some cute armor that is pink or purple with some sparkle? Maybe Pastel? This is wishful thinking but how about clerics getting robes or capes? Ngreth: Sparkles is something not really handled by our game, but pink is a possibility. At this time we are wary of adding new hero’s forge armor to the marketplace because, unless rather expensive, they rarely make as much money as they cost to create. Clerics are a bit out of luck on robes since they wear plate armor. While I won't say “never” there are no current plans in that direction. Q: Can we get some old school ornaments? can we get some old school zones that are HAs like seb, karnors, city of mist, veksar, city of dranik, muramite proving grounds, sol a and b, splitpaw, temple of cazic, just some dungeons that I like, maybe start a poll? Q: Would you please create these illusions? Ngreth: We can consider them. Class Balance Questions Q: Is there a plan in place to do a deep dive on the Ranger class? Ngreth: We would look into them as a group of classes, not on its own. Q: Why does resource management only apply to 3 classes in the game? Q: Is there any reason that druid requests for better mana recuperation seems to fall on deaf ears? Ngreth: Resource management should be a fundamental requirement of all classes. As mentioned elsewhere, we want classes to run out of mana. The fact that most classes currently don’t is a class balance issue. Q: How do you plan to make clerics more fun to play outside of raids? Q: Cleric usefulness outside of raids... when are you going to work on class balance? Ngreth: In the long term, we are considering new things for clerics to do without fundamentally changing their class. We have no ETA on this project at all. Q: Can clerics get a real invis item? or even the ability to cast it as an AA? Ngreth: At this time, the answer is still no. Q: Is there a chance of getting a dual invis potion? Aristo: It’s one of the few areas where class interdependence still matters, and we don’t want to change that at this time. Q: Question- is there going to be more class balancing in the future? Q: Are there any plans for specific class tuning to ever return? Aristo: Yes. We’ve got more people who can do systems work on the team so there’s more room in the schedule for class tuning now. Some of this work is already in the game and some is still to come. Q: Why is there no answer for years, almost a decade on certain class inquiries? Q: Why is there no communication with players about class tuning/balance? Ngreth: We get more feedback than we can respond to and if we spend all our time going back and forth with feedback we will get little done. We communicate with players for class balance at specific times and with limited groups. Q: Why do certain "favored" classes continue to receive large power boosts and others remain nearly flat going into a new expansion? Ngreth: It is not intentionally targeted at a favored class. We try things and sometimes that is with only one class, or one class where we saw an issue, or a group of classes. There are so many variables and so many ways that something can be used that we do not predict every possible combination of things so sometimes we miss the target. Q: What is class "balance" to Darkpaw? Aristo: An ideal that can't ever be achieved. The tough answer about balancing 16 classes, some of which are in direct opposition, is that in a truly balanced game everyone is capable in their designed roles, but a little bit jealous of something that other classes have, and they don't. We humans are very good at minimizing our own advantages and envying what we see of others. See also: Instagram. Q: Why do shamans contain / can learn the knowledge of how to create an invisibility to undead potion but can't learn the spell (nor AA)? Ngreth: Potion crafting is not the same as spell crafting. Q: At the Baltimore Fan Faire, oh so long ago. I was promised Shadow Knights would get their parent class (necro) ability Levant (Evacuate self to safe point in zone}; do I have to wait much longer? Aristo: The current development team does not believe that teleporting needs to be added to the tank toolbox. Q: While we are at it, isn't it about time SK's can at least Cast Convergence, with an Essence Emerald? Aristo: No. Q: Any chance you'd be willing to address the glaring imbalance of DPS vs Utility across the expansions? Q: Will you ever do class balance for TLPs? Aristo: While our main focus has to be the live game, many of the changes we have made and plan to make will affect TLPs as well. Ngreth: We do not plan a specific task to adjust balance in older expansions. As Aristo said, some tasks we do for the general balance will go backwards to a certain extent, which will balance TLPs in later expansions. Q: Is there any particular concern around the level 70 era expansions (Omens -> Prophecy of Ro) currently casters in that era are unable to do anything meaningful in raid situations due to resists and poor balancing 20 years ago, would there be any considerations to implementing some more favourable resist checks specifically for that era? Ngreth: I won’t say never, but we do not have any plans at this time. Q: There have been a plethera of indirect buffs to early era monks and melee throughout the last 4 years, primarily no longer needing magic items to kick / auto attack, or more loot (such as vaniki / mischief), are there any plans to re add focus items pre luclin as a way to equalise this imbalance? Aristo: No. We have no plans to restore the ability for focus items to be used before they were introduced. Q: Why does a player character with the ability to taunt (Ranger) get out tanked by a Pet/swarm pet outside of defensive abilities that we manually gotta push.. isn’t we half warrior? Why don’t our physical arrow attacks take endurance instead of mana? Aristo: Ranger tanking isn't a primary focus for the class. Allowing them to act as an emergency tank while using disciplines is exactly the intent of their toolkit. As for the flavor of bow-related spells, think of them as magical enhancement of your arrows rather than a physical change in firing the arrow. Q: Could bards AA's get a lookover? Ngreth: We are happy to listen to specific feedback, but we do not have the resources to focus on one class over all 16 classes. (This is also why we have answered no to the question/suggestion of adding new classes) Q: Can Bards get some better ADPS songs, change proc songs to flat dmg increase, better spell damage songs, better regen songs? Aristo: We don't have specifics yet, but we're working on this. We definitely want to reinforce bards' importance as a group force multiplier rather than their personal DPS. Q: What is it rogue's bring to the table that other classes can't already do as good or better? Q: Are there any plans to address this issue, or will rogue be left to squander in the gutters like the dirty fatherless sea urchins they are? Q: Are there any utility or DPS based reasons to play Rogue over any of the following classes: Ranger, Monk, Warrior, Bard? Aristo: We're aware that rogues aren't in the best spot as far as their personal damage goes, and we have plans to address that. Beyond that point it's a matter of which class playstyle you enjoy playing more. Q: Any chance the fantastic class fixes you're implementing could be done more retroactively? Ngreth: Some will, some won’t depending on the nature of the fix. Back to TOP.
Design - Systems, continued Items Questions Q: Can we let the NoS Cloak gain increased exp in LS zones? Ngreth: We will not do this. Q: Is there any way we can get items to have new focus effects? Ngreth: This question is too vague for an answer. I can guess that you are asking to have something different, but we are open to suggestions for new focus effects ideas. We have no plans at this time for different focus effects. Q: Any chance we can see some armor sets that are not super good, but easy enough to obtain for a new/returning player? Perhaps on the Overseer merchant? Ngreth: We do not have plans for basic low effort armor at this time. Q: Any chance of seeing some new class-specific primary/secondary again, sort of like Rain of Fear had(Possessed Dreadstone items)? Ngreth: While this may happen in the future, it is not in the plans for this year. Q: Any chance of seeing customizable focus items again for raids sort of like the old cultural armor (but not just one race or etc)? Ngreth: This is unlikely, but not impossible. Q: Any chance of seeing a new throwing item? Ngreth: There is a chance. Q: Is the luminous restless ice aug going to be updated past level 120 which it currently is at, or are you going to provide a new aug to complete to get the increases in damage and healing the that the luminous restless ice used to give? Mrtyu: We have no plans to continue this line of augments. Q: Any chance of seeing something like the Luminous Restless Ice damage % augment in a future expansion? Maybe something that we get a new one for every year for finishing group (or raid) content? Ngreth: We do not have plans at this time. Q: Any chance of seeing something like the LDoN charm aug again, maybe as an evolving item (Adventurer's Stone)? Ngreth: We do not have plans at this time. Q: Any chance of a special merchant or charm that works off of earned achievement points? SoW please? Ngreth: this is unlikely simply because the amount of points are not equal to everyone. Q: Could we see more class-specific weapons and quests such as upgrades to 'Possessed Dreadstone' weapons? Ngreth: We do not have plans at this time. Q: would you ever consider bring back 1.0 zones as a mission or even timed events like the war as a mission..? Absor: Just like all content, we can only make so much of it. This has never been on my radar. I’m certainly not against the idea of making missions in older zones, but if you have noticed, people seem to want us to make new stuff. I just don’t think this would be content we would make, to be honest. I suspect, however, that this is really a request for access to old items, not so much for the missions. Q: Will epic 1.0 ornaments ever be released on Agnarr or even tie them to the achievement of completing the epic? Aristo: Probably not. The quests are very complex and tied to the era when they were relased, so it's unlikely we could make them all available quickly. I will add the suggestion to our backlog. Q: Could you make it so items equipped in the primary/secondary slots can be made into ornaments and used in newer weapons? Aristo: That's not currently possible but it is on our wishlist, too. Q: Is there any plan to retroactively update the weapon damage from NOS raid weapons to be better than LS group weapons? Ngreth: Yes. Q: Why is required level on prestige gear set to max level for a leveling expansion? Ngreth: To encourage players to level. Q: Can type 3 augs be removed with regular distillers - or just do away with the Type 3 aug system entirely? Q: Can we get better slot 3 augs even at an additional cost? Same for weapon augs? Aristo: We currently like the niche type 3 augs fill for the most part. We're improving their creation process so they're less likely to be missing on the day of launch. We're aware that they are less optional for some classes and we have some ideas for technical changes to address that, but no firm plans at this time. Q: Have the Devs considered a progressive spawn/ rare drop rate incremental with non-rare spawns? Aristo: Not in this specific form, but we have brainstormed about similar mechanics. Q: Can we get early game armor appearances as HF ornaments such as Oracle Robe, Cryosilk Robe, and other armor items that aren't the 'plain' appearance of the stat armor that's only tinted by level? Ngreth: The technology is actually different, so we cannot, at this time at least, have ornaments the represent the basic clothing from before hero’s forge. Q: Are there any plans to increase the level of the type 5 augs that are not prestige? Ngreth: No. Q: Any chance you'll increase the Mod 2 caps? Ngreth: Only if this is something that we feel won’t break things. Q: any plans of ever making cloudy potions stack to 100 or something higher than they currently are? Ngreth: No. We do not want people that do not have the spells/abilities walking around with basically unlimited invisibility. Q: Gear and Personas - Can we have a way of changing archtypes and classes on gear? Aristo: Probably not. Race/Class/Deity requirements are inherent properties of the item, so we'd either have to fundamentally change how items are stored and addressed by the game, or make new copies of items for every permutation. Neither of those options are likely. Q: The stat differences between archtype-specific evolving items in TBL, TOV, NOS, and LS are very minor. Can these items be merged into one to make personas more feasible? Ngreth: While possible, this would make for more bland items, and if you see questions above, people are already upset with how “bland” things are. Q: Can you explain the thought process around not continuing the Luminous Restless Ice / Eyes of Life and Decay SPA 413 aug in Laurion's Song? Ngreth: We received enough conflicting feedback on these that we did not continue them this level increase. Q: Alacrity potions. These top at Alacrity 10. Why has there been no higher-level alacrity potions introduced (either vendor or player made)? Do you consider the haste currently available via potions to be as far as you want it to go? Ngreth: That is exactly the reason. Q: Can you Do away with the augmentation distiller system? Ngreth: We have no plans to do this. Q: Why is the Stoneroot Starfish No Trade on the FV server? Is this intentional? If so, why? If not, will it be fixed? Ngreth: No current developer knows the original intent on why this item is FV no trade. Looking at it now, I do not see a particular reason it is. We will investigate it, but I will not commit to a timeline. Q: Have you ever considered making older "No trade" alternate currencies heirloom? Ngreth: yes. We have considered this, but ultimately decided that each character should earn the currencies themselves. (except the ones that are already tradable) Q: Is there going to be epic Revamp? Ngreth: There are no plans for an epic revamp at this time. Q: Earlier on in the game there were items that were class specific, even plane of time and GoD had items with unique procs and stats, any plan to add items with that feel back to the game? Any plans to do anything like this in the future? Ngreth: We do not have specific plans, but this is not a general topic we are against. Q: Will there be an Upgrade to the Tonic of Efficiency Affinity XI Potion? Ngreth: We are not making a specific plan to create an upgrade of this item. Q: Can TLPs Get the same treatment with evolving items like live where opening raid/mission chests also gives experience? Ngreth: This is a time-consuming process and at this time I do not plan to go backwards. It is in no way “built in” and is custom scripting. Q: Why are the raid type 19’ from TBL not lore equipped like the type 18’s? Myrtu: There was not a reason to until recently. Those changed to lore_equip with the 3/13 patch. Q: Why can’t we buy crystallize luck/perfect augment distillers with current/ up to -2 expansions old raid currency? Ngreth: #1 we don’t have an automatic way to make it stay “current” which leads to trivial farming to get them, OR significant developer overhead to constantly change it. #2 these were specifically added to the game as bleeding edge items or luxury items. Q: Can you or would you consider adding in special chase items in expansions? If we are never getting class epic's again, would you be willing to consider putting back in special items? Ngreth: We put small and large chase items in many expansions. Q: If we can't have "loot filters" for forage and fishing, can we please have all forages and fishing item stackable? or at least the forages? Even better would be to have loot filters -and- stacking? Ngreth: We will not have a specific project to go back and change all previous forage items. We will attempt to keep stacking in mind in the future. Q: Can we replace vendor trash with coin? Ngreth: Interesting. I’ve also gotten many complaints that people miss vendor trash. So there is definitely a mixed opinion on this topic. At this time we don’t have plans to change past expansions, and, if we get certain changes, it could come back. Q: Will there ever be Indoor specific mounts, or mounts that work in both? Ngreth: That is not within our plans. Q: Since TLP servers require an active sub, would it be out of the realm of possibility to simply remove the 'prestige' tag from all items on regular servers for older content - possibly previous to CotF? Ngreth: Items are not server specific, So, we need to keep the prestige flag. Q: Why, in the new expansion, do we see plenty of COTF tradeskill items, left to rot, but have yet to see any type 14 augs drop ? Ngreth: Unfortunately, I am not sure that we have enough context to answer this question. Q: the sprite/wisp that i got in October doesn't give light. (it said it would) could you at least give it a light like a fire beetle? Ngreth: We will need more information to answer this question and see what we can do. What is the specific item you are speaking of? Q: Could the monk ammo stacks be increased to 1000? Ngreth: Yes, but we do not have a specific project or timeline for this. Some definition of what you mean by “monk ammo” would help. Q: Ancient Arrows have been around since The Darkened Sea. Any chance of an upgrade? Ngreth: At this time it is unlikely. While it may be “boring” to use the same ammo, it is also not something that really makes a difference in the combat calculation. The ammo has minimal effect on damage compared to the bow itself. So new arrows would only be for the sake of new arrows, not for any other purpose. They would in effect be the same arrow. Q: Why has there been no Armor Class on trophies (from collections) for years now ? Ngreth: Because we decided not to add it one year, and then stuck with that. Q: The guides reward a spoon ornament as a reward can it be changed to all weapons rather than just range? Ngreth: It can be considered, but not something we have a particular plan or timeline to complete. Q: How about an upgrade to items from the quests in Frontier Mountains for the Book of Obulous, Honed Wurmslayer, etc.? Ngreth: A this time, we will not be upgrading past content. Spell/AA Questions Q: Are we ever going to see old/unused spell lines be discontinued and replaced with new spell lines, not upgrades to existing spells, but actually new? Are we ever going to see new AA abilities, not upgrades to existing AAs, but actually new? Aristo: There are opposing goals at play regarding adding new abilities to classes. The general feeling is that, if anything, there are currently too many buttons to push and adding more is just needless complexity. On the other hand, simply updating abilities every level leaves things stagnant, which is also less than ideal. We work on new ideas when we can, but it’s been a while since one of those has made it through the prototype phase. Q: Can berserker decapitate be changed to be more powerful? Q: Are there any plans to make Decapitation in line with Backstab or Headshot? Ganzito: Execute AAs are on our radar for a future update. We have several goals in mind but making them more competitive between our dedicated physical DPS classes is one. However, this does not currently have an ETA. Q: Is there a chance that you guys would be looking into clerics being able to do damage? Aristo: We're not planning to make clerics competitive on DPS. We would like to strengthen their position as the best and most versatile healing class. Q: Any chance we can ease the returning player leveling process specifically related to obtaining spells and combat abilities / disciplines? Aristo: We’re definitely open to reducing barriers to entry, but time to research it competes with other goals. Specific, small changes are the easiest to implement. Q: Can you please move disconcerting to its own timer so that it does not share with mangling? Aristo: Already done. Q: Will the devs consider backfilling unity buffs for QoL on TLP? Or allowing group buffs that already exist to be purchased earlier? Aristo: It would be nice but we don't anticipate being able to do this. Q: Can you provide an update on Champion's Oath? This Paladin ability was to fill a similar role of the Shadow Knight ability, Reaver's Bargain and was first mentioned during Night of Shadows Beta, and then again during Laurion's Song Beta. Could you provide a timeline for when it will be introduced? Also maybe some background as to why it has been delayed? Ganzito: This is definitely still in the pipeline. In fact, it’s being actively worked on right now. Keep an eye out for more updates in the coming months. Q: Why do lower level shaman buffs over-write higher level shaman buffs? Aristo: We try not to have this happen, but sometimes it is unavoidable without adding additional complexity to the spells. If you know of specific spells that are doing this at certain levels, we can take a look. Q: Why are lots of abilities linearly upgraded into a state of uselessness instead of % based if the dev time isn't there to tune them? Aristo: For the most part we don’t want to continually update abilities that are percentage based (since the things they modify are also going to naturally increase in power), so where we can we’ve converted them to raw values. As you say, this can lead to cases where they fall off in relative power. Sometimes this is intentional. Sometimes it isn't. Q: AAs - Dragons of Norrath AAs really need to be shared. Is this something that is in the works? Aristo: Assuming this is referencing Alternate Personas, we have definitely had discussions with the code team about that. It’s currently not something that we have the ability to do but we are investigating solutions for sharing quest AAs. Meeko: The AA lines that Alternate Personas can share (as of the February update) are one-time grants given typically as part of Achievement rewards. However, the DoN AA line involves faction and there are multiple checks in place to prevent someone from obtaining these (or even remove them) when the game thinks they shouldn’t. The web of mechanics controlling them needs untangled and tweaked in order for these to end up being sharable between personas like other AA lines. Q: For QoL reasons, would it be possible to review backfilled spells from Classic to PoP? Aristo: The scope of this sort of review makes it unlikely. If there are specific spells that are problematic we can investigate that, but the task "Look at 4 expansions of spells" is not likely to be prioritized. Q: Can Livianus' Grip of Decay and Mourgis' Grip of Decay (Necromancer spells at level 104/110) be adjusted to have a twincast blocker on them? Aristo: I've added a ticket to do this. Q: What is the latest timeline on finishing DoT consolidation? Aristo: The last two lines are still on the backlog but are not prioritized above balance concerns, which is our current focus. Q: For Wizards Beams, the recast time is okay, but do you think we can get rid of the Blindness? Aristo: Not without providing another drawback. The blindness is an integral part of their tuning. Q: Why do gate spells still collapse before we can step through them? There is an AA ability that stops spells from fizzling, so why isn't there an AA that stops portals from closing early? Aristo: This is something that is hard-coded for teleport spells and has been in effect for as long as I can remember. The original team felt that magic should be a little bit unpredictable and always have a chance to fail. We have the ability to modify fizzle chance, but not collapsing portals. Q: Can we add more active spell buttons to the spell bar? or have a secondary with the same amount to store all our buffs separate from the main bar being used? Q: Could we have two or three pages for spell gems? Aristo: A new rank or two of Mnemonic Retention is not out of the question in the game’s future, but we don't want to do it too often. The choice of loadout is important to us and is something we want to continue. Q: NPT is there any ideas on making this a group version spell or make the buff last longer than say the 19 or so minutes? Aristo: The motivation behind this ability's long recast and single target nature was to provide a powerful group ADPS ability that doesn't significantly move the needle on raid DPS without multiple enchanters being present. Unfortunately, the current implementation only makes life harder for enchanters. We recognize that this is a problem but we haven't found an acceptable alternative yet that meets those goals. It probably won't maintain its power level if it becomes easy for one enchanter to keep an entire raid buffed. Q: Could the worthless buff/nuke lines be culled? Or otherwise changed to not be worthless? Aristo: This is possible if there is enough consensus on exactly which lines these are. Many lines that we have previously discontinued have people requesting their return later. There are also cases where a line isn't as useful because the situations it was designed for don't come up as often, but we don't want to limit the content team's ability to make more of those situations should they decide to. Q: Will the "once programmed but never actually made live" class illusions ever become a thing? Aristo: This is a case where we'd need specific examples to be able to answer. Q: AA Tokens? Why not sell AA Tokens that auto grant every expansion except the current one? Aristo: Selling abilities directly is definitely over the line for the sort of power we feel is appropriate on the marketplace. Q: Isn't it about time the teleporting classes get something similar if in the same zone, like teleport self/group to a selected group members location? Aristo: Those are interesting ideas but we don't have plans to allow more content bypasses than we already have. Q: Can you make spell Damage pre crit? Basically as an reembursement for the loss of the 10% dmg/heal slot 3 aug? Aristo: This isn't likely, and definitely not in response to a piece of gear that doesn't have an upgrade. Q: Will you guys ever heed the cries of the drakkin to expand our racial breath weapon to level appropriate instead of capping at 70? Ganzito: Racial bonuses aren’t meant to provide significant power or utility throughout a character's life, with some exceptions *cough*Ogre*cough*. Investing time towards adding more ranks of Drakkin breath weapons is possible, and may happen given enough time, but they would always be inferior to comparable combat spells/abilities. Because of this, other tasks have typically taken priority. Q: Why does the Mount buff say Permanent? But is not. Aristo: The "permanent" duration type that mount buffs use is the longest duration that the spell system supports. It refreshes to the maximum duration when zoning, but it will eventually run out if you stay in a single zone long enough. We chose "permanent" to represent this state because "about 6 hours if you stay in one zone, but essentially infinite if you zone more often than that" doesn't really fit in the window. Q: When will you be able to fix the Mage's Host of Elements AA? If, for some reason, you can't reinstate them as they were, can you give us back their dps in another way? Ganzito: There is currently an open issue with rank 40 of this AA. Expect a fix in the coming months. No additional modifications are currently planned. Q: What is the reason for the knock back component in some spells? Can we get it removed? Aristo: Knockback in spells is generally intended as a feature to help with positioning or, originally, as a way to interrupt NPC abilities. We have no plans to remove this aspect of the spell system universally. It could be a consideration for individual spell lines. Q: For Mages - could we get a Group CoH AA like the single target one? Ganzito: We’re open to the idea of adding a new AA that casts the highest rank of Call of the Heroes that you currently know. But this is likely going to be a low priority task. Q: During early Everquest priests were able to mem all imbue spells regardless of deity. It is very hard these days to find some deitys, would you consider removing the deity restriction? Aristo: It's unlikely that the gods will allow this to happen. Q: Can you make Necromancer Lifeburn aa stack with other Lifeburns? Ganzito: We’re open to the idea of letting modern ranks of Life Burn stack with other Necromancer casts. But it’s unlikely that this would be a retroactive change beyond one or two past expansions. Q: Also can you unblock the Stacking group for Grip of Mori? Aristo: Sorry, no. Those other spells aren't on the same stacking group, they just debuff the same stats. Q: Can one of the designers kindly look at the disparity for Wizard beam spells vs Mage? Aristo: The Wizard beam that has a 12 second recast and a chance to blind the caster does more damage than the two Magician beams that don't have those limitations (but also can't be used on the run). The difference in power doesn't appear to have changed proportions much over the years. I'm okay with the Wizard ability having a better alpha strike and the Magician abilities being better over a longer period of time. Back to TOP.
Design - Systems, continued Housing Questions Q: Are we ever going get some new house items added to the game and can they be for game play, not just Marketplace or loot box? Q: Could we get some new house item tradeskill recipes added to the game? Q: Can we get useful decorations that the guild members can use? Ngreth: There is so little interest in house items that we have not felt they are worth the person hours to create them any longer. We still do, and have taken some pieces out of zones and made them furniture, as recently as November. Q: Could we get mannequins or dressable NPCs for houses? Ngreth: This is something we have considered and are interested in doing, but it has not made the cut each time we make plans. Q: Are any of these ideas possible? The ability to add more items/pets to housing plots? Ngreth: Possible. We have considered it since these are not combat zones, so the possible lag caused by too many items/NPCs may not be an issue. JChan: With each item that is added to a plot that you have permissions for, this does add additional lag to zoning including into combat zones. All items that are in all plots are always loaded and processed with you each time you zone. Tradeskill Questions Q: Any chance of another new mega TS quest like Eron's Jewelry, Crestra's Earring, Earring of Rallos Zek, Artisan's Prize? Ngreth: Absolutely. But we are not sure when we can fit it in. Q: Can we get some new tradeskill recipes for some new bags? Ngreth: We can consider this. Q: Can we get a Tradeskill recipe please for fish and chips? Mrtyu: Maybe. I don't have an issue with this, but I will reserve it for when the setting makes sense. Q: Can we get the ability to use Pristmatic Dye or something like it to change the colour of HF items (even if it's a Marketplace item)? Ngreth: Currently the technology does not allow this. Q: Will you introduce another mid-expansion level tradable tradeskill armor line like Conflagrant armor? Mrtyu: There are no plans to do this currently. Q: any plans for increased size on tradeskill bags? Ngreth: Yes, but no ETA. Q: Is there any chance that we could have the TS tools like Smithy Hammers, Needles, Planning Tools, and the like changed to be stackable (it could even just be to 2), so that we could put them into the Depot? Mrtyu: I made a ticket to look at this. Q: Can we get a keyring for our trade skill trophies? Maybe an inventory tab to place them (kind of like the Merc tab) to always have them with you, which would also have all their benefits on, as if they were equipped? Ngreth: This is something we can consider, but I’m not sure it will make the cut as this is a project level task, and not simple. Q: How about a recipe/quest to combine your 7 primary tradeskill bonus items that are maxed level (Smithing, Jewelry, etc) into a single trophy with all the skills at the 15%. Maybe a Grandmaster Crafting Tool? Ngreth: Currently the technology does not allow this, nor does the design team feel a need to prioritize a change to make this possible. Q: can we please get trophy sets we can save and load as needed? Ngreth: This is something we can consider, but I’m not sure it will make the cut as this is a project level task, and not simple. Q: I am curious as to why certain items had their Tradeskill tag removed when, they are, in fact, used in at least one recipe? Ngreth: While yes, they were a recipe, they were not “skills”, thus not “trade-skills” even if they use the same system, they are just combines. Q: Can we extend the fishing skill point max to match other TS? Ngreth: At this time there is no point to this other than to have a number go up. There are not bigger fish out there to catch. Q: Can we get a Fishing Trophy? Ngreth: Not at this time. Q: Can we get it so we can put a ornamentation on a fishing pole The Bone Rod looks like a normal fishing pole and I best you can get in game? Ngreth: Currently the technology does not allow this, nor does the design team feel a need to prioritize a change to make this possible. Q: That said, can we get better fishing poles in game both visual and stat improvements? Ngreth: We can consider this, thought there may not be much room to improve the stats. (the bonus skill at least) Q: While I know that certain foraged / fished items carry over expansion to expansion... they did get introduced at some point, even if with the original game. I’d rather see a Fishing and Forging Achievement in each expansion, for foraging and / or fishing new stuff added with those expansions & zones. Rewards other than just the AP and / or XP / AA could be titles or plus 1% increase to chances to double fish / forage? Ngreth: We can consider this. Q: Y’all made gem cutting tools stackable. Thank you. Can we PLEASE do the same thing with other tradeskill tools? Clay stamps. Duo cutting tool. Scaler. Etching tools. ALL the cooking implements (too many to even list). Needles of all sorts? Mrtyu: See above. Q: What’s the recipe for Gigantic Cracked Tusk? Ngreth: I do not see a recipe in game to make that item. Overseer Questions Q: Can we please get a mass overseer conversion added and is there any plans for a baz marketplace in the future? Ganzito: We’ve had many discussions about ways to improve the conversion process. Currently, we don’t plan to implement a mass conversion feature, but as Overseer continues to develop it may become more necessary. Q: Are there any plans to expand Overseer beyond Faydwer and special events? Ganzito: Not at this time. But it has been discussed. Q: Are there currently any plans or considerations to allow for additional 'active overseer quests' to be ran in excess of 5? Perhaps a purchase from the overseer merchant for a large quantity of Tetradrachms, an in-game questline, or possibly a marketplace purchase? Ganzito: Not at this time. Pet Questions Q: For any class that has a pet, can you let it shoot arrows if you equip it with a bow? Aristo: This isn't currently possible, to my knowledge. Generally speaking, NPC archery attacks are unreliable and do single digit damage, so I don't anticipate pursuing this in the future. Q: Can you Give necromancers, magicians, and beastlords pet greater hold by default? Ganzito: The original hurdle of earning Companion’s Discipline as a means of gaining greater mastery over your pet is currently something we still wish to preserve about the classic EverQuest experience. Q: Rangers and druids get the pet whistle which I looked forward to for ages, considering the pet does almost no damage and is incredibly squishy would you consider removing it's timer that causes it to poof? Aristo: This isn't likely to happen, no. Q: Can the Necromancer Swarm pet spell from LS be made into an upgrade over the swarm pet spell from TOL? Aristo: This isn't the case anymore. When we consolidated swarm pets for zone efficiency reasons, we made them much more powerful than they should have. We fixed this in February, but not in the way you were hoping, probably. Q: Would it ever be possible to have pets auto-equip the pet toys if you hand them the bag? Aristo: This is a good suggestion. Currently there's not a way to do this but we're continuing to try to find a way. Q: Why cant pets hold agro in missions against melee, while they can against casters? Aristo: The answer is different for different situations. In some cases it's purely a matter of hate generation or positioning. In others it's because of how the NPCs are set to react to pets. Q: What about giving rangers that bear pet that druids get? Aristo: We have no plans to do this. Back to TOP.
Design - System, continued Fellowship Questions Q: Could we have a primary and secondary fellowship? Much like we have primary and secondary anchors? Aristo: No. It is contrary to our intent for the system. Q: Can you ever expand fellowships to a few more slots in it? Q: Can we please get more fellowship slots or make a guild stander that you can use a low number to work like 3 people for small guilds? Ngreth: We will not do this. Persona Questions Q: Could there be an xp buff, similar to the legacy buff, that grants a small boost to XP for each Alt Persona you have at the current max level? Ngreth: We will speak about this internally, but there are not promises of either doing this or a schedule for it if we do decide to do it. Q: I know you hear this a lot, any plan to make grinding personas any better? Ngreth: Other than the above mentioned conversation, there are no plans at this time. Q: With personas not being able to get achievements the base char has already done, can we get EXP added to the merc quests in ToV - NoS please? Ngreth: This is not in the current plans. I will not shut the door on it, but, for now, the answer is no. Model Limitation Questions Q: Why are some illusions one sex only? Q: The other chanter illusion this expansion Fernshade Defender casts both sexes of the illusion, depending on sex of the character it's being cast on. Why aren't all illusions like this ? Ngreth: Usually because we only have one sex for that model. The vast majority of the models in game only have one sex. Q: Why is Visage of the Rallosian Goblin (very cool of y'all to say that would be the Beta reward, very cool item except....) female only ? Ngreth: Because only the female was new. Q: Why is the chanter illusion Pal'lomen Infiltrator male only? (having this chanter illusion in game takes a LOT away from the coolness factor of the Visage of the Rallosian Goblin item) Aristo: It is male-only precisely because of the Visage of the Rallosian Goblin item. Mercenary Questions Q: can we get the following merc; Bard // ranger // enchanter //? Q: Can we get the following merc classes; Bard // ranger // chanter // shaman? Ngreth: We will not say never, but I do not foresee additional mercenary types. Q: Mercenary's are nice to have in the game however the DPS version and the Tank version have fallen behind significantly in terms of use. The healer is still pretty decent, are there any plans to potentially adjust these so they are some what relevant? Ngreth: yes. But there is no ETA. Other Questions Q: What do we want?! Vah Shir Wizards! When do we want them? Sometime in the next four quarters! (What? We can be reasonable with our demands here.) Ngreth: we continually consider other race class combinations. Q: Is there any way for players that have ingame concerns (balacing, etc.) to reach the devs to inform them of their concerns without having to post in the forum (which seems to be ignored a lot)? Ngreth: At this time the Forums are the best method. Q: Do the devs ever consider ideas put forward by the player base here on the forums, ie: when or even does it matter that we suggest new AA, or Discs? If so is the forum the best way to put forth these ideas or is there a better way and when should we do it? Ngreth: We do consider player feedback. We receive enough feedback that it seems like we ignore it, and, we do receive enough that we do miss some, so not intentionally ignoring, but missed. As implied, we also get enough that we simply cannot act on all of it. And, we sometimes disagree that it would be good for the game. Meeko: I’m constantly on the lookout for interesting QoL ideas posted to the forums or Discord. I’ve built up a list of the ones I’ve found over time and try to implement them when time permits. A recent example is the “/camp fast” command. Q: Itemization is somewhat bland, it's literally been the same slotted equipment for over 15 years now. Can we see something different in the future? Q: Why do you penalize enchanters and bards with very few fun AAs and abilities with new expansions? Q: Spell and AA development has been largely predictable and non interesting for the last 8ish years. What kind of daily tasks keep the developers in charge of these functional areas busy throughout the year that only copy/paste/+11% upgrades get pushed through each expansion? Ngreth: Constantly adding new things, increases the bloat, where we are required to maintain more and more. The changes for many years did not comprehensively take into consideration the future of the game. Maintenance takes time. Blindly removing things to reduce that bloat causes as many issues as not creating new things. We did not have the people and as we have increased the number of designers we have, we are still training them, and training takes time. During that we continue maintenance. Aristo: A few years ago it became obvious that we were not able to maintain our previous method of siloed, ever-expanding development. We need to be a game where it doesn't take a year or more of training to contribute, and if we continued to wait for a quiet period we'd never get it done. We've been restructuring and documenting our processes, one by one, over the past years, and unfortunately the time devoted to that process hasn't allowed for much time spent elsewhere. We've expanded the systems team and spent much of the last year training, and we've finally got a little bit of breathing room now. There is more to do but much of it is behind us. Q: Now that Personas are a thing, is it possible to ease the restrictions on buffing lower level characters? Aristo: We have no plans to reduce buff level restrictions, sorry. Q: Guild Hall Anchors - Can we scrap all the individual anchors in the guild hall and just have 1 primary and 1 Secondary that can be ported to? Aristo: Unfortunately, there isn't another way for teleport anchors to work at this time. Q: Vaniki - Can we get an NPC to delevel chars so lower level achievements can be completed with out spending hours dying over and over or having to create new chars? Can we have an NPC we can use to set us to a lower level, similar to shrouds, but limiting AAs, spells and discs to that level, for vaniki achievements and also to level with lower level characters? Aristo: Unlikely. This is a very complex ask, even by EverQuest's standards of complexity. Q: Could we get something similar to campfires to work for a group in classic EQ? Aristo: This isn't likely to happen. Q: With the introduction of all the guild hall teleportation items, is there a way to have a find function to enable players to find a destination without having to inspect where each one goes? Aristo: Not at this time, but we'll add it to the suggestion list. Q: Could you please reduce the campfire placement fellowship ring group to two instead of three? Ngreth: We are satisfied with the requirements at this time. Q: Can we please have an alternate way to earn group currency? Ngreth: We can consider this. Q: Any chance we could see the appearance of test dummy NPCs in the Arena for servers other than Test? Aristo: That functionality is too risky to consider on Live servers in an open zone with PvP areas. Using the dummies in housing is the closest that you're likely to see. Q: Can the April reward for tower please be 2 half coconuts that summon an invisible mount? Ngreth: Fun idea! We do already have the April item created We think you will like it. Q: Can FTP characters get some lovin'? New non-prestige augs type 5 and 7s? Ngreth: Not at this time. Q: Catch Up mechanic- Was giving people a chance to catch up really so bad (especially on 8-week expansions)? Aristo: The catch-up mechanic for AAs is unchanged, but it only applies when a character's AA total is below a threshold (this threshold changes with each expansion unlock). Q: Are there any plans to utilize any kind of reclaim system? An item we can buy from the marketplace that would allow us to reclaim LoN/Marketplace/Beta items to use for other chars or other servers? Aristo: It's a good suggestion. It is not currently possible, and there would be many hurdles to overcome before it could come to pass. I wouldn't expect it to happen, but forever is a long time. Q: Could cleric mercs be given the ability to buff the lowest person in the group? So could a level 40 be able to group with a level 125 in POK for example and receive a Temp ? Ngreth: No. This is not something that we want. Q: Can we please get an achievement for mastering all languages? Ngreth: We can consider this. Q: Have you ever thought about a final PC level cap, and what are the reasons for not doing that ? Ngreth: We have not considered this. Because we have not considered this. We have not even thought about never raising the cap again. And, with a few minutes of thinking on it with your question… My first answer is, the game would stagnate too much with fewer goals available. That is first blush of thought. leveling up is a fundamental part of the game’s design and that the ramifications of capping levels would be far too widespread and unpredictable for it to be a reasonable use of our limited development resources. Q: Likewise, the team made several passes to take out of era items out of the game and restrict them to the eras they should be in. Would the team consider another pass to clean them up? Aristo: We’re probably not going to have a consolidated team-wide task the way we did for the Ragefire launch, but if there are still outliers please let us know! Preferably soon! Q: Are you planning to continue the fables into more current content? Ngreth: While we want to, and have planned on more, It does continue to be one of the first things cut when we find we need to cut something. Q: Does increasing your +attack actually increase your threat or is threat generation based on the damage on the weapon itself, and your attack rating has no bearing on threat generation? Aristo: Attack doesn't affect hate generation. The base damage of your weapon is what generates the hate, whether you hit or miss. Q: If you had a blank check for development budget and an unlimited amount of time, which systems would you most like to overhaul/modernize? What makes these systems "poorly designed" or challenging to work with, and what would the mid to high level redesign look like? Ngreth: Mercenaries. #1 I would have a method for easy tuning in place. Tuning them in their current incarnation is essentially guesswork, sure, a somewhat educated guess, but still guesswork. Also to have a system of updating their AI that doesn’t require a masters in software engineering. The main issue is that they are overly complex to update and tune, making them take more time than is often available to properly tune. Also, we don’t really have the resources to add other types. Niente: Not strictly design, but if I were going to revamp a system it would be the skill system. Not because I have a problem with how it works, but because I think it would be great to modernize it so many of the classic EQ skills are more valuable in current content, and to come up with new ones. Aristo: AC, and melee combat in general, really needs a simplification. The formulas involved are overly complex, but not in a way that makes things more interesting. There is a very narrow 'goldilocks' band where hits don't get smushed into always max or always min, there are multiple ways to affect both sides of the equation, and it's easy to miss something that has a huge knock-on effect for balance in general. It would also be great to be able to back off melee lethality without trivializing, well, everything. Q: What are the definitions of the different values of spell_class and spell_subclass in the spell data file? Aristo: These are broad descriptions of what the spells do. Class 1 is "beneficial," class 2 is "cure," 3 is "damage," 4 is "detrimental," 5 is "heals," 6 is "heal + damage," 7 is "summon," and 8 is "transportation." The subclasses map to a different set of effects for each class. This is part of how NPCs with Mercenary AI choose what to use when. It doesn't affect other NPCs or players. Q: Will there be an Epic 3.0? If so, can they be different then the basic weapon? If there is an Epic 3.0, could it be something more specific for each class, ie Ranger – Bow? Ngreth: While I won’t say never, I do not foresee having the resources to do something actually epic for more epic weapons. What is more feasible is something class specific from a shared quest. Q: What are the chances of breeding mounts? Ngreth: Low! Q: Any plans for a bard/enchanter adps archetype mercenary? What about allowing players to hire a 2nd mercenary simultaneously? Ngreth: Not really, and no. We do not want people to have a viable “party” (the holy trinity) without involving other players. Q: can you give xp from gray con creatures? Ngreth: We will not. Q: Can you make a new class, like (universal class) that can do everything, just like 1/3rd as strong as main classes? Ngreth: We will not. Q: With max alcohol tolerance can we get a title, say "Town Drunk" ? Ngreth: Not at this time. It’s a fun, but, I’m not sure we like the implications that go with that title. Q: Can we increase grind XP? Ngreth: We have no plans to encourage grind. Q: How do you feel about stats generally? Are we ever going to get a retooling of the system where resists actually matter again? Ngreth: We do have conversations about making changes. Q: How do you manage perceivable improvement in a numerical sense with the math of stacking these improvements over and over? Ngreth: Realistically it is experience and slow adjustments. Q: Why do Mercenary and Partisan quests not reward gear or expansion currency? Ngreth: They do not offer currency because of how repeatable they are. They do not offer gear, in general. Q: Why has EQ never gotten resource nodes? Ngreth: We have not considered it. Back to TOP.
Game Team - Everyone Miscellaneous Questions Q: How popular is housing among the developers, any hardcore cozy gamers or absolute hoarders? Any thoughts on making it an earlier part of TLP lifecyle or expanding it in future live expansions? Ngreth: We do not plan to make housing available earlier on TLP servers. I personally am a disorganized hoarder. Niente: Player housing is a notoriously difficult system to work on for the engineering team. It is also a significant negative impact on server performance, which is something we’d like to fix in the future. This makes it not ideal to consider for earlier in a TLP’s lifespan at this time. As far as personal likes/dislikes, I get the itch to decorate maybe once every two years or so. I have a treehouse with lots of weapons, and bunnies and cats running around in the yard. I think player housing has some really cool unique items, like the light switch that makes things darker, and the trampoline. The things players make with housing are often truly amazing, and some have really impressive item collections. Absor: I think it’s amazing, but I can’t organize my own house as it is. How am I going to manage a virtual home too? Cairbrae: I hoard items absolutely! One never knows what the future might bring in the form of a quest or a recipe. Q: If you were a coconut tree, which Hawaiian island would you be on and why? Ngreth: Honolulu so I could watch the silly tourists! Zieri: Ni’ihau, the forbidden isle. Perfect for an introvert like me and I could grow unhindered by tourists. Niente: The hidden oasis in Timorous Deep. Oh, you were talking about Hawaii.. Pip: Molokai: Still people for people watching but it’s also the least visited so I can be left alone. Meeko: Kahoʻolawe because I’d probably make friends with the pineapple. JChan: Molokaʻi, it sounds friendly. Q: Any funny/cool bug stories? Niente: There was a bug on beta one time where all the NPCs would run to 0, 0 as soon as they spawned. Another kind of similar one is where all NPCs were animating like they were turning left, but would actually move forward. It was caused by an uninitialized variable. Some players might remember this. We did a hotfix and all the NPCs in the zones we updated were killing themselves and respawning every 6 seconds. You couldn’t target anything. A lot of things didn’t have names. We fixed it pretty quickly – it was caused by removing a column from the NPC table in the design DB (a change that was related to other development work). Some randomized loot tables had old GM event items mixed in. I think this one was pretty great. Pip: I have a bunch of them. In Cobalt Scar for Claws of Veeshan, I had a bug where all the mobs would disappear when I logged in. I would do a repop of the zone and they would all spawn in. I observe them all there, and then walked away for a moment and when I came back, all of my mobs were gone again. This time, I am determined to figure out what happened. I repop the zone and stare. Well, I discovered that when I put the mobs in the zone, I also told them all to walk to a specific point that did not exist yet. When mobs are told to go somewhere that does not exist, they all go to the same spot in the zone. In this case, it was in the middle of the ocean. I watched in horror as all my mobs just death marched out into the sea, never to be seen again. At one point during the development of CoV, I tried adding creatures to western wastes but thought I could be clever by changing their “type” to throw players off and give them something to think about. What I ended up doing was discovering that some of our “types” of mobs come with canned phrases. So, I was really confused why the worms started calling me names out of nowhere. It took me a day to realize why. Some of you who come to the beta server may have also seen the bug with one of our rares that would cause the rares to engage in a player and just stab them repeatedly, faster than the player could react, and kill them. You’d see the combat log just be “So and so engaged with rare mob <thing>; Rare mob <thing> stabs so and so for x damage” only 100 of them would just flash on the screen. Well, it turns out that when the rare items are put onto these mobs. There’s a flag on the mobs themselves that says “no_equip” that is there for this reason. I had marked that as “no” on the mob, so the mob equipped a weapon augment that was designed for players, specifically one that has damage but no delay. When a mob gets that kind of power, it just turns into a blender. It was very funny to realize how much torment I caused with one simple “0”. Ngreth: We used to have issues with designers creating infinite loops, which would crash the zone (the zone would become so busy running the script that it would not tell the world server it was still connected, so the world server would assume it was disconnected and restart it), so long ago we put an instruction limit on our scripts of 10000, so if a script runs 10000 lines of scripting before it ends, it will force an exit and end the script. I managed to break this! In a task, I wanted players to be able to choose which of two elements they wanted to complete. Completing either would update both. So, I added a script on A that would update B and a script on B that would update A. A (basically) 1 line script on each. The issue came when it ran... finishing A would properly update B, which updated A, which updated B, which updated A... And it did not trigger the execution limits because each “execution” was only one command... thus... it did not trigger the limit. Splat goes the zone! Aristo: At some point in the past, someone had a script running periodically on all the guards in Neriak, and later deleted the script but left the ID on the NPCs. Years later, a designer working in another part of the game unknowingly used that old script ID for a quest completion. Next time we patched the game, every guard in Neriak started saying something like "Wow, you found my egg!" every 5 seconds. The most head-scratching bug I remember was that if you were levitating AND wearing a charm item while crossing one of 5 specific zone lines, you would wind up just below the world on the other side. It took SKlug a long time to unravel that. The funniest internal-only one I remember was one day the code strings on Beta were offset, and so instead of messages like "you take 1000 points of falling damage" or "your spell is interrupted," the game was displaying lines from the bad word filter. Meeko: I once broke most pet commands because I put a new one in the middle of the list of existing ones and the AA system didn’t like that. And then there's these.... Q: What is your favorite thing you've worked on recently / something you're really proud of? Ngreth: The Rallos Zek questline in Torment of Velious that started the general modern path for progressive chase items. Aristo: It's not something that's visible to players, but over the past few years I've been organizing and identifying spell lines in meta data, which previously had no representation in the database. There are still more spells to identify and tag, but this past year was the first time there was enough of a system to use for the full process of making spell upgrades. Niente: I don’t write that much code any more. I made some changes to how chat filters work internally that should make it much easier for us to add them in the future. Also personas, in general. That was a very challenging project and I am super proud of the code team and what they accomplished. We still have some bugs to iron out. Sometimes programming on EQ is.. unpleasant, but the outcome is worth it. Absor: For me it’s always fun to invent entirely new things or reinvent existing stuff. Laurion’s Song was one of those. The notion of the Hero’s Realm has existed in game forever, but one in bits and scraps. Trying to make those scraps into something coherent and expanding on it was fun. We had to figure out exactly how a person gets to go to the realm after death and why nobody has been sent there in a long time. We also wanted to explain the concept of Hero’s Forge items and give them an origin. Wrapping that all up into a coherent and hopefully interesting story was the best part of last year (and a part of the year before too). Meeko: I’m proud of all the small changes that I’ve been able to put in that came from community suggestions. Identifying a pain point, coming up with a solution, and then implementing it is really gratifying. Pip: This AMA. Back to TOP.
Game Team - Everyone, continued Miscellaneous, continued Q: What is something you worked on that was really difficult to do? What made it difficult? Zieri: Shar Vahl, Divided. First, the pathing, in which the zone was a fully functional city with a “newbie yard” surrounding it. What pathing worked in the city didn’t like the combat area, and vice versa! Additionally, there were a lot of moving parts to the original Shar Vahl. Due to time having passed since the original zone, like our button girl Shainai growing up, not all ‘flavor’ was transferred over, but it still was a lot of documentation. I fully documented how the original zone was set up and used that as a template to modernize it with our newer systems. In retrospect, it took a lot longer than I had expected it to, but I did learn a few awesome flavor tricks I’ve used in quests since! Aristo: Patching. When I first started on the team, my job was to go through every release note from every designer and make sure that I added the correct files they modified to the list for the next live update. If someone forgot to tell me about a change, it just wouldn't go live, and we'd have to scramble to fix it. I soon cobbled together a system to detect changed files and gather them into a list, and eventually we changed the process to use deployment tools with as few manual interactions as possible. Niente: Server merges. EQ is an old game and some unusual bad data usually pops up when we do merges. For example, strangely corrupted characters who haven’t logged in since 2001. We also keep adding stuff and that also has to be merged. Overseer has 9 different tables in the character database (DB) that have to be merged. They don’t save the same way – for example your agents can be saved across all different DBs. Active quests will be together on one DB. EQ’s character DBs have data spread across multiple DBs for the same server, and that makes merges extremely complex. Some of the architecture choices made a long time ago would be monumental tasks to change, and we have to work around them in a merge (for example, the way real estate merges is very complex). Server merges are much, much better now than they used to be in terms of accuracy, reliability and speed. Meeko: Encounter Locking. The kill-stealing prevention was relatively straightforward to implement, but the anti-training mechanic was difficult. There are alot of ways that NPCs can pick who to aggro, when, and why. Each of those ways had to be considered and a solution tailored to fit each that accomplished the feature’s goal while also having minimal other impact. I think the feature is currently in a good spot and has come a long way from the first iteration released on Test. Like any feature though, there is always room for improvement. Q: What quest or thing did you make that you wish you hadn't added because of the problems it caused or difficulty of fixing it? Pip: In Maiden’s Eye (ToL), I added my first “Escort” quest with ambushes and everything. I felt like it was a rite of passage for mmo quest writers to have at least one escort quest. It took me 2 months of script work with Ngreth before I could get that working. Afterwards, I tell him that this seemed a lot harder than it should have been. He asks me “Why didn’t you just have them walk through a populated area instead of all the moving parts?” and my head shattered. That one move would have saved me so much time. I will say, I learned a lot but at the time I hated every second of making that quest. Aristo: Voting-based Progression Servers. There are so many systems involved that affect each other but aren't architected to talk to each other in the same way, and so many ways for each step to fail. It accomplished our goal of preventing a runaway unlock train like the original Progression Servers had, but it kept finding new ways to break itself. In retrospect going straight to a purely time-locked system like we use now would have been much simpler and saved a lot of time. We probably would always have wondered about the decision if we didn't have the data from the original voting servers, though. Niente: Sometimes I wish we’d never touched the pickzone logic, because it is a mess now. But I hope it is at least mostly better than it used to be. Q: Are there any game changes that were made to EQ that you would not have made, in retrospect? Pip: Mounts with stats on them. I didn’t make this, but whenever I think about this, it ruffles my feathers. Ngreth: It is not as much “one thing" as an attitude in the early game. There are many first Alternate Ability lines that simply give too much and use up all the design space immediately. The attitude was “this is the last thing we are doing for the game, let's give them everything!” Niente: In my time here, I was sad when we put a cap on Heroic Adventure levels. I think it was a really amazing system in terms of forward compatibility. It was difficult to tune though and there were a lot of complaints. From a code perspective, I wish the game did not have augments or Lore items. They are both fairly painful to deal with. I also wish we did not have to support two loot systems. Q: If you could add 2 projects regardless of scale or difficulty to be finished this year, what would they be? Niente: I’ll assume this would be projects that have started but not been completed – I'd like to see the persona system get enough polish that players have little to no complaints. I’d also like to see our anti-cheat measures become easier to do, and keep up with 3rd party software changes. If I could add two projects, one would be to improve our ability to hotfix things, so we could update spells/items without bringing servers down, and make it less risky to do hotfixes. Another would be to spend a lot of dedicated time on fixing bugs and performance in the Overseer system. As far as stability goes.. that's something we work on continuously, but I’d hesitate to categorize it as a project because it is not something I suspect we will ever see 100% completion. Meeko: The new UI Engine and Alternate Personas are two things that I’d love to see get completed this year. I think both have an enormous amount of potential positive impact to the game once completed and I’m excited to see that come to fruition. There’s a number of reasons for their current state, but both are still being worked on diligently. Q: Does anyone at the company play Everquest currently? If so, what’s the average amount of time spent playing for different roles from the above question (Editor’s Note: “above question” was a request for an overview of our org chart)? And how is that allocated between live vs TLP, soloing vs grouping vs raiding vs other activities like tradeskills? Niente: I play more EQ than I’d like to admit. Someone can play EQ, but also ignore problems and make changes that are not always well thought out. Someone can also not play, but listen to players and make quality changes and positively influence the game. I think that what would help is if you can let us know what areas of the game you think need our help/attention. I have played on TLP servers in the past, but currently play on Live (mostly raiding and grouping). I love tradeskills. Meeko: I play EQ for as many hours as I can spare with other life responsibilities. It varies week to week on what I choose to participate in, but it’s a combination of grouping, raiding, and soloing on Live servers. I sometimes play on TLPs with friends as well. Q: Between the period when a TLP is brand new and when mercs are introduced, the new character experience is pretty bad. This is likely why people resorted to rat ears and more recently red wine quests. Have any of you tried to level a fresh character without outside assistance between the time periods I mentioned above? How did it go? How long did it take you to get to maximum level? Niente: I've actually never used the Rat Ears or Red Wine quests to level, on a TLP or otherwise. I don’t really like to use mercenaries, either (just being honest) - it’s not that I dislike those quests / mercenaries, they just aren’t where I tend to end up. I don't know how fast I leveled the last time I got max level on a TLP, but I am sure it would not impress anyone. Q: If multiple devs are responding to this AMA. If you were given free reign/time/money to do whatever you wanted to Everquest, what would you do? Ngreth: I would have a dedicated developer responsible for curtailing cheaters and other behavior that disrupts the game for our players. Aristo: New player race models and a pipeline that eliminates the manual effort our artists have to do to make new armor for them. Update the lighting and shader models for the renderer. Complete documentation on, like, everything. Better metrics. Versioning for the design database. More ways for NPCs to interact with the world and each other, and behaviors that let them surprise us. Chickens. Weather. A more dynamic sky. Constellations. Point to point particles. Replay recording. Zieri: All the flavor, everywhere, bring the cities and camps to greater life. Fist fights in the bars! NPCs buying supplies from merchants! Bards being bards! Pip: Make new race/class combinations and figure out how to expand players wardrobes and customization options. Niente: Add an in-game system (or external tool) for players to create their own content/abilities (e.g. custom maps in Starcraft – the origin of DotA/MOBAs - and spell crafting in Oblivion). Absor: Ninjas. More ninjas. Meeko: I wo,uld add com,mas to all n,umb,ers in EQ. I gu,ess w,ith unl,imi,ted res,our,ces I’d al,low ot,her num,ber s,epa,rat,ors for you he.ath.ens t,hat use p,eri,ods. Q: Can you replace all character models with skeletons? Ngreth: We can, but we won’t. Pip: No, skeletons are too scary. Can you imagine if we lived in a world where skeletons are real? Chills go up my spine when I think about it. Q: What is one major joy of stewarding an old but storied game and franchise like Everquest and one major challenge? Pip: I get to partake in the work of the previous designers and add to their stories. The only difference is that I have literal decades worth of player’s stories to add onto it. Every day I’m in awe of what I get to be a part of. I take great pride in being able to carry the torch while still walking in the footsteps of giants. Niente: My favorite thing about working on EQ is being empowered to make positive change. Having the ability to do both minor things like changes / new slash commands, adding a button to a window, and also pitch projects or lobby for larger changes. The most challenging thing about working on EQ is its complexity. It is very easy to break things in unexpected ways. Aristo: I still take joy in being able to contribute ideas that shape the world that I've loved for so long. Getting to peek behind the curtain and rearrange the sets, so to speak. Coming up with answers for questions that plagued me for years. The most challenging aspect of working on this game is trying to make the right changes that improve it without removing the uniqueness that keeps EQ EQ. Meeko: goto: Niente’s answer; Back to TOP.
Game Team - Everyone, continued Miscellaneous, continued Q: Why does it take years to get fixes to things that could probably be done in 15 minutes? Such as the OoW instance hunter issue and fake AHR in VT reset issue? Niente: I think the insight here might be that implementing a fix may seem really simple, but there is always a lot of other planned work going on. It can take a while for some bugs to get our attention, and then get scheduled, looked at, fixed, tested, and patched live. If I knew off the top of my head all the things I could fix in 15 minutes I would write them all down and fix them tomorrow. To try to give you something, though, we have weekly meetings about the top bugs in the bugs forum, so that is a good avenue to get something fixed. Pip: “probably be done in 15 minutes.” Aristo: I always think of it like potholes. An individual pothole doesn't take that long to patch, but it still takes time to confirm them, triage them, assign people to fix them, and get those people the materials they need to fix them. Sometimes there are emergencies that are more urgent than a pothole. Sometimes you have to find the source of the pothole and fix that before you can permanently address the hole itself. And sometimes the transit department just doesn't find out about the pothole, even though it's on your commute and you think about it every day. Meeko: It’s usually about net positive and impact. There could be a large impact difference in spending 15 minutes working on a single thing that only affects a few players and is a minor inconvenience to them versus putting in 15 minutes towards a larger project that’ll impact everyone playing and is a noticeable improvement to an action they do often. Sometimes the judgements on what is impactful and how long something is going to take are wrong (we’re human after all) so it’s not always straightforward to make that decision. Q: What was (or is) your favourite unintended feature? Pip: I spent months trying to figure out why our sharks fly. I am traumatized by flying sharks. So I'd say my fav unintended feature is Hell levels. Niente: I really liked it when Selo’s Kick caused you to do the Flying Kick animation if you were an Iksar (fixed now I think). Another good one is EQ baseball (has since been fixed) - if you use Hate’s Attraction on an NPC, and mid-air, another player does a knockback (Sonic Displacement), it would fly across the zone. Aristo: Feign pulling. Q: Can you guys just keep doing what your doing? Ngreth: In a general sense yes. We will continue to try to improve and iterate. Pip: That’s all we do baybee! Q: When was the last time you leveled from one to max with a new character (Without getting power leveled or carried through content)? Pip: I don’t engage with nerd cred checking. Niente: 2020. To be honest, I don’t really like the low level part of EQ. Meeko: Potentially never? Once you’ve got a high level character or friends, it is straightforward to get help or help yourself with your leveling progress in some fashion. I would like to do a 1-125 journey at some point this year though. Potentially while playing on one of the upcoming TLPs or separately on one of the Live servers as an intel gathering mission. Q: Hello im wondering if i may have a Oakwynd Bow for my twink ranger named Neckbeard on the Zek Server please? Ngreth: No Pip: Waived: Not a bug. Q: When is the last time you raided on a tlp server and what content where you doing? any highlights or lowlights? Niente: The last time I raided on TLP was Vaniki (Emperor Ssraeshza at 55), which was definitely a unique experience. The highlight would definitely be charming super dangerous things. Lowlight, probably just that it’s a shame the server doesn’t have more players. Meeko: I’ve completed the first few Vaniki achievements while playing by myself and with friends. The highlight for me is always the communal aspect of working towards a goal and achieving it together. Q: DPG stakeholders and devs have previously been known to play in a few player run guilds, without giving yourself away, in recent years which guilds have you enjoyed being in the most? Niente: To give a side-answer, I really enjoyed Reversion (on Selo) - they were a late night raiding guild that didn’t make it much longer after the next TLP launch. I guest raided ToV with Nox Terrorem on Coirnav as a GM for a livestream. They were extremely kind and reminded me of old guilds from way back that were not cutting edge, but enjoyed themselves more than many players in top raiding guilds. EQ is great because of its community, and there are many truly amazing guilds out there (because they have amazing people). Meeko: I’ve played in casual family guilds, top end raiding guilds, and everything in between over the course of my playing career. Ultimately, my enjoyment from being in a guild ends up coming down to the friendships and players in it. I play EQ for the community and friendships and if I feel like I’m just playing by myself, then what’s the point of being in a guild at all? Q: Could halflings have handles on their backs? Some are so slippery that they are hard to throw. Ngreth: Good point! Pip: They are slippery BECAUSE you try to throw them. Q: EG7 gives you an unlimited budget to add more classes, what do you choose to add? Ngreth: I would pivot and add new races. The first would be Gelatinous Cube! I really think we do not need any more classes. All it will do is water down what we already have for classes. Niente: Battlemage! Pip: Dragoon (aka dragonrider), cannoneer, shogun, Geomancer. These are things I’m constantly daydreaming about. Meeko: I’d love to have a non-combat “Trader” class that focused on tradeskills, buying/selling, etc. In a former life I was a weaponsmith playing SWG and long for those days. Aristo: [screaming intensifies] Q: Follow up, is there anyone you would like to bring back to work with again? Ngreth: Qwalla. Pip: The entire tapestry that is EQ is covered with various techniques and fixes that shows its history of how many different people’s works were a part of creating it. Everyone had something to offer this incredible piece of work. One of the fun things I get to be blessed with is the ability to look through these archives and see these works in their original forms. Absor: Yes, several people in fact. They know who they are. Meeko: I’d prefer to bring in people with new ideas, frankly. There’s so many players I get to interact with in various ways that I think would do incredible things working on a certain aspect of the game. I wish we could hire them all. If it must be a person from the past though, then Dzarn. Q: How likely are you to recommend EQ to friends/colleagues on a 1-10 scale? Ngreth: 8. I only rate it this “low” because EQ is a difficult game, and I know that some of my friends are not interested in difficult games and I rate it accordingly! Niente: Only EQ players like EQ and they know from years of experience what happens when you try to get other people to play it. Back to TOP.
Leads TLP Questions Q: Is there any possibility of doing a progression sever that is like WoW's Season of Discovery? JChan: Time is vast, so we're not going to say never, but it's unlikely you'll see a heavy revamping of the early EverQuest. Q: Is there going to be an earlier release for the 25th TLP to coincide with the actual anniversary? Ngreth: No, it will be released in May. Q: Are there any plans to announce the new TLP soon? Will player feedback be taken into account? JChan: Soon is relative. So "soon" could be yes or it could be no. Yes, we take player feedback into account. Ngreth: It will depend on the feedback. We will listen to feedback, but not necessarily act on that feedback. Some feedback we are given we cannot execute in a reasonable amount of time, some we can, and some we disagree with or is too fringe. Q: Are there any plans to allow Beastlords and Beserkers at lvl 1 on new TLP launches? Ngreth: It is something we have considered but have not yet implemented. If these classes are okay with minimal new character quests, no epic until the release time of that epic, and other things like that, it is feasible. Changing these classes' starting experiences such that it is the “same” as the original classes is not feasible currently. Q: Is the 25th Anniversary server going to be more like Oakwynd in terms of bonuses? Ngreth: No. Q: Year of Darkpaw and the 2024 TLP(s) - Would you consider adding the monthly items to the 2024 TLP(s) marketplace that they missed as the server hadn't opened yet. So new chars on the new server(s) will be able to obtain all the items from this special year? Ngreth: Those items will be available again in the future, but not this year. Q: There’s a meme of “fixed for the next TLP” which seems to come from your development timeline with monthly patches to fix things being a bit slow for them to be relevant for the current TLP where the issue exists, as they typically move to the next era in 8 to 12 weeks. Two recent examples that come to mind are corruption cures on Vaniki and Legacy bonus for AA on Oakwynd. What are your thoughts about this and the responsiveness in your model when things don’t go as intended? Ngreth: The current EverQuest model does not allow for easy non-disruptive changes to the game. While we could wish for a more responsive model, it is not what we have. Niente: Both of these problems reached the dev team while we were working 95% on new expansions and expansion features (in late fall/winter). This is a very busy time of year for us and it can be quite difficult to squeeze in additional timely issues for TLP servers. It may not be ideal, but we do our best to fix things promptly and we do care about TLP issues, even if it is a smaller or late stage TLP. Q: Can you give some roadmap for Vaniki’s end of life? It was mentioned there would be new achievements for later expansions, but overall is it intended to remain as somewhere those achievements can be done, or will it be merged into live (approximate timeframe if so)? Ngreth: At some point in its life, Vaniki will be merged with another live server. This will happen either when the server population reaches a critical point, or Vaniki is at “live” AND the server population is at a different critical point. These Merges happen at the same time each year. Niente: I hope that we can keep Vaniki around so players who have not had the opportunity to get the special achievements and items on this server can still do so. However, if the server sustains too low of a population for too long, it is at risk of being merged. Q: Are there plans to remove true box from Agnarr? Ngreth: There are no plans. Q: Are you working on adding bazaar to classic for next TLP, or any other auction house/bazaar overhaul? Ngreth: This is not something that we have seriously considered. At this time we are going with the classic experience of no bazaar until it’s normal release time. Q: When are server transfers going to be allowed between Rizlona and Aradune as both have the exact same ruleset, unlock speed, and progression point? Niente: This is something that has not yet been discussed internally. Ngreth: We will consider this. The holdup is a decision on when the advantage of freely multiboxing for many expansions vs. a server with tighter restrictions expires. We do not have an ETA currently. Q: Are there any plans to add more QoL things to TLP like premium guild halls & fellowships in at classic so we can all hangout/group up with our guildies? Q: Would it be possible for the following systems: Housing, Banners, Fellowships and Overseer to be released earlier on TLP? Ngreth: At this time, there are no plans to change when housing is available. Banners and Fellowships are also unlikely, but we could consider some stat-less versions simply for ease of transport. We will not bring stated versions, even different stats, before their current release. This is currently not on the table, but it is something we would put into consideration. As for Overseer, it is within what we do want to bring to the game earlier but have not yet dedicated the necessary resources to making it happen. Q: Whats going on with Thornblade? Are you going to merge it? Offer transfers to Mischief? Niente: The 2024 Roadmap includes our current plans to potentially merge Thornblade and Mischief later this year. Q: Are there any plans to review and revise rules/events/gameplay for TLP's? Ngreth: We review the rules each year. We tend only to make incremental changes, but we do continue to innovate on the idea. Q: Hello, can you please open Agnarr to GoD or OOW please? Ngreth: That is not within the spirit of the Agnarr server, so no. Q: What about a Hardcore server where you only get 10% of normal xp per kill? Ngreth: It is an interesting idea. We did have a “Slow experience” server, and while not a flop, it was not long-lasting. It also had slower unlocks, so it is not an exact match to your idea if you wanted 10% EXP with the “standard” unlock schedule. Q: In honor of the Year of Darkpaw and with the success of tlp's in addition to classic games, could the Agnarr server be considered to be moved to Free to Play? JChan: This is a membership only experience. Q: Early TLP raiding is mainly throttled around the concept of MoTM, with aoc's and truebox now being limitations to why MoTM was originally introduced are there any plans to revisit MoTM and how it works? Ngreth: We would need some real data supporting the change. Back to TOP.
Honestly, I didn't expect answers to the questions to be tagged by the responding Dev. The format this was delivered in is awesome. @Absor There's a thread on the bug forums regarding VXAHR that I'm keeping alive. Please check it out
Thank you. And if we can't have handles on halflings can we get another way to launch them through the air and make them go...SMASH!
Complete waste of time. Its obvious the team has 0 desire to bring in new blood and are just riding this out. I guess they upheld their end of the bargain. Its AMA and they answered the questions.
