What? What do people who have 3k-7k AA need help with? You also ignore every family/casual guild to support your claim that "the player base doesn't support those players." I can't speak for other servers but I know Cazic has a bunch of guilds whos sole intent is to help out these players and bring other casual players close together. Getting away from captain sav-a-noob, autogranting 500-750 aa over the course of the first few levels(51-70) wouldn't be too bad. Namely for passives such as PP, CA/CS etc. Anything more than that would be over kill.
As was already posted, 90% of a handful of vocal people does NOT make you a majority. It makes you loud and annoying. Again, why don't you go ahead and open your game client and take a look at the voting results? Actually, lemme post a quote from Elidroth himself: What part of your 90% fits into that percentage, exactly? Call people lazy all you want from your supposed ivory tower, sneering upon all the new players and low level alts who cannot play the role they chose because of archaic mechanics. But here is the flat truth about it all. A class that cannot perform the role that it was chosen for (at least to minimal acceptable standards) at the character creation screen out of the box is a problem. Requiring that character to make a SIGNIFICANT time requirement to even be considered for their role in a group environment is a fundamental flaw with the game and is hindering new player retention regardless if you think it is or not. Just because the vocal bittervets are holding on desperately to the dwindling differentiating factors to these supposed unclean and lazy new upstarts, doesn't mean you should be vehemently opposing something that will help the game barely thrive for that much longer. Not everyone has a regular group of friends, an alt/box army or tons of funds to pay for AA PLs. Everyone who is stating how easy it is to get AAs nowadays needs to eat a whole humble pie by staring 100% fresh on a different server and see how EASY those AAs and levels really come.
Nothing I said in that post implied that it was the post that he said it would happen either. Looks like you're quite good at twisting people's words all by yourself. I was discussing the fact that the upping of the AA bonus did not affect the idea of auto-granting. End of story. In the discussions on the old boards we were told coding was still the biggest issue. Calm down. I'm not sure what your point about CA/CS was, I didn't mention getting new levels of it. The discussion about it originally he didn't mention any AAs specifically, only that he wanted to look at auto-granting AAs that were required to function in your current role. If you were a tank, that might be CA/CS. He was not a fan it seemed of granting class abilities really, but would give few if any specifics.
It's actually in this thread, before you made this post, about 50% only in this thread which has nothing at all to do with what the players in general want.
Maybe they should just up that AA bonus curve to 10k AAs and call it done? Or just keep it permanent. Hell, why not.
It already passed the vote. Sadly, most of those people quit and it's just the vets with self-esteem issues left posting here, for the most part.
I'm a vet, but I'm also a returning, low level vet right now (see sig). The only problem I see with auto-granting AA is that it kinda shoots me in the foot as to what I'm going to do with myself while I focus on my progression-mission. Yeah, sounds pretty self-serving, and perhaps it is. I do have a goal to go through old, outdated, and even no longer required progression (PoP, anyone?), and I set myself to max AA in those cases. As it is, it's hard for me to do my side projects and NOT hit my AA cap. Unlike EQ2, there's no way for me to turn OFF my experience bars, so am I supposed to sit on max banked AA? And in that case, could the bank be increased (at least for those of us not close to max level)?
As for the argument "there is no rush to the endgame" that holds little water and less sense. Yes you should enjoy the game, but the game as a whole has always been set up more like a second job than a game. Until the most recent expansion grinding away for hours, days, weeks, months, and years is almost the only option. Also, they aren't adding new things to the game for people below max level. All the new AAs are for the highest levels, all the new spells, all the new skills, all the new content. You can say that they added lots of stuff for your level range previously, but that was when it was current and there were a lot of people playing there. Now those level ranges and zones are empty and players 80 and under spend the vast majority of their time soloing or moloing. The content wasn't made easier and now you want people to do it alone. Yes sometimes they can use newer gear to make the content easier, but it doesn't always work out. The whole game is geared towards pushing you to the endgame as quickly as possible.
That's what the 'Glyph of Interminable' (or whatever) at 25 AA points is for, to allow you to burn off AA points uselessly.
Afaik there is a bonus up to 4k AA, although it goes down gradually. If they're going to grant AA they should do it where it has the most impact. It's not that hard for players to reach lvl 70, especially not thanks to DSH, which is an extremely nice place to get the first few thousand AA, thanks to mercs casters can easily solo there too now. But the jump from lvl 70 to lvl 100, and the jump fro 3000 AA to 7000 AA is a way bigger jump to make than the jump from lvl 1-70 and from 0-3000 AA. They can make the AA pre-3000 faster too, but if people are honest, that's not where the big timesink is, the big timesink is higher up when people can no longer solo, where a merc actually loses substantially in power and where zones are quite brutal for a number of expansions, HoT being the exceptions.
I think the motivation for the Devs too auto-grant any AA's is the fact that some essential and even "class defining" AA's are all listed under the General tab. Not to mention a few that aren't considered optional for any class.
Last I heard it was still 4000, but I am not positive. The bonus also degrades per AA you earn if I remember right.
Geesh. Of course you can give out AA automatically. The quality of the player has zero to do with auto AA or not. Also, you don't want quality players coming to the game...you want quality players STAYING in the game. There has to be a number of new players to find the quality players you desire... If the AAs started at level 71 instead of 51...so that the first 51 - 70 are 'auto granted' for all toons. It lowers the overall number of AA's to get...and yet requires work to get AAs still. Could still give out a bonus exp for AA for maybe 3k or something if you give the first 20 levels out free. It doesn't mean you deserve a refund or some other silly gift. That is like saying you want a refund for paying for all the expansion up to RoF since everyone else gets those for free with RoF.
A long time ago, they gave everyone 200 Sense Heading. They also gave them TWO free 8 slot bags. They put in newbie armour quests that you didn't have to leave your starting zone hunting grounds to get, it was all no-drop so you couldn't steal it off corpses on the Zeks, and it was ALL magic, so your kicks had a magic weapon, your slams, your regular weapon- man, no running for your life, shrieking like a girl to get away from a wisp. "Automatically maxing sense heading?" says I. "Man, that's lame. That took ages to get up binding that stupid key." But five minutes later, I got on with both my life and my EQ experience. Skills got autoseeded as you level- no more warriors going for tons of levels mashing taunt and never seeing it go up! Most of the tanks that did that and are still playing, by the way, are not bad players- they're often some of the best, being very long-playing veterans. They were just ignorant of certain knowledge then- information that wasn't intuitive. They weren't "apes smashing their head on a keyboard." Most of the people who post on these boards anywhere but in the newbie section will not be impacted in anyway by autogranting of basic mitigation AAs. There's no skill involved in a mitigation AA, anyway. They're all passive. And the higher level you are, the more you're expected to have- I'm not talking about raiding guilds, I'm talking about the game. Each expansion is tested with appropriate AAs to that expansion. You can argue that *everyone* needs to not grind out levels first, and to stop and AA, but the lower level community is fleeting-to-non-existent. It's about as vibrant as it has been since The Serpent's Spine (when a new race was introduced), due to returning players and new players with F2P, and it's *still* fleeting-to-non-existent. If there had been constant influxes every expansion, maybe. But now you're just telling people to spend a lot of time soloing with a merc, or taking up boxing with mercs... while at the same time, on these same boards, there's denigrating people in general for just playing with their own toons and mercs, and not so much of the MM in MMO. Can't have it both ways. At the same time, I don't like the idea of just autogranting AAs, personally. It's not even about grinding uphill both ways through rain, hail, snow, and blistering heat, barefoot, carrying the team on mah back. It's because "Ding! Grats, you have gained Combat Stability 14!" doesn't sound very fun. I always thought that if they want to make those basic passive AAs, that cost a lot, fast, to get, "autogranted," that it would be better to borrow a page out of EQII's book. Exploring in EQII is one of the ways you get AA XP- going somewhere new you haven't been before. A quest line, not linear, but open-ended, that dovetailed with the Hero's Journey, leading you all over zones throughout Norrath, where you could learn a bit about the zone: "The tunnels of Guk, twisting ever deeper, now bring the stench under the slime of the long dead. Lower Guk's ghoulish inhabitants, cursed by trollish dark magic, do not welcome interlopers for anything other than fresh meat. Many an adventurer has given much of their time braving their halls just the same, in search of spoils. It is said that a [ghoul assassin] possessed a [Mask of Deception], taking the form of a dark elf to hunt..." It could reference old items, chase items (Divine Hammer of Consternation! Truncheon of Doom! Willsapper!), and lead people into their epics organically. Maybe some wouldn't like it, but I personally would find that more fun than autogranting. It is, however, a LOT more work for the dev team. ~Sighs~
