2014 SoE Live - Q&A Panel Questions/Answers

This thread lists all questions asked by players in both EQ panels and is loosly organized by topics. Apologies as there are some questions and/or answers I didn’t hear. If anyone knows or can expand on any of these Q&A listings, please go ahead. Also, questions from day 2’s Q&A panel are listed with (Day 2) at the start.


VENDOR ABILITY

One thing that was a godsend was the combine all for tradeskills. Last night you talked about looting. For those who loot things and put them in a specific bag can we get a ‘sell all’ for bag.
-It’s on the list, will check when I get back (Jenn)

Can you add a check box to merchants to filter by class so you only see things what you can use or best for you.
-Not on the list, but we can look into it when we get back,




RAID SPECIFIC TOPICS

Instead of longer and longer raids, can you shorten them or find a different way to make it harder.
-It’s something we can look into but it’s different by guilds.

Is it possible to bring mercenaries in for old raid content for fun?
-The reality is because our data is set up we have to worry about progression content, so if we do a new progression server and it will blow progression servers out of the water.

Western Karana raid 2 – the dragon doesn’t reset to get up from feign death, there’s no way to have her start to engage the guards again (she used to).
-She should not feign death. Secondly she was never intended to be a part of the fight, she wasn’t supposed to attack NPC’s. She’s in a weakened state because she isn’t where she belongs. Players are supposed to protect her, not have her fight. I could go in and fix her so she doesn’t feign death anymore, however if I’m in there … (evil chuckle as it’s alluded he’d remove her ability to fight at all)

Illusion god – Since you’re saying these are supposed to be special. Can we end the contention for old game gods, make it 12 hour respawns, make loot no tribute so people can see all the chain farmed mobs.
-We can look at this as well, but it’s not on the list yet so can’t promise anything. We can add it to the list

Coins – is there any chance to combine the different tiers of coins, so we don’t have to repeat the old content for the item.
-Currency combination downgrading we have talked about. We’d never upconvert. We might have done it once in the past. We’ll discuss it. Limited resources and things we have to get done and like to get done.

Is it specifically designed in the last expansion to that each raid drops specifically tunics, or bracers, etc. rather than having it be more random.
-Yes, it was intentional? It was a way to make sure you played the content and not skipped. We had diverged from it a long time ago and came back to it this time.

Raid loot – we hate ‘all/all’, can we have more class specific wearable.
-We’re not bring back archetype gear. We may look at the stats to make the other groupings more advantageous for them (right now the stats are too close so everyone goes after tank etc.)

(Day 2) The raid currency help get rare items, is it possible to put power sources or purity augs into the gear again by adding them to the vendors?
-Couple of issues with that, if we put everything you need on the raid merchant you don’t have to go out into the world. Purity augs may never show up on merchants, power sources maybe. Have to talk about it.

(Day 2) Epic 1.0 quests for influx of heroic characters – long lines waiting for specific spawns with long respawn times.
-Something we discussed is trying to (not that we’re doing it) is removing the resale value of these so people don’t kill it for bazaar or tribute value.


GAME CONTENT TOPICS

Camp spots in current expansions – e.g. Argin Hiz not a lot of camp spots, etc.
-There needs to be more safe places. On the flip side, AH is the hardest zone in the expansion, it should be difficult. Adjust your playstyle.

People asked for link between bazaar and lobby – can we have link from guild hall to PoK directly.
-We can look into it.

(Day 2) Pathing issues – level 80 hills of shade quest. May have to kill 8 to get 5.
-Do a /bug report (dev took down the name/



MERCENARY TOPICS

(Day 2) Autofollow and circles with the 2nd character.
-It’s been quirky forever. JChan asks if you could us info on what zones and actual coordinates, etc. when it happens. (Audience shouted every zone). She responded with mercs follow the same pathing as NPC’s. Another suggestion is keep frame rate high in your background.

(Day 2) Mercs – is there any way to increase the amount of buff slots that it has or make it so the specific type can lock spells? Cap is 15.
-That’s been fixed (it’s not on live yet) but buff slots thing is adjustable as well.



FELLOWSHIP TOPICS

Can we get a channel filter for fellowship.
-SURE (it’s on test now we think)

Can you make it that every toon on your account can be on the same fellowship?
-Fellowships are a specific size. If you’re taking it up with a character, you’re taking it up with a character. That would effectively make fellowship sizes unlimited. We don’t want fellowships to turn into guilds.



SPECIFIC CLASS TOPICS

(Berserker) Addressing last night zerkers comment – mini burns and sustained boosts.
-The issue with zerkers and burst DPS is related to the AOE melee changes. I want to make it clear, the way it’s going to happen. We’re making changes first to the underlying code, but keep DPS values the same. Lots of iterations on test and asking for you to check it often and help us. We’re more interactive in our development process, so very iterative, won’t be live until SoE is happy with it. Long process.

(Day 2) (Berserker) - In general, endurance is in the toilet in 2 minutes. We’re dead in the water.
-We agree and in general our goal is to cut a little off the burn and add it to the sustain. It’s going to be a slow process of minor adjustments.

(Day 2) (Berserker) Something clicks off my buff when I hit a glyph (didn’t catch this question fully, player was soft spoken)
-PM Aristo with info. Elidroth added that with as old as this game is there will be stacking issues and there’s no way to avoid them sometimes.

(Mage) Call of heroes line of spell, request is a reverse call of hero.
-Emphatically NO!!! The spell effect for that to happen doesn’t exist, and it’s potentially game breaking.

(Cleric) Turn undead or smite the wicked has so much agro. Can that be tuned down some so you don’t use it and go splat.
-Learn to play and use your ability better. Clerics are DPS’ing on raids? This is a secondary ability and should be used in conjunction with your other abilities so you aren’t a detriment when you use these. (Audience suggestions – use Turn undead only when silent casting is up; use smite the wicked with both silent casting and divine peace)

(Day 2) (Bard) Mercenaries don’t pair well with me. They can’t solo or molo so are useless without other players.
-Feedback was ‘have you considered a group’? Bards make other people better, that’s their focus. Not every class is going to be good at solo, group and raid as there are tradeoffs.

(Day 2) (Troll beastlord) – some years ago, warder exchange alligator to basilisk. Marketplace (can we get the lavastorm basilisk). Can we get something like that to change the colors?
-We can do it through a petamorph wand, but we wouldn’t do an AA, etc. There’s a different NPC file for every focus level and every level. Chandrok has added it to the list. Also at high levels do you want it to be changed like necro pets? YES was the crowd answer.



GENERAL ITEM TOPICS

1 hand weapons with prim/sec weapons – what’s chances of getting the lore tag removed off them.
-We can look into removing them, but some are intentionally lore.

From ecommerce – we’re supposed to tell you what EQ players would want to buy. Lots of old weapon graphics from Kunark and Velious that we’d love.

The new illusion – what’s up with that duration and recast?
-We are talking about it but don’t have an answer. The item was always designed to be special for limited duration so you can’t walk around in god form too long. It wasn’t messaged well and we acknowledge that. We want to sweeten the reward a bit, still a work in process. It’s a special thing, so we want people to look like people primarily. As far as the weapon looks, we occasionally do those tradeskill augs and transformation mods. If you have specific weapons you like, give them to Jansan PM him (he’s the tradeskill guy).

Illusion god clicky reward – is that the same one that’s viable through the store here. You just mentioned it’s supposed to be special but if you can buy it anytime at the store.
-You can only buy it here at the Store on sight in Vegas and only during SoE Live.

If you have any nimbus on you (butterflies, etc.) and you click an illusion, and move – all your nimbus effects stay where they were until you zone and then the illusion goes away. Can you fix that.
-We’ll see if we can get that fixed.

Can we get older items that no longer drop, onto the economy or in other ways to help get plat out of game?
-Initially SoE didn’t want to extend casino, but it’s a great way to get plat out. We’ve discussed it and not sure when it will come up. It was a topic literally last month. When, don’t know? But it’s still coming. If you have suggestions for what you want, PM Aristo or Elidroth or make a forum thread. BFG will not be one of the things, you’d REALLy have to convince us. It just doesn’t fit the genre of EQ so we don’t want to repeat a mistake.

There doesn’t seem to be a hate mask or agro weapon on the merchants, is that intentional?
-There are some items on merchants but we don’t want everything on a merchant all of the time, and especially not for every tier. It’s intentional to get you to play the game.

Can we get a Tavid Dennet for Hero’s Forge armor set for storage? 9 sets is 72 bank slots used up.
-Collapsing them to a storage item, that is doable but (chuckles), by a tradeskill recipe. I feel sad for Jansan. It can be done.

(Day 2) Bard only weapons are now truly rare.
-Specific to the ideas of class specific weapon/instruments, the mods reached a point that things are capped. Mods are capped at 35. Class balance is really hard to hit.

(Day 2) Ornaments – can archetypes be interswitched so that robes, etc. can be worn by plate classes (and other combinations that now do not exist)?
-It’s about consistency in the world. It has to make sense in the world. It’s not a technical issue, it’s a team issue that we decided. The only way you can do it is with hero’s forge, however you’ll have to go out into the world and find an older all/all piece that is that specific look in order to drop the existing armor looks in.

(Day 2) I’m a high elf and I wear a hat sometime. It used to be very stylish, now it’s a flipped up ugly hat. Could you get me something prettier?
-Take a screenshot and send it to the Devs, have your char showing the link to the item as well.

(Day 2) Can paladin wear robes?
-NO

(Day 2) Can you fix it so all races can wear robes for the heroes forge robes?
-Heroe’s robes DO show up, but you have to find an all/all robe first to put it in.

(Day 2) I have all the quests done, tradeskill 16 slot bags, is there any way I can make these heirloom?
-We want you to have them at your level. Quest rewards are for doing the content and in the nature of an item acquisition based games, items are intended to be superseded. We want the quest rewards to remain the reward for completing the quest and not give you a hand me down. No, because of the reasoning you go tthem.



SPELL TOPICS

Spell gem flips (last year said can’t code add new ones easily)
-Part of the difficulty of the game is choosing your spells. It’s a tricky thing because we don’t want to give you too much power to give you almost essentially have all your spells. Allowing you to have hotswappable spell gem bars negates your requirement to

Can we get a carry down for spells so we can purchase ROF, aka get NPC similar so we can downgrade within the same level range.
-Generally we don’t want to trade across expansions. It won’t happen for rank 3, but for rank 2 I can look at it.

(Day 2) Spell resist system – instead of all or nothing with resists, can you do partial resists so the spell hits for something?
-Yes, but no eta.

(Day 2) Dead man floating is blocking spirit of eagle and flight of eagle. Also ranger single target SoE blocks druid SoE?
-We can look at it.

(Day 2) Why do all the cleric spell hastes land? Why can’t they overwrite each other?
-It’s because there are points in the transition between the level cap where the effect of an old rank 3 and a new rank 2 to get the maximum haste. If they overwrite them, you won’t get the focus from both based on which spell you use.

(Day 2) We talked about reverse coth earlier – why can’t we buy a reverse call of the hero from cash reward or loyalty vendor.
-Reverse coh doesn’t exist and mages won’t get it either. In general farming out abilities from classes, especially for AA’s that someone can purchase anywhere (instead of loyalty points which enter the world at a fixed rate) is not something we want to do. (Player then said take rez tokens out of the game if that’s the stance).

(Day 2) A lot of effects are not scalable (regen, damage shield). Is irrelevant to the content on these two.
-I can look at it. I’ve already increased above more than usually.

(Day 2) Can you block entire lines of buffs instead of individual level’s range of buffs?
-We have to be careful to increase that all that gets stored on the server when you log in, so when it’s going to get cast it’s immediate. Because there is that memory limitation. As for blocking entire spell lines, that does require some data (we don’t have great ways of knowing which spells are in which spell lines).
-We’ve been wanting to specifically define lines of spells for a long time but no currently have a data method to do it. If we get that in, then being able to block a line would be possible at that point, but that’s a while out.



AA TOPICS

When you have max aa/xp, some way to expend AA’s for gem of live that gives divine rez, half mana, half rez effects, etc.?
-Things like the glyph of interminable reward, rank 2 could come up. Will cost 100 AA. I realize there are a lot of people who are max. I say first of all, thank you. But there are a lot of players who aren’t in that line. We can add things but the AA system is limited but we aren’t going to add things that are too impactful. We can look into it though.

Touching base on max aa/exp, can you do an exchange rate for merc AA cause merc AA is slow.
-There is a way to do it, we can talk about it when we get back. But you probably won’t like what the ratio would be.

(Day 2) Is there any way to turn off passive AA’s?
-There is no way to currently turn off passive AA’s. It’s a significantly difficult hurdle to jump.

(Day 2) Thank you for the recent mage group call. Any AA ability for that coming?
-Not a fan of giving out abilities that were just as a spell. It ‘could’ come later but that would be a good while/long time.


.

KEYRING TOPICS

Can we have illusion keyring similar to the new mount keyring.
-It was on our short list for things we wanted to do within the next year. Mount keyring slightly won but now that we have the mount keyring it will help make the illusion keyring.



GENERAL BALANCE TOPICS

Strength of healing versus damage incoming isn’t equal. Anything you can do to it?
-Damage is more spiky than we like. Been looking at it all year. It’s still an ongoing process. We like the average damage coming in, but we don’t like the spikes. So it’s a work in process, and we’re working on it. Also mentioned strikethrough (fixing the issues with mobs that aren’t working through the defensive abilities that are broken on some mobs).



MOUNT TOPICS

Question on flying mounts – we have the technology to levitate across zones but if you get into a lower part of the zone you can’t get up into the air to cross the zone. Is there any point to looking at flying mounts (we have winged mount). It would take “slight coding”.
-The art in our game isn’t really built for flying over the game. The game isn’t built that it looks good from flying up above, you see over the way the game art is built. Probably not going to happen in near future.



GENERAL UI / CODE TOPICS

Can players change the color of the targeting ring in our own settings rather than through UI. It makes it challenging to play based on the floor designs of several places and also among those who are color blind.
-Right now you do have the ability to change for your own client. It’s a hidden feature (you change the art file that is a targeting ring). We want a UI way to change the color. We can look at that.

Can we have a way to order spell effects, by time, spell order, etc.?
-We’ve discussed this. We’re still going through the design phase of how it would work, how would the UI flow and how it would be a smooth experience and not too complicated to use.

Guild bank that is collection specific since there are so many and they take up so much room?
-We can look into it but it wouldn’t be a 2nd guild bank. Would have more guild bank space satisfy? (Answer from crowd was yes). We’ll look at giving more guild bank space.

The raid tool, you said in the earlier panel that you’re looking into some changes. Some specific changes I’d like – open up non group window (can only see 4 names right now), shuffle the raid without locking the raid.
-We can increase the size of the non groupable window (thought it already was). While moving around shuffling members. The locking is in place for a reason. Because we are sending messages back/forth across everyone in the raid, across all guilds, all zones, all servers. We don’t want to do that at this time. It increases the traffic going through our servers, to a point it won’t be safe.

Question to raid leaders out there – can we get a raid window redesign to add raid invite they already can be added to Dz design.
-It’s possible, there is new capability you can 1 touch invite everyone to the raid.

Can a raid please get functionality to place a banner when you are an alliance? Like an alliance banner.
-We can talk about it. It’s not a horrible difficult task, but it is a change in the game play. (Player thoughts, make it a system like the raid banner – but it’s an alliance banner. Similar to fellowship you have to invite people into it then have X number in zone to plant it. Don’t need the fancy effects like the raid banner have, just a way to get into the zone.)

Would it be possible to learn a tracking skill for non trackers?
-I doubt we’re going to extend tracking.

Years ago you could move strikethrough to a new window. Can we get more filters?
-Better filters is something Jenn’s wanted to do for a long. Flurry we’ve looked at very specifically.

(Day 2) Thank you for expanding stacking to food/drink. Now, could player made potions stack higher than the 10-20 that they do now since so many other things stack to 100 now.

(Day 2) Could fellowship sorting be added (like the function for raids) and can you extend fellowships to 18:
-We’ll look into adding that functionality (and as to size, NO)

(Day 2) EQIM – will this come back to EQ? EQMessenger was the name of it.
-It dropped off because it broke. All our chat systems run off a common platform/service that is used by the entire company. We can request that they put in something (API) so that system can be exposed outside of our game server but it’s outside of our control.

(Day 2) Can we get a /tribute off at the end of the day, so you don’t eat up your tribute.
-I think that just went into test.

(Day 2) Mount keyring was talked about coming to the game. What about illusion keyrings and familiars as well?
-Strangely enough, the system was actually designed for familiars, but we felt it worked best for mounts first. We like the idea of the illusion and familiars and can look into those once we know the mount system is in game and working correctly.

(Day 2) With the current amount of bloated plat, can we increased size for pricing in the bazaar since the game now has bigger tradable items that are pulling more than a million, we really could use that price cap be increased?
-There is a data limitation (we can go up to 2 million) and then that’s your cap without severely working how money flows throughout the game.

(Day 2) Buyer window – can this be sortable?
-Yes

(Day 2) Could we have an inventory list that’s sortable for inventory and bank?
-We can talk about it and seehow that would low. We’ve talked about inventory searching for a long time.



HOUSING AND PLAYER STUDIO TOPICS

Housing item suggestion – many of us like to hang onto old sets of armor. Can we get mannequin and stick it in your house.
-We’d like to see it too and it’s on the list. We’ve talked about it for a couple of years

(Day 2) Could you lower the price of upkeep of house?
-Missed answer entirely (not sure if devs mumbled or just didn’t answer this)

(Day 2) Guild hall to guild lobby door (give us more models).
-Door isn’t pretty enough for you? It’s a concept that gets a lot of discussion on the dev team. Need time from an artist and items guy.

(Day 2) Player studio – trophy case. Make one.
-Icy (player studio maker) jumped in to say you could use her cherry bookcase. She also mentioned that she is working on a trophy case as well.



ACHIEVEMENT / TITLE TOPICS

Achievement awards – are you going to get the quest for tradeskills that’s been listed for a long time (mounted heads, etc.) added to this? In the achievement list there’s a spot for tradeskills but other things could be added.
-We’re always trying to backfill these. Ideally we’d like to have them listed, but those haven’t yet come up. It’s planned, but when the guys doing achievements can get to them.

(Day 2) Can we add back the old server names (from the prior merged) “of ____”
-Looking at it. Got this at brunch.

(Day 2) Is there any way to make it so guild doesn’t see my achievement AA’s. (Example used is he ding’d 7000 AA in a guild whose average is 14000)
-It was designed so that people could cheer each other on. We can add it to the list to discuss.

(Day 2) For some of us who have maxxed AA’s, we don’t get the achievements anymore. (Aka the extra AA’s we use on glyph of __ reward). Can you add more achievements for us?
-Devs didn’t really answer this.



TRADESKILL TOPICS

(Day 2) Tradeskills – got to 300 and now need to evolve the trophy. However one of the recipes which seems to be a perfect one to evolve this requires an item that is lore. Why is it lore (one of the items needed is lore).
-Will talk to Jansan (liquid nightmare) and see why he had that listed as lore.



MISCELLANEOUS TOPICS

(Both days) – Lots of praise for being forward/open/transparent with information on the forums, for keeping the game going, etc.

(Day 2) Player asked what would you remove from the game if you could.
-Elidroth said armor dyes (someone can no longer look at you and see the adventures you’ve had), Ngreth said shrouds

(Day 2) Is there any plans to change hot zones.
-They changed 6 months agol

(Day 2) When Luclin was released and vah shir came out, it would have been naturally for them to be a monk. Why can’t agile cats be monks?
-Elidroth explained that frankly it’s because of character models not allowing it.

(Day 2) No good way to get plat out of the economy – nothing in game right now.
-We’ve got some plans for that. We have a couple ideas in the works but we’re not ready to talk about them now

Thanks so much for posting this.

I see a lot of good things the Devs have done and are planning to do. So thank you Devs.

Now moving on:

I really hope they meant, "We are looking into this".

I don't expect them to have memorized every bug in the game so I have no problem if they didn't know off the cuff, but I've reported it and if it isn't already on a list of bugs to fix then their bug reporting system is an Epic Fail.

My records show hot zones were last changed on June 19, 2013. Am I wrong or are they?

It's possible my math is off but I don't see how this would make 'unlimited size fellowships' ?
The fellowship would have 12 slots, just they would be account based instead of character based, so still only 12 active characters at a time.
An account can only have 10(?) character slots ? so , the fellowship could have a max of 120 characters, but still only 12 online at a time.

If my math is off, or I'm missing something obvious that would allow for these unlimited size fellowships, please let me know, it's been a long day

Personally I think an account based fellowship would be great, would let you have more real people instead of taking up space with alts.

Current hotzones were set June 19, 2013. That's 14 months ago not 6. Get a current calendar. lol

I also think it would be great but how do you handle fellowship experience sharing?

Yes, I know everyone hates the way it currently works but changing to an account based fellowship would really change things on that. So it would be needed to figure out how to do it. I'm sure it could be done some way, but it is another thing to consider.

Use the loyalty code ? thats an account based bar.
So, xp on whichever character you want, with sharing turned on, then swap to you alt and use the bonus.

Would be nice if the sharing options could be made to 'Donate/Receive/Both'.
Donate = You give a share of your xp (with a slider 0% - 100% would be great) to all characters marked as Receive or Both.
Receive = You receive xp from all characters marked Donate or Both.
Both = You receive xp and donate xp.

To flag a character you would have to log in and set it in the fellowship window (only logged in characters would be visible).
Or maybe have an option similar to the guild window to show all characters ? (or just show your characters?)

Also, may want an option to exclude a character from the fellowship (e.g. they are in a different one, or just antisocial).

So this BFG, what about it doesnt fit?, the name, the graphic, or its stats and effects?

Lets find a solution to this, its obviously asked about a lot for you to mention it.



The name can be obviously easy changed to something less "offensive"

The Graphic is pretty unique, and animated - hope its not that.

Its effects
- main hand archery? - its dam/delay should counteract any abuse
- clickable knockback, not really a problem with all them other knockback/pull AAs now.


or is it due to being a "sci fi" item, so, tell me about Arx Mentis.

Cancelling my subscription.

http://everquest.allakhazam.com/wiki/EQ:Hotzones

Angahram, I started a thread
Targeted Fellowship Experience Sharing


You might want to start a thread on being able to add all toons on the same account and have it count as one member of the fellowship, since only one toon can be online at a time. I like that idea as well.

BFG?

http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=4970

Note the term BFG comes from other video games and usually stands for Big F'ing Gun.

Actually they are Wrong....

Big Friendly Giant !

/nod
There's an All/All Robe from the Luclin era

Though, I think that had to do with the Hero's Forge that costs 10 bucks per character and not 10 bucks per account... so no one really uses it

Well, actually I thought it meant "No robes for Paladins on hero's forge items"
(I was joking about the cancelling also )

Here is an All/All robe
http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=90071

There are plenty of all/all robes. Several from Underfoot for example.

If we can't toggle passive AAs on and off, Can we get some AAs changed from Passive to long duration buffs? Headshot (and it's cousins) and finishing blow can make some quests where you aren't supposed to kill the mobs (many epics) very difficult. Headshot also makes pulling summoning mobs difficult as a Ranger as 1 arrow can get you summoned into the center of mobs.

I am dismayed that housing eviction due to not logging in periodically despite having rent covered was not brought up. I can only hope it was one of the questions that you didn't hear. Would be unfortunate to not have taken this opportunity to push the idea of not getting evicted if rent is paid.