It would be nice to go back to how it was back then, I used to enjoy the 6 month expansions. All it seems I'm doing these days is farm, farm, farm.....
A few people always ask for things to be slower or faster. There was NEVER some huge clamoring of the community to slow down expansions. And I also recall them bumping up the expansion cost, and telling us that they were doing it to give us MORE content each expansion that was less buggy and better developed. I don't ever recall getting that.
There's been hundreds of posts trying to contribute to this beta, and every past one I've been in. The overwhelming response to feedback in many areas is to be ignored in word and action.
There were multiple threads each year we had two expansions. Every single year. Far more than a lot of subjects that have been placed on the boards. As for the price hike, yes we got a hike and yeah I too am still waiting on that less buggy more content expansion to be released.
I still say (and have been saying for years now) that we should get a new expansion every 9 months and a level increase every other expansion (every 18 months). Its much better timing than what we have now. But they are slaves to getting out one expansion a fiscal year for their bottom line.
Well, we dont know ... and thats the point, why pay $40 for a full "xpac" if we dont even know if something else is going to be released later.
I agree. 1 FULL Expansion (ALL AT ONCE) every 9-12 months, a level increase every OTHER expansion would be great. That is the method that ive always preferred and wanted too. I think that this staggered release stuff fell flat on its face and its time to trash it and go back to the traditional way. (or as you said, new expansion every 9 months, lvl increase every other expansion) Almost everyone ive talked to has said that they hate this current expansion staggered release method.
It makes me wonder if that is true - I remember a developer quote (I wish I could remember the threads so I could cite them) stating that the staggered release method of RoF had an overwhelmingly positive response from players. Judging by feedback on the forums, you would think otherwise. but I wonder if they are a silent majority, or if it is something else. We'll wait and see. I understand everyone's skepticism, but with all the layoffs, the time they had to devote to making EQ free to play, the skeleton crew... I'll give the developers the benefit of the doubt. I understand that many people don't share that view, and that's fine - I'm not saying you're wrong for what you think. We're not going to know until a few months to see what kind of content is delivered, and at what pace. And that "not knowing" naturally frustrates people.
I much prefer 1-2 tiers at a time. Otherwise, I'll just rush to the end game and play that for a long time. The only reason I'd even want more than one tier of content would be to justify hard vs. easy zones. RoF was perfect, I just would have liked a more difficult T4.
I think for the groupers its fine, its the raiders who are suffering with so few new raids at a time. Our concern in tonight's discussion is the lack of back flags in RoF and how long before we will have to go back and start doing back flagging to be able to continue T4 ROF. Every other expansion has obsoleted the previous content so reflagging didn't matter adnd even then it had backflags. I've felt more burned out with the continuous farming than I ever did with the content all in 1 go and the weeks of trying to get enough flags/keys to do the next event.
The problem is, how are they going to get out of this cycle of constantly developing the current expansion's content? They just sold an expansion and now still have to create the next 3 content releases throughout the year. I don't know whether it's just the different design philosophy when you're doing it all at once or what but what we saw in RoF is that even when they're only developing one tier for the next content release (and have 3+ months), they're still producing garbage. HoF wasn't even ever finished and it apparently isn't ever going to be.
Then sooner or later you get a full expansion with a level raise in the middle of the summer, when a bunch of people are enjoying vacations and other outdoor activities.
They'll say anything to make their product look good. Even if it means false advertising and pulling the wool over our eyes. They certainly wont shine a negative light on their product even when a negative light IS warranted. Ive seen Piestro and others go on huge damage control campaigns spewing forth lies and other contradicting nonsense plenty of times before. This is a concern for me too. Its ANOTHER "human element" factor that the devs did not consider when implementing things. As it stands right now, there are no raid BPs in the first part of this next expansion. Which means, if we want BPs, we have to go back and continue to do the RoF T4 snooze-fest. There are only four raids in this new "expansion" too, so we'd all have to continue doing RoF T4 (and perhaps even RoF T3) to keep our guilds busy. Sadly, T4 and T3 RoF non visibles are almost 90% alt status in my guild too. So this will be a fun "forced" way to be playing/raiding deep into this next expansion since no BPs exist yet. I really dislike this new factor of having to continually raid the last tier that your guild has ALREADY overfarmed just to keep your guild busy. This seems to be the new trend. New content comes out, but its not enough by itself to keep your guild busy past 1-2 nights max. So in order to keep your guild active and busy, you must continue to farm something that your guild has already overfarmed to death. That is not fun. ITS BORING. When new expansions come out, I dont even want to look at the last expansion. I want to stay in the new expansion and only the new expansion (this is regarding raids by the way, not the group game, because the group game is a different animal regarding this subject) - Anyway, forcing us to raid old overfarmed content is just.......horrible. Yes, it is forcing us in this case since no new BPs are going to be in the first part of this new expansion. If guilds want to BP themselves out, they have to continue raiding the same junk that they have been for months now. Talk about a burnout wand being waved around guilds. I suspect that sales will be down to all time lows for this expansion too. Also, as you say there, AT SOME POINT there is a chance that a lot of guilds will have to go back and backflag in RoF once again if these guilds want to continue farming RoF T4 and T3 for BPs and whatnot. This means dipping down into the lower RoF tiers once again that nobody in their right mind will want to be doing again ad nauseum. Fun times, let me tell you.
This is the first expansion they haven't been trying to get us all into to progress. It is new territory keeping the last expansion relevant. I'm more happy that HoT stays green/light blue than RoF staying current. HoT is by far my fav expansion of recent years. Anyway I digress, the flag issue is an easy one to fix, they either have to add a backflag or just make it so the raid leader is the only one who needs the flags so they can request the raid. Or even add an item to the CotF T1 raids that flag you for T4 RoF....or they could just give us full itemisation in CotF!
We have been reaching our piggy limit lately. We have had a few retire/take breaks and have a few returning members and apps who are missing flags. This is the first expansion for a long time which didn't have a backflag system of any sort. Any normal expansion it wouldn't matter as the old content would be dropped, but this time round we need to keep farming T4 at least. I don't fancy doing 15 backflag raids, for those who are missing flags, because you know they won't all be on at the same time! we have already done T1 & T2 to death trying to get achievements done before T4 went live.
