Changes with the February Update: Alternate Ability Grants for Gold Members and Ability Changes

“
Best Solutions are Fix Greatest Problems With Least Impact to the Environment Around You....
AA mess up have stated a couple and new idea too will post here
1. Adjust XP on a scale (EARN your levels or add in /livebuff like /betabuff)
2. Make a few instant tasks that are:
- - - Hard as hell
- - - Level range locked ie 51-60, 61-65, so on upto 81-85
- - - Grants 100 of the stored glyphs of XP let players put it where they want or store up for later

Mass Pull Issue
- - the MOB count is the problem on servers
- - as YOUR SOE reps said Cleaver Players came up with things you didnt expect
- - guess what, it will happen again so all nerfs are a band-aid fix, and the mass pull will come again
- - Prevent Mass Pulls prevents Mass pulls...

K.I.S.S. when finding solutions”

Regarding the AA grants, I support this idea. The stated intention is to make the transition back into the game less daunting for returning players. If a player comes back to EQ and finds that they are not too far behind AA wise the better they will feel and less likely to quit a week later. Keep in mind that not everyone has their own box team or know players who will power-level them to get them up to speed. I also think this will be a boon to raiding guilds who need more players to fill their ranks.

I also agree that people who have earned set amounts of AA's the long way should receive 1-time rewards on patch day in some way. Perhaps for 5000, then 7500, then 10000.

Played a bard 8 years ago and quit when expansion after expansion made it impossible to play a solo bard and have any fun. Came back 2.5 months ago and I've been enjoying the new game with another bard and a rising cleric.

As for the PL nerfs: Welcome to my world 8 years ago. I note with amusement that the bard is specifically listed as no changes - we were already nerfed to oblivion so no further need for adjustments.

As for the AAs - I would certainly benefit from an influx of AAs to catch up with my friends. But I agree that giving every AA up through level 85 or whatever is too much. What I need is basic survivability - you cannot really play a level 75 toon without enough AAs to keep him alive against the power of level 75 content. What I'd like to see is a core set of standard AAs: Combat Stability and Agility, HP pool size, mana regen, buff slot max, spell gems, planar power, run speed, and such. Take those and make them go up with you automatically when you level. Give us the ability to actually play at level 75 when we hit it, and not have to stop and grind 1k AAs to get there. But also leave us the option to pick and choose from the other AAs, earn them for ourselves, and tune our characters into what we want them to be.

Another thought on PL'ing. Many folks have already mentioned that its pretty easy to level a toon to 50 or 60 these days with mercs. I'd go so far as to say it is exactly the same experience regardless of which class you are leveling. You get your J1 tank merc, and you follow him around in a support role while his 55ish combat HP regen keeps you alive and gaining experience. After a few days, you are level 60. So let's just skip this step, or at least have the option to skip it. Please give gold members a claim item or some such that lets us pop a new character up to 50 or 60 immediately. Then we can go out and start playing the class from there, instead of following a tank merc around and doing nearly nothing.

Pathfinding is an incredibly expensive CPU task. They would have to throw new hardware at it, which probably means they would have to completely overhaul their codebase to work on new hardware -- which is cost prohibitive. The price of new computers is a lot more than the new computers...

now, i play a rogue and shadow knight, while i do understand why the shadow knight abilities got the nerf stick (dont agree with it but understand).... why nerf anatomy?? it barely works as it is and it only works on certain npcs ....14 years ive been playing EQ, ive seen it all, the nerf bat has hit everyone at one point or another, but this??

As is the price of removing the attractive qualities of a unique game and losing the player base responsible for the majority of the recruiting.

i am sorry but this auto grant aa is an absolute joke, I have been playing since 1999 and they have been hard earnt and a real sense of achievement, you may as well remove aa and just grant new ones for all expansions automatically. Talk about dumming down a great game.

With regards to groups thats been dead over 4 years now with lack of population people box to get what they want.

Yeah that's a bi-product of eliminating those abilities. But it seems strange to me they eliminate Powerleveling capabilities, but they want to give a "free" powerlevel in the form of thousands of AA's.

This should be an episode on Rediculousness

As a bard, knew the nerf bat was coming. We took our beating years ago.

Gotta say the thought of auto-granted AA makes me not care about EQ. Don't wanna be a drama queen about it, but if you're just going to give it away if all you gotta do is wait for it, whats the point? Can we get an option of being a gold member of 85+ and NOT receive welfare AAs?

I played a bard forever, and the swarm nerfs were a hit -- until I discovered bard charm kiting. You can still do this and it's ridiculously fast experience. In fact, it's a whole lot easier now that you have the large extended target window. Bards were nerfed one way, and just like that creative people found another way to game the system. Same thing will happen here, just expect it to come in a different form.

everyone on the zek server is complaining about your up comming aa and nerfing suggestion your basicily ruining the game and steering people away from it ppl spend countless hrs and MONEY getting there characters able to do the things they are doing you cant just do it. it tooks countless hrs to earn the things the characters can do and ppl that been playing for years earned all the aa to be able to do it and now you just wanna hand aa to 80 out free so u gonna reimburst the ppl that been playing for 10 years there money back since your just handing all the new people all that free ?they spent hrs and countless money to get the character able to do swarms and mass mob pulls its rediculas your destroying the game ppl play this game cause they DONT LIKE world of warcraft and your making the came easy and exactly like wow more adults play this game cause its challenging and your taking the challange right out of it so you pretty much should take your suggestion and shove it cause your just bringing the game down even more.you ask for everyones feed back but you just ignore it and only take in the suggestion of people who cry well i been playing this game forever and seen all the changes you made if you want it to be like wow then go work there stop ruining the everquest experience because i wasnt handed anything in this game i EARNED AND QUESTED it like the game name EVERQUEST you need to stop tryin to take to fun experiences outta the game like beaming and swarming head shots it takes skill to do that stuff you have to learn how to do it and if your not skilled enough to do it and complaining grow up learn how to play a game and stop taking the ENJOYMENT outta the game as you can see EVERYONE is agaisnt it your taking the fun outta the game its as simple as that we dont think its right u just hand ppl aa free when ppl took time to have to farm them like i said you gonna refund them there MONEY for all the years played to earn them ?

Could you not let people choose whether they want or not want the auto granted AA "service"? To current players and when a character is created.

Developer solutions to problems without fully considering the consequences to the player community is short sighted and potentially dangerous.

Auto-granting AA's feels like it cheapens the effort that was put into earning existing AAs, as well as the strategy of spending the AAs to individualize your character. If EQ Gods feel that more AAs would "incentive-ize" new & returning players - then award some AAs as a player levels up or reaches mini-milestones.

For the swarm adversely affecting Server performance - why not limit the number of baddies that will aggro follow a player or attack a party to a fixed amount (like a dozen) that the Server's can handle ? Once the limit of baddies is reached, no more baddies will follow a player or be drawn to a group. If the EQ gods limited the number of baddies, they would fix their problem without it being a player issue.

from amonraa on povar server:

i have been on hiatus for a couple years from this game and have recently returned with latest expansion. i first started eq nine months after release of orignal game. i suspect this threat to destroy eq game is a trick to get me to post in the forum which i could not login to my forum account i had to make this new one until i figure out what is going on.

i think giving all "gold" player 4000+ aas for free and then more with every expansion is a very lame and uncreative idea. you state one problem is new players and returning players need power leveling services ?? i know i have because i recently power-leveled my shaman so he could get into adventure group with my two other accounts. we got what would have taken me maybe a week or twoo weeks done in a couple hours and now my team is in the adventures.

if there are so many aas and is such a problem then why do you guys have the amount of aas can be stored capped so low ?? why not 1000 aas stored or something if it is such an issue ?? and if you feel the need to give away aas then maybe an lon card will be better way to award free aas .. or maybe these new adventure zone instances should be turned into *power-leveling* zones where the xp is massive power-level xp with alternate currency at the end to purchase merc gear or whatever. u guys sell a four hour group xp potion then maybe we can buy the power level group adventures . then u guys dont have to go for a one time money grab. not saying that would even work but i probably would do some those sometimes.

sorry to hear about the resource spikes and all that. are u guys sure thats not a hardware issue ?? is it really going to kill the game if u guys dont nerf the heck out the game ?? well i can say this that if we (me and my son) stay with our three accounts then we will be needing power-level services for our fourth account we been thinking about purchasing for our team. of course we will have to power level him. that is four gold accounts kept paid in full so i should get four votes on this nerf bat. i dont like the free aas * four votes...


thanks..

amonraa
povar server

I recently replied to a poster on the New Player forum who wrote:
"Really wish i could just buy like a level 85 toon with 2,000 AA through soe"

by posting a link to:
https://forums.station.sony.com/eq/index.php?threads/november-producers-letter.205020/
in which SOE's intent to create Heroic Characters is discussed.

On the surface your advice to focusing on leveling given the impending grant of AA's up to UF sounds solid, but...there are at least two more shoes to drop:

#1 - it's not just AA's up to UF. IF what is being done in EQ2 is any kind of precedent new accounts will get a level 85 or 90 Heroic Character, Gold accounts may get 1 upgrade to Heroic Character free, and you'll be able to buy a Heroic upgrade.

You may not be able to reveal things atm but, "I would personally focus more on leveling at this point." might in fact be bad advice for those characters below level 85.

Separate from your advice there is yet the other shoe:

#2 - It's not just AA's and Level's. Heroic characters are going to come with gear. Camp gear for your soon to be level 85 or better 4500AA toon? Don't camp gear? Sell all lower than level 85 gear at bargain prices? I personally camped/bought level 80/85, 90/92, and some 95 gear if I take a pp loss on half of it then that's what happens.

Basically I'm suggesting we (players and SOE employees alike) don't look at the AA grant in isolation. In the absence of SOE announcing that given the different culture in EQ, Heroic Characters aren't happening and AA grants are happening instead, I'm assuming Heroic Characters. They will have more impact (for good and ill) than AA grants alone.

oh and for such thing like nerfing the sk epic were it dont heal on reposte ppl need that in raids were they have to tank more then one mob cause there just wont be enuff PLAYER/CLASSES in a raid to be able to do them like i said RUINING eq so my feedback is NO NERF NO FREE AA

For a Rogue this is the ONLY way to earn solo experience.
This was offcourse allready severely nerfed by not giving us any uprades in the last expansion.
After this change A rogue wont be able to earn any solo exp anymore.

The free aa's are offcourse a nice gift.
That being said, the free aa's are being given to EVERY class and since they do not have their ability to solo nerfed, they're advantage over rogues only increases.

This is another straight Rogue nerf.

I was gonne ask whats next?
But after you allready made all our class abilities (Pickpocket/seek traps etcetc) useless,
made our dps marginal (currently 3 or 4th melee dps, sometimes even behind hybrids!)
you now are taking our ONLY way to earn solo dps.
So whats next?
Nothing cause there is NOTHING left to take!
On the up side it cant get any worse.

This is what I think is the best solution... as you aggro more than, say, 12 mobs (seems like their target number) mobs with the least aggro stop pathfinding, lose aggro and wander back to their return point. That seems much less CPU intensive and will prevent future AE leveling from abilities they didn't think about. If multiple people pull, you get more mobs, but as soon as those mobs make it to the aggro list of the beamer/sk/whatever, you'll drop half your pull.

They specifically stated THEY WANT YOUR FEEDBACK.

So give some real feedback. And leave the whining to my tell window.

TIGERTONE SWARMSAZONE
91 bard
CT FR

I love EQ and have been playing since 2001. I really enjoy working on my character and seeing how my earned aa's make my character better. I returned 2 months ago from 3 years away, and have earned over 1500 aa's in that time, which is something I am very proud of. I understand what you're trying to do with the auto granting aa's, but I don't think it's the right idea. What about giving gold members a pool of aa's to spend either granted on a weekly or monthly basis, that accrues similar to loyalty crowns? The longer you remain a paying member the more you get. This makes it easier for people to get caught up over time, yet doesn't cheapen the leveling process or take away nearly as much of the sense of accomplishment.