Changes with the February Update: Developer Updates

Piestro, you have numerous rogues responding here. We're quoting Versifier. If you're going to our solo flexibility then make it useful for something else.

Eldiroth also said he was going to remove the need for defensive for warriors yet still keep us viable.

Noble intention, but then reality hit.

Piestro,

Some issues have been brought up about issues with ranger's headshot, first it can cause catastrophic problems with pulling with an arrow, second, bowing isn't rangers primary form of dps.

What considerations are being addressed to these issues?

Aggro, and kicking the mob into summoning mode is a possible issue.

Mystical Shield.

Mystical Shield gives a flat 5% chance to resist any spell, to include as I understand it, heals. As someone who gets beat on a lot, I prefer to risk the AE (or whatever) and not risk having a heal resisted at an awkward time. Dunno if other tanks feel this way as well, but may be worth leaving Mystical Shield out of the autogrant list.

[Hopefully this is where someone tells me that I have it all wrong, that this AA won't block heals, so I can finally get that one spell off of my general AA tab.]

"....reasonable goals that are achievable with reasonable amount of effort." ? Precisely what effort? Leveling???? Have you checked your "tons of data" (anecdotal and statistical to see how quickly a character levels?

"....internal criteria for good design."??? Who decided on the criteria that says only the endgame is worth the bother? Over the years more than one developer has hinted and at least one has flat out stated that the game doesn't start until max level! It seems the desire of Smedley and his development team to abandon 85% of their creation has finally been fulfilled. Happy Fifteenth Anniversary?

What will a new player learn when they enter the game? They will learn that they need an immediate power-level so they can be "max" within hours or a few days. Buy a Krono (SoE makes money.), sell it for plat, buy a power-level, voila. They will learn that they can make a one time expenditure of $14.99 (SoE makes money.), log in and be automatically granted free, effortlessly "earned" aa's - to Hades with actually learning the game, their characters abilities, exploring the vastness of the game or even taking time to possibly make some friends - drop their subscription while retaining all the benefits from those free, effortlessly "earned" AA's then, upon release of the next expansion simply rinse, repeat. (SoE makes money.)

"If we don't make this change someone is going to leave." Do you really believe that the players who have no real commitment to either their character, the community or the game will stay?? Do you really believe that handing out thousands of AA's to an ignorant new comer will enhance his/her enjoyment of the game or will magically transform them into long term, committed paying customers and/or enhance the chances that a long term player will happily gather said "newbie" into the fold and then spend days, weeks, months in an attempt to educate them? Do you really???

SoE has, very clearly, expressed to its long time, loyal and PAYING customers that they really don't count for a hill of beans. What SoE is actually telling the gaming population in its entirety is that EverQuest is a "Pay for Power" game and that 85% of the game is a complete and utter waste of time and effort. Unbelievable that a company would declare that their creation isn't worth the effort unless you open your wallet!

I have little doubt that the actual reason behind this wholesale auto-grant of AA's has everything to do with the introduction of Heroic Characters (SoE makes money.) and absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the overall health of anything beyond SoE's wallet. That might not be a bad thing for SoE's wallet in the short term, except that EverQuest will assuredly not be the beneficiary of that largesse.

As a Gold player since January 2001 and a survivor of a myriad number of "fixes", "nerfs", and "for the health of the game" changes, for the first time since 2001 the very thought of logging in and playing the game all but turns my stomach. SoE has loudly declared to all of its long term, loyal players, that we do not now nor, it would appear, have we ever counted for anything other than as suppliers of money.

Happy Fifteenth Anniversary.

I like this option:

/headshot ON - I want to use headshot ability
/headshot OFF - I do not want to use headshot ability (because pulling or summoning mobs).

Fixed. You're welcome.

It's useless, because it's our only way of having any solo efficiency. We cannot walk past Valley in VoA or higher with a healer merc and do anything. You've made being a melee a more hostile environment than it has been in the past. All casters with a wizard merc can walk around and solo more effectively than we can without our kill abilities, and you are nerfing the crap out of them. So yes, we except a pretty decent boost to compensate. And at level 99 we're dealing with mobs that have a couple million hit points, so yes, a 240k crit is pretty sad from this ability. It was your teams idea to raise the level on this, we weren't asking for it. Chain classes wanted it left alone.

With a reduced proc rate don't count on any utility out of it.

Seriously, Dont make this change to headshot.

Make it not return xp if you have to, but really dont make it affect lvl99 mobs, you will totally ruin rangers ability to pull.
Harmony arrow has a long refresh, and other methods are what?, nukeing the mobs, casting snare?, going in and attacking, all are nothing like the range of archery.

I ask again, what is the problem with Headshot as it is, people abusing its ability to gain tiny amounts of xp with the few mobs that it can affect at lvl 88, then sort that out, make it not affect xp mobs, dont make it worse and inso doing mess up other abilitys.

This compromise is a very bad idea. It will not attract the type of player that others will want to group with, these "super newbs" still won't know how to group or play their class. Most importantly it will seed the game with distrust. You already see it against people who pay for a lot of PL services. There is a perceived lack of integrity against people who "cheated" to 100. There's already an issue with players with high level toons and can't play the class. This will tear at the fabric of the community.

What type of example does that give to young players, you pay enough you can get everything for free without the work? There are tons of games that teach money for nothing chicks for free, only EQ teaches work hard and get respect and inclusion.

Considering HS is only usable as a range attack and mobs don't stay at range too long it won't be very frequently used.

I can see how these changes are going to help many players but for the rest of us I think it is completely neutral. Nothing to complain about except it would be nice if there was something for the many players already at the end game with AAs. How about some new AAs or upgraded ranks on the existing ones?

For months now I have been throwing AAs into the glyphs just for the sake of using them. I am maxed out at level 100 normal xp. I used to enjoy my once-per-day LOTD session with double-xp. Now I don't use it because it just means I have twice as much AAs to get rid of.

For those who are just returning to the game thinking it will take forever to catch up...
One of my friends returned only 6 months ago, created a brand new character (a mage) and already he has more AAs than my wizard which is the only character I have played since Day One. He also found enough time to farm all the collectables in RoF (I still need 2 or 3 pieces).

Catching up isn't difficult if you choose to do it the old way. But having something to aim for is the most enjoyable part of this game. Once you have everything what else is there to do?
My friend is now at the same stage as myself. He has every AA possible and has started throwing them away on glyphs. Thanks to the long list of Slayer achievements we have enough to keep us busy, but eventually those will run out and then what?

Really? Two ancient raids are not a good enough reason to exclude useful abilities from this.
Honestly, look at this sentence and tell me this sounds reasonable "The Twincast AA will be excluded from the auto-grant program because of Discord Tower Event #6"

It's just another couple raids that get harder and/or randomly fail through no fault of our own.

100% aa exp solo, group exp should be divided up.
3aa per red con kill
2aa per yellow con kill
1.5aa per white con kill
1aa per dark blue con kill
.5aa per light blue con kill
.25aa per green con kill

Up to 6,000 aa and no auto assign. Let it still be fun auto assign is not fun... Not hard to kill a light blue and get an aa. The fun of EQ is the grind.... No need to reward anyone for grinding the aa because everyone will then..

Nerfs are always lame, but.... How about you make mobs run faster if some one tries to mass pull.. the mobs kick in super speed and or ae/range attack and kill the mass puller.. Mass pullers hate nukes and speed changes...... Obviously Summon but that's no fun either.. Chain of 15 mobs bam range attack/super speed.. It would stop all mass pullers...

Don't change adapt.. Think smarter not harder.

Can SOE staff pm if some one actually reads this?? Just say read... Make my day lol.. Don't want to feel I wasted my time.

I joined the forum to bring up an idea I don't *think* I saw anyone mention yet? Been playing since velious, with a couple breaks and a few solid stints every few years. My most recent return in the fall of 2013.

I saw this huge carrot of an AA bonus, and focused on building those up, and knocking them down. had a couple re-rolled toons and was enjoying being able to keep up with the AA. To me that was the the incentive. Finally keep abreast of the AAs as we level!

I think this is part of why it seems so shocking to give the whole thing away now. Until the patch, there is just zero incentive to get AA, and leveling too far without it will make for a weak experience as well.

And I understand why people feel deflated that the effort they put in, as far as any current position is, that folks will get bupkus. I see some entertainment of the idea that some reward can be considered, and there's some challenges to that I think, but I think it's necessary to warm people up to this.

The biggest challenge is... how do you scale it? For the person returning pre AA bonus, who worked up some toons to 500 or so, that will seem huge. To the hardcore with 10k+ toons, I imagine it will feel like they should get something bigger. People don't seem to like the idea of titles, but maybe one for those who never click the enable for the grant get one?

But this is the idea that no one's mentioned that I find surprising, would let people feel like the effort at least gets converted somehow...

Convert AA to loyalty on the transition. Make a few crazy items that can be only gotten this way, and would only be practical for those with large AA conversions to realize. Make a few things that scale through the range that would be possible. (I dunno, some crazy person with 11 toons and 10k AA on all, gets the 4-5K credit for their classes for all of them, 50K ?)

Maybe not do 1 for 1, but have a scaled tiered reward?

If you do that it may be practical to have some SC thing, but I am going to guess loyalty (IE: the thing people are feeling all a twitter about), is more practical for a number of reasons. I suggest the new itemization as part of it to counter the fact that you only need so many punting gnomes...

Anyhow, didn't see this angle suggested, didn't know if it came up, so there it is. It scales, you could do some really cool things with it, but it is some extra effort.

Lastly, to the people who are suggesting "They should just get new servers", you should read up on the Travelling Salesman Problem, and what it means for something to be NP-hard. The very nature of what they are trying to fix w/ swarming, is that the more distant the mob, and the more paths it could consider, is not a problem you can easily optimize, and to achieve ANY kind of speed, as in say a game, requires some compromises, and still kicks the crap out of a CPU. So for people playing normally (pretty much anything but swarming), these optimizations work, as the problem hasn't gone into having too many combinations, and happy servers, happy players.

Why do you think there is a timeout when using find NPC or the map? Because cross-zone pathing is seriously expensive. I have no idea how they do it, but assuming even just 10 possible connected way points between you and the destination, or the mob and you, gets expensive. Now multiply that by 20-100 mobs, and do it multiple times per second each, because you keep moving around...

Anyways, I could go on, but probably boring most. But it has to be said, the very nature of the issue being addressed means you can't really just throw hardware at it. To suggest otherwise betrays you're not qualified to speak on the matter. (And no, linking devs SQL query stuff isn't doing anything but being insulting. I doubt much to do w/ mobs chasing you gets committed to a database, at least until said mob is dead, and I bet it's more interval than event driven anyways when things do...)

Blah. Yes. I am the guy who yells at a movie when lasers in space make sounds. Deal with it.

Anyhow, I hope I've provided a worthwhile addition what has to be the most lively discussion I have seen in a long while.

How about you make all the so called needed aa's abilities granted at levels. Take them out of the aa pool all together. This would make all aa's still earned.

I've maxed my aa's. On both my main and my primary alt. And I didn't do it via any sorta power leveling tricks, I just killed stuff, did missions, did raids, ect ect over and over. I don't consider it any sort of slap in the face.

The only veterans that should be worried are the ones who play so bad that they're worried about losing their spots due to skill to them young'un's and get off my lawn because they didn't quit after seeing the uphill battle and not wanting to spend 6 months to be merely viable.

We got to use our aa's as veterans for a long long time which gave us a huge bonus compared to others. Let our new friends or returning friends play with us by being viable in a group/raid. They'll still be at a huge disadvantage at 4 expansions behind. At least they won't be 10 expansions behind now.

Heals can't be resisted.

There is no real drawback to that ability.

So, basically useless.

It is what it is, the minds are made up.