Changes with the February Update: Developer Updates

As mentioned in the original post, the intent was to "...allow players to quickly get up to speed without completely eliminating the need to invest time in their character." If you believe that granting AAs up to Underfoot will not satisfy this requirement because it doesn't get the player up to speed quickly enough or it in some way eliminates the need to invest time in their character, use this thread to provide your feedback. Please explain why and provide an alternative.

After carefully considering your feedback and weighing our options, our current plan is to grant all AAs up to four expansions behind the current expansion. This will allow players to quickly get up to speed without completely eliminating the need to invest time in their character. Currently this will bestow the AAs up to and including Underfoot, but when we publish our next expansion, characters will receive the House of Thule AAs. Note that accounts must be Gold (after the membership changes, SOE All Access) to receive the auto-granted AAs and other requirements such as character level and pre-requisite abilities must also be met.

less vague this is from piestro from orig that filled up

You want to speed it up without straight up giving it to people? Extend the bonus to 5-6k total AA, and make the first 1500-2500 AA the same bonus as the first 500 currently are. Same goal achieved without granting a bunch of worthless AA in among the useful ones. Every class will get their useful ones without a huge time investment and you've avoided a lot of all *this*.

actually pretty damn clear hehe next exp youl get thule and forever more so doin aa's forever is now an excersise in futility

And you don"t Listen I do not pull mass numbers of anything i kill one by one cause thats my play style as for being a crappy serker what ever to each there own my point being simply put Reckless is the ability i keep reading about that allows for swarming and decap was never apart of the math on it , it just increases its effectiveness from what i am gathering. I do not swarm never have an would rather have that reckless aa broken than the decap CAN YOU SEE ME NOW

Wow, you're right. I don't know how I missed that. I was on the fence about a one-time autogrant, but continual autogranting is just a horrible idea. This makes AAing totally pointless unless you're already well ahead of the curve. This isn't helping new & returning players, this is destroying a huge chunk of the fun of building your character in EQ.

I agree i had no prob with the one time and im a returning player only 74 and 485 aa now theres like no point i was havin fun doin the aa's in increments lol now its just pointless.

You forgot to include Wooly Mammoth/Rhino mounts from Velious! Could you imagine a couple dozen of these sitting around the guild lobby while players are afk waiting for buffs,!

They should just change the basic way titles are awarded. Don't award them based on how many aa's you have but rather on how many aa's you've earned.

Yes now even the new players have nothing to work for even with the 4k freebee anything we do aa wise is just gonna be free in 2 months

Decap/Reckless is how it always worked (minus shakerpaging). It's not reckless alone.

I prefer what others have suggested: Regularly updating the AA exp curve each expansion. Make it reach higher in AAs and make the first 2-3 thousand scale faster. This would give people a better feel of agency in deciding where to spend AAs and earning them. Perhaps you can give a few hundred AA via the leveling achievements but i prefer most be earned by killing/quests.

If AAs are granted straight to the player i don't want it to be updated each expansion in the same fashion as it encourages not doing AAs in some ways.

I'm ok with other means. Either way, i think that getting caught up with the rest of the population does need to be addressed for new and returning players

Velious doesn't have AAs, but that would be kinda cool nonetheless. I enjoyed Yinla's suggestions. I added some suggestions of my own on Pg. 23 as well. Add mine to the list of loyalty merchant items if they don't go through! =P

Thats right dont listen to me , If you just leave a few servers un nerfed and let us choose if we wanted to play on them sony would have the best of both worlds all the longtime players would stay and the silvers folks would go gold and create the revenue they need cause they want the free AA, also a ton of cash could be made from server transfers etc etc Come on SOE wake up and save yourselves.....

It was called Mayong (headstart 51 with 50 AAs) and Sony already put it on the chopping block for no apparent reason years ago, so I doubt they'll do another server.

Mayong was the reason I came back to this game , So it worked at least in my case and the case of alot of folks I know . If they were smart they would just give folks a choice instead of alienating half of the much needed customers that pay the bills .......

People against the AA initiative fall into two camps :

i) Those who have done it the hard way over the years

ii) Those who still want to do it the hard way


Make the AA granting optional and the people in ii) can still play how they wish.

As for the folks in i) I respect what everyone has achieved (I've been playing since '99) but we need to be realistic. These people who get the 4k AA still have FOUR YEARS worth of AA content to grind through before they are end game.

Without doing this we'll continue to see end game content becoming less and less used and less relevant.

Other games start new expansions with absolutely everything you have achieved on your character in the past being totally irrelevant. This new system is a good compromise and gives us the best chance of retaining and keeping customers so the game can survive.


Now the HS / Decapitate / Anatomy fix I am absolutely 100% against. Swarming needs dealing with - 100%. I think everyone in the community agrees with that. But I suspect the devs are throwing the baby out with the bathwater and using the fixing of Swarming as an opportunity to do away with what they (the devs) see as a mistake but the vast majority of the player base see as a core part of what makes EQ so special - emergent game play.

Ok Dev's ,

Here is a suggestion how about a mentor program? A function that makes the current person/people in mentor mode scale to the avg level of the group while in this mode the higher level characters that has now become a mentor will gain mentor (xp, volocity, vitality, whatever you care to name it) make a special mentor vendor (with meaningful rewards) for those points gained for mentoring others thus promoting groups, meanwhile increase the AA curves for those that are under your projected AA count so that they will gain AA much quicker and actually be earning them in some fashion? This seems to be far and would reward Old, New, and returning for their efforts???? Might this even be a option?

This is what I consider to be the best way forward, either that or make the bonus exp for the first X aa degrade at a much slower rate, still come thick and fast but you actually have to do something to get them. Hell through in a bonus for gold members if you want to try and add incentive.

Even if the changes go ahead as planned, do not make it a constant thing every new expansion, that is just way, way too much.

It was the most fun I had in years. I've waited since 2009 to get that rush again, it was THE group-game server. Even when transfers opened up, I stayed until the very end.

On a related note, funny to think how many people cried over 51/50...and now they're getting this. Grats guys!

OK so folks want free AA ok just let them have it at the price of going gold and create revenue ,
But why make those the folks who dont want to play a game that has been nerfed ... Just let the customer decide what server they want to play on >>>> the one that lets them have fun and allows headshot, swarming etc etc, Or the vanilla server that gives free aa. Even if the headshot server had a warning on it play at your own risk cause it might be laggy I would be first in line to transfer to it . besides I have 2 computers in my home . and having lag mostly has to do with the users computer my newest comp does not lag when I am in a zone with a swarmer but the older one does .