To Scornfire's point, concerns about players influencing class changes are moot if those changes don't happen in the first place, which has largely been the norm for the past few years. "Class balance" is on the roadmap, but there hasn't been a change made to intentionally shift balance since the expansion launched. There were a number of AA changes in the January and March patches, but they were entirely done to mirror ToV AA upgrades/upgrade scaling that weren't implemented or were improperly implemented. Nothing outside of those purely formulaic changes have been made. Spell changes have similarly been bug fixes and adding Type 3's that should've been in at launch. The most impactful "spell" changes from a balance perspective were the debuff slot changes and the fix to Season's Wrath, both of which were done by the code team, not systems designers. In other words, it's June, and spells/AA are finally getting to the state they should've launched in (with some notable bugs still outstanding). There's a very small window for changes before work begins on the (significantly fewer) copy/paste spells/AA presumably coming in the next expansion. The AA dev is also the one who works on Overseer and achievements, meaning those overseer achievements likely preclude any time for additional changes and limit the scope of next year's AAs to copy/pastes of CoV upgrades (just as CoV copy/pasted of TBL's AA upgrades and ToL copy/pasted ToV's upgrades). Spells will likely mirror CoV upgrades, which mirrored TBL upgrades, which mirrored TBM/EoK upgrades. Basically, real class development hasn't happened in years, and the prospects for it happening now are low. It's possible some imprudently broad change slips in (like the DD changes in ToL Beta), but, like that change, at best it'll be an inadequate response to general community sentiment, not specific changes influenced by individuals' feedback. Even the highest quality CRC team won't have any impact unless there's a substantial shift from how class design is currently handled.
Like ratio doesn't mean much as people are able to like any post no matter how crazy it is or if it is relevant to EQ at all.
This is the first thing I'd like to see addressed by a CRC. It seems to me that we've had this issue with type 3's before. Maybe it's a better investment if we went without it for an expansion or two in favor of converting that system into something less time consuming. Rank 4&5 for currency perhaps? Overseer is the perfect example of something that should never see a single second of attention ever again. Achievements, the only attention here I'd like to see is that the vast majority of them are outright removed, converted to a sub-achievement checklist, or changed to not report. Sure, tell me when my guildies hit max level, Achieve Megadeath, finish this expansion's Hunter or Challenger lines. We don't need are 50 lines of spam every time some group does a mission for the first time, an achievement for every old zone someone hasn't visited since Traveler was implemented, achievements for Pottery Apprentices, literally any Slayer achievement that isn't table flipper, or achievements for people raising their Safe Fall skill. Suggesting client-side filtering for these ignores the issue. Beyond that, any time spent on Achievements rather than AA is time wasted in my eyes. I'd go so far as to suggest that consolidating abilities and converting actives to passive should be the top priority.
This whole council thing is just a PR stunt to give the illusion that devs care about player feedback. Feedback is given on the forum all the time, as previously stated above, and they ignore the vast majority of it. The only stickied thread on the forum for player feedback is for EQ Lore. Never going to see any stickied threads for gameplay mechanics, class specific issues, etc. Good luck to those still trying though, hope you get through to them one day.....lol.
There are a lot of people in this community who I would absolutely hate being selected to the council and representing me in any way. Sadly those are mostly the type of people who would actually apply to it. Unless the entire community gets to vote for who's on the council I hope they end up changing absolutely nothing and have no real voice.
whole lot of folks reading the CRC bass-ackwards. It's not some new avenue for players to get their wishlists carried to the ears of god. It's a resource for the developers made up of community members. Not for the players. For the developers. There's less euphemism involved than folks are apparently thinking. Community Resource Council: it's a council, made up of the community, to provide a resource. Resource for who? For developers. This council won't ever "address" anything, it's not fundamentally for Addressing Things.
And here I was under the impression that EQ was a form of entertainment for the playerbase rather than some sort of dev pet project.
Hello, CRC propaganda have been a huge success. Community members pushing class discords, increasing the forum spam and doing self-propaganda, resulted in more social media activity. People have been more active and expressive on the community just because they thought that this would help themselves on being picked up. The fact that they (DPG) have zero reason to publicly state the reasoning about why they picked CRC members make the hole process meaningless. They can say they have been 72 months checking Curriculums vitae from the candidates and it would just be a lie. It's obvious who is engaging on this community and who may provide meaningful outputs since that community members are already vocal or easy to spot. Someone eager to share knowledge or opinions is already doing it, not hiding in the shadows waiting to be picked for the CRC. They just have to pick them, there is absolutely zero reason to make an open "contest" or "merit competition" that would make zero sense and be a total waste of resources. Jezz, why spend resources checking CV's when you can just ask directly 50 ppl from guilds that are active on Live and TLP, or from things like "top contributors on beta /bug reports", and get in the ones who accept to join under their specific conditions. It would be stupid to spend 1 year wasting resources checking CV's from random ppl that are mostly trolls. If CRC ever happens, the members are long chosen, they just pretended it to be public to make it feel like a transparent and fair process where everyone got a chance. ggwp TL;DR: It's a win-win situation, even if it never happens.
Very naive take. There will be a private communication channel between CRC members and the Dev team, where each individual provides their own flavor of feedback as a resource. They'll push their own narrative towards things they want addressed. We've already been through this multiple times, guild summit excluding casuals, class leaders, etc. First of, who was there: yes, of the 63 attendees, it was mostly guild leaders of the big guilds across the servers - Silent Redemption, Rising Ascension, BotS, Township Rebellion, LoS, etc., etc. But several mid-range guilds were invited to (those in high-end Luclin and mid-range PoP) and then class and fan board sites (DG!, Safehouse, Berserker.com, Shaman's Crucible, Steel Warrior, Graffe's, The Runes, EQRolePlayers.com, Woody of /GU comics, the House Ogre from EQTraders, etc.). Just look through what happened after the guild summit from the list of changes. http://thedruidsgrove.org/archive/eq/t-8094.html
I guess you haven't looked in the right areas lately. I understand burn out and frustration but just because you don't want to invest into the game or can't invest into the game doesn't mean you should throw the entire server under the bus. There are lots of us left but we are in Discord and less likely to be paying attention to any of the chat channels at any given time.
