DBG and how they design things

I don't know I just don't get the total lack of consistency from the Dev team.

EoK great expansion. When I heard there would be a Kunark part two I figured great they will design it in a similar way similar difficulty levels etc.... but no..... Maybe they didn't consider EoK to be a success?

And anniversary tasks that are JUST doable by group players if you do everything right and are at the top of your game.

I am not sure the devs play much at all never mind actually play in group geared groups or try to box themselves. Run a data search for all current accounts with the same email address and think about what you see. And PLEASE look at the average age of people playing active accounts. I once thought I would still be playing EQ years from now as long as the nursing home I end up in has good wifi.... I wonder if I will be done with EQ before EQ is done.

I can't pull everyone who can't handle the Dreadspire mission through it. I don't want to do tahnk it over and over because there aren't so many tanks these days in the group game. I don't want to get steamrolled either.

Everquest is just wearing me down. I have been playing this game for 19 years and that means I am 19 years older. I don't know.... maybe the devs figure the raid game is all that's left in EQ and losing the group players is no big deal.

And before some raiders get their panties in a bunch you guys deserve whatever level of play difficulty that you like too. Just saying how I feel. Not sure how long the game will last when they manage to piss off the group players and raiders in different ways all in the same year.

And before some fool talks about me wanting to just log in and level get all my gear and loot at the press of one easy button don't bother. unless you really get your jollies out of it then go ahead I don't want to rain on your parade

Ok done my whining

It's this simple. Stop designing group play with Raiders in mind. Raiders *SHOULD* be able to steamroll group content. Are you guys afraid we'll abandon the game for 6 months at a time or something because we're "bored?" How the hell can we? All our guilds would die.

You don't have a surplus of players playing on Norrath. You don't have new players entering the game. TLP has to have been squeezed for all it's worth as far as old players returning to play where they know. Stop acting like you're WoW or FFIV, you are not. Stop making casuals quit in droves with each poor design choice you have made of late (starting with the OP nature of RoS group content). We still despite obvious poor mistakes never get any indication from DBG in a "Sense Heading" type of post we used to get. The current Producers of Everquest need to be replaced. You don't understand your base and you're killing the game. It often looks on purpose. Go back to EQ II, get out of our World.

They should talk to their daddy about the origins of the phrase, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

I'm playing on a TLP server for a bit. I know this is pretty much the end for me as I watch EQ slowly die.

I just can't stand the way EoK turned out. I am not a raider - as I get older I just don't have the time or energy to do that anymore.

I don't understand what you mean when you say you just can't stand the way EoK turned out. I am a group player, and I play what I consider medium levels of playtime (10-20 hours per week). I came back last year November and I had a BLAST in EoK. The quests and content are pretty damn good.

RoS is meh. It's difficult. Higher difficulty doesn't automatically mean more fun. The quests seem okay and the lore is pretty spot-on. But it's very difficult for my character and my skill level. So I tend to play more in EoK. It's somewhat tough, but achievable without too many deaths usually. Sometimes no deaths. When I venture into RoS, I KNOW I am going to die multiple times. It's just a fact.

I don't raid. Don't plan to raid unless it's an open raid, and even those are difficult to get in to. I am a grouper and I am having fun so far. The 19th Anniversary mission looks a treat. I plan to try to get that done, among many other Anniversary tasks and missions.

If you're not having fun any more, don't try to force it. Just take a break, friend. Coming back is sometimes the best thing in the world.

What do you think the secret is, then? I have heard a lot of complaints here on the forums about how difficult this expansion is and how it isn't meant for group players. Yet I am in the game and regularly see non-raiders playing and progressing, no problem.

ROS has some annoying features but overall it's been ok. I'm not a big fan of the progresson quests AT all. I manage to box FF with about 3-4 different combo of characters regularly now but it's a dumb dps check - frankly I can only do it with the heroes I have because I have 25k aa minimum and 30k+ on the SK and mage.

End of Empire is also pretty bad. Overall mechanics in these missions make them a pita for the average grouper. EE is pretty damn bugged the 3rd round almost never activates and just sits back and summon mobs.

Outside of the missions I have no real problem with ROS. Even coming back from TDS age I had no real problem gearing up in EOK tier 2 on the SK and then moving on to ROS. Frankly I was killing the named with little issue even sub 200k HP buffed.

I see it as an active decision to cater to broader spectrum of players, and as such, I applaud it.

Let me give you my perspective.

EQ players distribute over a number of competency levels, powerlevels (level, gear, AA, solo vs box vs group vs raid), levels of available playtime, etc. Let us for shorts call these Player Umph.

At the same time, the playerbase is not so big that mega-expansions can be afforded to be created.

So now we have two parts of an expansion, (which is how I choose to see EoK and RoS), that is beautifully distributed for different levels of Player Umph. Most players in Everquest has somewhere to play that is right for them, as well as an area that is above their Umph level.

I think this is key, and it demonstrates that DB are very competent in their overall game design strategy.

The ˋclassicˋ feeling for me was that this game had an enourmeous amount of game ahead of me, that I was not yet powerful enough to play. This gave me an incentive to gain more Umph. EoK became more fun to me when RoS came out, because RoS was out of my league. So I build Umph in EoK now with more satisfaction than I did last year, and I am working through progression, because it will give me an edge when I transition into RoS in a couple of months.

In a year, RoS will be 22% easier (I think that is the number Sancus has reverse engineered for power growth per expansion). So a lot of players with insufficient Umph to play RoS now will move into the Umph bracket for RoS, and the RoS bracket will move into the new expansion.

I think it is alpha and omega to take a step back, and be realistic about ones own Umph level. I am a boxer/grouper with limited playtime, but with some history under my belt, so EoK is perfect for my current Umph. I have not leveled my toons to 110 yet, because then I would position myself between EoK and RoS, before being ready wrt other Umph factors, and I would be slowing down my journey to umph building, since I would be underpowered for RoS.

Please let me know if this makes any sense to you or not. The bottom line is: the game can cater to a more varied group of players with its game design strategies, and I think players tend to think of themselves as representative of the playerbase as a whole, or the player base to be more homogenous than it actually is.

My guess is, that the devs don't box at all. I think they tune events based on how it feels, when they group together and test the difficulty together.
However that particular way of grouping is more a "lan-party-group" than an "MMO-group", given that they are all within talking distance of eachother, are used to play together, and have a reasonable combination of classes. They might even have "RoS-beta-fished"-equipment, rather than the "multiple-era-mix" most casuals have. Not to mention that they know before-hand exactly how to approach every ingame situation.
Having the actual content-designer in your group, is as optimal as you can get...

Thats my theory at least, and it would explain why content is often somewhat overtuned...

While this is a dramatic statement, I have to say I wholeheartedly agree. They need new leadership to get the team energized, communicating, and with some sense of discipline in creating a product people want to keep playing.

There has been plenty of leeway for them to get their things in order and to step up to the plate and hit a home run. Sadly, we have only seen continued incompetence in almost all aspects.

It should NOT be this hard to make acceptable content, especially with the very involved EQ community willing to help. The failure at this point is leadership, and I can't help but feel that they have earned their farewell many times over recently.

I must say that I really disagree with you, because of what I wrote above, and because I am in no way convinced that your premises are true, specifically the one about casuals quitting in droves over overtuned content. If I where to bet, I would bet the opposite. I believe EQ has entered a small growth phase.

I also believe that DB is very professional, and I also feel secure in my assumption that they know exactly how to introduce change that will have a long term acceptance. It is no accident that things get broken, then fixed. It is Change Management, and it is hillarious to see how these cheeky basterds (DB) can get away with the same modus operandi every time. Look at most nerfs, how they have a pain/outrage phase, and then a fix, after which it is completely forgotten. There are no more threads on HA, no more threads on Shaman dots, etc etc. Right now Potion Belt is the toy that is dangled in front of the cat, and lo and behold, if there isn’t a fix for it next time. A good friend once made me and another friend argue about a thing that we often argued about, after which he looked at us and said: “dance puppets, dance”. It was a bucket of cold water, but also hilariously funny once we got over the humiliation.

Having said that, my gut feeling is that there is some form of structured trolling, as opposed to the spontaneous trolling that we are used to. Agent Provocateur, if you will. I don’t know if it is somebody with too much time on their hands, having a laugh over the power they have to instigate insurrection, or it an effort from a competitor. My money is on the “I do it because I can” .

Does that include the RoS T2 named? Some of those mobs are absolutely disgusting, then you get into VP and it's a loot pinata (both group and raid version from what I understand).

And I actually see it as them appealing to a narrower class of player. At the same point in the EoK expansion there were more players active in the T1 zones then there are in RoS T1 zones. A LOT more at least on xegony. And I don't think it was people leaving, And I am talking about before the new TLP server went live.

Now now sure how much you check these things but I actively look to see who is camping in the zones I am in. I also run the largest casual guild on my server and I see where my people are playing. I see the hard core groupers in RoS but almost never see any of the others there or if so rarely. Things were much different with EoK. Don't get me wrong EoK had a few challenges in T2 zones but overall was much better balanced then RoS.

And I dont think a 4 tier system spread out over 2 years will be a good idea. They just push more people away.

Honestly I have had not had any issue with any ROS named - in fact i find most of t2 easier than mobs like Grotesque or majestic cockatrice in OT but even those I pick off when running through the zones. It's sad though that I have no problem with named and yet I'm still struggling with end of empire mission. My group is more capable than the typical grouper and I suspect that most have given up on progression for VP.

I'm running 33,000aa, 6300 AC on a group geared tank (about 265k-280k HP when buffed depending on if cleric or shaman is in the mission) which is about as high as you get. Fell foliage I have on farm status but the DPS check aspect of it is stupid and empire is just a nightmare with the way the event tends to break on the final adds where they sit back and summon dogs but don't move. Very rarely do I not make it to the end phase but I have not gotten by it yet. I'm sure I'll eventually beat it but I sure as hell won't repeat this mission.

I imagine the average grouper is pulling their hair out though. IN my mind thats a sign of poor design.ROS is defintiely harder than EoK but it's doable. From what I can tell the progression for VP is barely even being touched by average grouper.

There are a few T2 named that are complete cancer to deal with, like a grave robber in ST, and for the life of me I can't see how you can do them without tailoring the group to it. How are you running 6300 AC on a group geared tank? Full trophies, tribute, and just T2 RoS gear? Is that all the Hero's AAs?

I still wait for an MMO that is all about challenging group content, and doesn't get ruined by raiding. I think raiding is super boring, and has very little challenge, most of the work is done by other people (the pullers, the tank, the main healers etc, and the people who figure out the strategies). The majority of people just sit at the back, riding on the coat tails of the good guys. And either way, I just really dislike it. It takes too long, and bores me. The most fun I ever had in this game was in a group doing group content, in era, with a team of people with group gear only.

I hope Pantheon might be the game I hope for, but I am assuming even they will give in to pressure eventually. To me raiding was just a vague idea of what might be cool to do as an endgame thing in 1999, but it isn't the best idea, and not much has been added to it since then. Just a bit of Dance Dance Revolution line dancing and side stepping. Yet people expect it and will demand it. This is why we can't have nice things.

Perhaps he has several chase drops, which means its not group geared.

So you basically hate raiding because you're not good at it, and you're a waste of a raid spot, and you don't do anything while other people do stuff, and you get bored spending hours in a raid that you're not contributing anything to, while others who are better than you are contributing?

I have a hard time being able to tell whether or not you're being serious.

Grave robber killed me once first time I attacked it because I hopped it quick with some cool downs but I had no issue after that first death and that was with my non-ideal group of sk, necro, shaman, mage, bard.

As to AC max AA, max ac augs, and some trophies. Working on TBM and TDS still ( I left during TDS) and I guess Tent also from anniversary.

Edit: And yes I have almost full chase loots. But at the time graverobber I had 1. I had to work harder before than I do now (especially with 8k more aa that I have now). That said even with max chase I am struggling with a group mission....

They don't test anything by grouping up and playing through it like players do. There's literally not enough devs who know how to play on live for that to happen. And not enough time for them to devote 3+ devs to testing group content.

Content is never tested by devs in group gear, raid gear, or any gear. They run through everything solo while invul and death touching mobs. Mob stats get pulled from somewhere to jam into templates and pasted around.

The first time content gets used in its intended manner is when players see it on Test or Beta. And Test lacks the daily patching of Beta, so at best there's one round of untested changes before something goes live a week later. That's assuming anyone bothers to listen to Test players.