EverQuest: Call of the Forsaken

Let's not pretend that raiders are the minority. They are the majority and you know it.

And while the writing may be "on the wall". Are you perhaps not misinterpreting it? Where in that quote did he say "We're making tank and spank the majority. Screw complex raids"?

You realize for the longest time up until NToV revamp in RoF and a couple other raids (Velishan) there was very very very very very very very very very minimal tank and spank raids in each expac right? I cannot stress "VERY minimal" enough. All he could mean is that he is making it 50%-50%. Half tank and spank like the raids were in Classic for good parses, ease, and the ability to gear raid composition quickly, and half elaborately scripted lore filled complex raids packed with fun and strategy.

Honestly I'd love the half and half design, especially if they provide unique items to each 'type' of raid. Like the items in NToV that were direct copies of the old gear and thus fit into unique slot selections most items don't possess anymore. Which sometimes conflicted foci and made you pick and choose but in some cases provided things like the TWO items that could fit into Primary, Secondary AND Range slot and had a sympathetic mana return proc....which is so so so sexy. and something Sony needs to do more often imo.

raiders are a minority whether what you read here on theforums represents it as such or not, they are however typically more vocal here. Go count the guilds on yoru server, how many are raidguilds, figure the average active membership. now figure all the family guilds and your approximations of those (im betting theyre much higher than you think though), who's over 50%? the nonraiders, by a longshot. Sure, the raiders are more visible at times and often play more predictably and even longer hours, but pound for pound they are indeed the minority, keep in mind minority doesnt mean a tiny number like 2% or 5%, but simply less than the majority. If you look around you, look at general chats, ooc's in pok (yes people still hang out in pok, mainly new or returning players taht arent in teh lobby habit yet lol) and you will see a much larger grouping population than you may at first realize.

So here's my question.

If T4 is planned to stay relevant with new gear from CotF being less of an upgrade than T3/T4 were... AND they plan to do less complex raids and more NToV type raids... it basically means everyone will have the best loot in the game without any difficulty?

Why would raiders bother with T4 anymore if CotF is going to be 10x easier? I'm just confused on how it keep HoF relevant at all.

Or am I missing something?

I stopped reading right there.

Do people really already forget farming DoN, DoDH, AND PoR while working towards Deathknell? You're really getting more raids to add to your schedule, yet this is a bad thing? I'm not gonna get into the raid V. group other than this...

For the past few years, it's been ALL ABOUT RAIDERS. Now it's getting toned back because it isn't and will never be viable to constantly produce content for you guys to plow through.

Not gonna happen by any stretch of the imagination. If yiou remember when EQ2 launched the lore from EQ supported it with the event that took place in the Nexus. This is merely both games' lore supporting EQN and that is it.

You are gonna love the lore in EQN. One of the panels today focused solely on that and everyone was blow away. It is amazing!

Text communication of lore (aka EQ method) will be slightly present in EQN. Text communication of lore will NOT be prevalent.
They did not go into specific details but the lore will be delivered in several different ways, one of which will be by visually observing changes in the environment.
They made a big point of telling folks not to expect "!" or "?" over NPC heads or the typical text methods of communicating lore or quests.

Back when we were getting 50 - 100HP upgrades we only 10K - 20K HP in the first place now we are over 100K HP those same upgrades are tiny. Back then guilds were larger and there were a lot of players trying to get in a raid guild, you could afford for some of them to get bored and move on, you can't do that these days, there just isn't the player base.

The last couple of expansions have been about groupers, why do you think we have those stupid missions which are copies of the raids?
HoF raids have been a lot easier than we are used to, the only thing giving us any grief is that stupid spider. But no doubt that will get changed right after we get it beat the same with X1.

There was upset over how small the upgrades were in RoF and yet they are doing the same if not worse in the next one, who is going to raid anything when all the loot rots? We don't allow alts to loot, our guild is all about the main toons, many of our members don't even have an alt. Not looking forward to trying to keep the guild motivated.

No, no, no, if SoE wants to make Everquest a success still they need to have all the raids they plan at release, I find it funny, how now Prathun is the lead dev (he still is right?), he bought us a change of emphasis in raiding with emotes when he did them in dodh etc, and now he changing it to tank and spank? You won't keep raiders entertained if the raids are just tank and spank. As for no level increases and sidegrades in equipment, I think the equipment need to be upgrades still or people will not bother raiding or maybe buying the expansion even? But that the way SoE seems to want to go, to get people to play EQN? Please do not alienate the raiding guilds in this game. Delay the expansion launch, put more content in it. State when you plan to do a level increase so people can see they can work for any equipment in it. Do you plan on a level increase in T2, T3 or T4 for example?

I am getting roughly the same amount of raw hp/mana upgrades on gear in going from T2 to T3/T4 that I was getting on upgrading a bad piece of gear during Planes of Power. The difference is that in PoP those 60-120hp were 25-50% of the total stats on the item and now they're 2%.

It's cool that they realized the mudflation from 4 tiers of upgrades each expansions was getting out of hand. But the answer wasn't to cut the upgrades in half and keep the same number of tiers, it was to keep the upgrades meaningful and merge the middle tiers into the lowest and highest tiers.

I'm confused as to why you would reply to my post with a post referencing itself.

Working on the tenuous assumption that you were attempting to reference my post with a post of sheer idiocy, there is nothing in my post that is unclear or inaccurate. SOE would only crossover EQ1 with EQ2 out of laziness and perhaps too much exposure to old Dallas episodes. If they cross EQ1 with EQ2 in the next expansion, then the expansion after that will assert that the last expansion was only a dream. That's how blatant and unimaginative the idea of crossing EQ and EQ2 is... soap opera tedium.

Storytelling at it's worst.

Before we even accessed Alaris, we had TWO WORLDS' worth of lore to explore... and yet SOE sent us to Alaris. As though, by 2011, we heroes of Norrath hadn't been able to explore the world in it's entirety and document it's land masses by then. But I can assure you that we've touched on all of ONE continent of Ku'ua, and have yet to explore or participate in any more of that world's lore... which is especially sad since there has been ample opportunity in the NINE years since Omens came out.

And now we've touched on TWO other worlds in Everquest's timeline... but SOE can barely be bothered to generate more content for ANY of those three worlds (Norrath, Ku'ua, Alaris, ignoring related bodies such as Luclin) at this point. They have to resort to the cheapest fiction-writing tactics instead.

My position is in no way unclear, and, as a storyteller and a writer, is a viable position. I dislike shoddy storytelling. I dislike hasty game design. I dislike bad writing. SOE crossing EQ with EQ2 is all of the above.

Why would you ever want to go back to Kuua?

Everquest is/was famous for 2 things:
a) being the original @tm mmo with great lore, traveling and adventures.
b) It's Raiding game structure, with large scaled forces and events

It's sad to read that casual group content players think otherwise, and even more so selfish that you think you are more important for this game. You have many games to discover (why would i play Eq1 casual if i could play something like Vanguard which is way more interesting to discover by now..).
Raiders have nowhere to go. There are no new games that offer pve raids in this form for big guilds.

This game would be very dead by now without the raiding, and it's not just an opinion it's a simple fact.

We've not been to the Alaran homeworld; Alaris is a continent on Norrath, and has been on the globe in Skyfire as long as there's been a globe in Skyfire, as well as on the maps in Plane of Valor as long as we've been able to go there.
Just clarifying- staying out of most of the debate at the moment.

lol

........................................... what?

This game was initially launched in 1999 with (I believe) 71 zones. 3 of which possessed raids mobs (1....1 raid mob each) and one of those raid mobs was barely a raid mob (Phinny) and only one guild could kill them at a time because they had long respawns and were not instanced as instances did not exist yet and would not exist for the first 6 expansions.

This game was not even remotely close to raid centric when it was first released. It centered around grouping, around player interaction, around the lore, and around doing quests. Then Kunark presented a few more, then Velious a few more, then Luclin a few more still, then PoP was essentially 90% raid content. By GoD the game switched to a nearly full focus on raid content and the desires of raiders. Why I said raiders aren't the minority... maybe numerically speaking yes, and certainly were in the past, but raiders have this game twisted around their finger. Why do you think they are the vocal (complaining) majority on the forums? Because they can.

This exactly.

I kinda wish we could see a population chart for EQ by expansion just to see how badly PoP and GoD hurt the game with the focus on raiding.

I remember being on line when SoE flashed a system wide message thanking the player base for 500,000 accounts being logged in or active I forget which. That was during PoP btw...

Oh I loved PoP AND GoD. Well....not so much GoD until it was an expac or two old but... PoP definitely lol. I'm merely saying it changed EQ's focus a lot haha.

This game doesn't need to focus on groupers, it doesn't need to focus on raiders either. Coming from someone who does a lot of both....it needs to find a balance. That means ignoring the wants/needs of one side or the other from time to time to maintain that balance.

I wouldn't want a return to Classic's raiding, with only a couple raid targets and that's it. Not much raiding to do. But I wouldn't want a return to PoP or GoD's level of raiding either, where that's almost ALL there is to do. I know I've praised RoF a lot in these CoF threads, but RoF did a phenomenal job balancing the two imo. Great raid content, great additions to raid content (like the mini raids, Velishan etc, and the NToV "Tier 0" raid revamp) great group content, focus on questing, lore etc. And it only gives me hope for CoF. A hope that only time will tell if it's well placed or not, since CoF still has 10 days until I can even be in Beta haha.

Also, off the topic of the raids but back on the topic of CoF... since West Karana is CoF's hub can we get a quest arc (Like Bloodmoon orc illusion, or Field of Scale Iksar Skeleton illusion) that has an illusion of the old Qeynos Guards? ;D