Actually, it was in support of the reasoning within your "Generation Mine" post and the Dev's catering to/over use of the easy button that causes the shift away from what makes this game great. I'm sorry if I wan't clear in my response. I just read another post where, on the way back there backburner, they are considering removing LAA effort and give most of them to everyone. Damn button is stuck...full speed ahead. <sarcasm> I hope they can get voice activated toons, so I can tell it what to do...go watch a movie, make some food, do laundry and come back and it will have gained 5 levels, 2200 aa's and beat that raid. You know, sitting at the computer tapping keys and clicking... and, OMG having to move the mouse is sooo tedious.<sarcasm off>
Yes, your reading comprehension and rationalization is as tight as always. It is not the point of a lvl 1 toon running around with arrows, it is that there is nothing left, or not much left, worthy of effort in the game that is considered special. To be able to talk in guild/group in Alaran because you put the effort to raise your alaran up past 93, for RoF to go..here do this pick up a few things task and click yourself to Alaran 100 in no time. Is that a better example than the arrows? Can you understand? It is about accomplishments that have some shelf life longer than six months.
Yes because we should all have to farm alaran because you did.makes sense right? No... you shouldn't have to go through all the tedious crap from an old expansion to move on to the next. It would just be tedious and annoying.
Oh man, there is another bard in my guild that just seethes every time he sees someone's Alaran language skill bounce up from nothing to 100 in a few short minutes. He worked really hard to max out his skill, and now it's just being handed to people with the new expansion, and he feels it's defecating all over his accomplishments. I only got my Alaran up to 81 before the expansion (mainly, I really didn't need to max it, to be honest), so I thought it was cool to get it maxed out quickly, but didn't understand why I needed it maxed. I guess it had something to do with the new expansion.
I was up around 90 Alaran and was very happy to see the easy 100 for everyone. It was a tedious timesink that added very little to the game other than more hoops to jump through. I've never understood the whole "I spent 2 hours walking from Qeynos to Freeport and died four times along the way, so everyone else should, too!" mentality. Sorry your nerd achievement points feel a little less special to you now that everyone can get them easily, I'm personally ecstatic to share them with everyone else.
A tedious timesink....Please. So everything in EQ that isn't "WoW-like or Rift-like" is tedious to you. How is completing tasks, the whole point of EQ be it solo, group or raid, tedious? And nice strawman counter..."I spent 2 hours walking from Qeynos to Freeport and died four times along the way, so everyone else should, too!" As I said, your reading comprehension and rationalization is as tight as always. Actual timesinks removed for a more streamlined gameplay is a huge benifit, removing any sort of an achievement or giving them a very short lifespan is for the GAME, except for those who just grind or solo. *Real Achievements* (not the bs ones like slayer or collections) are not tedious timesinks its the core of EQ. If you think they are; just don't do any of them...be happy and grind. Oh, here is a strawman argument to counter your strawman...You know, why doesn't everyone get top tier raid gear from the previous expansion...I mean...everyone should get T4 VoA raid gear once they do a few hails in RoF, without raiding because raiding is a tedious timesink. I would be very happy to see everyone get it. What's next...I paid my money, I can play however I want?
i got mine to 100 jsut a couple weeks before release bc id procrastinated last 7 points for the whole eyar lol. i hated it but i did it, and at the time it was a big accomplishment. jsut bc its not a big accomplishment later on doesnt subtract from teh feeling you got when you did finish it the hard way. i have no issue with people being able to do it now, those without rof, that are still playing in voa waiting for a sale or soemthign, still have to work for it, or wait. their choice. idk the need for it in rof honestly, but to make people able to use stuff from the previous year a little easier is fine. personally i hated that they removed the need to get to 71 for the aas while expansion was still current, but woudlnt have had an issue with it going away with rof launch either. when an expansion is current, this "easy button" thing ppl keep whining about , is annoying, but once that expansion has been moved off the "current" list, then theres no problem with removing it. if things like this were never done, people would have to grind through all 14 years of content to be able to play with their friends if they're new or returning from long ago. i think the trek to current is appropriately hard, and appropriately easy as it is now. im not in favor of being able to join raiding guilds your first month, im also not in favor of expecting people to play the game for 2-3 years or more before they can even be useful to current players. they found a happy medium imo. defiant gear generally doesnt drop for your level , it drops for lower levels than what you're at, bc of waht you're killing at the time, to buy it for your level you ahve to grind out plat. thus defiant isnt an easy button, its just a boost. low aa xp mods are nice for people catchign up, they are a bit over the top for some classes taht at 4k are done with everything useful to their class while being nowehre near done for other classes, but that cant be controlled by class except to completely overhaul the aa costs, and thats not going to happen. letting people catch up a little faster than we went through content when it was current is NOT a bad thing. you're not going ot get new players or returning layers if you make the mountain steeper to climb, and you wont hold their itnerest if you make that mountain disappear altogether, having a hill to run up taht will wind you but not kill you, wehre your friends are waiting at the top to join even though they climbed a mountain on the other side to get there, is just fine.
do you have your epic? did you farm the pieces for it? if you said yes to either one of these questions... MOVE ALONG if the alaran thing was ooh 2 or 3 expansions ago i could maybe understand putting in a "bypass" or "catch up" mechanic... but it wasnt it was last expansion. People still raid VoA to help them with RoF... No one expansion should ever fully replace the last in its functional manner and place in the norrath time line
Yeah I got my epic, took a few hours and was stupid easy. Did 1.5 and 2.0 solo beginning to end and in fact bought almost everything for it on the bazaar. Such a comparable example... No one expansion should make you do boring progression just to get your spells so you can move on. Welcome to mmos once the new expansion is out the last one loses almost all relevancy. Standard practice in the industry.
As leader of a large family guild, I'm one of several people that help new/returned players get their epic, MPG group trials, DoN progression, T5 mercs, HoT progression. I'm grateful I don't have to help people go from 0 to 100 Alaran. I hope new/returned players get a chance to experience some of the VoA group missions, but I would like to focus most of my time on the new expansion.
Actually, there's no question at all about the result of hard as nails EQ vs. more assessable. Mr. Smedly stated in an interview that GoD was SOE's biggest messup in it's first 5 years. Now I've heard that there wasn't an extraordinary mass exodus, but there surely were guilds that imploded (with 90% of their members leaving the game entirely - dead guilds have a big impact on their members), a lot of player unhappiness, and IMO it was a watershed event - when deciding when EQ went from genre leader to also ran one needs look no further than GoD, the move to the new version of DirectX, and competition from easier games (EQ2 and WoW). Further one can look at the erosion of EQ's population. We aren't nearing 1M accounts anymore and haven't been in years. We don't have 200 progression raid guilds anymore - we're lucky to have 80. It's not all on account of EQ being both harder and less single account player friendly, but I argue a lot of it is. Finally one can look at more assessable/"easier" products - 10M (so they say) subscribers. It's easy to make a hard game. Unfortunately it is definitely not easy to make a fun game. Hard does not equal fun - not for the broad swath of MMoRPG subscribers even though it does equal fun for a small minority. My prediction is that SOE wants to make money. You make money when people want to play your game and don't migrate to other products that beat down customers less. All that said, man new NToV is serious fun. I miss the Flurry Drakes, the little chicken swarms, gaters/runners, and armor dropping from yardtrash. But 70% of a raid that was created a looooong time ago is still fun. The fact that many many guilds were able to beat it did not make it less fun. Not then and not now. (and overtuned events are still not fun. I wouldn't do an updated Glorification raid for 50AA and everyone gets a BP.)
Spells? Are you talking about a playing toon or a PL toon (or a rather sad self PL'ing high lvl toon like a lvl 90-95 SK that still swarms in MG)? if your just powerleveling a toon...spells dont matter much do they? Since when do you ever use spells from past expansions unless its for ports or creating items? If you playing a toon and spells are so important...then you will be hunting in that expansion anyways. But since you are talking about...Spells Correct me if i'm wrong, say for VoA you can get 91-93 RK I spells easy as walking up and buying them. For 94-95 spells you need an alaran lang of 50. You can get 51 with 7 easy missions in what...2 hours. Oh the travesty, the horror...what a boring time sink that must be. To be forced to experience just a little bit of content for two hours in order to purchase spells. And if its an alt, where you have done it before....less time. And just out of curiosity...how exactly do you get your exp? Do you sit there and grind for hours in a spot? That is the biggest boring time sink BS way to play this game. Bar none. Which brings me to the final point "Welcome to mmos once the new expansion is out the last one loses almost all relevancy. Standard practice in the industry." Standard practice in the industry...that caters to the 11 to 20 year olds. What is the age of the average EQ player? I never said keep in all the hard as hell, weeklong camps for a single drop in the chain of an endless quest...I said keep the achievements and rewards as meaningful and relevant. And this is EQ, maybe a bit of a lofty belief, but this is what separates EQ from Wow or Rift or the console mmo, and is why adults continue to play this game.
You know, my opinion really isn't that different from yours. 1. Yes, but to use GoD as the example is half there. GoD was an abomination as it was created for lvl 70 content but the players were stuck at 65 making it impossible. IIRC, a huge turnover at SOE created this unfinished product with lots of game/graphic bugs. This was a total snafu on SOE part and had dire ramifications. But..every opinion I typed here was not about making a game hard, it was about keeping the achievements and rewards pertinent. I used the drakespike arrow as it was an achievement to obtain one (either by hunting/ts and making one or saving your plat to buy one from the guy who did). Other items in the game that were a “badge of honor” (not talking about the perma camped twink gear) have no 2. Yes, we can look at the uber easy product…and I agree, but it wasn’t just ‘easy’ that took them there. There was a huge shift towards anime, the goofy stupid cartoonish characters that is *The Hot Craze*of the 10 to 18 year olds for the past ten years…even more so now. Now they have a kung fu panda and are still losing subscribers (down to 9M in 3 months) and the even More anime cartoonish game LoL is at 15M accounts. SOE countered that by going F2P and make money off of Marketplace (what LoL does…I think). SOE also countered with the stupid cartoonish things but a gingerbread man etc. etc., but isn’t going to work in a japanime crazed society. In otherwords…they got kids and we got adults. Kids have time and parents money..adults have to work, raise families and have priorities regarding finances and down time. 3. Again I agree but this is on game play dynamics, (not my original opinion). This is where I we are crossing paths again. *Some* things in EQ are hard, but they are not needed in order to play the game or continue at pace to the next expansion. Will EQ cease to function if someone doesn’t do it…no. Did anyone *have* to complete Rubak Time and Tides group mission in order to get their spells/aa’s unlocked (prior to locks being removed)…. No. But this is where SOE balances easy game play for the masses with a few hard missions for the minority. Having a small handful of things that are hard isn’t a game killer…they just get bypassed by those who don’t want to do it. Those who like a challenge…do it. And when Dev’s make something hard, there has to be logic and reasoning behind it…not stupid hard for no good or no apparent reason. 4. Yes. Hence marketplace and player made stuff. It’s the image of EQ that isn’t appealing to the masses (see #2) more so than the game difficulty imo. I have a ranger that main tanked all of VoA…all of it from Argath to (most of)Sepulcher, except for T3/T4 named. It really wasn’t that hard. 5. I agree wholeheartedly.
League of Legends basically sells power, they release new OP flavor of the week characters then nerf em later on in the line so they can release more. It's a terrible game with an even worse community, lord knows how it has so many players.
I play the content when it's new. I go through all the tedious crap to stay near the top of the game (my guild is currently third on the server, was first before the Maelin merger). But I have zero issue with other people being able to avoid that junk if they're a year behind the power curve. I have friends who come back from long breaks, know people in lower-tier guilds who enjoy older raid content, blah blah blah. I don't personally consider removing all the effort to get a single achievement a year from release to be some major slap in the face-it's a leg up that helps keep people who don't have the time/desire to farm a bunch of missions just so they can buy spells or make armor (remember that VoA group armor is also locked behind language progression) on their way through the lower 90s so they can get into the current expansion. It keeps my more casual friends interested in the game and it helps recruitment for my guild and many others. The only loss I see is the people who no longer feel like a special snowflake because they did things (well, thing, since it really only trivializes a single facet) the hard way and now anyone can do it (even though there is a whole new list of things to do the hard way available to them now). I'd rather be able to hang out with returning friends in newer content than spend a few weeks of their limited play time with me helping them do old tasks for the 15th time. It's obvious we have different opinions on this matter and aren't likely to sway the other anytime soon, I'm just glad the devs currently agree with my viewpoint. If that changes sometime in the future, it's not going to drive me away from the game, but it will make me sad to see friends who don't have my kind of playtime availability get frustrated beating their head against the ceiling to hang out in the same zones I prefer to.
When the Guild Raid Progression website show 10-15 guilds beating expansions before the next one is released and all other guilds either working on last year's content (seamless progression) or just as bad skipping massive amounts of content because of overtuned gatekeepers and getting a toehold in the new expansion's early and easier initial tiers (episodic/mudflation) it is a game killer. Very few people are going to accept waiting for the next expansion because the latest GoD expansion is overtuned. Very few people are going to play 10% of the game because of overtuned gatekeepers making downstrean content inaccessible while it's in the current expansion. Look at subscription numbers between competing products in each difficulty. There is almost no difference between nobody beat it before the next expansion overtuned GoD and 12 guilds beat it many other expansions. The failure rate in both cases is too high for the product's audience. Game killer might be overstating things. Low population niche product as opposed to genre dominating product however isn't overstating. Such content when it sits astride the progression path is not "throwing a bone" to players who enjoy hard. It's sacrificing the enjoyment of a much larger majority of players (and people who might otherwise be players) to pander to those favoring overly difficult content. On the other hand, there's a difference between accommodating more casual players or helping people who just started or returned catch up, and destroying all previous accomplishment. I simply think that the game ought not be an ordeal that weighs players and finds most of them undeserving of reasonable success or just as bad hands out stuff half of the players in the gsme worked a year to attain like it was nothing.
