I have always been the one to refute anyones idea that everquest was coming to an end. Today it struck me, that maybe the epoch is here. Here is how i see it unfolding. Sony is the term i use in this post to describe whomever is in charge of game design these days. So forgive me if it is not correct, I use it simply as the best term I can think of here. Sony decided a few years back that the programming involved in keeping classes balanced and developing gear that actually made sense, a uniform system of gear sould be unfolded and it should be so comprehensive that nearly everyone would use it, thus defiant is born. I hated losing the ability of picking my own way to fame, but then again, i loved the stats. Then came expansion gear, Voa Rof, and now Cotf. In this last expansion it boils down to group gear raid gear and crafted gear, forget the rest, nothing else is playable. Oh, augs are still there for those creative ones among you, or to work on after you wind up in an endgame guild where it seems that the only ones that play regularly hang out. Now, we have the onslaught of 85 plus chars with gear. Okay, this is fine too, but given that each expansion now has 2 or 3 levels of gear, no intelligence is required. The game itself never presented the skill level of say, flying a rc model airplane. Yet players who are high end and have the best gear will swear they possess amazing talent. Now here is where I am on all this. I loved eq because i enjoyed playing with people. Not raiding in a guld that never talks to each other outside of raid time, or discusses anything not related to the guild or raiding. I enjoyed camping hours even days for some obscure item that had an extra 12 int. Of course those days are gone, but why and where did everquest go? I honestly dont recognize the game or the players. I have seen untold dozens of friends outright quit, and have in my possession at least 5 or 6 accounts with end or near endgame chars who nobody wants to play. I loved this game so much, but lately I have to force myself to log on. The problem with the game never had anything to do with gear or making it easy. The book actually was genious. Why has sony been so determined to ruin the designers of this games original concept? Everyone knows in any industry, music, oil and gas exploration, new product development that large publicily held companies cannol innovate. It stikes me that sony is trying to innovate and does not accept the truth that nobody in their corporate structure has the motivation or talent needed to do so. With that all said. I am gonig to make my heroic character, and I suppose I will play some characters who will only log on randomly and without predictable way of ever meeting them. I assume that their are a few of my associates in the endgame guild I belong to who will make them also, but I doublt they will mention their names, or even join them as alts of their endgame guild. I envsion an aweful lot of players just spitting up an eq furball that has been stuck in our craw for the last 10 years and finally taking the big jump into leaving forever and not returning. I hope I am wrong, but this is the first time i honestly think its over. Riviera 100 ench bertox
You are wrong on so many aspects.. Yes, defiant gear was a game changer.. Made our toons much stronger than they should have been.. But in general, the camping of some obscure item is still needed, even if it is old world. The way bosses are made these days, they have enormous debuffs, so you need as many clickies as you can get. Where are you going to get said clickies? In older world content.. Second. After this many years, even when the original designers did not think this game would be here today, can you fault sony for having a different vision? Look at how many games, have died, but the first true MMORPG is still here and kicking. Some may say its a cash cow now, with Kronos. But this game is still here when so many popular MMOs are buried in the sands. Do you really honestly think the game is easy now? Even with heroic toons, try tanking or something else in RoF or CotF, with just a silver account and the only AAs are the ones auto granted from heroics..remeber, you can only gain 1k on silver.. the heroics kill that.. you have to spend 100SC for 100 more AA limit or go gold.. No, this game is not far from easy.
Unless you are tackling old world bosses at low level... I can't think of any enormous debuff. gear from lvl... 70 and up i wanna say, start having all the clickies built on them. I'm also unsure what old clicky would make such a big difference on those name? My reactive cleric merc seems to keep my wizard alive just fine on CoTF content. can even do some names that way. Of course, if you are silver at lvl 100, the AA barrier gonna block you alot ( and the lack of prestige gear)... but EQ was never meant to be a F2P game , and has never been balanced around it. I honestly think the game is too easy, and I honestly believe this is one of the reason so many people stop logging in regulary ; they just did all the current content! ( and most of them were done within the weekend)
1) That wasn't why Defiant gear was created. Defiant gear was created to help speed new players through lower level content because it took a huge amount of time to get gear in the older lower levels of content and it was way more powerful so that they could quickly progress through the content. 2) What do you mean by "expansion gear?" I can only guess you mean either sets of gear in the general sense, which started long before VoA, or the planned obsolescence of older gear, which started in TBS/SoF. This was supposedly done with the goal being to "help" people catch up, though in reality it harmed the raid game more than anything else ever has. 3) You left out the Autogranting of AAs, which came before Heroic Characters. This was also done to help newer/lower level players, and it has. 4) Heroic characters, done to help newer/lower level players, and it has/will. Only number 2 actually did anything to harm EQ. Defiant gear was needed, autogranted was needed, and heroic characters I think looking back will be said to have been needed as well.
The thing that bothers me more than anything is all this is being done to help lower level chars stay in zone etc, but nothing is being done to keep those at the top end here. I'm tired of seeing long standing members of the guild quit as CotF has been way lower content than expected. I'm tired of seeing I'll be back if the rest of CotF is worth playing. All this concentrating at the low end is losing those at the top end. The rest of CotF better be worth it but being as they will now or shortly be working on the next expansion, I seriously have my doubts.
The game and its developers have become their own worst enemy. The current regime has lost the vision that the original creators of this game had. Its not EverQuest anymore. It needs to be renamed something else to be honest. But perhaps a shoestring budget, minimal resources and a skeleton dev crew with a revolving door of interns has something to do with it. Not to mention, a lot of the funds that we put into this game are not being put back into the game. Its all going to their EQnext project. So if EQs demise is a lot closer than some think, then you can look at the above as the reasons why. I also want to add, that obviously, the raiding game is on its last leg. That will be the first shoe to drop.
If raiding stops my account will drop to silver...raiding is the only reason I have CotF and a gold account. I've even started beta testing other games, something I never thought I'd do.
everquest being a 15 year old game, was forced to make these changes. after 15 years, most of the player base was very much into the high-end and SoE was constantly fighting mudflation of items / gear. SoE had basically ran into a wall as far as content development. it had become just harder mobs / higher lvl gear , which caused lower level stuff to increasingly become obsolete. the player base as well wasn't growing. there were a few returnees / new folks when SoE ran some kind of special , but it wasn't enough to offset the loss of players retiring, going to other games. it became general to just see boxed groups and alts. SoE made these changes to keep up with the changed gaming model. most games now are FTP with options to buy "premium" subscriptions / items. also SoE was fighting against the folks that were trying to profit off of their game - plat farmers , selling ingame items / toons. Blizzard recently shut down their in-game "auction house " and made everything no-trade because it had gotten out of control and had become the focus of the game rather then actually playing and leveling. Everquest needed new folks. people coming to our game were soon turned away when they saw that they had to grind 100 levels and accumulate 6000 AA's to be a real part of the community. also why pay 15 bucks a month , buy expansions if you cannot even play in the newest created content ? while I cringe somewhat with these new changes - when I look at my wiz that I have worked all these years to develop and advance. I do like the heroic toons. I can now play a different class without the empty grind. and at a level where the content is fresh and the general community is playing.
everything dies. everything ends. you need to enjoy eq for what it is today, not what it was. and i don't type that with my passiveaggressive hat on. no, it's my oversized boonie hat while we sip some homemade hooch watching my cows lumber around talking about that time when mudcrush deleveled himself and then leveled himself back up for laughs. nostalgia is a powerful force that can really kink your tail.
The problem is while they have been doing this they have been loosing more and more of those at the top end of the game. EQ end game has been in decline since EQ went F2P as they haven't been able to deliver on expansion content. VoA had finished its development time before F2P went in RoF was a split up and the last 2 releases were both rushed and incomplete..we still have that unusable portal in Shards Landing CotF extremely lacking, I know we still haven't had all of it but I don't see them adding enough content in the final 1 or 2 updates to warant the cost and calling it an expansion. Those who purchased it deserve a partial refund for an expansion with less content than LoY. The only way I can see them actually having enough time to turn CotF into something worthy of being an expansion is to push back starting work on the next expansion. If they cannot turn CotF around they may find that is the last expansion many will purchase.
You have anything to suggest, or is this just venting? EQ has never been very good at catering to everyone's needs since it tends to sacrifice one demographic of play for another. Velious came as close as it ever will to pleasing everyone but that is ancient history. The so called "top end" have always been dissatisfied when there is never enough content at the challenge level they crave. Its pretty obvious that the dev team is through with trying to one up themselves with raid content and they might even be satisfied with having every 1 disgruntled end game power raider leave the game if it means 3 other players stay in the game or even 1 new sub comes of it. People tend to have their schedule and real life circumstances change, so sometimes it is nice to have something to fall back on that is not always a huge demand of time and ability. If you are that person who never missed a raid night in the past 10 years, well that is pretty amazing but not realistic for most. Expecting SoE to cater to that, when there is already so much in the game to do is just selfish. Even for non-raiders, there are massive laundry lists of achievements. Its daunting. Most of it is open to all levels. If these changes are what it takes to maintain the game or even grow it, than so be it. Not everyone is going to agree with it but hey, that's life. Your only right you really get is the one that enables you to complain, which many exercise freely.
I'm not talking about challenging content I'm talking about content as a whole, I don't see raiders ever having anything challenging in the group game or the raid game ever again. We have members leaving every week all citing the lack of content in CotF as their reason for leaving. We had some leave at the beginning of CotF who didn't bother to purchase the expansion. We now have members who are scrabling round for things to do as their alts have now hit max AA, and that is without the AA grant. I hope your right and SOE is getting more people to subscribe with these changes than are leaving. I also hope now they have done these changes, they crack on and finish CotF and give those who purchased it what they paid for. With the raid items being added to CotF group game now, it does worry me that we won't see any more for this expansion, it also worries me as to what the next level of gear is going to be.
It is what it is. The fact that content is considered trivial is not just the content's fault (IE the dev team). Many of the top end players have been playing a LONG time and everything is down to a science. They squeeze out so much power from their characters that designing content to challenge them would be unfeasible. For most players things are fine how they are. The content that is in place for level 100 is adequate. It is on the players to revisit it, or not. There is also the issue of how long they want to ration it out. Anyone who just binges the first few weeks and doesn't bother to revisit anything will be let down. I still have tons of unchecked boxes in RoF and CotF and massive amounts in older content left unfinished and I probably have about as much play time as the "typical" casual player that makes up the bulk of the player base. It is not like I am not sympathetic to having more content with greater challenge for those who have the time and inclination...
Havn't people been discussing the death of EQ for close to 15 years now? The game survives because it keeps changing for the times.
When content is easy, the hardcore players complain. When content is hard, the casual players complain. It's a no-win situation and right now, the casual players have the upper hand. However, one thing I think most of us can agree on is that CotF has been a travesty due to lack of content across the board. 4 zones, 7 group missions, 8 raids and a couple dozen heroic adventures for half an expansion's worth of content? Pathetic. I love EverQuest, but I also believe that SOE only cares about its players when it benefits their bottom line, and my love is not everlasting.
If by 4 zones you mean 2.5 then yeah. Bixie and DH aren't real zones, they're just instance hubs with no real content of their own which is very sad.
but this time... it's not only the hardcore gamer. Yes, hardcore gamer finished coTF 1B raid within the afternoon of it'S release. like 30 guild were done within the week... but general grouper were also done with the new heroics stuff within the same week. I remember Smedley saying EQ1 would get some love, that he heard us loud and clear.. with augur going to EQnext, it was a lie...
