NDA Lifted .. Beta tester thoughts / observations pls

My question, on many rank of Anatomy do Rogue get ? in VoA we're at 22. Do we get 2 ? or 3 more rank ?

My understanding Kirokan is that anatomy doesn't increase at all. Neither does headshot or decapitate. So if you're at 22 now.. you are at 22 in the future. You'll still find light blues to assassinate, but the exp will degrade and discourage people from doing it at 100 (though I imagine they still will.)

Well yeah, it has nothing to do with reality. Casters need more than just focus, just like melee need more than just weapons. Otherwise, with that logic, melee would get only weapons and ignore all other slots too. It's a long-perpetuated double-standard that has no place in EQ.

On topic: Buy the expansion if you intend to keep playing EQ1.

I have always had similar thoughts about focus degrading. Imagine if the haste from one expansion's belt degraded when using weapons from the new expansion.

Yes, casters need to upgrade even without focus degrading. Damage output by mobs and AEs affects casters too. Many need the extra mana too.

Too lazy to find it in Beta, but did Chandrok's 'customizable stats' ever become 'customizable' or did he keep all his choices that most people disagreed with?

Seemed to keep most of the choices people disagreed with, like allowing the tier 1 ToV raid weapon to have the best 1 hander ratio in the game, and allowing war/knight bows to have better ratios than the ranger only bows... as well as various other things.

All it did was create a situation to increase competition on tank gear. Higher ac and tanking heroics are going to be preferred by a lot of players who could not wear the gear previously because of the marginal gains on dps heroics. I imagine casters will still seek things like sdmg etc but why wouldn't a chanter want high hagi etc when their dps is pedestrian at best. I suppose necros and shaman might* still aug for hp. A few melee fanatics will go for hstr but otherwise lol customized gear lol.

That's one thing I don't understand..I'm not a 13 year veteran of the raiding and development scene in EQ1...but I have beta tested everything from vanilla EQ2 to every WoW expansion and games like Rift, Aion & Age of Conan...hell even Darkfall for 2 years. typically if a class asks for something in unison, and it's reasonable...they get it, or a portion of it.

This was my first beta test with EQ1 and it was terrible..we had 15 page threads for certain classes, detailing reasonable requests and fixes (like the 26 delay bow being rng only, and rng being blocked on the lower delay ones) for reasonably broken things...and 99.9% of them weren't payed any attention to. Is this really the norm for this games development and feedback process?

Don't misunderstand me either, the above is a question...which is why it ends in ? I'm genuinely curious. I understand they had to do hero's forge, and free to play etc. So it's entirely possible this beta wasn't normal.

Zahrym, you have to understand that for every 1 reasonable idea there are at least 10 bad ones. Of the reasonable ones you have probably have differences in class direction, the dev then has to decide which direction they feel is the best if any. Factor in that there's 1 Dev and maybe an intern doing spells along with 1 Dev and maybe an intern doing AA. Probably the same for items. It's not a lot of time to get all of that done. Also they have to think about the impacts of these choices. I'm not saying that it's a hard or easy job, but more that there's a lot of work load for just a handful of people.
Also from my understanding they didn't actually do Hero's Forge. They hired another team, or maybe just reallocated, to do the HF stuff (like LoN cardgames). Free to Play, though, was probably them.
This beta and VoA were very similar in that we suggested things and we didn't hear a lot of feedback one way or the other. VoA, as some may recall, didn't launch with a large amount of 'new' AA and didn't introduce very many, if any, 'new' spells.

Thanks for the response Luftt, I'm not trying to bash SoE or the dev team in general. I was just curious if they're swamped and undermanned or overworked or all three because the combination of lack of communication for what's going on with lack of general content and changes or reactive changes based on feedback makes it seem like it.

I like the new expansion. And we have purchased 2 collectors and 2 regular pre-orders.

I do have to disagree with the "raiders" on this thread that insist this expansion is not for the casual players.

Alot of the players like me that have been here since 1999 with no break in subscription or play, have done the "raid thing" and have moved on to greener pastures. When I say greener pastures I mean we have decided to leave the full time job of being told what to do when online. The egos, the morally corrupt leadership of guilds, got tiring. Rushing through content to the end game... and missing everything else about the game. For what? Godly loot? Or being that uber Magelo stat king?

We have a very nice set of "fellowship friends" that have allowed us to complete the teir progressions, get the gear, and even call people in to loot or task add those that may need the tasks. We also invite fellow EQ'ers to tag along when we have an open spot, or stop what we are doing to kill that named that keeps wiping a lesser geared group.

I like the tradeskill portions of beta, and look forward to making many of the items offered.

The slayer titles? I cannot wait to do. Old and new zones, yes even my home town of Qeynos will be getting some visits from me.

For the casual player that does not raid? Look no further than Shard's Landing to solo.

You cannot please everyone, but you do have to offer something to everyone. I get that. Because after 7 years of raiding? I finally figured it out, that it is not about those raid guilds 24/7. Simple fact is once that raid guild uses up the player base it has on it own server and becomes crippled to the point of needing help to raid, they get a lifeline tossed to them. That lifeline? A server merger where that have an entirely new player base to fool.

There are many great, and skilled players on the server that are not wearing a tag, or an unknown tag.

As a casual player with a guild of 10 people? RoF will be pretty decent for us and we look forward to it.

Maybe you should have joined better guilds and worked on your issues with authority figures.

Some game leaders are twits... and some are not.

RoF won't require this to be enjoyable.

Past expansions...yes there really was a need to join a progressive and driven raiding guild if you wanted to get anything out of the expansion. That sometimes required growing at thicker skin in order to deal with elitist jerks, overbearing raid/guild leaders, guild mates that assume you are competition as opposed to team mates and all the lazy, rude or incompetent players that go along with the gamer culture at times in spite of its best intentions. In a nutshell: Drama. For some it is worth it but for others it isn't. It just depends if you considered yourself a "have" or "have not" at the time and if it is really all that important. Some just want to log on, do what they want to do without being told or having to endure drama. RoF will probably place less emphasis on elitism and more on the casual play. Which makes sense since expansions seem to have cycles where one is more hard core and the next one is more casual.

Zahrym, for the last five years or so, Sony has made the absolute minimal effort in its expansions. They raise the levels and give us the same spells with new names, raise the AA, and recycle 2/3 of old content for the new expansion. There is no real effort made any more, no imagination.

Anyone of talent is quickly moved off the EQ team (like Steve Klug) to more important games, like EQ2 or EQ Next. What's left is what I like to call the JV squad. The junior varsity squad. Mostly new people with no connection to the game who don't play it, let alone have an end-game level character. I learned this years ago at FFs and getting to know SOE people. Sony doesn't eat its own dog food, as they say it. If they played the game they'd know all the problems we complain about.

They don't care because too many people keep blindly buying.

Great way to get more work on things
Did you test anything in Beta? They were working on testing stuff, and people were trying to give feedback to improve things. Lot of it is copy and paste, but what other things can they give us? I like the addition of the agro meter, may even like the off line trader thing. They took our opinions on the raids and tried to improve them. Problem is, EVERYONE has a different opinion of each situation. Some will be happy with a certain decision, others will be pissed.

I still don't buy that VoA was hard core.

20 guilds finished VoA raid completely. Thats like 1200 people or so out of how many copies of VoA sold. Chances are those same 1200 also did all the group content. Does that denote...easy? Average? Is hardcore an expansion only the top 5 finish and everyone else flounders? Is it the game's fault or is it just that the majority of players are idiots that can't play their class or follow instructions? Its all subjective. If your guild cleared the whole expansion before New Years than its not hardcore but who is to say that play style is the target audience?

Is VoA well utilized and populated? The end zone of VoA is pretty much vacant at the group game. How many people actually go to Pillars other than for required language? How many guilds actually bother to do Sep 5 other than once for the title? How many named in group content get left alive because no one could kill them or felt it was worth killing them?

Beats me. Maybe it is not so much hardcore as poorly implemented but needless to say the majority of the people who bought VoA found little use for over 50% of the content, either because it was too difficult or too annoying. Eventually people will get wise and figure out they are wasting their money and time.

This a cop out argument. I challenge you to name any mmo since the generation one inception that increased in active subs when they catered to the majority & back it up with facts. I can actually save you time, there isn't a single one.

The absolute hardest expansion in WoW was burning crusade, as much as I don't like what the game is..or what it started, this fact is undeniable by statistics (less then .2% finished it before changes were implemented). This was also the peak of active subscriptions in the game. They decided with WOTLK to give a buff over time in the final tier of raids (basically for every X amount of weeks, Y buff would increase so every person could see/finish the content) in other words, Blizzard conceded to the suggestion that everyone should experience everything if they pay an arbitrary amount of money.

There seems to be a basic misunderstanding in what you're paying for, you don't pay for the right to get to see and complete all content on a basis you feel appropriate. By definition of EQ being an mmo you pay for the right to *explore* and if lucky *experience* as much as you're driven too. This mentality of I pay 40$ for an expansion, everything better be useful and I better get to complete all the raids is gen2 and what drives subs down historically for the companies and kills games. Look at any release, you will see a direct decline in active player base associated with the mentality of 'we should all get to do it' is directly correlated as stated in studies.

One main source I used

http://www.hci.iastate.edu/REU09/pub/Main/723/yee-psychology-mmorpg.pdf

I wrote an essay on the subject actually, it's quite interesting. What people want vs what they actually receive is directly relative to their investment in an mmo. Where as it tends to trend if they actually do experience everything & get what they want the majority of the time they become disinterested and disillusioned in the particular game. Where as it tends to trend if they never completely finish a content tier before a new one is released they are more likely to stay focused and interested in the next tier or 'new content' regardless if they finished the previous or not.

If you want to play a game where you feel if you invest an arbitrary amount of money into it you should get to see everything regardless of your effort, maybe try a single player game?