NDA Lifted .. Beta tester thoughts / observations pls

[x] told
[ ] not told

I challenge you to name a college with a 90% first year flunk out rate that stayed in business. I can save you time - there aren't any.

The truth is there's a choice - you either present content that is doable by a reasonable portion of your audience or you watch your audiance slowly trickle away if they have any other option. There are D&D-theme MMoRPG options to EQ. Options that cater to a wider audience, particularly log in and immediately do something useful all on your own casuals,

People should go play those games? They have. 10M subscribers vs. probably 75K subscribers. (Let's go FtP as if the number of people paying for a full subscription doesn't count.)

Given that EQ does have content I enjoy I don't want it to wither away. It's my recollection that the population when PoHate, PoFear, PoTime were still usefully farmed for their drops (rather than something like GoD for BiC only) was EQ's high water mark. And GoD, a more assessable competing product (and some technical slipups) marked its slide down.

With console games taking a revenue hit, desktop computers taking a hit, and only a small handful of blockbuster titles doing well I don't want to see EQ gamble on catering to 5% of its subscribers and hoping the 95% will continue tolerating it.

Of course some players who are on top of the progression hilltop (now that they have finally arrived there) would like it's summit to be as far as possible out of reach of others. It seems to be human nature - I win more if you lose worse. I believe the opposite - I win more if others win too.

Yeah, "everybody wins" is bad. But practically nobody wins is no better.

Zahrym, based on that, if SoE released another "Gates of Discord" difficulty level expansion it would actually be good for business? If so than EVE should be vastly bigger than WoW. EQ should be vastly bigger than WoW, but WoW is still the elephant in the room of the genre. Based also on your assumption, RoF will be a dud for EQ as a whole because it lacks in the hardcore element which will require people to buy the following year's expansion just to be able to surpass what they paid for this year. Just hope you don't have to deal with mudflation, focii rot and all the other tools they use to herd people into the new content even if there is never a chance of seeing even 1/3 of it.

Anyway thanks for the insight. Art reflects reality apparently. A select privileged few will see all the world has to offer but most will just scratch out a living and die before even coming close. Still we all gotta keep on truck'n regardless.

I'm sorry but the argument is wrong, biggest drop in eq subs was GoD, subs dropped UF, both hardcore expansions. WoW subs highest during WoTLK, dropped with return to hardcore Cataclysm. But they beat this horse on the WoW forums. If you had been here for GoD or UF you would have seen what happens when fun is replaced by grind, hard core gameplay that the bulk of your subs can't participate in.

Why does everyone think they deserve a trophy just for participating? I know this isn't real life but it's amazing how everyone thinks their entitled to everything. Smart business caters to the average as the average is usually the majority. You have three tiers of players. Good players which is a minority, Bad players which is also a minority and average players that usually are the majority. Cater to one of the minorities and you lose the other. Cater to the majority and you probably just lose a little from both the minorities. Not everyone can be a success. If there isn't any failure than there can't be any success because you have nothing to base it off of.

Another thing is this notion that EQ is hardcore or even hard at all is also laughable. Sorry but a game were people play multiple characters at a single time does not qualify as hard by any means. If it was so hard they would be struggling since their attention is divided up. Some people play multiple characters for various reasons. Some prefer the solo aspect of it. Some to accomplish things instead of waiting and than there are those that do it to make it more challenging of a game because it is so easy of a game. (Just to clarify I'm only a single account player)

Amorcen

RoF is not hardcore by any means, I guarantee that more then twenty, most likely 40+, will have it finished by the time SoE gives us another major content release. This expansion is Seeds of Destruction 2.0 .

No trophy is required just for having a pulse and being logged on. People just want to be able to see a good chunk of what they pay for and/or have reason to go back to finish it up later if they don't get through it right off. Its not unreasonable.

Should have joined a better guild? Hard to do when you were already in one that was #2.

I never had an issue with authority figures unless of course they decided to use that "authority" to abuse the guild in general. Sure most will sit back and say absolutely nothing when an officer... that has not been on the raid for the first 3 hours "all the sudden logs in" when something they want in game drops.

Like I stated before, there are alot of great players in game that are veterans that choose not to be associated with people like that.

Thin skinned? No, just not a slave to the grind. Nor do I feel that I need to compromise my real life morals for an in game virtual piece of loot.

If this expansion is like SoD 2.0, I must have missed something. I was hoping for more from this expansion, granted, the new achievements might have some decent benefits, but for the characters overall, it is not that good.

For those who say UF was hard, pfft. It was hard if you didn't know your limits. UF was a lot better than VoA imo in terms of difficulty and content that your able to do. The main problem is that people want to play classes that can not solo or molo well. If your able to box, you can get some good combos going and able to beat some content. I decided to box around UF and found it much more fun. I find that I can still do content in each expansion and hoping I can do some in RoF but that to me is a toss up. I was one of the players who threw up their hands at VoA T4 group gear. Other than the difficulty, I just found something else to do and didn't put time into EQ. Like most other players, I am sure that several did not like the constant head banging it took to kill named for VoA. IF this RoF expansion is relative to SoD 2.0 than perhaps I will find some way to spend more time playing EQ, otherwise, I am gonna just sit on the sidelines since I have other things on my mind.

I would agree that not everybody wants easy street, but many just want to get their money's worth of content or stuff to do. I know raiders are in the same boat, they want to have more raids to raid so they aren't just doing the same raid for 7 months or more for the best gear. What ever happened to just have a raid or two that were old school raids? You know, just a burn the raid mob and nothing special, or just one or two tricks. Anguish was the most fun in the terms of raiding that I enjoy and still like to do from time to time.

How is VoA hard? I can 3/4 box pretty much all the T4 named and I'm not a very efficient boxer. It was tough leveling up a bit, but once at 95 with T4 gear, it's not that much of a challenge. The mobs do hit hard and the named have a ton of his, but it's fun to actually be able to use your burn disc's and not have the mobs dead before you finish clicking.

If RoF is easier, I can't imagine anybody who puts any effort into getting some gear, not being able to do well in it.

Honestly I thought VoA was pretty good for grouping. You had a variety of nameds at T4. You had easy ones, hard ones, medium ones. You had easy zones to group in, harder zones to group in. You had stuff for the casual grouper, and the hardcore grouper.
The progression (language) was not absolutely required to max out. It only helped to get T4 gear faster.

I'm glad you're in RoI.

Depends if they tune it up or not before it goes live. In it's current state, agreed.

I think this flawed logic is driving a lot of the odd curiosity with people thinking the expansion was or was not difficult. Not everyone boxes; I duo, at best, with someone - but usually I solo. While I don't expect to be able to kill all nameds in an expansion when it is current, it sure is annoying to barely be able to kill any nameds even in T2 when duoing - thus leaving me without many gear upgrades to try to improve my survival to go through more content. I craft my cultural gear and weapon, then I can solo through the easier half of the t3 missions (the non-raid copies), as well as the first CoB mission. Once I get those few items that I can wear, I'm kind of stalled.

tldr: not everyone boxes or plays at times when grouping is a valid option - the named have way too many hp for folks like that. I was able to solo all but one of the named in the HoT expansion before VoA came out - I hope this one doesn't swing that far in the other direction, as too easy isn't much fun either. There needs to be a surmountable challenge which doesn't require a full group, boxing sucks and is not a fun alternative that I will pursue.

So..because you can't SOLO most if not all of the VoA named...VoA is a hard expansion?

Am I reading this right?

Its their play style. Used to be fairly common. Druids used to be solo class. Most people "solo" anyway, even if it is with boxes and mercs. It is still one actual player. Not sure where the shock and awe is.

As for the tuning, if left be it will assure there will be a more challenging release to follow RoF. Seems to be how the cycles work.

I solo xp pretty great in VoA. I will not label VoA a hard expansion because I spawned a named in CoB while kiting and couldn't solo it. Soloing shouldn't *expect* nameds. If you can do it, that's great.

Zahrym, a key thing this time for beta that doesn't normally occur is - we were told straight up front that there would be no AA and no Spell additions. What was in the game for beta start is what was launching. However, that didn't stop all those threads from going on and on about new things they wanted to see. You can probably see why Devs wouldn't have taken the time (which they sometimes do) to actually post on some of the spell/AA threads.

However, if you posted and alerted them about bug fixes (actual bugs, not someone thinking something was underpowered), those got updated/changed.

So no, this wasn't a typical beta in terms of the types of responses/interactions we got.

Thanks Crys that's more what I was curious about.

You shouldn't be able to kill a named mob with 2 players in bazaar gear. That would be a complete lack of challenge. If you are boxing 3 players with 3 mercs, in current tier gear, you should have little problem. I would consider it hard, if a full group, with T4 group gear couldn't kill a named after a couple tries. VoA does require you to level up and gear up, but once you do, a real group should be able to steamroll it.