Yeah on the switch to /tell or some other mechanism...It was truly Hailquest on some in this expansion...I don't see a sense of achievement in getting 12 separate updates for hailing an NPC. (Unless it gets me a +12 Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch)
Alright Ms. Negative, i want to actually work through a story, not have it stream lined in 5 minutes via quest journals. Is that so hard to understand or are you just dense? Geeze
Hmm. How does one answer this, when they love all of Everquest? Over these past few weeks, when things have felt unsteady and I have had to face the question of, "Well, what the hell do I do if this wonderful world ceases to exist? What other game offers what Everquest has?" Every time that I log in, I have a laundry list of fun and interesting options laid out before me: 1. Endless QUESTS: Even though I have finished main prog in TDS on my main, there are still so many other things to do in TDS, like finish hunters and quest achievements. OR, I can keep working on those older quest items that I have not yet finished but want to, like the Bic aug. I still haven't finished prog in VoA and Underfoot. I still haven't finished Hero's Journey. I still haven't finished Slayer. Currently a large part of our guild is working through PoW prog and faction, and that has been a blast. The list goes on and on. It is an embarrassment of riches. 2. RAIDS: Oh how I love thee, raid. Getting together three nights a week with my EQ besties. Even when an expansion is beaten, it is still so much fun to come back, over and over, not only to get gear for everyone, but to see how much better, faster, and stronger we all get over time. This is not to mention the hilarity of my peeps over vent. 3. NEW CONTENT: I know that about once a year, I get to see all brand new things. Brand new quests, brand new zones, brand new raids, brand new tradeskill items, brand new mobs, and brand new achievements. This is my Christmas. This is worth the wait. 4. TRADESKILLS: Not only fun to find new items to make, not only a decent way to make money in the game, but oddly relaxing. 5. Character IMPROVEMENT: It is seemingly never ending, these ways to improve one's character. There is always a better aug somewhere, or a clicky, or quest or whatever that will make you one-enth degree better - that on its own this one minuscule enhancement would mean nothing, but taken as a whole all these little tiny steps add up to one great thing that make what you do, what you are, that much better. That journey of character enrichment is also incredibly individualistic, because at the end of the day the choices you have made in the life of your toon has made that being unlike any other in Norrath and entirely your own. How wonderfully satisfying. 6. COMMUNITY: The Everquest community is like no other. It is a rare day that you don't have an interaction that touches you, makes you laugh uproariously or, on rare occasion, brings a tear to your eye. There is always help to be had, from somewhere or someone. The word Guild here means something, it has weight and value. Many EQ friendships go beyond play and stretches into real lives. All of these things and more are what I value and enjoy about Everquest. I have not tried to look and see if other games offer all of these fine attributes, because I know in my heart that there are none that would fully satisfy me. There may be other, newer games that "look better", but none of them will have the richness and depth of this game. It would be akin to eating every day at the finest of restaurants, and then being forced to dine at McDonalds. Thank you, Windstalker, for asking the question. I hope that you are afforded the opportunity to help this game continue and grow. Best always, Mayfairre Warrior of Reckless Ascension Bristlebane
The old style quests existed for people that enjoyed solving them. For the most part, they were not essential to "progress" in the game. It was merely another path for people to take. Freedom of play style. I knew a lot of people that spent hours and hours happily wandering around getting clues and piecing things together. They loved that process. Now, you're practically forced to quest if you want to do anything (required progression to access zones). It's no longer about the joy of questing and figuring things out, but about checking boxes to go forward. The spirit of questing is gone. It's now forced and handheld. At some point, someone looked at the name of the game and figured that means everyone has to quest and forced it upon the entire population.
On the other hand we should not go back to Planes of Fear times, I doubt people would have fun nowadays to zone in, die and recover corpses 17 hours with the danger to loose all your equipment, login in and out, having telephone conferences with guildmates (no skype at that time) to dicuss the possibility to get a cleric to safe spot.... no no noo that is a part I don't want to have back. Or wiping in old Planes of Hate having a poor mage summoning armor and weapons for the whole raid so we were able to get back..... Oh my memories coming back, dying deep within Lower Guk not able to get char back, or fell into the Hole in lvl 20 and meeting a GM without mercy and all your stuff was gone....
Into midday Monday, not a word from Daybreak about the issues on Saturday (thot a 2xp) would be announced. And even more alarming, no new TLP announced yet!
I've been thinking about this a lot, and this is what I've come up with. The opportunity: EQ's systems and behind-the-scenes coding for what spells and abilities can do have evolved impressively over the years. Devs are passionate about EQ and want to use these systems and code to do cool things and deliver a magical and wonder-inducing experience to their players. The problem: EQ's design space is so utterly used-up and cluttered now that you can't see the floor when you look down, and figuring out what to meaningfully reward the players with is incredibly hard beyond just following the formula and giving them their teeny tiny progression "fix" with each content update/expack. A solution: do an experiment in reclaiming design space. See what you can create within EQ's engine and systems when liberated from the current design knots and the red-dwarf star that is constantly designing toward an endgame. Possible steps to implementing this solution: Fork the database. (I see no other way around this.) Make an experimental server using this different fork of the DB. Give the server a limited run (give it a defined start date and closure date, lasting perhaps six months in total) Use this server as a blank slate upon which to focus and distill good design elements from Live while discarding anything that's just bloat. I recommend something like the following: Max level of 50 Revised spell and AA progression: Integrate some modern spell and ability complexity (e.g. target of target mechanics, defensive proc buffs, free-cast AoEs, multi-in-one buffs, etc.) into ability progression in those first 50 levels, while shedding 50% to 70% of the normal servers' hotkey bloat. Give any copy-pasted-with-bigger-numbers spells simplified Roman Numeral'd names (Fireball I, Fireball II, Fireball III) so that the system is coherent and easier for the community to discuss with clarity. Enable AAs from about level 10 onward and provide some AA points as quest/level-up rewards while also allowing them to be grinded for. Make AA point expenditures into meaningful specialization (or hybridization) choices. For instance, include things like Warrior wield-style proficiencies among the available AAs. Revised item progression: Make weapons slower or make haste lesser, in order to make scrolling combat text comprehensible without the aid of a parser. Deflate stats back to near-Classic era levels. Include numerous augmentations and design them in such a way as to provide players with interesting choices and help Crafting be immediately relevant. Use familiar systems, zone files, and model assets to create a new and unknown gameplay experience: For a starting run, make the world consist of a very limited number of static zones (perhaps 7 to 12) and just a few types of instances, in order to keep design tight and make the world feel focused and coherent for testing purposes. Since you're forking the database, feel free to go off the rails and radically redesign zone populations, quest arcs, and anything else you like. Tell us some new stories using familiar assets. Alternatively, if it would save on design time, just make the server into a Diablo-esque progression romp through a series of old dungeon zones, keeping the focus on combat and questing and perhaps requiring completion of one zone to progress to the next. Either way, definitely make use of the Housing system, and make it important. Make it a thoroughly gameplay-useful place where players will want to return home to after their adventures (rather than mostly a museum of phat loots). Monetize the server in support of EQ's future: Allow basically unrestricted play up to level 20 for free. Require All-Access to go farther. Be perfectly willing to bite the players with the pay-wall just when "it's getting good" (they're reaching some of their first major AA allocation choices, etc.) Use the server as a testing ground in support of EQ's future design, and to foster the community coming together to really give serious feedback about what's fun in the game: Incentivize playing on and achieving things on the experimental server by offering /claim rewards for regular Live characters once the experimental server's term has ended. For instance, offer a reward for reaching max level, a reward for completing particular quest arcs, etc. Placeable house loot is a good start, and I'm sure players can suggest others too. Gather feedback from players about what they like or dislike about the experimental server compared to the regular live servers. Compile the data and iterate a new experimental server every so often to continue refining things. Going forward, also consider crowdsourcing experimental server design ideas and/or eventually allow MineCraft-esque private server hosting. If taking the latter route, sell hosting development kits and tools and/or crowdsource their creation. Basically, create a situation where Daybreak can keep monetizing EQ while reducing its personal overhead in the matter and tapping into the ideas and passion of the community. How to balance the above against designing fuel for the regular live-server endgame is a question I leave for the devs and fans to answer. Just my two copper as someone who finds he enjoys the exploration and sense of progression and character-definition within EQ, a lot more than he enjoys the endgame.
I like the roman numeral idea, but would modify it slightly. Many (if not all) casters have specific spells that are copy pasted throughout life: Mage / Bst / Necro pets, Ench mezz, charm, Wiz nuke, etc. These "main" spells should "grow" with the player throughout life. Introduce the variant spells (heal over time, proc based slow, reverse damage shield, etc) as the character levels.
Why do I play? hmmm I play to be with my wife and because we love EQ. My wife and I having been playing/grouping together for 4 years now. She started the first day the game went live and I started in 2003. We met in BoT 4 years ago. Got married a year later and 5 days ago we celebrated our 3 yr anniversary. We play our own group. I am the SK, Chanter and Mage and she is the Cleric, Druid and Shaman. After all these years I can't play without her. We love EQ, even though we do not like all of the recent decisions that have been made concerning xp nerfs and merc nerfs and HA nerfs. We left EQ back when TDS first went live and found a new game but of course it wasn't EQ, so after a month or so we came back. We bought TDS and made our way to 102 (almost 103) then left again because even before the recent news of DGC and CN we were afraid this game was dieing. Well we decided to come back again yesterday and stay til it closes. Since my wife started playing this game the first day it went live, we want her to be here the day it closes. No more leaving this game we love. I will miss our 25% discount we had on all 6 accounts but that's what i get for cancelling our subs so early before they lapse. So now the reason we play is because we love this game too much to go anywhere else. We are starting in HoT with our 102 toons and finishing expansions for as long as we can. Killed 195 mobs yesterday that were green and light blue and I don't think we got a single percent point but we killed 5 names to finish hunter. Still 3 more names to kill for my wife's cleric but we will get there.
It was a ddos attack. Which means it wasn't their doing or fault, so I personally don't expect them to compensate me for it.
I have a very varied and odd playstyle. I moved to Firiona Vie couple years ago and love it. Love how I can gather all sorts of twink gear I wouldn't have every planned to do in the past, it's caused me to go to all sorts of old areas I either haven't been to in a while or never went to (though I have played since EQ beta). For example I've been taking my three 72 characters (yes I haven't progress beyond 72 despite playing since launch lol) and been farming Skyshrine armor quests items from the Temple of Veeshan. I never got that far in content back in the day and it's been a lot of fun. Now I'm twinking characters with that armor (after working up their faction which has also been fun). I *really* enjoy finding ways to experience lower level content, so I keep creating new characters with my own mindset, such as super twinked or ones that don't get twinked at all, or ones that progress through only old world content for the first 50 levels etc. I don't like bursting to the end game and just sitting there, I do that in other MMOs but I won't allow myself to do that here. Why I won't make my 72's heroic, I want to experience the content as I go up (though I did create a new heroic 85 character for farming purposes). I do like the auto AA feature... it bumped me from 180AAs to 1800AAs, really showed me how far behind I was. It allowed my tank to stay viable without having to farm thousands of AAs to catch up. I would really like to see the game do things to bring in new players and make it easier for people to jump in. I really can't even recommend EQ to anyone these days since it's such a harsh experience (UI, graphics, etc), mostly in regards to usability. I'd love to see more tradeskill usage at all levels. I'd also love to see better guild recruitment tools. It's hard finding a good group of people after coming back. I love progression servers though it seems like they outpace me after the first couple/few months and then I have to wait years for another one to come around.
in response to lenowills forking of database: sod was perfect place to fork everquest into something new while retaining old , could have easily called it everquest realms, built on the settling of qeynos and moving out from there , a truly empty game world. expanding zone by zone as folks moved out into it creating different hometowns and back storys forever changing the route everquest took but keeping basic game mechanics the same we could be a part of finding hi keep and other small towns or even use the landmark game to build them by the players. town quests could be player driven as in needs of supplys for town building and such .
This is an outside of the game request, but on the new Daybreak boards can we get more then just the "Like" button, a "Laugh", "Disagree", "Agree", "Thanks", "Hug", "Groan", "Yay!" and "WTF!" button would really add some colour to the boards... oh and lots more smileys too!
what happend to being able to grind for exp as in olden days, what made eq cool was fact of find friends go camp someplace and level by grinding and shooting bull with friends, I feel like devs we have now all want to make this like wow where you quest for exp and then get nothing for grinding. if i wanted to play wow i would, i liked eq for grinding and grouping with friends, it is what made the game social. however you can grind for 8 hrs now adays and never see half a level.
