Shadowknight Epic - please reconsider

They have been quite a bit more communicative than they have in the past. They generally don't discuss design plans but they have been recently which is a nice change, even providing patch notes before those patches even hit.

It's nice to see them finally working on the bottlenecks for the epics. It's very much needed for TLP servers with a large population.

It's great that the devs addressed SK epic... With the TLP anniversary server likely to be as popular or bigger than Phinny, I can only imagine the screeching if epics remained unchanged.

Once wiz and enc epics get some much needed bottleneck balancing as well then that should address a lot of the forum toxicity rather nicely.

Curious - what are some of the priorities on that list?

i took that as a threat to shelve these changes indefinitely if people complained too much with the "What about MY epic?!" cause they dont have a comprehensive to do balancing list of epics, nor plans to make a pass at them. they are just fixing this SK issue cause its relatively quick and easy and makes sense, as a turn in NPC being the choke point is just silly.

I would agree that anyone who had a shred of common sense would interpret it as that. Hopefully that includes the poster he was replying to. The question still stands, however.

I did the Enchanter epic and VP key in era before any changes to make them easier. I also don't have a dog in the fight anymore since my server is well beyond this point. My original question has validity behind it but it was also done to poke fun at the fact that they always cave to peer pressure of all the crying.

have a feeling shaman might not enjoy any 'comprehensive rebalance' of their epic.

this is the whole point. Wizards have the same problem, so why arent they being given a chance to fix theirs?

its not the same problem. the sk epic choke was literally the hand in. nothing spawned after the hand in you could have the entire quest done, but not be able to hand it in.

hopefully this means they will start looking at other chokepoints over time, but even though the wizard and chanter epics have choke points, none of them were quite as dumb as simply not being able to hand in the completed quest.

When it comes to the Broken Golem in Fear, it's a DPS racing against other players is an option. Bind on the North Wall, use the eye ball to check if he is up. When you see him get your friends to haul and kill him. It's highly unlikely that your are soloing this encounter.

Marl was just a turn in npc who gave you items needed to trigger encounters for the progression in the quest. SK were waiting around alone in a newbie zone for him to spawn, so they could do the turn in and leave.

Peer pressure implies that we are their peers, we are not. We are their customers. Flexing in response to years of customer feedback about an issue with your product is not "caving to crying".

So not agreeing with the change and then asking the dev team to communicate more are mutually exclusive?
I could be totally fine with this change if the devs would tell us the direction. But right now half the players want and expect a classic experience and the other half want easy mode and a modern game. The problem is that DBG has yet to tell us which way they intend to take the game.

The reality is expansions aren't lasting months on end like in original EQ, with a condensed schedule and only 1 TLP in an expansion at a given time (relatively speaking), the bottleneck issue becomes exacerbated. It seems that DBG may be finally wising up to what Blizzard figured out years ago; catering to casual players while dangling a small bone for your hardcore to ensure that your game doesn't fall into obscurity. What this means is making the game relatively accessible to all, especially those coming back who maybe haven't played since original EQ and have very different idea today of what is acceptable fun. AoC are the perfect example of this. Addressing epic bottlenecks to make them more accessible is another good change. But on the flip side, leaving OW targets available for anyone who wants to go for the more authentic and hardcore experience. Keying/flagging remains largely untouched and can still be a bit of competitive grind early on. Certain side quests remain "as is" and open to the inherent risks of open world competition.

There's literally no downside to this type of business plan, it's about as much of a compromise as you can hope for while maintaining the spirit of EQ. We're not all 14 years old living with parents and playing 24/7. There aren't 15-20 servers all set at the same pace of progression for players to spread out on. I'd say the average age of players is somewhere in the early 30s. Allowing the majority of your players to be able to pick up and put down EQ similar to other games is a good thing.

tl;dr: epic bottleneck changes are good, leave some old school/hardcore experiences untouched, the game is still overall accessible to more players which equals more revenue for DBG and EQ gets to hobble along a bit longer.

tl;dr the tl;dr: Adapt to the changing needs of your customers or fail, simple as that.

Here's the problem with addicts: They just don't care as much about quality as others.

You're right, at the end of the day the addicts aren't paying the bills and maybe DBG is starting to realize that. There's no need to turn EQ into Hello Kitty Island Adventure but there's nothing wrong with making some of the more frustrating content more accessible. Players have options these days and aren't going to tolerate a 72 hour camp like they did in 2001.

Enough of us do

The shame of it is, as you probably agree, if there were some simple common sense changes we wouldn't have so much retention problems.

You are dead wrong about that. If the addicts weren't paying the bills, this game would have shut down in 2002 or so.

Got a list?

There have been a hundred simple common sense changes in the last year or two, how's that working out?

Click from bags was an incredibly good change and I'm really glad the devs did it even though it may have cut into sales of their 40 slot bags

How did click from bags cut into their bag sales? You are nuts if you really think it did. Most players have at most 2-3 clicks. Now, the players that have 3 clicks can buy 3 more bags and bag their clicks. It is a win/win and something DBG should have done years ago.