That isn't the only problem. Some of those team members have been at the company far to long and become complacent in their jobs because of being a veteran holds more job security. Its not a matter of being overworked but I'd say a more a matter of complacency. You only need to look toward Dzarn and Jchann, for the type of work they do compared to the others.
I like the concept, but wish there were more zones then just 3. Are we getting multiple instances of the open zones when they get to crowded? Having 200+ people piling into a zone trying to do tasks/progression is going to be BAD. Remember Argin-Hiz and the fun of that progression............. As long as all 15 raids are worth doing then its good. Having 15 raids means nothing when at least 7 would be worthless to do like NToV was after a month. Speaking of Hate and Fear, I would jump for joy if the raid versions are old school; corpses cant be summoned out and gear locked on them with a lot of hard hitting trash to clear. It would be awesome to crack the zones with random trash wondering in from all sides. That is what made raiding fun back in 99-00. But then again even a large portion of my guild would cry about that The pricing points are very steep for the amount of content we are getting for an "expansion".
I'm sad they fixed the Z-axis aggro training in Hate Enchanters need something more challenging to do!
The beta does sound short, but it its true to what they have said and the raids/group content is finished then its no problem. How many times have we gone in to test a raid to find out that 1/2 the stuff in the raid are still being programmed and the night is pretty much worthless for both the devs and players. It hasn't even been worth testing the first month of beta in the past. It sounds like the devs want to avoid that this time around and I applaud them for that.
Pretty sure Fear/Hate will be instanced. I don't see how else the level-based scaling ('the highest lv player in your group or raid') could work.
Shrug, we do all 7 raids in 2 hours, congrats 98% of the loot rotting or going to alts, and the only issues are achievements and still paying attention to the raid.
That's not progression, 150+ players trying to do progression is not going to work with only 3 (5) zones.
Fear, Hate will have raid instances for sure but if you watched the stream, he just clicked and zoned into hate. I see a PoW style zone for Hate and Fear myself. After that you have Plane of Health being the first zone of the progressing storyline and new expansion. From there you zone into Life and use a mirror frag (clicky) to zone over to Decay and again back to Life. I assume this clicky is obtained in Health and maybe Life progression. After that, we have 1 unknown zone for sure. They also stated there are 2 tiers of raids, and end zone (Arx type) locked being the T1 progression raids. I am assuming this is the one unknown zone. With 1 tier of Vis and 2 of weapons and non vis I wonder if we wont see armor upgrades until the end zone.
From what I gathered there is progression but only one tier of raids and gear (with 2 different sets). So all the progression raids will be done every week. 1st raid is just as good as the last.
You might be right, he did say each raid will drop a best in slot item keeping the raids viable all year. I wonder if they will just drop less visible pieces. Either way it was mentioned that an end zone would be locked behind the first "set" of raids.
Actually, I am just watching it now and he tried and couldn't just click and go into Hate. They had to cheat and use a Dev tool to go there. "Do you guys want me to go to Hate just to prove that it exists? I'm not sure that it is set up. Nope, maybe not". I am watching closely because I'm looking for the real names of the upcoming zones. I hate (no pun intended) when they don't put any thought into zone names which makes it harder to know what zone you are talking about. Just to mention, when they finally used the Dev tool to get there, it said, "Entering The Plane of Hate", which I hope gets changed later to a different name, to distinguish it from the real Plane of Hate. "Plane of Loathing" anyone? There is a whole thesaurus.com, please use it.
BUT .. some of us, THATS .. how we Love our EQ.. The thrill of the race to first, second, yadda yadda yadda .. How fast did you complete all prog ? 2.5 sec ? I did it in 1.3 sec MWHAHAHAHA To some of us, Thats where we are at, and hooked and love the fact that yes, its not handed to you on a silver platter, you have to be in line, or get in line an simply run missions. We love the actual race to first. Thats why I personally hope it is like that .
And what if the PoFear /PoHate raids = Locked behind beating entire expansions raids .. and you have to beat one of the outter planes to get to the next ? Then what people .. guess what, THATS .. progression in an of itself.. and thus .. whats your next nitpicking ?
Content is so easy now the race means nothing. It comes down to who can log in the fastest and miss work to beat the raids 30 minutes before another guild. Same thing goes for group stuff. Except, the quicker you beat that the quicker you become bored and stop logging in. Whooo what a thrill this race is!
Being that my progression group has been within the first 5 groups to be done on server launch for the last 4 expansions on all servers, I think I have that race covered. Just trying to help you out.
