Things I'd LOVE to see on the "roadmap."

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Volas, May 10, 2022.

  1. Volas Lorekeeper

    1 - Get rid of the utterly obnoxious absolutely TERRIBLE "Thunder" sound file. Its atrocious. It's been atrocious since day 1. There have been multiple independent fixes simply by replacing the sound file. So i *know* its not difficult to do. Blowing out my friggen eardrums in EVERY zone every 60 seconds is unbelievably irritating. Its been 20 years. Enough now.

    2 - Turn DOWN the Scarecrow, Skeleton and every other mobs obnoxious sound effects. While this sorta ties into 1, again, multiple independent fixes have already been done, so we all know this isnt difficult. But hearing AHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA at maximum volume on my headphones every 10 seconds fighting at Dragonscale Hills farm is literally enough to drive any man completely insane. Its not that they do it.. its that they ALL do it WAY WAAAAAY louder than any other SFX around them. Nobody can argue this. Its terrible. This cant take more then 5 seconds to actually FIX the problem.

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    those are the EASY ones... the rest.. well.. Im strapping on my flame proof troll suit as i type this..
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    3 - Im level 92 now. I already have FOUR HOTBARS full of friggen buttons, 90% of them I have NO idea wth they're supposed to even DO. This is utterly obnoxious. Couple of my guildmates are saying they have 7-8 hotbars FULL of buttons, and even they arent 100% sure what every one of them do without right clicking them (praying its an AA) and reading teeny tiny print.. in the middle of a fight.. while trying to keep the group going. This doesnt even count the bar they have for potions, the bar for clickies, the bar for combat abilities..

    There is only one real solution for this, and its fairly simple. They've done it before actually...

    We (once again) need a MASSIVE AA Purge/Merger. This isnt even cute anymore. Ive got 2-3 different AA that invis me to Undead, plus 2 spells. WHY!? There is no point to this. There's literally DOZENS of examples of this, and thats just the ones Ive located. I'd be willing to bet real money the community could find a hundred more examples of completely redundant and/or absolutely irrelevant/useless AA abilities. I personally have at *least* six different AA that Add to my Armor Class and Reduce Incoming Damage.... SIX DIFFERENT buttons to do the EXACT same thing!!!

    Looking at EQ strictly as an outside observer, an not the 20+ year veteran that I am.. I can absolutely get why nobody wants to bother past PoP and all of the TLP servers die the second that GoD comes around. Who the heck wants to try and memorize EIGHT HOTBARS FULL OF BUTTONS WITH TINY WORDS ON THEM!? That's NINETY SIX different abilities to memorize and use. Its a nightmare. Im a die hard EQ fan, and Ive had it up to my neck with this nonsense already.. nevermind adding 4 more (48) rows of buttons to memorize!!!

    Allow me to be 100% clear.. when I say massive purge.. I mean MASSIVE. Nobody should have to MEMORIZE and be able to effectively use 96 friggen different buttons. Nobody. There isnt a person alive on this planet that could possibly find that entertaining or fun. 20 buttons is seriously pushing the limits of fun in the modern MMORPG. You're topping out in the TRIPLE DIGITS..

    4 - You (again, partially related to #3) need a MASSIVE number crunch DOWN. I saw a berserker do 1.2 MILLION damage in 2 hits.. the mob lost like 30% health. This is absolute insanity. Of course you're getting lagged out servers.. they're crunching THOSE kinds of numbers non-stop over hundreds of thousands of combats across the realms. People have 60,000 AA points. SIXTY THOUSAND AA?!

    Now I get it.. when SOE had this game, there idea of a "new" expansion was to add a zero to the end of the mobs hp and call it "progression." .. its a tough pill to swallow.. but something has GOT to be done to get these hyper inflated absolutely bonkers numbers under control. Its time for you to step up and break the cycle and fix the problem.

    (EDIT.. forgot this one! ) 5 - Get rid of the old defunct and out of use mechanics like Spirit Shrouds and useless NPC's like "Beta Mercenaries". That would clean up some more irrelevant and/or useless things from the game. (Just give em a /claim item. problem solved.)

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    Thank you for reading.
    ChiiChii, Shenovar and Ariana like this.
  2. Viper1 Augur

    Modern EQ is played using multibinding and/or social keys that combine multiple things into 1 button. I raid 2 different characters and they can do all their stuff on 2 hotbars, but mostly it boils down to 5 or 6 keys that do most of the work. The rest are for clickies and other random, one-off stuff. You're absolutely not meant to have 96 buttons that need to be pressed all the time.
    code-zero likes this.
  3. Ariana Augur

    I completely agree with you on pretty much all of this. Not 1&2 directly, I have had sound off for like 20 years.

    The bloat is absolutely insane at the highest level of the game. I don't think you really feel it at GoD, that's not the issue that causes the TLP churn IMO anyway. At that point you can still realistically keybind everything and the cognitive load isn't that high. Most classes still only have a handful of activated abilities outside of spells at that point. It's more of a fear of the unknown that causes people to dip after PoP.

    How do you think the EQ community would handle a WoW style level/ability/stat squash to get numbers back to a reasonable level? Think of how big of an undertaking that would be to rebalance 28 expansions worth of content. You have items from the first raid bosses with +50HP, ranging all the way up to items with tens of thousands of HP. How do you rebalance that? We're talking about pretty much anything in the game that has a number associated. We're talking about reworking the spell system to something with ranked spell lines instead of new spells with % upgrades. We're talking about reimagining AA as a concept to something that scales better than it currently does. Outside of the insane amount of work that this would take, what does a solution actually look like?

    It absolutely should have never gotten to this point, but it's way easier to say "this is bad, fix it" than it is to determine what a realistic solution is and actually get a very stubborn community behind the fixes. EQ players are among the most change averse communities I have ever seen, which explains to a high degree why this kind of necessary maintenance hasn't occurred over the years to any appreciable degree.
  4. Arkanny Augur

    Anyone that has 8 bars of stuff to click doenst know how to play EQ at all honestly. Socials exist for a reason, write your macros, stop whining. But yeah, thunder and hahahahaha skelly sounds ARE pretty obnoxious.
  5. Volas Lorekeeper

    So you want new blood to come into a 20+ year old game, with multi-defunct systems, and somehow learn to write, program and functionally use macros? Nevermind macros for AA's that are extremely similar and redundant and with almost two decades of confusing conflicting information? Is there even an up to date source material for writing macros in EQ that's relevant in 2022 with all the patches and updates? Closest one Ive located was last updated in 2013... 2013!! That was a private page, not even one by DBG!

    Happy to agree to disagree, but there's a problem here.. and its a pretty big one.

    The funniest part is, you're answer will be irrelevant in a few short months, as DBG has already announced a brand new UI. Your "Socials" and "macros" may not even exist anymore. Then what? Ready for 96+ buttons?

    As I stated in my OP.. I have at least 4 AA and 2-3 Combat Abilities that do the same thing. Raise my AC and Lower incoming damage. By your logic, that means, right there.. JUST there.. is 6 or 7 buttons, cause you're not gonna stack the same AA multiple times in a single macro right? Of course not. Hence where the AA purge/merger needs to happen. Cutting down on repeated AA ability spam will go a LOONG way towards solving alot of these problems.

    But hey, as i said, agree to disagree. No hard feelings at all.
    ChiiChii and Dre. like this.
  6. Bigstomp Augur


    Not every disc or AA needs to go on a hotbar.
    In fact most of them have no business on a hotbar.

    Put the buttons you intend to actually use on the hotbars.
    You should not be reading your hotbar buttons mechanics in the middle of the fight.
    You should know what they do before you add them to the bar.

    Use what you know. As you learn new buttons, retire old buttons when you decide you no longer need them.
  7. Volas Lorekeeper

    They've made plenty of decisions everyone has insisted time and again will "kill the game." Good lord were you around when they announced Mercenaries? It was like Y2K meets COVID meets Mayan Calendar around here. Krono will "Kill the game", allowing EQ to run in a window will "kill the game."

    EQ has been killed so many times at this point I'd have to assume its a full on zombie :p
  8. Celephane Augur

    It's been 20 years, quit playing with sound, giants won't sneak up on you


    Learn your class and the buttons will all make sense
    Joules_Bianchi likes this.
  9. Flatchy Court Jester

    You dont sound like a 20 year old veteren. With your confusion over the amount of hot buttons you NEED up. Im guessing another one who played early on then ran to the next shiny (WOW) , got disillusioned then came back home. Why would you need every activated AA up when you obviously dont use half of them? I have lots of spells yet get by with the spell gems they allot us.

    Skells are annoying , that has been a complaint since day one. Turn off your sound and listen to music instead lol.
    Ozon and Joules_Bianchi like this.
  10. Svann2 The Magnificent

    If there is something you dont need or dont know what it does then dont put it on a hotbar.
  11. MacDubh TABLES!!!

    The AA bloat is especially daunting around those levels. With autogrant you all of the sudden get drowned in new abilities every few levels and it can be hard to know what they all do.

    As previous posters have said, a lot of the stuff you don't really need and others is extremely situational to the point you will almost never use it.

    That being said there could definitely be some consolidation of AAs. For instance couldn't most classes burn AAs be grouped in to Burn 1 and Burn 2. Obviously you can macro it that way, but that doesn't indicate when the refresh timer is ready so you still need them up on the UI unless using Gina for timing.
  12. Svann2 The Magnificent

    I think jumping ahead with Heroics makes it hard to know how to handle all the abilities.
    Flatchy likes this.
  13. Burdi Augur

    As for the 4 hotbars, i got the secret hack solution!
    Just bind all you spell, ability, and Aa to one or two keys and spam spam spam!!!
    You just need one or two keys to play EQ.
    MacDubh likes this.
  14. strongbus Augur

    playing a bst i have 6 hotbars and i only really use 2 of them during a fight. 3 during raids. the other 3 are just stuff i use now and then and just don't feel like having to go looking for it.
  15. Waring_McMarrin Augur



    The size of the hits isn't causing lag as computers have no problems doing math on those numbers. What would cause lag is the number of hits when players are doing some sort of damage 10-20+ times every second.
    Skuz and Svann2 like this.
  16. Tucoh Augur

  17. Ozon Augur



    Same as a SK, although I suppose I could go down to 2 hotbars at all times if I made some more multibind keys. But I am picky like that
  18. Ariana Augur

    While multibinding is a bandaid to hide the bloat, remember that there was just a dev post talking about how the sheer number of spells going off and ability spammage is a significant contributor to lag in the modern game. There is no way multibinding helps with that.
    Skuz likes this.
  19. Joules_Bianchi A certain gnome

    I played World of Warcraft from the end of Warlords of Draenor through Legion and then abruptly quit playing WoW ever again.

    Why?

    Thirteen TRILLION (not kidding) "Artifact Points" to max out the class defining weapon while getting to max. Mostly by feeding crack to addict NPC around the world).

    The next expansion saw a "stat quish" and a rollback of the whole game, including artifact weapons.

    NOPE.

    HARD NOPE for me. I never even logged my characters back in.

    /logs back into Everquest and loots a Spiked Seahorse Hide Belt and vendors it for 15k.

    The whole POINT of Everquest is it is ever lasting. Rewards gained in 1999 are still assets in game.


    What everquest DOES need is something like Gribbles for Moloers, Like a new Overseer, but you actually play the game as a catch up mechanic.

    Stop making the game smaller, make getting characters bigger easier over time.
  20. Cadira Augur

    The team has already stated their goal is not to bring new blood in, and rather to retain current players or bring back old players.

    The old players can enjoy constantly new released tlp servers to avoid the complexity of higher level if that's not their thing, and the veterans on live can merge most of their buttons on socials to reduce clutter and enjoy the complexity of finding what abilities do what to max their efficiency to separate them from the bad players if they want. Or just keep being bad and not care by playing casually. Everyone's (kinda) happy.

    Sound can (and should - lol) be turned the hell off.

    Any change to the non-sound issues you presented would require massive amounts of work, produce tons of bugs and be completely unwarranted to the majority of players they would affect. The team can't even fix the real issues the game currently has, let alone reinvent the whole wheel.