Why does no one understand how to works in regards to aa vs regular with increased levels and levels of mobs? An AA is a set amount of experience. Levels can't be. This is why 10 yrs ago you didn't even care about there being a 5AA/kill cap and why there weren't AAs that cost 100-150 for a single rank. This is why everything was fine with a 30AAbank cap. You didn't count AA experience in whole numbers, but fractions. At level 51, an AA was the same as the entire level. Later on they introduced the bonus for 4k to help people catch up if they were new. Then they added autogrant. It took us 49 levels to accrue 20k aas on the highest-aa class, and less than 20 levels to triple that. An AA is an AA. Either it's going to take you a year of grinding to buy all the new aas after maxing the previous expansion if they change how all that works, or it's going to take more kills every level than ever before, every year. The thing is, you get 2 years to do 5 levels, and a year to do however many tens of thousands of aas you have left. Which do you get the most power from? Hint: AAs are only locked behind levels at certain ranks to make there a reason to level. The gear isn't that much improvement, only so eti e are the spells really much improvement, but the difference between 4 10 25 and 50 thousand AAs as well as having (slot5)augs and not having (slot5)augs, make the biggest impact. People who left and came back can see this the best because we're not sitting maxed out waiting for stuff to do, but looking at the OMG of things to catch up. If you left at 100 like I did way back, and come back at 110 you saw 10 levels..boohoo...and 35000 aas. The levels aren't what's daunting, never were. Once you start playing again you realize those AAs maje a huge difference but the levels are only incremental. Further proof the AAs matter and should be your worry not the levels: the simple fact of turning on EoK autogrants last year overnight increased the expansion I could comfortably kill in after my break, by more than 2. EoK was when those enormously costly AAs showed up. XP friend is slow, so what. If you don't want to play the name of the game, everQUEST, then suck it up buttercup. Don't complain that quests actually provide experience rewards. What doctor do you want: the guy that only sees people for annual physical but sees hundreds of them a week, or the guy that does everything but less often? Well, unless I'm confident there's absolutely nothing wrong with me, I want the guy with...drumroll...more experience! Mindless grinding isn't worthy of same or better experience than accomplishing new things. Edit: and overseers xp is a joke. They cap it at 10tasks per 12hr period to keep you from using it instead of playing unless you wanna go really slow. I like it for the stupid mercAAs but those are best on experience not Merc experience rewards, so those and the quests and missions all feel like wasted xp to me and I didn't grind out a single % of regular. There's almost too much regular xp to be had if you do ANYthing other than just grind, and if you only wanna kill repeatedly, they have dungeoncrawlers for that. EQ has way too many things to do to waste time just grinding xp and most people don't want to skip all other activities bc "EQ is all about killing" lol it's not named EverKill
I think there is a meta balance. If you gain potent XP from both Overseer and grinding, the overwhelming majority of players will use both and reach max level in a matter of weeks (across multiple characters). The devs understand this and have to balance accordingly (give and take). Grind XP is still one of the primary methods of gaining AA XP. Overseer and Achievement XP allows you to reach max level faster (and more rewardingly) and then switch to grind XP for AA.
I have to agree about what you have said. This is my opinion, that Casual players probably will be happy with even small bones thrown at them with the expansion. It doesn't have to be fancy, just some small fries should be good. This will keep them happy for quite a while, since they may not have ample amount of time to play. If they happened to burn out on the small fries thrown at them, then they have rest of the expansion and other options they can go thru. I think they (returning players/casuals) just need small attention to keep them happy. I don't think they don't demand alot... Players keep returning back and we are keep losing them as I see it. Seems they get overwhelmed, etc. Good amount of players coming back probably don't want to get their time tied up like old days.
Don't worry all you as a returning player have to do is. If you left pre-ToV - relearn how to level. Does the game tell you? Naw not really. Ask around and get told to do ToV progression. Whats ToV? Is an expansion. Maybe you can find it, maybe not. But you need to start up the progression to get good xp post 110. Ok so you are now in EW. Wait. There isn't really anyone there. Maybe someone in gen chat will help. So you go to gen chat. Wait people are doing ToL progression now? CoV progression? Whats that? Well maybe me and a merc can solo....nope. Well what option do I have? All those guys yelling stuff about PL seeeeeem really tempting. Do I have the cash for it? Nope. Well. Time to log.
To be fair, it's due to the servers being at capacity. It's not a bad problem to have as an online game, but the hardware availability issues are costing them a ton of revenue right now.
And everquest has capacity issues too, I have being logging off more that actaully playing as the lag on FV is so bad. Same/same to me, I am not playing either. At least FFViX at least have an incentive to fix their problem, DB has proven they do not care.
