I wish there was a way to opt out of this installment, as in force my computer to not download it. Oh well...not logging on anymore might be a start, lol.
An expansion. Not nerfs because of a lack of content and having to slow people down. Where did the dev team that did RoF go? That was a great expansion. Unique events, an actual chunk of content that deemed calling it an expansion, other than ridiculous wild rampage and mobs hitting way too hard it was a pretty great expansion. More of that.
I think some of the folks who contribute to Player Studio & others could come up with some great content if they were given the chance to do so & that would free up SOE to focus on their other games since that seems to be management's intent.
I bought Cotf three times... that has just passed that 240 lb German girl to move into #14 on my list of all time bad decisions. constructive comment: more content.
before i get into what i would like to see with the rest of CoTF and what would i like to see with the next expansion, let me ask. 1) were the new spells and aa's that you are not ready to release supposed to be part of "T2 CoTF"? If so why are they not being released with the "T2 " content? 2) are the recent changes to end regen, rune absorb/mana cost/and recast, syllable of renewal not effecting twin cast or mana regen spell's in response to said spells and aa's that are not ready to be announced? if so why are they going live before the new are announced? Now on to what i would like to see from the rest of CoTF if anything else is going to be released other than said spells and aa's that are not yet ready. 1) more zones, CoTF as to date has been a huge let down. limited zones, limited things to do in the few zones we have ( other than instanced HA's which are just down right boring to do over and over and over ). I told myself i wasn't paying for this expansion simply because of the sheer lack of content, lack of enough time in beta and limited things to do. ( i traded krono for my codes which i bought with plat, so i really didnt pay a dime of real $$$ for it and glad i didn't). 2) More HA's and raids seeing how this expansion is centered around HA's , 2 for an entire tier is very disappointing. 3) every class should have access to the same items from the mark of valor merchants, why were some classes left out like casters with weapons? It's like when CoTF craft weapons were released and everyone had a class specific type except for monk/bst, they had no H2H crafted weapons to choose from only 1hb. Again very disappointing that certain class's have to either wait till soe decides to release these items or have to wait till they can do certain group HA's to get a weapon when all the other class's just ran a couple basic HA's for one. I know there are other classes effected with other items but i'm trying to keep it as short as possible. 4) Since most have already chalked this expansion up as a huge failure i will only add one more thing i would like to see before CoTF is done. Having the rare chase items put back into HA's seeing that HA's are what the expansion is centered around. I know it's been said that it was going to take time, and i wont pretend to know how long it takes for this kind of work. But i think this is something that should have been taken care of before more nerf's, just an IMHO As far as what i would like to see in future expansions.... 1) Obviously, more zones, quests and content than was released with CoTF. 2) A SOE statement of what all will be included in said expansion ( how many zones, new spells, AA's, disc's, quests... Really just an idea of what is going to be in it. After CoTF I doubt you are going to find many people who will take the blind leap of faith and pre-order another expansion without more info on what has been put into it. Lets face it, your sales of CoTF obviously were disappointing hence the 2nd round of giveaways for ordering it. Guess that's about all i can add for a constructive comment, at least at the moment.
I purchased 5 copies of CoTF. I assumed it would include at least the same amount of content that RoF had and these new heroic missions, Merc gear, Merc AA, sounded interesting... Until you actually look at them. Merc gear & AA could have been really fun instead we got stuff like "improved spell resistance" and "healing acumen" holy sh*t exciting my merc heals or nukes a TINY bit more. Turns out heroic missions are pretty boring and they replaced most of the group and partisan mission content we had in the previous expansions. A whole 3 new spells per class! At this point even if they doubled the current content I would still feel like it was worth about half the amount I paid. Personally I was shocked to hear they are planning another expansion in 5-6 months considering they have not even delivered on the current expansion yet. They seemed to miss the whole reason why a lot of us enjoyed RoF. Most of us have very fond memories of Velious and they choose a few of those zones to revamp. They also based a few of the zones off old lore again which much of us have fond memories of. I was stoked to kill Statue/AoW and check out plane of shadow and chelsith reborn. I found myself actually reading and following most of the quests. Well someone missed the whole point and came up with the great idea to base the whole new expac out of West Karana. Oh help the poor villagers!! Their homes are on fire!! Sorry but we dont give a ****. Neriak? hated that zone I have no desire to revisit it. Deadhills? Really? If you cannot come up with something completely new at least throw us content that is based on stuff we enjoined ToV, Velks, Sebilis, KC, CoM, VP, CT, Chardok, there are a ton of zones to pull from that would be a ton of fun. The ones they chose for this expansion... not so much.
I agree. If a dev reads this, it's not my intention to offend. That being said, the whole collections thing feels like a realization that there's simply not enough content. It's an answer to the question "how can we stretch this, how can we make it feel bigger than it is". It's not real content in and of itself. Imagine if Velious hadn't shipped with any dragons, but HAD included a quest to collect all the beard styles on the continent. Or if you couldn't do LDoN raids until you'd collected a super rare ground spawn from each of the possible dungeons in each theme.
An on this note - it's time for a fitting "rat-parable". (that's very applicable to this topic) About 7+ years ago I went to an Ozz Fest: A) Because I like my rock on the hard side. B) The original Sabbath lineup was headlining. (a rare treat at that time) Watching the bands during the late afternoon / early evening, it wasn't too hard to notice that they were making up for a lack of truly great material and polish with a lot of "side show". Lots of lighting effects, decorations, make-up, some pyrotechnics - all in the effort to look the part. ie To make their set and show "bigger than it was". Then as the night drew on, a set change left the set pretty much thread-bare. And stacks and stacks of old Marshall amps, (older and taller than I was!) appeared. Add a kinda older large drum-kit - and that was it. Then Iommi (using the SG - with all its black paint worn off the face) and the boys took the house down. They did it with note for note perfection of trued and true content. No smoke and mirrors needed. They just did what they did best. -Rat PS: Please don't reply to this with more "band" related stuff - PM me if you feel the need to. The intent here was to tell a "parable" of sorts - not derail the topic.
As much of a love hate i have for level increase expansions...if they had brought us to 105.... they could have atleast pretended it was content... lol
I bet lvl 105 is a real ideological conundrum for SoE. No one foresaw this going 15+ years. No one thought that lvl 100 would happen. Kinda like no one foresaw the Simpsons running all these years either. Level 100 is just a number, but it is a huge, clean, milestone number. Its one where people might be on the fence both for development and for....do I hang it up? Do we keep it at 100 and go a fresh direction for power ups/advancement or do we crack open the lvl 105 spread sheet and charge on to lvl 255 tiers (which might be a theoretical max) of the same ole same ole . Do we arrest the exponential curve that is player power through nerfs, or do we scale it all down like devaluing pesos through content? Time will only tell. Right now, it looks like the dev team is trying to flatten the curve based on the nerfs. My guess is right now there are lots of meetings that are inconclusive, with multiple view points, which might even involve shutting the game down for lack of knowing how to proceed. This is uncharted territory.
It's not the Dev's fault but they do need to understand the discontent of the player base and pass the message to those upstairs at SOE. I've played this game since 1999 and have never been as disappointed with the state of EQ as I am right now - the lack of content, especially raids, is killing this game. In the last 6 months I've gone from having 6 gold accounts to 1, and still lack motivation to log in and play with my main. Nerfs come and go and we learn to re-adjust and within a few weeks it's forgotten about, however bored players will only mean one thing - people moving on and given this games age we don't exactly get a steady flow of new people filling the gaps. Please do something about the content, it needs to be large enough and hard enough to keep the average player (group and raider) busy for at least 2/3 of the year. Koldanar
I would like to see Raid Mechanics kept out of the group game. Duck when you hear this and run away when you hear something else etc etc aren't really fun for me. I don't raid much at all because I am not that interested in that style of play so I don't really like seeing it enter the group game. That being said I am sure it adds something to the game for those who enjoy such things. I just like to see it kept to raiding as it gives a choice to both those who like and dislike said mechanics. People may say that setting up audio triggers makes it easy to avoid these mechanics but then why even add them if they are that easy to avoid? The only thing I can think of is that its to try and punish boxers and encourage grouping. So the boxers go out and buy [Unmentioned 3rd Party Software] I guess. Problem is I don't think you will really encourage grouping that way. I guess the other way raid mechanics are entering the group game is devs might be creating group content by scaling down raid content and just leaving that stuff in there. That would be sad if that is what is happening. Just my two cents I don't expect everyone to agree with me and I respect everyone else's right to their own opinion.
I would rather see more emotes enter the group game personally. Its about the only way they can possibly make group content remotely difficult at this point. Otherwise its just log in the day of content release, Steamroll through the quests, do the missions quick, Hit the HA's to see whats up and done by the end of the first night... It would be nice if group content had a lifespan beyond hours.
That would help and hurt they need to first make them harder for groups so people can't just box anything they want and not be social. To start to repair the grouping part of the game. Some way of splitting up all these cliches would also help the social aspect by making us meet new people . I am not sure how they can do that but that is something that needs to be fixed. Back in the beginning everything was unknown we all didn't know how skilled everyone was so it let us chat and even poke fun at others while still hanging out with each other. And that made it fun at least I think it did ? Doing the hunters and the 50 million collections just are not really all that fun especially how the named in the heroics were at first and theres really not a reward that makes it worthy of doing it all.
They can't make content hard enough to not be boxable but still be groupable. They tried. Plane of War. The named that are 1 groupable (and theres quite afew for all the naysayers out there), were/are boxable. Let alone the fact people cried so hard on these very forums about PoWar, I doubt it would honestly increase real groups versus boxing. Although I agree with you Hunters and Collections are worthless content In my eyes, there might be some that disagree with me on that tho.
