RoR is harder for casuals/returning players than VoV, some fixes

Discussion in 'General Gameplay Discussion' started by Tyrval, Jan 6, 2023.

  1. mouser Well-Known Member

    One of the main draws of EQ2 has always been it's solo content. Actually having an endgame and solo dungeons for players. One of the things that keeps me coming back, and I strongly suspect one of the things keeping people here. Lose that, and you may lose a larger part of the player base than you think.
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  2. Heresford Active Member

    Since I got back to the game in 2014, I've soloed exclusively. My guild hasn't been active in years, and pickup groups are not at all the same as they were in 2009 (when I left) going back to the beginning, when a modestly geared toon could easily get into a pickup group at any random time and still get through content with some success.

    I mention this because I honestly don't know if the content and zones in the heroic dungeons are materially different from the solo instances or just harder with a few extra mechanics, steps, stat checks, etc. thrown in. I know the raid zones are different because I can solo many of them from old expansions, but are the heroics? What about them makes them 90% of the game content?

    As far as the original topic goes, there is no way I'd try to bring in friends to play end game content together. The complexity, time commitment, and learning curve are far, far too steep for anyone not willing to invest several hours a week for months researching as well as playing the game. I probably play about 12-14 hours a week. If I were to bring in friends, I would take them to the lower levels only and teach them the tricks of avoiding levelling out of content so we could group in the T2-T5 dungeons.

    Two questions come immediately to mind. First, what is a typical level of time commitment. How many hours a week do the non-casual players play? Second, does anyone here play EQ1 and what is the level of satisfaction of that community with the current state of their game?
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  3. Aethos Well-Known Member


    I'm hesitant to put a number on it, but to stay up with a reasonable pace this expansion, it's a pretty huge time commitment, even compared just to VoV. Maybe 10 hours a week? It depends on if you run with a regular group and if that group is ideal and smashes everything.
  4. ConcealFate Well-Known Member

    You'd be surprised how many people are overly attached to that server that, in the not so distant past, would insist over and over that just because there isn't active raiding...or grouping....or chat...doesn't mean there is a low population. It's an even worse sign that there arent any of those people speaking up now.

    Does that last alliance/pur still exist there? It's past the time to suggest a move to one of the two bigger servers. Everyone else left at least. I understand what your saying about it being a legacy, but anyone on any other server that hears....... "we are going to merge you into AB" and they will quit or transfer to another server asap.
  5. Aethos Well-Known Member

    There are two - it actually peaked at three raiding alliances mid to late VoV doing end game content. There were four, maybe five if you included folks that were raiding but didn't make it to Haunting Presence/Veeshan's Peak. If RoR hadn't turned out to be so god awful, I expect there would still be three.

    As for "they will quit or transfer to another server asap", that's a patently absurd thing to say. Why would they do that? There's no reason to. If they were going to do that, they would have done it already, not do it because suddenly they're getting merged.
  6. Sleppen Active Member

    If heroics and raids were really 90% of the content, I would have run out of things to do years ago.

    All the way back in EQ1, I realized that everyone in an MMO generalizes from their own personal experiences. If you were a raider, then the game was all about raiding. If you were a casual player in a little guild, then the game was all about casual players in little guilds. Everyone extrapolated their personal experience to the whole game, but no one really saw the big picture. I can remember back in EQ1 when people from the uber raiding guilds claimed that they understood what casual players wanted because they played in casual guilds when they first started. In fact, they had no clue, because they weren't casual players. For every person trying to get flagged for the Plane of Time, there was some person still trying to get that last damned snow griffin egg.

    Over the years, I've gotten over this. I don't want to raid any more. If other people do, then I genuinely hope that they have fun with it. I just do what I want to do.

    The point of all this is that heroics and raids may very well be 90% of the game for some players. But that does not mean that they are actually 90% of the game. It just means that it is 90% of what one slice of the player base does with its time. There is nothing wrong with that.
  7. Tanto Done, finished, gone.

    Well yes, but then... no.. The comment that heroics & raids are 90% of the game come from the format of each expansion from about CD onwards. Yes there are solo things to do, but you can easily complete the entire suite of solo content in a given expansion in a day and then it's just repeating the repeatable bits until the next expansion. Each expansion is clearly designed to be a linear progression from solo to heroic to raid, that's not the fault of the players, that's how the devs are designing it. If you choose to only solo, you really are only getting about 10% of the content in that expansion. If I were a pure solo player these days, I'd be asking for a great deal more content... Or, actually no, if I was playing purely solo I wouldn't be playing EQ2 as there's very little point and almost every game on the market is a better solo game than this.
    Priority likes this.
  8. Sleppen Active Member


    This is an example of how your perceptions are affected by your particular choice of playstyle. You are doing the same thing as solos: you are playing the same content over and over again. You're just playing the heroic and/or raid content over and over again, with some of the solo content thrown in. Let's say that there are 10 instanced solo zones in an expansion, to use a round number. There aren't 90 heroic and raid zones. In fact, most if not all of the heroic zones are just group versions of the solo zones. They are more difficult because (duh) they are designed for groups.

    Sure, there's a progression for raiders. From your perspective, that's what the expansion is about. For everyone else, it's just a feature. When you tell us what you would do as a solo player, that's interesting, but in fact you aren't a solo player.

    My complaint with RoR isn't really the volume of content. It's that the content is disappointing and (in my opinion) boring. I suspect that this has more to do with the financial status of the game than anything about a raid progression. That's understandable, but still sad.
  9. Tanto Done, finished, gone.

    You seem to imagine that heroic/raid players don't also do all the same solo content you do. They do it too, and it makes up about 10% of their play time (maybe less) as they do it very quickly. Once you've learned how to rush through the solo content in an expansion, it's just a speed bump. It hardly constitutes adequate content to keep you occupied for a year.

    I think most people have the same complaint you do about RoR. They had a similar complaint about VoV, RoS, BoL.... The quality and quantity of content in each expansion has been substandard for years, and the game has started to look very very overpriced because of that. I'm not talking about the monthly sub, I'm talking about the retail price of the expansion. It's very difficult to justify when you look at what you actually get. It's even more difficult when you put it side by side with other games expansions and DLC. Daybreak imo are just going to carry on with the overpriced cookie-cutter re-skin expansions until too many people get fed up of it. The quality won't improve.
  10. Heresford Active Member


    I appreciate these distinctions, but I'd still like to know: how many hours a day or week do non-casual players play? Also, is the content in these zones materially different from the solo zones? If I do a Heroic I zone, is the landscape and content different from the solo zone? If I then went to a Heroic II zone, would the content be different from the Heroic I, etc.? I only solo, so I don't know the answer to this. I only know that the raid zones are different, since I've been able to solo older content.
  11. Priority Well-Known Member

    The answer you're looking for doesnt exist.

    Some people enjoy this years heroic content, I don't.

    Some folks enjoy this years harvesting and atmosphere, I do not.

    Some folks raid twice a week, some raid 4+ times a week. I kill 2 T1s.

    There's no average for how much time people spend. There's a guy in my guild that claims to have spent 90 hours/week in game every week for the last 2 years while I myself log in the absolute bare minimum because this game is absolutely nothing compared to what it was 10-13 years ago. I'd say I average 9-12 hours/week in game.

    Same guild, same raid force, entirely different ends of the spectrum.
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  12. Sigrdrifa EQ2 Wiki Author

    The big difference between the various instances is what kind of scripts you have to follow to kill the names. They're the same landscape and often the same monsters. Even the raids tend to use the same landscape or buildings.
  13. Tanto Done, finished, gone.

    Priority and Sigrdrifa have answered your points, but I'll just add that the raid zones you can solo hark back to better times when the content was worked on by a larger team and the quality of content was significantly better than today. Usually these days a small number of zones are created for each expansion, and chunks of those zones, or in some cases the entire zone, are used for solo, heroic and raid zones. There isn't usually any artwork exclusive to one or the other. In fact if you keep an eye on EQ1 at the same time as EQ2, you'll see artwork being reused across both games.
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  14. Arclite Well-Known Member

    As others have already mentioned.

    This distinction between different tiers of play is kept to minimal at best.

    Solo and heroic zones share the same zone layout. The scrip on fights have added layer of mechanic with increasing tier which gives a semblance of difficulty but as a matter of fact it all just boils down to stat checks.

    The overland solo zones form the basis of raid zones. There is nothing unique or new to look at. To find that, you need to go back over 10 years when there were plenty of development resources.

    The only pull for me personally is to raid with friends whom I have known since I started playing back in 2005. Everything about this game is boring, repetitive and lacks vision and creativity.

    For solo play, you will find a significantly better experience in picking up pretty much any mmo out there with a decent population.

    It is just a shame what they have done to this game which we all know was once very good.
  15. Sleppen Active Member

    I don't imagine that at all. In fact, I mentioned it in my prior post, which you probably didn't bother to read carefully. Anyway, you're in the peculiar position of telling soloists what they do with their time. But you really don't know, because you aren't a soloist.

    Anyway, this gets back to my theme. In an MMO, people think that their own particular experience is universal. You think that heroics and raiding are 90% of the game because you spend 90% of your time on it. That's what you just wrote. It may be difficult for you to grasp that, for a soloist, the stuff that consumes your time is just a game feature that we don't use. And that's fine. I hope you have fun with it.

    The rest of what you wrote is just projection. I thought that the prior expansions were just fine. We're a long way from the glory days of EQ2, but I found them satisfactory. My only major gripe is the number of gimmick fights, but that's a different subject for a different thread. RoR was the first expansion that left me feeling disappointed.
  16. Priority Well-Known Member

    Lol, you read a whole lot into a statement that wasn't in that. Nowhere did he tell you how you spend ypur time. He told you how those of us taking advantage of all the games content spend our time. Anyhow, please enlighten us to the content that "Soloists" do that the rest of us can't begin to imagine. I'm intrigued.
  17. Smashey Well-Known Member

    I mean yeah, the last unique feature we got were familiars and overseers. Both ideas stolen from EQ1 and other games.

    We have gotten zero new classes since Tears of Veeshan in 2013 with the addition of channeler.
    We get reused assets for summer updates. The worst example was last years VP which just slapped more health on mobs. Zero hard fights at all through the entirety of Fabled VP. No changes to mechanics at all. A huge wasted opportunity.
    We get no real class balance, all defensive classes is just there to fill the room.
    Every single raid encounter killed so far in current expansion have had zero or 1 mechanic. Nothing hard whatsoever.

    I think the last unique idea in EQ2 were Diety points and that was just an endless grind.

    EQ2 of the last 10 years have been mostly do as much as we can to sell a product, lock people out of content for a few months to force sell expensive expansions and then we take an old classic zone and slap more health on the mobs and sell that as a content update together with a new season of p2w familiars and crates.

    The game has been a complete META shiny collection at expansion launch, which takes around 1½ months, then login to do overseers and then raid log 1/2/3 times a week until you can spend another $249 to not be a viability for the first couple months of the expansion and pull your weight.

    I am impressed they managed to keep 20k players subbed to this game with the lack of updates, fixes, creativity and content to play.
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  18. Sleppen Active Member


    No, you're not getting it. Soloists play the game differently than you do. This does not mean that there is some package of material that you can't do. Quite the contrary. Everything we do is something that you can do and almost certainly have done. The difference lies in how we spend our time.

    You invest a great deal of your time in gearing up to beat the raid content in each expansion. That's fine. I used to do that back in EQ1. I am not belittling it at all. But from the perspective of a soloist, that is a feature that we choose not to use.

    This is a gigantic game, running from your arrival on the boat with Captain Varlos through the raiding zones in RoR. It involves everything from adventuring to tradeskilling to collecting shinies to decorating houses. There are heritage quests and event quests (Erollisi Day at the moment) and overseer quests. There are lots of things to do in this game that have nothing to do with beating the raid content in the current expansion.

    You can do all of those things. If you've been playing for a few years, you've probably done most of them. The difference is how you choose to focus your time. If you and I play an equivalent number of hours in a week, you will spend the bulk of your time doing things that I don't do, and vice versa. If you play a lot more hours than me, you can do both. If so, it has no affect on me at all. I have plenty of things to do.
  19. Priority Well-Known Member

    So, you believe i can feasibly spend the same amount of time raiding AND doing heroics than you can soloing? My guy, theres not that much heroic/raid content. Both heroic weeklies take about 90 minutes total to knock out. Raids are 3 day lockouts and take around 3 hours/zone to clear right now. What else do you think raiders are doing outside those times? Its not raiding zones that dont exist or running heroics theyre locked on...
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  20. Aethos Well-Known Member


    VP did have changes. Not many, but they were there.Kluzen, Ekron, Kindasorta Druushk, Cinder Queen (aka the drake whose name I can never remember, though this was only different due to a shorter leash range invalidating old pull spots. Silverwing, Phara Dar. I might be missing some, but all of those fights are at least different in mostly small but not insignificant ways.