A Note from Kander

They haven't been remade as super-grindy and pay to win yet, though, unlike end game; I think that was more Tkia's point.

I am gathering from this thread that there is considerable work to be done both on live and on TLE for the devs to revive PvP again?

Hopefully they will have an announcement if they plan to do it once they finish or not. The openness and transparency is quite refreshing.

Can you imagine PVP on unplayable Server with 2-5 minutes Screen Freezes and/or horrible lags ? I can't its hard to play on PVE Server at the moment let alone PVP Server......

Loot? Who said anything about loot? Although the automated scripts have been breaking that on a regular basis for several years now. Particulary the unique tradeskill quest reward items that shouldn't be getting touched by automated scripts at all.

I'm more concerned with this worrying new trend of changing game mechanics that have been around and working fine since launch or soon after, in order to hide the shortcomings of some of the more recent content.

That's DBG standard operations in a nutshell.

I've had this horrible "what else can they do to mess up crafting" feeling in my stomach since AoM -- or maybe even before, when they did away with our first time pristine combo bonus ( long time ago)
and now ... it isn't fun anymore .. I raided for a year, got severe burnout, and went back to casual; but now? ...
NO fun -- I can't get expert books unless I raid, which I will never go back to; yes, I do the Overseer's, but get "junk"
Time for a NEW game for me -- if Pantheon isn't vaporware, I will be there in beta on my chanter .... and they even have a Pantheon store -- yes, EQ has one too, but so do they ...
and I love this game, (look at my sig and see what the date is guys);
but it is time I moved on with no regrets ... I always came back for the crafting, but nothing to come back for anymore
simply the way it is -- thank you DBG

Some are saying the book market is normalizing. The cheapest shadow sage book on my server is 500k. The cheapest ancient empyral teachings book is 10m. Do the devs see some of these books as chase items (EQ2's equivalent of EQ1's Ice Encrusted loot)?

Unless they are revamping the Overseer and TS system, there are a few things that may help:

• Limit expansion TS boosts in the future or set them at a lower level. (TS sig line can have a lower minimum). This way only serious crafters and hardcore players will be able to use the books at the beginning of an expansion release. It will also prevent the proliferation of pocket 110+ Sages.
• Address the plat dupe or players who may have benefited from a plat dupe in the past.

Benito at least you can find some -- I can't even find any
Adept books ( I have most of them), yes, lots -- but the expert ones ? <sigh>
I don't expect Masters or higher -- and I am NOT paying to win -- period
I just want what we always had -- access to the experts

I'm on Skyfire. It's low-mid pop. I am guessing you are on Maj'Dul or HoF?

Edit: It's also possible someone is doing a plat dupe on one or more of the servers and buying up the books (to hoard or grief). Daybreak needs to investigate this point.

I ran into two major problems with the harvest downgrade since my last post.

First: harvesting in lowbie zones, aka all the "new" newbie zones which are T1-T2. How do you expect a new player (or a progression player) to know what tier he's harvesting based on "this can be used to craft something"? With 2 tiers in a zone and small bags, this is really a problem.

Second: I'm leveling a second adorner on Test due to getting all those stupid heirloom adorn recipes from overseer quests. I only had one and it was fine for years, but now the second account is getting recipes nobody can write down so here I am diluting and distilling fragments and powders to get somebody to write them. I grabbed everything from my depot and went to craft... Lo and Behold, I can't know by looking at my bags what amount I have per tier of anything because, well, it's not written down on the items any more. And it is REALLY annoying.

I'm happy for you, I have a couple adept books, need about 8 more sage and 6 or 7 alchemist and jeweler. Although whats the point? I can't be viable as I do not have millions of plat to buy items (like red adorns etc). It breaks my heart to see things selling for 20 million plat or more. (I have less than 5 mil on all my toons combined). I've been around since shortly after launch (and EQ1 prior to that) but it's just no fun anymore. I have neither the time nor the desire to harvest shiny's and rares to sell on the broker. By the time I do all the 'busy work' on my toon there's not much time for anything else and I don't even bother with my high level alts. It's boring and not fun. I remember when you could log in and just play, pick up groups were easy to find and you didn't have to meet 'minimum requirements' to get in group or be effective in a zone I was an end game raider for a few years and then a grind was expected and necessary to meet requirements and achieve raid goals but after awhile that was no longer fun. I have played casually for several years now but never quite able to catch up as the 'requirements' & grind increase with each xpac. I recently started over on a different region and really enjoying taking my time through the low level zones. Unfortunately I will eventually max out my toons again and will need something else to play.
PS No levels on harvesting mats sucks at low levels.

There definitely could be an active plat dupe or players who benefited from a past dupe. Ancient Empyral Teachings (Artisan 120) being the highest in demand with a large market (aggravated by the proliferation of TS boosts).

/shrug Blame being able to sell and buy Kronos on the Broker for a lot of the inflation, and that earlier exploit that the devs could either not fix for the longest time, or didn't care enough about to do so. >:-/

Uwk
who thinks there should be a value cap on the Broker; nothing more than 10K plat, period

I'm honestly confused what you're talking about. Changing mechanics has nothing to do with traditional old questlines, nor will my calling attention to them be a cause for more changing game mechanics. Mechanics and content aren't linked in any way I can see.

You told me not to call attention to old questlines because you were worried that they would change. I said they have already changed. Now you're saying you said nothing about loot. And you continued to bring up a new subject: automated scripts. Which ones?

And what are you referring to when you say "Particulary the unique tradeskill quest reward items that shouldn't be getting touched by automated scripts at all." ? I think if you want something done, or not done, to something, you should name it. It's hard to guess what you mean.

I remember running the Protector's Realm twice a week to get plat. Until the plat chests were removed. At that time, there were several large operations on Freeport server and others where people sold you plat for SOE cash cards, well, the code from the card.

The Kronos made all that unnecessary. And since the people who farmed plat needed the Kronos more than the average player who plays one character at a time, it redistributed wealth pretty well.

But in the same way that there's always some guy with a high price on things buying up the cheap things and adding them to their stack, we now have some people with lots of accounts that have lots of Kronos making veiled threats to tank the price of Kronos "anytime they want." Someone said that on this forum just about a month ago.

I'm not sure if a ceiling on broker prices would help infinitely, but it would be a start. As long as Kronos are left out of that ceiling.

It still wouldn't help places like Rivervale which don't have the history of plat farmers.

I think that as a group we should identify those things that multiboxers need and focus on selling them. Shiny's would be nice. But the rare ones are no trade. And there's no point trying to SLR a shiny in the landscape. You'd have people crowding you.

Wish we could sell the 7 day raid reset baubles. That would make some money flow.

Surely a contributing factor to everything being is so expensive on broker is because there is so little worth buying.
Plat exploits aside, it seems to me so much is no trade/heirloom that plat just accumulates and the few things that people want are put up for huge prices.

Other than plat infusion and crafting fuel is there much in the game that sucks plat out of the economy?
The cost of infusion though seems to be extremely punitive to players of lesser means (ie. have not purchased Krono's to sell)

I promise there was no veiled threat there. I speak plainly. Most of it gets used to keep several friends of mine playing EQ1.

I want to say thank you but to be honest I must admit that I am disappointed for a number of reasons.

Firstly this apology is late, as in late by 2 months. The run up to the launch of this expansion all the way to this letter has been nothing short of disastrous. Keeping the customers, who keep this game alive, happy and content by drip feeding them with cohesive short messages by the higher ups in the game development is not a privilege but should be considered as the bare minimum. I could understand the complacency if the game had WoW like numbers and you could afford to get away with something like that but no. You have a highly concentrated and vocal remaining playerbase who jump on every and any official response related to this game.

What I would have liked from the Lead Designer is a summary of what went wrong, the current state of the game and the immediate roadmap that details the major issues plaguing the game.

For example.

1. Class balance (which we have been promised for years) Kander's Candor a few years ago was one of the examples of that. We have absolutely no evidence of whats happening on that front?
2. Itemisation which is unbelievably broken for a while now?
3. Broken heroic and raid content that requires so many patches that either makes the content trivial or outright difficult to complete?
3. The promise of not using mechanics such as the "critical mitigation" now known as "Resolve" ever in the game post TSO. Gninja's letter prior to the launch of the expansion stating that "resolve will not play as much of an important role as it did before" - Yes, ok to some extent but still does not justify its use yet again?
4. The lag?
5. The state of crafting and the use of crafted items. Why limited charges on rune crafting? Why some players based on the RNG are rewarded with overpowered runes for little amount of time spent as opposed to players who may have spent hundreds of hours but nothing to show for it?
6. The aboslute RNG nature of everything in this expansion. The crates in game that reward an item based on RNG, why? where 87 of the currency + thousand of status points and some plat = ONE infuser?

I am not going to detail all of them because they are as apparent as the grey sky outside in London right now.

P.S. I know Dreamweaver may be compelled to lock this thread down but i can safely speak on behalf of the majority of the people playing this game. Some sort of frequent communication by chief developers to the players (and no Discord does not count - as you are more likely to get banned then getting a response) is very much needed and not a condescending letter every now then to frankly insult our intelligence.

/Thanks

I agree. The custom UIs have made it too easy for people to go above the 10m broker soft limit. (You can manually input 999999 gold but it's discouraging).

The game needs a plat sink other than infusion. Perhaps, they should sell the high demand TS books (Ancient Empyral Teachings) on a summer merchant for 2m pp?

Edit: The 2m pp or whatever price the merchant sells the TS book would create a price ceiling. By doing it in the summer, you are letting people "chase" the books first then opening it up for the broader base later in the year.