Seeing the fate of Freeport, I'm making a plea for Qeynos. PLEASE leave it alone. No, I'm not horrified by the sprucing up of Freeport. What disappoints me is that the city is now devoid of detailed and varied signs of life. The weapons rack near the door of a house. The many and varied shops. The crafting guild workshops. The city has been reduced to a guilded facade much in the manner of Thurgadin. Nice to look at but nothing to see and explore beyond the fancy walls and lightposts. It's a shame really. While everyone has their own ideas. I'd be praising Freeport now, if only they'd left the shops and little details. The sprucing up is a logical change. Those work gangs must have been doing something all these years, after all. Making one big city is ok by me, but not at the expense of loss of city detail. I could even be ok with instanced racial villages, if there was a repeatable quest that would allow anyone access to any of the suburbs. Sadly not the case. PLEASE don't give Qeynos the same simplifying treatment. It's the best zones in the game, IMO. The richness of detail means you can travel through the city and always be seeing something you haven't noticed in awhile. It's immersive. There are shops with doors and details everywhere. I'd love added details and a change here and there, but don't strip the city of it's richness in order to ...I'm still not sure what the reason is for wanting to change the two best cities in the game. (Although the sprucing up of Freeport makes sense after all these years). If you were to spruce up Qeynos, here what needs doing in my opinion: (1) Get rid of the portalpark eyesore. Since players can hop from one place to the next easily, I'd love to see the houses put in their proper zones. If not, well, the Freeport solution is annoying as all getout, but better than the string of portals. (2) Leave Qeynos proper substantially alone, except for getting rid of the zones IF it can be done without reducing the current level of detail. I'd rather have several richly detailed zones than one big bland zone stripped of it's smaller details. (3) Leave at least one crafting house. Even in the suburbs, I can go in the crafting house and rarely be the only player. (4) Retain the suburbs. IF you are really itching to rennovate something, do it here! Spruce up Greystone yard with stuff from New Halas and Thurgadin. Add more tinkered contraptions to the Baubbleshire. Ditto for the others. Add new quests. However, if you really have a bee in your bonnet to remove zones from the game, ...well, better here than removing the heart of Qeynos. (5) Adding new additional quests to the city proper is good. Adding new details is good. The game now has so many new items since the game was first released that you could really upgrade the details in some of the shops. Always bothered me the art shop had no art to buy in Qeynos. Lots of food item for the bakery, etc. (6) Adding apartment numbers to the various doors in the Lion's Mane Inn is good. They are terrible for merchants now since patrons have to just keep trying doors until they find the right one. Qeynos IS EQ2 to me. It's the place in EQ2 that is home and I always have some of my characters based there and all of them return frequently. Without it, I don't know that I'd feel at home in the game anymore.
I would agree. And I expect just as much consideration as we got when we asked for slow mounts back. If the abomination that is the new Freeport is any indication, the New Qeynos will have gingerbread houses, rainbow generators, bubble fountains, and bambi and friends frolicking in neon glow magical meadows. Qeynos guard will be mounted on My Pretty Ponies, wearing armor inspired by the Pink Power Ranger, She Ra, and The Justice League. This will properly project an aura of Happy Happy Joy Joy, Truth, and Justice. Much like Lucan's CarnyTown reflects an image of.. giggle.. power. I would imagine that the suburbs will become themed shopping malls, Animal Shelters, and Wellness Retreats. Perhaps a Spa or two.
lol they are going to do it anyway. Should be obvious now that we don't have a say in just about anything.
I hope they listen to you. That was a well thought out and presented post and I support your suggestions 100%.
I like new freeport completely. the weaponracks outside of homes never made any sense to me. why in the world would you leave a rack of weapons right outside your frontdoor, in a city where someone is likely to not only steal them, but use one to run you through as your leaving your house? I also didn't notice a lot of changes to shops. seems like mostly they just got relocated. there are a bunch more tents/merchants in West Freeport...even Boomba has some new company. the one building by the dock that had 2 people it in now has like 7...and got completely opened up almost fleamarket style. more of the buildings in that little rontunda actually have a use now, so people go in that area rather then just running past it. and the questlines explain some of those details as well. No one is allowed to carry weapons in Freeport without being 'authorized' by the militia...unless you blackmarket it or are willing to risk being arrested. so no one is keeping racks of weapons outside thier doors to give them a reason to be 'detained'. as to the crafting instances...I don't know many people that ever use them to begin with, especially freeport's version with 7 floors up and down where the broker is at teh bottom and the writs are at the top. bleh. now it's more like qeynos' setup, with one main building that has all teh stations and such in it easily accessable. heck I don't even go to the qeynos subs anymore becuase everything I need is in North Qeynos, and my homes are in South Qeynos. In freeport, the burbs are no longer safe pretty much. One is a rioting civil war, two of them are prisons/internment camps, one is building secret machines and woudl rather keep everyone out, and one is overrun by cristanos worshipping arasai performing an inqusition. not sure what's going on in Big Bend, but I bet nothing you'd want to move into. if they do remove the Qeynos burbs...dunno what the story might be for it though. not like they are suddenly going to become 'unsafe'...but we'll wait and see. maybe it'll be a safety precaution from Lucan's armada or military incursion or something.
There are a few things I had fond memories of in freeport that are now gone. The Inn and Tavern behind the militia house in WFP for one. The hamlets are the other thing that I really want back. However, Freeport was truly quite emply and I'm glad it got its facelift. It's nearly impossible to guess as to what everyone's favorite locations would be to keep in town. They kept armor by Ikthar in EFP, and they kept the pet merchant in West FP, those are two things I've seen mention of in the forums that people are happy they kept. Overall I'm impressed with FP's facelift and think the tradeoff was worth it. However, I know that Qeynos is simply not the same as FP because it's always been a pretty pleasant place to be. I think Qeynos does not require a change in the basic 'feel' of the city, like Freeport did... It just needs more of an update.
They say you don't really know what you've got until it's gone. We no longer have Freeport, and all we can do is remember what we had, but we also now know what we're gonna get when Qeynos follows suit. Please don't take Qeynos away from us again.
They're dumbing down everything and there's nothing we can do to stop it. I also remember them saying you'd be able to fly around the new zoneless cities. Yet we cant. But you can fly around the cavernous city of Thurgadin! Like that makes any sense........ If we all /feedback at once and flood them with it, we might have a chance of changing their minds (since obviously the forums doesn't ever do any good). Our other option, get the majority to stop paying/playing EQ2. Then they'd buck up and listen But that'd never happen...
I will live with whatever decision they make. But I hope they follow through. I love the new FP and have been in game since EQ2 started and before in EQ1.. and I LOVE the new FP. I am anxiously waiting for the change to Qeynos.
Rainmare@Oasis wrote: I used the crafting instance in Temple Street every single day. Might have been the only one, but I was there. I don't care much about how convenient something is, but crafting in the suburb was convenient. House, Bank, Craft Hole, all within spitting distance of each other. As for Qeynos. Freeport used to be my city of choice. I understand your concerns about what will happen to Qeynos. I hope it turns out better for you Qeynos folk than it did for us. -Miz
The new Freeport is amazing. At the very least, no zoning is fantastic. I'll have been playing this game for 6 years in February, and I felt like my first day the first time I was running through new Freeport. It was amazing to run from North to South to East to West without stopping, to have that feeling of exploration, to wonder where *this* turn would take me next. The old Freeport didn't have character--it was just the old Freeport. THIS Freeport shouts Lucan's name to the rooftops.
Rainmare@Oasis wrote: This. And 20 bucks says the reason they removed some of the smaller things, like the weapon racks outside the houses(chests I can see, some stuff you want to store outside.. but your weapons? Heck no..) were likely removed to improve framerate. Not sure about you, but I'm running a GeForce 250 GTS with a gig of VRAM. Freeport is a slideshow and I don't have max settings. The entire city is a HUGE resource pig. It ran smoother before the revamp because the city was done in chunks. That's why there's things like the roundabout between the sections that everyone seems to hate. That's why you can't fly. My system isn't the best... but I pull 60 fps most everywhere BUT Freeport. As I said before, 20 bucks says a lot of the clutter was removed due to framerate concerns.
Mizlek wrote: There is still one last remaining classic tradeskill instance left, in West Freeport behind the Coalition of Tradesfolk building, to the left just before you hit the wall where the door to East Freeport used to be. It's still there, able to be used...thank goodness. My concern is that the one in North Qeynos, that used to be behind the Ironforge Estate, was removed, and that they will not take this into account. I absolutely despise in-city crafting. I do all my non-guild crafting work in the Baubbleshire tradeskill society (unguilded alts and so on). There was a time when the village crafting societies were removed...and anyone who was there will remember that both Qeynos and Freeport were all but paralyzed by the in-city crafting generating brutal amounts of lag. So they put them back in. Problem fixed. Domino isn't doing tradeskill stuff anymore. Not sure if her duties preclude it, or she's lost interest. Either way, Qeynosian tradeskill societies are hosed worse than Bob and Doug being forced to drink American beer if the Qeynos villages go the way of Freeport's districts. If they return the North Qeynos instance, or drop one in the Elddar Grove, they'll head a lot of grief off, but I'm dubious as to whether they will. The rush to 'improve' seems to be consuming them without looking back at the trusty vehicle that got them there. Sort of makes me feel like Tevye the Russian milkman - TRADITION!
WeatherMan wrote: Domino is no longer the Tradeskill Developer. To my knowledge, we currently don't have one. So it's not that she's "lost interest"--her job is a completely different one now, with a much larger scope. Hopefully we'll get a new TS dev soon.
Don't want to get too off-topic from the Qeynos discussion, but FYI, there is still a tradeskill instance in North Qeynos at the Ironskill Exchange near the Claymore Plaza. It's to the left of the front door of the building. I use that one, and the ones in Baubbleshire, Willow Wood, and Graystone Yard. Thanks for info on the remaining craft instance in Freeport. I missed that. Also, while I'm still missing the smaller details in Freeport that make a city seemed lived in, I agree the weapon rack might not have been the best example given the nature of Freeport. However, in my favor, the rack was by a rather off-the-beaten-path front door.
msgnomer wrote: A better example for me would Brushwhittle painting in a shop full of his paintings vs Brushwhittle standing under an awning with an easel and nothing else. Gurb standing in his Armory surrounded by crafting stations and mounted weapons on the walls vs. Gurb standing out on the cobblestones with nothing but a forge. May as well go the GW route and have nothing but NPCs standing in an open area, with nothing but a title over thier heads to indicate what they do. It is pretty close already now in reality. I'm pretty sad. Losing SWG and Freeport within a week of each other. I expected to come "home" to Freeport after seeing the end of SWG.. and now home isnt home anymore.
I love the revamp to Freeport. The questlines are amazing and for all the "prettying up" that was done to Freeport it feels like a much darker, evil place once you realize some of the shady things going on in the background. Interrment camp in Beggar's Court, gnomes coming up with weapons of mass destruction, arasai torturing Thexians, Scale Yard now a prison..the list goes on and I've only experienced the scout questline. It makes me *want* to bring my healers in to see what the priest line is, makes me want to bring my fighter, mage etc...and it's been a long time since I've actively wanted to see how quests turned out on different classes. There is so much more lore and RP background now in Freeport. The slums before were slums, you did the quests once for your crappy low level race item and then all there was was an inn room there. I was very skeptical about the Freeport revamp because I've always played evil races and I was very attached to Freeport as it was, but I am very happy with the results. I hope they do such a good job with the quests when they revamp Qeynos. I don't have many good toons, but I'd still want to go through the quests.
I preferred the old Freeport to the new one, but the new one is ok visually/flavor-wise I guess....Problem is that I can't really run around in the city for more than a few minutes without crashing. So functionally, it's garbage to me. Seriously, leave Qeynos alone. I like the way it is now, and I want it to stay that way. Both in flavor and in function. Remove all thoughts of revamping it. Spend your development time on something actually NEEDED rather than wasting and dumping time into something COMPLETELY unnecessary like facelifts for the best functioning cities in the game. There's a reason people preferred Qeynos/FP in general to the newer cities. Just ****ing leave it alone.
