Another player lost - New/Returning player unfriendliness

What I have heard from many new players the game is amazing level 1-99. Once you hit 100 and start getting the free gear from tisha boxes each expansion is where the game becomes confusing and the fun falls apart for most. Free gear is cool and all but there is no teaching these players about adorns, mounts, mercs, familiars, Trackers, Prestige. Forget your "current" familiar? Good luck doing ANY content in RoR, this is NOT good game design.... Got the wrong blue adorns on? Good luck doing content in RoR without struggling missing fervor... Got the wrong mount on? Good luck meeting the resolve check for Heroic 1... Again this is not good game design, please address and fix this and help get and retain new players to the game!

I don't disagree that there is a fairly steep learning curve, but I'm not sure what the people who complain about this expect the developers to actually do. If players aren't willing to spend any time learning the - I'll be honest, not *that* complex - adornment system, or the fact that they have to actually cast their buffs, etc, I don't think taking the time to expand the tutorial systems in game would honestly help.

Even if they *do* take the time to make the in game tutorials more advanced, what are they supposed to do to help in situations like you bring up? Have a pop up window a la Clippy from MS Word (RIP) that pops up and says 'It looks like you are trying to do Renewal of Ro Heroic One instances, but your resolve is only <8,838>. I see that your mount has no resolve on it, maybe you should try getting a new mount?'

As hilarious as that would be to me, people ignore in game tutorials and messaging completely, and would only be angry about getting a pop up like that. Even if they actually WERE helped by it, I guarantee at least 70% of players would whine and moan and spit back angry feedback, at best, at DBG over it.

[Edit: That's not to say I don't think ANYTHING should be done, but people keep coming in and saying 'YOU GUYS NEED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS!' and ignoring the fact that they have done things, but they can't literally spell it out for people for every single thing in game. And even if they could and did, players would ignore it and whine that they never got told they needed to summon their familiar, or that they can't wear adornments from four expansions ago and expect them to work (See: Ethereal belt adorns at the beginning of RoR and a solid 75% of EQ2 being confused as to why they don't work despite the message saying they would not work) - I don't have a perfect answer for this either, but the game is 20 years old. There are literally tens of thousands of hours from hundreds of players put into various guides, info, help sites, etc to help new players, and still (at least) dozens of players who are willing to help out when questions are asked - but people have to get over themselves and admit they need help, first.]

I do try to help out with a guide to getting started each expansion. The RoR Gear Guide should help for now.

I think part of the problem is that some of the people who return or are new don’t bother with the forums - here or on Steam. I know that Sig puts a lot of effort in to the wiki and the forums guides, but if they never bother to get outside help from people here instead of in game, sadly they won’t learn much. And I tried when I came back to get low level groups going so we could all learn together but no one was interested. Well, a couple people were but that’s it.

Getting people to ask for help is one thing, getting them to listen is an entirely different. thing. There have been several people reach out to me in game about playing a shadowknight and I can count on one hand how many have actually taken and applied that information.

One guy went so far as starting a stream, gathering a following, and spent half his time complaining about my guild and claiming the only reason I was performing better than him was gear. It couldn't possibly have been his wasted AAs, poor cast order, misinterpretation of mechanics, or simply having less experience at the class.

I'm all for helping new players but they also need to want to help themselves and remove themselves from their own way.

I liked it when mounts where for riding, not stats. I liked it when you relied on gear for stats, not adorns. Each slot as how many options for adorns but there really is only one correct one for each slot, you have to figure out which one. Oh, don't forget to take a full bag of temp adorns, because those are the bestest idea yet! People loved the idea of AA's. So many ways to build a character. Too bad there isn't only one correct way and endless bad ways. I'm going to go get a doughnut. I'm hungry.

I do think there should be more developer-driven guides on how gear works, resolve, crit bonus, potency, chaotic leech, auto-attack stats, etc. New and returning players need help learning these concepts and the player guides are often old, incomplete or sometimes just plain inaccurate.

I imagine it would be an hours worth of work to post something official on those and could be done by the community relations folks.

Honestly, I think doing something like potentially bring Sigrdrifa onboard (as a temp/consultant, maybe) to work with them to get 'official' documentation on some of the systems would be a fantastic idea.

This post right here, starts the core issue of why players don't understand the game, because in the first place, at no point did the devs ever give us any solid info of exactly how any of these things all work together. In fact, the devs explicitly have said at various times, that they don't want the player base to have the exact math of how the game works. So any dev based guide is going to very intentionally skip data that would make it useful for the player base, outside of general information, which I'll admit would help a fair few of the newest players.

The single item in that line we understand the most about is "resolve" of which we still have plenty of finer questions of exactly how it effects equations when you don't meet the check. While other stats such as potency and crit bonus, fervor and other similar stats we have a general idea of how these work, basically as independent power multipliers. When you put them into the games system, of mob resists, chaotic leech, and level differences the math just becomes one massive cloud of confusion for the player base. The smartest players have used a combination of parse data and tons of guesswork to acquire a fairly decent "feel" of ideal stat balances to bring out the most power from their characters. One of the very large issues here is that, the vast majority of the player base isn't anywhere near as clever as they think they are with stuff like this, and the quality of gameplay has fallen off a cliff.

Going along the same train of thought of complicated stat issues, player gear this expansion has been reaching all time highs for complication to min max. it has done this, while somehow remaining as boring as possible, which in itself is quite the accomplishment. While all at the same time, it has been harder than ever to acquire various parts of ideal gear setups, even very important pieces, whether that be a particular CBOC piece, a blue adorn, or a high resolve piece. Another massive issue with gear this expansion in this same vane, is that if you do "get the piece", you were hunting, it could require you to switch out 3 or 4 other items, and in some cases even more, to hit an ideal stat balance with what you have, forcing the player hoard gear at unreasonable levels.

This only scratches the surface of gameplay accessibility to new and returning players, or even existing players, and serious conversations should be had internally about the direction of this games gear and combat system, because as it is, there are game killing issues with it.

I've offered, being a retired tech writer. But it would be a huge project.

The issue may be there are too many complex mechanics in the game and could just be trimmed down or out right removed?

Hate to bring this brand here but WoW is just as old with just as much if not more content but yet has continued to make its content cater to both casuals and elitists as well as make it easy for new and returning players every expansion. EQ2 needs to figure out how to do this as well. I understand they have way more resources but maybe daybreak could take a year off from making cookie cutter expansions and making major changes with their systems and or cleaning up all the unnecessary bloat.

Everquest 2 - A New Beginning

Just curious if your friend here ever checked out the TLE Server?

I'm for this but as a Server so they can test it.
It should be far easier to maintain and tweak.
A Casual Server.

You've already done the hard part for them by coming up with a cool name.
Everquest 2 - A New Beginning


They could start by doing this,

SOE had it going on back in the day.

EQ2 Manual

OP is spot on. It feels that in recent years, the dev team is trying their worst to turn eq2 into a convoluted eq1 with prettier graphics.
This topic seems to be constantly ignored by the dev team.

Honestly, if someone were to develop a p99 style set up with eq2 as it was prior to the level 100 shift into oblivion, i would indeed jump ship and never look back.

Maybe I just don’t understand much about how games work in coding and such, but why can’t they just take the TLE based server design and apply it to the main servers? Is it seriously that hard of a concept to take all the craptastic stats and such out, and make the xp a little slower like it used to be? But leave the rest in?

Compared to that, they'd need the old printed Yellow Pages-size manual today.

One good thing to know is that after 90, your experience comes mostly from signature timelines instead of grinding mobs.

I find it ironic that the OP could find the correct forum / thread to post this, but could not find the:
Tips, Tricks, FAQs, and New Player Discussion

If the information you sought wasn't there, posting questions would have given you some insight.

Well....the way things are done on the live server is the problem, and the TLEs are actually molded to fit the way live servers work. This makes them significantly inferior to when the era's they're emulating were actually live. Inflation is already a problem on TLEs, just less so than live (obviously).

TLEs don't really have their own "coding", they're just capped lower and that's kinda it. Their coding is inherited from live (to their detriment)

I remember someone telling me that in TLE KOS era, the tier 1 DPS was parsing like 8k or something?

Lol, when it was live they were parsing about 2100, 2300 on big bursts.


I can never play TLEs for this reason, because all I see is eras I loved poisoned by having problems from modern EQ2 imported into them. As another person said, if someone did like a p99 for eq2 I'd be all about it.

I've always said that putting blue stats on gear was a mistake, and they've just never ever corrected it and made it worse and worse and worse and worse over time. Blue stats should have stayed on AA specs.