Another player lost - New/Returning player unfriendliness

Well that sucks. Rest in peace to the good old days I guess.

Out of curiosity, did those class-based attribute bonuses actually make it to live or were they abandoned in beta?

Oh it was there back in the day. I member fighters being able to carry boxes instead of bags do to their str stat and having more inventory space then mages. If a mage tried to carry inventory boxes their move speed would suffer majorly.

TLE is cool and all but it will never bring back the actual 2004-2008 game unless they completely make it its own game on its own server not connected to live server in any way. Plus they will need to bring back the old files if they even still have them.

As a fresh new eq2 player yes the TLE server may be best for them if they dont care to experience ALL content. But as for returning player TLE will never be the same as the old days.

Awesome, thanks. The game was so different back then it's hard to remember how everything was done. Like there being no such thing as ^^^ heroics. I can't even remember when those actually showed up. LU13 maybe?

To be fair I have been playing since the beginning and took a break from 2013 - moved to the UK and then started playing again two years ago. I was so lost it wasn't even funny. On top fo that my max chars were 91 monk and 96 necro. The game evolved a lot by then. My father in law has stuck with it though and we agree the game has turned into more work than fun. It's unreal and getting raids like you used to be able to forget it. So can't get the upgraded gear. I had my AA tree gear right my neco had raid gear and she oddly enough can hold her own barely in VOV. I used the token to junop her to 125 to help my father in law out. But, even her master spells and raid gear I had to replace it and use the guide which is really like a bible to me by Sigrdrifa. Explaining the adornments has helped immesnley because I avoided reading that post for a long time trying to find the inforamtion on each thing seperately and it was non exsistant or hard to find. Another player in game told me about it the guide and I read it and was like wow. That is what you need returning into the game you hit 100 and it's like you are learning the game all over again. It took me a while I had found where to upgrade my merc but couldn't figure out the mount upgrade. Still not sure how to get the saddle on but looks like it's an unlock like the mercs.Who's idea was it to make mercs get scared and run off? That should not have happened. It improved solo game play but seriously - they can get scared? Stupid. I am with the other comments what happened to the AA improvements and the gear pulling the wieght. Ya nobility in the 1200 might have adornments but they were decorations not enchanments. I get adronments improve things but like it was said why is they take the bulk of stats on now? I'm struggling with the new exp even with what I have been told and my father in law and I try the dugeons and they are soo very difficult we can't do it ourselvese even with mercs and pets. Mine doesn't have the upgraded spells and I don't know why but the plat have gone insanely stupid just like EQ1. I don't have millions of plat to spend on upgrades I don't know how you make that either. I don't know why players think a lvl 30 new player would have 600k plat for spell upgrade for journey man level. Honestly it's ridiculous. My father in law has his spells maxed but not gear and his potency is where it needs to raid, but mine is not mine us at 8k and my gear is upgraded through the questlines. I can't afford the spell upgrades. Trying to farm materials and until a week ago I finally found out what I needed to upgrade. The game used to be fun and you could get pick up raids and pick up groups. I't just hard and it has taken me a year to learn all the stuff. SO ya I can see why people coming back don't bother staying or leave.

That's about the time I took a break too, and came back last spring. I agree it was a HUGE change to what I remembered when I left. I was so lost after a few weeks and asking in world chat was pointless. I finally came to the forums and joined a guild. Both of those things helped me understand more, but I still really don't have a full understanding of it all and still in no means even close to being able to consider raiding. Which is something I considered when starting to play again since I was a hardcore raider before I took a break.

That was probably the hardest comment to read I have ever read on this sit, Ironkitten. I'm still not entirely sure of what you said and I "read" it 3 times.

It wasn't that hard to understand. He could use some paragraph breaks in there and he needs to work on his punctuation, but it was far from incoherent.

How long can a player do a variation of "Get 10 widgets and get back to me"? Also, quest completion has absolutely no impact on the game, whatsoever. It's hard to pretend that our characters are nigh on god-like beings when we're still doing the "Get 10 'whatevers' and report back to me" daily quests.

Whats even worse is damn near every MMO now days is exactly this, fetch quests.

I think that is the name of one of the heritage quests, "Go here, go there, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth."

Pssst…I would love to go in to detail about why ff14 in particular is such a better game than this, but I have a feeling it would not be received well. Gam, trust me though it is.

Sure ff14 had an amazing story telling quest line and raids were crazy challenging but for some odd reason I am just eq2 addicted always coming back to my most hated but loved MMO. Possibly cause it was my first /shrug..

Oh trust me I get it. This was my first MMO ever, and it will always have a special place in my heart. But the game flat out sucks now. And they don’t listen to anyone’s opinion. It just sucks.

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

...and making major changes with their systems and or cleaning up all the unnecessary bloat.

Everquest 2 - A New Beginning"

^THIS would be amazing. I would be so there, and I know a few gaming friends that would come back for this.

I would add: to update all maps for the expansions that did not give quest indicators on the in game map. I know I'm beating a dead horse. (yes, I use EQ2 maps and am grateful for it, but I like the EQ2 official version similar to WoW as you just hit M and know where to go at a quick glance) I still don't understand why they stopped updating the maps (after Malice? I think?).

I don't think expanded in game guides would help, they are just a band aid over the problem at best. The core issue is game bloat it's everywhere and ridiculous. The biggest barriers are really just the massive amount of mechanism's added to the game that's not even obvious as something you should be getting or working towards. Even Sigrdrifa's excellent guide (which I used a lot!) has some very important omissions depending on when you left the game.

Even with tons of research and help from other players it can sometimes be an offhand comment that makes you realize your missing a whole area that you need to go into old content for and grind something or do tons of research and ask a bunch of questions to figure out whats going on and how to get whatever it is. I've been back since January after a 8 year break and only recently found out about epic spells which completely transformed my sk with a pet and able to use my def temp skills in offense stance. Ethereal trackers and the AA boosts that provides was another fairly new thing I'd learned. I recently completed the 20 bonus EP's you need and wrote a guide to those for my guild because they were such a nightmare to figure out with overlapping ones.

In total a new or returning player may have to figure out:
- Bonus Prestige points.
- old EPIC2.0 spells, how to get and level them
- Etheral Trackers, how to farm them, boosts AA's how to buy them with the ethereal trackers
- Mounts, Mercs, Familiars how they matter now or even new to you, that there's different seasons of them, how to level, how to get the buffs etc.
- Panda quests for adorns, so may different adorns now
- Ascension spells most of which seem to be worthless but some real gems I'm only now discovering. Not very easy learning how to level these
- Dyrraga coins (more adorns) - 42 runs through an old challenge mode heroic dungeon. Decided not to subject myself or any friends to that one.
- stats - which ones even matter especially where a hybrid class like the SK is concerned, a lot of the tank stats seem to be largely ignored which is bizarre to me.
- overseer which is the only real way of leveling mounts, mercs and familiars outside of big bucks.

List keeps growing too because we now Kael Drak green runes

Some things are impossible to get like some sort of pre-order pet buff which I haven't even looked into because I don't want to get that annoyed.

I would like this game to keep going, these are real issues that keep getting brought up. They are costing us player base and making issues even worse. Personally I'd like to see some of the bloat removed, any move in the direction would be welcome. Take a look at lists like the above and view each thing as a barrier to a returning player, how do we make these things more obvious and less of a barrier? Things like make 20 bonus prestige points available in each new expansion, make them hard to get like now but at least they can be earned in current content where most of the player base is spending their time.

Ultimately it would be nice if health and power had values between 0 and 100 and stats are squished to reasonable levels with half the available abilities we now have. But I'm not holding my breath, the complexity in trying to do something like that is staggering. It may be ultimately better for the game but it wouldn't be funded to get there.

Sorry for the long post but Furlogg was a nice person, they put in a lot of work in the game and it's a shame to lose them. This post also comes from my own experiences and frustrations as a returning player.

Honestly would never recommend TLE for returning player as non of the TLE servers has ever been like 2004-2009. None of the gear is the same making all content trivial. EQ2 has changed so much it has broken every TLE server they try to release an manually tweak content and gear but fail every time. If you played during 2004-2008 you would know what I mean.

If they really wanted to make a true classic eq2 (EQ2 Project 2004) they would need to completely separate the classic server from live with its own files from 2004-2008 and its own dev team like what WoW did with its classic but DB does not have this kind of resource. If someone outside did project 2004 for eq2 DB would go bankrupt as even more people would jump ship leaving eq2 live with a few hundred people left instead of a few thousand..

Maybe so, I've never played on the Server. All I really know of TLE is that the players in the guild I'm in who left EQII years back because of gatekeeping did try it before they left for good. They didn't stay too long. They really didn't want to start over. They had spent years on Live. They love their Toons. They said the players over there are super cool. The other thing I know is that it has a healthy population.

Players leaving this game over decisions made and directions the Companies have taken is nothing new and is not just recently as some players claim. Many working Casuals have been lost along the way.

Like the Players I mentioned above.

All they wanted to do was group, tear it up, have fun, score some awesome armor, slay the Dragon,
lots of Banter (slap each other on the back, have a brew) and call it a good night.

This sounds really cool.
I'm not sure I would go.
I'm so invested now. I could never leave the Guilds.
It's a double-edged sword for me.
I love Live but there are things I would like to see changed.

As I understand this, when EQ1 got new expansions the old zones where left in tacked, but when EQ2 got new expansions the old zones where corrupted by reusing them for new zones with different parts added and others taken out.
The problem is the old codes where not saved, I mean they never imagined that the game would get this old.

tasnee my son is a hard core supporter of FF14 and I have watched him go into a dungeon over and over looking for a part that was a rare drop and when it did drop he had to compeat with others to get it, he spend days heck weeks to get his special weapon doing the same thing over and over.

In FF14 I see the same thing happening as in EQ2, the quests are getting more and more boring and the scenery
gets more and more plain. having platforms of different colors with the deity appearing up to his or her waist is not very inventive.
Last year to make it more challenging they reduced the group sizes so now only the best players can finish the raids.
They even stated that the casual player will take a year to finish the last dungeon, failing over and over.
People with better gear and a very good knowledge of their job class will do better and the best players will be the only ones who get to have fun.

the devs actually answered the question about a real back to Vanilla server, and the answer was that it would be like designing a brand new game, because way to much of the old coding was lost.