LOL I couldn't care less if you choose to read it or not. You're choice to be lazy and unwilling to have a conversation. My point still stands that many people likely had issues with the stat changes. Not just me. Or are you seriously telling me you liked the stat changes?? That you liked them dumbing down the stat system all for the sake of making it easier to design gear. You're going to bull **** me and say this wasn't the start of absurd stat inflation between each tier. That's a joke. Do you even remember the stat difference between 80 and 90? Lv 80 sk had 17k hp on average, 22k if equipped with high sta gear. How much did they have at 90? 45k? OBVIOUSLY this wasn't the only reason people left. I've highlighted many of the reasons people left Nagafen in my post you chose to ignore. But that's okay. You very clearly like the game how it is right, so like I said at the very end of the post. "Done, let this game burn already and just wait for Pantheon. All we're doing is blowing on the embers of a already extinguished flame."
That one of the major reason for which i left live. I ended up spending way too much time reforging. And I had like 3 set of gear, one to solo with ~ 100% melee aoe. ome for heroic and one for raids. |Second reason was that my necro did adv solo 2-3 times faster and never followed any script while my warden could not bypass thehn, on top warden never got any decent mercenary, tanks would never hold agro, dps were doing 1/4 of what she did and healers did 1/10 oof her hps.
Argue all you want about whether or not stat changes were the reason people quit (it's not, but w/e), the fact of the matter is the chance that you'll ever get to see an official EQ2 TLE that goes back to those old systems is practically nil. Blizzard had an entire team of devs working on WoW Classic for something like 2 years, and that was with the original code as a reference point. Maybe if you can go crowdfund a couple million dollars, you can give Daybreak the cash to hire a dedicated TLE team, bearing in mind that almost none of the old data exists anywhere, in any form, save for old forum posts and links to EQ2u, Zam, and Xanadu. SOE were apparently nowhere near as sophisticated as Blizzard when it came to source control and archiving. So good luck with that.
Like I said, "dumbing" the stats down did nothing, the gear was given the stats that the developers decided for you. You didn't gear based on primary stat because it was all class restricted anyway is my point. You wore the set pieces, you didn't break from this; surprise. Stats were on it and you wore it, you didn't care about primary. Same goes with mythical's, and class restricted bows/jewelry which... surprise, had the scout specific requirement with the stats they gave you. It could've been agi doing the same thing as str,int,agi and it wouldn't of made a difference. You still would've worn a trixy bracelet, the same 6 set TSO gear, avatar BP, avatar offhand, munzok offhand. These items were all scout/mage/priest etc. specific, meaning you wore it because it was the option available. People left nagafen because of the broken mitigation at the start of SF, and the fact that battlegrounds was offering better loot and warfields essentially killed open world pvp. Coupled with the lack of contesteds it made pvp incredibly boring. The stamina/hp increases were irrelevant anyways, people still stacked shamans because it didn't matter how much HP you had, you weren't gonna live without one. The other reason people left during SF non nagafen related was avatar gear nerf/removal, the horrible gear SF had at the start meaning your t4 TSO pieces were better as they had resists on them, the same crit mit, and the fact that you got 900000000:1 pieces of brawler to other pieces. I guess some people were upset about crit consolidation but I for one was a ranger in TSO and it was fun to see 3/4 of the itemization not having ranged crit giving me one small drop per zone that was geared towards me, while the rogue/assassin/bards literally were raining loot. I remember SF very vividly, I can honestly care less about nagafen locked toons as it didn't matter at all to majority of the game except the few hundred who locked and killed people leveling/shitters hundreds of times. I'll argue with you all you want, but to state that the primary stat change was the reason that the game died is a fallacy at the least.
Ok then give us the reason people left in droves after these changes and the other changes to how gear reforging and stat allocation and the need to replace all gear and all currency for earning adornments were introduced? The CORE changes to how people had to manage their toons and the 26 different requirements to gear those toons for each and every next tier was the biggest reason everyone quit.
Two questions. 1- Do you have any actual evidence that there was a dramatic population drop after the patch that changed the stats? And don't just say "if you were playing then you would know" Because that is not evidence. 2- What other mention-able things happened the same time that patch went live?
Are you saying things got more complicated or less complicated? I thought you were arguing that the "dumbing down" of things was what drove people away, but when I read your response here it seems like you're complaining that it was too much work to manage all the different "requirements". I suggest if you're going to try to make a point, at least be consistent in what message it is you are trying to get across. Sentinel's Fate was a relative step up in difficulty from the likes of RoK and TSO, from a casual player's point of view. Arguably that would have had a larger impact on the population than gear changes, which a large proportion of the player base probably didn't even know about, much less care about. As for raiding, Adon already covered that. Edit: And reforging didn't come along until AoD, almost 2 years after the stat consolidation.
I think you know what I'm saying but since we're dumbing this down for "others" I'll explain. I grouped, leveled, raided got all the best adornments for level 80. Exp pack comes...my adornments down't matter anymore because the stats they enhanced had been nullified by the new exp pack mechanics. So I'd grind, level, raid, re-adorn, grind dungeons now because a new currency was added to get a second adornment slot filled....done. New exp pack releases. None of that matter, because they changed the entire mechanics. Not only that but the 300 extra currency I grinded to try to be ready for the next exp pack was all worthless because in the new exp pack I had to grind for a different currency which was needed for a 3 adornment slot. So, I'd level, grind, raid, grind, quest, grind get my guy good to go, and the next exp pack would change it ALL again. Change the currency, change what stat I needed to worry about (Crit Mit, Potency, Fervor etc....not Str, Agi, Wis, Sta). So yes, that is the what was wrong and what they did wrong and what drove people away. EVERYONE KNOWS THIS! The change of primary stats to all 1 stat was just a good nail in the coffin at the end of some exp pack 3 or 4 years ago. And then reforging came along because the Min Maxer crowd was all that was left, so wtf do you think happened.
Whoa, are you telling me that a new expansion requires you to get new gear and learn a new stat or mechanic? Oh my goodness, how unprecedented. Thank god no other MMO does that. You might have a point with currency, but pretty much everything else is par for the course.
No saying you were playing the game when the patch hit is not evidence. Just like I if I was at the Presidential Inauguration in 2016, and said "it was the biggest crowd ever". Doesn't make it true. Do you have any evidence showing that there was a massive drop in population when that patch hit? What is more likely was, EQ2 had been hemorrhaging players for several years at that point and it just became more obvious it was a dying game.
So if they had made good decision, released good expansion packs and made engaging content, the population still would have declined as quick as it did?
Sentinels Fate actually had some good raid content. It was far from the worst expansion. We could only speculate what the population would have done if they did things differently. But 2010 is just when the genre as a whole was losing players. (It's the same year WoW launched Cataclysm and lost millions of players). It also just happen to be the same time that MOBA like League of Legends were taking off. It is unlikely that the stat changes during SF, was the cause for a massive population decline. The decline was already there.
You're trying to throw a few years worth of changes into one sweeping reason for people quitting. People quit in SF largely because of the removal of avatars, and the nerfing of avatar gear raider wise. A lot of casual players were also upset with the direction that x2 content went, no longer was their a WoE type of zone where casual players could go and hit a loot pinata with ease. Vigilant x2 wasn't a hard zone to be quite honest once you had all the hard mode gear from raids and a solid setup, but for a PuG where 1/2 the raid was wearing battlegrounds gear? Yikes. Before reforging even came in there was a mass exodus of casual players during DoV because of the mass introduction of crit mit to non raid zones, and the high crit requirements it put on players. Oh you have this super cool weapon from SF? Well grats, now it's useless and worse than a zone you can solo (the chronomentor event). DoV was also super boring for a lot of players, you had to farm faction to get the ry'gorr gear, the heroics introduced mechanics such as requiring interupts, etc. It wasn't casual friendly at all. It also as you mentioned introduced the whole adornment system, which, once again was faction gated. I do agree that people left eq2, but it was for a myriad of reasons over two-three long years, not a sudden drop of 50% of the player base over primary stat consolidation. Hyperlul my friend. Basically this, the thought you had to put into specs, gear, and the time commitment to playing eq2 is exponentially higher in expansions post SF than it is in the expansions before. You had to grind endless faction in DoV, run a x2 that a lot of casuals once again couldn't clear for the debuff to even clear easy mode zones. These requirements it put on players is why a lot left. I'm confused why you're upset over an expansion level increase requiring you to get new adornments, you would've put new tier higher quality adornments on your new gear anyway. It's also not like we didn't sit at level 80 for like 2-3 years and people had like a million/trillion manas that they could just instantly readorn. In SF the yellow adornments were also incredibly easy to obtain as you could run each instance, the weekly and have a full set of it. This is assuming you didn't keep grinding out the currency system to get the upgraded pieces from the 220 mark rare merchant they added later. By the time you start talking about fervor, the game is already a ****** pay to win grab anyway, so who cares. No one who doesn't have beaten wife syndrome plays live. Also refer to my post to your buddy who thinks primary stat consolidation is the reason eq2 died. Do me a favor and look up loot from prior the stat consolidation and try and tell me that the BiS t4 TSO gear didn't have str/agi/int on it which was the primary things you geared for on a predator. The pieces that had non tank stats, and melee crit all had the primary stat that scouts wanted, I don't understand how it's so hard for you two to understand that primary stat is null in itemization even back then because the other stats on the pieces/procs/class restrictions, already made you run specific pieces only and it made you pick the pieces regardless of primary stat.
They also unlocked plane of war and many other things with DoV. Basically, they hadn't really coded to allow for a TLE to get that far as they never expected one to last as long as FG. My tin foil hat tells me this is the primary reason for the 4 month expansions on Kaladim, to ensure it dies before DoV.
Was one supposed to screen shot the server dropping from red to orange? Orange to green? I have 2 accounts I've played on, one is 15 years old (5483 days) and the other is 7 years old (2827 days) not including any of the +90 days from the expansions. I watched the population fall off on Nagafen and there was 3 huge drops in population that I can recall. The stat change, the removal of the hottest t2 pvp zone, and the release of mercenaries. All 3 had very large impacts on the population and were much more than a "steady decline" in population. The entire fundamentals of the game changed on two occasions and the removal of t2 pvp changed a way of playing that, probably a understatement, a large amount of players on Nagafen enjoyed doing. I'm talking from having a account that's 15 years old. I remember when the classes were split into fighter, priest, scout, mage and you had to do class quests to get to the sub classes. When your stats weren't through the roof. Which yes, the stat consolidation, which wasn't the only reason people left was more than just a "no one cared about that". It's also one of the reason stats are so inflated. Instead of stats being split among 5 different stats they are crammed into one. Instead of them releasing gear that maybe had 5 more int and only 1 extra sta and other stats, they only had to make gear with 2 stats for each class, so they couldn't get away with small bonuses on some stats and larger bonuses on other stats. If you were a brawler you only needed str and sta, nothing else. Only so many things they can do to make you feel like your progressing when you only use 2 stats. Seriously my 95 illy has a level 92 pvp staff on atm. The stats on it are 297.. How did we go from 25-30 a stat at most on a TSO raid gear to over 100+ at level 92. All in all, the stats before the change made the gear much more interesting, especially to those who didn't raid.The set gear was just lack of creativity and they should have (and did) stop doing it. But by then the stats had already been changed. Set bonus or not, there's always going to be BIS gear. Doesn't mean the rest of it has to be uninteresting as well. Would you not rather have two pieces of gear with different stats and try to decide which you want to use? Or rather get 2 pieces with the exact same stats?
