EverQuest II Producer's Letter July 2022

I am going to ask, respectfully, that you stop referring to "most people" and "majority of us". There is a substantual part of the community that will never see 355 resolve gear. They are thrilled to finally have an opportunity to get something as good as 340R.. What a number of players see is that they are again looking to be totally left out of the chance to improve their character. The way the game is now, everything is based on your resolve and potency, not on how well you play your class as it once was for so many years. The direction they have taken the game is leaving behind many PAYING players and if that is what they want to continue to do, Fine. When you have nothing but the group of "most people" and "majority of us", all of us 'lesser than you are' will be putting our money elsewhere. But please, if you are not happy with the gear that is 340 because it is beneath you, speak for yourself, not "most people".

yeah for most people i would think 340 bracers is BiS

Could you guys maybe take this opportunity to give the other races such as Freebloods, High Elves, Dark Elves and Wood Elves the popular LONG hair style of the AREKYN??? Work on it now for the new expac. I know alot of people love that hairstyle. I am sooo tired of having to play an Arekyn just to have Long hair. It's about time his was incorporated. You gave us the ability to Catdance and I LOVE IT! NOW . . . HAIR! PLEASE????

Are we still getting the Panda quests? It was listed for September in the 2022 Roadmap, but only the Swag Store is listed here.

From the "Roadmap" posted at the beginning of the year.

• September:
  • Swag Store
  • 2022's Expansion Prelude - A new expansion deserves a new prelude, complete with new items and new quests!
  • Panda, Panda, Panda Updates - The Hua Mein event of the year returns! You never know what they'll ask of you, or where it'll require you to go.

So you willingly would prefer for a supposedly BiS item to be lesser in stats?

If I was out of the "most people" bracket, I would be thrilled to see an item get a boost regardless of what "most people" have access to.

Appreciate the information you've shared. That said, what hasn't been on the list or even addressed is the absolutely inexcusable (in my book) state of guild chat in the game that has been broken for 16 months now. For an MMO company to have a fundamental chat system broken this long should be an embarrassment and a high priority to fix.

Sigh, my main point was you can't call something "Close to BiS" when the BiS item is *at least* 15 points higher than it. The fact that even my bracers are better than it by 5 points and I'm pretty sure is from Den 2, since as a mage I still have to be carried through challenge is part of the point. If you want to talk about the barriers to doing challenge Den 2 that's a whole different thing. Heck for all I know there's something out of Vacrul that's even better, I really am not sure what the actual BiS item is but, something 340 vs at least 355 isn't close by what I would expect is basic math. Having access to the BiS item is in my opinion irrelevant to the point. A significantly higher resolve item is the actual BiS thus, a 340 resolve item is not close at all.

So just to be clear there, the current BiS item that I know of, I can not even really get. I do know it exists, thus I know that the event one is not anywhere near the same resolve. As a replacement for the etheral events, we're talking about an item that takes a fairly large amount of effort to max out. That arguably should be replace within a month or two of getting it, at the longest. Since I doubt that the next GU is going to not make it even easier to get higher than 340 resolve gear.

The animators have commented on this in the past. Each race's individual hairstyle is, in essence, a Hat appearance on each model. Creating the Vah Shir race with RoS took a few years of work, and just adding some form of straight long hair for those four listed races would take literal years.

Well technically BiS bracer is dropped from Mayong Mistmoore and is i think 370 resolve with 35ish Fervor and some other stuff (listed as on equip stats and not the base stats listed for the item itself) which makes 340 not even close would be nice is there was some upgrade path to them like a drop of mayong blood plus the fully stated golden bracer brings it up to end game stats but personally , I think 340 for the difficulty to get (ie just doing the same zone 6 times for each event) is actually pretty decent. Though kinda of annoyed the ones for paladin, zerker, bruiser, monk, guardian, shadow knight are exactly the same whereas every other class got something specific to that class. Have found for most classes the actually clicky on it is kinda worthless.

I do not know any player who really plays EQ2 and is able to get the 3x event bracers and has not a better bracers item.
The actual version the festival bracers are not a motivation to do the festival - hopefully the final version gets an upgrade.

yeah but there are a lot of non-raider solo only players who dont know you who cant get anything better

Odd; what's the issue with guild chat? I haven't had any problems with it working...

Uwk

You'd notice it right away if you left your guild and joined another one. You wouldn't be able to access guild chat--period. This problem cropped up after a platform maintenance occurring in March 2021. It's been bugged, reported several times and zero attention has been paid to it. Anybody that joins a guild won't have access to guild chat. It also randomly borks any custom chat channels you create. You can have 5 characters for example, and one will have the custom channel show up. Usually, you have to delete the old channel and retype it again.

"Once powered up, you will get a new buff, Steam Powered Metabolism."
Maybe you get the buff from the bracers without having to equip them?

I have been told the removal of the inheritance merchant from ALL servers was not an accident, because I most definitely think it was a mistake.
Please bring the merchants back to all regular servers, a lot of people do care about their disappearance.
There are merchants of other past events still here (on the regular servers)
I absolutely understand why the merchants would not be on Tarinax and Varsoon, but pretty please bring them back on other servers.

why?

Hmm! And it's not just a thing with the new guild where you may or may not have enough Rank to have access to Guild Chat? Although anyone who'd restrict that to higher Rank levels would be a massive -- Richard-head, imho. :-/

Yeah, I haven't changed guilds for a few years, now, so I wouldn't've noticed. :-/

When you say "custom channels," is it a channel you'd like to come up with yourself, or any custom channel at all, like, say, Antonia_Bayle.Homeshow? :-/

Uwk

I'm not sure what "inheritance merchant" means, but if it refers to merchants offering things from past events still, I completely agree with Schmett. Why? 'Cause there's more than likely lots of folks out there who have tons of the old event currencies still (/raising_paw), are either unwilling or unable to convert them to something like City Tokens, and would like to still have access to the stuff that was offered.

Barring that, I'd love to have all the old currencies be convertible, possibly even to something like Loyalty Tokens, and have the old event stuff be available on the various Loyalty Merchants. If the Powers are uncomfortable with letting that be a thing, make the stuff for Members Only or something. /shrug

Uwk
who has to wonder: if we weren't actually spending anything on the Marketplace to get cool stuff in the various World Events, why not make it accessible somehow for always afterwards? :-/

the inheritance merchants were selling gear that was earned doing heritage quests on former TLE servers.
The deal was that any toon on the same account could get said gear items on any server in this game.
At level these items were just a little less powerful than the original, but at higher levels these items were a really good deal
the best one was 2 bags, one with 54 slots and the other with 56 slots, the original bags have 36 slots and 42 slots.

I understand that on our newest 2 servers these items were not allowed, but I think the merchants should be returned on regular servers.

there is a merchant from the PvP event server, why is that still here?

I can say for sure it's one you would create yourself. Let's say you have a raid alliance or a group of friends in different guilds. Obviously, you can't talk in each other's guild channels, so you create a "custom" channel just for yourselves where you can gather and talk. I can't speak to the Homeshow channel.