Few words on Level Agnostics 'n' stuff

Greetings Norrath!

With our Level 90 Heroic Characters release tomorrow, I've seen a few questions/comments around Level Agnostic Dungeons in various places so I thought I'd give a quick update on a couple of things.

First, on Level Agnostic dungeons: We're working on updating existing Level Agnostic Dungeons to accommodate up to level 94. We expect to launch this in the next few weeks. We'll give you more information and a date when we have it all done and tested and are confident in the launch. Later this year we plan to add more dungeons to the system also.

Secondarily, with Level Agnostic questions I've seen some inquiries around our plans to do Cross-Server Dungeons. I'm happy to say that's still in our plan. What I haven't said is what this new feature requires. Since December, we have been rewriting a lot of the back-end systems (i.e. databases and stuff) which is all part of our foundation for the long and healthy future of EQ2. The changes and updates we're making are going to give us a lot of benefits on the dev/server side as well as giving us the ability to do things like Cross-Server Dungeons. This takes time as I'm sure you can imagine.

This work on our systems will be ongoing well into this year with several challenging and exciting updates. The team is really excited as these "upgrades" and fundamental improvements will give us some exciting options in the future, the first being Cross-Server Dungeons (we'll be looking into Battlegrounds also to make it a better system on the back end and the front end...and all the ends -- except the dead ends).

More news to come!

Sincerely, as always,

Holly "Windstalker" Longdale

I hope you guys get it working sounds fun

I am excited to hear this.

I hope you all work out the crazy scaling in gear over the tiers. I consistently parse over 120K zonewide on my 80warlock when I am noticing the vast majority of players cannot parse over 10k (most are around 4-7k). I am not the only one, I've seen several classes at the top of the level bracket doing insane numbers that aren't even dps classes. This is an existing problem and I cannot imagine how much worse things could get when you include 90-94 gear!

I know it's not the end of the world if these are being blown through, but all my characters can easily solo these zones, even my terribly geared 40 Illy, likely the least solo friendly class in game.

Balance is an issue, but <94 stuff does not need to be hard. Characters should be learning to play their classes properly, not banging their heads against content they can't handle because they don't have all their spells yet (and probably don't have adept or higher because they outlevel spells so fast).

The concept of Level Agnostic dungeons is a really nice idea. But it is broken and broken badly. Game play across a wide spread of levels doesn't work well. Damage output, healing it all needs a revamp. The dungeons over compensates for the spread and gear of players.

I haven't been able to get a LA since the expansion release, well even before that players quit doing them. I hope you can fix the dungeons but I am not holding my breath. Bad execution to start has soured many.

During the experience bonus time there were constant Level Agnostic group(s) running on my server.

So, there's already a level-agnostic system in place for joining players together across servers. We call it Battlegrounds. Honestly, the whole system could be used to join players across servers into groups and even *gasp* raids! The architecture has been there for years. Don't know how much work it is to make it PvE instead of PvP, but I can't imagine it being that difficult.

If you knew how Battlegrounds worked, you'd cry, so grab your Kleenex...

When you jump to Battlegrounds, your character is physically being COPIED to the Battlegrounds server. You'll notice that things like the Broker, Banker, Crafting, Marketplace, Claim, and a slew of other game features that would affect your character record are DISABLED during the time you are on the BG server. When you do come back from Battlegrounds, the two character records are compared ("diffed"), synced, and then any trace of your character on the BG server is wiped.

So let's imagine trying to take this same behavior and use it on PvE servers. Let's say you are character #49201235 on Butcherblock. Now let's hop your character over to Everfrost. Oops, you just overwrote all data for character #49201235 on Everfrost. You just blew away all of his or her Broker, Banker, Housing, Item Discoveries, etc. Almost none of the code that makes Battlegrounds work could EVER be used for Cross-Server Dungeon Finder.

What is being done is to completely rewrite the back end code so that, behind the scenes, your character from Everfrost could temporarily exist on Guk or Butcherblock or Antonia Bayle without conflicting with other characters with the same ID and without corrupting the broker, banker, item discoveries, or any other systems on the foreign server. Cross-Server Dungeon Finder is just the first and the biggest "Here's what you get for all this hard work". The other benefits are SOE getting to drop an overpriced Oracle license, and it opens up many other possibilities like improvements in Broker performance.

People have spoken about their negative experience with "megaservers" and losing their server identity, and I think the team is aware of those issues.

Please please please please please, when you are implementing cross-server dungeon grouping find some way to add in the ability to invite specific members from other servers to a group. That other game that shall not be named (I lied, I'm gonna name it: World of Warcraft) implemented cross server dungeon finders, and it turned pretty much everyone you ran a dungeon with into an anonymous drone. Basically you would run dungeons with mercs that had really good AI programming.

Prior to their implementation of this feature, server communities would get to know each other through PUGing and a stronger community resulted. After the change, dungeon groups lost any sort of salience in the social sense. If you grouped with a good group of folks, it didn't matter because the chance of you getting to group with those same folks again was next to nil. That fact also made it aok in the eyes of a large portion of players to act like total asshats when in a dungeon finder group.

I believe that just adding the ability to selectively invite players to group cross server (within or in addition to the dungeon finder proper) would alleviate the problems just mentioned.

Suppose I use the dungeon finder to PUG some zone, and I find two others who are like-minded players. The ability to invite them to a future group and then enter that group into the dungeon finder queue to fill out the other three spots would, I think, make the whole feature a lot more attractive to the userbase. It would be an additional outlet to make player connections, and maintain reputation repercussions for those who, well.....ought to have some.

Heck, it may even affect your bottom line. If enough people *make friends* through the dungeon maker (not just anonymous 30 min acquaintances) you may end up selling some server transfer tokens. My concern is for the cohesiveness of the community.

I have no idea how hard that would be to implement, just my two cents.

my question is... are these cross-server dungeon plans meant just to run dungeons and meet new people? or if you have quests in these particular dungeons you do run in cross server groups will you get quest updates and they be applied to your character upon returning to your own server?

mind you i don't do groups often so im not really well informed.

That's a good question and a challenging one, I think, hopefully the dev team has already think about it

Hi here ! are the Euro servers included in these features ???? On Storms (french server), we can only play in BG with ... Storms ..... so there is nobody in BG. The few who likes it or wants to test it can't do because they are enough to begin a 6vs6. So for cross server dungeon, do you think it will be OK on Euro servers ? and maybe later for BG ?

I love seeing these words "long and healthy future of EQ2" I absolutely love this game. We need more advertising. We need more players doing streams like they do on landmark live. Looking forward to the new stuffs...can we have more recipes for us crafters and tinkers please? Some flatware? lol. The plans sound great!

I completely agree, I remember when WOW did that and what ended up happening to the community. Would hate to see that here. If at all possible being able to invite folks cross server would be outstanding and keep that from happening.

I did a few LA dungeons and while for the most part, I truly enjoyed them, I will have to say, the system is very much so still in need of refining. In a one day period, My ranger was put in a group with 3 tanks two rangers and a wizard, four scouts and two casters, three healers and the rest scouts. Multiple times I would re-que and end either at the named mob at the end of the same dungeon or end up qued up in the same group i just tried leaving, even after changing the dungeon choice settings. Yeah, the groups that balanced that I did get into were awesome fun. So good to see some of the old dungeons again. Just wish I had found more balanced groups. Oh, and a little variety to the loot would also be very nice.

Which is more likely to influence SOE.s decision to make a megaserver or merge servers? Is it the loss of a possible identity or the loss of the huge amount of sales from server transfer tokens? If people knew how nice it would be to have the ability to group and run zones with any other player in the game they would lose their server loyalty in a heartbeat I guarantee it. I play another game that is a megaserver and since the switch over I can find a capable group 24/7 to run any zone i want within 2 minutes.

Merging and maintaining the game better to keep players or make more players join the game is the better solution.

I see here some valid points regarding cross server matchmaking with total strangers ... maybe if the code implemented something like a preferential grouping if you are in each others friends lists (not just on yours or theirs to avoid stalking lol)

In regards to balance of power across level gaps... you reach 80 in LADs and you basically wipe out the zone laughing ... the buff you receive should scale in power.... being at its peak at 20... then drop a little at 30... so on and so forth. As a group leader in LAD I have had A-holes (sorry) ask for player X who just joined to be kicked since he is level 20 and will drag us down... (which I of course refused because I am there to have fun and to teach those new players and we did the zone...And BTW that level 20 was more competent since he listened and did everything as they should at their role than the level 80 hahaha..he was TERRIBLE)

So this is my take on what lower level players should receive in their buff (not much but some... because healers in particular at lower levels suffer greatly without these)

+Cast speed
+Reuse
+recovery (not as crucial but helpful for many classes)

Also if they could add more dungeons for more variety.. not too punishing or too long as I believe that LAD are a key thing to get more casual players back into enjoying the game.

Also instead of having the item drop in dungeon... you could get 1 token for item of your tier (heirloom tag) which you could buy from your merchant 1 item of your tier excess tokens (2 maybe) can be used to buy a transmutable no value item... once you move tiers you can no longer buy previous tier. The reason I say this is as follows: I have a baby assassin and he keeps on getting round shields I would not mind 1 but 4 in a row is quite crazy considering I lack both charms rings neck and wrists

And masters should drop at the tier one is at currently. This actually happened to me: in 1 chest i got super lucky with my 70+ SK and got double masters ...both the same Spell... one of a past tier and one of the current tier did not know if to laugh or cry

Cross server dungeons will make EQ2 even more awesome, I can't stress this enough. This feature needs to be on top of the todo list. Can anyone recall how fun leveling was before and after this was introduced in that "other" mmo. I practically make alts because I miss the experience of old dungeons.

On the surface it sounds wonderful... UNLESS everyone of your altss are already 95+

So really what is the point of bothering with any of this coding unless it can be used by every level?? It's like saying we really want you to meet new people and network and have fun with all these new features UNLESS you were max level in the last expac then we really don't want you to have any fun with what we are spending your subscription money on.

Maybe it isn't meant that way but that is how it feels