General gameplay, transparency and rng madness!

The definition of engaging doesn't meet with mine.
RNG is horrible.

It might give those that may want to raid again but cannot OR who are returning a change to catch up a little more if they did NOT make raid loot non-tradeable or sellable. Let it be put on the market. Let others be able to buy it from guilds/players to better THEIR toons and have a chance to get gear that will allow them to join or play more? Right now there is no chance for them and after awhile people get tired of knowing they are stuck with very little, if any, chance to upgrade regardless of how much time or work they put into it.

And here we are in Mid-may and the game is a desert. No one logs in to do anything except raid or turn over OSer because people are just tired of beating their heads against the wall for minimal rewards. Well, to be fair, the only other people logging in are those people camping the same bosses in the same zones. But yeah, that's real time "engagement" in a game, haha. Off to do something productive--landscaping the yard. Fresh air, visible progress while I'm working and a sense of accomplishment when I'm done.

Wait for it....incoming posts about how the new PVP server just launched and that's why it's a desert. I have a lifetime membership with more maxed out characters than I can even realistically build and I only log in anymore to do the overseer quest resets. I have no idea why I even care...maybe to justify having paid for the lifetime account or trying not to give up hope on a game I've played since launch.

I cant remember the last time I logged in to do anything but overseers and raid. Might have been week 3 of the expansion if im brutally honest for signature weapon, the prestige AA points and adornment. Other than that there has not really been a whole lot of content worth doing other than wasting hours gathering for the raid quest progress.

I suppose thats what they want us to do now though since we keep subbing for this content, no way they can make enough content every year that is replayable.

I find it is the repetition that gets to me and I can repeat things a lot. By my estimate, I now have 27 characters with ponies just on Test alone and I haven't even checked 3 of my accounts to see if any of my other characters have ponies as I no longer sub all 7 accounts. I imagine I have just as many characters with ponies on Maj'Dul, IoR, and Thurgadin.

So I can repeat content but there are times when the repetition just gets to be too much. For example, I recently had to do the Grim Running quest, on Test, 15 times to get the Rallic pack pattern. That's is just too much. Ever since, I've been having to force myself to log on and do something.

But DB doesn't seem to know their game should be fun rather than constantly frustrating. The RNG part tends to get totally out of hand. It's nice to get new overseer agents but not when it is the same agent over and over.

And I can't get new quests to get better gear. My main account, on Test, has a pathetic number of quests available that aren't blue. It's hard to get excited to log in to complete more treasured quests that are only going to return stuff of little or no real value. It just wastes time and I don't have a lot of play time to waste.

So it is disheartening and I think that is what troubles so many players. Time is limited so we want to spend it productively--even when relaxing. And when we get frustrated we are no longer relaxing so that pretty much kills the whole point of playing.

I don't know if the new ownership will change things or not. We've been promised so much, over the years, that wasn't delivered so it is hard to keep faith. The only thing I do know is that I hope they rethink the emphasis on RNG and go with a plan that lets us choose our rewards according to our needs. That, alone, would go a long way in making the game more rewarding and enjoyable.

If anyone thinks the PvP server is going to make a difference, they have their heads seriously in a dark place. It's been a desert long before PvP was announced and nothing is going to change that. If anything, with past experience for pvp in this game, anyone who thought this was going to "save" the game and bring back droves of people, must also believe the latest Republican talking head I saw on a newsfeed last nite saying January 6th/D.C. was just a bunch of tourists in town.

Also merge the goddamn servers already. I dont understand why they are so stubborn. Sure, servers are laggy right now as soon as you get more than 3 people in a zone, but I rather have laggy servers and people to play with than laggy servers with hardly anyone to play with.

The lifetime membership paid for itself already, if you want an excuse to stop. I only log in on live to raid and do holidays. I prefer older, doable, coherent content of the TLE/PVP servers.

Look at it this way. It has turned into "Evercamp" instead of Everquest so with nobody logging in, you don't have to fight to get a spot to camp waiting on a PH to spawn every hour or so that you can kill and wait another hour or so for another PH to spawn in the hopes that by hour 8 you my have seen the named pop up it's rarely seen head. THEN you can move on to ANOTHER spot to camp for the next 8 or so hours and HOPE to see another named THEN you can finish the quest.

"Our engagement figures show you guys are spending 75% of your logged in time camping placeholders, therefore you love placeholders and we'll make sure to incorporate more into future content".

Running EQ2 slowly into the ground is such a missed opportunity. There's very little in the way of quality MMO's out there. EQ2 still has the building blocks to be an outstanding game. It just needs... rethinking. New direction, new leadership, and a tonne of cash thrown at it. It'd work. I'm certain of it. I'd come back in a heartbeat if they flipped the table and had a go at a (genuinely this time) massive overhaul. I expect there are thousands of players out there who'd do the same. But I think the Hydra would need a few heads cut off first.

^

It's hard to believe reasoning like this is used to explain design decisions for this game, but it is.

P.S.:
Listening to customers is useful.