Improving Our Alternate Advancement (AA) System

Oh, the irony!

So as long as you have YOUR challenge its ok to ruin the game for others.
And it's your choice to to have a dozen or more toons.

As Klayari pointed out, no one is forced to make dozens of alts that such players feel that they need to get to max level by yesterday.That is a choice that those players make.

Those of us who have small groups of characters that we wanted to slowly level by taking our time questing and exploring have had much of the challenge taken away whether we want it or not.

Yes; depending on how many they already had, it is entirely possible for that to be the case. After the original announcement, they considered some player feedback that was posted and altered the formula to apply the base plan on top of the existing AA the character already had, but only up to 280AA. Level 50 should have given you approximately 140AA (if my math-challenged brain came up with anything close to the correct answer). That would have been added to what they already had, up to 280 points.

EDIT:

There's a chart in post #151 that shows how many AA you would have been granted at every level from 10 all the way to 90. Level 50 is 141 AA. I'm slightly less an idiot than I thought. Slightly.

Yes, it is my choice, and the choice of many others. And HOW is your game ruined, now, exactly??

It's been said several times now. You dont have to use those AA points if you dont want too. So how is your challenge taken away, exactly?

Sounds like the real, unspoken "challenge" here, may be to prevent other players from getting what you didnt have at their level. A sort of crab in the bucket type of thing. It ruins your game if you think another player is getting something you didnt. Is that it? Because otherwise, just dont use the AAs, and your game is the same as it was yesterday.

If every time you leveled, you were given a piece of Raid gear for your class, would you feel you earned it?
Would you feel like you actually accomplished something good?

Would you feel the game is still challenging?

And while I have 7 toons I'm working on at the moment, I still want to earn the AA myself. To me the trip is the fun part, the destination is the end of a toon.
I dont care if people PL, rush to end game, craft, any play style is fine with me.

I just wish they would have auto mailed baubles to everyone at lvl 90 or made a few lvl 90 quests that gave a bunch of AA to help players up to 280.

I'm really not sure how auto mailing a bauble at lvl 90 to push people up to 280 AA would be any different from granting points gradually along the way? Well, except that someone who hasn't been earning AA before 90 with the mailed bauble would suddenly have all these new abilities and buffs to learn all at once, whereas the person granted a few points at a time while leveling is learning their abilities as they go. It's certainly possible to learn to use all those abilities at once - people can and have done it for Heroic characters - but it's the tougher go.

For people concerned this will make their gameplay too easy and they won't be able to enjoy questing through zones, please remember we have not only the XP-AA slider, but the ability to disable some forms of xp entirely. So if you want to take the slow path, leave the slider at 100% xp and disable combat experience. Quest to your heart's content, level at a more leisurely pace, and the AA grants will create the level-to-AA ratio that moving the slider used to. You'll probably need to toggle the combat xp on and off to find a leveling pace that works for you, but it seems like a very comfortable option.

I know. I wish they had not taken away pre-made apprentice turn-ins and High Quality Slag for commons. I wish I had made more small Harvest Depots, back when I had the chance, to hold all the commons that are not worth the effort to refine anymore, now. I even wish that they hadn't nerfed the DMs, cos now all the contested zones will be crowded.

We just have to find a way to deal with the disappointment and move on!

Thank you for your quick response and as it turns out the stuff on my trees stayed where they were ---- now to put on all the new ones LOL

The new system is here , like it or loathe it, so we just have to get used to it either way. I'm leaving well alone now.

Howether, I'd like to ask is it possible to add into your 'improvement' phase that you add an additional option on the aa system for a 'build as you go' option. I bemuse why for a new player you have the choice of the pre-set solo/group etc builds, or enter build mode whereby you assume everyone knows every single spell you are going to use right up to 90 and beyond and commit to it.
The old system, around the time you brought out ftp did this, if you made a mistake or wanted to change you buy an item from the advancement council to reset.
The new system is very clunky, with the new aa's being given out, all my old aa combat arts were disabled and i had to make a new saved profile , commit to it , just in order to reload my original one and re-commit.
Keep the options you have now, I would just like an additional choice of a build on the fly aa version, if nothing else but to give aa's the illusion that we dont have to follow the cookie cutter patterns and those with an IQ greater than their shoe size have a place in EQ2. Or at least a small corner to fester in.

I would love it if we could reset individual trees without resetting the whole build, like we used to be able to...

If they'd sent out a bauble people would have had a CHOICE on whether to use it or not. Since the update I'm slowly acquiring a full set of mid level toons with maxed 280 AA. I used to enjoy earning those points as it gave me a sense of accomplishment. Thanks for taking that away, SOE.

This morning I logged on a lvl 22 toon and decided to set my aa slider to 100% aa just as an experiment, ran crushbone keep middle floor, fallen gate, and stormwind with most named up and barely filled 1/2 of one aa bar at 82 aa's ( after the freebies added on from thursday) including using a potion of advancement giving me 25% extra. I switched to 100% adventure experience , ran just crushbone once, gained 2 levels and 6 aa. Seems the choice isnt there at all now.

That's because your higher level AAs require more xp to level, than does an entire level at lvl 22. Isn't it?

It does, and at first glance that is the obvious assumption. The interesting thing is I ran the same instances last week on another toon at lvl 20 on 75% aa with 84aa to start with, and gained 4 levels and another 9 aa with no potion. Something is obviously different.

I was apprehensive at first....but now I love it! spending all that new AA is a lot of fun and with the amount of alt I have it's great to not have to worry about the AA grind, on every single one.

Not to mention discovering all the cool abilities that come with some of the trees.

This update was great!

I don't understand why people are complaining, there is still a grind from 280 to 350 to advance your character.

But you CAN do this, I've been doing it on all my characters for a very long time. Open build mode, make a blank profile (no points spent) and commit to it. There you are, you can build/spend as you go, with all the points you have earned already and will earn in the future, and your build-so-far will be saved to that profile in case you need to switch to a different one (such as for mass production crafting).

Surprised by some of these comments. There are options to workaround the auto-grant option, very easy to implement. This game really lets you do AA's the way you want - you have complete control, and yet the hate towards this change is palpable. It really does seem that some people HATE IT when other, less committed, more casual players get a quality of life improvement. Be happy that you have the granular control that you do in EQ2! A lot of MMO games don't offer this level of customization.

Really? Please explain how we can avoid getting a shedload of unwanted AA points dropped in our laps if we dare to log in a toon for more than 2 minutes?

No, some people hate that other people's quality of life improvements become their punishment simply because SOE once again chose to amend a feature in a way that gave no player CHOICE. They've been getting screamed at for years now for this sort of behaviour but they never seem to learn.