It's not yet too late to save the live servers ......

I logged on my former Stormhold toons, now exiled on Drunder Antonia Bayle, the server is now almost completely iddled, and it is on that server that a friend of mine moved some year ago to do hardcore raiding, and when he came back he was telling us how lively and thrving it was. Without any doubt other serversm currently more active, will follow.

For me the reason is that almost everything that came after AoM has been very detriemtal.

Let us look frankly at the situation : The mechanics and the grind was already huge in AoM, we already had ranking (3 levels of green gems for heroic gear) and adornement grind (green adorn) + currency grind. Deity was not grindy which was actually a good thing. We had no famillair, mercenaries had now level or equipment ... but now it's quite extreme :

(A) A fully gated universe :

Post AoM devellopment totally gated the game, and nobody will ever come back.

Here is a list of requirements (to start playing in groups) that list is probably not even complete.:

• Ascension, even if now the levels are easier to obtain it's obscure and messy, on top nobody ever asked to be dual classed.
• Item ranking and infusion.
• Rune ranking (apparently from PQ). Even in velious you would try to get war rune, but they were optionnal and there was a single rank. Apparently nowday you need to participate to 20-1000 PQ to even start playing.
• Fervor/Resolve level.
• Mercenary training.
• --> this is new but apparently now we have Mount training.
• Familiar leveling.
• Requirement to run the signature time lines (solo) for crafter and adventurers of the last 3 expansions ...
• + stuff that i may forget.

Result is a fully gated game, you can only loose players and nobody can start, even former players cannot come back. The current system just claim : Go away don' t even try our game, we need need your sub.

inflated mechanics,

Even now on Fallen Gate in early velious my 10 hotbars are full and i m already saving space consolidating my abilities in a single macro (i.e I have only one ST ressurection with the two spell and clearability queue, and my 3 ST nukes are consolidated too). Of course the fact that out of combat and in combat interface are the same does not help since I have raid buttons (mana, signet, macros, potions) when fooloing around and abilities such as disenchant , adornment reclaimer while raiding ;-) And no no ... i know that Sig will tell me that i can use /load_uisetting etc .. but tis is too messy to maintain.

For dps even in ToV it was already semi crazy, with many temp dps booster from clickies + sequences (especially for wizzlock or bards).
Honestly if what the game has to offer is to find out the best dps sequence (clickie one, self pot buf, clickie 3, clickie 5 .. ability 1, ability 6 ...) it is very limitated and super boring.

Reforging took already too much time, especially if you were trying to have 2 sets .. one for easy stuff dps oriented and one for raid with much higher survavibility.

Post AoM it got totally crazy with ascension abilities and new deity ones.

To be clear what is the point of having 7 stats just to handle Single target auto attack damage : MA/dps mod/Weapon damage bonus, haste, precision, striketrhough, flurry .... and this is just a tiny part of the mechanics ... (apparently melee damage is now irrelevant but well it is just an example).

And ... why did we got legendary,fabled mythical critical ... we all know that deviation from the mean is bad, and what was the point there, knowing that at the end what you get is some dps value.

Could we get some outsider (still somewhat used to MMORPG) to look at that mess and to propose and design a way out to the Devs ?



Conclusion :

What is needed is a complete "rollback" to something sane, it is no easy to do.

• The main issue is that a simple reset is hard since it may prevent people from doing the content that came after AoM.
• Another issue is that people who grinded may be upset, but well when mythical was given for almost free VP raiders just accepted it, after all they beneficited from their mythical 2 year before new players or non raiders.
• The idea of a main stat regulating progression (first it was resist, then crit mitigation, then crti chance and now it is fervor) is good, but the whole point there is that this main regulator allow to keep other stats low ... and this was not done.
• One could perfectly imagine an universe in which MA/Dpsmod/Crit chance would be capped at 100 whatever be the adventurer level.

The real core of the problem is how to undo the current mess, what could be the Roleplay story and the way out. Back when i played ADD we became too powerfull and our GM did a reset, for that he invented a rather complex story. At first we were upset, but quite quickly we found out that it was for the best.

Last this move is really imperative if DBG want to retain more than a handull of players on the live server(s), may be it' s too complicated and only the TLE will live ... I wonder. Looking at how exited are people about Kaladim it's clear that people just want to log and play.

I don't have DBG data, i don' t know how much station cash spend the live players but i believe that it's better to have 10 000 players paying 30 dollars/month than 100 paying 300/month. Actually i may be wrong due to Elephant and Mice and the the power law distribution. It is very possible that the goal is 100 players paying 1000 dollars a month ...

The key phrase here being that no, you certainly do not have DBG data, but they do. Obviously, if they were making a lot of money from the free players, they'd be doing a lot more for the free servers.

Every new expansion bolts on more pay-to-win onto the end game, and they put every new server behind a gold subscription paywall for a reason: They need to feed their families, and pay server and development costs.

This same company's Free Realms game ran in the red its entire lifespan, and never even recouped its original development costs: These facts came from Smedley at the time of its shutdown.

Remember that when you're inventing free server income numbers in your head.

Actually Siren you missed the whole point of what Kalika was saying. they key point was not about having access to DBG data. They key point is that for the last 5 years since the huge state inflation and major grinds that have been put into game live servers have taken a massive hit to populations. All you really need to do is take a look at eq2 raid progression and see how many guilds where raiding pre AoM and how many are raiding now. Better yet ill do it for you ToV 107 guilds tried raiding....CD 54 thats just about 50% less.
What i believe kailik is trying to say and something i am a big believer in is the game mechanics have gotten way out of control and a massive roll back would help put some balance back into what alot of people would agree to as a very broken game. Band-aids after band-aids being put into place. Eq2 players have been asking for a proper class balancing for years and yet they dont they just aid another ban-aid to cover it up ( ascensions ).

Bottom line is simple if you dont bring players back to the game soon there will be no game left free or TLE servers.
Some would say well just play on a TLE server, why would i love my characters that i spent years and years playing on live i want to play them.
I subbed for 6 years straight and quite 2 years ago cause of the issues Kalik has mentioned. When DBG fixes the game i will be back subbing again with alot of others that quit over the years.

Also, it is not only FTP players on the live servers. I am subbed, but only play on Live. My main is on Thurgadin, the only EU server left, and that is a Live server. Yes, to play on the special ruleset servers like TLE and the new PVP server require a sub, but this does not at all mean that all subbed players go there.

I expected to come to this thread to refute some "sky is falling" thing, but I tend to agree with the OP and Healsu for the most part. The game is kind of going backwards instead of forwards again.

Too much grind, too hard to catch up even if you still play, but have to play casually for a while. And every time we turn around a new "cool and fun" game mechanic is added that ends up being just another chore unless you decide to open up your wallet. It's not fun. It's not appealing to people who are fresh coming back or starting.


They do the TLE servers here because they've been a huge hit in the original Everquest and at least temporarily bring back some of the people who left. However, consistently the largest server base is on the live servers after the first couple of months of the TLE.
Some TLE players seem to love to pretend otherwise, but there's many people who still pay subs and play on the regular servers. We aren't all just free players. And I don't know that there is anyone on the regular servers who doesn't spend at least a little on DBC.
None of that is going to make a difference if they don't make the game more friendly for people to stay, return, or join for the first time.

I also agree with this post. Just to make another case in point, if you don't have someone who is paying to win in your group it is next to impossible to do some t2 heroics. On AB it has taken alot longer to get people to were they "need" to be, and in T2 because 1 healer can't handle the zones, you can't afford to take people less geared in with you, unless you have 1 or 2 OP players. This has been VERY discouraging to alot of people. I can't even imagine being someone new coming back to the game and trying to figure out how to get where you need to go. He is also correct, when 10 hot bars isn't enough, then something is wrong. Ascension was not a great idea, heck there is really no clear choice per class. anyway I get what your saying here.

I loved this game i truly did it was a world of wonder with quests ever where, always things to do and when you leveled you could start a new alt and do it over again. Now its not the case every expansion brings more and more gating and another " cool mechanic" that only ends up hurting the game. ToV expansion my raid illy was doing around 100k dps with top dps players doing 200k or so. Now i hear that top dps are doing over 12bil? and non geared dps are not even been looked at for groups, in 5 expansions thats a huge huge jump how does no one over at DBG see that this is just bad for the game?

Again I loved this game and i have yet to find another game that fits the way EQ2 did but i have no desire to come back to the mess the game is in. As for the term " the sky is falling " it is and im sorry to say that but until someone over at DBG wakes up and says geez i think we really need to look at all these game mechanics, more and more people will leave and the people that try and make a come back only to find that they need to spend a wack of money or tireless grinding to catch up will also move on.

Throwing in my 2 cents here. As a returning player who, prior to this, played when the cap was 80. My highest adventure level toon is 91 and frankly after seeing alllllll the stuff coming up with to deal with not just between 100-110 but then all the stuff to do at 110? It's extremely daunting and insanely confusing and doesn't give me a feeling of looking forward to it. Multi tiers of adorns? That alone confuses me, and apparently it's extremely important.
I'm having more fun doing the tradeskilling lines, and have 3 crafters at 110. But with those, they are easy in the sense that they're straightforward, you know what to do. Faction and the currency systems make sense for the most part. (Even though the sheer amount of different currency is also mind boggling)
But yeah, I'm most likely not even going to bother with a lot of it, I just want to check out the new zones, do quest lines and not have to spend a few hours reading up on a wiki to figure out what I should do first and how to do it then go grind for weeks.
Most likely I'll get this toon up to 100, then go back and level some alts up. I'm way too casual a player to want to deal with muddled mechanics. DBG seemed to have gotten the idea that MORE MORE MORE was the way to keep people around, when they should have focused more on refining what was there and improving on that.

Well I think this thread is a very good one
I am also a returning player to EQ2
Let me share my own view
I had a sub running constantly from launch to ToV,though had a play break at some point but easily picked up from where i stopped.
So did my brother .He quit due to real life stuff and i sort of followed after that
So yes I quit 5 years ago with 10+ maxed out crafters and adventurers
Now I have quit other games for years and came back.Notably ESO,DAoC,WoW and list goes on and came back to try them
No game have i played more then EQ2 including EQ1 and WoW
Each time i come back to the other games(excluding EQ1 since only ever came back for TLE) have i had to spend hours trying to read thru the wiki just so i can actually do a group content .heck in most of them i can slide into group content fairly quick and relearn the game there .In some i am able to actually raid as soon as i am max or near max level since i done most of the group content while leveling up
Now EQ2 which for all its flaws was a game that was easy to pick up from where you stopped.
It was a game you could run many alts and experience the joy with each
Now it is the most confusing and daunting game
So I got to max my levels.Thats fine, other games do that
But oh wait you need to max your AA,then there is a familiar now he needs sorting,then don't forget your merc and mount needs levels too,ah remember there is a ascension level also and i long gear grind just to get to do anything
I do not even include crafting since i love crafting
I even looked into buying the Premium edition because hey it helps keeps the lights on but from what i can see even thats not enough and thats shelling $140 out on top of the sub(i always sub in my games)
I am not looking to jump into raids as soon as my toon hits level 110(even though some games permit that) but really you need a less complex system without a long grind .
This is my 2 cents

While I pretty much agree with the OP's points, I disagree with the rollback idea. I assume it to mean people losing their progress. I'd be unhappy about that, and I'm only here as a prelude to cancelling my account (to make sure that things haven't changed since I last played regularly, about two months ago). People who still want to play the game as is would be more unhappy, and going forward, they are the ones paying the bills.

Account cancelling is not a big deal for me, since I often return to good games, which EQ2 has always been. I understand the devs can't possibly keep up with developing new content for people who play games a lot. So I move on, but come back when new expansions are released.

However, there was an usually long absence before coming back this time (and the last time I played, it was on the first TLE server - which means that the new content at the time did not interest me). And this time, I doubt if I'll be back, primarily because I suspect these draconian money grabs are a sign of the end.

Because no MMO in its right mind would make it so hard for people to get into a basic group.

I'm pretty sure that the devs have been given marching orders to make money or else shut down (as they did with Landmark). I can't believe any dev interested in the long term could possibly be so stupid to cannibalize itself this way by eating their subscribers, so it must be the suits giving them an ultimatum - make money NOW (as opposed to the future, which a properly managed MMO must always be considering to survive - make money NOW is the province of single player games, and which Chaos Descending smells of).

What they need to do to fix it:

• Make it so that a full group of characters who have just completed the solo Chaos Descending signature line can complete basic group content, no crafting required, not doing Panda quests, or any old content that new or returning players might have missed, including Ascension abilities. I can't stress this enough, for any MMO that wants to survive, even though my spouse and I made huge amounts of plat (enough to buy several Kronos, which we don't need, since we always subscribe when we play) by leveling our crafters first.
• Despite the fact that we have all crafters at max level and who have completed the CD crafting signature line, and have lots of plat, neither of us have any interest in doing the work necessary to use them to make our adventure toons group viable, because that process is not fun.
• That process is not fun because the mechanics required to refine, experiment, infuse is not fun. Not hard, but tedious, and I have other things to do that are more fun.
• That not fun process is made worse because the stats that are most important change every expansion. I had to make spreadsheets SOLELY to determine which of the Mastercrafted gear (which we can make all of) had the least useless stats. Making spreadsheets is not fun when you do that at work.
• The sheer quantity of useless stats made it impractical to learn which ones they are in game.
• The fact that the majority of those now useless stats relate to anything that buffs auto-attack, the weaving of which between casting a combat art/spell once set EQ2 apart from other MMOs, since it made it a bit more difficult to faceroll your keyboard after you found a good casting order. That's now gone, making simpler games more appealing.
• The level of work necessary to just join a basic group in EQ2 these days is similar to the work needed to join raids in some other MMO's I've played. That needs to be dumbed down a bit to compete. Solo content is fine, i.e., provide some middle ground between solo and raiding effort.
• Trim the number of abilities/spells plus all the utility abilities to fit within the 100 slots allowed. 100 slots to use however we wish is wonderful, but the fact that it's not enough, is the devs fault, not the players. While we can try to figure out what things we don't need, that varies
• In summary, reduce the work and increase the fun.

QFT, and hadn't read before I posted mine, since it took me awhile to compose.

For the first several years of EQ2, a new expansion was essentially a soft-reset. Some backtracking may have been required, but the list was generally small and tasks/requirements were clear. This annual soft-reset maintained a measure of balance on the barrier of entry for new or returning players, and promoted a healthy system.

But something changed.
RMT was introduced.

SOE claimed that RMT in EQ2 was not a slippery slope. However, I doubt people can honestly attempt to debate it now. Since the EQ2x/FTP/CashShop model was introduced, EQ2 has progressively become more reliant on RMT to be viable, being most notable in high end heroic or raiding play styles. New expansions no longer perform a comparable service to their mechanical function in the first several years of EQ2.

Matters have been made even worse by an obvious lack of long term planning for stats and itemization. The explosion of stats and discrepancies between the growth of things like player health (closer to being linear) and player DPS (closer to being exponential) all but guaranteed the Dev team would be incapable of keeping the game balanced. Not a recipe for success.

For people who hold hope that EQ2 will see any tangible improvement, I wish you all the best. However, after considering the track record of EQ2 over the last decade, threads and posts like the OP have been plentiful, but the ship keeps sailing in the same direction. Anyone who expects that to suddenly change, has more optimism on this topic than I.

Just remove ascensions entirely, and ofcourse balance the content with the removal, and i would be happy with the game tbh. Its fine being able to level mercs, familiars and mounts - but its not like thats required to actually do current content.

Well as said this is one of my best mmo of all times and sadly some early decision at launch the game failed to perform as well as hoped
Some of this things were corrected in future patches and expac making it a real fun game
However its current form is totally uninviting to new players ,worse then any other mmo i can think of(unsure of EQ1 since i only play the TLE)
I love the game to the point that if dropping 140$ will help with it remaining afloat i will but it seems it requires even more money
You need to make the game more casual friendly bottom line as it has always been

docsam
"I had a sub running constantly from launch to ToV,though had a play break at some point but easily picked up from where i stopped."
This is a very very good point, prior to ToV it was very very easy to come back after a "break" and pick up again all you needed to do was level to the new max and go there was no stupid new game mechanic that you needed to grind for months to get to max level. The game was easy enough for new players to play and jump right in and returning players as well.

Tommara
"While I pretty much agree with the OP's points, I disagree with the rollback idea. I assume it to mean people losing their progress"
When i say roll back it is the stat area and the over all dps health pools that need to be rolled back. they are way to inflated and at the rate of growth the trend is going it will be even harder and harder to do any such balancing.

Gematria
"Just remove ascensions entirely, and of course balance the content with the removal"
I hate ascensions i truly do, it was a cool idea that turned into a very bad one when implemented but the fact is they are here to stay only because they earn so so much money for DBG in the P2W business model. This also brings up a point for another post is there business model is so very wrong so i wont get into it here.

Best solution
complete overhaul, Fix the problems stop adding to it with stupid mechanics every year or sooner then later it will break

Returned about 3 weeks ago figuring I'd mes around while waiting on new servers. I'm giving it an honest attempt but it's beyond confusing and if I didn't alway know a few EQ2 players to give me advice I wouldn't have lasted a week in the current state of things. There's still a good game in there but seems buried in a cluttered sea of chaos. More is good if more is done right, but this is really messy.

I love EQ2 and has a special place in my heart but will instead just sub(already have) and play the TLE.At this point will not bother with the expac.
The "new" EQ2 is way too grindy and way too confusing for the effort.Bottom line not fun and more like a job you are not happy with it
At least hopefully can relive EQ2 in way i remember it on TLE and see you all there!

I was initially reminded that Fallen Gate was there through the constant 10-second lag and crashing of free servers this past Frostfell. People have been returning since 2018's Nights of the Dead, and more for Chaos Descending and Frostfell, and it gets too much for whatever free server hosting is currently being used these days.

All the free servers would be down, but my characters on Fallen Gate and Isle of Refuge would still be up (IoR is the live client with free trade enabled but it's gold sub required, so IoR seems to be hosted somewhere better, along with the TLs).

As I'm already gold anyway, I started really playing my Fallen Gate characters, and it's been a relief not to have to deal with the confusing, bolted on, ascension/pay-to-win end game from the F2P servers anymore.

I probably will not play Kaladim, because the XP will be way too slow for me versus FG's XP nowadays, but I'll be on Nagafen when seasons are running anyhow. And I still won't have to deal with live end-game even at that. I sub gold and buy things here and there from the cash shop. That's enough for me, and it's way less convoluted.

I dunno how dead the standard servers are, but try finding a group and leveling a char on FG... will never happen. At least on standard servers have mercs. Really there should just be one or two servers, the game is too old to make any kind of comeback. Most people have moved on to new games, but there will likely never be a new Everquest MMO.

I think there might be in the works another EQ3. i feel both EQ and EQ2 now have a end date in sight and in order to keep the company going releasing a new title would be the way to go. The history of these titles would bring back the gamers to something new but all we can is cross our fingers and hope they do it right. Take the time to see what was great and what was ****. See what other games are doing and what makes them great or **** and build something worthy of the EQ name. With the population decreasing on live servers and making event servers for cash flow can only keep the boat afloat for so long