New Expansion - Itemization and Rewards

Thank you for the responses. I would suggest with this answer that you please, please, please talk to the tradeskill people in the tradeskill forum or in homeshow about what they/we'd like to see. I can tell you myself that I would love for the tradeskill timeline to provide the advanced tradeskill books upon completion, purchasable by regular plat, and that those advanced tradeskill books allow me to craft Mastercrafted items that are better than solo signature line gear (or at least equal to it) and the advanced spellbooks allow me to craft expert spells that I can use immediately.

Many Kander's Candor's ago, he talked about an idea for a rune which grew with the character as you completed achievements, as a way to replace things like flawless buffs etc. I'd really like to see where this idea could go. I think it has more possibilities than just replacing the flawless buff. I think evolving (long term evolving that is) runes is a really interesting idea and could be a great way to manage a character's growth alongside armor and weapons.

I did wonder if maybe this year's ethereal rune might be a step towards this and who knows? Maybe it is. But anyway, of all the things which came up in Kander's Candor. This one was a eureka moment for me and something well worth having a go at.

Yep, as I said before, this this this!

No. It is not.

First and foremost Alts are an integral part of game play. An EQ2 FTP account has two character slots. A subscriber account has seven character slots. Players can buy additional character slots. IF Everquest II did not want players to use or have Alts, they would have gone the Landmark route. Which was one account, one character.

And to Mint, at a minimum this should be kept as is. And as a suggestion, all no trade items should be heirloom. As noted above, EverQuest II approves of the use of Alts. EverQuest II positively profits from people getting more Alts. Improving the company bottom line is a good thing.

Along those lines, the Ethereal coins attached to an account (heirloom) and not to a character is a welcome change. There should be more of that, not less.

Based on other forum posts, that is incorrect. Based on personal game play, and first hand knowledge of other players, that is incorrect.

This position has been seen multiple times on the forums, but it has a few flaws. It does not take into account game play time.

Let's use the Vasty Deep solo weekly as an example. IF you're running the solo in solo gear, it takes about an hour (give or take 30 minutes) to complete. Mostly. So let's say it takes one GameHour (think the mythical man-hour) of effort.

A Vasty Deep weekly collection bag has six collectibles. A player needs six bags to get all the 'shines.' Which I think is for six different collections. There are at least two ways to go about this.

A) One player with one character expends one GameHour to get one bag. The one player does this over the course of six weeks to get six bags. Total expenditure is six GameHours; one GameHour times six runs over six weeks.

B) One player with six Alts/characters expends one GameHour to get one bag. The one player does the run with each of their six Alts during the week. Total expenditure is six GameHours; one GameHour times six runs over one week.

Both players expend the same six GameHours of effort. But one player 'gets the work done in less time' because they are efficiently multi-tasking. Why should there be a penalty for the same level of effort?

And to Mint and corporate, keep in mind that according to forum posts, Alts get geared. That's a boost to player engagement stats. Why gear Alts? Because a poorly geared Alt can not run contemporary content. Which is the other flaw.

The "B" example player will likely spend six weeks getting weekly 'shinies' for all Alts. That's thirty-six GameHours; six GameHours times six runs over six weeks. Again, this is a boost to player engagement stats. Not necessarily the thirty-six GameHours. That's six different characters logged in.

And to Mint, according to forum posts and personal observation, players with Alts spend on their Alts. Content that takes this into account is a good thing for the company.

More heirloom. More rewards tied to an account, not to a character.

Oh, and how about flagging an account and all Alts within, when a player completes their Signature and TradeSkill lines?

That's just not the case, today everyone is forced to play several characters in order to be able to keep up his main character with the progress in the content. Otherwise it is not possible, nothing more is behind this statement. If this were possible with only a character you would do it, but it doesn't work. As the quest and mission restrictions prohibit this.

In this form it is not ok, no one should be forced to keep up with others to play more than one character!!!!

And the whole thing turned around again, simply the question why should someone get an advantage over other players just because they have more characters than the other?

That doesn't make any sense at all. People who take advantage of this are cheating on my eyes for me.

You don't play the game just to take advantage of opportunities to cheat your way past others.

You play the game to have fun and to be able to have a healthy competition among each other, but that doesn't work if there is no fair basis for receiving loot.

Most players have to work, take care of their families, they can't play 24/7 like others here.

To this end, the powergaming restrictions were introduced once at the beginning of the game.

If you would cancel the timers on the instances and allow everyone to do as many quests / missions as they want with a character, 99.95% of all alt's or twinks would disappear from the game. Thus it can be clearly seen that it is only used to circumvent the game restrictions.

.........................................

That of course people want it that way is clear, these are exactly the people who have been taking advantage of this for years. ( To put yourself above others and to think how good you would be because you can reach everthing so well and fast, while circumventing the restrictions imposed on a character, is not a real achievement, sorry.)

[ This is just like the folks who use Final Judgment to kill the adds on the Emperor, even though people know this ability is bugged and therefore does far too much damage. It would be an achievement to use normal abilities and ascensions, everything else is cheating.]

Let's take the Vasty Deep instances, here the loot is far too good for the actual effort.

It is not in proportion to the effort of raids. Not even to the simple raids.

So the equipment spiral is now much too fast (especially for people with multiple characters) and the loot is way too good compared to the raids, so that most people ask themselves, why are raids at all now?

Because of a single encounter at the end of the challenge mode raid zone? That's ridiculous, sorry.

In case you still haven't understood it, it's not about the pure playing time to be spent.

It's about the part of real life that is needed to achieve something.

As you said, it only takes a couple of hours to make the 6 weekklies. But one needs a day with 6 characters and the other 6 weeks with one character, real lifetime, to achieve it. That means the one with 6 characters is 6 weeks ahead of the player with one character in the progress.

If a raid consists only of multiple character accounts and all of these people only run VD2, then these people achieve the necessary resolve much faster than others, only because they have several characters on each account, which they use to equip a single main character.

Thus you can then progress faster than everyone else in the complete content including the raid content, as you logically reach the necessary resolve much faster. So you can save all progress lists and the like, since there is no longer any real competition.

It's only about if you have more characters and luck to achieve things like the raid progress faster than others.

>>> This is how it is and was not intended to mean that things were made heirloom. It massively warps the game progress. <<<

If you really want to play your twinks, as you say, then you don't need a heirloom, because if you play these twinks, you get the items with the twinks accordingly. Like anyone else who only plays a single character.


So it wouldn't make any difference to you if things were not trade or not. It's just not that you really play your twinks, so it bothers you when things are no trade. Because you lose your unfair advantage that you buy yourself through the twinks and the circumvention of the restrictions.

You just don't want to wait like others have to do with a character to achieve things that are dictated by the game restrictions.

Everything would be the same for everyone if each character, rewards and achievements unlocked were only for themselves.


If you want more, you would have to make the appropriate effort to get this, to expect that everything will be given to you, only because you have already done it with your main is actually a cheek. Do it 2 times if you want it for 2 characters, do it 20 times if you want it for 20 characters, why should the developers make this easier for you, just so that you have even less effort with your main ???

I personally like the bags being heirloom because it incentivized playing alts before having the shinies done on their main.
[I initally thought they should be no-trade, but then the tradeable showed to be a hold up, making it near impossible for someone to finish in 1 week anyways]

I appreciate the tradeables being a bigger hold up than the no-trades. I also appreciate that once you finish you get 3 shinies per a daily, as that allows a group to really speed up their progress on completion. I prefer this to just getting the reward on my alt as it provides a way to help out other groupies, make some plat, but still made it easy to complete on said alt when I wanted to.
[Also if someone has the time to run 6 alts through in a week and do enough extra runs to get all of the tradeable shinies then kudos to them. It seemed like most people going hard after the shinies started finished during week 3 so running 2 toons each week. There were enough semi-rare tradeable shinies to make it hard to actually get all of the tradeables that quick, especially if you were doing straight NBG loot.]
While I don't think people should get everything faster because they play alts, I think it is okay for people that go hard on playing their alts to get ONE item 2-3 weeks earlier than someone playing exactly 1 toon.

So please please please do shinies like the VD zones moving forwards(especially keep the extra shinies after finishing bit-even if it needs to be just 1 per a quest since an entire xpac has way more daily zone quests).

For me when no-trade shinies were first introduced it made me no longer want to play alts because I couldn't just pass the shinies to my main, versus when they were all tradeable I had no problem playing an alt to fill the needed slot because my main could still get the shinies. [But also I have an obsession with shinies, so no matter what the reward is shinies are my main goal lol]

As far as tradeskill acquired items, the mastercrafted gear being locked behind completing heriocs was problematic. I kind of understood not wanting people to just be able to make em day one for every slot with old rares, but they still should of been accessible from day 1 without running heroics. (even if it had been a currency thing on the TS missions to acquire them, though a harvestable would of been preferred).

Going off that, for tradeskill missions, the rewards have really been lackluster. We had the recipies to work towards for raiders, but that was really it.
One system I actually enjoyed in the past was when the runes required something bought with TS currency to make(think AOM and also TOT). The rate of acquiring them was reasonable enough for people without crafters to buy them from crafters, but gave tradeskillers something useful they could acquire. So I'd appreciate seeing something like this again(even if its not specifically for runes, could be the coins let us buy something needed for powerlinks or better temp adorns or whatever; just want to have something useful come from the tradeskill missions).

As another comment on that, I really hate that powerlinks were added as a rare reward to overseers instead of being acquirable through some reliable means. I'm lucky if I see even one powerlink in a week from overseers - I would like to see recipies for these being a reward or the links acquirable via coins again.


I really enjoyed the cabal system(though I thought the armor was a bit overpriced compared to the jewelry). I liked that it was a select few specific spots rather than everywhere, so we had something to work towards but still needed other stuff for the rest of our slots. I enjoyed the balance between weekly rewards/daily rewards for earning coins. People running the den zones daily were able to get the rewards faster, but not way too far ahead of people just doing the weeklies. [this also allowed non-raiders access to a few slots of better gear, which I like as long as its limited to a few slots, rather than the best of everything being from heroic/non-raid stuff].

How about being more friendly to alts. I got a lot of alts and I hate all this non shared loot like adornments and so forth. This last expansion was not alt friendly and I find myself now days just logging in on my main to run one toil and trouble. There is no reason to run my alts as toil and trouble kill them right off even with good gear.

There is so much I would like to discuss here but I do have one suggestion:

Please add an option to help with "bag flooding". Many times there is not an option to decline loot (I'm talking to you, overseer). I have 5 toons and cleaning up there bags is some time. If there was just an option to decline on some of the un needed loot I think that would be helpful.

Will say this again.

Keep the account flags like you did with Ethereal coins and no-trade collectibles this summer in the next expansion.

1. Would also like the signature adventure and crafting questline also as an account flag. There may be some people who like doing the quests over and over again but I am not one of them. Running them once on my main takes a monumental effort for me to go through the tedium and whoever amongst devs thought it was a good idea since Kunark ascending of making signature quests to be a requirement needs some enlightenment from a players perspective. Make the signature and heritage quests like they were years ago when they were completely optional and rewarded very good items for the effort required. Let the player level up/grind in a new expansion however they like, we should get xp from running groups, doing quests, collections etc.

2. If you are intending to keep ascensions still relevant next expansion (i sincerely hope not) then make their upgrades account wide. So if you have reached a celestial level on spell and if you roll an alt and choose that class, the spell should automatically be at celestial. Running Chaos descending PQs was never fun back then and these days its a ghost town. Getting alts to raid level ready requires a fair bit of effort as it is and finding players to do the PQ is just too much these days.

3. Make guild flawless buff something that once a guild has unlocked it, the guild leader can give access to it to any guild member at a set rank. A lot of new players/alts still need to dragged through older content to get them done. This is also relevant for red and blue runes which are an absolute requirement. Getting the old destruction rune requires you to do old seru zone flawless or be extremely lucky on RNG. Same goes with the embers rune, either its a PoW clearing or doing the CD zone. Your game simply does not have the luxury to do this with such low population and people running old zones regularly.

They should have account flags as well as an option to grind the expansion currency for, so for any returning player they have a realistic chance of catching up with people if they can put in time and effort to grind.

Lastly, nearly all of this is pointing to risk vs reward that is severely lacking from the game these days. The RNG based grind sucks the fun out of the game. I mean i know of a friend who logged on a few times and opened a loot crate box after buying them on marketplace and then got the merc buff and the mount. He does not even play the game anymore...Here I am after spending a few $$$ and still not got it. All the marketplace items should be exactly the same in stats and be available in the game and without RNG. You always talk about players losing interest with content quickly then give them the incentive to hang around. Put that marketplace mount or merc on a long grind in game and see how many players become more active in doing content. Put like 100000 currency requirement or any reasonable number that can players keep grinding for a long time but what you get is the best in slot item. Sure who want to skip the grind and have money could still do so but you are levelling the playing field. As it stands, it is simply not.

Yes. Completely agree. Listen to this idea right here ^^

You don't have to play more than one character to keep up a main. The only mechanic in the game that you could argue exists like this is the ethereal event, which is running indefinitely. You may not get the stuff as fast as your peer who has alts, but you will get it. That being said, making it easier on alts is never a bad thing. Account unlocks for gear, achievement runes, etc. Having alts makes the game more fun for longer, for more people.

The main problem that stands in between alts and being relevant is two things: Pay to win and Combat Mit.
Pay to win, to me, is defined as anything in the game that cannot be realistically achieved without paying for it, via crate baubles or straight station cash. This includes: Crate buffs, spell leveling to ancient, mount leveling, merc leveling, and familiar leveling.
The actual dps difference, stats alone, between a character with 300k potency and 350K potency is mathematically ~16%. With combat mit in the game, it suddenly becomes a difference of 500%. This is only exacerbated by pay to win. If Daybreak wants alts to be viable, they need to remove pay to win (which they are doing things to appease this, but it will not ever be completely removed), and tone down how combat mit effects stats. Mint can't realistically promise changes on either of these things, but itemization becomes way easier if you dont have to deal with these types of mechanics.

It is absolutely ok. Spending more time on something should net more rewards. If you spend 30 minutes harvesting, you should not be able to get the same amount of rewards as a person who spends 4 hours harvesting. This would kill the game. People would log in, do their 20 minutes of stuff, then log out. Groups would be impossible to get. 90% of the groups i run for VD1/VD2/weeklies include alts of other players.
If you take away time spent = rewards earned, problems occur. Why would people have alts, especially with the pure amount of time and investment it takes to have a well geared alt. Just because you only have one character you can play doesn't mean the game should be tailored around only having one character.

And saying the biggest flaw is mission loot is... lol. Gross pay to win and combat mit walls are exponentially worse. Not to mention class balance, broken encounters, spaghetti code, and broken mechanics.
For someone who's played the game for 17 years and has years of playtime, you sure are out of touch with the issues that plague the game.

Telling the ultimate EQ2 gigawhale that pay to win is bad is a waste of keyboard strokes. You're right though! Combat mit, pay to win and (imo) resolve, can all go die in a fire.

I made peace with combat mit years ago when it was Crit Mit. It sucks, but I understand its value to game longevity. All the P2W stuff should just be dumped though.

Give us some monthly bonuses like they're doing on EQ1. Let's see how that does for supporting the game instead of having a 70K Potency spread in raids between players.

I don't see how combat mit is important to longevity of the game. If you're at the leading edge of the raiding scene, perhaps the problem isn't as tangible, but for those who are following behind, this year has seen combat mit become a very high wall to the latest content. That only makes people frustrated and unhappy, which is the opposite of what a game should do.
I guess maybe it's important simply because this is the system we have, and to abandon it now throws up too many problems, but it's not good. We'll soon be at the point where those who don't buy the collectors edition will be waiting months for a nerf to get in the door of T1 heroics.

As an additional comment on bag flooding.....The no-value rewards that also don't go in depos so the only way to get rid of is destroy are annoying. Please make rewards worth like 1 copper instead of being no value.
Getting all the extra no-trade shinie bags from vd zones doesn't annoy me cause I just sell them to the merchant. However I absolutely hate getting the green adorn boxes and the mount gear boxes because the only way to get rid of them is to manually destroy them and I get them near daily(if not multiple a day).
So please make common rewards sellable, even if its just 1 copper.

Analogy: You have a broken arm. You decide to put a bandaid on it instead of a cast.
Basically, stat inflation is the broken arm, and combat mit is the bandaid. A stat squish would be the cast.
Combat mit is in the game to make it so we dont hit for quadrillions, but isnt effective because we still hit for trillions. Its a nice idea, but has the problem that it makes stats on characters ever more valuable, etc, etc.
All this has been said before. It is important to game longevity, but will never be a good fix for the problem at hand.

Resolve is decent. I wont complain about it because its not really an issue outside of the first couple weeks. It's a good tool to make us replace gear that would otherwise carry through multiple expansions. At least its not like it was at release where every player had a resolve buff they gave to the raid. THAT was bad.