Producer's Letter -- February Update Coming!

I don't know anyone saying the Signature quest line can be done in 6 hours. It took me about 14 hours and that is not too far off from the numbers I've heard from others.

What you call "design flaws" are encounters that require a little bit of paying attention, trial-and-error, and strategy.

Oh yeah? Go read this one http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/...key-and-access-to-drinal-merchant.3010/page-2

And even it takes 14 hour it's still far cry from saying that coe solo oriented. Not like other expaccs before.

You are aware that the sig quest is not needed for most group zones (it unlocks harrows end raid/group zone only now, rest are completely unlocked) allows you to loot obols/essences/spirits (which is fair somewhat since you actually have to do the sig line to have access to the "faction merchant")...as for solo content as others have said there is a huge amount in coe than previous xpacs....this feels more of "I want more solo stuff" response than anything else.

And when the solo stuff takes too long to do and there isn't instant gratification via loot piñatas the tears start flowing.

14 hours only and you call it huge more than other expacs? Did you ever play Rok solo? That expac i call huge for soloing.

Coe is very small for all solo, heroic and raid. Stop repeating nonsense after others. And if sig is not necessary to do at all then the conclusion is coe is not solo oriented. You could get all updates in heroic instances not even stepping in solo. Plus somebody in one of the threads was sayinga that advanced solo doesn't mean solo at all? So what is it then solo or non-solo? I wonder...

What other expacs had 0 group and 0 raid quests?

Maybe you need to offer him a higher grade of cheese.

Feldon is right. In all previous expansions we had quests for all type of players: those who like to solo, group, raid, craft and even harvest. CoE is the first expansion where we got quests only for Soloers and none other group...

This is really disappointing. I remember Kaitheel when he was presenting expansion during SOE Live, he looked so proud of himself when he was saying about signature quest. I like that there is finally signature quest for Soloers and they can get a very decent reward without needing to group. But people who like to raid and group didn't get any quests. No heritage, no signature, no raid and no tradeskill quests in this x-pac. We only got 7 group instances with easy encounters and 3 raid zones with easy mobs where some of them are still not working as intended (3 months after release!). Not to mention that crafters didn't get even one single quest as well... Yes RoK was great x-pac, but I also liked TSO, SF and even DoV. I hate CoE mainly because of that stupid, boring signature quest. Honestly I play only because I like raiding and we have lots of fun with my friends during raids.

We pay 40$ for x-pac and 14,99 per month to have fun (or less). Of course each of us has different meaning of "fun in eq2", but developers should take that diversity into account and give something to do for each of us. That's why I am worried about incoming February 26th update as well as GU66. Me and many of my friends are not happy about CoE as we feel there is something missing...

I wish that Windstalker actually come to this forum and discussed with us, eq2 players, what kind of "great future" she sees for Everquest 2.Come on, Holly, you have to increase number of your posts on this forum from 3 to 100 at least

I wish we could get all developers ideas posted in one place and we could vote and discuss some of them so Devs finally see what EQ2 players really wants. It was already done in other SOE game Planetside 2 (RoadMap) so I think it can be done i n Everquest 2 as well.

Exactly...some believe loot is to fall from the skies or something....

I did most of the quests solo on a templar, next question (was like watching paint dry on killing stuff).

What you call nonsense is the truth how much easier do you want their xpacs to be...talk to an NPC and get gear instantly? As others have pointed out the soloer got the majority (I say majority since the only raid quest is begun doing soloing questline), no tradeskill quests, no meaningful quests of any sort with the exception of the soloer/sig quest....you and others would do well to bring the all the issues regarding the quests to the table for discussion instead of the tunnelvision of your perceived lack of solo content...if you and others still continue to be under that impression then may I suggest Hello Kitty Island Adventure as a change.

You didn't get my post, did you? I am going to spell it again just for you. Solo as you raiders like to claim sig quest can get updates in heroic zones too instead of solo. Devs just didn't force you to do it this time. Not like in SS. Here is your heroic quest line if you did choose to do it. But everybody rushed to finish it solo then started to whine.

Btw if you've read my posts i never whined about anything neither difficulty nor loot on these forums. So your accusations are unwarranted. What i don't like how you are so called raiders like to belittle soloers. I am a raider btw too. But during many years of playing this game i was a soloer, a grouper and a raider. So i have tendency to respect everyone except may be for few haters here.

Again if you really want to have heroic quest line next time instead of rushing through zones solo on your alt just get a group for updates. Here is a choice.

Telling soloers that they should not get raid gear for running solo content is not belittleing them, I know that you think it is but it isn't.

You also don't seem to be capable of getting his point. This ENTIRE expansions questline was tailored for SOLO, the group zones that were made ro have about the same level of difficulty as the SOLO zones update the quests, yea we understand that. The complaint here is that there was no EPIC quest timeline of any kind here, something that was available for ANYONE and EVERYONE to pursue if they chose to, but the reward(s) were of a signifigant increase in quality beyond the other items. Something like the Fallen swords timeline. Of course we can't have that because if we have that then everybody that logs in doesn't get a trophy and that upsets some because they have been conditioned to it all their lives.

You need to pick up more shinnies then ... and there ya go.

We say COE is solo oriented, cause its the first time I can remember that SOLO play was forced on everyone. I personally loath it. It damn well is enough to keep me from continuing to play. I hate suffering content I'm not interested in to do the content I do want to do. SS was one of the best launches I've every experienced. I got to dive in and do what I wanted.

What also makes CoE so solo oriented is the fact that practically every instance came with a solo version as well. You can literally see it all solo, and you can get raid loot solo, etc, etc. There is very little this expansion you can not get via some amount of solo play. I can't remember the game ever being as solo friendly as it is now.

We can argue about the amount of content for sure, but the solo playstyle is ultimately rewarded more than any other at CoE launch. Only recently is heroic getting any attention, and the raids have been so broken my head spins on some of these encounters.

I have run that sig quest and most of the solo non related quests on at least 6 alts (I have 10 95's and a few other various levels) and only 2 of them have any raid gear....in addition as I'm on naggy, I have to do those questline with the lovely fact I can be engaged at any time by pvp (think Bg's with quests) and had some interesting and annoying fights while I did those quests...but they got done and they were all done via the solo zones....yawn.

Actually, no, I don't think it is unfair. It would be unfair to compare both expansions if CoE would have been cheaper than RoK, but this is not the case. We paid the same amount as we did back in the day, but we got content that is like a quarter (if even that) of what was offered in RoK.

As you described, RoK was - also in my opinion - the best laid out expansion. Because it offered content for everybody. Soloers could do all the overland zones, tradeskillers had their epic quest, groupers had a lot of available dungeons to go to and raiding was simply amazing at that time.
Out of my mind, I even think you could double the amount of quests you had in the overland zones to around ~100 or even more per zone.

What do we have now? A tedious signature questline. And if you don't like to do it, you have like overall 10 quests, that's it.
Tradeskilling got prestige AAs. Which first sounds nice. But
a) can be achieved in like 2 hours to be maxed out
b) nearly all of them got nerfed into uselessness. Experimenting and mass production the most interesting ones
I don't even want to go into the heroic and raid-content or into the stat inflation or the copy&paste of items that just have a different name, but exactly the same stats.

It is extremely obvious that most of SoE's resources are being put into EQNext and into the $"!$$% SC. When I compare the furniture that you get during the quests with what you can buy, I could cry.

Just adding one x2 and one x4 with the same layout as already available zones, doesn't change my opinion about the expansion at all. Especially chosing the by far smallest zone as an X4 doesn't make much sense.

Totally agree

Holly,
I think there are a lot of players who will owe an apology to the dev team if this comes out the half of what's expected here. My view is that you're hitting the nail precisely on the head with these changes; the bags thing is, if anything, overdue--but it's about as welcome a change as any of us could reasonably ask for, especially coming at this stage of the game's life. Anything on top of that would be a nice bonus but it appears that's only the half of what you guys have in store.

One cheer from me right now, another when the changes land, and one more to keep up the good work makes three.

GAFE

But you are aware that you can't do any of the quest in the Obol (forget the obol drops) -- you can't do the quest without doing the signature line -- that is a poor design to block a whole quest line because of a mandatory signature quests. It should be like Kunark - raid and instance progression separate from the overland quest lines.Nothing should block a player from the overland quests in both zones in this games, It was just the poor design of the devs that block this. They need to go back to design school and learn a few things about game design or have a talk with Scott.

Maybe Scott will feel bad and offer them some advice for the next expansion.. like don't charge $40 for what's effectively 1/3 of any previous expansion. Also I finally finished the signature quest, it has to be the single most annoying questline in the entire game, it's literally 100 quests of kill 10 rats which SoE promised they were moving away from. So much for that.

That's this whole expansion for someone who doesn't raid, kill 1000 rats, once you're done with that do easy group zones that are about as hard as OOA was in TSO and less rewarding most of the time.

(Honestly after seeing Rifts latest expansion I feel kind of sad I came back to EQ2 over Rift, if I had known CoE would be like this I wouldn't have) - I am really enjoying my progression guild though.

That is a sperate issue from the lack of solo content...I will agree obols/essences/spirits are essentially this xpacs current faction currency for lack of a better term of which you need to finish the sig quest to unlock them...(prob should have had obols and spirits unlocked regardless if you did the sig quest or not but thats for another discussion). The current discussion is regarding the lack of solo content which there is not (always could have used more but whatever) but there is exactly 1 raid quest (off a mob thats so easy one could sneeze and kill everling), zero tradeskill ....add in solo zones and there is alot one could do if your solo this xpac...just saying.