I “retired” from this game years ago, but have always tried to get back into it here and there. The commentary in this thread is spot on about the uphill battle for anyone returning to the game to get anywhere. I understand the game studio needs to make money, but I will not drop hundreds if not thousands of dollars to play this game. It’s a non-starter. I would perhaps pay more like $30/month instead of $15, but not in conjunction with the state of the live game. They have had years to condense the complexity of this game down some and instead doubled down with yet more. Ascensions. Familiars. Mount leveling. Mercenary leveling. Mercenary collecting. Mount training. So many spell tiers I’ve lost track. Each and every one an obscene time-gate, infinitesimally small random chance or credit-card maxing debacle. For what? To play with whom? And I could be absolutely off base about all of this… and it’s still their fault because it’s not *my* job to interest and convince myself to play their game. It’s not on me as a potential customer to completely comport to what they’re offering — they need a compelling product to sell. They have the IP, but the game’s mechanics have gotten so onerously complex that no one who isn’t already caught up has any intention of doing nor likely ability to do so. The returning players like me go play on the TLE for a reason. It’s far from perfect but it’s closer than live. And that is endlessly frustrating to players who would come back otherwise for something they haven’t seen over and over. But it requires letting go of this fallacy that bolt-on mechanic after bolt-on mechanic is a good design philosophy. The customers have spoken loud and clear, and the population will continue to decline until it changes or the game shutters.
This right here and more so scripts. The contested isn't even horrible for scripts, yet we have had people complain about needing to do HO's to remove a buff, missing dispels, etc. I did a PUG the other night and got through 2 areas total..because people wouldn't listen to what needed to be done and/or just didn't understand. Most people stay with-in the circle of people they know. People that return to this game, need to find friends fast or return with old friends to game, because, yes, solo.. u won't jump in right away. Some guilds take returning players which is great and sometimes teach them the ropes, but people need to understand the basics really before just jumping in. The basics aren't even hard either..
I raid, I group, I molo, and I solo. You are missing my point completely. There are days that a lot of people want to RELAX, you know not fight for every blessed thing or be jumped every step of the way. You are forgetting about the other players...the crafters (you know the people who make your food and gear?) the people who work and only have an hour or two to play. Yes, the population isn't what it was when I started playing 13 years ago. But new players do come, then run after a day or two because they use those tokens and don't know how to work their class and all the time-consuming junk like training mercs, mounts, and familiars. I also remember how 'fun' (read not) it was to be doing a quest that required you to speak to someone and not being able to because of the mob around them or having to kill x number of critters and not being able to because a guild was in there power leveling a new member. I have noticed the Dev's are trying hard to make this enjoyable for EVERYONE, the updates seem to go in cycles. Challenging (fun), difficult (a little frustrating), and stupid hard (one was so bad I almost cancelled my accounts). I'm sorry you can't find enough people to play with or that your guild isn't ginormous enough for you. Raids and PUG's are near impossible now because everyone is so picky on who can join in. Used to be you could jump in and help out or ask for help and peeps would accept you. Now though, it's no, no you're a zerker we only want a beastlord or why on earth do you think we want a guardian? Merging all the servers won't solve those problems for you. It will only drive away the people who want to just enjoy the journey or play for the limited time they have because of the frustrations in mobs on nodes, shinies, blocking the vendors, sitting on the NPC you need to speak to, I could go on and on. I suggest you use a little common sense and realize this is an MMORPG. That means yes we need lots of people to play but it also means there are other people out there besides raiders.
Funny thing is, in Outlaws we accept everyone in grps no matter the class. We help everyone we can in more ways than most others. Were not picky about having the perfect grp. As far as you or anyone else making anything for me? Nah, I craft everything, harvest everything and kill everything I need to on my own just fine. But it's kind of you to think so little of us "all". I guess when you play in your own little corner, the mind will tend to wander on what others might or might not be doing... I'm not saying there aren't other things that need to be fixed. But you are the one missing the point of my OP. Your argument on a lot of things wrong with the game are not wrong. Not admitting we need a merger is you blinded by your own desire. To say one server is better than another by people who clearly don't play on other servers is also irresponsible. We NEED a merger for the health of the game. Sorry you can't see it through your harvest bag.
Honestly, I think they should just take HoF and split the guilds/players there among the rest of the servers. The solo-focused folks can go to AB and the raiders/heroic folks can come to Skyfire and Maj.
This, who wants a pug group when you spend over an hour to do a single heroic 1 zone. I will stick to my guild groups even if I can only get one just for weeklies.
Grouping outside of guild seems to be a favorite pasttime that no longer exists.... you think a server merge will fix grouping outside of guilds? NA.. no one does a PUG because everyone has their own agenda when they join group, some aren't willing to listen to strats, some argue over loot.. example I got a CBOC charm on a dirge and it was discoed and the DPS in the group goes, that would be better for me, you should trade it. I said nope.. 15 resolve upgrade is good for me to, sorry. They were a little sore and starting not pulling their weight like they were before the drop lol. PUGS are dead, because well, most people in guilds would rather have someone they know will listen, be able to get through a zone or area quickly, and not argue about loot, period. If you feel moving to another server will allow you to raid, just server transfer and app to a guild that raids. Merging will not magically make you be able to raid or have enough to raid, nor will it help create more PUG groups. Sorry.
I would like to see everything merged, its not because I am locked into a certain type of play, I do a bit of everything that doesnt require a group. Most of the core friends a started with have long since moved on to greener pastures, but.. one of the best parts of this game left is (and I may be the only one who feels this way) seeing active chat channels, we dont have that anymore on live servers I play on. It will continue its steady decline of players and the powers that be could still just sit on their hands about it until even the diehards give up and find something else, or they can fixit. We the players have told them what we want and they will listen and do something about it, or they will shutter the company.
Well said. Apparently, there are different interpretations of what constitutes a 'game.' That's something I do to have fun. As Anna Ferris remarked in a movie (The Accountant), she went to a college where 'fun goes to die.' It feels like that with EQII. People are already stopping logging in. They're burnt out of trying to jump numerous roadblocks with a game where not even the fundamental game mechanics work on so many levels. As someone said earlier, it's one bolt-on mechanic after another with some of the dumbest gaming/strat mechanics ever created. Clean up the morass of classes into something that makes sense, stop feeling the need to put something new in a strat (yeah, cause we all love to jump up and down countless times when we're fighting a frog). Merge servers. I'm reminded of the old saying, "when the only people you serve are yourself, pretty soon you will serve no one." Right now, Anna Ferris could be describing EQII--where fun goes to die. Let's start having some fun again.
I mean its better than, hey turn that and just burn it to the ground.. don't worry about anything lol...This is what everyone wants, tank and spank and not have to do a single thing lol.. really, you hop maybe 3 times to dump it and back to burning.. new strats, whether you like them or not doesn't make the game horrible. You know the strat i hate, but still do lol.. hey cure the curse that matches the total number of letters in 2 group mates names.. I mean thats a far off crazy strat lol, but hey jumping for a frog is hard i suppose..s.
Here's 163 posts to get you started: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq2/index.php?search/111434262/&q=merge&o=date&c[node]=103 That said, I believe many are moved, in a different forum, or removed.
Most of the people I know turn off general chat as the first thing they do after rolling a toon. Like grouping happens primarily in guilds, chat happens primarily in guild chat.
When PoP came out they decided to practically do away with crafters, thankfully they corrected that and crafting is now becoming meaningful again. Then came CD. Where they decided everyone wanted to be aggro all of the time and the whole thing was so stupid hard it almost made me quit. Now they bounce around. I don't know the answer to that. I do know that the person who brought me into this wonderful and sometimes painful game quit because it became too linear. So, here are my suggestions. Forgive how this will sound, I'm venting a little. Prior to PoP you could spend weeks in a zone, raids, heroics, and dungeons were lovely things to do after you finished the tons of overland quests. It was easy to find people to play with, even if you weren't in a guild, because there were so many of us out there doing all those fun quests. It would be nice if they could go back to that, but they have made it clear that isn't going to happen. Keep going with the crafting being relevant. That has always been a big draw for many people. Luclin gave me hope for more overland things. But, no they decided that from now on you must do the sig lines to do anything. Oh, but they combined everything into the sig lines, so once you're done with those well repeat and repeat parts of it. Then to rub salt in the wound they locked everything behind flaming spinning wheels. You want to make food for your high level guildmates or to sell, sorry you need to do the sig line and probably some heroics oh and then wait for the RNG to drop the recipe book. (This is true for collections and fertilizer too). The problem with this idea is that you can barely survive the sig lines unless you can get the gear. Which brings me to the gear issue. Overseer was a fun little bonus but wait! The gear is nearly required to survive the first few inches of the new zones. Familiars were nice bonuses too. But you have to have the best one and it better be trained to max, or you will die. Same with mounts and mercs and those better be geared with the best stuff too. My thoughts on this, make it doable again. You should be able to go into a zone with gear from the last expansion and survive. I have had several people return to the game and join my guild, only to quit the game altogether because it has become a spreadsheet game. By the time you're done doing all the maintenance you need to do every day you have very little time to quest. Bring back the days when you could log in and run around for hours, explore and do the fun outside quests and actually survive. Perhaps if the learning curve weren't so ridiculously high and we weren't rushed to get to the latest and greatest expansion more people would come back, try out the game, group, and (dare I say it) stay.
I'm done with you. That was an example for crying out loud. Edit: I don't need to be bullied. I usually just glance at what you post then move on, but I had to respond to this one.
The game up until recently was very new player friendly IMO. I had 3 friends join up in the game that had never played before. They joined right at the end of Chaos Descending and started Blood of Luclin. They had no issues going through the game getting little things here and there they needed. It was pretty much the same right up until this expansion started. The grind for gear and the grind of the quest design was just way more for them to deal with. Two of the people I mentioned that quit when the Dev team annouced those loot keys.. were part of these three people. The last person is trying to stick it out. But the amount of grind it took and still takes this expansion to get a character out of solo content is not inviting to new players. Also, what came to a head this expansion was the lack of Contested content. People dont want to sit in instances all day looking at sometimes the same 5 players. Worthwhile contested content gives players another avenue to play when instanced content is done and the lockout is ticking. But it HAS TO BE WORTH the effort! A server merge is not the answer to this problem. Not yet. The game needs to be massively changed from a fundamental and mechanical level to be more inviting to new players and still be challenging to existing players. This means you need to have a easy to follow gear progression from Solo to Heroic to Raid and beyond. There needs to be a path there for players to get to that next level if they do the work to do so. That was completely lost this expansion. Loot was all over the place and the loot that was dropping was completely worthless. Loot needs to be steamlined. You cant have these "GOTCHA" loot mechanics like all of a sudden you need to find these 5-6 specific loot pieces that have the super special stat on them for this expansion ONLY and its call CBOC... without it you are pretty much trash... so get GRINDING. Loot needs to be easy to understand and it needs to be accessible. Loot used to be this way... if you did harder things.. you got better loot and it made those harder things easier until you accomplished all you needed to do for that particular content release. Player ability needs to stop being regulated behind invisible mitigation numbers and over emphasis on mechanics like Resolve. There were plenty of stats already in game that could have been used over resolve. We already had Resistance stats in game and the Dev team basically abandoned that for ONE resistance.. RESOLVE. If resistance type doesnt matter then my spell type shouldnt matter either against mobs. Just get rid of the singular resolve mechanic. Hopefully, the dev team can right the ship in time with the next expansion because I think alot hinges on it. It needs to have a clear vision and path for progression for players of ALL types... and those paths need to include NEW players as well.. (not just a here's a Tishan's Lock box... Good Luck New player!!!.... . . . ) I dont know where the disconnect was this expansion and why everything seemed all over the place... Some people say its because the Dev Team is still working from home instead of together in a creative environment back in the Game Studio.. I dont know. But I hope things get fixed. I've been in this game and around everyone here for far too long to not hope for the best.
Antonia Bayle server population issues | EverQuest 2 Forums (daybreakgames.com) I think the AB Raiders would really like a merge also. I had been following this thread. My heart went out to them.
Same. And no, you're not the only one. I would love to see this too. I'm in two Guilds, one that was started back in the glory days with 30 some accounts, now I'm mostly alone. I dust the trophy heads off and I keep the doors open. Some players return every now and then to see if things have changed. I also have my Alt Guild. Remember the days when Guilds didn't want bloat from Alts? I'm like, seriously? I have to have all 9 crafters! So I started my own.
To each their own, nothing wrong with turning off gen chat, but with a higher population there are far more folks that don't turn it off. I just think its very sad that I see people log in who havent been here in a while and they ask things like "Where did they move the inheritance merchants?" and the response is they Re-moved them...guess what the chances of retaining that returning player are, I would estimate approximately 28.502%, could be a little off but the point is they are removing things the players happen to like, so they are not listening, or listening and ignoring the pulse of what they have left of the playerbase. They may say its a gear progression issue or something lame like that but I have to ask, What gear progression? Its all the same! Its also very sad when I have a better conversation here on the forums with the like 40-50 of us left that use them and its still more than in game. Numbers are fictitious but I know you see what I am trying to say.
