Yeah comparing the BL and Predator ones made me smh and laugh. But apparently we should have all realised they were still a work in progress and all our criticism is unfair and unhelpful.
I play a beastlord. I could choose to retort in the minutiae but I won't. I am addressing the discussion from the meta.
This is the only part I will comment on - In the interest of keeping our Spouse Faction maxxed, we keep his work with EQ and my work with EQ2 as separate as possible. I don't use him to get things addressed in either game. We may hear grumbles from each other about x, y or z, but not in a "hon, fix this" or "tell them to fix that" sort of way.
Bonito, My understanding is that you are an extremely casual eq2 player (nothingnwrong with that). This, however, shows in your evaluation of the impact these runes have on the game and competitive balance. Eq2 is an extremely competitive game at the mid-high end. I suggest you hook up with a top 25 raid guild for a couple of months, it would be add a lot to your perspective on how important getting these things right is for the community.
1. Based on the chronology of the events and feedback, the introduction (placeholder), withdrawal, and reintroduction of class runes may have been due to management or community pressure to put out content (damned if they do, damned if they don't). Although tight on resources, they are, in essence, pushing/rushing content out to satisfy the player base. 2. I have witnessed in both EQ1 and EQ2, and other games (Planetside 2), content being secretly worked on and tweaked out of the purview of Test Server. I am sure there are reasons that this is done secretly. In this special case: class runes, feedback may need to be more compartmentalized than in other content (cosmetics, event mechanics) because players will be biased in their assessments or not know the road map (later balancing). (They may have made a mistake by going public with the runes to begin with). Additionally, I have seen unbalanced content in many games go live to surprise players. The final iteration of the runes may not go in until live or shortly thereafter (hotfix). 3. EQ2 is no longer in the PvP niche so I suspect that the dev may weighing the the expediency to releasing content and disappointing players with a dearth of content instead of overriding the high class balancing standards of PvP. Even if raid guilds benefit from a handful of "OP classes" for a brief period of time (until a final fix), this may be better than other sorts of criticism (e.g. lack of content).
Let's see. The runes, if at all, come in in phase 3. So why put them on test for the world to see, in any form whatsoever, if they're still being worked on? It sounds like a faux pas to me. And when it all kicked off they took far too long to spot and correct their mistake. Otherwise, the length of time taken to correct the mistake is due to them having to decide it WAS a mistake. I'm inclined to go with this option. The plan all along was to chuck them back in in the form they left of in, last xpac. That this was ever considered can only be because the people making the decisions do not play the game.
I will say, beyond all of the bungling on the Test Server, the proof will be in the pudding (Live and the short period after for hotfixes). The final iteration of the runes may be a 'work in progress' out of sight. (The current iteration on Test Server being bungled workflow or outreach).
Honestly, I hope the ones on test are a way for them to show us trash only to blow our minds with something substantial when they do actually drop??? Here's to hoping. Oh yea, not holding my breath by the way.
Lets, for the sake of argument, say that the rune changes were because of the community pressure and people being overly uptight about it on forums and discord and the pressure was too much and they went with a knee-jerk reaction and ended up messing it up even more. I am trying to see the logic or reasoning here because how can a supposedly a very experienced team react this way? If anything, this highlights and affirms what most of us feel and that is a clear lack of understanding of the underlying issues within the game by the developers - be it from the point of view when to reveal the items in question to the customers or the actual items themselves. I am trying really hard to side with the argument of "they buckled under community pressure so give them some room and chill" but come up short on an acceptable justification. More so, when I factor in the response from the creative designer of the game. Majority of the issues players raised about the runes were legitimate given the adverse effects it would've had on the game and adding to an already existing problem of class imbalance. Then the decision to zoom out on the effects and make them subclass type only was almost an indication of the realisation of "yes, i think we went a bit too far, lets tone it down" and then going further by saying "they may not even make it into the game" -- all highlights uncertainty and lack of confidence in game design. A simple apology on the lines of: "Hey, we know we kind of underestimated our own design philosophy and overshot the mark on the runes. We will take on-board some of the concerns by players and test them out, tweak them until they have reached an acceptable level of class balance before rolling them. Please be patient with us" -- would have sufficed. I am not sure whether this post will be taken as per the recently defined paradigm of feedback by Kander but I suppose my enthusiasm got the best of me here.
1. If you look at the past Test Server activities and threads, I think the devs (perhaps, not all) have been mostly fair about communication and feedback. 2. The class runes are not expected to go Live until September or October in Wave 3 of Summer Ethereals. 3. Class runes (all iterations) would probably qualify as sensitive (compartmented) or special game content. (On a somewhat related note, according to past devs - Azaliil's Twitch interview with Bill Fisher; devs can have access extended or revoked to the game item generator and archive). 4. The devs likely wanted to test and work the first iteration of the runes (based on the PoP expansion template) in a fairly discrete manner. (This in the context of kinks in the new Test Server cycle). The decisions to put them on Test were not wrong per se. But the unexpected community blowback (viral reactions on based on screenshots of early iterations) led to a bungled handling of the public relations and some player reactions which may have amounted to making a mountain out of an ant hill. In other words, the devs' intentions were likely pure and correct but the subsequent chain reaction created a strange, likely exaggerated community pressure (or antagonism) thus causing the various stages of conflict (or misperceptions). Should the release of class runes on Test Server have been prefaced or curated in a better way: like a de facto NDA to handpicked testers? Sure.
Dude, ROFL... You give way too much credit, do you need some tp for that nose bruh? J/K lol I think you are giving too much credit though. The backlash was created by them putting a copy and paste on test if there was never any intention of releasing them in that manner. And if the way they have changed them now has zero chance of making live, then they are wasting everyone's time on test who dedicate time to help test it, right? Blowback you call it, is the result of a continued pattern. If you want to defend it fine, but I hope you don't actually believe what your selling...
I concur that copy and paste ethereal runes werent the way to go when the entire player base has been waiting for a FULL class balance pass and has seen barely 25% of that at this point and endgame power remains heavily skewed towards one damage type (melee) thanks to critical mitigation. At the same time the team needs to be upfront about the ethereals this year. Must have class runes cant be introduced in wave 3 without the ability to then earn them cause the playerbase thought they were scrapped. Make a decision one way or another. Are they in or out and communicate that to your players
Mechanics You automatically get an ethereal quest once per week, which seems to reset on Thurs like other weekly quests. The ethereal quest is to complete any weekly BOL quest. If you complete a solo weekly quest, you get 6 tokens (12 member). If you complete a heroic weekly quest, you get 12 tokens (24 member). Presumably scales up for harder heroics. Unknown if you can screw yourself over by completing a solo weekly before a heroic or harder weekly because Test is awarding them in a strange way. The first solo weekly on Test gives 24 tokens to members in two batches of 12 with the second batch containing a message that you are getting heroic rewards due to a server bonus. The second solo weekly is giving 12 tokens with the same note that you are getting heroic rewards due to a server bonus, but no message that you are completing the quest a second time. Does this mean that there is a 'flag' for solo, heroic, challenge, and expert and you can only get 6 coins per flag per week but the server bonus is applying more than it should because no real heroic weekly is completed? Costs - 100 coins for each of the jewelry items (cloak is greater eth relic, others are eth relic - limit 2) - 3 coins per upgrade shard - 300 coins for the blood rune of torment (50 fervor and overcap, 100 wdb and overcap, 5 adc) - class runes have been removed Separate from ethereals, there is a 205 resolve helm triumph achievement for defeating all expert bosses
Isn't the solo weekly quests mainly killing open zone boss mobs? I would hope people doing heroic weekly does not go after solo weekly also because the needed mobs will be perma killed. Actually they will probably be perma killed anyway.
Solo weeklies only work on Test server or to validate the Ethereal Ahoy special quests you get every week (which can be validated with any weekly). hence the 12+12 said above. Live will only have access to heroic+ weeklies to get coins. I think that, from what they said, the quest can be validated and give the same amount of coins whatever the weekly you run (including solos outdoors and solo instance weekly). Others weeklies should give a reward depending on what kind of zone you run them in (aka if you run your heroic in a challenge heroic you should get more coins than running it in a regular heroic).
