Why is this game never mentioned.....

There's a fine line, a very fine line, between "mature"and "deep" vs "tedious". This is a line that EQ1 has been battling for over 13 years. Now there's also a line between deep & rich vs excessive. I think EQ2 is laying around the excessive part when it comes to the amount of buttons & cooldowns to watch.

Now just because some other MMO's have less buttons to press, it doesn't mean the combat is any less involved than EQ2 with 5-6 hotbars worth of buttons to press. I would argue the combat in WoW is a lot more technical than combat in EQ2 because you are not just lining up 6-10 spells/abilities in a row based on their cooldowns. Why does it make combat deep, hard, or involved if you know you're going to fire off those 6-10 abilities/spells anyway? More does not mean deeper, more does not mean more involved, more does not mean mature. It's like SOE's philosophy awhile back for grabbing and launching more games, rather than concentrating on the IP's that make them famous like Everquest. More does not always mean better.

One of my major complaints since the launch of this game, and my 3 return attempts including this one, was always the combat. I feel I'm watching and waiting for the cooldowns rather than really fighting or reacting to the combat encounter. I'm not the only one that feels this way, I know over the past 9 years I've read several reviews of those that tried EQ2 and said the same things. You have so many buttons, which some call it deep & rich combat experience. But to many people, all they see are just buttons to press/macro, and as you are fighting there's a lot of cooldown watching & waiting. Now if you are talking about reactionary skills, those I have no problems with. Games with less buttons tend to have more reactionary and positional skills & spells, and you end up actually feeling more involved in a combat than you do in a game where you wait for cooldowns.

Complaint aside, I will say the NPC encounters in this game are actually fun. I feel the actual deep & rich part of combat is what the NPC's do and how you have to time yourself and react to what they do. It's probably weird for me to complain about character combat, but at the same time loving the NPC combat. But it's a valid complaint that's shared by many. One of the problems with EQ1 is that a lot of the mobs are just tank & spank, and you could single box most encounters, even at high end. In this game you can't do that, or can't do it well, because you often have to send multiple people off different directions or doing different things. Now that's the part I'm talking about, what the NPC's do, the devs did a great job designing encounters. They deserve props, and that's the part of the combat gameplay that feels rich & cool. But the personal combat part, controlling your characters and casting spells or using abilities, it's to my opinion that it's just excessive. On many of my characters I have 6-10 abilities lined up that I know I'm gonna press & use, they serve little meaning other than they are just different wording with different cooldowns. They can be reduced by 50% in number, and have the remaining spells/abilities and their reuse timer reduced, and the same can still be achieved in combat. Excessive is the word that comes to mind when looking at the amount of buttons to press.

actually i do raid.

the thing is that i don't mind everyone having access to good stuff with in reason. why? because i don't feel that wearing raid gear entitles me to be 200% more effective at this game. i don't think it's right when raid gear becomes so powerful over everyone else that heroic content or any content other than raid content is so easy that BAD PLAYERS in raid gear become better players than skilled players in heroic gear. why? because i don't like scrubs!

as others pointed out.. this isn't a job, it's a game so your analogy is dumb. also i'm firmly against red adorned gear only dropping in solo instances and not heroic.


btw hardcore raiders got how many avatar mobs put in game just for them? because no one other than hardcore players are going to have access to those mobs.
before you cry out about quest and solo/heroic instances.. think to yourself.. can you run this content? yes. can a casual guild of mostly employed adults with families that put aside a few days a week to have some fun killing digital dragons EVER get so much as a chance at these mobs?

exactly.. stop crying

hey man.. if you like pushing 3 buttons for 4 hours in raid then you can play a necro( thought i think my necro has like 6 buttons now) or you can go play another game.

Raiding with multiple groups, whether it's easy to press a few buttons at once, it's still a chore and a challenge whether or not that becomes trivial when you get a handful of people who know what they're doing.

Like it or not Plavem's post on page 1 still correctly outlines the downfalls of this game. The things that are actually interesting and unique when it comes to this game are outdated, under-appreciated, half-finished, or simply boring. To top it off, Live & current game-breaking bugs take days to weeks too long to be fixed. Minor bugs months, and some things... years.

It's still a good game overall, but to the OP's question: A 7+ year old games only holds its weight among current games when it's maintained with equal investment and care. Obviously the people at the top aren't supplying the tools or $$$ to keep the game competitive in the market versus other similar titles. Sustainable and cash shop-marketable? Surely. But nicely polished and ever groundbreaking? Not by a long shot.

Does a necro really only use 3-6 buttons? I find it hard to believe, but then if it's true then I don't get why the huge differences in number of spells/abilities between classes.

As for the whole "go play another game" thing, that's the kind of attitude that makes people complain about population. But then the Everquest playerbase is good at telling people to play elsewhere. And by the looks of it, people have been doing just that over the years.

yes, a necro has about 6 abilites that they cycle thru. the difference between a good necro and a bad necro is support available to said necro and the players sense of timing.

i have been playing and raiding in MMO's for long enough to be sick and tired of the emo's cry babies that find something to whine about every single day and would much rather to do with out them. everyone has a bad day from time to time but there are certain people that are just never happy. people truly unable to just look around and say.. . hey, this is pretty good. i have fun for hours on in and monetary compensation is minimal.

One of the key reasons people fail to mention and play this game, and which I don't think has been mentioned here yet but forgive me if I missed it in a quick read-through, is the reputation of SOE generally, especially in relation to its handling of its customers. A classic example is the debacle of the last 12 months with ProSiebenSat.1 and the way in which SOE initially discarded its European players, then stayed silent for months, finally conceding those players could remain with them, and then going silent again with the result that even tho' it's obvious that the deal is dead in the water no-one is prepared to step up to the line and so as much, or else if it is still alive then there is a complete lack of information as to what is happening and when.

The ProSieben saga is but one example of many that indicates why so many people forming the MMO playerbase are simply unwilling to devote their time and money to games that are run in such a way that there is never any real sense of loyalty or commitment from the developers. Throughout its history EQ2 has been constantly changed, usually by way of dumbing down in a forlorn attempt to capture the WoW crowd, and every time players begin to feel comfortable with the way the game is playing the devs come up with something like RMT, FTP, or ProSieben, and kick the players in the nuts again!

I've always said that SOE develop really good games, they just don't know how to look after their players, and this has been especially true of EQ2 since Scott Hartsman left. Development is strong, management and communication are weak, and those factors need to be improved if EQ Next is to be in the top flight of MMOs as EQ used to be when there was little in the way of competition but which EQ2 has frankly never been despite all its potential. If players from a number of MMOs were quizzed on the point my bet is that EQ2 would have by far the highest proportion of players who expressed constant frustration with the way the game was run, and that has to be reflected in the viral marketing on which games depend so much these days for their success.

Some people sit on FB and Twitter for hours a day, every day, every week.

Others, play games hardcore for several hours a day, every day, every week.

Zero'ing in on that part of your post... In large, I agree (with that sentence), it is not the most ideal prospect to compare EQ2 to a job. EQ2 is far more comparable to a sport, which is why there is no surprise that sports are also games. This does allow for some interesting comparisons to be drawn.

Some people approach a particular sport with a very light-hearted view. Examples include investing very little effort toward improvement, spending little time playing the sport, spending minimal time with fellow team members (if applicable), and not caring if they lose matches. To these people, it is just a short spurt of fun for a short amount of time, every week or few. This sums up how I played baseball, having a go for the sake of having a go, but I otherwise didn't care much for it.

Some people take a particular sport seriously. They are competitive people and want to succeed. They invest time into improving, invest time into the sport, are consistent with spending time with fellow team members (if applicable), and give it their all to win. These people often train several times a week, and strive for success. This sums up how I approached basketball and triathlons.

The exact same comparisons can be made to how people play MMO's. And lets just say I felt much more accomplished from my efforts in basketball, than from baseball. In addition, I do not find it shocking that there is no baseball trophies to keep the basketball trophies company. The people who invested more effort, deserved more.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand... I feel EQ2 is not as mainstream as the likes of WoW, because the game engine is very inefficient (I refer to multicore CPUs, and GPUs), World of Warcraft sounds kinda cool, EverQuest2 sounds like nerd central. Marketing matters, just ask any major company... Sure the product has to be OK, but if no one knows it exists you will not sell squat. WoW went full steam ahead, while EQ2 literally lagged into obscurity.

They have never even mentioned EQ on The Big Bang Theory! Age of Conan, WoW etc but never this, if it's not mainstream nerd or geek enough for that show it has to be a purely niche game with a limited audience.

One of the largest negatives I hear in regards to SOE is the gaming community's fundamental issue with management. In particular, Smedley, and to a minor extent SJ. Someone mentioned earlier that, in regards to advertisement, articles on EQ2 and EQ Next do appear on various gaming sites such as mmorpg.com, massively, etc. Those articles attract attention from the readers, and lengthy commentary ensues. Invariably, discussion quickly turns into how people got burned through the whole SWG fiasco with the NGE issue, and the general distrust of Smedley due to his involvement. Then tack on the PSS1 debacle, The Hack, and any number of fundamental issues. There are a large amount of people that will have nothing whatsoever to do with SOE again, no matter what glowing advertisement or article is presented, based on past performances of management vs community. These people, in turn, bring their stories to their friends.

So, yes, there is advertisement out there, but a lot of it has been very detrimental to SOE's reputation of their own doing. In today's market of jaded gamers, people seem to want something fresh and new. Everyone is waiting for the next..something..that will take them away to a world where they can spend years of their time adventuring, not weeks or months like the current pitiful games offer. While there is hope that EQ Next will be that for some people, articles surrounding it consistently get drowned out by the anti-SOE, anti-Smedley contingent. If people are having issues climbing aboard a new title due to the company's past rep, think of the difficulties in bringing them to an old title.

Your post reminded me of this picture... I see the potential to apply it to your comment.

I haven't yet read every post in this thread so may be somebody already said it. The reason why blizzard wow is very popular around the world is b/c of their single player games that were available such as warcraft, starcraft and diabolo. When 15 years ago more of us in russia were able to get our hands on pc first games we played i mentioned, also doom and heretic. That's how i knew about blizzard and then their WoW. I learned about everquest only after i came here in states and saw game boxes on shelves of compusa and fry's. It still didn't make me feel to buy it. Only in 2006 and only b/c of my husband 's insisting i started to play eq2. So i say the advertisement of at least of a gaming company plays a role to get people involved

Please explain this quote SJ.

"When I came back to the game and started playing and leveled back up to 90, i started playing with the uber guilds and getting involved with them, and of course they didn't know who I was. So i was working my way as a newbie into some of the big guilds, I'll tell ya, i wasn't very happy with my raiding experiences because basically I was getting told - "this is the way we have to do it, there's a formula, you have to stand here, you have to do that at exactly this time, and thats the only way you do it, and if you deviate you're out." and i'm sorry, but that's just not a game. That's just not fun at all."

Sounds like SJ has never played an MMO in his life, which would explain so much. I agree with him about "hardcore" raiding personally, but saying "it's not fun at all" like that is some universal truth is very silly, since obviously it is, and has been, to a great number of people in multiple games for many years.

Personally what I love about this game was what it was up to sky, and that was awesome enough to make me play for a while every now and then. What keeps this from being a top or even mid tier game in my mind, as much as I want it to be.

- Outdoor questing has been terrible since Kunark. It's like they tried to imitate wow-style mass solo questing except it's bad even by "wow standards."

- Dungeons have been terrible since TSO. Again trying to copy the gimmicky nature of wow bosses, except the gimmicks are almost always dumb, not fun, and just there for the sake of being there. Look at this game at the beginning, it was about epic adventure through these amazing dungeons, now we get loot corridors that are again terrible even by the standards of that which they try to imitate.

- While I like the class and ability diversity on paper, it just gets irritating to deal with in practice with grouping/raiding. There always exists an ideal group setup that is just so much better than grabbing whatever friends are on and going. Thankfully it doesn't always even matter because of the next point.

- Gear scaling has been broken for a while, which causes content to quickly become boring. In DoV my coercer did about 10k dps in PQ armor, 50 main stat quest jewelry, and almost-but-not-quite-enough crit chance for whatever dungeon. After getting rygorr armor and velks jewelry, he was doing 50-60k easy, and as much as 80k depending on the group setup and their gear. That is just stupid, completely trivializes all heroic content except one dungeon that I knew of, temple of rallos zek. How do you make a healthy balanced game, content wise, with this type of scaling? You can't.

- The entire 1-90 game is broken at this point with thrice? buffed gear, aa, and mercs.

- Zero "legitimacy" in the traditional sense. A lot of what keeps people playing and loving an MMO is the work they put into their character over a long period of time. There needs to be a grind, as much as people love to complain about them. These days leveling is a joke, getting your aa is a joke, having raid gear passed down from your alt is a joke, buying raid gear with plat you bought with real money is a joke. You can make the argument that no one is forcing you to do any of these things and you'd be right, but because human psychology is the way it is, people do get discouraged from this.

I think most of the above points come down to lack of people working on the game. The game has already made the shift to a "make do with what he have" type deal. From their own business standpoint they do a great job, and that's enough since you guys keep feeding it since you can convince yourself you're better than those "other baby gamers."

I also think the dungeon finder deserves special mention. It's design and post-release handling by soe is just a perfect example of everything that is currently bad about this game.

Then why didn't crafters get a crafting timeline? Instead, what we got was a cop out, either farming our own recipes or relying on other adventurers to do it for us and put them on the broker.

I think the most interesting part about that quote from Smokejumper is that he himself tried raiding in EQ2, and said its just not fun. Also in the podcast he talked about how they want raid mobs to be more dynamic and fun. Instead of the usual "pull here, joust there, cure this, kill these adds in this order" typical fight.

Yet they pretty much produced the same exact type of stuff he considered "not fun."

Not delivering on stuff you say like that as the producer or w/e makes us wonder how much you really care about this game.
Don't say things like that, and then not do it. It's just bad mmkay?

Sorry for a silly question! But what would be considered fun at raiding? Dance in a face of a mob at certain time to get him perplexed or blow him a kiss to disorient him for a couple of seconds? I mean i really don't understand SJ comment about not fun. I think chasing a monkey in altar is actually fun. At least something new.

I see the game mentioned all the time to answer the OP. The status of the game now is whats puzzling. I still think the core game is solid. This is what a majority of the player base enjoys. The raiding and itemization is what is killing the rest of the audience. The raiding is too easy. There is NO progression anymore. The simplified itemization has killed the "woohoo' factor in trying to develop your character. The gear use to jump, probably to fast, but it was something worth to work towards. Now the gear is .2 CB and .2 POT and 4 stats. Its silly. To many levels of gear. Its time to revamp the itemization and fix its flaws that the 'new fix' created. Treasured should be decent gear with legendary as the next major step and fabled from raiding. Legendary used to be gear that you actually wanted and needed. Now its fabled or bust. From there the raiding should have two steps. The easy mode gears you up and progresses you to the hardmode. As in progression. Kunark was such a great expansion and I know lots of people despise flagging but its a sense of accomplishment to open up that next zone. Just make it so only one person needs to be flagged. I have heard people say that they payed the same amount of money as a hardcore raider did and should be able to see all the content. Thats just not true. Its a MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER online rpg. The people who love to quest and run heoric zones won't see end game raid mobs. They just won't. The one thing they did correct in COE is they gave the grouping player a taste of the raid zones in the heroic content. Great idea. Technically everyone gets to see the content.

Since its very early AM let me simply all that rambling.

1. Fix the itemization. Treasured gear should be useful as should legendary. The fabled should be a jump due to the nature of obtaining it.
2. Bring back progression. Both in raiding and heroic zones. easy heroic zones have legendary gear then the hardmode ones have better LEGENDARY gear. Raiding works the same way but with fabled.
3. Allow flagging to progress in both heroic and raid. One person needed to flag. I know this will cause an uproar.
4. Streamline the CA/spells. I don't mean 1 or 2 hotbars but enough to drop the need for 5 and 6 hotbars. Quite a few abilities can easily be combined.

Enough of that. Back to the game which I still love. Just my 2 cents.

Nidy

You are wrong about a couple of things.

First anything I do I am going to do it well. To me raiding is a job, but while a job it is also fun. When you have 20+ people relying on you to be there it is just like a job, you fail to see this. You also are prolly one of those people who join a heroic group and drop group leaving 5 people stranded to find a replacement just so you can go do whatever you want.

There is plenty being normal with raiding 4 times a week 3 hours at a time. A study was done awhile ago with what people did in their spare time. Apparently its ok to watch TV ( like the average joe ) 4 hours a night 7 days a week, than it is to play video games and interact with physical people. Opps. I just shot your statement to poop.

Really games are steering away from the hardcore crowd? Really? What evidence do you have?

None.

Last I checked you still have to raid to get the best stuff in any game. And you will still get it faster being hardcore. Or are you talking about the advanced solo zones? LOL seriously?! BTW I do advanced solo zones, I raid PoW, I do everything the game has to offer, so good luck with the casual catering game that allows you to run advanced solo zones.

The truth is there is not a game that caters to the casual people. There are games that try to cater to both the hardcore and the casual, but after the dusts settles its the hardcore people who pay the bills. EQ2 would be a long time dead game if not for the hardcore people and you can bet your butt on that.