Hey folks,

I'm sitting in the hotel in San Diego (nice digs), tapping away on my laptop via the 100mb broadband connection provided by SOE, not quite ready to head home yet.

The last 48 hours have been great. SOE really rolled out the red carpet and opened it's doors and collective minds to hear us and talk with us. Something has really lit the fires under the butts of SOE executives, EQ directors and dev team staff and if they follow through with the committments made this weekend, well, EQ has a really good chance to kick some butt again and be fun to play. I'm looking forward to it.

First of, who was there: yes, of the 63 attendees, it was mostly guild leaders of the big guilds across the servers - Silent Redemption, Rising Ascension, BotS, Township Rebellion, LoS, etc., etc. But several mid-range guilds were invited to (those in high-end Luclin and mid-range PoP) and then class and fan board sites (DG!, Safehouse, Berserker.com, Shaman's Crucible, Steel Warrior, Graffe's, The Runes, EQRolePlayers.com, Woody of /GU comics, the House Ogre from EQTraders, etc.).

I'll get pictures and a few artwork scans up after I get home, so this'll be an ongoing report.

Yesterday, we bussed to SOE headquarters for introductions, tours, demo's of EQ2 and Omens of War but most importantly, discussions with developers and customer service staff. I took a couple of copies of the druid issues document and then a abbreviated list from that with me and was pleasantly surprised to hear that many developers and directors had already seen it from just having posted it Friday (thanks guys!).

The day started with introductions by John Smedley - he really is a pretty normal, cool guy. Smedley started by saying that he took full responsibility for the "cluster" that was the Gates of Discord release. He said that he and the EQ dev staff fully realize now that it was not tested enough. As it turns out, there's also a reason why it's so hard; SOE had planned to raise the level limits to level 70 during the April 5th anniversary, but decided not to. However, GoD content was designed for that level. It was amazing to see SOE fess up and later in the day, we all spent time talking how players and SOE can better perform beta testing.

During the tours, it was super cool to see the customer service area and the GMs working on petitions (piccy's inc). Later in the afternoon, the director of CS and several Lead GMs told about the new petition system, new customer service goals and what they've got in the works which I think is really going to make a difference online. More details below.

Fun facts: EverQuest customer service (just EQ - not including SWG or FF CS) receives approximately 75,000 petitions a month (I think that was a number - it was huge); 70% of customer service time is spent on researching scams - this is part of the reason why SOE polled the EQ playerbase on how we'd feel about an official SOE RL cash selling system.

For the actual discussions, the broke us into 6 smaller groups and let us have at it. The discussions mostly were focused on high end raiding, testing, and customer service, but many topics were covered and I think many ideas with committment to doing or being talked about more that will effect players of every level and play style. The number segment of the EQ subscriber base is level 30-50 and they did seem genuinely concerned about those players who are casual to harder core but time-restricted. Woody (who was in my small break out group), spoke passionately about making it fun for those who log in for an hour or two again and a lot of ideas were discussed.

At the end of the day, the dev team met by the themselves and compiled a list, which was typed up, printed and given to us during dinner. Herewith, that document:

"June 5, 2004

Dear Guild and Community Representatives,

Thank you very much for a great Summit! By all accounts it was a huge success. I can speak for the EverQuest Development Team and tell you that we're grateful for the input you provided. In fact, in trying to generate this list to give to you this evening, we realized there was so much to go over that wouldn't be able to get a complete list together in time. We're committed to not only listening to your feedback, but working with you to make EverQuest more enjoyable for years to come.

So, we decided to list the Top Ten themes we would address starting Mondy, as well as the most common themes that we'll come back with more informationo n by mid-week next week.

A quick discussion resulted in a list of items that we will immediately address:

- Add scripting to shut off empty instances of Plane of Time
[Chen note: Everyone was pretty unanimous about looking for ways to improve this. The example situation of guild A kills phases 1-4, spawning the little dudes, armies, whatever you wanna call them, and then zoning out. Guild B can not now zone into Time for their instance for 4 hours. This sort of thing is what they are committing to working on immediately).

- Raid messages of the day
- Improving how we handle beta and the testing process
- Increase the number of debuffs allowed on the MOBs
[Chen note: The dev team got told many times that 30 slots on the MOBs is not enough. Although they didn't say how many they're going to increase it to, a larger amount should help.]

- Increase buffs on players through AAs
[Chen note: When I spoke to the spell and AA developer, Ryan, it sounded like this was already planned and that the Guild Summit just confirmed the need for it. Again, no firm number on the increase nor AAs required to buy them, but WOOHOO!]

- Note field on raid window

- Improved consent & drag for raid, group and guild
- Improve corpse drag radius
[Chen note: The functionality discussed sounded like a command you would turn on that would automatically consent all the rogues in your raid, group or guild - something like that - until you turned it off. The rogues in attendance were maniacially happy. Let's hope it goes live soon!]

- Make charms not no-drop
- Guild and individual rewards for guild beta testing
- Work on large To Do list....I know this one is a little random

Future items we will immediately begin looking at and discussions are as follows:

- Plane of Time instancing and other issues
- Back flaggings solutions to help with High-end guild atrophy
[Chen note: Lots of time was spent talking about the frustrations many/all guilds had when GoD came out; guilds were tuned for 72 man raids to then have to downsize to 54. SOE dev staffers admit now that it was a mistake to set the number and then change it, but consensus from the attendees in my group, at least, was that the number should stay the same or increase to just 60. SOE recognized that back flagging was a major pain in the ass and committed to figuring out some ways to make it easier. I hope we see something soon.]

- Improved raid and guild functionality
- Auto loot all for your corpse
- Improvements to Raid XP
[Chen note: I hadn't even thought about this before going, several folks mentioned how much raid xp sucked and that they'd like to see it improved. I think this would be great for all raiders, from the super hard core to those time-restricted players. While SOE said that they wanted group experience to still be the best, hopefully we'll see an improvement soon for regular raid xp.]

- Review the Epic 2.0 quests
- No more alien NPCs ;-) (focusing more on familiar Norrathians themes)
[Chen note: It was pretty funny actually during the introductions yesterday morning, Smed was introducing some of the game artists and mentioning how hard they work. One of the EQ directors heckled him from the back of the group about pirates - turns out Smed hated the pirate idea and said so, to which all of the attendees started clapping and saying "aaarrr!" in support of the pirates. =D]

- Solo LDoN-stype instances or similiar content
[Chen note: While I can understand how this might sound a little lame, the ideas floating around about it seemed pretty cool. Think "missions" that a solo player, even a warrior, could do - kill some stuff, collect something, deliver some stuff. Some ideas included installing NPC "helpers" in the dungeon that, for example, would heal the solo warrior, etc. This idea will hopefully give the players with just some limited time something fun to do while progressing their character some - without wasting tons of time sitting LFG.]

- Issues with item augmenetations
[Chen note: Hopefully we can see the ability to recycle augs soon. Discussions alluded to perhaps buying an expensive solvent, which would loosen the augment from your armor without damaging it. Yes plz thx!]

- Possible enhancements to Guild Wars

Of course these aren't all of the items. You brought us a CD, 2 books, 20 printed sheets and a manifesto. We'll need to go through all of those and our notes before we can really get a good tally of all of the wonderful ideas and questions that were presented.

Thank you again for your feedback and participation. We've had a great weekend and a wonderful display of things to come.

Sincerely,

Robert Pfister
Executive Producer
EverQuest

And the EverQuest Development Team!"

As far as druid specific issues, Trevize and I cornered "Ryan the spell guy" (when we could get him away from Gemdriver of Graffe's!) and chatted about big druid spell issues. Trev told him that a line of group heals was the most lacking and I talked about how the resistance check on E'ci's really needed fixing. We also talked about the refresh timer on SotW and I tried to impress upon him that the timer should just be reduced without removing the DS - we'll see. He said that the code for AA's was frozen atm, so nothing can be modified at the moment. Hopefully our long list of impassioned requests to reduce it will not go unnoticed.

I did talk about allowing TR and KR to crit and to reduce the cast time on our fast heals and/or increase the amount healed, but I'm doubtful they'll change either. We'll keep working on them about it!

From the tradeskill front (sorry guys, but y'all know I'm a nutty tradeskiller, so I had to ask), both Maddoc and Absor said they're working on more stuff, more recipes, especially for GoD and Omens will have some fun stuff (Absor doesn't give up information easily tho, that rascal =D)

Okay, Customer Service: Recently, SOE introduced a new in-game petition tool last week which is already greatly improving how SOE CS handles issues. If you haven't seen it, take a look. I think the commands to opening it are /petition, keystroke P, and then some way via the menus (can't remember now what it was).

Anyway, this new interface prompts the player for more detailed information about the problem and writes a much better CS "ticket" to be processed; a category and sub-category help direct the ticket exactly where it needs to go (for example, bugs go directly to the dev team) and fields request more specific time, zone, NPC, player name, etc. fields. The tickets are also not reset and lost when the servers go down like the old system did - and GMs will be able to resinstate items into your inventory when when you are offline as well as send you a message when you'll see when you log in.

The Lead GM who spoke with our group said that while they are still working on a large backlog from the old system, they are making great progress on the backlog while keeping up on petitions. They're goal is to get the petitions down to a much more controllable level and reduce response times down to hopefully an hour or two at the outside. Once they've got the petitions under control, they want their GMs to have more fun with the players - more GM events, more happy love.

They are also working on a system for guild leaders and officers to submit a few Guild Critical issues to CS that would receive top priority; e.g., a mob on your raid has warped into a wall and you need a GM there now to pop him out or your raid is hosed. Hopefully, we'll see this system in place very soon.

***
So, lots of stuff. I know I'm not remembering everything at the moment. I would suggest checking out Safehouse and /GU forums and other forums soon for their reviews of the event. I'll get some pictures up soon and anything I remember.

It was an amazing event and I am very thankful to SOE for hosting us and listening to what we had to say, to Sobe and the rest of the staff here at the DG for allowing a silly cupcake to attend and especially to you guys, the DG community for supporting me and allowing me to represent you. Together, we can work more closely the EQ dev team and hopefully see some real and good and FUN! changes soon.

If you guys have any questions or comments for me, please don't hesitate to reply here or PM me. =D

I like to say I am always more on the optimistic side but over and over druid issues have been discussed (or should I say class issues). The response seems to always be "no changes at this time".

Good things are being done to the game itself which is always good but my optimism on class issues has begun to take a dive.

Nice report!! Thanks!

Was anything said or any committment made to balancing healing throughout the game? I don't mean changing a spell or two of OURS... more gamewide. From all druid concerns I see here (as well as those I live with when I play) healing is way out of whack and is causing most of our problems.

Very cool! Thanks for the great report, Chen, and I look forward to your updates too! :)

Bah. Nothing in there for casual gamers. Not even solo instanced content is enough to make me reconsider my decision to quit. The game is just not fun for time limited players anymore. CoH is. SoE won't be getting any money from me for some time, if ever.

Wake me if SoE ever decides to stop ignoring the non-raiders. =(

unless you've glossed over a lot of the "smaller" ideas, sounds like mostly raiding guild fixes to me too.

than again, don't know what i really expected to come out of a summit that involved inviting all the uber guilds anyway. the uber guild concerns certainly aren't the majority of players concerns

thanks for taking the time to write it up

Any discussion about EQ's healing paradigm?

Unfortunately, it sounds like it was rather unproductive. Most of what you mentioned involves raid tweaks that don't affect most EQ players, and the other things (like auto looting your corpse) are nice but too trivial to make worn out players want to return. The rest, like the promise of trade skill recipes, were just more empty promises -- they said the same thing about GoD.

If they want to do something for the casual/solo player, all they really need to do is stop all the trash mobs from summoning. Epic and Boss mobs are the only mobs that should really summon but no... "you shall not evade me Solice," says an anonymous mob of no repute.

It does sound like they had a conference so they could hear how to better cater to that small portion of the population that is not really leaving anyway, but I guess it was good for the big guilds.

Hopefully they have enough sense to look at actual populations and flags and not make the same mistakes again.

The GoDs level thing was classic though, lol.

This is extremely underwhelming.

I am not sure the majority of players even care about half of that stuff. And most of it is minor to begin with.

Of course I don't get the impression that the people invited were an overall good reprenstation of the playerbase either.

I think they missed the mark entirely with this thing and have done nothing to help retain/return the bulk of their playerbase.

Well thanks for the writeup Chenier. Probably going to more to add on later with just did the short post I guess.

I am rather dissappointed with the way the summit sounded. Seems like to much was involved into making the high end areas a better place to play. Which is fine and dandy those players pay the bills for SOE as well as alot of other players. It does not seem like Sony really put to much interests into revamping old zones and leaving them as virtually dead space, as well as fixing and continuing old storylines such as Firionia Vie, The Trak Prophecies, as well as the still relativly untouched luclin storylines, with not to much on those storylines I might also add. With what eq still has for future expansions that I see still possible, An "underdark expansion" with Brell, An underwater expansions with cities underwater and the icy depths of norrath. Finishing up the planes with Erollisi Marr the astral magic of druzzil ro, Rodcet Nife, Prexus, the taelosian water god thingy, Veeshan and the nameless. While I realize that Veeshan and the nameless are quite large entities it would still be nice to have something else like a toned down version. The void is an expansion all to itself as well. And good ole Mayong Mistmoore would be a nice thing to work with. Ole Kerafrym would be nice to see where he ran off in the storyline as well.

I would like to see Antonius Bayle actually after 5 years or so start to figure out that his good brother is actually trying to do. Lots of stuff to do just it is not getting done. That is lots of stuff that can be done that ubers and casual players can do alike and have fun. Basically, I am dissappointed so far from what I have heard from the summit.

Thanks for the write up, but damn... that's a sucky summit. Nothing at all for the casual player except a little discussion about backflagging. I would've had a 50 page report to hand to them if I'd been able to go.

It does sound like they had a conference so they could hear how to better cater to that small portion of the population that is not really leaving anyway, but I guess it was good for the big guilds.

Uh... guess you missed seeing that Afterlife pretty much as a whole guild decided to quit EQ for WoW.

This is nearly all positive stuff but I'm not sure it will solve the worst problems. People aren't leaving the game because of corpse dragging, lack of buff slots, refunding augments, raid xp, and other small gameplay issues. They'll all welcome improvements but just trivial when you look at the big picture. I hope the people attending gave priority on the real issues that will stop people cancelling accounts, things like reducing backflagging, providing more instanced content to let people get on and play no matter what their class, level, flags, and gear, and better storylines to make players interested in the new zones and enemies.

I hope the people attending gave priority on the real issues that will stop people cancelling accounts, things like reducing backflagging, providing more instanced content to let people get on and play no matter what their class level and gear, and more better storylines to keep players interested.
Yes, those were all discussed at length.

Remember that change isn't over night and development does take time. I think SOE is definitely going be more careful about releasing expansions - making sure they are better tested (they got fried on the bugginess and crappiness of the GoD).

And yes, many of us, especially the class and fansites, were a little surprised at the lack of low- to mid-range guild and player representation, but Smedley, the team, Vannoth and Brenlo all said yes, they wanted to do these Summit thingies on somewhat a regular basis and I definitely think this summit has established many channels of communication. Hell, I know where they work now - I'll drive back down and beat on the door til they fix stuff. =)

There is no magic switch to flip the game into everyone's personal view of perfection - but they want to hear what we think and I believe will be more communicative with us about issues.

It really was a positive experience. Think positive folks.

Was anything said or any committment made to balancing healing throughout the game? I don't mean changing a spell or two of OURS... more gamewide. From all druid concerns I see here (as well as those I live with when I play) healing is way out of whack and is causing most of our problems.
To answer your question, Arienne, Trevize and I did talk to their spell developer and from what I know, the Shaman's Crucible representative didn't have much to say about healing (other than their heals sucked, so they didn't heal much). And I don't know what the Paladins of Norrath had to say either; oddly, no eqclerics rep was there.

But as I said above, this is a first step and I hope to see more communication and progress.

Meh, it's hard to think positive when nearly everything on the list only helps the raider for the most part. I don't play games to help 59 other people kill one mob which drops only two or three pieces of loot after four hours of tarsh mob killing to get there plus the set up time.

I want to log in, grab some friends and go have fun. Much like CoH. I really doubt these summits will ever bring that kind of accessibility and fun to EQ.

To answer your question, Arienne, Trevize and I did talk to their spell developer and from what I know, the Shaman's Crucible representative didn't have much to say about healing (other than their heals sucked, so they didn't heal much). And I don't know what the Paladins of Norrath had to say either; oddly, no eqclerics rep was there.No eqcleric rep was there? That sux. Are they so dis-enchanted with the game that none of the community leaders wanted to go? Or perhaps SOE doesn't care enough to invite them? Or what?

What bugs me is: Gates of Discord is 'tuned' for level 70 (heh, whoops), Healing Per Second (HPS) is increased a negligible amount, Damage Per Second (DPS) is increased significantly, and it appears as though the trends of max/min extremes of the game isn't given a second thought at this summit. How long can this last?

No eqcleric rep was there? That sux. Are they so dis-enchanted with the game that none of the community leaders wanted to go? Or perhaps SOE doesn't care enough to invite them? Or what?

I asked Brenlo about this - I would think the clerics would be pissed. The general idea I got is that either they haven't much to complain, haven't been complaining and/or just haven't been communicating with SOE much. They weren't the only class not there. /shrug

<b>***Edit by Storm***
Please see <a href="http://forums.thedruidsgrove.org/showpost.php?p=117281&postcount=63">Brenlo's reply here</a> before using Chen's quote.</b>

What bugs me is: Gates of Discord is 'tuned' for level 70 (heh, whoops), Healing Per Second (HPS) is increased a negligible amount, Damage Per Second (DPS) is increased significantly, and it appears as though the trends of max/min extremes of the game isn't given a second thought at this summit. How long can this last?
The fubar-ness of designing an expansion for a specific level and then not including it certainly seemed odd to me. I hope that they make adjustments soon.

I wrote the word "hope" a lot in this thread (and told Brenlo as much this morning after I posted the first bit). Let's see what SOE does to live up to these committments this time.

That they are thinking about allowing solo LDoN's is a very good step for the time restricted player I think. That they are going to work on the back flagging problem for guilds sounds good too.

I'll be glad to hear more ideas they come up with as they have time to sort through all of the information and ideas they were given in a short time. I really want to be positive about this summit. I'm glad that they are now wanting input from the players and hope they will make many positive changes that will bring the fun back to the game.

Things that will help the solo or small group, time restricted player actually being introduced to the game would make me consider playing again.

He said that the code for AA's was frozen atm, so nothing can be modified at the moment. .. I did talk about allowing TR and KR to crit and to reduce the cast time on our fast heals and/or increase the amount healed, but I'm doubtful they'll change either. We'll keep working on them about it!

Did they feed you guys odd-looking mushrooms or what? Your report comes across as awfully excited and enthusiastic, considering they totally blew off druid issues without so much as a mention that they'd look into it.

Did anyone even bother to ask them to explain WHY these issues have been ignored for so long? I know SOE isn't fond of the druid class, but I'm very disheartened by their lack of acknowledgement.

I find myself much closer to giving up on EQ than I had been before reading about the summit. Kinda wish I'd missed this report.

~Firemynd

These are good results to see for a first-time discussion session such as this, and I am encouraged. Yes, some of the results are vague, but that is to be expected at this point. Now is the time to let the SoE reps go back, digest what they learned, and respond. Once we get a better idea of how they plan on handling various issues (e.g., soloing, my own pet issue) will be the time to decide how well they are really listening now.

Vestix
63 optimistic druid of Tunare

"He said that the code for AA's was frozen atm, so nothing can be modified at the moment. "


This has been the reply since the beginning. When will the moment be passed, or just give us a solid yes or no it will or will not be ever changed. Giving someone hope that it might be when it will not be changed is giving false hope.

Well the summit was, as stated many times, about high end and overall gameplay, and not so much about class specific issues. The fact that they werent particularly receptive on anyone's class issues is simply a reflection that it wasnt a goal of the meetings.

Not that they came up with some list of things to cure EQ either... but come on guys, they had like 60-odd people and 2 days... what can you realistically expect?

Note the mention of possible future summits as well. I'd expect that any future ones would have different invitees and different focii as well.

Its interesting to note that a similiar thread with the exact same stuff posted by Chenier on Steel Warriors (http://www.thesteelwarrior.org/forum/showthread.php?t=7457) has garnered very similiar responses. People are calling it "throwing tiny roadspikes on a runaway car instead of jumping in and pulling the brakes", "big elephant coming into the room but people are not commenting about it".

y take on this is that this is just a rushed written in 5 minutes letter just so the community leaders have something to show to us, things they can easily and definately change for now. Hopefully they can follow through and announce bigger and more impactful changes soon, before more people decide to leave the game.

They are also working on a system for guild leaders and officers to submit a few Guild Critical issues to CS that would receive top priority; e.g., a mob on your raid has warped into a wall and you need a GM there now to pop him out or your raid is hosed. Hopefully, we'll see this system in place very soon.

Great idea, assuming that they also give the GMs the ability to actually help. Usually as a raid leader, I can't get a GM when things get bugged. But, the few times I have, they have consistently told me 'sorry, can't help you with that'.

...but come on guys, they had like 60-odd people and 2 days... what can you realistically expect?Oh I doubt that ALL 60 were odd. Probably a lot were more nerdy than odd :)

But seriously, one report isn't the whole picture. Wait and see what statements SOE comes out with before writing the whole thing off. I'm not particularly optimistic, but let's see what Scirocco says, too. I've been looking at other forums for even a hint of feedback and I think ours is the first to have any info at all.

I've been looking at other forums for even a hint of feedback and I think ours is the first to have any info at all

y writeup wasnt *that* bad =( haha.

I think it was productive, exspections are too high if people think its was supposed to be a silver bullet with immediate results (that list was made just *hours* after the meeting, it should have been done months ago, but hopefully they will continue, with different types of people, people say things have been on messageboards for months, but really look at any thread, the playerbase can barely ever aggree on an issue. making people happy overall is hard (but yes they did really **** up, and havnt been doing a good job) but its more about realistic exspectionans...

That said my biggest concern is if its too late, a lot of the damage has been done, and will they beable to do things fast enough, and well enough to keep people generally happy (at least as happy as people were PreGoD) It really needed to be done a while ago, but its too late for that now, so hopefully will continue and will see more results from it, only time can tell, but time is the most precious commodity of all.

I think thatHe said that the code for AA's was frozen atm, so nothing can be modified at the moment.and- Increase buffs on players through AAsdon't go so well together :D

Edit: Oh and... very nice writeup Miss Cupcake, it's very nice to see passionate Druids take up the cause.

This WOW and COH has got SOE SCARED as they should be. All these years they ignored all these legitimate complaints and now they are starting to "listen" Yeah right!, they are "listening" because of Blizzard and other MMORPG companies that are going to kick SOE's arse. After reading the the changes planned after the "summit", these people still don't get it. Thank god for competition and a free market. I hope EQ II dies a painful death costing Sony plenty of $$. When is WOW coming out? *sigh*

um, ok.

have you folks every been at a meeting-style conference? I think it sounds like they did a great job of gathering feedback.

As stated in the letter attendees got at the end,

Of course these aren't all of the items. You brought us a CD, 2 books, 20 printed sheets and a manifesto. We'll need to go through all of those and our notes before we can really get a good tally of all of the wonderful ideas and questions that were presented.


The fact that SoE managed to put together a list at all after two days of meetings with players, to be presented to the attendees at the final dinner, blows my mind. (On the Steel Warrior, an attendee posted that SoE had one hour to come up with that letter in between the final panel and the dinner.) I'm very encouraged, and look forward to seeing where things develop once they've had time to digest everything that came up at that conference. And they specifically say that this is only a scattered list of issues that they will start discussing tomorrow, (monday).

Thank you, Chenier, (and the rest of the attendees) for attending this conference.

It was a pleasure to meet you, Chenier.

Loral
http://mobhunter.com/

/applaud Chen

Good job on your writeup and thanks for voicing some Druid issues.

I am a little disappointed at the lack of representation from the non-ubers, but oh well.

BTW, did you compare notes with Scirocco at any point? Does he have a summary on the way? Just curious.

Well, its all PR until they actually live up to the commitments. And great PR too! 60 or so charged up and enthusiastic people with message forums hanging on their words.

Pana such a cynic 8)

Last defense of the optimist, doncha know!

As it turns out, there's also a reason why it's so hard; SOE had planned to raise the level limits to level 70 during the April 5th anniversary, but decided not to.

Err... so now you have to pay for it instead?

I guess, at this stage, it's hard to say what will happen. It's a step in the right direction at least. I'll avoid being pessimistic and just hope they can continue down this path and set things right.

Well, I've been claiming the summit would be little more than a PR tool for OoW and it does seem like thats all it'll be really.

I'm sorry, but I dont buy the level 70 thing really. Exactly what sort of idiot plans an expansion around an idea that they never implement. And then tells you that you will need to buy a second expansion in order to realistically complete the content from the previous expansion? I mean, is Microsoft handling their Marketing now?

If Gates was designed around level 70 then where were the appropriate spells and skills to go with it? Or were they planning on just giving us level 70 and pushing out new spells and skills later? Not to mention this would be the first time SoE ever did a level increase without an expansion, or at least did it later on.

I'll grant you it might be true. Nothing is crazier than the truth after all. But I'd say that's an even worse black mark against SoE if it is true. That sort of ill advised, simple not thinking, idiotic design for an expansion is nothing short of insane. And they expect us to trust them to put it right? Make the next expansion free to those that bought the Gates expansion and I might come back for that.

As for the rest, I dont see it really changing things for even the large raiding guilds. Granted I havent raided with one in years, so I dont know many of their complaints these days. And certainly improved Time Critical GM petitions would help them a lot. That alone might be enough for even the most cynical guild to start liking SoE's CS assuming it works well.

But one thing is that I see many of the druid issues to be intimitely intertwined with how EQ will move forward. Lack of clerics has always been a problem for 98% of the guilds out there. For years most guilds have just dealt with it. We've simply accepted inferior druid healing and made it up by doing things 2-3 expansions later. But times have changed. There are many many more MMORPG's out there that dont require this sort of class lock. Better healing, or rather lack of options in that field, is probably the second or third biggest problem facing EQ.

If they want to retain players they need to make the content available to the players. If a guild cannot advance to the upper content due to lack of healing, no change to the format of the game will help them. And I doubt players today, especially the older more stable ones, will be willing to wait another 2-3 years before being able to access the current expansions.

Of course, I wasnt there at the summit. :) So its quite possible I'm being way too cynical there. Chernier sounded happy and optimistic enough, and I'm willing to concede a lot there. There's always a ton of stuff that any report leaves out and its hard to convey real feeling in text.

But it did sound to me that SoE still thinks that bandages are all thats really necessary. And I think at this point they need to radically rethink the game if they intend to hold onto players past the end of summer.

What they mean is gates was origianlly tuned* around having later portions be level 70, but now is (Hopefully?) tuned for level 65's.

*Gates was barely tuned, and they admited that but gates was badly tuned, and at esome parts, were badly tuned for level 70, which just make the problem expontentiall worse

Paladin of Norrath says SoE planned to raise the level cap to 70 for the 5th anniversary celebrations and a further raise to level 75 cap for OoW. On this thread however Chenier only said they planned an increase to level 70 as part of the 5th anniversary.

Obviously, there is some disagreement over what's been said by SoE. Can some dev (Brenlo?) confirm exactly what the situation is? And since 5th anniversary celebrations are over and there's no level cap increase, what's going to happen next? Do we have to pay for the new level cap now?

On a side note, I'm taking the attitude of once bitten twice shy so I'ld agree with Panamah. Until these promises are delivered, I'll reserve final judgement on returning to the lands of Norrath.

Ok, where to begin. This was a total 180 from all other experiences I have had with Sony. IMO, they are scared. As Chris, the EQ project manager, said to me in private, this is the first time when people leave, they have an alternative of somewhere else to go, in their opinion.

The event was extravagant. They flew us all in, had free beer on the bus on the way to the game and hotel, everything in the hotel was free, meals, room service, the bar, movies, long distance, internet access, everything. They took us to the Padre game where we had the most expensive seats and even had the billboard welcome us during the 6th inning. We came back from the game to find a gift packet in our room with a Zboard Gaming Keyboard with EQ overlay and a bunch of other cool gifts, including a free CD key of Omens of War. Don't be too jealous of me =).

The next day we took a bus to SOE after breakfast with the developers where they had a tent set up in the parking lot for a meeting. Smedley opened up with a speech that began. GoD was our biggest f-up yet, we are sorry and vow never to make that mistake again. Then the guy over GoD got up and apologized and said hate me. It's my fault and it will never happen again. They then answered a bunch of questions about various things, before breaking us up into tour groups. Smedley led my group and we went first to customer service where we toured the facility and walked around looking over GMs shoulders as they helped petitions. They explained how they have just instituted new software that should speed up customer service - we basically said we would believe it when we see it. There was a board up that said 55,355 people were playing EQ, 2,912 in Planetside and 35,000 something in SWG.

We then went to Ops where we saw the guys who reboot the server before touring the server room. For you geek types, EQ is on Windows NT from 8 years ago while EQ2 and all the other games are on Linux.

The server room is cool. Old servers were about 2 1/2 racks currently. Each server handles around 5 zones and with 300 zones in game, its cumbersome. They are currently installing Bladestrike servers which will shrink EQ servers down a ton. Only one server is currently on that now. They also have a backup diesel generator to keep the game going during power outages. Some of the servers are in a remote location so that if they go down someone has to drive over to that location to reboot them. The Bladestrikes will solve that issue.

Next we went to the developers area. They had all the Epic artwork on the wall. One senior animator was working on a Chimera model that rocked and he showed us some of the Omens of War models. Smedley mentioned to us that they are going to start outsourcing a lot of the artwork so that they can concentrate more on content rather than art, as that takes up the bulk of their time.

We also saw the developer's schedule. One of them is doing the druid epic tuning next week, another is working on the guild tribute system for OOW. They also are adding a new AA structure to the backbone which will make it so that they can add AAs much much easier. That just got finished so we should expect new AAs before OOW that are free.

After that we broke off into 10-15 man groups for development discussions. They said who wants to go first and I opened up and said my peace first. Smedley, Travis (designed the final zone of GoD and Yxtta (who said he would change the BiC quest pieces off the primals), Shaun Lord (a developer), and Alan (brenlo) were in our group.

I said first thing they need to fix is making it so a guild can raid together. They seemed to like my 85/15 rule with keys dropping off the end game bosses. They also mentioned wanting to create the guild as an identity. I explained that people come back and can't raid with the guild so they lose interest and disappear and they said they will fix this somehow guaranteed. Their precise way of doing it will be worked out in the future.

I also mentioned with the lvl 70 cap they need to instance time cause it will be a nightmare. Smedley said, Can that be done to the developers. They said yes, he said ok. We will look into it. Lots of other ideas happened as well. Some they liked, some they didn't. I suggested epic mount quests like dragons and underwater mounts, but they said they have issues with the global file. They also said they can't fly cause of the geometry of the engine. Brenlo pushed for halfling bards.

After that we did lunch, I did the EQ2 demo instead. EQ2 is eye candy, wood elf girls have like 20 different hair models, even choosing flowers or butterflys in their hair. Personally, I wasn't impressed. You make furniture and stuff although the mirror was really cool in your house. It actually worked and had reflections as well.

Back to customer service sessions where they explained their new customer service plan. I asked if they were swamped and he said yes. Average resolve time is like 33 hours but their new system will shrink that hopefully. They also said they are instituting new software which will speed that up. There is a red flag that pops up on an account that gets over a certain amount of plat or has a lot of plat pass through it. They wouldn't give us the exact numbers for obvious reasons. These accounts are checked to see if they are legit. One thing to note is that you no longer have to stay online to get a petition answered. They are saved now as instant messages.

Next another development meeting, this time Chris the project manager and Hobart, one of the head programmers, replaced Smedley and Travis.

Hobart asked us if we would be interested in a DKP-type table next to the guild management tool that would allow us to keep track of attendance for everyone automatically. Everyone said yes. They asked us if we wanted housing. Most people said no. I suggested to Chris a guild banker where you could turn in items and withdraw tradeskill stuff and such. He liked that idea. They want to add a trophy house for guilds which shows which mobs each guild has killed. Lots of other ideas went around as well.

After that we went to dinner at a bar where practically everyone but me got plastered and they handed out a paper with a lot of immediate fixes and a lot of promises to look at other suggestions.

Almost everyone came out of there very happy, including me, which was suprising as I was pretty cynical heading in.

Other items of note:

They promised to not go up and down with raid sizes.

I talked to a dev who went through an Ikkinz trial last week with a paladin tanking. After the paladin went splat, he looked into it. He told me he spent the last four days retuning them so a paladin can tank it.

They said they are changing spell drops so that you can quest every one. They will still drop randomly but they are adding a quest for each individual spell. One good suggestion someone made that they liked is making it so that in instanced zones, only spells of those present can drop.

New melee animations and new player models will be coming out by the end of the year. The DX9 collision crap was done cause they upgraded the engine so they can make better looking zones. They are also mentioned hiring an outside company to go back and redo all the old zones to bring them up to the new engine.

They are adding solo LDON expeditions for every class so that people who only have an hour can log on and do experience immediately.

They are considering adding a whole other line of abilities for clerics, like making them nuke for 6k on undead or stuff or make them turn into a warriortype when fighting undead so that more people will play clerics, but they had no definitive answers for that.

One of the things people said is they want expansions to use old lore, we don't need new aliens and stuff, building storylines and flush out the current lore. They said ok.

Smedley asked us if we wanted to see numbers of mana and experience and he said they would consider adding it as an option you can turn on. They also said they would add it so you can see how much mana each person in the group has.

They admitted this summit should have happened two years ago and they are now learning that they need more interaction with the players since we are the real power. They said they want to start doing a summit like this every six months or so. Another big fubar they mentioned is Uqua was finished. The problem is that it was designed for level 70. Originally they planned on adding two levels on the 5th anniversary of EQ and then 3 more in OOW. The developers then killed this idea. They said future expansions will have every encounter tuned by uber guilds rather than beta buffed randoms so they are ready when the expansion goes live.

They admitted LoY was a rush job. One thing they are doing is adding a portal in PoK to LoY. That's how rushed it was, it didn't even get a portal (an obvious bug).

Also one thing to note is that Omens of War only has one flagged zone, the rest is like Kunark where everyone can go everywhere.

As far as GM events, they will be coming back. Test of Tactics, Best of the Best and other events will happen again for sure. They also are coming up with a more advanced Guild War system, including a specific zone for it. Hobart also mentioned a complete makeover of it with all kinds of events. I told him about the one we did with EOD where we had to kill the other guys GM, and he said "regicide, that's one I hadn't thought of, will make sure it gets in."

They asked alot of opinions. A company has contacted Sony about developing a Magic The Gathering-type card game for EQ and since I was wearing a MTG shirt on Smedley asked my opinion. The common cards will be bought at vendors and rare cards will drop off of different mobs. This game can be played against people while in EQ waiting for raids and such.

One suggestion Rich from Talisman made that they liked was a raid leader being able to move groups around from the raid window. Murphy from BOTS had a good suggestion to combine the expedition and raid window so that you can see who logged without quitting expeditions.

There was a ton more suggestions made and I thought it was worthwhile. They seemed genuine anyway.

Thornsong
GM, The Relentless

Before the 'round tables/10 person discussion groups' when Smedley and a few people from dev team talked to everyone (and gave the yes we ***ed up/cluster * speak) they said 5th anniversay was gunna be 70, then OoW 75, but they decided it was a bad idea.

I dont think theres a disagreement, as much as its just that any one person who went isn't going to beable to write everything up, that was said, and will have gaps, I know there werea lot of gaps in my writeup that I dont remember till I read others or see questions.

Correct me if I'm wrong though Chenier.

Edit just read post above, I personally dont remeber saying 73 instead of 75, but its very possibly, but I distinictily remember saying that both 5th aniversary, and OoW was going to have level caps

Paladin of Norrath says SoE planned to raise the level cap to 70 for the 5th anniversary celebrations and a further raise to level 75 cap for OoW. On this thread however Chenier only said they planned an increase to level 70 as part of the 5th anniversary.
Both are correct, except, SOE *had* planned lvl 70 for GoD and then 75 for OoW, but realized that was crazy, so changed it to no levels for GoD and 70 for OoW.
Well, I've been claiming the summit would be little more than a PR tool for OoW and it does seem like thats all it'll be really.
I disagree. It didn't feel "PR"y to me. They had even planned a "PR" event for OoW but dropped it.

I'll give you that I feel like some of the dev staff need to learn to take constructive critism and learn to brainstorm with the players as opposed to just defending why it is the way it is. But that takes learning. =)

Scirocco unfortunately was unable to attend. =(

Loral! /wave =D

And the discrepancies between "aa code is locked" and "we'll fix that with aa's" - dunno, I agree that's weird too. IMHO, Ryan the spell and aa guy seemed either overwhelmed with us or something...love ya, 'mano...we're intense, sorry! (I promise I don't bite!)

Oh, I was wondering where Scir was, was gunna say hi to him since same server.

I was that guy who sat to your left when we had the dev discussions hah (group C!)

Was probably Trev =)

They also are adding a new AA structure to the backbone which will make it so that they can add AAs much much easier. That just got finished so we should expect new AAs before OOW that are free.

That is no doubt why another dev said that current AA's were code locked, probably until this new AA structure has been added and pushed live. Still, gotta keep hammering home that stupid sotw timer issue.

Trev talked **** behind my back entire time we were there i think! =(

Both are correct, except, SOE *had* planned lvl 70 for GoD and then 75 for OoW, but realized that was crazy, so changed it to no levels for GoD and 70 for OoW.

I disagree. It didn't feel "PR"y to me. They had even planned a "PR" event for OoW but dropped it.


Actually I didnt mean the event itself was supposed to be a PR thing, but rather they'd simply use the event *as* PR for OoW.

See? We've improved! We went through all this trouble to fix the game! Buy our expansion!

Okay, I will grant that this is highly cynical and bitter and right now we do need to think positively. Its just somewhat hard right now. Especially having not been there.

On one note though, Solo or even Duo LDoN content would probably be enough to cause me to uncancel my second account and keep my primary one active for awhile. Whether or not it'll keep me once WoW comes out will depend on the overall changes.

One thing that struck me reading Thornsong's writeup was the number of 55k for EQ. Wasnt that a weekend primetime? That's approximately half their max of 110k wasnt it? I havent kept up on numbers, but it seems to me like 55k on weekend primetime is a pretty serious drop.

I agree that they did seem much more open. Regardless it does still seem to me to be too little too late. I know pretty much everyone who went seems very optimistic. However, I find it very very difficult to give SoE the benefit of the doubt anymore. Over the years SoE has epitomized the term "talk is cheap". And while I'm sure the summit was anything but cheap for SoE, I still want to see them walk the walk before I commit again to EQ.

But what the hell. I'll give them a few months anyway. Its not like I was doing anything over the summer. At least till WoW comes out anyway. But I'd better see some serious change if they expect me to stay at least.

One thing that struck me reading Thornsong's writeup was the number of 55k for EQ. Wasnt that a weekend primetime? That's approximately half their max of 110k wasnt it? I havent kept up on numbers, but it seems to me like 55k on weekend primetime is a pretty serious drop.


Actually that was at 9 am or so PST on a Saturday. Is that prime time?

I remember hearing that bit, but I can't remember the answer, sorry. =P

It was the numbers on the little scroller bar above the gameroom (where group C was) I saw the 55k number around noonish PST, which isnt exactly primetime, although I didnt check it later

Thank you Chenier for going to represent us and for the report and the pictures :).

I hope all is well with Scirocco and it was only a problem of schedules that kept him from attending.

*pokes his nose around for a moment*

nothing for the casuals. too bad Scirocco wasn't there cause he would have championed our cause. his attendance was the one that i really thought would make a difference to the non-raiders.

*still smells the same*

Interesting, predictable. Actions will speak louder to me than words. I still beleive Sony is great at talking, less so on delivery.

In their defense, they did say they want EQ1 to be for raiders now and EQ2 for "casuals". I've covered my opinion on that one already elsewhere as well.

Sharing Woody's cool-aid

Smed is actually a really good sport. He's a nice guy with a sense of humor. And, unfortunately, that's a fact that has been clouded from the perspective of our community for a long time. He doesn't post to the forums because he becomes an immediate target. The quote about us not knowing what we want... he never said. It was Kelly Flock.

And it's exactly that kind of miscommunication, and lack of communication, that has brought EQ to the point it's currently at.

But now, on the heels of the Guild Summit, we find ourselves in a new exciting time. The lines of communication have been restored. The single biggest issue for me, going to the Guild Summit, was that the Devs would finally be heard.

See the Devs want to fix the game, and change some stuff, and stir the EQ pot as much as we do. But, they didn't feel like they could really approach the higher ups with their ideas (ie. our ideas) for change.

With the ultimate failure of GoD, the whispering sigh of OoW pre-orders, and a community that rose up as one voice to cry out our needs... we stirred the larger pot. We demanded to be heard, and we have been. The Designers, developer, execs and everyone are communicating openly about the game. And that's only the beginning. The Guild Summit is a preamble of things to come.

From now on, the community leaders have open lines of communication with the SOE staff to effect change within the game to our collective benefit. SOE now realizes above all things that they can not sell us a product that we're not interested in. Now they know we have a voice, and they have begun the change to allow us to freely speak out. And in speaking out, we scrub off the rust, to return the luster and shine of the game we once loved: EverQuest.

So now is not the time to be silent. Now is the time to talk to your community leaders. Let them know what you want from the game so that it can be passed on to SOE who is now positioning themselve to embrace our requests.

Now, I don't say this half-heartedly. I'm not saying it because I was invited out. I'm saying it... because I saw it. I saw it in the faces and enthusiasm of everyone at SOE, from the designers to the marketting staff, from the artists to the execs, from the developers to the CS staff. That shine is there. This unquestionable glow of progression in a positive direction.

In other words, the feeling of change was almost tangible.
Atleast from my perspective.

And later in the same thread:

The list that you're seeing is only the TIP of the "immediately address" iceberg. You have to remember that the most represented segment of the game at the summit was the higher end guilds. So, the ten hottest topics were related to what they said. But, I can also tell you that they heard the pleas to address casual gamer concerns loud and clear.

There's a LOT happening. A WHOLE lot more than JUST that abbreviated list. I promise you.

I'm glad, for my friends who haven't cancelled their accounts yet, that there will be changes. I'm sure my uber friends will be happy with the changes in GoD. I'm sure my casual friends will be happy, um, being able to autoloot their corpse.

As for me, I am finding CoH to fit my lifestyle much better than EQ. They got my money for 5 years until dissappointment and dissillusionment finally took its toll.

Thank you very much for the write up Chen. I hope to see those pictures soon. Your work is appreciated.

I do hope the LDoN's will instance for the number of people who enter. That they will make it available for soloers is wonderful news, but I also know several husband/wife and parent/child teams who need this available to duos as well. Not to mention that many people now box and this would offer them more to do when not grouped or raiding as well.

Ya, they did say they would allow you to duo as well.

I asked Brenlo about this - I would think the clerics would be pissed. The general idea I got is that either they haven't much to complain, haven't been complaining and/or just haven't been communicating with SOE much.

*bitter laughter*

There was a board up that said 55,355 people were playing EQ, 2,912 in Planetside and 35,000 something in SWG.Seems to me SOE should have focused more on their biggest hit (and its playerbase) then churning out more MMOG's (supposedly with the revenue from EQ).

I played PlanetSide... and what turned me off was the same timesink mentality. Shortly after release (or thereabouts) full group experience was cut tenfold. I mean geeez, all I wanted was to log on and blow people up, and now all of a sudden they wanted me to sink ~6 months of my life into being able to pick the weapons/armor/vehicle qualifications I want? Get a life.

I guess all that to say... focus on your cash cow and make those customers happy and stop spending your millions on development that you're gonna fubar anyway or else you're gonna end up with no customers at all. I don't mean to be as rude as that, but hey, lets see some change soon. /cheer

They are also working on a system for guild leaders and officers to submit a few Guild Critical issues to CS that would receive top priority; e.g., a mob on your raid has warped into a wall and you need a GM there now to pop him out or your raid is hosed. Hopefully, we'll see this system in place very soon.

This had better be raid based and NOT guild based. For the time impaired, there are the public/open flag raid. There are between 80-100 people in channel prime time on Povar and we had a full 72 man raid on AD. Should something like that get bugged, open raid orgs need responce as fast as FoH/Trion etc.

I asked Brenlo about this - I would think the clerics would be pissed. The general idea I got is that either they haven't much to complain, haven't been complaining and/or just haven't been communicating with SOE much.


Ahem,

Chenier is trying to get me in trouble here. Silly Druid =P She forgot the part where I said I was limited in space for class sites. So Clerics, who have not been as angry as other classes were not invited this time. There were however, well over a dozen clerics in attendance and they gave us quite a bit of feedback.

Brenlo

Me, try to get you in trouble?! Never!

No, he's correct - he did say that. =)

They are considering adding a whole other line of abilities for clerics, like making them nuke for 6k on undead or stuff or make them turn into a warriortype when fighting undead so that more people will play clerics, but they had no definitive answers for that.Sounds like that's more info on a single class than the druids got with a Druid's Grove representative there. But the "summit" was touted as a "guild summit" and not a class meeting. It seems that the representatives were chosen from the more frequented sites to "get the word out" to the players faster than guild sites would, not because they wanted specific class input.

I'm more interested in seeing the healing ABILITY better balanced in the game. Frankly I don't care which class gets the dubious honor of being healer/rezzer/roadkill from it. The global healing balance itself is what's broken.

**edit**
Amazing what pops up between hitting "reply" and the actual posting on a busy day!

I have not read every reply but my feel from the replies so far:

-Sony served up lots of beer
-Lots of talk, talk, and talk for guild issues
-Lots of eye candy but little meat
-Why go in to EQ2 when this is about the current problems in EQ
-People fessed up about sony making mistakes and?????
-Uber guilds were there - gratz to them - what about the rest of us???
-Lots of talk about Sony making mistakes with the current releases - what about the problems from the past few years???????
-Sony talks about solo instance dungeons (YES) and no word on anything other than talk?

Elder Kensol Stice
62 Druid on MT

From the non-raider perspective:

Note how I didn't title this "From the Casual Gamer's Perspective":

I do not consider myself casual. Since I have Two level 65 characters, 4 accounts, run a guild, lead raids and am in the game 3-5 hours every night, I have ceased to call myself casual.

Power gamer does not equal raider
Casual does not equal non-raider

Raider and non-raider are playstyles.
Casual and power-gamer reflect lifestyles.

Ones lifestyle may not allow for a raiding playstyle. Content should be designed independent of lifestyle or playstlye. My largest concern is that the non-raiding playstyle was not represented at this meeting. This is wholely unfortunate as the majority of EQ players are not raiders. In this case it seems that the most vocal and visual individuals got the representation.

Note how I said that this is how it SEEMS. I will hold out hope that SOE heard more than one perspective and LISTENED. Some don't think much of LDoN, but I love it. We need more of it. More themes, better armor, more focus effects, ability to sell back not only purchased aug's, but purchased equipment.

The best summary I have seen so far of this event is from The Steel Warrior where they speak not only of the raiders perspective, but also SOME non-raider stuff such as higher cost LDoN equipment.

Hopefully someone will post a non-raiders summary soon.

Well, hopefully SOE was listening more than talking. Although, they've had access to message forums and Fan Faire's for 5 years where I'm sure they heard exactly the same stuff they heard from the players at the summit. /shrug

So Clerics, who have not been as angry as other classes were not invited this time.
Brenlo


:banghead_ :banghead_ :banghead_ :banghead_ :banghead_ :banghead_

So how loud do we have to shout to get heard ???

Sorry shouldn't be whineing about my class on the druid board :(

/sigh

:banghead_ :banghead_ :banghead_ :banghead_ :banghead_ :banghead_

So how loud do we have to shout to get heard ???

Sorry shouldn't be whineing about my class on the druid board :(

/sigh

They are considering adding a whole other line of abilities for clerics, like making them nuke for 6k on undead or stuff or make them turn into a warriortype when fighting undead so that more people will play clerics, but they had no definitive answers for that.

Er, I think you were heard. More than the druids were anyway.

But then again, keeping clerics happy and playing IS a game/guild issue. Keeping druids happy and playing is not really. All I know is that if smaller guilds can keep their clerics and get them playing again, it can only be a good thing overall.

Oh my! *gets some popcorn*, I've gotta head to EqCleric and see if this spawns any discussion.

On a side note, Brenlo, have you thought that the Cleric population isn't as vocal... just possibly, because of the bot population in the ranks? I run a 65 Cleric bot (who I levelled) and, despite my passion for the healing problems in the game, I have not made a peep out of the mouth of my Cleric about it. It makes me wonder how many more are out there like me. I really have no idea if I'm in the minority or not, but it would be interesting to see the statistic; if it existed.

I saw it in the faces and enthusiasm of everyone at SOE, from the designers to the marketting staff, from the artists to the execs, from the developers to the CS staff. That shine is there. This unquestionable glow of progression in a positive direction.

Were SOE's accountants present? Would have been appropriate, since they've been running this show for the past few years.

Honestly, until I've seen positive changes which are more than lures to sell expansions, I will remain suspicious that SOE's only goal for this summit was to turn some of our higher profile players into forum evangelists to spread a message that "sony cares" and "sony listens" ...
Bottom line is: company action speaks louder than any words, even if those words are relayed from players we tend to respect and admire.

Positive changes required:

Customer Service
- Ensure that GMs are properly empowered to provide meaningful assistance to players, and adequately staffed to provide timely responses on evenings and weekends when demand is greatest.

- Outsource programming and art design if necessary; but bring support jobs back to countries in which English is their primary language. Nothing is more frustrating to players than not being understood by CS sufficiently enough to even acknowledge an issue, much less address it.

Game Stability
- Put every new graphical element through a battery of tests in a wide variety of zones, on a variety of systems and connections with the game's minimum requirements in mind, rather than expecting players to customize and upgrade their systems according to the latest recommended 'ideal hardware configuration' of a single game. We may be playing in "your world now" but we're still living in the "real" one.

- Implement a duplication system in which players from any server can have one of their characters 'copied' to the Test server for a session. This would give players a method of actually testing and feedbacking new code in a more controlled environ (they'd be using the same class/race they normally play, at the same levels they normally play, with at least some of the same content they normally play).

- If players are willing to devote some of their personal time towards helping test new code, listen to them. Stop patching to live servers code that has been reported faulty by a significant number of testers. The best possible bug fix is one in which the bug doesn't go live in the first place.

Class Balance & Gameplay
- It is human nature to ask for what we want, rather than what we need. Realize that longterm game integrity is far more important than how one segment of the community might react to needed improvements for another class.

- Acknowledge that there are now too many classes in EQ for a single class to continue adequately serving as the only viable main healer at the higher levels of content. Many druids may not want to share that responsibility, but realize their class is the most logical choice; and as yet, it remains to be the only class which lacks a prominent role.

Positive changes hoped for:

- Don't hesitate to add unique abilities to each class which add to its 'fun' factor ... or conversely, which detracts from its 'unfun' factor. For the latter, at higher levels I would like to see clerics and shaman given a fixed duration self-invis spell; druids given an upgrade in movement and maybe a fun new shapechange form; warriors given a "call to arms" group buff (short duration box please) and some type of stun immunity disc regardless of race ..... and so on.

- Implement solo quests using instancing which, if at all possible, adjusts its difficulty around the class, level, *and* gear of the quester.

- Quit relying upon uncreative solutions like summoning or snare immunity for 'normal' mobs. Keep in mind that those attributes were originally designed to add challenge to special/unique encounters; they don't translate well to yard trash, at any level. I can think of a dozen other ways to make mobs more challenging without unduly penalizing specific caster classes... why can't SOE's designers do this?

~Firemynd

-Sony served up lots of beer
-Lots of talk, talk, and talk for guild issues
-Lots of eye candy but little meat
-Why go in to EQ2 when this is about the current problems in EQ
-People fessed up about sony making mistakes and?????
-Uber guilds were there - gratz to them - what about the rest of us???
-Lots of talk about Sony making mistakes with the current releases - what about the problems from the past few years???????
-Sony talks about solo instance dungeons (YES) and no word on anything other than talk?

What did you expect? I mean, come on. It was a 3 day meeting, not even. Was there anything else to do but talk? *Of course* at this point it's just talk. Geez. The immediate future and the next few months will tell us how well the talk hit home.

As far as uber guilds being there and not "casual"... I'd like to think the uber guilds know EQ inside out. Arguably so anyways. They are in a very good position to make recommendations, and they are very visible representatives of the community. Same with Class Boards runners, for everyone. They were the best choice for representing good chunks of the community. Picking casual_gamer_03974 at random really isn't an attractive option. I can't find any faults in SoE's choices of people going to the summit. Except perhaps a couple Class Board reps missing, but that has also been explained...

Callahad

Uber guilds might know parts of the game inside and out that they experience, but they don't in anyway represent what time-constrained players want from the game. I think there's a complete dicotomy there. I believe the entire reason this enormous rift between time-constrained and uber guild players exists is because SOE has spent all their time listening to the uber guilds and hasn't put much effort into listening to what other players want.

Callahad

If there is something that the last week has taught me is the uber players have no idea what game we are playing. Because they can't. They do a pickup normal LDoN your time+ druid can take any 5 other smack-tards and win.

A time+ warrior has more than double my warriors HP, 175% of my AC, and probably 300 more AAs. Time druids could probably out tank me but for my disaplines.

Gemdiver (the wizzy rep) asked for a new level of LDoN--extra hard! Ubers think 45 minutes is average for an LDoN (of normal or hard)--casuals high average is probably 120 minutes.

The game chances so much when you are able to get the elemental armors (or so it seems from below the glass cieling).

Now I understand that SOE was size limited and had the whole casual thing pop up on them from no where (does make one wonder though) but I can come up with at least 3 warriors who represent the casuals on TSW would I would have loved to have there...Haass, Bruutal and Glatius.

This is quoting Chen from the /gu forums:

I'd like to brag on Woody a moment.

Woody was in the same breakout group I was in during the Summit this weekend. A heated discussion ensued about Time instancing, the pains of backflagging new members and the difficulties of travel through GoD.

All of a sudden, Woody piped up from the back of the room.

"I don't mean to interrupt you all," he began, "but everything you guys are talking about does not effect the people I represent, the casual gamer." Woody went on to talk about how he's frustrated that when he logs in for two hours, he spends an hour of that LFG, etc.

What I thought was really neat is that the rest of the breakout group (at least in my opinion), supported what Woody was saying and added into the discussion on what things we'd like to see for the casual and/or serious but time-restricted playerbase.

Actually, if SOE wants to learn about what time-constrained players want from a game, they might take a long look at the competition like City of Heroes. It's possible to jump into that game, play for 30 minutes, go afk for 30 minutes, play for another 30 minutes, and feel like you've really accomplished something in game. You can solo, you can group, but at no point in the game are you standing around with your finger in your nose for long amounts of time waiting for things to happen like you do in EQ.

Uber guilds might know parts of the game inside and out that they experience, but they don't in anyway represent what time-constrained players want from the game. I think there's a complete dicotomy there. I believe the entire reason this enormous rift between time-constrained and uber guild players exists is because SOE has spent all their time listening to the uber guilds and hasn't put much effort into listening to what other players want.Panamah I think a lot of people have been hearing this message but there is one question that remains... WHO? Who does SOE turn to as the "champion of the casual player?" How do they find one from each server.. or class/forum community? I would hazard a guess that the greatest number of "casual" players are so casual that they don't even come to the boards. Even taking a rep from a "casual guild" is pretty tough. Which one? It's not so easy to pick a representative from the "silent majority".

I think I speak for most Druids in saying I would wholeheartedly support someone like Scirocco, Firemynd, Tudamorf or perhaps others to represent that viewpoint as Woody seems to have done. So, it would be my hope that those types of folks are also included in future summits as well. It was nice having Chen there to bring up tradeskilling also.

On the subject of ideas: A good idea is a good idea. I know it's more difficult to consolidate and/or quantify the perspective of the time-constrained or casual player (2 different categories, IMO), but this board routinely solicits this type of feedback as do other class boards. Each board has many thoughtful posters and if I were a Dev (I know they're busy) I would routinely take time to check these out and evaluate/explore the "good" ideas further.

If it becomes obvious that the Devs are starting to do this more often, it will go a long way toward re-establishing the confidence of the player base, not to mention make the game more fun for all types of players.

My report included nothing about druids, cause to be honest, none of my guildies asked me to ask any questions about them and I made sure to ask every question my guildies gave me a list of first. My report was a perspective from a guild leader standpoint, not an advocate for druids, so please don't misconstrue anything I posted about as them not caring about druids. I will be honest and said I didn't need to see any druid changes made other than general flaws I feel with healing, which I championed shaman instead cause they need it even worse than we do, in my opinion. They are basically a one-buff utility for raids nowadays.

There is too much ideas to be stated that happened. Sylvene's report from eqstratics (http://eq.crgaming.com/viewarticle.asp?Article=5406 ) included several things that I had forgotten to mention and she was in my group the entire time.

A lot of ideas were generated. The question is to wait and see how many get implemented. I think Sony will implement any that they can do with time constraints and code restraints.

Thornsong
GM, The Relentless

I've been sitting here thinking about EQ's issues, after reading a lot of these posts. I've come to a couple conclusions. Firstly, the exodus from EQ is a social issue rooted in gameplay issues. When a single player quits because he/she is tired of some aspect of the game (lack of challege, lockups, time sinks...whatever), that spawns a cascade of losses for SOE. They lose the revenue of 1-X accounts from that single player quitting. They also will eventually lose Y (Y can be zero here, obviously) accounts from others quitting just because that single player isn't there anymore. Then they lose Z accounts from unrelated players who notice an outflux and decide it's not worth playing with so few people online. This effect continues for each unique player that quits stemming from that single original unsubscription. So one or more gameplay issues can lead to massive social problems. Secondly, I believe SOE has chosen an "uber"-guild-centric emphasis to their corrections because it is the most easily targetable group. They're the most vocal and they only inhabit a few high-end zones. It's much easier to SOE to twink "uber" content than it is for them to reform the entire game. I think they have made a general decision based on odds. The casual game is far gone. It has a much higher population, but it also would require a much higher amount of resources to save. They have already invested in EQ2, and it will pick up a large amount of their casual gamer loss. It is not a comprehensive solution, but it doesn't require an additional unplanned expense. With a small investment, they can attempt to save a large portion of the high-end players. I would wager what they're doing is what they've deemed the most likely to pay off for them, which is what a business does. They're cutting their losses and moving on. You shouldn't be mad at SOE. A business has no heart. You're just an account number.

My report was a perspective from a guild leader standpoint, not an advocate for druids, so please don't misconstrue anything I posted about as them not caring about druids.

Fair enough. I certainly don't hold that against you. If this is indeed a recurring event, then a simple solution would be to continue to rotate the types of representatives while still keeping an eye on class boards to keep the pulse of those players. I don't really think it's that hard to find a few common issues to focus on for the time-constrained and casual players.

Panamah I think a lot of people have been hearing this message but there is one question that remains... WHO? Who does SOE turn to as the "champion of the casual player?" How do they find one from each server.. or class/forum community? I would hazard a guess that the greatest number of "casual" players are so casual that they don't even come to the boards. Even taking a rep from a "casual guild" is pretty tough. Which one? It's not so easy to pick a representative from the "silent majority".

LOL! There's no silent majority here! I answered this before with, look at the message forums. There may not be a person wearing a sign that says "Casual player advocate" but if you wanted someone that understood the issues you could look to:

Rayne (and a number of moderators and posters at): EQClerics
Woody: GU Comics
Scirocco: Druids Grove -- unfortunately Scirocco didn't attend the summit.

Those are just the MB's I frequent. I know every other EQ related MB I've ever visited had the same uber/casual debates and people gripping about the same casual player issues as on every other MB.

Then there are a number of frequent posters at just about every message board forum, some very intelligent and coherent folks, who have a keen understanding of the problems. Almost any message board moderator could point them out.

I would have nominated myself, I used to run a web site devoted to the issues of the casual player, but I quit playing. In the past Lum the Mad and I think several other web sites were devoted to these issues. I personally can't visualize that SOE after so many years of neglecting this issue will change EQ enough to bring me back, so even if given the opportunity, I wouldn't do it. I'm way too jaded now even to hope for the best.

Also, another good source for casual players is the EQ Trader's message board. A *lot* of them are non-raiders, or lite-raiders.

Then there are the guild leaders of small, family or casual guilds in EQ. I know SOE has access to who belongs to a guild, how many players they encompass, how long they've been in existence.

No, sorry, this is not the silent majority. It's a very visible and vocal majority. There is absolutely no excuse other than they don't care, or don't wish to address these issues or listen to the casual player contingent.

Clerics, who have not been as angry as other classes were not invited this time.

Note to self: Must sound angrier.

With a small investment, they can attempt to save a large portion of the high-end players. I would wager what they're doing is what they've deemed the most likely to pay off for them, which is what a business does. They're cutting their losses and moving on.
The problem with this philosophy is that Uberhood requires casuals. Why would you care about progression if there's nobody left "under" you? Why grind AAs or raid new targets if not to get "ahead" of the competition. If your only reward is to see new content or compete with a small number of other guilds for raid targets then the incentive dips considerably.

I think they have made a general decision based on odds. The casual game is far gone.
I respectfully disagree. While the terms "casual" and "time-constrained" are not the same thing (I'm assuming you're lumping both together), I believe that there's a huge percentage of the player base is not raid-centric and seeks to progress through questing, tradeskilling, grouping, soloing, farming pp, etc. If they merely tune the game for raiders, then they'll continue to lose "account numbers," as you point out.

It has a much higher population, but it also would require a much higher amount of resources to save. They have already invested in EQ2, and it will pick up a large amount of their casual gamer loss.
Again, I don't quite agree. Many time-constrained players will be unwilling to abandon their investment in EQ for EQ2, so that's a dangerous assumption. Also, I don't think it will really take an unreasonable amount of resources to add content for non-raiders. Solo LDoN is a good step. Zones revamps like Droga/Nurga, improved tradeskilling recipes and more Shawl-like quests also go a long way toward giving non-raiders ways to progress.

No, sorry, this is not the silent majority. It's a very visible and vocal majority. There is absolutely no excuse other than they don't care, or don't wish to address these issues or listen to the casual player contingent.Or they felt that the GoD fiasco showed an immediate need for now. And with the GoD advancement system... bad as it is... the ones who are most affected are the GoD level raiding guilds.

Clerics were at the meeting but no representative specifically from a cleric site was invited so now they don't care about clerics. No newbies were invited so they don't care about newbies. No tradeskillers were specifically invited so they don't care about tradeskillers. No one from a quest specific site was invited so they don't care about quests. I still think that for a two weeks' notice thing the group that they brought in was easier to target invitees for. Perhaps the next will invite a different group and then they can be said not to care for raiding guilds any longer.

As for me assuming that there are fewer visible "casual" players, I suppose it's my fault for tuning them out. I tend to concentrate on the EQ game I play. All too often the uber vs casual discussion loses my attention real fast and I move on to a topic that holds my interest.

The problem with this philosophy is that Uberhood requires casuals. Why would you care about progression if there's nobody left "under" you? Why grind AAs or raid new targets if not to get "ahead" of the competition. If your only reward is to see new content or compete with a small number of other guilds for raid targets then the incentive dips considerably.I have to disagree. I believe it is the exact opposite. Those ahead are the ones who are the driving force to get ahead for most. Competition and carrot dangling is what motivates most players who want to move forward in a game. Just my opinion... Maybe it's not true for you. :) Probably a "chicken or the egg" thing here.

The problem with this philosophy is that Uberhood requires casuals. Why would you care about progression if there's nobody left "under" you? Why grind AAs or raid new targets if not to get "ahead" of the competition. If your only reward is to see new content or compete with a small number of other guilds for raid targets then the incentive dips considerably.

ost of the posts from the "uber" guilders concern new content and challege level, not "bring more non-ubers to make us feel better about our uberness". You cannot assume you know why people play. If that is why you personally play, you have my condolences.

I respectfully disagree. While the terms "casual" and "time-constrained" are not the same thing (I'm assuming you're lumping both together), I believe that there's a huge percentage of the player base is not raid-centric and seeks to progress through questing, tradeskilling, grouping, soloing, farming pp, etc. If they merely tune the game for raiders, then they'll continue to lose "account numbers," as you point out.

Other than your challenge to my use of "casual", this is just a reiteration of my point. I never claimed the high-end players outnumbered the low-end players. In fact, I stated the opposite.

Again, I don't quite agree. Many time-constrained players will be unwilling to abandon their investment in EQ for EQ2, so that's a dangerous assumption. Also, I don't think it will really take an unreasonable amount of resources to add content for non-raiders. Solo LDoN is a good step. Zones revamps like Droga/Nurga, improved tradeskilling recipes and more Shawl-like quests also go a long way toward giving non-raiders ways to progress.

Your suggestions may be sound, but your point at the beginning of this paragraph is irrelevant. Any player that is "unwilling to abandon their investment in EQ for EQ2" is not a concern for SOE. SOE only needs to concern itself with those who are willing to abandon their investment to play a non-SOE product (or no product at all). If the players do eventually quit (which is innevitable at some point), then their willingness to abandon their investment is not pertinent since the abandonment, however painful, will already have taken place. Either the player is willing to quit, and, thus is open to playing EQ2 (or any other game, or no game, as the case may be), or they are willing to stay. SOE has chosen to target the group of potential quitters that it can most easily affect. The difference between which "time constrained/casual" players move on to EQ2 or quit SOE entirely is the loss I speak of when I say they're cutting their losses. They are counting on a fantastic looking EQ2 to draw many of those who are finished with EQ1. I would wager it will. Despite the resolve some state to stay away forever, many will not. The majority, those time-constrained and casual players, will play EQ2 simply because it looks/sounds "neat". SOE understands this reality.

I have to disagree. I believe it is the exact opposite. Those ahead are the ones who are the driving force to get ahead for most. Competition and carrot dangling is what motivates most players who want to move forward in a game. Just my opinion... Maybe it's not true for you. :) Probably a "chicken or the egg" thing here.
Perhaps I paint with broad strokes. You're probably right that folks are motivated by lots of different things. I'm certain that some folks relish Uberhood because of the relative status to other players. It's human nature.

BTW, I'm not against SOE getting feedback from Ubers or Uber Guilds, especially in light of the fiasco that was GoD. I want a well-balanced EQ, which involves good content for different play styles. I just think SOE would be making a huge mistake if they didn't solicit feedback from another of their big constituencies (i.e. the non-raiders).

I think Sony could have gone a lot further by addressing the current state of THEIR problems by trying to fix what is wrong with THEIR game. The best example is having a mob go poof when it is low on health. A major problem for players in lots of zones. I do not know what specific issues the Uber guilds have in the higher ends because I as a solo player will never get there. There are way too many problems in the game NOW that have been ignored in order to produce new content and to reserver this summit for Uber players to discuss the recent problems is great for them but the non-uber palyers, and guilds, get left off of the summit agenda? I know my $12.95 a month is very little on their bottom line but now I can tell it means nothing to them becuase they refuse to address the problems that we have seen for years. These forums are available to all and if Sony would spend the time to read them they would know what is wrong with their game but I guess it's too much to ask that they actually read forums that discuss their game problems.

Elder Kensol Stice
62 Druid on MT

p.s. L II gets you in the game in seconds and you can play for as long or as little time as you want or have available and then you can exit the game even quicker.

Any player that is "unwilling to abandon their investment in EQ for EQ2" is not a concern for SOE. SOE only needs to concern itself with those who are willing to abandon their investment to play a non-SOE product (or no product at all). If the players do eventually quit (which is innevitable at some point), then their willingness to abandon their investment is not pertinent since the abandonment, however painful, will already have taken place. Either the player is willing to quit, and, thus is open to playing EQ2 (or any other game, or no game, as the case may be), or they are willing to stay.

SOE needs to concern itself with the entire player base, or at least a large majority, if they are to a) keep accounts or b) win back accounts. Your assumptions don't take into consideration the fact that nearly everyone is willing to abandon an investment if the pain is too great or if the alternative incentive is too good to pass up. In a sense, all customers have a price. If my level of frustration with EQ outweighs my enjoyment, I will leave. Maybe I will try EQ2, maybe I won't, but I guarantee I'll remember my frustration with SOE and it will weigh in my future decisions about how I spend my discretionary time and money. SOE wants my discretionary time and money, so they obviously want to know how to get/keep it.

You're right that they're a business. Far from cutting their losses, they should be looking for ways to GROW. There is a lot of room in a burgeoning market for many, many MMORPGs. Several of my friends play 2-3 routinely and if you pay attention to projections, the market could easily accommodate several large, growing offerings simultaneously.

Let's put it this way. If SOE is throwing in the towel on EQ or just trying to "cut their losses" they're making a grave business mistake. Anyone in business knows it costs exponentially more money to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. That's why they ought to care.

The majority, those time-constrained and casual players, will play EQ2 simply because it looks/sounds "neat". SOE understands this reality.
I'm trying hard not to feel condescended to here. As a time-constrainded powergamer, I certainly don't play EQ because it looks/sounds "neat," and neither do most of my friends and guild mates. We play because it's fun and we can progress our characters through new and different challenges. You may be right that SOE has lost sight of the fact that this type of demographic exists, but it's to their peril, as I posted previously.

Why are people surprised that raiding was the main topic at a summit that invited mostly raid guild leaders and highly involved community members??

Bah. Nothing in there for casual gamers. Not even solo instanced content is enough to make me reconsider my decision to quit. The game is just not fun for time limited players anymore. CoH is. SoE won't be getting any money from me for some time, if ever.

Wake me if SoE ever decides to stop ignoring the non-raiders. =(

You miss LoY and LDoN? 2 of the past 3 expansions were completely geared for the casual gamer.

I think the major problem SOE is really facing isn't just the people leaving EQI, but its the loss of good faith that customers have that SOE can produce and operate a game that is fun and will develop in a way that keeps the game fresh and worthy of playing.

So I think when they lose an EQ 1 customer chances are they've lost a potential customer for any of their future games.

I'm trying hard not to feel condescended to here. As a time-constrainded powergamer, I certainly don't play EQ because it looks/sounds "neat," and neither do most of my friends and guild mates. We play because it's fun and we can progress our characters through new and different challenges. You may be right that SOE has lost sight of the fact that this type of demographic exists, but it's to their peril, as I posted previously.

You would be what is considered "hard-core" by whoever makes up these terms, and you would be a minority. They know exactly every demographic that exists. They choose to invest their efforts based on a wide range of factors, however, many of which don't even directly concern EQ1. They have to balance all their investments & forecasts and they have to make decisions based on projected profit and loss. They wouldn't even be making EQ2 if they didn't believe they were going to get mass migration from EQ1. They've already made public their plan to have the vast majority of EQ2 players be former/current EQ1 players. Although many will most likely initially play both, over time, the numbers will tip toward EQ2 until EQ1 isn't even a viable operation for SOE. This is all based on what SOE must believe, that EQ2 will be viewed as a great improvement to EQ1.

Personally, I've about had it with SOE. I only play about a day a week now (raid night, if you can call it that when only 10 people show up sometimes). I'm waiting, as many are, to see how WoW turns out. I'm also interested in seeing the finished Guild Wars.

If Tribes 3 (Vengeance) is as good in 2004 as Tribes 2 was in 2001 (sans launch bugs), I might not have time to play an MMORPG anyway.:)

If there is something that the last week has taught me is the uber players have no idea what game we are playing. Because they can't. They do a pickup normal LDoN your time+ druid can take any 5 other smack-tards and win.

Think again. Ubers have not always been uber. They know what it is to not be able to do such and such content. They know what it takes to win an event, kill a mob, do a quest, xp, at any level of gear. They have been there, remember that. I stand by my point : they know EQ inside out. Not so evident for the casual gamer...

y other point stands : who do you pick to represent casual gamers? Throw a dice and invite casual_0354756??

Callahad

I think the major problem SOE is really facing isn't just the people leaving EQI, but its the loss of good faith that customers have that SOE can produce and operate a game that is fun and will develop in a way that keeps the game fresh and worthy of playing.

So I think when they lose an EQ 1 customer chances are they've lost a potential customer for any of their future games.
Smedley made a point at saying EverQuest (or if you think of it as EverQuest 1) is not going away. He said that SOE was dedicated to making it fun again - they all play the game and love it very much and want to make it better.

Let's see how they fulfill these first step committments.

***
btw, I did get to see a demo of EQ2, not canned (it even crashed once "hehe, oops...running the daily build here"), just running around, trying to smack down gnolls in Blackburrow, and the character creation process. My chin was on the floor. I'm very excited about EQ2 as well, as a different game from EQ1.

Think again. Ubers have not always been uber. They know what it is to not be able to do such and such content. They know what it takes to win an event, kill a mob, do a quest, xp, at any level of gear. They have been there, remember that. I stand by my point : they know EQ inside out. Not so evident for the casual gamer...

y other point stands : who do you pick to represent casual gamers? Throw a dice and invite casual_0354756??

Callahad

It stands like a 2 legged stool... wobbly... ;)
A few suggestions (http://www.thedruidsgrove.org/forums/showpost.php?p=117325&postcount=83)

Then there are the guild leaders of small, family or casual guilds in EQ. I know SOE has access to who belongs to a guild, how many players they encompass, how long they've been in existence.

No, sorry, this is not the silent majority. It's a very visible and vocal majority. There is absolutely no excuse other than they don't care, or don't wish to address these issues or listen to the casual player contingent.

Pan we speak the same language. There are those of us that have been in game since beta, that have been inand run non-raid guilds, that are NOT silent. Our guild is the second oldest on Xegony and we are flourishing. It would be very simple to list the 10 oldest guilds on all the servers and pick the ones that is still strong, but not raiders, and find out what they think about the game. Frankly until SOE does something like this their credibilty with me will be LOW.

The question is, does SOE want to listen more to the vocal minority or to the less vocal majority? Those of us who are non-raiders, but in the majority, can be just as serious, just as good at our classes, and spend just as much time and money on the game and have just as many accounts as the raiders, but we are poorly represented because we don't necessarily have fancy web sites, or do profound things or do things first or do things that draw attention.

And yet I find all this very interesting because it isn't in SOE's best interest to build content for the raiders. They eat up content far too fast. SOE has had to put unkillable mobs or broken content into the game to keep people out of final zones or final fights. Expansions like LDoN are much more profitable to SOE. It is nearly a year since LDoN came out and I still have 1000's of points to get. And now with the promise of highe level gear from LDoN, I will finally be able to get Elemental levle gear without having to change my lifestyle or playstyle or give up my guild. What the game needs for the non-rading player is more solo content, more single groupable content and more expansions LIKE LDoN.

For al the bad things said about PoP, the largest crime for me was the expectation that SOE put out to everyone that it would be single groupable content and progression which many people were SO happy to get. I really think they started down that path and then gave up on it. There were single groupable ways to get into nearly every Tier 3 zone except Sol Ro Tower, and then it stopped. The way it should be is PoP should be revamped with instanced single groupable quests which get you "keys" to every PoP zone except time. These quests should count the SAME as current planar progression. They should count toward getting into the elementals. The residual effect is 3 fold 1) there would be an alternate path through progression that was promised and expected with PoP, 2) it would put an end to the majority of backflagging, 3) it would still keep TIME out of reach as the "candyland" zone.

Shoulda woulda coulda - we'll see what happens.

I know every other EQ related MB I've ever visited had the same uber/casual debates and people gripping about the same casual player issues as on every other MB. Then there are a number of frequent posters at just about every message board forum, some very intelligent and coherent folks, who have a keen understanding of the problems.

Ahh, but you see, therein lies the problem. Where do you stop? Which do you choose? If you pick someone who posts that much, then that person obviously cannot be that casual. Will that person represent faithfully the casual aspect of the game? How many do you invite? Where do you stop? Guild leaders of casual guilds ain't much better. They lead raids, as leaders they are required to play more than the average casual. As such, the challenges offered to them are easier than for the average casual, and suddenly they become a variation of the uber vs casual thing.

There are other issues as well. The persons present at the summit were obvious choices. When you pick other folks, a few things happen : the bill increases, the choice of people become less unanimous, increasing dissension, and you start creating jealousy (they DID have a nice trip, didnt they?...)

Callahad

Uber guilds might know parts of the game inside and out that they experience, but they don't in anyway represent what time-constrained players want from the game. I think there's a complete dicotomy there. I believe the entire reason this enormous rift between time-constrained and uber guild players exists is because SOE has spent all their time listening to the uber guilds and hasn't put much effort into listening to what other players want.


This is my concern about the entire thing. I think they missed the mark. They held a summit to get feedback from people they least needed to get feedback from.

I haven't seen anything that makes me want to continue playing EQ at this point. And I am a huge EQ fanboy.

btw, I did get to see a demo of EQ2, not canned (it even crashed once "hehe, oops...running the daily build here"), just running around, trying to smack down gnolls in Blackburrow, and the character creation process. My chin was on the floor. I'm very excited about EQ2 as well, as a different game from EQ1.

This is so very sad. Sony invites people, spends money, wants to show off their next uber release and it crashes???????? How about that. I guess not enough development went in to getting their promo ready for review. Oh well, at least we can count on them putting it out and letting the community help them fix their buggy software.

Elder Kensol Stice
62 Druid on MT

Whoa, whoa whoa....don't take that the wrong way.

Software in development crashes, especially when you are showing people - it's just inevitable. They will test the hell out of it, especially after the thrashing they received about the quality of GoD.

The viewing of the EQ2 demo was not a scheduled event - we could go over and see it during lunch. I chose to. Our main purpose for being there was to talk about issues about EverQuest - and we did.

I was just giving a "woohoo!" about another product they are working on.

Ahh, but you see, therein lies the problem. Where do you stop? Which do you choose? If you pick someone who posts that much, then that person obviously cannot be that casual. Will that person represent faithfully the casual aspect of the game? How many do you invite? Where do you stop? Guild leaders of casual guilds ain't much better. They lead raids, as leaders they are required to play more than the average casual. As such, the challenges offered to them are easier than for the average casual, and suddenly they become a variation of the uber vs casual thing.

There are other issues as well. The persons present at the summit were obvious choices. When you pick other folks, a few things happen : the bill increases, the choice of people become less unanimous, increasing dissension, and you start creating jealousy (they DID have a nice trip, didnt they?...)

Callahad


Who cares what criteria they use? The worst criteria, though, is to focus on high-end uber-guilds as they are unlikely to represent the casual and/or time-limited playerbase at al.

So basically anything other than they did this time would be a good start.

From the very long TSW thread, some selected quotes:

I'm frankly shocked to see level 65 players with 4909 HP's (heck, sub-7200 HP's is not good at all) and can only suppose this is achievable by not doing content that exists and provides upgrades. If this is the case, SoE might as well give up now - the instant gratifiaction crowd wants too much.

I agree that people who've been at the endgame awhile have no idea what the rest of the game is like anymore. Thats half of posting this, I realize how much different the game is for you guys.

The thing is though, how do you fix it? How can you help the casual player with their issues without encroaching upon the endgame players? If you increase casual player power - all that happens is casual guilds become endgame guilds. I don't buy the "we just want to exp there!".

Non-ubers (and I say this in a friendly manner),

To some extent you're right. I've totally forgotten that it is difficult to break 5K HP's. Part of the reason is that I think I may have broken it around 2 years ago.

I am a guild tool. For as long as I can remember my raid attendance has been 100%. BB has 450 days played.

The problem is that SoE does not realize 1150AP's/51 per mission*(30 minutes to do a mission + unknown time /lfg) for a 40HP augment is ludicious. It's beyond rediculous that if you get an upgrade, you have to put in all that time again to augment it.

How often do you do 30 minute LDoNs?

Then add Gemdiver from Graffes asking for another level of LDoNs--extra hard.

Because high end guild members have never been casual players, or had days when they were time limited, or never done an ldon with a lower level toon, or any of the billion other things there are to do in EQ.

Thats just a bad conclusion.

If you are looking to get feedback from 50 people who *KNOW* EQ inside and out, and you want to have the highest probability of getting those people, then leaders of high end guilds are a perfect choice. Because, in all likelyhood, over the long period of time those people have been playing, they HAVE done everything, they've been the casual player, the /lfg-er, the tradeskiller, IN ADDITION to being the uber raider, the guild leader, the organizer, the content devourer, and the beta tester.

They were an easy target, and they were a good choice for an initial dialogue to get things moving. You cant invite 200 specialists in each narrow area of the game! And how would you even find them? Your best shot is to invite the generalists, who have proven by in-game leadership and out of game distribution of knowledge that they are familiar with the widest possible number of EQ things that can reasonably be expected to survive in one person's brain.

It's easy to criticize, but I've seen no other realistic solutions to the "dilemma" of who they should have invited. The criticism of frustrated "casual" players is short sighted... it was 2 days, and a lot of talk, and you're ticked because your pet issue didnt get addressed? This wasnt designed to be a magic bullet! It's a START. And that's all!

That may not be enough for some of you. If that's the case, accept that it's probably too late for anything to satisfy you. Fundamental changes like the ones people want on a massive game like EQ take time to design, test, and implement. Isnt one of the criticisms about lack of thought and testing? Let them!

People you really just need to let go of this hatred about who they picked to go this time around... they could have asked 2,000 people to go and still there would be those who cry that they arent represented. Well, that's life. They had a limited number of spots, short notice, and did the best job they could. Some will be left out, but guess what, that doesnt mean your voices arent heard. They read the forums, nearly all of them. Post your constructive ideas and they will be seen.

Tia

Thank you Tiane

Callahad

Indeed, thank you Tiane.

I'd like to give extra Kudos for Vannoth for pulling off the short-term organization of the event. Working with SOE staff trying to figure out who should come, contacting everyone via email or actually in game, getting 60+ people plane tickets, hotel arrangements, figuring out the schedule of the day to get in much constructive time as possible, etc., etc. Everything went really smooth and was very professional.

Kick ass job, man. Even if you are a land shark. =D

I love sunsets.

I guess Woody was championing the time-restricted player. Panamah would've been an absolute golden choice to select as well. I think I'm a bit too heated with my arguments to make a dent. I tend to be a real smart ass when I get upset about something. There's plenty of time-restricted gamers that have quit the game but continue to visit the class sites.

I think the major problem SOE is really facing isn't just the people leaving EQI, but its the loss of good faith that customers have that SOE can produce and operate a game that is fun and will develop in a way that keeps the game fresh and worthy of playing.

So I think when they lose an EQ 1 customer chances are they've lost a potential customer for any of their future games.

Nail on the head award for this post!

Here's a good example of SoE's knack for making things NOT FUN:

1) I had a hard collect 26 in Tak the other day with less than a 30% drop rate - we had to kill 95 level 64/65 mobs to finish which took us 2 hours (we got the last drop seconds before being booted) with an "ideal" group of 65(100-400s) with no wipes. Impossible adventures are NOT FUN.

2) I spent >40 hours total camping the stupid Ghoul of Takish-Iz - 20 kills, 1 drop finally. With GM Blacksmithing skill I failed on the combine with that drop and now have to start over. NOT FUN.

3) I wanted to get the healing waters spell to fill out my spell book, maybe use it for caster patches or group dot healing. 12+ hours of mind numbing killing in Dulak, >500 kills of the target mobs and ZERO drops - I still have 0/2 of the quest pieces. NOT FUN.

4) Got an adventure group together late at night on Rodcet - a rarity - but we had to sit around for almost an hour looking for a slower. Finally decided to do without and took a death or two on adventure but won in the end. Then had to wait doing nothing for corpses to pop for 30 min. Finally got corpses but couldnt find anyone with a 90%+ rez who would come to Guk - even for 300pp. NOT FUN.

This is too long already but the 85% PoP gimp-in thing combined with our rapidly declining server population is also making for lots of fun too.

----------------------

Overall, I dont like the way WoW looks so much but I trust it will be a fun game not riddled with stupid time sinks because that's the kind of game Blizzard makes. I have no such trust in SoE. WoW will make a fun game, Sigil will make a challenging one that isn't slow. EQ really doesnt seem to know how to be challenging or fun without throwing in a ton of artificial, void of story or theme time sinks and barriers.

Because high end guild members have never been casual players, or had days when they were time limited, or never done an ldon with a lower level toon, or any of the billion other things there are to do in EQ.

But they're not going there to represent casual/time-restricted (whatever the hell we're calling them these days) players. They're there to represent their set of problems. If I wanted to hear what the people in New Guinea are thinking about, I'd send for a New Guinean, not someone that took a vacation in New Guinea 5 years ago.

I don't think one single guild leader came to any message fourm that I view and ask, "Hey casual/time-restricted (whatever the hell we're calling them these days) players, what are your concerns about the game?" Scirocco was making an attempt to do that but he didn't attend. :(

If they're looking for ways to make the game fun to the casual/time-restricted (whatever the hell we're calling them these days) players then you ask THEM what sort of things would be fun for them. Not a guild leader of a large raiding guild.

If for no other reason than credibility... Even if there were uber raid guild leaders there championing the casual/time-restricted (whatever the hell we're calling them these days) players, do you think anyone would believe it? Well, just read through this thread for the answer to that question.

Don't try to pass it off as anything other than what it was. It was a summit about how to keep the raiding guilds happy. If Woody from GU Comics and some tradeskills folks got in a few talking points for casual/time-restricted (whatever the hell we're calling them these days) players , that's a plus, but I don't think anyone is even remotely convinced that this was about casual/time-restricted (whatever the hell we're calling them these days) players. If SOE wants to find out how to fix the game for those players, they'll ask 'em.

Like I said. I'm waiting for someone to make a post discussing the non-raider issues that were discussed. Most things that have been posted (barring Raaj's post on The Steel Warrior) have been canned from the hand out from SOE. I've seen the same thing posted in 4 places.

y conclusion: The people hwo attended are stil recovering information and will post more details soon. So I am hopeful that more was discussed than raiding and raiding issues, but it hasn't been posted yet. Right?

Geeze Panamah. I suggest you quit the game!

Oh wait! you did :/


No offense, but there has to be a starting point somewhere. If an Emergency Room Dr. is looking at a gushing artery, a broken arm and a stubbed toe he'd BETTER go for the artery first. It's called triage.

I'm not defending the fact that they should have done something TWO YEARS AGO to avoid where they are now, but at least when they finally get slapped with reality, let them work at it a bit before we condemn them. "Humble pie" is VERY NEW to SOE's menu. In fact, you, Aly and a few others have the luxury of watching from a distance without being immediately affected. Some of us haven't pressed the "eject" button yet.
If they're looking for ways to make the game fun to the casual/time-restricted (whatever the hell we're calling them these days) players then you ask THEM what sort of things would be fun for them. Not a guild leader of a large raiding guild.I guess I missed something, but I don't remember seeing anything indicating that this was the reason why they pulled 60 people to SoCal. My guess is that THAT particular meeting is down the road a bit yet. Maybe that's the broken arm. :)

Yeah, Pana, that's fine. So what are you going to do, invite a single person from every nation on earth? You dont have 300+ invite spots. You have 50. So how do you narrow it down and still keep a wide range of knowledge in the pool? You invite someone who vacationed in New Guinea and South Africa and Botswana and Outer Mongolia and hope that between them, and others who may also have visited those and other combinations of countries will be able to come up with issues that concern them ALL.

And Sunfire, I dont mean to pick on you, but look at your list....

#1 = Bad RNG luck. You got the short end of the stick. 99% of the time it's not like that. What do you want them to do? Specifically? There are so many random elements involved with collection missions its impossible to guarantee timely completion 100% of the time. If you've got a fix, I'm sure they'd love to hear about it. Be specific.

#2 = Bad RNG luck on the combine. Sucks, I know, I've had it happen to me. Part of the game. Do you even notice the other 99% of the time that you succeed on a risky combine? As for camping... well you *chose* to sit there in one spot and camp something. Nothing forced you except your choice. You have only yourself to blame for that decision. Yes, Sony could (and should) adjust spawn rates of many rare mobs... but that still wouldnt guarantee that a particular mob would pop just when *you* want it to. This isnt a single player game. Your needs and wants will not be catered to on an immediate basis because they dont happen in a vacuum, and affect more people than just yourself.

#3 = You decided to camp for a spell thats well below your level, killing mobs that are well below your level, and you're upset that it's boring? The quests were designed so that the mobs would give xp to those who were level appropriate to attain and use the spell. Again, it was your choice that put you there killing greens for a basically useless spell. Drop rates do suck on that particular component, yes, and should be upped. That's a specific fix. But the rest is not SOE's fault.

#4 = Besides waiting for the 30 minute popout... none of that has anything to do with SOE. Graveyards are not an ideal solution, and many ideas have been tossed around on here and other forums over the years. Often they are far more exploitable than the current implementation. I dont see a specific solution in your list.

Now, again I dont mean to pick on you Sunfire. But if, as an example, your list is representative of what someone like you, a "casual" player would take to a summit such as this, well honestly there's very little that concerns SOE and very little they can do to change your decisions on how you play the game.

It's easy to say things like, "I hate sitting around being LFG for an hour, and LDoN is repetitive." Where's the solutions? The suggestions? You think the devs dont KNOW those things? Of course they do, they play the game.

Put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself what you specifically need to change to make things fun again. When you have THAT list, post it.

The summit was great IMO. I got so many ideas on the table and was able to really sit down and explain what was wrong and what could be done to fix. Everybody from SOE ran around with a notebook and hand and wrote down everything everybody said. The ideas above are basically the "top ten" to get fixed right away. They seriously have 100s of other stuff on their list but wanted to get out the the things that really screamed priority.

I've been thinking about healing today. So many people here have commented that "healing is unbalanced" and are disappointed that we have very little to report on that subject.

What about this? What if all the priest class worked together to come up with some ideas and solutions to acceptably fix healing for all us? Druids, clerics, shamans and paladins, coming together to talk and brainstorm. A united healing voice and some unified ideas and solutions would surely have a lot more power than all of us separately calling out "fix me! fix me!".

What do you guys think? Too crazy to get all those groups together to discuss without the topic getting off track with cross-class flames and arguements or do you think it's worth a try?

Yeah, Pana, that's fine. So what are you going to do, invite a single person from every nation on earth? You dont have 300+ invite spots. You have 50. So how do you narrow it down and still keep a wide range of knowledge in the pool? You invite someone who vacationed in New Guinea and South Africa and Botswana and Outer Mongolia and hope that between them, and others who may also have visited those and other combinations of countries will be able to come up with issues that concern them ALL.



Well, I sure wouldn't invite 45 people from the same nation and then claimed the world was represented.

What do you guys think? Too crazy to get all those groups together to discuss without the topic getting off track with cross-class flames and arguements or do you think it's worth a try?

I tried. Remember?

Tiane is on a roll!!

And /agree with the slight detour to Sunfire's post. Sorry man, but sounds like you are pestering on 2 things : RNG, and instant gratification. Hate to break it to you man, but RNG is an integral part of EQ. It was a design decision, EQ has always been like that, has been enjoyable with the RNG, and there is no guarantee it would be more enjoyable by making the very drastic design decision of removing it. Instant gratification : again, this has always been a fundamental part of EQ; something you earn the hard way grips you a lot more than something you can get in 30 minutes. THat is not to say EQ cannot improve the way the time sinks are implemented, to make them more enjoyable /less ridiculously long. But I would be totally against removing them entirely.

Callahad

Well, I sure wouldn't invite 45 people from the same nation and then claimed the world was represented.

I dont think they pitched it as being representative of everyone. From Smedley's letter (http://eqlive.station.sony.com/news_section/newsview.jsp?story=62268)
We're also inviting many members of the community to join us here at SOE for a day to have a direct dialog with the development team about issues that are important to the EverQuest community as a whole.

Not all issues. Not all members. I think many people had way too high expectations for this thing.

And finally, I dont wanna seem to blast away at "casuals" who feel under represented. So here's a bit from Woody's thread (http://forums.gucomics.com/viewtopic.php?t=2220) on the summit. (BTW his comic for today is simply hilarious.)

Let me also go ahead and clarify the note from Robert Pfister that many of you will see in other writeups in the next few days.

Please don't take that as the ONLY things that are being worked on.

The dev team is working HARD to fix current collision issues. The delay comes from trying to recreate them. The same holds true with the PoK crash bug. It was related to collision issues, levitation, bodies of water, falling through the world, and an infinite loop. It was a nasty bug for even the BEST bug hunter to track down.

They are also working hard correct any lingering NGE issues, and to optimize everything.

Oh, and did I mention that there is a new designer working furiously to finish up and correct broken quests?

Did you know that Smedley wants new character models by the end of the calendar year? I'm not sure how doable it is... but Smedley is a very motivated man.

The list that you're seeing is only the TIP of the "immediately address" iceberg. You have to remember that the most represented segment of the game at the summit was the higher end guilds. So, the ten hottest topics were related to what they said. But, I can also tell you that they heard the pleas to address casual gamer concerns loud and clear.

There's a LOT happening. A WHOLE lot more than JUST that abbreviated list. I promise you.

Give them, the devs, producers and the attendees, a chance to digest what was discussed and start putting things into motion. Be realistic. It's hard to be told to "be patient" when we've all been so patient for so long, but good things dont happen overnight. If things still arent better in a month, if we see nothing happening, I'll be right there with the rest of you asking why. But until then, we need to realize that these are real human beings, who are at least trying to change things for the better, and they can use our help and understanding.

I dont think they pitched it as being representative of everyone.

I realize that actually. But there are folks here on this thread, yourself included, making the claim that casual or time-restricted players are adequately represented by the uber guild leaders that were invited. I'm sorry, but that one has as much lift as a lead balloon, with me anyway.

While much, if not most, of that list of fact list you posted is either raid related or just general bug related, there are some good things there for casual or time-restricted players. Still, I don't share the prevailing optimism that they can correct 5 years of decisions about time-sinks and the direction of high level playing such that would turn this into a game for me again. I think they've invested too much coding into that philosophy to decide to change it. Lots of players are locked into it too.

I've been thinking about healing today. So many people here have commented that "healing is unbalanced" and are disappointed that we have very little to report on that subject.

What about this? What if all the priest class worked together to come up with some ideas and solutions to acceptably fix healing for all us? Druids, clerics, shamans and paladins, coming together to talk and brainstorm. A united healing voice and some unified ideas and solutions would surely have a lot more power than all of us separately calling out "fix me! fix me!".

What do you guys think? Too crazy to get all those groups together to discuss without the topic getting off track with cross-class flames and arguements or do you think it's worth a try?The only way I could honestly see that working is with someone.. SOE(?).. mediating. I think there would be too many personal agendas to gain a concensus. I don't think any class can look at healing globally, forgetting the other areas their own class touches on. And after healing balances... then each class needs balancing too. I don't think the players' idea of balanced class is the same as SOE's.

I visited EQClerics this morning to see what was being said about the conference. There was a lot of hostility about druids for no apparent reason. Well.. Chenier plays a druid and they were quoting her report about non-druid game issues. I suppose that was the connection but I was pretty disappointed. I guess it's a good thing I don't typically visit there.

I do agree about the healing thing being about impossible for the players to arbitrate. It seems to me there's too much jealousy and rancor between the two groups. There are clerics with a pathological hatred of druids and druids who hate clerics (I think that was Aenamander if memory serves...). It reminds me of middle-east politics. Just when a cease-fire gets negotiated someone throws a bomb and it all goes to hell.

Since I've been active on both message forums for many years and have seen the rift get larger all the time, with knee-jerk reactions from folks on both boards to anyone suggesting that the other camp get anything new. Druids will ask for better healing, clerics will ask for something druids have, and then they all start lobbing grenades at one another. Or if clerics ask for nukes or melee abililties they'll get harrassed by paladins and wizards.

I dunno how you unhash the healing mess without ruining at least one class in the process. If you all figure it out, I'll be very impressed. Good luck!

I dont think people who went from raid guilds said they can fully represent a casual (which itself is a misnomer, or at least covers too much ground to be a single group of people) but rather that they do infact have a good grasp on EQ as a whole, and that there were some people who went, that had a very casual perspective.

If you are looking to get feedback from 50 people who *KNOW* EQ inside and out, and you want to have the highest probability of getting those people, then leaders of high end guilds are a perfect choice.

Some people would argue that it has been Sony's over-dependence on feedback from that corner that has ended them up where they are now. Regardless of what "high-end-uber-whateveryouwantocallthem players" feel like, they have always had a more public and organized voice than anyone else.



Because, in all likelyhood, over the long period of time those people have been playing, they HAVE done everything, they've been the casual player, the /lfg-er, the tradeskiller, IN ADDITION to being the uber raider, the guild leader, the organizer, the content devourer, and the beta tester.

Sorry.. Not buying it. You are much more likely to find people who went from raiders to more casual players than vice-versa. In fact the later is probably extremely rare. Regardless human nature is going to have people focused on how they are playing now, so the perspective of the current crop of players does not adequately represent the playerbase at all. Sure we have Woody and probably a few others from fansites who have a casual angle, but it appears the numbers were way out-of-whack with the actual playerbase.


They were an easy target, and they were a good choice for an initial dialogue to get things moving. You cant invite 200 specialists in each narrow area of the game!

I don't know this smacks of a continuation of the EQ development team not understanding who their actual playerbase is. This has been the biggest problem with EQ since almost its inception. Truth is none of it probably matters, the bulk of casual/limited-time players are unlikely to be saved at this point without some major changes. They have been pretty much ignored in terms of top-level advancement since the game has existed. It is naive to think they could fix it in a few months.



And how would you even find them? Your best shot is to invite the generalists,

Sorry, but I am not going to accept your characterization of uber-guild leaders as "generalists". That is more than a stretch.


who have proven by in-game leadership and out of game distribution of knowledge that they are familiar with the widest possible number of EQ things that can reasonably be expected to survive in one person's brain.

What good is all that if they are not represantative of the people who play the game. Nielson doesn't call one guy who watches 120 hours of tv a week to rank the shows. I don't care how they do it... I don't really care if they do it at this point. Considering the expense that went into this whole thing though, I don't see the benefit.


It's easy to criticize, but I've seen no other realistic solutions to the "dilemma" of who they should have invited.

I don't slight anyone for getting invited. The truth is the whole thing was likely very unnecessary. They could have garnered much of the same information and dialogue without spending $50,000. Great they are going to make a few changes that appeal to a minority percentage of their playerbase. Just doesn't seem terribly productive.

Where is the discussion for alternative methods of advancement and acquiring top-end equipment outside of uber-raiding? Those are the kinds of changes that need to be made to actually make the game viable to a larger audience into the future. Not changing a Raid Message of the Day or whatever else they mentioned.

The criticism of frustrated "casual" players is short sighted... it was 2 days, and a lot of talk, and you're ticked because your pet issue didnt get addressed? This wasnt designed to be a magic bullet! It's a START. And that's all!

A start for what exactly? I don't get encouraged or excited about any of that. I am one of the biggest Sony/EQ fanboys on the entire planet. This does nothing for me.


That may not be enough for some of you. If that's the case, accept that it's probably too late for anything to satisfy you.

You are right. I accept that. I don't need to play EQ. I would like to see them make some changes to actually make the game appealing and enjoyable to me again. But I am not holding my breath and demanding they do so. If they do they do, if they don't they don't. BUT, I think this whole summit was done with the intent of bolstering EQ's position, prevent further erosion and keep the game going strong into the future. With that being the goal, I just think they are approaching it in the wrong way.

When one of the biggest items on the agenda is instancing Time, I have to chuckle a bit. Some people actually think that is the biggest problem facing EQ in the coming months? All these generalists you mentioned?


Fundamental changes like the ones people want on a massive game like EQ take time to design, test, and implement. Isnt one of the criticisms about lack of thought and testing? Let them!

Agreed. But I would love to hear some ideas or thoughts on what they are planning on doing, or trying to do that would actually change the game. Not much of that has come out so far.


People you really just need to let go of this hatred about who they picked to go this time around...

I don't personally care who they picked. I just think they missed their mark in terms of what they needed to do in order to achieve their goal. They didn't pick a representative group of people who play the game. They chose a single-specialized niche.

Madrone,

What do you think of my idea about all priest classes collectively talking and brainstorming constructively on ideas and solutions for healing balance? Am I pipe dreaming? Or do you think it's worth a shot?

I dont think they pitched it as being representative of everyone. From Smedley's letter

I can't believe you made the above comments right above the quote below from Smedley, Tiane.


We're also inviting many members of the community to join us here at SOE for a day to have a direct dialog with the development team about issues that are important to the EverQuest community as a whole.


They didn't pitch it as being representative of everyone but it was to create a dialog about issues that are import to the Everquest community as a whole? Explain to me how you make that make sense.

You guys are arguing semantics.

Would you at least agree that this is a first step and that if SOE keeps their promise, there will be more steps, more Summits to come?

Fundamental changes like the ones people want on a massive game like EQ take time to design, test, and implement.
The SoE mantra of "it takes time to rebalance" seems like just another excuse, though, for delaying an issue they don't want to face. They sure don't bother taking their time when it comes to insta-nerfing or releasing yet another unplayable/buggy/game-breaking expansion. Yet, when it comes to even the simplest rebalancing issues like improving healing, it suddenly takes years and never gets done.

Why? They could implement a simple database change in 5 minutes to improve healing and give it a test run for a few weeks on the live servers. Even if it were a change for the worse, it wouldn't break the game anywhere near as badly as most of SoE's expansions do.

You guys are arguing semantics.

Would you at least agree that this is a first step and that if SOE keeps their promise, there will be more steps, more Summits to come?

I would never bash them for trying to make the game better. And it does have to start somewhere.

I do think the clock is running out fairly fast, unfortunately.

They can take all the time they need right now. I am enjoying COH. So if they do something that makes the game more appealing I will play again. If not I will not.

In their defense, they did say they want EQ1 to be for raiders now and EQ2 for "casuals". I've covered my opinion on that one already elsewhere as well.

I would love to see them clearly and publicly make that staement before OoW was released, might save their customers a lot of money.

So if they do something that makes the game more appealing I will play again. If not I will not.

Well put. If they can create something which doesn't require 72 or 54 or whatever people to be online simultaneously and race for a mob....or if they can get away from keys/flags as the way to progress through content...or if they can fix the old quests so they work...or if they can create something for a casual/time limited (whatever) person to do that doesn't require sitting LFG for 3 hours and logging off, doesn't require 80 hours of time to achieve one mediocre upgrade, doesn't involve seeing the same hallways with the same mobs month after month to earn enough points to buy a piece of armor which I could get on my own if I had access to a zone WHICH I PAID FOR JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE....

then I will reactivate my account and check it out.

eanwhile, nearly all the changes they looked at had to do with raids. Last time I raided anything, it took at least 2 hours to set the thing up and get everyone in position. For us 'time limited' folks, that means we get set up, then have to camp.

I really am glad SOE is listening. I have friends in uber guilds. This will be great for them. As for me, they lost my account in November. They will probably lose my other account and my husband's two accounts pretty soon.

Too little, too late. I've found a game I can play casually, in small increments of time, still advance, and have fun. I can solo if I need/want to. I can group if I want to. We can go on 'raids' if we want to. And so far, customer service has replied to any petition I have sent in under 15 minutes. Sure beats the heck out of that 33 hour average response time.

As for who they could have chosen, someone mentioned that they didn't know how SOE could possibly figure out who to invite to represent the casuals. I said it in another thread, just in case SOE is reading this one, I'll say it again: You look for long term casual guilds. The ones who have been around since forever. Companions of Norrath (Tunare), of which I was the guild leader for a period of time, is the 3rd oldest surviving guild on Tunare. None of the uber guilds on that server are as old as CoN is.

Perhaps looking to the old guilds, who aren't time enabled (thereby indicating that they aren't uberguilds), who have been around since guilds could first be created, would be a good place to find those players. Casual guilds don't last very long unless they have something really going for them.

give it a test run for a few weeks on the live servers.

This is exactly the sort of thing that SOE has taken (justifiable) flak for over the past couple years. People time and again have said they dont want the live servers to be test grounds.

This summit wasnt about class balance. Perhaps a future one will be.

And yes, aeiouy, when addressing issues that concern the community, it's often a good start to talk to the various members and leaders of the community, dont you think? I dont care if you dont buy my assertion about guildleaders having experience with other aspects of the game. I've known and met *many* uber guild leaders over the years, on my own and other servers, and have been helping run them myself for years, and I'm *telling* you that's who these people are. It doesnt matter that you dont believe me, what matters is that these community leaders have a firm grasp on most of the EQ game, they live and breathe EQ, they *know* their stuff. They may not remember the recipe for steel boning off hand, but they've made their share of reinforced leather. Your assertion that "When one of the biggest items on the agenda is instancing Time, " is rediculous... just because Time was mentioned on a couple of people's lists, means it's one of the biggest items on the agenda? Huh? You are reading a lot more into things than is actually there. And it's not like this is a small issue... on my server alone there's over 1,000 inndividual players all jockeying for their piece of the zone, who represent probably 2-3k accounts. Even a pessimistic estimation puts that at 10% of the active server population (its more), surely you cant begrudge one point on a bullet list of 50 topics covered.

You are right to criticize that they shouldnt listen to just one group of people, and I have said that very same thing myself in other threads, many many times. But you arent listening to what these people are saying. They have asked for ideas, not just on gameplay issues, but also on class balance and other issues. Go read their own forums some time. See that great big sticky about Brenlo's druid issues on this forum. And there will be other new avenues for the players to get their points accross. These take time to set up.

Pana, there were other guildleaders that went to some of the communities and asked for issues to take to SOE. Grabbit (http://p201.ezboard.com/fmonklybusiness43508frm1.showMessage?topicID=45994 .topic) is one example.

And I'm sorry, Tuda, but you cant expect that and other things to be done in a day. If you dont want to give them a chance to actually, you know, sleep and eat and do their other job duties, well that's not particularly fair, and doesnt support your argument well.

We will see in a week, and in a month, how things are going.

Scirocco was making an attempt to do that but he didn't attend.


For those wondering, I was dying to go, but I re-separated my right shoulder the evening before, and when my plane was taking off I was in the doctor's office (I actually had my bags in the car and was driving to the airport but the pain just to be too much, so I diverted, thus sparing the summiteers the pleasure of seeing the end of my clavicle stick up about two inches from my shoulder...I still think I could have done it, though, as I know from my rugby days the benefits of beer as a general anesthetic). I actually spoke with Chen and Thomas Taylor (from SOE) that morning when I got back from the doctors, so they knew what was going on (hope the pain meds didn't make me too incoherent, Chen!). Haven't posted anything til now because it's too hard to sit at a keyboard.

Anyway, I'll be sending my thoughts on the time-restricted mid-level game via email this week to Thomas Taylor, who said he would get it sent to the appropriate folks. Apparently, they are serious about listening to us (however you define "us"), and even if nothing comes of it, we'll be no worse off than we would otherwise. Based on the list from SOE, though, it appears as though there will be some beneficial changes along the lines I had been pushing for (I'll keep pushing for the bigger changes as well).

For the moment, I'll continue to stick around and play the game and see what happens....

In their defense, they did say they want EQ1 to be for raiders now and EQ2 for "casuals". I've covered my opinion on that one already elsewhere as well.

I think a lot of the casual/time-restricted folks are going to be ex-SOE customers by the time EQ2 comes out. Because there are games out there that "get it" when it comes to us. Personally I wouldn't trust them to keep the game focus after muffing it so badly the first time around.

I dont care if you dont buy my assertion about guildleaders having experience with other aspects of the game. I've known and met *many* uber guild leaders over the years, on my own and other servers, and have been helping run them myself for years, and I'm *telling* you that's who these people are

Hmmm... this argument seems to be getting really circular. Tiane, I think what you aren't understanding is that we aren't questioning whether or not they were or were not a casual player or a tradeskiller, I'm sure such people exist. What I question is whether or not that person is going to attend the summit with the intention of promoting the interests and concerns of casual/time-restricted players or tradeskillers.

Did anyone there that was attending hear anyone of these guild leaders raise issues concerning the interests of casual/time-restricted players? Did the leader of Township Rebellion stand up and say, "Fixing raiding is all well and good, but what are you going to do for people that don't have hours and hours to spend online to raid?"

It doesn't matter what they did in their past. They're not there to represent the casual/time-restricted set of folks. They're representing their guild. They were chosen because of their guild and their position in the game now and the issues they have as a raiding guild or with raids and what-not. If they'd like to represent the casual/time-restricted players they need to be involved in that community, be a member of a small, family guild like Jinjre's and understand the issues and be recognized as such. Something any number of people from various message forums could do.

Yes, I believe you that many uber raiders were once casual players. But no, I don't buy it that they were picked to attend the summit to represent casual players.

I wish you could have been there too, Scirocco. =P And no, I didn't think you were too groggy with the drugs. /hug

I tried. Remember?This (http://forums.thedruidsgrove.org/showthread.php?t=5743&page=1&pp=15) thread? The one that got an award on page 44 (now appears to be gone) when it was less then half of the size that the fully formed beast would become?

I must say, that was one thread where numerous Clerics were very involved (including taking a lot of flak, and dishing some too). Some very knowledgeable and respected EqCleric mods popped in too.

We've proven that we can talk about it, but we disagree and definately aren't always civil.

First. Sony lost my respect and it is up to them to earn it back.
Second. If they really mean to address all the issues of all the players, they need to have about 5 of these so called "Summits".
Third. If a game stops having a story that engages people....the people will quit coming.

I understand that ANY "Summit" is better than none at all, but more talk after more talk after more talk....well, /yawn.

After nearly 5 years (since release date anyway), I lost all my plat due to a game bug. This was not reimbursed. We're talking 90k folks....I'm a rich one /sarcasm off. Consider this my "boy did I get the Customer Service Shaft" rant.

Had to retire my main, a Ranger, because that was pure masochism to solo...and I made a Druid. I've read the boards ad nausem to the effect that EQ is NOT a solo game, but is a community. Well, it might once have been, but that is certainly not what it is today.....and that is okay, but please quit penalizing me when I play it solo.

Here is one druid that does NOT want a new heal. I never heal...I solo, if I need to heal I must be dead.

I want to know what happened to my Norrath...what happened to the time when I was proud to be of Tunare. What the hell happened to faction, and who are these stupid aliens and why am I playing a fantasy (Tolkien-eske) game that has a moon with creepys that have nothing to do with Friona, or Tunare, or Brell or....well you get the idea.

I realize that Sony owes us nothing. I realize that they will survive whether or not I or hundreds like me stop playing. But dammit, it is my game. I've invested 5 years in it. I'm not a raider...I'm not a casual...

I'm Grisyn...and I want my game back.

It doesnt matter that you dont believe me, what matters is that these community leaders have a firm grasp on most of the EQ game, they live and breathe EQ, they *know* their stuff.

Tiane, take a few deep breaths. People are not denying that high tier guildleaders "know their stuff" -- they're simply pointing out that while these folks may possess vast knowledge for all things EQ-related, they are naturally going to represent the people they encounter on a daily basis, and issues they deal with on a daily basis.

Note above, I'm using the word "represent" (verb), not "representative" (noun). There's no doubt in my mind that leaders of raiding guilds can make fine representitives (n.), but serious doubt that in the space of 2 days they could possibly have represented (v.) "issues that are important to the EverQuest community as a whole." -- which is what Smedley claimed to want.

They may not remember the recipe for steel boning off hand, but they've made their share of reinforced leather.

You're illustrating aeiouy's point pretty well. Just because raid guildleaders have done their share of tailoring doesn't mean they have any clue about most pressing issues in the tradeskilling community over the past few months, or even years. Someone who is still active in that community would not only be better qualified to represent their issues, but would also be more inclined to mention those issues in a face-to-face meeting.

See, there was nothing wrong with SOE conducting a summit to discuss one particular aspect of the game; raiding problems certainly need to be addressed. But was that a good start? I don't think so. I believe a good start would have been a summit which involved the widest range of playstyles they could find in the "Everquest community as a whole"--- and then FUTURE summits could have focused on a variety of more specific concerns such as raiding, healing, etc.

Because they focused on a specific category first, they've alienated a lot of players who don't happen to fit into that category, who don't feel their issues were even presented, much less considered. IMO, that was a bad move on SOE's part, and a fairly strong indication that their real goal for this summit was not to gather feedback from the "whole community" but simply to generate positive PR.

Frankly I'll be surprised if they're actually planning on holding future summits. I suspect this was a one-shot deal. Another reason why non/light-raiding players might be feeling as though they missed their one last chance at being represented before they give up and move onto another game.

~Firemynd

Frankly I'll be surprised if they're actually planning on holding future summits. I suspect this was a one-shot deal. Another reason why non/light-raiding players might be feeling as though they missed their one last chance at being represented before they give up and move onto another game.

What worse is that they said they wanted to do these Summits every 6 months but, the problem that they are facing is now. The things that they need to change needed to be changed years ago. The competition is here now and, I'm here to say it looks very nice. The question for them should not be should we change but, can we change fast enough to save our jobs. Saddly it doesn't look like this will be the case.

Ack! Sounds painful Scirocco :(. So sorry to hear about your injury and hope you will mend and be out of pain very soon.

I'm glad also that you will be sending your thoughts along to SOE via e-mail. It does sound as if they are serious about listening to their players now. Crossing fingers that they will take action and fix the problems asap.

Shadow your suggestions were outrageous to say the least and I highly doubt the priest classes could come together on anything resembling a fair and practical solution(well maybe the shaman and druids could, hehe).

Chenier,

Autumn10's post right there demonstrates why such a conference doesn't work. Not to mention the attitudes of some of the other posters and moderators who took part in that thread.

You can't do it here on the DG. You might manage it on an entirely separate forum.

I assume you are including yourself in that "Not to mention the attitudes of some of the other posters" jab, Shadowfrost. You were not at all innocent in fanning the flames or, indeed, encouraging cross posting from other forums.... So lets not be so quick to throw stones.

Anyway, there's no point in re-opening that whole debate at this time. There are plenty of other issues that affect *everybody* I'd rather see addressed first, like making the game playable and reliable, which sadly it is not at the moment.

Tiane, I plead guilty with mitigating circumstances. ;)

Sorry.. Not buying it. You are much more likely to find people who went from raiders to more casual players than vice-versa.

I dont know who you think comprises the "uber" population, but you have a very warped view of them. Try again, you missed the mark.


Sorry, but I am not going to accept your characterization of uber-guild leaders as "generalists". That is more than a stretch.

Therein lies your problem. You fail to recognize these people as what they are. Talk to one. They are likely to show you a thing or two, regardless of class, regardless of level, regardless of zone.

I don't slight anyone for getting invited. The truth is the whole thing was likely very unnecessary. They could have garnered much of the same information and dialogue without spending $50,000. Great they are going to make a few changes that appeal to a minority percentage of their playerbase. Just doesn't seem terribly productive.

Ahh naysaying at its best. Now, it all reduces to the changes that have been mentioned, worse, it all reduces to a subset of them. On, and FYI, in case you haven't noticed already, the reason we still conduct meetings with live persons, not over internet chat or the phone, is that it's still much much more productive.


Where is the discussion for alternative methods of advancement and acquiring top-end equipment outside of uber-raiding?

Didn't you read? LdoN will be made soloable. There will be new set that will be buyable, comparable to the EP set. OoW should be made so that you can advance in those zones, being a casual player. Inform yourself before posting stuff like this.

BUT, I think this whole summit was done with the intent of bolstering EQ's position, prevent further erosion and keep the game going strong into the future. With that being the goal, I just think they are approaching it in the wrong way.

Propose another one that makes sense. I have yet to see one from anyone.

When one of the biggest items on the agenda is instancing Time, I have to chuckle a bit. Some people actually think that is the biggest problem facing EQ in the coming months? All these generalists you mentioned?

First off, you suppose it's one of the biggest items. Shame on you, again, naysaying at its best. Second off, why YES, it's big problem. Why? Because in a few months, with OoW running full swing, level 70, etc etc, there wont be 2-3 guilds in Time per server, there will be 10+. THat's a LOT of people affected...

I don't personally care who they picked. I just think they missed their mark in terms of what they needed to do in order to achieve their goal. They didn't pick a representative group of people who play the game. They chose a single-specialized niche.

And again it comes to this. Who should they have picked? You?

Callahad

Did the leader of Township Rebellion stand up and say, "Fixing raiding is all well and good, but what are you going to do for people that don't have hours and hours to spend online to raid?"

No, they had, amongst a few, Wooddyy for that. And guess what? The leader of TR, once Wooddyy geared the discussion towards casuals, could very well put in his two cents, and do a fairly good job of providing an informed opinion on the casual question on the table.

That's what I think you have failed to grasp. You seem to think the uber guild leaders invited were bent on the destruction of the casual aspect, and refrained from participating on the casual questions on the table. I refer to Chenier for that, I wasnt there... But I am willing to bet they didnt.

Callahad

The good news is they cared enough to have the summit. The people that went are knowledgeable and cover a range of groups they represent. 99% of what was discussed and the solutions recommended would not make me come back but at least there was discussion. Too many things should have been fixed years ago but maybe now they will be a little more attentive when they construct new expansions. But at least the 1% represented may get Raid fixes.

y 5 year old lv 65 druid is too tired of exp grind to play any more and my lv 41 SK cannot find groups or solo and I am tired of playing my Cleric and Enc twinks so they are not worth playing. I can't 3 Box any more because of DX9 since I am not willing to dish out the cash to upgrade my son's machine and my wife can't play on her laptop any more so they canceled their accts. When I log on everyone wants me to log on my Wifes lv 61 Cleric or 65 Rogue or my Sons 65 Warrior (but not his wizzy) but they could care less who plays them. The prospect of having to farm an instanced Time to get level 70 just doesn't thrill me. Why have higher levels if you don't need them for lower content and can't get exp except from a limited number of zones which of course are in bugged expansions.

The comments I get when trying to find something fun to do any more are depressing and I don't think many of these suggested fixes will change that. If Solo LDoN adventures are created I will probably stay long enough to try them it fun Pickup groups are a thing of the past. And that uber Elemental LDoN gear will require living in LDoN for a long time.

There are 2 issues that are here that I see - One is class balancing and one is game play problems. Not to ignore class balancing but we cannot seem to agree on this resolution. I would like to discuss the game play problems because, imho, game play problems are a problem for everyone that plays the game from beginner to uberer (my new word for the day). If Sony were to address the game play problems of mobs going poof, quests broken, mobs with very bad pathing, tradeskills that got us past 200 without needing uber drop components, stop having fabled drops in low level zones that ruin that zone for low level players (try hunting in Najena with 40 people lined up to get in that group), traders in the bazaar being booted due to inactivity, zoning and then crashing, and this is just a few of the issues that I have come up with in a few minutes.
Sony your game, to me, is very broken and if you resolved the class balance issue over the course of a year guess what, your game is still broke. If you resolve the game problems over a year then the class balance issue is still there but at least the game will be better to play in.
If Sony really does read these and other boards there should never ever be a need for any summit at all because they would know what the current state of their game is - it is VERY BROKEN!!!!

Elder Kensol Stice
A very sad 62 Druid on MT

And that uber Elemental LDoN gear will require living in LDoN for a long time.

Probably. And I find nothing wrong with that. Depends of course how long it would take, but I am against giving items away too easily. Instant gratification is not EQish in my book, other games can fill this need.

Callahad

Didn't you read? LdoN will be made soloable. There will be new set that will be buyable, comparable to the EP set.
Probably. And I find nothing wrong with that. Depends of course how long it would take, but I am against giving items away too easily. Instant gratification is not EQish in my book, other games can fill this need.
It would already take a casual gamer that does roughly 5 adventures a week well over two years to get a full set of armor, weapons and augments from LDoN. If EQ is even out by then... that gear will be so outdated it wouldn't be worth the time.

See, you're one of those ... *grumbles*... that thinks others should go through the same timesink just because you went through it as well. Timesinks are not the way a game should be balanced. Timesinks are not the way a game should reward people. Entertainment is supposed to be instant gratification. Not a second job. [removed]

I play games to have fun. FUN. Not to work a second job just for an additional +4 strength or +10 hp on my left bracer. I play games to be challenged. There is no frelling challenge to sitting on your butt for six+ hours with 50-70 people on a raid. Unless... unless you are one of the few organizers who lead the raid. The majority of people on a raid only need to know who that MA/SA/TA's are and have the ability to pay attention to the screen and listen to commands.

Why should those people be rewarded for that kind of gameplay? It's not difficult. It's not a challenge. And when you do throw challenging content at them, they whine and moan and want things to be made easier. I understand GoD was tuned for level 70... and y'know what, if I was uber and was beating GoD content right now... I'd be damn proud of myself. The people at the very tip top end of the content in GoD are proving they have the balls and the skills to meet the challenge and beat it.

If every expansion was designed this way without craptastic timesinks, pure skill and knowledge of the game would be the only thing seperating the uber from the casual. Once the timesinks have been eliminated, it allows anyone to reach the end game eventually. As it stands now in EQ, that is impossible for a time limited gamer. They cannot reach the end even if they're the best damn cleric on the server. That cleric might have nearly all their spells, some decent bazaar bought equipment, know exactly when to cast their heals, know exactly what buffs are needed when, and have a working knowledge of many many quests, but it will all mean jack because that cleric can only play a couple hours a night, maybe two, sometimes three nights a week.

SOE needs to make the entire game accessible to everyone provided they have the ability to defeat the content/encounter. They should not use timesinks as a limiter. Period.

I play games to have fun. FUN.

So do most players, I would imagine. But before you make some blanket judgemental statements, I wuld suggest to you that your idea of "fun" is not the same as mine, nor anyone else's.

I agree that timesinks that serve no other purpose thatn to slow you down are cr*p, I do like the fact that you don't get instant gratification on everything. Knowing how much time and effort I had to devote to getting 1750 in tradeskills makes that accomplishment mean something to me. It may not mean anything to you, but don't berate me for an accomplishment that I value.

Along the same lines, working for a few hours to get an extra +4 stat on something is also worth it imho.

When the game stops being 'fun' for me, I will stop. Until then, I will be out there questing, grouping, Tradeskilling, soloing, or whatever.

I definitely hate PoP flags, tho ;P

Chenier,

I think a consortium of sorts for priests as a whole could work. It would have to be heavily controlled though. Perhaps something to the effect of the leaders from each of the class forums/sites get together & hash ideas out & take them to the communties. Each person would also bring to the table ideas & suggestions from their respective communities. This would help to prevent wholesale flaming & could get truly good ideas for improvement to the powers that be.

working for a few hours to get an extra +4 stat on something is also worth it imho.

If it was just a few hours, I would still be playing the game. Doing the same content over and over and over and over again for months on end is not "a few hours".

Pan said it pretty well for me. EQI was originally tuned for single group adventuring. Now it is tuned for massive raids. No matter what their promises, I pretty well believe that EQII will do the same thing eventually. Remember that it wasn't until Velious that raiding really became pretty mandatory, and after Velious it slippery sloped to the point it's at now.

SOE has sent me a pretty clear message many times: if you are casual/time limited, we don't care about you. SOE will not be getting money from me in the future either. For 5 years they got my money and my time.

Fool me once, shame on you. I won't be fooled again by the same company.

It would already take a casual gamer that does roughly 5 adventures a week well over two years to get a full set of armor, weapons and augments from LDoN. If EQ is even out by then... that gear will be so outdated it wouldn't be worth the time.

I am not inclined to start discussing numbers. suffice to say, im my book, it's important not to make it too easy. Otherwise it's instant gratification.

See, you're one of those sadistic-masochistic ... that enjoys inflicting pain on others just because you went through it as well.

/siren noise. You have failed to judge me! Actually, I am one of those peoples that know that to truly enjoy something you have, you have to work/play hard for it. Your first motorcycle is just a motorcycle when your father buys it for you. But when you have had to work 2 summers to get it... This, to me, is one of fundamental principles of EQ. I dont want to inflict pain on others, I want EQ to stay true to its principles, and I want other EQ gamers to truly *enjoy* the items they get.

Timesinks are not the way a game should reward people. Entertainment is supposed to be instant gratification. Not a second job.

/siren noise. Wrong!! There are different ways to entertain yourself. Some do marathons, others play bridge, yet others go shopping. Do puzzles. Etc etc. Instant Gratification is just one way to entertain yourself. If we were to discuss face to face, I would tell you why I think it's become sad. But that's not necessary right here and now.

Nor is Delayed Gratification synonymous with second job. Too bad you think that way.

When are you masochistic uber goobers going to get that through your thick heads

Have I insulted you? No? Then please refrain from doing so. Furthermore I dont qualify myself as uber... Why, you assume I am one??

I play games to have fun. FUN. Not to work a second job just for an additional +4 strength or +10 hp on my left bracer. I play games to be challenged. There is no frelling challenge to sitting on your butt for six+ hours with 50-70 people on a raid. Unless... unless you are one of the few organizers who lead the raid. The majority of people on a raid only need to know who that MA/SA/TA's are and have the ability to pay attention to the screen and listen to commands.

Ahh yes. The Famous Challenge. There is no more challenge in EQ in doing solo content than grouping or raiding content. You should know that by now. the only true lasting challenge you are ever going to find, as far as gameplay aptitudes, is PvP, when well balanced. Personally, I dont like it, I have had more than enough competition in RL.

The only difference is the number of people it takes, and appropriately, the reward given. Arguably the balance is out of whack right now, so that it too heavily favors raiding.

Why should those people be rewarded for that kind of gameplay? It's not difficult. It's not a challenge. And when you do throw challenging content at them, they whine and moan and want things to be made easier. I understand GoD was tuned for level 70... and y'know what, if I was uber and was beating GoD content right now... I'd be damn proud of myself. The people at the very tip top end of the content in GoD are proving they have the balls and the skills to meet the challenge and beat it.

Of course, you realize that the ubers who "are damn proud of themselves" are the ones who have been most vocal about the difficulty of GoD? That it has been tuned largely in part because of their feedback. That it now is to a level more appropriate to what can be attained, and thus hard but beatable? That there are also complaints to make some of the stuff slightly harder, when it's too easy?

If every expansion was designed this way without craptastic timesinks, pure skill and knowledge of the game would be the only thing seperating the uber from the casual.

You assume GoD has no timesinks?? Eh, dont make me laugh. Furthermore, I very strongly disagree with putting the only difference on skill and knowledge. EQ is not a PvP game, nor a first person shooter, nor a "twitch" game. It's a social game, a RPG game. The kind of challenge you seem to be referring to (ie mostly "twitch"), can be had in other games. Personally, what attracted me in parts to EQ was that the challenge was not in how good you can "twitch".

I'm sorry to say this to you, but the more I read you, the more I realize EQ is not for you.

Once the timesinks have been eliminated, it allows anyone to reach the end game eventually.

So everyone is in Tacvi. Grrreaaattt. Talk about mudflation. Oh wait. if someone doesnt have the skills, he cant get in Tacvi. Ever. Right? Unless he puts in a LOT of time trying to improve his "skillz". On the same mobs, the same content, with no rewards. But wait, thats not permitted, it's a timesink.Tell me again, how is that better?

Callahad

Hello Chenier,
This is the old Nuge. Thanks for the info. Hope they upgrade the amount of loot a boss mob gives up. 64 peeps go on a raid and he drops 4 items, that just don't inspire people to go and kill the guy in my opinion. At that rate it it would take 16 raids to give everyone something. Second give us Exp, 4 hrs of raid produce about 1/10 bub of exp, that blows.

Nuge

Folks,

If you guys continue down this path to the old "uber vs. casual" debate and continue to eek closer to deletable flaming, I will lock this thread so fast it'll make your head spin. CHILL OUT.

Chenier,

I think a consortium of sorts for priests as a whole could work. It would have to be heavily controlled though. Perhaps something to the effect of the leaders from each of the class forums/sites get together & hash ideas out & take them to the communties. Each person would also bring to the table ideas & suggestions from their respective communities. This would help to prevent wholesale flaming & could get truly good ideas for improvement to the powers that be.
Thanks Aset. I think it's enough to at least try. I've been talking with Madrone from Paladins of Norrath as well - I need to scoot on over to the Crucible and bug them as well - and then ask Brenlo, etc. for suggestions.

Chenier,

Autumn10's post right there demonstrates why such a conference doesn't work. Not to mention the attitudes of some of the other posters and moderators who took part in that thread.

You can't do it here on the DG. You might manage it on an entirely separate forum.
I think we can do it. Your undying thread was a rant - not a constructive collaboration - and was not moderated as such.

No, they had, amongst a few, Wooddyy for that. And guess what? The leader of TR, once Wooddyy geared the discussion towards casuals, could very well put in his two cents, and do a fairly good job of providing an informed opinion on the casual question on the table.

That's what I think you have failed to grasp. You seem to think the uber guild leaders invited were bent on the destruction of the casual aspect, and refrained from participating on the casual questions on the table. I refer to Chenier for that, I wasnt there... But I am willing to bet they didnt.

Callahad
As I said on /GU Forums, when Woody piped up in our break out group, everyone joined in the discussion. It was then that we talked about solo LDoNs, how to make those work, sitting LFG, etc. One of the designers even gave me her card and asked me to email her if I had more ideas. But to answer your question, yes, EVERYONE was participating in that discussion. It was very, very cool.

***

I would really appreciate it if you guys could please try to take on a positive attitude about this. The dev's are reading these boards (after working really hard this past weekend) and it's depressing to them to see so much negativity. It's depressing to me.

I'm not asking you to come back to the game yet. I'm not asking you to pre-order OoW. I'm not even asking you to send Brenlo flowers!

You've expressed your opinions on the event and the document given us to an hour after it ended, their extremely quick reply. They've promised to make longer lists, and to communicate more. Let's see what happens - but let's do that with a positive outlook.

Aly you were doing pretty well until When are you masochistic uber goobers going to get that through your thick heads?

ost of your points and opinions could stand on their own without the insults you tend to toss in for measure. At the moment you've given 'food for thought' to those who might not normally consider things from a casual/time-restricted perspective, you hand them a warm sour beer to chase it down... making it impossible for them to digest what you've said.

As for SOE having devoted so much of their efforts towards raiding content, I don't think anyone in particular is to blame. When players got their first taste of raiding from encounters like Vox and Naggy, the level of excitement was tangible and obvious to developers. Many players for first time began thinking in the longterm, began forming collectives with plans to accomplish more than what they could in typical groups or impromptu raids. This one shift quite possibly added years onto the game's lifespan.

However, I believe today's developers need to be reminded that many players who might actually enjoy raiding aren't given a fair chance to do so. In some cases, the biggest guilds literally remove content before smaller guilds can possibly see it for themselves. Has nothing to do with being capable of defeating an encounter, and everything to do with having 'enough' people online when the encounter is available (often leaving those in certain time zones at an automatic disadvantage).

This is where I thought "instancing" might save the day. At long last, developers finally had the technical flexibility of creating raid content for which the challenge was in the content itself, rather than the challenge being based upon whether a guild had the right numbers at the right time.

Unfortunately, the raid content SOE gave us in LDoN was tailored for gulids who were already further along and didn't really need instanced content. For them it was a luxury, something else to do; they could compete for 'non-instanced' raid content and simply needed more of it.

At the end of the day, SOE has still left out in the cold all the time-restricted players who really enjoy raiding and higher difficulty encounters, in spite of not meeting the schedule requirements of larger raiding guilds.

Seems the biggest misconception developers have is that casual players and time-restricted players are the same people. They're not.

~Firemynd

Personaly, I started reading this post with much enthusiasm. Not only did all the people have a chance to bounce idea's off the Dev's themselves, they also opened the doors for communications between eq and its players.

Seems the "casual" players have taken over and voiced opinions on "who should have invited to the summit". The whole point of the summit was to bounce ideas on what should be done to improve the game we love no?

Wouldn't it be a little more productive to just throw out your idea's on these boards knowing full well that they ARE being looked at... I see a whole lot of complaining and very little idea's on how to fix things...

It shouldn't be that way? HOW SHOULD IT BE?

So i dont get caught up in one of those pot/kettle flames

In my EQ world....
A very small percentage of Norath's mobs would summon...
Druids CH's would have a mana cost lowered to that of a Cleric's
ore classes would have the ability to slow..even if for a minimal percentage

Before this summit I honestly didn't see that many problems with EQ...a few bugs...of course GoD...collision...a bit of class balancing...but all in all I'm still enjoying myself.

Im not quoting anyone but let it be said..Those of you posting after not playing for 2 years dont even have a clue whats going on in EQ anymore...you haven't seen the changes and your pleas fall on deaf ears...They did good inviting who they did.

You didn't get the beer..the baseball games..the tour...

But you still have a voice on what changes...less complaining...more creative ideas!

Hollowends

Druid Issues:- SoTW: As per Rytan, the AA Code is in a freeze state, so this will not be changed in the near future, however it may be looked at later on.


This was there immediate Druid issues? What about the REAL problems for druids? Sure SOTW should be fixed but it's such a minor issue compared to the real issues. This is seriously all they got from the list that was compiled to be taken to the summit and from talking to Druid representives from around the game? Where was our possible future path in that summit consolidation thread?

I would really appreciate it if you guys could please try to take on a positive attitude about this. The dev's are reading these boards (after working really hard this past weekend) and it's depressing to them to see so much negativity. It's depressing to me.

What exactly is there to be positive about? I hope they are reading this because from the looks of this Chenier you guys were feed a bunch of free booze, food, entertainment and other goodies, patted on the head and told things will get better. Sorry not buying it when I see one single Druid issue listed as SoTw and even that can't be fixed at this time.

So sad all I can do is laugh.

Shadow your suggestions were outrageous to say the least and I highly doubt the priest classes could come together on anything resembling a fair and practical solution(well maybe the shaman and druids could, hehe). And I'm sure wizard and mages could come to agreement on removing all druid nukes, what is your point? You still have failed class balance completly afterwards.

On the same mobs, the same content, with no rewards. But wait, thats not permitted, it's a timesink.Tell me again, how is that better?
Because an artificial timesink that completely stops someone from progressing is far worse than a difficult encounter preventing that player from progressing. At least they can attempt to defeat the encounter when they want to instead of being forced to endure a lame timesink that they just can't do because of real life responsibilities.

Take the Halo game for example. I spent several months playing the game on Legendary, doing the same missions over and over and dying at roughly the same spot. I finally beat it and was ecstatic. I finally got past that difficult part and moved on to one of the best missions in the game (storming the beach).

Now imagine Halo with current EQ gameplay. To beat the mission I was on, I would have to sit in one spit killing the same respawning mobs over and over and over and over for a random rare key piece from one of 'em and then repeat it nine more times. That kind of timesink doesn't work in single player games and there's no valid reason to keep it in multi-player games.

If you had to complete a difficult dungeon quest to gain access to Vex Thal, I would jump all over that. It is so much better than farming a bunch of silly ass shards from mostly green con/cyan mobs. A timesink that prevents me from accessing content is far worse than a difficult encounter.

I would enjoy trying to defeat that encounter over and over, with different group/class combinations and strategies. I wouldn't care about the xp loss from deaths. It's a challenge in front of me that I want to defeat. Wasting my time farming pointless crap is not a challenge and it is really damn boring. Multiply this by the number of people in the guild and you get a lot of bored people farming mobs for crappy xp and rare drops. Factor in the competition and you really increase the amount of time needed to gain access to a zone.

I love the way Horizons handles new content. They make the server work together to access that content and then once the event is done, it is accessible to everyone. None of that exclusive, elitist bs. I said it before, people that are proud of wasting their time with long, boring timesinks to gain access to the end game do not have my respect. Only my pity.

The game could have been so much better, but catering to the powergamer that has far too much time on their hands to play a game ruined the fun for nearly everyone else. Now this silly summit is only serving to cater to that minority of the playerbase yet again.

Six months is just far too long to go between these summits if they really want to help the community as a whole. In six months, WoW will be out, several new updates for CoH probably. Jump to Lightspeed will be out for SWG. Horizons will still be having their monthly events. SOE doesn't have six months to fix the game for the majority of the playerbase.

Cryptic should jump on the ball and create a fantasy genre game using the City of Heroes graphics engine and gameplay style. It would suck in a ton of people from fantasy RPG's that weren't interested in being a super hero.

edit:
Aly you were doing pretty well until...
I know... I toned it way down from what I wanted to type however. I just get so frustrated with the complete lack of understanding that timesinks are not a way to create longevity in a game. Especially considering the gamers in EQ right now are getting older, taking on more responsibilities in their life, and just not having enough time to play the game like they used to. Also more options are becoming available and taking away even more of that limited amount of time.

A long, long time ago... on an ISP some call AOHell, there was a game called Neverwinter Nights. Made by SSI. It was cheesy pixel graphics with turn based combat, but some of my best memories from online roleplaying come from that game. There were no artificial timesinks in the game preventing you from see some area. It was just a lot of fun to play. Even the pvp was balanced. You had to be a human cleric 11 / Magic-user 10 to have a chance. Course that was a problem with the engine. Only spells could hurt other players. No melee attacks. =)

I just see so many games out there now and games that passed on before that had it right. EQ, when it was the only thing around pretty much, could do almost anything they wanted and still retain their playerbase. This summit is just too little to late.

Not druid related at all but sort of an updated to compiled list

Re Taunt Mod

I was the Dev that you were redirected to.

The taunt mod was not functioning properly, but was fixed recently and, if it's not on test already, it will be updated and working there properly very soon.

-- Maddoc

Keira (and those who feel as Keira does),

This Summit and the document they gave us is a FIRST STEP. You can't change everything for everyone at once and make everyone happy. You can't tell me that there is not one single thing in that list that doesn't make you go "yeah, that might be cool".

If not, then fine. Go to the rant forum, start a thread and rant away.

But, if you do find one single thing to be slightly cool, then for the love of all that is holy, try to think a little positive.

I'm not easily bought by "freebies". I've been all over the world by companies trying to woo my opinion on their products. What I am concerned with is the willingness to cooperate, communicate, brainstorm and then follow through. In my mind, SOE has taken the first three steps and is working on the fourth. It is my job, it is our job, to hold them responsible for following through AND to support them doing that.

Let's take an example: You have two clients. One is excited about what your work and what the final outcome might be in hopes it will be better than what he has and is looking forward to working with you on it to work out the kinks. The other is judgemental and negative and thinks you can do no right.

Who do you want to work for?

Not druid related at all but sort of an updated to compiled list

Re Taunt Mod
Thanks Madrone. Updated our list.

Autumn Instant gratification - therein lies the problem. Some casuals want it all right here, right now. Where's the fun in that? I'm not advocating time-sinks, I hate them too, but what about anticipation?

Acknowledging that you used the word "some" casuals, we need to be careful about lumping all of a certain type of players together. I know many "casual" (non-raid) players who worked for months on end to complete the shawl quest; there was nothing instant about that gratification. They don't necessarily enjoy camping and farming, but they endure those activities for a longterm goal. They're doing the same in LDoN, doing adventures and saving up points to upgrade their weaker pieces of gear.

Really, though, everyone likes instant gratification and they take it when they can get it. Raiding guilds actually epitomize this philosophy in one sense, bringing larger numbers of people to an encounter to: a) reduce the risk that another guild will beat them to it and thereby delay their gratification, or b) reduce the time it takes to clear mobs and get the boss done, or c) some combination of a & b.

~Firemynd

If you had to complete a difficult dungeon quest to gain access to Vex Thal, I would jump all over that. It is so much better than farming a bunch of silly ass shards from mostly green con/cyan mobs. A timesink that prevents me from accessing content is far worse than a difficult encounter.

I would enjoy trying to defeat that encounter over and over, with different group/class combinations and strategies. I wouldn't care about the xp loss from deaths. It's a challenge in front of me that I want to defeat. Wasting my time farming pointless crap is not a challenge and it is really damn boring. Multiply this by the number of people in the guild and you get a lot of bored people farming mobs for crappy xp and rare drops. Factor in the competition and you really increase the amount of time needed to gain access to a zone.

You will love GoD then. That's exactly what the sewers and Vxed/Tipt are.

One thing I see hear is people saying that they didn't listen to anyone but uber guilds. That is a wrong statement. I sat on the bus to the airport with Loral from Healers United. He told me how he gives a museum-like tour of Kunark where he takes about 20 people around to the different statues in Kunark and explains the lore and they pass out cheese and wine. If that smacks of uber, you guys are losing it.

In fact, as a leader of a guild who is suffering cause of their idiot moves of lowering raid content from 72 people to 54, to be honest, I was annoyed at my development group who kept going back to asking questions about casual play. I felt we wasted about 1/2 the time alloted us on things that affect the whole world instead of my guild. I did see the point of it, but I did want to focus on my problems.

I did hear a good comment from Baelish, who I sat next to on the ride back from the bar party. "The Smedley today is not the same Smedley as the one this morning. He said that he learned more about Everquest in this day then he has in the last of couple of years."

As far as the game not catering to time-restricted, thats debatable. The gear coming out of a six-man LDON group is better than what I spent hours and hours farming in TOV with 40 people. You prolly put in far less time to get it, than I had to get crappier armor. Sure real life time has passed since then and it's not the best any more, but if you typed /played on your toon and we type /played on ours, the same amount of game time has probably passed.

Because an artificial timesink that completely stops someone from progressing is far worse than a difficult encounter preventing that player from progressing.

Then what you are against is not timesinks, its badly tuned encounters... right? That makes sense, and I would agree with you. the only difference then is that I adopt a more positive view than you.

Take the Halo game for example. Now imagine Halo with current EQ gameplay.

If i wanted a Halo type of game, I would not play EQ, but a Halo type of game. The same reason I dont play a first person shooter when I want to play a D&D type of game. Thus, while your reasoning is entertaining, it is flawed from the start : it stems from assuming EQ should be a Halo type of game.


If you had to complete a difficult dungeon quest to gain access to Vex Thal, I would jump all over that. It is so much better than farming a bunch of silly ass shards from mostly green con/cyan mobs. A timesink that prevents me from accessing content is far worse than a difficult encounter.

You seem to forget *when* that became live. At the time, level 60 was the limit. A 100hp item was rare as hell, very few people has any AAs at all. The mobs involved in the quest for VT access were decent xp givers. They were never raid encounters, thank god. But at the time, to solo them was a decent challenge. Key words : at the time. NOW they are easy to solo, light blue and green.

EDIT : I was thinking only the shard pieces. The raids themselves were also appropriately difficult at the time, and rewarded more than just the quest piece.

I said it before, people that are proud of wasting their time with long, boring timesinks to gain access to the end game do not have my respect. Only my pity.

I have said it before I will say it again. People who ridicule people that enjoy other things than the things you enjoy dont earn much respect from me. Instead of "pitying", you should say, ok, that's not me, but to each their own. And then judge whether EQ is for you or not. Halo obviously is. And EQ?

I don't agree that things would be dead in 6 months. But I do agree that action will speak louder than words. And fast action, too. But unlike you, I am optimistic that it can happen. Perhaps it's because I know what Summits and meetings are like, but I have a good gut feeling with all I have read.

Callahad

I for one was very happy to hear about the summit. The fact that Sony finally fessed up to issues and wanted to take COMMUNITY steps to fix them gave me much hope.

After the summit, I am still VERY pleased. The fact that there is changes at all make me very happy. Whereas I can understand speculation about the changes - given several years of complaining with no result - at least speculate with a positive outlook. Being negative won't get anyone anywhere at this point. It does no good while making you look like a complainer and whiner.

There are plenty of other threads already started titled "Little too late Sony" etc, flame away there. This thread is meant to further the development already in the works.

I still believe if you dont like the game - QUIT PLAYING. However if you'd like to play and maybe help with the changes feel free to post some constructive feedback for the devs listening.

If I were a dev looking in on this Id see a bunch of people who are never happy no matter what happens. Would make me feel a lot less anxious to start on changes or even care really. "They're just going to bitch anyway." And we dont need that.

So thank you Chen and the other folks from the forum who made it to the summit, and thank you to the devs who are listening. This druid is looking forward to what's coming up.

Chenier: don't erase my posts when I ask you "what crap" and you have no real reason or answer for it.
Your deliberate jab at another poster here was deleted. You know exactly what crap I'm talking about. Cut it out.

Thank you Grendul for being positive! Yay!

Positive Note - Auto loot all for your corpse!

Yay me, now I can hit one button to auto loot when I die from rediculously high healing agro and a lack of any type of help to avoid it ever other then not healing.

Isn't a review suppose to include your "thoughts" regardless of being good or bad?

aybe this thread should be changed to Summit Review - Positive thoughts only?

No need to reply I won't be responding on this thread again and do hope your positive outlook helps. I just don't see it happening from the facts being laid out at this time.

On the autoloot all idea

Can we make it autoloot all -1?

Say the whole corpse gets looted except for the item in the first slot. Wouldn't be hard to right click the last item and be on your way...

Otherwise they are gonna be swamped with more petitions stating "You're stupid autoloot button made me loot all my corpse and now i want my EXP back"

They are trying to slim down the petition list no?

Hollowends

I know... I toned it way down from what I wanted to type however. I just get so frustrated with the complete lack of understanding that timesinks are not a way to create longevity in a game.

I understood the first time loud and clear. That's what *you* think. What *I* think is that EQ is intentionally using the Delayed Gratification principle. *I* think it made for a game that has far surpassed expectations. It went far beyond, in longevity, the most optimistic plannings. Obviously, EQ is proof before your eyes that Delayed Gratification can be used in a game that can last a long time.

It's not lack of understanding... On the contrary. It's realizing that it is one possible game-design, that it will not cater to everyone, but it will attract some. Just like first-person shooters aren't for everyone.

It's also highly dependent on what you call a timesink.. see my above post ;-)

Callahad

Thornsong I felt we wasted about 1/2 the time alloted us on things that affect the whole world instead of my guild. I did see the point of it, but I did want to focus on my problems.

This is why Panamah expressed concern about SOE restricting summit invitations to higher end guildleaders and high profile community voices. You felt that discussing questions about "casual play" was a waste of time (your own words), and you wanted to focus on the problems that matter to you and your guild, right here in today's game -- regardless of how you might have played EQ at any point in the past. And I'm not blaming you for having felt that way, just pointing out why so many folks didn't feel represented.

Chenier This Summit and the document they gave us is a FIRST STEP. You can't change everything for everyone at once and make everyone happy. You can't tell me that there is not one single thing in that list that doesn't make you go "yeah, that might be cool".

There are absolutely a few things in the list I think will be cool, no doubt! My concern, however, is that overall gameplay issues are taking a back seat to issues related to the highest tier of content.

Even assuming another summit is forthcoming in 6 months to go back and address the more universal problems... that's an awfully long time for players to stew about being left feeling alienated or neglected this time around, especially with other games nearing some form of public release. How are those suddenly happy high-tier guilds going to offset natural attrition if their potential recruits are no longer playing EQ?

Another example of SOE not placing enough focus where it would do the most good:
If, instead of promising new character models by the end of this year, they had promised to have all graphics/dx9 issues ironed out for existing character models and zones, I would've been much more encouraged.

Think about it. After SOE's performance over the past year, the very last thing players want to hear is that they're going to faced with stuff that caused severe performance problems last time models changed. I know too many people who still use the velious models and who are going to be understandably leary of version 3.0... at best, not exactly a reason to feel encouraged by the news from this summit.

~Firemynd

"I see this as I have seen every other SOE promise to change. I will not accept or deny it. I will not give in to "hope" or "dispare." I simply await the next few patch messages."

Good point Hollow, we need to look at these things from all angles.

Hollowends, excellent thought:
On the autoloot all idea

Can we make it autoloot all -1?

Say the whole corpse gets looted except for the item in the first slot. Wouldn't be hard to right click the last item and be on your way...

Otherwise they are gonna be swamped with more petitions stating "You're stupid autoloot button made me loot all my corpse and now i want my EXP back"

They are trying to slim down the petition list no?

I HOPE this most insightful idea catches a developer's eye.

~Firemynd

Correct me if I am wrong, but I would think full autoloot would be an option... right? I think it's the easiest answer. Autoloot -1 runs into the problem of which item you leave on your corpse. Especially if you have more than 1 corpse.

Callahad

For a meeting of the minds to work, BOTH sides would have to be willing to give up a few ghosts. For the Druids we need to stop thinking of the clerics only healers and buffers and start helping them find somewhere else to shine, for the clerics they need to come to the table with a willingness to break at least 2 or 3 of their 6 monopolys Rez, Big Fast Heal, CH, Group Heals, HoTs, Buffs.

Secondly the hotheads amongst both groups would need to stop bashing each other for a while. It's not polite to go trolling in someone else's home and a person should be admonished on both communities when they do. This goes double for admins and board leaders who should know better. You want to rant about how unfair the other side is being go to the unkempt forum.

It cannot be one sided though. From what I have seen the Druid and Shaman community has been upset about the heals at least since PoP. The clerics have been buttonholed in their role for at least that long as well. There is ALOT of old hurts that were never addressed. We cannot fix the past and yes a time geared level 52 monk will still be able to solo Vox.

We should move on to a new order of business though especially with 5 more levels that IF DONE PROPERLY could fix the high end game for starters. I am not saying that should be the end of the project, but it sounds to me like a reasonable place to start. Most of us here are 60+ with a decent amount of /played time in. I do not mean to slight the sub 60 crowd, but building new has always been easier than remodeling old. If we could come together and at least get levels 65-70 correct that would give us a template to look back and start fixing the older content/levels.

Lastly we need a unbiased person to head the project up. Someone who is not a Cleric, Druid or a Shaman, but has enough gusto to say "Hey your way over the line".

Ellzii

Chenier, an off topic note to your side topic of healing...

It's my firm belief that if you want to delve into the "what's wrong with and how do we fix" healing, you need to bring all parties to the table with an exclusive understanding. That would be that the discussions are ONLY for healing balance within the game and peripheral topics of other skills, talents, spells, AAs will not be brought into the mix. That the ONLY discussion would be healing and additional "class balancing" would be addressed in a completely seperate forum.

I will say, however, that this IS SOE's job and while they might appreciate player input, they are the ones who need the "buy in" to make it happen. I would think that SOE is better equipped to review and make global changes from ideas presented from individual groups than a collection of ideas presented by a consortium. This allows them the flexibility to take their own path and anger far fewer players when they find something that some players want isn't what they are willing to do. Yeah... the players have a vested interested in the game, however, at the end of the day, it's SOE who has to make their own game integrity decisions whether we like them or not.

If a roundtable of a dozen people comes out and says "this is what we have all come up with and are presenting to SOE", how many in the player community will flare with anger when SOE says "we thing we can make 8 of these 20 suggestions work" (or even 18 of 20). It's back to "they don't care enough about our wants to fix the game".

Even for SOE to say "your idea of getting the healers together to talk sounds great but we are taking a different direction" is going to be a touchy response if they are asked today. I suppose the question would have been better put to Brenlo before it went public. :/

I would really appreciate it if you guys could please try to take on a positive attitude about this. The dev's are reading these boards (after working really hard this past weekend) and it's depressing to them to see so much negativity. It's depressing to me.I'll be the first to admit that I am much more... confrontational... on the boards then I am in game. I want to see issues that affect me addressed. In game, I try 'n have fun and forget about the problems. I havn't played for a few months now though, partly 'cuz I'm dating da ladies IRL, and partly because I'm just tired of the BS in game. Sometimes... it's simply hard to stay positive with such a long history (Druid class); some cuts run pretty deep.

But here's to all things in EQ being made fun again! /cheers I hope it happens.

Obviously, EQ is proof before your eyes that Delayed Gratification can be used in a game that can last a long time.
Delayed Gratification can still be used in a game that doesn't impose artifical timesinks on the players. Especially stupid timesinks that require four hours or more to get through in one game session. I've said it many times, I don't care if it takes me 50 hours of questing to obtain an item (as long as it's worth it). Just so long as those 50 hours aren't all in a row and it's not a bunch of boring camps. If I can't make reasonable progress (aside from XP) in two or three hours, that's a serious problem. That is the biggest problem I have with EQ. Anything longer than three hours seriously cramps a time-limited player that could possibly be quite capable of defeating that content, but cannot because they don't have the uninterrupted time to do something of that magnitude. There is a point at which even a series of small quests becomes too much for the time-limited gamer too. Take the LDoN armor/augments for example. 2+ years to get a full set of armor/weapons and augments for them. That's too long.

I'd much rather have a 10 part quest that takes roughly 2 hours for each part to complete than a single quest that takes 20 freaking hours sitting in the same spot to complete. It's more work for the devs, but provides and overall better gaming experience and much more immersive and story-rich atmosphere. It involves the player in the storyline much, much more.

Then what you are against is not timesinks, its badly tuned encounters... right? That makes sense, and I would agree with you. the only difference then is that I adopt a more positive view than you.
No, I am adamantly against timesinks. If it takes more than two-three hours to complete a task in EQ, that's too long. There are camps in EQ that take upwards of 40+ hours. Stormfeather, Raster of Guk to name a couple, unless you get extremely lucky and happen to be in the right place at the right time. Poorly tuned encounters are seperate problem altogether. I could design better encounters in NWN all day long.

If i wanted a Halo type of game, I would not play EQ, but a Halo type of game.
I was comparing the excitment generated by the fast and furious combat in Halo to the boring single pulls in EQ. It is possible to make the combat in EQ more exciting without twitch combat. I just want exciting combat. Mobs that are little bit smarter than moshing on the big meatshield taunting them. Random battle cries during combat would be great. I love it in Halo when you stick a plasma grenade on a grunt and the run around screaming, "Get it off!" or when you toss a frag grenade down the hallway and you see the little buggers scamper off in all directions shouting, "Grenade!"

It's hilarious and immersive. I hope little things like that make it into EQ2. I'd love to see things like that in EQ. Anything to make the game more fun and less of a chore. Grinding XP for AA's, farming green con mobs for quest drops... that's not fun. That's boring. Killing one mob at a time in the same spot... not fun. Fighting hordes of monsters and standing victorious over the mounds of slain foes... now that's fun.

You will love GoD then. That's exactly what the sewers and Vxed/Tipt are. - Thornsong
Except because of timesinks in previous expansions and being tuned for the uber goobers geared up from those expansions, I cannot participate in the GoD sewers and trials. My rogue is wearing Tae Ew chainmail pieces and quite a bit of random bazaar bought gear. I was lucky to break 4.5k hp with the very best buffs. The typical end game rogue has closer to 6-7k and a boatload of AA's. I think my rogue only has like 50-60 aa's. I spent more time in EQ socializing because it was pointless for me to waste my time attempting to see the end game at my own pace. Only being able to play two hour chunks here and there makes it impossible to get through Luclin/PoP/GoD. If they broke up encounters/quests into two hour chunks, it would be accessible to nearly everyone that is a capable enough player. Nothing would stop the powergamers from playing 6+ hours and doing 3 parts of the quest, but at least the time-limited player like myself would be able to do 1 part of the quest every now and then and eventually complete it.

I just want to have fun in a game that doesn't feel like it's a second job. If I have to sit in the same spot doing the same thing over and over just to get some meager reward, that's a job. It's akin to sitting in a mailroom sorting the mail as it comes in and then a week later collecting your paycheck. That's not a game. That's a job.

My ideal EQ night would consist of the following:

Log-in, say hi to the guild, my friends. Do a bit of shopping for necessities (food/drink if low, arrows or daggers to restock, and maybe a potion or two). Then I'd grab some of my LFG friends or some random people from the LFG tool and go do something fun that doesn't involve repetitive tunnels or sitting in the same spot killing one mob at a time. Maybe one of my friends has an instanced quest to complete and needs some help. The adventure lasts about two hours, we get some xp, some coin, maybe a nice drop or two, and my friend gets what they need. We have fun. It didn't take 6 hours of camping the same spot killing a placeholder over and over and hoping the rare spawn mob would drop the rare item needed for the quest.

Well. I'm not a druid (never played one past tenth level) but like many other retired players, I'm reading everything I can find from the various people who attended. I have reached the following conclusions:

1. Sony is scared *bleep*less.
2. Sony only invited, listened to, and cares about the uberguilders. Period.
3. The bulk of the casual playerbase knows this and is still hostile to SOE.
4. The bulk of the non-casual playerbase is also still highly skeptical.
5. Therefore, Sony has NOT achieved their goal of "fixing things."
6. Yes, that means their goal was NOT to actually fix anything, it was really to convince us that they cared enough to fix them. They invited 60 people to SanDiego, gave them song, dance, wine (and stronger spirits), plus much swag and then said "Hey, watch us fall on our swords!" Then they spent two days taking notes on THINGS WE HAVE BEEN SUBMITTING VIA /bug AND /feedback FOR 2 FREAKING YEARS!!!!! Or at least notes on the ones that affected uberguilders enough that they deemed fit to mention them. ("Oh look they fixed Plane of Time instancing, that helps 0.001% of the server population!")
7. Conclusion #6 is subject to being changed IF and ONLY IF Sony backs up their talk with real action. I'm just enough interested to wait.

And meanwhile, I'm watching SWG start to travel down this same road to perdition. Nobody can convince me _SONY_ has learned anything until I see it cross game boundries. Otherwise we can only say "Smedley learned something."

First of all, THANK YOU CHENIER for summarizing the druid community concerns and presenting them at the summit. Also, thanks for reporting back to us on what was discussed.
I am hopeful that positive things will be done to help all types of players , but I am in agreement with just about everything Firemynd has been posting. I agree that by deciding to focus on one specialized group of players for their first Summit, that SoE has sent a message to the rest of the players.
Anyways, I pretty much can't add much more to what Firemynd has already posted (in a much clearer and organized manner than I can right now) throughout this thread, so I'll just say: /agree Firemynd.

Oh, and yes I still play EQ and I am in a casual, but fun guild. We are limited by numbers and also many of our players have limited time that they can play.

I forgot If I posted this on this board, but they are considering having a partial sellback for LDON Armor, so you get points back making it easier to have a progressive upgrade path there..

Remember this is just considering so it may or may not materialize

I forgot If I posted this on this board, but they are considering having a partial sellback for LDON Armor, so you get points back making it easier to have a progressive upgrade path there..

That would help some, but would in no way speed up the time it takes to get the full set and would probably only increase it as I'm almost 100% positive... maybe 99.9% positive the buy back would never be the full cost of the armor. So it would really be pointless for them to add that ability if they're not going to allow you to sell it back at full cost.

I would take half cost for a few of my bought peices of gear that I have since upgraded. I would consider it payment for how useful it was to me for the time in which I used it. What vendor in their right mind would take back a blood soaked tunic at what he sold it 6 months ago? Youd be killing the gnome economy!

Quote:
I forgot If I posted this on this board, but they are considering having a partial sellback for LDON Armor, so you get points back making it easier to have a progressive upgrade path there..

That would help some, but would in no way speed up the time it takes to get the full set and would probably only increase it as I'm almost 100% positive... maybe 99.9% positive the buy back would never be the full cost of the armor. So it would really be pointless for them to add that ability if they're not going to allow you to sell it back at full cost.

Reusable augments will help some at least.

Even partial buy back is good for people who have armor already and want to be able to move to the new elemental level armor that has been discussed.

Delayed Gratification can still be used in a game that doesn't impose artifical timesinks on the players. Especially stupid timesinks that require four hours or more to get through in one game session. I've said it many times, I don't care if it takes me 50 hours of questing to obtain an item (as long as it's worth it). Just so long as those 50 hours aren't all in a row and it's not a bunch of boring camps.

Now we are getting somewhere. So you are not against timesinks. By definition, a timesink is spending time, lots of it, to achieve a goal. What you are against is having to spend 5 hours in a row doing something.

That I agree with. I will note however that things are not as bad as you make them to be. Most PoP mobs can be done easily within 2 hours. The exceptions being Xegony and Rathe. Rathe is too fun an encounter to reduce in time spent though. That leaves Xegony, and Xegony herself is one hour, with like 3 hours to get everyone there prepped and ready.

As fair as raid zones, VT and PoTime are the zones with the biggest one-sit time sinks. Nothing however obligates you to be there for every single mob. Except social guild pressure of course, depending on your guild.

Raster is prolly the worst of all mob camps.

And yes I agree with incremental quests. LdoN is designed like that. 8th shawl. 10th ring. Breakdown in Communication. Everything I have done in GoD so far has been under 3 hours. And unlike most people, I find it not too boring and repetitive.

So you see, while I agree with you, it's just not that bad to me.

2+ years to get a full set of armor/weapons and augments for them. That's too long.

Again I wont comment on numbers. I have an ex-guildmate who pretty much got everything he wanted from LdoN within 6 months. /shrug Again, as long as its not too easy.

I was comparing the excitment generated by the fast and furious combat in Halo to the boring single pulls in EQ.

Wow. I have much to say to that comment.I'll try and be brief. Emp Ssra. Rathe Council. MANY PoTime gods. Xegony. Saryrn. Most of GoD raids.

In single group camps, or solo camps, you can have a challenge bringing one mob to camp. Or you can save yourself the trouble and bring a few, so you dont have that "boring single pull".


It is possible to make the combat in EQ more exciting without twitch combat. I just want exciting combat. Mobs that are little bit smarter than moshing on the big meatshield taunting them. Random battle cries during combat would be great. I love it in Halo when you stick a plasma grenade on a grunt and the run around screaming, "Get it off!" or when you toss a frag grenade down the hallway and you see the little buggers scamper off in all directions shouting, "Grenade!"

Fun ideas. Graphics, sounds. A little immersive script that doesnt affect gameplay too much. Eye and ear candy. Not dismissing your ideas, they are really great. But I am much more into the core than the dressing, so forgive me if I am not overly excited.

The typical end game rogue has closer to 6-7k and a boatload of AA's. I think my rogue only has like 50-60 aa's.

You would be surprised. You would have enough to get into many a PoTime guild, imho. From there, within 6 months, assuming you were participating semi-regularly in the raids, you would get a whole lot of gear. With the right guild, your schedule would be ok with them. I know druids with about 100AAs that are Uqua enabled...

aybe one of my friends has an instanced quest to complete and needs some help. The adventure lasts about two hours, we get some xp, some coin, maybe a nice drop or two, and my friend gets what they need. We have fun. It didn't take 6 hours of camping the same spot killing a placeholder over and over and hoping the rare spawn mob would drop the rare item needed for the quest.

GoD trials. Breakdown in communication. A few PoP quests.

Callahad

Buyback will help along the way, but it in no way helps the actual length of time it takes to get the best armor. Do the math yourself. It'll boggle you. If LDoN armor is supposed to be the casual/time limited players path for upgrading, it needs to be made reasonable. The current points reward and AP costs for items are far out of whack for a time limited player.

This is why Panamah expressed concern about SOE restricting summit invitations to higher end guildleaders and high profile community voices. You felt that discussing questions about "casual play" was a waste of time (your own words), and you wanted to focus on the problems that matter to you and your guild, right here in today's game -- regardless of how you might have played EQ at any point in the past. And I'm not blaming you for having felt that way, just pointing out why so many folks didn't feel represented.

Right, but let me clarify. We actually talked about stuff for the under 30 people who have been playing for FIVE years. That imo, is TOO casual that you don't need to add new content for them. Anyone who plays consistent enough will surpass that. I mean we talked about adding LDON adventures for people under level 10.

I currently play 2-3 nights a week for about 3-4 hours a night, with usually 5-6 hours on Saturday. Am I uber? About 1-2 days a month I deviate and play for a 12 hour stretch if I can get off work. I consider myself time-resistricted but I spend my time online worth while and focused. I started a guild. I have completed every quest I considered worthwhile through PoP, including the Aid Grimel quest.

y three biggest issues for the summit were:

1. Making it so a guild can play together when people are not flagged.
2. Making it so that when I only have an hour, it is worthwhile to log on.
3. Making it so that backflagging isn't constant so you don't have to go back and do old world content so much.

I think you would be suprised at how many us uberguild leaders can relate to ya'll.

I'd much rather have a 10 part quest that takes roughly 2 hours for each part to complete than a single quest that takes 20 freaking hours sitting in the same spot to complete. It's more work for the devs, but provides and overall better gaming experience and much more immersive and story-rich atmosphere. It involves the player in the storyline much, much more.

I thought you said you didn't like the VT quest.

Chenier -

I’m sure all the priests would love to discuss balancing, but it would need to be done in a neutral forum. I’m not sure that can be done on any class forum. As a cleric, I completely realize the stranglehold we have on healing in this game and I would be more than eager to see other classes share this role.

However whether you agree or not, many clerics (myself included) feel very unbalanced in the non-healing game. Once healing is good enough between all the priests, it then turns to a “what else can you do” comparison. No class willingly becomes the gimp class – clerics will never support increases to druid healing without a complete balancing picture. Whether this is perceived as the “zero sum” philosophy or not – this is our viewpoint as we feel that if healing was comparatively equal that there would be no reason to invite a cleric to a group. From what I’ve seen here, we see rez like you see ports & evacs – nice to have, but not critical to a group.

For any reasonable, constructive discussion to take place between the priests it needs to be done at the complete class level and not at a single function level such as healing. Flame me if you will, but if the classes want to work together they need to understand where each other are coming from and what their concerns are.

Didn't mean to derail - just one humble cleric's opinion

Did any druids bother to bring up why they killed wolf form?

Talking about making the game fun, this was fun. Do they still have the attitude that led to the killing of wolf form, i.e., fun is bad?

They should definitely fix the faction problems with wolf form, the bobbing when attacking and fix the spells so they are useful. A self wolf from spell that does the same exact thing as the Mask spells but also has wolf form / SoW is the kind of thing that would be useful and fun. Oh, make it indoor castable too, since they removed that restriction with the LDoN spell.

And Alchork, as a guild leader, I begged them to make clerics so overpowered that everyone would want to play them as they are the single most needed classes for raids.

I thought you said you didn't like the VT quest.

It took me four hours soloing hoppers to get my first shard. Well over four hours of grouping in Maiden's Eye near AR to get that shard. I spent two hours soloing revs in Scarlet Desert for that shard. It was painful. I died many times. And was, in the end, very pointless. The rest of the shards would take me more than four hours each. Some probably ten or more because I would have to find groups to go with me. Find people that either are suckers for a pretty smile or friends that don't mind boring camps and don't need the shards or find a shard group and have to possibly walk away from six hours of camping with nothing to show for it because the RNG screwed me.

If the VT key quest could be completed in 20 hours in 10 two hour chunks, I would've been in VT a long time ago. It's not possible except in extenuating circumstances and matters of extreme luck. Yeah you'll hear of people that went with a group to each shard camp and in four or five hours had every shard, but that is the exception.

The VT key quest is not a good example of a segmented quest. It is in fact quite boring and farming shards is just plain stupid and very bad quest design. I'll write up the quest I would've made to gain access to VT later. I'm busy in CoH at the moment though.

As fair as raid zones, VT and PoTime are the zones with the biggest one-sit time sinks. Nothing however obligates you to be there for every single mob. Except social guild pressure of course, depending on your guild.

I tried the raid thing for awhile. Raids were never just two hours. It was always at least four and usually ended up nearing six or seven. And most raid guilds require you to have at least 80% attendance. Oftentimes the first two hours were just set-up and finding a target to raid. Very, very boring.

Again I wont comment on numbers. I have an ex-guildmate who pretty much got everything he wanted from LdoN within 6 months. /shrug Again, as long as its not too easy.

Your friend prolly didn't go for a full set of gear and augments from LDoN as I would. The best chain gear from LDoN is better than my set of armor. Add in augments and it would double my effectiveness. That's not worth two years of doing 5 LDoN's a week.

Wow. I have much to say to that comment.I'll try and be brief. Emp Ssra. Rathe Council. MANY PoTime gods. Xegony. Saryrn. Most of GoD raids.

The problem with those is that the competition often kills them before the time limited raider can get enough people online to kill the mob. You can't schedule them. If progression mobs were instanced it would be different. Set-up would be a helluva lot easier as the casual guild could plan their raid two-three weeks in advance. I don't like the competitive raid target crap either. Racing for mobs is just plain stupid.

In single group camps, or solo camps, you can have a challenge bringing one mob to camp. Or you can save yourself the trouble and bring a few, so you dont have that "boring single pull".

Yeah. Right. Try getting the group to do that next time you enter some random pickup group in BoT or Valor or somewhere.

Fun ideas. Graphics, sounds. A little immersive script that doesnt affect gameplay too much. Eye and ear candy. Not dismissing your ideas, they are really great. But I am much more into the core than the dressing, so forgive me if I am not overly excited.

Once it was done however, it would be very easy to go back and change old phrases, add new phrases and the like on a whim. Especially if they were made into a small seperate library the mobs could pull the text from.

Fun ideas. Graphics, sounds. A little immersive script that doesnt affect gameplay too much. Eye and ear candy. Not dismissing your ideas, they are really great. But I am much more into the core than the dressing, so forgive me if I am not overly excited.

ost ele+ guilds on my server require 100+ aa's and a specific set of resists I cannot hope to match in a timely manner. They also require a lot of flags that I just don't have and cannot get.

I think this thread needs a scorecard. Or at least a synopsis. ;)

If progression mobs were instanced it would be different.

Heh, us non-caring uberguilders actually recommended that in the future they make all of progression instanced. The only static mobs should be non-required loot mobs. The devs I talked to thought this was a solid step as well.

And Alchork, as a guild leader, I begged them to make clerics so overpowered that everyone would want to play them as they are the single most needed classes for raids.

I saw that comment in reading thru the threads. As a raid leader for my guild (working on Uqua - we are an "uber?" family guild), I hate the fact that we have about 4 clerics per every druid. I would love healing to be balanced so that we can reasonably substitute druids/shamans/paladins for clerics as the individual situation warrants.

Healing upgrades are desperately needed for the non-clerics, but I am extremely worried what that would do to the cleric class (not just because I play one).

Heh, us non-caring uberguilders actually recommended that in the future they make all of progression instanced. The only static mobs should be non-required loot mobs. The devs I talked to thought this was a solid step as well.

Instanced progression mobs helps ubers just as much, if not more than it helps time-limited / casualgamers. So don't try to say that you're advocating instanced content solely for the benefit of the casual gamer. 8p

"I’m not sure that can be done on any class forum."

It is possible. I did it once.. It has to be expressly heavily moderated. I'm not doing it again.

If anyone can do it, Chen can. I know she can; I and the other mods, I am sure, would be glad to help.

I as a cleric would also support a multi-healer class discussion on how to solve the healing discussion--BUT only if it brought in the total balance.



It's my firm belief that if you want to delve into the "what's wrong with and how do we fix" healing, you need to bring all parties to the table with an exclusive understanding. That would be that the discussions are ONLY for healing balance within the game and peripheral topics of other skills, talents, spells, AAs will not be brought into the mix. That the ONLY discussion would be healing and additional "class balancing" would be addressed in a completely seperate forum

I would never support or participate in this. To me it sounds suspiciously like. Make druids and shaman heal almost equal to clerics and then when clerics cant bring anthing extra and cant get groups-we will support them later to get their adjustments to almost equal in utility and dps NUDGE NUDGE WINK WINK.

As a cleric I am very skeptical the follow on cleric fix would ever be addressed or that we would have any support from our fellow druid and shamans to help fix us once we had helped fix them.

The fix cant happen in a vacuum. You cant make druids and shamans into cleric+ ie cleric level healing plus all of their added benefits.

A shaman with cleric level healing, slows to 1/4 mob damage, stat buffs, desists, better pet?

A druid with cleric level healing, twice as much dps, twice as much utility, charm ability (I know its weak but it is better then what we have)

A cleric--------retired due to "who the &^&*^ wants this lame ass who offers nothing but heals that the other two classes cover plus"

No. A discussion on balancing healing classes is overdue, but it must bring into play a balance of all areas. Not just healing. i would welcome druids and shaman being able to heal almost as well as me and being able to be primary healer in groups and raids. But only if I shared their abilities in dps and utility also. Not their exact abilities but ones that were equal to them. Let me mitigate and melee well enough to solo 80% as well. give me invis/lev/see invis/eb. give me nuke resist debuffs, give me multiple nukes (only 80% as powerful as druids nukes but with different resists than just magic and with quicker recasts and less mana--the same problem you face with heals (ie more mana for less healed--we face with nukes. we pay more mana for less damage and on the most resisted type of nuke possible.

dots, snares, ports, wolf form, charm, dire charm, quad nukes should all remain the druid only flavor with harmony being able to work indoors

better mitigation due to plate armor, da, better melee damage should remain cleric only flavor

slow, canni, massive debuffs, best pet should remain the shaman flavor

heals almost equal.

If you want to make them equal then the nukes should be equal also instead of clerics only 80%. but even being equal you could have each have their own specialty. ie clerics get biggest heals 5 levels earlier, druids get group heals 5 levels earlier, shaman get HOT 5 levels earlier and they all get fast heals at same level.

rez. If all 3 had equal rez then the advantage of evac and ports back to corpses with invis and SOE would give the advantage to druids.

so maybe make clerics and shaman with equal rez at 96% and drop druid rez down to 75% to counter their chance to evac instead of needing to rez. or offer druids a choice of specializing in rez or evac. you choose one and you can never scribe the other in your spell book. egress, ports and circles would still work, but any kind of group evac would be sacrificed for the 96% rez.

Just some ideas.

but fixing healing in a vacuum. I would fight it tooth and nail. I know as a cleric from experience that once other classes heal a certain content well enough, that they offer so much more that my grouping ability as a cleric goes down the ****ter.

I agree we need an all-priest healing conference. My target would be to move toward a 100%:80%:60% Cleric to Druid to Shaman healing paradigm. We would get bigger faster quick heals, fully-moddable CH without the 75% restrictions, and group heals - shaman would get pretty close to what we have now.

Clerics can have 10k hps and mez for all I care - there arent enough my server that aren't bots for it to matter anyway.

Reading through the summary post, I have to wonder...

what is WIP?

Reading through the summary post, I have to wonder...

what is WIP?
Work in Progress.

I don't know why they needed a summit, spending huge amounts of money to find out what anyone playing the game knows. Reading the fan web site forums can tell you what you need to do to fix the game, if you want to hear from lots of informed people.

Everything they listed has been discussed on this and the other fan boards. I'm guessing this was more a PR stunt to show us they are listening. Either that or the bosses are so stubborn that they had to have a summit with people face to face to show them what needs to be done.

Frankly, if I was on the EQ staff, I would have done this all from the SOE forums, first reading the major class boards and then emailing the people who were invited to the summit for details and opinions.

But it did give some cool people a free trip to EQ headquarters, so I hope they had fun. But it wasn't necessary unless SOE is too lame to do anything without a face to face meeting.

Frankly, if I was on the EQ staff, I would have done this all from the SOE forums, first reading the major class boards and then emailing the people who were invited to the summit for details and opinions.
Reading and filtering ALL of the fansites, class boards, server boards and guild boards to summarize and find what things are needed to fix the game would take an army of people. All those boards produce untold VOLUMES of information, much of which is repeated or not related. Brenlo said that he does read the boards everyday, but I think what you are thinking should happen is impossible.

We have a responsibility as a class board to collect the druid issues, complaints, request, ideas and solutions, summarize and prioritize them and present them to SOE. A unified voice is strong.

But it wasn't necessary unless SOE is too lame to do anything without a face to face meeting.

Not really sure why the bitterness.... meeting and talking with a group of people in person is about 1,000 times more effective in every conceivable way than doing stuff via email and forum messages.

Not really sure why the bitterness.... meeting and talking with a group of people in person is about 1,000 times more effective in every conceivable way than doing stuff via email and forum messages.
Sorry, I shouldn't have come across bitter.

It's just that listening to your customers is so basic, I found it strange that they needed something so special to do so.

As for what Chenier said about that they can't read everything posted, that is true. It is also true that this board has made up petitions and currently has threads that break down what we want into easy to read items.

This board and the other class boards have no problem with presenting our ideas in an short, easy to read form for Sony any time. All they have to do is ask.

Again, I have no problem with the summit. It just seems a lot of money was spent for something that can be done just by paying attention to the players. I guess for a company the size of SOE it was pocket change, though. Frankly, anything that helps is good. I'm all for the summits if that's what it takes. I'm just the kind of person who favors function over form.

Did any druids bother to bring up why they killed wolf form?


I don't know why anyone would want to bring this up. Knowing the way I was treated just a few months ago when I brought this up at fan faire. I think that even just looking at the list that they have put out they really are still missing the boat. The problems EQ will be facing are fundemental issues. The Next generation MMOGs have develope ways of dealing with issues like the death penalty, delevling, down time, character portability, self expression, customization and, support of multiple play styles. Unless they are talking about dealing with these issues then the end is inevidable. They don't even really have the luxury of time because the next generation MMOGs are released or soon to be released. These issues are obviously issues they had the luxury of looking at EQ and saying we aren't making the same mistakes. Even EQ2 has had this luxury. Infact all that I have heard about EQ2 says that they have done things to deal with these issues. So why not at the same time try to incorperate these same solutions into EQ? I think fundementally if that doesn't happen EQ1 will not stand.

Did any druids bother to bring up why they killed wolf form? I don't know why anyone would want to bring this up. Knowing the way I was treated just a few months ago when I brought this up at fan faire. I think that even just looking at the list that they have put out they really are still missing the boat. The problems EQ will be facing are fundamental issues.
True. Wolf form isn't a fundamental issue.

But I brought it up in relation to several posts that one thing people were saying is they miss is the "fun factor" they used to have when they played EQ.

Not only do I want wolf form back, but I'm also curious about whether SOE has changed their attitude about fun. Crippling wolf form seemed to me to be a indicator of a fun factor that was removed for no reason and the many druids asking for it to be fixed were ignored.

I'm really thinking of coming back to EQ. But I know I will be frustrated if I send them suggestions on how to make the game more fun and remove annoying stuff and SOE just ignores it as before.

from consolidation thread

Omens of War will only have one flagged zone, although some high-end zones may be locked (aka: Veeshan's Peak).



from updated Warrior thread
http://www.thesteelwarrior.org/forum/showthread.php?t=7457

OOW will only have a very small number (I was told 1) of locked zones. The end encounters will be locked, but anyone will be free to go into the zone.

...

Epic 1.5's. These are designed more for Time-level people, while 2.0's are aimed at the endgame.

I don't want this to come accross the way I know it is going to, but I can not really come up with another way to put so...

Unless you can come up with how Wolf Form is going to effect the current or even future end game, I seriously doubt anyone will push it forward.

No one seems to want anything because it is kind of cool or fun any more, it really has become far too much like work for way too many people.

Now to completely be the person I just discussed....


Did anyone else notice that 65-70 spells are realy a duplicate of the 60-65 spells. We can hope this will change, or has the last creative person really left the buillding.

The EQ team needs more than a summitt, they need to be inspired. I really never was Brads biggest fan, but between him, those that left with him and those that went to EQ2, EQLive has been left with a huge creative hole.

It is pretty clear that even upper management (primarily John Smedley) looked at EQ live as their cash cow, and did not give it a second thought until they announced an expansion and no one handed over their wallet.

I am not trying to slam the EQlive team, I am sure it is loaded with talented people, but there just seems to be no creative spark. The same could be said for whoever is developing expansions. They have made a lot of good solid code fixes lately. (Ignoring the testing ethic they already addressed). They just seem to be in the maintenance part of the life cycle, and for an MMORPG, that is death.

I'm really thinking of coming back to EQ. But I know I will be frustrated if I send them suggestions on how to make the game more fun and remove annoying stuff and SOE just ignores it as before.

Or even worse they laff at you and deride you for even asking the question. Don't get me wrong I totally agree with you about wolf form. Even though it's not a fundemental issue it's an attention to detail issue that would really show me that SOE has changed. Really I try to be optimistic about the future of EQ but, reading this thread is like a roller coaster. At times I see hope but, bringing up these years old issues like Wolf Form and I remember my bitterness.

Instanced progression mobs helps ubers just as much, if not more than it helps time-limited / casualgamers. So don't try to say that you're advocating instanced content solely for the benefit of the casual gamer.

Now now, be a good sport. You had no reason to say that. Admit it, a Uberguilder has managed to make a suggestion you yourself would have made, that affects positively the casual player.

It took me four hours soloing hoppers to get my first shard. Well over four hours of grouping in Maiden's Eye near AR to get that shard. I spent two hours soloing revs in Scarlet Desert for that shard. It was painful. I died many times.

REad yourself again. Read again what you wrote prior to the post. You specifically said these were "green-light blue" mobs that posed no challenge, and that you didn't mind spending 50 hours as long as you didnt have to spend it all in one sitting. Have you decided to change your arguments?

Because no challenge = no deaths as a prerequisite... Because pharming the shards *certainly* does not need to be done in one sitting. Because even so, you mightily complain about the time spent.

have to possibly walk away from six hours of camping with nothing to show for it because the RNG screwed me.

It may screw you, it may give you a boon. That's the name of the game. But to think you will only get screwed is not being totally objective about the system.

If the VT key quest could be completed in 20 hours in 10 two hour chunks, I would've been in VT a long time ago.

It IS breakable in whatever chunks you want. Furthermore, you said prior to that you did not mind spending 50 hours... Changed your mind?

The VT key quest is not a good example of a segmented quest. It is in fact quite boring and farming shards is just plain stupid and very bad quest design.

It answers all your criterias : it's breakable in chunks, it's challenging (proof of it, you died lots). What more do you want?

I tried the raid thing for awhile. Raids were never just two hours. It was always at least four and usually ended up nearing six or seven. And most raid guilds require you to have at least 80% attendance.

Now this is VERY uninformed. My guild finishes Pofire minis AND Powater minis within 4 hours. Thats like 12 raid-worthy targets right there. Grummus can be done by an EP guild in less than an hour. Manaetic Behemoth is so quick it's ridiculous - it's just set up time, and nothing over an hour of setup time is good. You obviously had a couple bad experiences with raids and wrongly concluded that this was typical. I strongly advise you to get a more informed opinion about the matter.

About the 80% raidind attendance; UUUHHH???? Actually, I do not know of a SINGLE raid guild that *requires* that much attendance. If some exist, they are likely to either falter out of existence, or be in the very very top on your server (they are in Qvic and further atm). So hearing this I strongly suspect you have only looked at 1 or 2 guilds, the top guilds on your server. Or pulled that number out of thin air.


Your friend prolly didn't go for a full set of gear and augments from LDoN as I would.

Why, as a matter of fact, he DID get a full set, plus augments...

Yeah. Right. Try getting the group to do that next time you enter some random pickup group in BoT or Valor or somewhere.

I have done that numerous times, especially in LDoN. Sometimes I didnt even need to bring it up. I think however that someone who dies a lot on VT shard mobs is highly challenged by BoT mobs, one at a time... wouldn't you say so?

Once it was done however, it would be very easy to go back and change old phrases, add new phrases and the like on a whim. Especially if they were made into a small seperate library the mobs could pull the text from.

What's your point? It's still just eye-candy, and I have explained to you it's not my cup of tea.

ost ele+ guilds on my server require 100+ aa's and a specific set of resists I cannot hope to match in a timely manner. They also require a lot of flags that I just don't have and cannot get.

Look again. My ex-guild is EP-enabled and required 50 AAs and no flags. I highly suspect a guild requiring 100AAs and sticking to that while being in the EP will find a hard time recruiting. If I were you, and interested in EQ and raiding, I would try and apply to such guilds before saying they wont do it. My feelings is AAs and flags won't be an issue. As far as resists, it's rather easy to get over 100. Just need a few hundred plats.

Callahad

Reading through the summary post, I have to wonder...

what is WIP?

Work in progress?

My guild's policy is, if we feel a person looks promising despite lack of AA's/flags/gear/whatever, we simply extend the recruitment period to give that person time to catch up (and typically a guildmember of the same class will help the person improve whatever area is lacking). This also gives guild members more time to meet that person, when the applicant might not be able to participate in many of our raids right away.

We had a cleric applicant who started off with under 50 AA's and a mana pool slightly over 4000. He managed to complete the trials with us to get kod'taz access and then held his own against the first named in trial 7--we beat that named on the first try with only him and myself as healers in a suboptimal group. Combined with a consistently positive attitude, he has really impressed many of us.

We had another applicant who applied missing most of his PoP flags. He's simply a lot of fun to be around; he really brightens up guildchat. He has also put a lot of effort into improving his character without asking for help, largely through LDoN and open raids.

As far as raid attendance, anytime we're raiding we are expected (but not required) to participate. The points system for loot of course favors people who are there day after day, but we have members that show up once every couple weeks or so too.

Now now, be a good sport. You had no reason to say that. Admit it, a Uberguilder has managed to make a suggestion you yourself would have made, that affects positively the casual player.
Regardless, instanced progression mobs help the ubers just as much if not more than casual players. Now if some uber guilber made a suggestion that only benefited the casual player, I'd be amazed.

Read again what you wrote prior to the post. You specifically said these were "green-light blue" mobs that posed no challenge, and that you didn't mind spending 50 hours as long as you didnt have to spend it all in one sitting. Have you decided to change your arguments?
They pose no challenge to a lvl 60+ group. As a solo rogue, even a level 65 rogue, I could kill one, but it takes freaking forever. I might kill a second one, and if I use my discs properly, kill three of them before I have to sit around waiting for discs to repop and binding my wounds. And that's only if I can get them one or two at a time. Three or more hoppers mash me into the ground faster than a ranger saying hi to Rallos Zek.

I guess I forgot something... I don't mind 50 hours on a quest, as long as it's fun. Mindless farming of trivial content is not a quest. It's a job. I don't pay SOE to make me work. I pay SOE to entertain me. Farming rare drops from rare spawn mobs (Maiden's Eye specifically) is just not fun. Getting only 1 drop for a group of six is just plain stupid. WoW/DAoC at least have that done right.

It answers all your criterias : it's breakable in chunks, it's challenging (proof of it, you died lots). What more do you want?
The VT key quest is not fun. It's a bunch of pointless farming with a couple raids. When I talk about quests... I mean QUESTS. Heavy storyline involvement. No pointless farming. Exciting and challenging encounters. Not farming green con mobs that can kill me. Rogues have it the hardest when it comes to quests. We almost always have to have a group help us and have no ability to use our class skills to aid. SOE in their infinite wisdom screwed rogues over with the pick pocket skill.

You know how many times a rogue is required to use that in the game for a quest? Twice. Once for picking Founy Jestands pockets and once for picking Tani' N'Mar's pockets. There's only one quest that requires a rogue to be sneaky and stealth. And that's also part of the epic. Sneak through the Plane of Hate to steal the Book of Souls.

My epic quest is the only damned quest where I actually felt like I was playing a rogue. A thief. Sure, I could design a much more fun quest that is a helluva lot more sneaky and shady full of intrigue and deception, but the rogue epic quest is the only quest I ever enjoyed doing. It's possible for the lucky rogue to only need to form two raids for the rogue epic. One for the wench in Steamfont and one for the General in Kithicor. These days it only requires a single group or a skilled duo/trio of level 65 characters.

Now this is VERY uninformed. My guild finishes Pofire minis AND Powater minis within 4 hours. Thats like 12 raid-worthy targets right there. Grummus can be done by an EP guild in less than an hour. Manaetic Behemoth is so quick it's ridiculous - it's just set up time, and nothing over an hour of setup time is good. You obviously had a couple bad experiences with raids and wrongly concluded that this was typical. I strongly advise you to get a more informed opinion about the matter.
It wasn't "a couple" bad experiences. It was pretty much every raid I went to barring a few good ones. Some of these raids were even scheduled events and people still straggled in to the meeting spot in ones and twos. I have an informed opinion on most of the game, barring events past Rallos Zek and much of GoD. With the proliferation of information about the game, someone could never have played the game yet still know pretty much everything you know.

That's not the way I want to play though. I want to see things firsthand. Experience the storyline events firsthand. I just absolutely do not want to be forced into changing my lifestyle outside the game to be able to do so. EQ is a damned game. Not a second job you schedule your real job around. You schedule EQ around your real job and real life.

The devs in EQ did not seem to understand that though and created content that forced people into making a hard decision that they should have had to make.

SOE has to do two things for me to come back to EQ.

1. Make the game fun to play again.
2. Make the game playable by everyone at their own pace instead of the pace dictated by artificial timesinks.

The first thing would take me pages to explain. The second one is simple. Remove the timesinks and let players play the game as fast or as slow as they want to. People are going to stay if the gameplay is good and they have good friends to game with. Even if they run out of content.

Look at the CoH. People that have run out of stuff to do are coming up with new things to do... like Thug Volleyball using the repel power. Look at the old Gnomeball matches in EQ. Or the drunken races. Given the tools, the players can come up with some wacky and crazy things to do to pass the time when they run out of content.

I have done that numerous times, especially in LDoN. Sometimes I didnt even need to bring it up. I think however that someone who dies a lot on VT shard mobs is highly challenged by BoT mobs, one at a time... wouldn't you say so?
Not as a rogue. I'm not tanking the mobs in BoT. 8p I'd wager 95% of the groups in typical xp places that I'm forced to go to only wnat to single pull xp grind. It's damned boring and pretty damned pointless to try and drag them to LDoN or into some revamped dungeon and crawl it. People are lazy and they are cowards. And as a rogue, I was pretty much forced to either log on an alt, log off, or take whatever meager group I could get since to try and get people to do something other than grind aaxp was like pulling teeth.

<snip> Not only do I want wolf form back, but I'm also curious about whether SOE has changed their attitude about fun. Crippling wolf form seemed to me to be a indicator of a fun factor that was removed for no reason and the many druids asking for it to be fixed were ignored.

(History lesson) When the original few petitions for the druid class were created, and even the newer ones, both wolf form and Booboo were pushed aside as very secondary "we'd like to address someday" issues. Wolf form in its original form was actually pretty overpowering, and it was understandable why it was nerfed. Wolf form made you non-KOS to over half the population of the old world. The most common exploits were players leap-frogging content, not to mention other griefing other players by camp stealing. The wolf form of lore was very close to the coveted "beta neutral" faction setting. Now, making wolf form reflecting your character's current faction setting (ie: no faction change) would make more sense, and wouldn't be overpowering. Giving wolf form a +1 faction bonus to good/neutral races and -1 to evil races wouldn't be bad either, imo.

Sorry to post so late! I just wanted to say it was great to meet you Chenier. You were so much fun to talk to!

It was a lot of fun, and Chenier asked a lot of excellent questions along the way. Next time you shall not resist my camera mezz though! If you notice Fricka was trying to sneak in a quick backstab :P

http://www.therunes.net/P1010041.JPG

Regardless, instanced progression mobs help the ubers just as much if not more than casual players. Now if some uber guilber made a suggestion that only benefited the casual player, I'd be amazed.

Again, why bring this up? Why would someone care where a good suggestion came from? Are you not happy to see that the Summit was NOT, after all, strictly for raiding?

They pose no challenge to a lvl 60+ group. As a solo rogue, even a level 65 rogue, I could kill one, but it takes freaking forever.

You died. Many times. It was a challenge.

I guess I forgot something... I don't mind 50 hours on a quest, as long as it's fun. Mindless farming of trivial content is not a quest.

It was not trivial. See above. Furthermore, the quest requires you to travel to 10 different places and hunt there for a while. There is lore to explain the quest. If the items dropped every single kill, it would make the quest totally trivial, and make getting into VT Instant Gratification. Exactly not what EQ is about.

Exciting and challenging encounters. Not farming green con mobs that can kill me. Rogues have it the hardest when it comes to quests. We almost always have to have a group help us and have no ability to use our class skills to aid.

Ah. So now we come to class balance. But first things first. What more do you want for challenge?? You have mobs that have and did kill you. How can mobs be at the same time trivial and dangerous enough to kill you? You make no sense whatsoever.

Class balance. That's an ongoing issue, for every class.

You know how many times a rogue is required to use that in the game for a quest? Twice.

Class balance again? Or are you saying Quests should allow classes to use their class-specific abilities more often?

I have an informed opinion on most of the game, barring events past Rallos Zek and much of GoD.

Then show it. To say raids take at least 4 hours is wrong. Bertoxx is time-limited to 2 hours. Villager trial is done in less than 30, plus setup time. RZ script takes about 20-45 minutes to get to from Zone In, and is from then on time-limited to less than an hour. VT is cleared in 6 to 24 hours depending of the guild; there are 14 raid targets in the zone. Hedge MAze is scripted ; takes about 45 minutes-1hour to complete. Agnarr is about 90 minutes. Coirnav needs to be done within 15 minutes once started.

Need I go on? I could talk luclin as well if you like, emp ssra, HP, Cursed, Arch Lich, Deep Burrower, Evolved Burrower. Or Velious with Vindy and AoW.

If your gripe is with the setup time, then I say, you totally exaggerate. And if you still think that it's too long, consider that EQ is a social game, and parts of being social is to be with others, even if they come late etc.

I just absolutely do not want to be forced into changing my lifestyle outside the game to be able to do so.

EQ is a social game. As with any social events, you have to schedule your time to allow it. Some can schedule it more often, some less. Some not at all. But to be unwilling to do so in EQ is to ignore the "social" part of the game that is EQ.

That's your choice. But in doing so, you are from the start limiting your EQ options. You then have to wonder if the options still available to you are enough. But to say that the "social" aspect of EQ should not be there simply because you dont want it there... Let's just say I totally disagree. There are other non-social games out there.

Look at the CoH. People that have run out of stuff to do are coming up with new things to do... like Thug Volleyball using the repel power.

ark my words. Once they run out of that stuff as well.... See what will happen. "Ahh, the good old days of CoH, where everything was fun, bright and shiny. Where has CoH come to?"

People are lazy and they are cowards. And as a rogue, I was pretty much forced to either log on an alt, log off, or take whatever meager group I could get since to try and get people to do something other than grind aaxp was like pulling teeth.

First off, insulting others gets you nowhere fast. Second off, you are again showing an uninformed viewpoint. Rogues are in good standings with groups. Wicked DPS, the ability to open up some areas, easier CR. Third off, EQ being a social game, you *want* to make friends. Eventually, when you log on, you have a decent-sized list of friends you have picked up along the way that share the same interests as you. It's part of the "challenge" that EQ offers...

Callahad

Wolf form in its original form was actually pretty overpowering, and it was understandable why it was nerfed. Wolf form made you non-KOS to over half the population of the old world. Now, making wolf form reflecting your character's current faction setting (ie: no faction change) would make more sense, and wouldn't be overpowering. Giving wolf form a +1 faction bonus to good/neutral races and -1 to evil races wouldn't be bad either, imo.
This is what we have been asking for. No faction change. Of course, if I really could get everything I wanted, I would ask for a few bonuses (like Unrest remaining wolf neutral) but I would settle for just no faction change.

It wasn't a case of fixing a problem in the best easy way. That would have been easy. All they had to do was make wolf form not change faction any from your non wolf form. That would have been the quick, easy fix.

Naturally, I would prefer a more detailed fix to allow some extras (like Unrest) but since I understand that it wasn't a priority, I would have been ok with just no faction change. Then maybe over months they could have adjusted it to give back Unrest.

But it has been YEARS and we are stuck with the worst of all possible worlds. Every NPC in the game (except for Unrest) lowers your faction by two places when you are a wolf. Even Misty thicket, home of Hobbits, the halfling NPCs like you less as a wolf. Halflings hating druids? Next, see Merry and Pippin deciding they hate food.

If you have to nerf something fast and don't have time to do the job right, at least do it in a way that doesn't destroy something fun. But for an unknown reason, they chose the worst way. You can't convince me that they couldn't have just made it no faction change.

There are other issues with wolf form. But that was the killer. The middle finger that SOE gave druids (and rangers).

Again, why bring this up? Why would someone care where a good suggestion came from? Are you not happy to see that the Summit was NOT, after all, strictly for raiding?
The suggestion for intanced progression mobs was not made solely for a casual gamer. Nothing talked about at the summit solely affected the casual gamer. It was all raid crap and general bugfixes that affect everyone. When I see an actual list of things SOE's fixing that truly takes a look at the plight of the casual gamers... then I will be happy to see the summit working.

However, six months is just too damn far away. Most people that are getting fed up will probably quit within a month or two if nothing is done. Especially since new games are coming out by that time.

You died. Many times. It was a challenge. It was not trivial. See above. Furthermore, the quest requires you to travel to 10 different places and hunt there for a while. There is lore to explain the quest. If the items dropped every single kill, it would make the quest totally trivial, and make getting into VT Instant Gratification. Exactly not what EQ is about.
It was a challenge because of my class choice. I logged on my level 53 cleric to solo the hoppers with more efficiancy than my rogue could. I want there to be a story behind the quest while I am doing the quest. Not have some NPC go "blah blah blah bring me 10 shards". The shards were just a stupid timesink meant to slow people down. That's it.

I was apped to a guild that was a casual raiding guild, while I was camping the shards. I tried many, many times to get other apps to help me with the shard camps. Some would come help, they'd get their shard and then find an excuse to leave. Seems obvious to me that a quest is no fun if you have to pull people around by the ear to get help doing the quest.

I'd rather have a single zone with a set of scripted encounters/challenges that requires a group to defeat. Much like the expeditions in GoD. The problem is, as an average geared rogue I cannot just skip Luclin/PoP and go straight to GoD. So I'm forced to endure those stupid timesinks to actually have fun playing the game at some later point.

Fun. I really don't want to play a game that treats me like an employee. On the flip side, I don't want to just push a button, get loot/xp. There's a balance between how much time an ecounter will take and how difficult it is. SOE took the wrong path and made the timesinks bigger and bigger and bigger.

If your gripe is with the setup time, then I say, you totally exaggerate. And if you still think that it's too long, consider that EQ is a social game, and parts of being social is to be with others, even if they come late etc.
I do not exaggerate. The casual guild I was in disintegrated and shattered because of the timesinks; because of long setup times; because a lack of targets to kill. Everything would be dead by the time enough people showed up. A casual guild cannot summon their forces together in mere minutes as an uber guild can.

That guild I was in had over 300 characters in it. Probably 100 were alts/mules. Most of the others were just random people that like the guild, but would seldom log in. There was a small core group that played more frequently, but they were not enough to be an effective raid force 100% of the time.

EQ is a social game. As with any social events, you have to schedule your time to allow it. Some can schedule it more often, some less. Some not at all. But to be unwilling to do so in EQ is to ignore the "social" part of the game that is EQ.
:bs: :bs: :bs: :bs: :bs: :bs: :bs: :bs: :bs:

You cannot schedule crap in EQ because the content is not always there. You cannot reliably go to some zone and find something to do. Instanced content greatly alleviates that problem for the casual gamer.

If the guild I was in had access to instanced progression mobs, they would have gained access to the elemental planes eventually. The core group of people had the knowledge and the drive to do so. They just did not have the time to compete against the goober guilds. Nor did they have the ability to schedule their life around a game.

That is the fundamental flaw with the timesink bs. You should never, ever, never be forced to re-schedule your life outside of EQ to play EQ; to enjoy the entirety of the game.

Second off, you are again showing an uninformed viewpoint. Rogues are in good standings with groups. Wicked DPS, the ability to open up some areas, easier CR. Third off, EQ being a social game, you *want* to make friends. Eventually, when you log on, you have a decent-sized list of friends you have picked up along the way that share the same interests as you. It's part of the "challenge" that EQ offers...
Wicked DPS? *laughs* The average bazaar rogue does 80-100 dps at level 65 against BoT mobs (from my own parses). The average bazaar bought ranger does 100+ consistently (again from my own parses). Casters can buy their best spells much more easilly than a rogue can get a better piercer than Ragebringer. My rogue still has Ragebringer in mainhand. Gomdurig offhand. The best I was able to get with my limited play time.

I had plenty of friends. I grouped with them when I could, but I have a serious problem asking people for help when the end result only benefits me. I refuse to beg people to help me with quest farming.

It's not a challenge you simply cannot even attempt to progress through the game because of artificial timesinks and silly competition for key/flag mobs.

About the only thing that would get me back playing regular again would be solo LDON, or 2 person LDON. I remeber LDON first came out, I was rather suprised that you needed 4 people to do an LDON. For someone who is goal orientated like myself, solo or 2 people LDON would probably keep me playing a long time. Hope they take that one to heart and get it done, don't know what kind of coding that would require though. You think they must have thought of it when they made LDON and scrapped the idea becuase it was to hard? Instanced MOBS lets players play on their own time, not someone else's time. Another good idea for making EQ less work and more fun. My 2 cents :D

There are so many posts here and on other boards that continue to harp on the fact that "casual" players weren't the main topic of the player/SOE meeting. I find it sad because at this point there is absolutely NOTHING that can do to change the meeting because it's in the past. If everyone concentrated on discussing what CAN be changed for the PRESENT and the FUTURE, we might have a constructive thread here.

If I was a SOE employee and saw people whining about things that couldn't be changed, I don't think I would want to talk to them either. If, on the other hand, I saw some constructive comments on what COULD be improved, I would say to myself "Hmm... maybe I should see if I can pick this guys brain a bit more. Good ideas."

Presentation has a lot to do with it, too. Few people want to jump into an adversarial discussion when they are looking at the same goals. Lively discussion is one thing but bitterness isn't usually constructive. While it says a LOT about EQ if retired players are still so wrapped up in EQ that they want to see change, realize that you don't have to bite everyone else just to be noticed. :/

Lastly, if you are gonna complain about the redundancy of EQ, do it once and call it even. To repeat the same complaint over and over becomes more alienating than any redundant EQ camp. :(

Can't we just share some constructive ideas here?

I'm not sure why I'm going to bother arguing with Aly, but hey, I have some free time on my hands and it's always somewhat amusing watching her just ignore things which she doesnt like.

I was apped to a guild that was a casual raiding guild, while I was camping the shards. I tried many, many times to get other apps to help me with the shard camps. Some would come help, they'd get their shard and then find an excuse to leave. Seems obvious to me that a quest is no fun if you have to pull people around by the ear to get help doing the quest.


I find myself wondering how many times you helped other people get their shards, or with other things. It's a two way process. And no matter how much fun the quest is, it gets very boring after you have done it a few times. In fact it loses most of its thrill after the very first time. If you want people to help you to do something they have already done, then most of the time you will have to pull them around by the ear to some extent, whether in RL or in a game.

To be honest, from what I read of you on these boards, if I found myself in a group with you I think I would be finding excuses to leave pretty quickly. Probably something along the lines of "I've just doused myself in petrol and am juggling matches. You may want to look for another healer."

I'd rather have a single zone with a set of scripted encounters/challenges that requires a group to defeat. Much like the expeditions in GoD. The problem is, as an average geared rogue I cannot just skip Luclin/PoP and go straight to GoD. So I'm forced to endure those stupid timesinks to actually have fun playing the game at some later point.

You want to be able to just skip to the end parts without going through the middle part.

However, consider that these end parts need to be an exciting challenge to those people who have already progressed through the intermediary stages. Those intermediary stages will have made those players more powerful, through equipment, skills, spells, etc - otherwise there would have been little reason to do them.
So the end parts need to be reasonably difficult to the well equipped players in order for them to be a challenge to them. Unfortunately this means that someone who tries to skip the intermediary stages will have a very difficult time of it. This is inevitable and unavoidable.

In many ways you can skip a lot of the intermediary stages and still be successful in GoD, especially if you have done some LDoN's to fill out the worst gaps from bazaar bought gear. I've grouped with bazaar equipped rogues without it being a problem. Amongst other things they can still drag corpses and scout with all the effectiveness of the very best equipped rogues. Maybe you just aren't a very good player, because those I never want in my groups.

That is the fundamental flaw with the timesink bs. You should never, ever, never be forced to re-schedule your life outside of EQ to play EQ; to enjoy the entirety of the game.


EQ is a social game played by a lot of people. Inevitably it will be necessary to re-schedule RL to some extent to fit in with EQ, even if everything is instanced. If you are a member of a casual guild wanting to kill King Tormax (assuming he was instanced), then the guild might plan to kill him at 6pm. If you want to turn up, then you will need to rearrange your life in order to fit in logging on at 6pm.
Any game which ever requires more than 1 person will have this same problem. As I have suspected from previous posts of yours, it seems that what you really want is a single player game.

It's not that wolf form is the most important issue even on my list but, I see it as an symbol of SOEs stubborn inability to go back and review what they have done and the current effect on the game. It both ironic and insulting that skeleton form is no faction change. Enchanters got a faction neutral scaled wolf form. SOE is going to have to learn that they can no longer try to engineer player behavior.

/AGREE with Amonra

I avoid negative players like the plague.

Then you find them on the boards complaining how the game is too hard..no one will help them...Its not them thats the problem, its the game.

It's one thing to express your ideas and let people constructively have at them...chiseling the edges until its finely tuned.

It's another to complain over and over about the same point and expect things to change.

State your point...move on. Keep it positive. Challenge others in a respectful manner.

I know a few people who have no friends.... Every time I meet them, they complain on how they don't have any friends....see that vicious circle?

Hollowends

Correct me if I am wrong, but I would think full autoloot would be an option... right? I think it's the easiest answer. Autoloot -1 runs into the problem of which item you leave on your corpse. Especially if you have more than 1 corpse.

Callahad

Good point.

y first thought with "autoloot corpse -1" was leave the first item on the corpse. That would be the head slot wouldn't it? I'm sure alot of people would like to keep the elemental helm/whatever effect/focus effect over others pieces of gear they could leave on a corpse.

So yes that would cause conflicts on what piece would left behind.

-We could highlight one piece of loot to leave on the corpse then hit the autoloot button leaving the highlighted item behind (think selecting an item on a vendor before having to push the buy/sell button)...I don't know if it can even be done, but its an option...

-some PVP servers have a symbol/token drop on corpses killed by another player as some sort of kill token. Could we have one drop with each corpse and leave it as the one thing not looted after hitting the autoloot button?
ake the token disapear if the corpse has gotten a rez? Would there be a problem with too many corpses laying about?

I'm not against the autoloot button. I would just like to see the petition list cut down so that GM's can put time into issues that really matter to the player. Not answering petitions on how the autoloot button has lost them some exp yet again.

Hollowends

Heres a radical idea. Why not just return the toon to bind with all equiptment? Leave a corpse so that they can be rezzed and, call it a day?

Keep right-click looting the same as now but add the commands /loot all and /loot -1, where the LAST item would not be looted. This way it would just be simple typed commands one could use depending upon the situation.

I think being ported back to your bind with all equiptment is easier :p

The suggestion for intanced progression mobs was not made solely for a casual gamer. Nothing talked about at the summit solely affected the casual gamer.

And? Is this suggestion not as good because of where it came from? Would the suggestion have been better because it came from you? Is 1-person LDoN affecting "ubers" in any way? Does the fact that there will be an EP-caliber set to buy from LDoN affecting "ubers" in any way? Does 30-90 minutes tasks affect "ubers" in any way? "Nothing" does not describe what happened.

It was a challenge because of my class choice.
Glad to see you changed your mind. Now dont tell me again EQ isnt a challenge, it obviously can be.

I was apped to a guild that was a casual raiding guild, while I was camping the shards. I tried many, many times to get other apps to help me with the shard camps. Some would come help, they'd get their shard and then find an excuse to leave. Seems obvious to me that a quest is no fun if you have to pull people around by the ear to get help doing the quest.
That's actually interesting, and hits closer to home. *My* personal take of the situation is 1- its not bad as you make it seem to be, 2- Delayed Gratification is not meant to be easy. It doesnt appeal to everyone, some prefer Instant Gratification. I think the main failing of the VT key quest is that it failed to provide small rewards along the way.

I'd rather have a single zone with a set of scripted encounters/challenges that requires a group to defeat. Much like the expeditions in GoD. The problem is, as an average geared rogue I cannot just skip Luclin/PoP and go straight to GoD.

Again, that's interesting. Because you see, such questions were raised and answered at the Summit. Read all about OoW and zone content, as well as flagging.

There's a balance between how much time an encounter will take and how difficult it is. SOE took the wrong path and made the timesinks bigger and bigger and bigger.

Not so as is evidenced by GoD, most of EP, and PoTime. But now, you say not all timesinks are bad, just the bigger ones that dont provide the appropriate rewards. I tend to agree much more with that line of thought.

The casual guild I was in disintegrated and shattered because of the timesinks; because of long setup times
That explains a lot. Unfortunately, you do not see that what you experienced is not the only way it can be, or it has been.

That is the fundamental flaw with the timesink bs. You should never, ever, never be forced to re-schedule your life outside of EQ to play EQ; to enjoy the entirety of the game.

Herein lies the fundamental flaw in your reasoning. Do you not schedule a dinner with your family when you play Monopoly? Do you not schedule your weekend when you have a Baseball tournament? Do you not schedule a trip to another city when the bridge tournament you want to go to is held there? Do you not schedule a free night so you can play D&D with your friends?

Wicked DPS? *laughs*

Laugh all you want. Rangers, wizards, rogues. That's the DPS classes. But if you look at the Safehouse, you will see an interesting tidbit for the casual rogue : a better weapon for your type and better poisons are being looked into. Result of the Summit, no less.

Callahad

I think being ported back to your bind with all equiptment is easier :p

uch easier...

Throw a 3 hour timer on the corpse (the time allowed for a rez) and there is no reason to have corpses lying around everywhere anymore.

2 things that will be brought up

-corpse summoning is not class defining, but still a skill that separates the sk's/necro's from all the rest...would the SK's/Necro's feel left out? Would they care?

-people that leave no rent items on corpses to keep em through many sessions...

Personally I like a challenge...

y corpse is in the back of dungeon because I felt I would chance fate and survive...I died and that's my fault... I pay a necro 200pp to follow me and bail me out of trouble... Now I'm left thinking "do i chance this again?" If i do decide to chance it again, I will do so with the risk that I may die again. Even though some may see this as "annoying" or "time consuming", my heart pumping cuz i know I'm taking chances... is rewarding to me.

If we take all the RISK out of the game there is no fun left.

on a side note...

I did the 8th shawl quest all on my own except for the last crawl. At times I spit and cursed because it took too long or it was frustrating. Funny thing is...when I had finally finished I asked myself "what to do now?"
I then realized that even though I was cursing the whole way through...i was loving every minute of it. It kept me busy/challenged...better then lfg for hours...

Hollowends

Much easier...

Throw a 3 hour timer on the corpse (the time allowed for a rez) and there is no reason to have corpses lying around everywhere anymore.

2 things that will be brought up

-corpse summoning is not class defining, but still a skill that separates the sk's/necro's from all the rest...would the SK's/Necro's feel left out? Would they care?

-people that leave no rent items on corpses to keep em through many sessions...Actually more than two. Some raiding encounters are delayed or actually "done" when a raid wipes because there are LDoN type timers on new dungeon encounters. If everyone returned fully armored we wouldn't care about such things as corpse camping MoBs because we'd just take them out and then CR.

Because of the myriad of expansions in EQ that don't necessarily all stack the same way, what makes sense at some levels or areas can easily trivialize others. Glad the mechanics of one click corpse looting isn't our worry yet. =D That's why the devs get paid the big bucks!

I find myself wondering how many times you helped other people get their shards, or with other things. It's a two way process. And no matter how much fun the quest is, it gets very boring after you have done it a few times. In fact it loses most of its thrill after the very first time. If you want people to help you to do something they have already done, then most of the time you will have to pull them around by the ear to some extent, whether in RL or in a game.

Actually I helped quite a few people get their shards. Even if I had that shard from that camp already, if someone asked for help, I was there so long as I could find a replacement if I was in an xp group somewhere. I don't recall actual numbers, but it was more than a dozen shards that I helped people aquire. Yet when I asked for help those same people were always too busy to help.

You want to be able to just skip to the end parts without going through the middle part.

No, I want to cut out the boring parts and make the game fun again. If it was possible to get through Luclin/PoP at a more sedate pace, I'd be thrilled. There are some PoP encounters I'd love to see, but the timesinks are too much for me.

EQ is a social game played by a lot of people. Inevitably it will be necessary to re-schedule RL to some extent to fit in with EQ, even if everything is instanced. If you are a member of a casual guild wanting to kill King Tormax (assuming he was instanced), then the guild might plan to kill him at 6pm. If you want to turn up, then you will need to rearrange your life in order to fit in logging on at 6pm.

I'm talking about totally rescheduling your life around raiding so that you can keep up with the guild your in. Keep up with the flags. Keep up with the DKP... etc. I have not problem making arrangement to be at a raid at a certain time, such as the 6pm number you provided. I have no problem with that kind of scheduling. It's the raid every day mentality that I refuse to do.

Unfortunately, most uber guilds do just that. Raid every day. They're the ones that get to see the end game firsthand and experience the ultimate goal of storyline and questing. I don't give damn about the loot along the way. It's just the means to get to the meat of the story. If I could play EQ in banded mail and a pair of fine steel daggers, I would. But I can't. I can just imagine the looks I would get in BoT.

Herein lies the fundamental flaw in your reasoning. Do you not schedule a dinner with your family when you play Monopoly?

And here's the biggest damn flaw you keep forgetting. You can't schedule events in EQ because competition, random spawn times, and lack of content will bite you in the ass almost every time. The only thing you can do is hope the target is still alive if you ever manage to get enough people online.

I'm not talking about my personal schedule that way. I'm talking about an entire guilds schedule, being able to set a day/time to meet and raid. It's a pretty ****ty day when your guild finally meets and the only thing you find alive is Gorenaire in DL.

Unfortunately, most uber guilds do just that. Raid every day. They're the ones that get to see the end game firsthand and experience the ultimate goal of storyline and questing.

Since they are the most dedicated, I dont see what the problem is. You still refuse to see that many guilds raid without doing it every day.

And here's the biggest damn flaw you keep forgetting. You can't schedule events in EQ because competition, random spawn times, and lack of content will bite you in the ass almost every time.

Hmm. It's really funny you mention that. You see, I was in a guild aspiring to be an EP guild (and beyond). It was facing stiff competition. It was trained, cockblocked, griefed, you name it. Mobs were rarely up. It was a casual raiding guild, much like you described. And yet, as incredible as it may sound to you, we were successfully scheduling raiding. There was *rarely* a day we scheduled where there was none of the targets we wanted to hit. I know dozens more who do that as well, and not necessarily the most uber ones.

And if you are wondering, the guild I am talking about is *still* doing that, with no problems whatsoever. If your flawed view of the situation is all that is keeping you from enjoying the game, send me a PM and I will gladly direct you to that guild.

Bottom line, you can schedule. Despite what you think.

Callahad

If we take all the RISK out of the game there is no fun left.


You forgot to say Fiddledy Fee!

I dare say that the minority of players find 2 hour CRs, Deleveling, EXP loss and Loss of time invested due to total wipe REWARDING. If I were SOE I would take the chance of alienating players who feel this way. On the bet that the vast majority of players when seeing features that reduce these RISKs in other MMOGs might think about going there rather then enjoy the current REWARDs of EQ. If you don't think this is the case look at my sig. Never once while playing CoH did I lament that I didn't have to beg someone to come to a zone to summon my corpse. Never once in CoH did I have to petition CS because my corpse was lost in a wall. Never once in CoH did I give a second though of how less rewarding this fight was because if I died I could come back in less then 5 mins at full strength read to try again.

Bottom line, you can schedule. Despite what you think.

No, I can't. I refuse to schedule my life around a freaking game. Period. End of story. I will play games when I have the time available. No game should ever be designed with the lame timesinks that EQ has in it right now. Timesinks that require you to change your life to get through. I refuse to do that.

If I can't play a game at my own place, logging on when I want to, for however long I want to, and still get something meaningful done, I won't play that game. City of Heroes is great in that regard. I can log on, grab a couple missions from my contacts, read the story behind 'em and then go do them. Solo or with some random passersby or some SG friends.

At most it'll take ten minutes to travel to most places once you've hit level 14 and have your travel power. Aside from the Task Force missions, I've yet to spend more than an hour on a single mission. It's great. Even the task force missions though work out great for casual gamers. You can log off in the middle of the task force story arc and pick up right where you left off the next day.

It'd be great if I could do stuff like that in EQ. Nope. If you want to see the end game, you're forced to change your lifestyle to play a freaking game. It should never have been allowed to turn out that way. EQ should have been designed with the casual gamer in mind.

I don't have a problem with uber goobers burning through the content and being the first ones done with it. Let them waste their time doing so just for that ephemeral goal of being top dog by being first. You'd think the devs would've realized that timesinks are only minor speedbumps to the ubers, but near impossible roadblocks to casual gamers by now. It shouldn't be that way.

If I were SOE I would take the chance of alienating players who feel this way.

Quoted for emphasis. I've not had one regret in CoH about the lack of equipment. I've not had one regret that I didn't have to go back and get my corpse. I've not had one regret about XP Debt. In fact, I think it's great! Dying sucks because it wastes some of your time but not the idiotic amounts of time questing and raiding does in EQ.

Not sure if it was said anywhere, since by now the thread is so long I couldn't read over it all, but about the casual gaming thing...

I've read several reports from the Summit, and since they've all had different groups where they split off to talk to devs, here's some of the casual stuff I've seen listed they may be implementing. Loral seemed to list the most I've seen (Quellious > all).

- better LDoN equipment
- ability to remove/sell/reattach augments
- solo/duo adventures and missions
- epic 1.5's (like 1-2 group encounters)
- quests for spells
- easier backflagging (especially for the casual people who love their guilds)
- LDoN improvement in general (mention on Steel Warrior about possible flagging-progression through it)
- more tradeskill stuff added


Not bad actually, when you look over it. There were other ideas people gave to SoE reps (like one about NPC "helpers" to help people on solo instances - warriors for example could get a npc healer), but I left the smaller stuff out.

No, I can't. I refuse to schedule my life around a freaking game. Period. End of story. I will play games when I have the time available.

Then it is crystal clear. EQ is not and never was for you. It is impossible to envision playing with a group of people and not think you will have to schedule your time to meet them. It's not about being uber, time-limited, or casual. It's about socializing with people. You want EQ to be a solo game, with possibility of grouping. Well, it's not. It's not a Halo-clone, or a diablo-clone. Sorry it took you so long to find this out.

Callahad

*snip* tone it down - Tia

I will not rearrange my life to participate in the end game in EQ. I will make time however to be at scheduled events as my time permits. If this means I make it to two raids a month, so be it. But again, I will not change how I live my life, my job, my social activities just to play a damn game when by all rights, I should not have to.

I paid the same amount of money each month to play EQ that you do or did. Why am I denied full access to the game because I choose to play at a more sedate, casual pace? You do not deserve exclusive access to content just because you can play longer sessions than I can. That should mean you just reach the end faster. I should be able to reach the same goals you can, albeit at my own pace and playing time instead of the playing time forced on us by timesinks. Realistically, nothing should take more than three hours to complete in one session.

You want EQ to be a solo game, with possibility of grouping.
No. I want all the content accessable by everyone. As long as they put in the time (not all at once mind you) and it's feasible to do so, everyone should be able to eventually gain access to everything. By time I mean doing the quests, fun quests, that do not require camping in one spot for hours upon hours farming the same mobs over and over.

The VT key quest could have been much more interesting and fun to do if you had to work for the shards by adventuring instead of farming. Going to different spots and killing random mobs over and over for a single shard is ridiculous. So much more could be done with multi-part quests; it's mind boggling SOE doesn't do so.

Quoted for emphasis. I've not had one regret in CoH about the lack of equipment. I've not had one regret that I didn't have to go back and get my corpse. I've not had one regret about XP Debt. In fact, I think it's great! Dying sucks because it wastes some of your time but not the idiotic amounts of time questing and raiding does in EQ.


So see ya 5 years later in CoH still playing every day or every other day, I think not.

So see ya 5 years later in CoH still playing every day or every other day, I think not.

Who knows? CoH has massive potential expansion material. In fact what ammounts to the first expansion for CoH will be FREE! CoH has lots of room to grow. Judging by SOE's reaction they have certainly taken notice.

This is becoming circular, so I will stop posting. I have shown you just about everything in EQ can be done within 3 hours in a sitting. I have shown you it can be challenging. I have shown you it is a social gathering. I have shown you that you can progress at a more casual pace - it will take time, lots of it, no doubt. Yet you refuse to accept the evidence I have shown you.

Should EQ allow a player who refuse an integral part of the game access to everything? My answer is no. If I was playing a D&D game meant for a group of 6, solo, should I be allowed to see the ending of the game? THat's what I mean by refusing an integral part.

Again, EQ is not and never was for you. Once you start to enjoy more the social aspects of EQ, you may change your mind.

Callahad

This is becoming circular, so I will stop posting.

Good, because you're like a brick wall. You have no clue what it's like to start out playing a game that you could play at your own pace, getting stuff done with limited amounts of time to play, and enjoying the game only to see it turn into the giant pile of feces it is today. Hardcore powergamers and the devs idiocy to allow the powergamers to dictate the evolution of EQ ruined it for the casual/time-limited gamers.

Ruined it. I have no doubt in my mind about that. It used to be that you could log on, play for an hour and make some meaningful progress. Now you have to spend at least three or four hours to even make a little progress. Unless you just happen to be really lucky every time you log on and have a group waiting for you, it's going to take a half hour, forty-five minutes to finally get a group together and to a camp since 90% of the gamers are cowards and lazy and won't do a dungeon crawl the way they were meant to be done.

Should EQ allow a player who refuse an integral part of the game access to everything?

Sitting in one spot farming placeholders to get that rare drop from a rare spawn mob should not be a part of the game. Timesinks in general should not be a part of the game. They were great for the life of EQ when nothing else was out there, but now there's a ton of options and some people, myself included, would love to have the time to play more than one game.

Currently I spend my time alternating between SWG and COH. COH right now however is getting most of my time since it's new and I'm waiting for some combat rebalance publishes and the space expansion for SWG. I play when I get some spare time, and hour here... a half hour there. Maybe four hours on the weekend. And y'know what, I don't feel like I'm stuck as I did in EQ right before I quit.

It was pointless to log on unless I was going to have at least four hours to play. Even then, it was still pretty much pointless for me to log on. The AP cost of the LDON gear was too high for the low payout on adventures and the amount of AA's needed for many of my class were just way too much in my opinion. I was lucky to get 75% of an AA during the time I would have free to play EQ. I wasn't able to get freaking 8 - 10 aa's an evening farming trash mobs in Fire or Earth.

That is what needs to be fixed in EQ. You should be able to log on to a game and be able to make some progress regardless of how long you plan to spend online. Even a half hour of gaming should be fruitful. It's a game. Not a second job. Not a responsibility or a chore you're forced to work at. It's supposed to fun. Something you can do in your spare time.

Again, even if they made the game accessible to time-limited players, it is not going to stop the power gamers from rushing through all the content. They're going to do that entway. So why should the time-limited players be forced to play your way instead of their way?

Aly, you remind me of some of my college students.

They get mad at me for assigning a lot of homework due in one week. They say but I am taking two other classes, working full-time, kids to take care of, I got a frat party to go to and blah blah blah blah. They ask me to give them a break cause they still want the reward of an A without putting in the effort to get it.

ost things in EQ take time because they want the game to last and they want it to be an "ever quest" for everyone. If they did what you are suggesting, half the people, not just the raiders, but the casuals too, would be done with the game cause they would have done everything. I mean people beg Sony to increase it so that loot mobs are always up so that everyone can have loot but Sony purposely sets long spawn times to control the amount of loot in the game.

You are on the 10-year plan for your "EQ" degree but are jealous of those who go full-time and will be done in 4. And although you can't spend as much time as someone playing full-time, you still expect the same rewards.

Thornsong
GM, The Relentless

Most of the people I know who started playing CoH have now either quit or say that they are feeling like quitting. The main reasons they give are that the missions become very repetitive once you have done them for a while, the game is too easy and there isn’t much to do once you reach the maximum level. These players are mostly hard core players, so maybe casual players won’t run into these problems, but maybe they will too in time.

For the people I know who moved to FFXI, I’ve heard similar complaints and again most of them have now either quit or are thinking of quitting.

I remember in the past people who moved to DaoC experienced similar problems and only 1 of them still plays there now. For myself I played Anarchy Online for 6 months when it came out and ran into the same problems and came back to EQ.

I plan on playing WoW when (if?!) it comes out and I hope that it will be a great success. Reports from the beta are very promising, but only about half the levels are in the game so far, and none of the high end stuff.

I also like a lot of the changes which are being made in EQ, or are being planned which sound like they will make the game a lot more fun, making it very tempting to go back to EQ. However the guild I was in has effectively broken up so in order to start playing again I need to find another guild, maybe on another server which is a big step. But if WoW doesn’t work out then I will probably find myself coming back to EQ again.

It’s not an easy task making a game which will be successful and last a long time.

Can we perhaps let debates subside that don't really seem to be going anywhere? Some folks minds are set on their opinions and discussing it endlessly is just bandwidth.

Um....hey! I have an idea! Donate to the Grove and then you debate more! (see donate button below!)

You play cleric, I seriously doubt you will have a problem finding a home.