Feldon Most of my gametime these days is either raiding with my Ranger, or leveling my Dirge alt. I do live events (looking forward to Nights of the Dead), but otherwise, I’m fairly bored with the runaround quest lines. Groups in the 20’s-60’s are few and far between, but that is an issue for another blog post…
Our guild is currently running Ward of Elements (I have all but shoulders and the cloak from Aiden) and we do as much x4 raiding as we can with 2 1/2 groups. That’s the first 3 named of Tomb of the Mad Crusader (including Thet) and the twins in Palace of the Ancient One. We’re probably going to start doing Kurn’s X2 because we’re pretty much blocked from doing anything else by lack of players/needed classes.
This is a chronic problem on Butcherblock, and I think other servers. At last count there were over 15 semi-casual raid guilds each about 4-8 players away from having a full raid force. Nobody wants to merge or switch guilds. And there’s never been a successful Raid Alliance on Butcherblock.
I read the EQ2 forums every day looking for news and info for EQ2Wire readers. So today I found a couple of posts that really jive with how I’ve been feeling lately…
First up from Shianne <Tainted> @ Kithicor:
Dear SOE,
I have been a loyal subscriber since July of 2005. I have been a co-leader of a raiding guild since Dec of 2006, and an officer prior to that. In the time I have played I have seen many people come and go. I have seen good expansions and bad. I have seen nerfs and character balance issues; server mergers and many other developments and setbacks.
One thing I can say is that I have always enjoyed the game, no matter how badly my class was messed up or how many of my friends or guild mates left for greener pastures in other MMOs or guilds or just to experience the real world. However, my enjoyment is waning along with so many others.
My server, Kithicor, has suffered many guilds disbanding of late due to a lack of available players to fill out their rosters. i have lost 8-9 people of my raid force myself. The commen thread to all of the people leaving? They are bored. Most of them (including myself) have multiple characters that are level 80 and at 200 AA or close to. They have no need of shard gear. They have no need of instance loot. They don’t want to level yet another character. The only thing to log in for is raids and when you can’t get classes you need, those are getting old to since you can’t progress.
The release of GU53 did little to entice people to remain. The Achivement System gives no tangible and USEFUL rewards. Those that missed out on getting AA for various things aren’t likely to go get the achievements done as they will hold out till there is an AA cap increase. So, there is still no reason to log in. The Shard of Love offers nothing but fluff items and 1 time AA experience. A fair amount of people will do it once, then never again. Miragul’s Planar Shard – while it is nice to have another raid zone, many of us can’t clear what is already out there due to lack of population to flesh out our ranks. Then, you add items into the heroic instances to make the raids easier, so in essence creating the necessity for many people to run zones for no other reason than to collect those items. It is becoming a JOB and not fun.
If the achievement system had offered useful rewards, such as dual stat adornments, or the ability to add 2 points to an AA tree when completing an achievement, or rocking charm items, etc. This MIGHT have been a draw for those of us who want something to work towards that IMPROVES our characters.
If you had done server mergers, then at least the population wouldn’t be spread so thin. I realize that server mergers would cut into the Cash Cow transfer potions that are available thru the Marketplace, but please, understand that the economy sucks at the moment. For many people this is their entertainment. This is their hobby. This is their escape from reality. Many people are struggling just to pay the subscription fees. Throw us a bone and think about merging some servers so that we have a base of people to work with so perhaps we may find some enjoyment in the game again.
This latest expansion with its cure heavy scripting has burned out the healers. I have been looking for ONE templar for going on 3 months. I have had 2 applicants in that time and neither were able to handle the whack-a-mole curing as well as keeping their reactives up. When you spend THREE months trying to find a single class and have no success, this tells you things are not well in the land of Norrath.
In the last three months, we have lost at least two major guilds to collapse. Unfortunately, those people didn’t remain on the server. Most went to other servers or quit entirely. We have had one guild transfer here to “rule the school” and another leave to go to another server to do the same. We have at least 2 other non-avatar raid guilds on the verge of collapse and at least 2-3 others with severe recruitment issues. Much of this is being caused by people QUITTING EQ2.
Please SOE, I implore you to do something to breathe some life into the game before more people take of for Aion or other MMOs. Delaying the expansion is killing the game, fluffy GUs with no real substance aren’t keeping the interest of a vast amount of us, continued nerfs and re-defining classes isn’t the best way to hold on to people.
I see hundred of posts from people on ways to improve the game, ways to work towards class balance, ways to deal with itemization, ways to implement avatars into instanced encounters, and a majestic array of other ideas, suggestions, wants, desires,etc. People WANT to play EQ2, but they also want to know their voices are heard, that the devlopers realize the we, the players, have a borader understanding of the game than you may think. We the players are a font of knowldge, we are talented and skilled and we know what gamers want, do you?
Pervis has a nice followup which makes some great points about Itemization:
There is nothing more disapointing in raiding when you spend weeks working on an encounter to finally get the kill, only to have the one item in the chest be totally worthless. What this game needs, and what one of my primary complaints has been with TSO (paired with Research Assistants, which only add to the issue) is the total lack of any raid-based quests.
The original game was great. As soon as your guild killed Darathar, you basically took a giant step forward. Every mage and healer in the guild got a huge upgrade, and scouts and tanks got an item that was invaluable on many encounters.
Desert of Flames had the same with killing the Godking, and getting the weapons from the peacock quest series.
Kingdom of Sky had similar with the Claymore, though once you had killed Taranax you had no progression left until Fallen Dynasty was added.
Echoes of Faydwer was wasted, due to the Soulfire quest taking so long to implement. While it was great for lore reasons, it was horrible for content/mechanics reasons.
Rise of Kunark of course had epic [weapons], and as soon as you were able to kill Nexona and Druushk, you had an almost clear run to getting every mythical weapon. There is no need to even mention the difference between a raid with identicle equipment, but one with mythicals the other without.
The Shadow Odyssey has… umm… the earring from Munzok’s Material Bastion (MMB)?
There is no carrot dangling. When we kill a mob, we have no guarentee that the item it drops will be wanted. Why bother working on mobs in MMB if you know you are going to get a summoner-only item (we had the cloak and charm both drop 3 times in a row, prior to GU#53, we have no summoners).
While raiders are less interested in quests for the story aspect (in general, many raiders are as into the lore of this game as any non-raider), what they like is the guarantee that the time and effort they put in to killing encounters is going to be rewarded. Again until GU#53, I was looking at Ykesha thinking… why even bother? As a mage, he had no items that were worth me even looking at, and since he is not required for any quest update, I have no personal reason to care.
How is that good for the expansion’s end mob?
I have seen more raiders quit in TSO than any other time. Most of the players I know that have quit have done so for itemization reasons. While there are more item options and effect in game than ever before, it is how those effects have been distributed that has simply caused people to not want to bother. Its not enough to just create 100 items and throw them on loot tables at random, the placement of each item should have more attention paid to it than the creation of the item itself.
I have zero faith that the next expansion will be any better, simply because the same issues have been bought up with every previous expansion. Players have asked during beta to look over items to check for progression, and have either been not heard or ignored. Just look at how long it took to get items in to Miragul’s. If us players are being asked to test content out to make sure it is working as intended, and is set to the appropriate difficulty, we should also have someone asking us to test itemization progression.
Revisiting the same content over and over is just part of any MMO. Keeping players hooked as long as you can to keep subscription rates up is just part of the game business model. However the reliance on the Random Number Generator in gearing players up is really getting out of hand. Folks identify the best item for a slot (sometimes the best item in the game for a certain class and for a certain slot drops in an easy group zone, sometimes off the hardest raid mob in the game, it’s completely random) and then run that zone until they get the item. Then they never go back. Then there’s Healer Burnout, where healers are sticking around even though they currently hate some of the encounters just to not let their friends down.
We’ve had the same problem with our raiding alliance- we can take the first two in TMC twice a weekend (set timer midweek), we’ve cleared WoE and can clear the first five no problem twice a week- but people have become frustrated because we have 12 people who can play, 12 random others part of the time, typical attendance of about 18, and a growing divide between the “halves” of the raid force. It makes for a very unstable mix as the better players have the gear from this content, want more, and head out to other raid groups (who have the same problems).
WoE was an improvement, but fundamentally we’re seeing the next move in raid progression is a wall, not a step or a slope, and we’re not finding any tools to climb the wall.
Raid progression should not be progression from group to group until you find one that can go all the way. 😉
It wouldn’t be so bad if you could outright resist some of the detriments. But nope…
I know there is a lot that needs to be done, but one simple this they could do is change the GU’s back to every month. That is one of the first things that would help people find more to do. As you, me, everyone knows, That the players will run down all the new content of a every three months GU in a week or so. This is leaving people to feel that there is not much to do, So if they went back with smaller, every month GU’s would make it feel like there is more to do. Also with every month GU’s if they mess up, It can be fixed faster.
I am a player from all the way back to beta, And yes, I just left the game a few weeks ago. As you can tell I do still read up on it, I hope one day I will be able to come back. But I’m not holding my breath for it.
Been playing on Runnyeye since release, I left the game a 3 months ago, with the plan to come back when the 3.0 shaders were put in. When they were pushed back to GU 54 I sighed deeply. Then GU 53 hit, and now I’m not sure I will come back. I miss the game, there is none that even comes close to it but… I’ll most likely have a look around GU 54, but unless things improve, I doubt I’ll stay.
Why I left? Raiding falling apart and population collapsing/imploding = always a struggle to get a full raid, usually ending up with 15-20 players, and only now and then getting a full raid.
As usual, (1) the devs are either oblivious to what the game needs or (2) have bosses that think they know what the game needs, and force their agenda on the devs. I think it’s more number 2 than 1. Either way, we, their customers, suffer for it.
I honestly don’t think SOE can save EQ2 this time. They are not looking at the quality or health of their product. They are only concerned about milking the current playerbase for as much as they can, SC/LON etc.
Now, if they made a commitment and started funding and developing EQ3 there *might* be hope, but I can’t see that happening…
The boss who forced their agenda down the developer’s necks left several months back. Unfortunately, that was not soon enough and the next expansion has his finger prints all over it. I sincerely hope that Brenlo, as the new producer, is able to bring that expansion back in line with what the paying and playing population wants, in a timely manner.
Everyone there in the office has their work cut out for them designing and implementing content that intrigues and engages all types of gamers: solo, small group and raiders a-like. A good over-arcing story quest that evolves and provides rewards at the end of each “tier” (solo, group, small raid, full raid) would go a long way to satisfying everyone’s desires. The challenge to that is having mystery around the lore provided during the quest. Two or three different quest paths that reach the same “gating” point would supply replay for those with alts.
In addition to basing a metric on “how many characters see this quest” try for “How many quests does one account complete in this category/series/quest line”.
I agree – bring back the monthly updates (yes, it costs money paid into Operations’ budget, but you’ll keep more money coming in). I also agree that Itemization for the last couple of expansions has been lackluster. Upgradeable items has provided a lot of incentive to continue playing – IMO you should put more weight on this sort of tactic than the creation of Yet Another Damn Token System (YADTS). All that does is highlite and enforce the perception of grinding.
More weight on playability, REplayability and player retention and less concentration on development costs and corner trimming.
SOE has to care about their own game to get their subscribers to continue to care.
What we can see from this development is, that players consume the content faster than SOE can produce it. And the interesing thing is, that this is the case from the beginning of the game. So it seems it doesn’t pay back economically to put more recources into producing more content. Otherwise this would have been done already.
Peter – They ARE developing EQ3.
The continuing and ever increasing problem with progression is SOE’s attempt to stop plat farmers by neutering content for non hardcore raiders. They destroy the loot table on lower level mobs once the hard cores are done with the content. it’s pointless to even attempt to put together lower end raids with lower level toons because they’ve removed the incentives. The idea of balancing a raid is to add ignorant “strategies” like you can’t use any spells at this point or you’ll wipe the raid! well what the hell is the point of fighting if you can’t fight ? How much fun is it when you get hit with an uncurable or unavoidable stun or stifle ? If they mobs are being taken down too easily then come up with some new mechanics to scale the mobs and the loot that comes from them accordingly.
As for Brenlo, one word (or three i guess) SWG. The community is ignored and their development is reduced to keep revenue steady.
People want to advance and have fun. People do not want to fail miserably because when you try to help new or inexperienced people raid it’s an automatic wipe.
people do not want to spend months working towards a myth to end up not being able to do anything different after they get it. more raiding and more depending on 23 other people to do the right thing at the right moment.