Dev Chat Covers Wide Range of Issues, Offers Few Revelations

Thursday night saw the first post-expansion developer chat of 2010. Hosted by ZAM, this chat had previously been scheduled for March 4th, but was postponed to March 18th as developers focused on issues with Battlegrounds.

You would have assumed, with the key issues of Battlegrounds and Itemization consuming a great deal of development effort in the month since Sentinel’s Fate launched, AND the 2 week postponement in the EQ2 Developer Chat, that Calthine at ZAM would have received an avalanche of hardball questions. Instead, we saw just a few of these critical issues raised, with the rest running the usual gamut of comfortable questions.

I have been assured that “hard questions” weren’t ignored, that the chat did cover most of the questions, especially those submitted in advance. I cannot emphasize enough that if you want a question asked during this chat, e-mail it to calthine (at) zam.com. If you think I have a better chance of getting it asked, e-mail using the Contact Us form here on EQ2Wire.

Complete Developer Chat logs from the March 18th chat appear at ZAM. You can read player reaction to the questions posed and answers revealed on the EQ2 Forums here, elsewhere on the EQ2 Forums, and also on EQ2 Flames. Some questions which caught our eye:

Qeynos and Freeport Starting Zones

Question: Many folks are confused by Brenlo’s statement that it is planned to “move away from” Qeynos and Freeport as starting cities. Could you please expand on that?

Brenlo: Well when I said that, I had been drinking . . . Seriously though, we plan to only allow new characters to start in the newer player areas. Timorous, Greater Fay, Darklight and Soon Halas. The new player experience in Qeynos and Freeport are just not up to snuff anymore and do not provide as solid an experience when you enter the game for the first time.

The question made reference to Brenlo post’s post in the ‘What is the Golden Path?’ thread on EQ2 Forums:

The golden path is the first step in a larger revamp of our new player experience.   We took a look at the starting areas, other than Qeynos and Freeport as we plan to move away from those, and reworked content so that it had a better flow.

While the Queen’s Colony and Outpost of the Overlord starting islands only present content from levels 1-10, and the quest rewards remain meager, a lot of players have a nostalgia for these zones. My suggestion has always been: Add a portal NPC to the starting island allowing players to immediately port to Gorowyn, Neriak, the Faydark Nursery, or Halas. Eliminating these islands altogether seems to me to be an unnecessary step.

Class Balance-focused Game Update?

Question: In the area of class balance, would you guys consider having the first Game Update AFTER an expansion focus on many of the new and un-finished concerns that players have with class balance? Especially those that arise DURING the expansion that were not really as big an issue during beta?

My interpretation of the response is that the EQ2 team are moving away from annual sweeping class changes and hope instead to include class balance fixes in every game update, the first one after the expansion being no exception.

Appearance Mounts

Question: Will there be appearances for mounts? e.g. i would like to hide my mount or use the appearance of another one.

Frizznik: We do have plans for something for mounts. We are looking into different ideas and want it to be a really cool feature. I don’t have a time of when it is coming though, there is a bunch of work to do with it. It is certainly on our minds though!

Brenlo: Indeed. Frizznik and I are exchanging emails on mounts as we do this chat.

The issue here is that mounts now have buffs for the rider increasing spell and melee damage, casting speed, health, etc. This leads to players wanting to have their mounts at all times, even in dungeons, and also be able to change the appearance of the mount, and for other players to be able to hide them. Brenlo has publically stated his feeling that mounts should never have been given such desirable buffs, because it caused all of these unintended issues.

Server Lag on Antonia Bayle (and other servers)

This has been a persistent problem despite the recent 64-bit database upgrade, Rothgar has been the point man on trying to solve performance issues and he comes through with this reply:

Rothgar: We have some short-term plans to help lag by increasing the number of servers that can service zones for AB as well as other servers in that data center.

Long term we want to do something about the population. We don’t want to restrict where you can transfer to, so we’re going to try to make some of the other servers more desirable by considering some mergers to increase their populations as well.

This is a big task though and must be coordinated with database upgrades. So its certainly a high priority for us, but it will take some time to implement. Meanwhile we’re still looking at performance improvements to the code.

Research Assistants

The revelation that Research Assistants will soon lose their one-per-account limitation has gained substantial traction on EQ2 Flames and the EQ2 Forums alike. Players will be able to research Master spells for every character on their account, simultaneously.

Rothgar: Originally this was meant as an account-based reward for keeping your account subscribed. The idea was that everyone should receive the same benefit, like a once-per-account vet reward.

Rothgar: But at this point we can certainly see that using it on multiple characters would just be more fun and wouldn’t really break anything, so those changes are underway as we speak.

My issue with this change is that level-raising expansions now are on a 2 year cycle. 24 months is plenty of time for most character classes to acquire the majority of their most useful master spells.

What is there to prevent EQ2 Developers from balancing raid, group, and even solo content in the following expansion around players having Master spells? If they continued to balance content around Adept spells, wouldn’t the content become trivially easy for most players? Kunark was balanced around Apprentice II spells. So already we’ve seen some inflation in how content is balanced.

Progression Server

Question: Are there any plans to open a progression server for EQ2, ala Sleeper/Combine for EQ1?

Brenlo: Yes

For those not familiar, a Progression Server implements (for the most part) the current rule set, but restores all of the Access Quests, Level & AA Limitations, and other barriers into the game, which players must unlock. For instance, at the start, players would not have access to AAs, nor be able to surpass level 50. Only after group/heroic players have unlocked all of the access quests and raid guilds completed all of the raid content in the game would the level cap raise to 60 and AAs become available.

Progression servers are time-consuming to implement, as rules and quests long since removed or altered must be reintegrated into the game. Triggers must be added throughout the game to unlock parts of the game on a progression server. When a progression server was introduced to EQ1, I believe it reached parity with live servers, unlocking all of the content in just 1 month. Surelythe programming and QA testing required to implement this in EQ2 would surpass 1 month.

We will stay on top of this startling revelation and bring you any news that comes to light. For now, there’s a thread on the EQ2 Forums.

Again, the complete Chat Logs are available at EQ2 ZAM.