Feldon 
As we prepare for our busiest weekend of the year we’re keeping an eye out for any and all advice on how to survive another blistering Las Vegas trip, cover EQ2 (and we’re guessing EQNext), and not forgetting to occasionally eat and/or sleep.
Calthine‘s annual Fan Faire Guide over at EQ2 ZAM is a favorite and includes helpful tips to save time and money.
Karen Bryan has turned in her own Fan Faire Survival Guide over at Massively and it’s worth a read with advice on food, meeting guildies, and the value of planning ahead.
You may want to download the Hotel Maps @ the SOE Fan Faire Forums to your phone.
If you haven’t already, download the Fan Faire app for your iPhone by Greg “Rothgar” Spence.
UPDATE: The new version of this app has been revised for 2011 and is now available.
I sincerely hope someone calls out these worthless devs about how the itemization in EQ2 has nearly ruined the game.
Necro,
They would most likely blow off anyong that did. Likely in the same fashion they shrugged off the Questions about fighter heal crits last year, among countless other such happenings.
They also took a lot of unfair criticism from people who fail to acknowledge anything positive (the sullen must make their mothers’ basements unhappy places). They also took away several pieces of feedback and ideas that they implemented. I love the blow off answer: we’ll look into that. It’s much more polite than MY preferred reply: pull your head out mate, this ain’t a charity we don’t have crystal balls.
Charming Striinger,
Win many friends with those kinds of attacks?
Players do seem to think that $14.99 a month entitles them to sling any vile insult that comes to their mind at the developers, who clearly must have lead-lined stomachs and fireproof underpants to deal with it all. In my opinion the EQ2 forums are undermoderated these days.
That said, dev communication is at an all-time low. We’ve lost dev chats, Q&A, interviews, and almost all of the interaction we used to have. Communication during DoV beta was absolutely abysmal.
I’m working on a commentary on Itemization. I think SmokeJumper thinks we’re complaining about the power of items, not that they are so cookie-cutter that nobody gets excited anymore.
@Feldon
How could SJ possibly think that the complaints are over the power of the items? The forums are pretty clear on the point that 99% of the gear is a copy and paste and change the primary stat, leave stamina the same and put an appropriate (or outright wrong) blue stat here and there.
I agree that there has been a great deal of ugly thrown at the developers from a lot of people (myself included) but like you said there has been an extreme lack of communication. Other than being able to gather some strats early the beta was a waste of my time, several things were reported to them by me that absolutely should have been fixed but were not for many weeks after release. Someone from SOE even went as far as to say that it was the first time they had heard of one issue I reported with certain mobs not spawning because of a pathing issue (first room of OOA) that was /bugged, posted on the beta forms and directly addressed to a dev by myself. What I rported was ignored, written off as no big deal and actually wasn’t only affecting mobs in there but in other places as well.
If you get the chance, I highly recommend checking out the class mechanics panel, very high on the lulz factor. The EQ2X panel last year was quite interesting as well.
And in regards to developer communication, I wish it were better, but honestly, I really doubt many of the same people dishing it out would dare to take half of the abuse. And cry me a river over the “but we’re paying customer’s” jank. $14.99 does not entitle anyone to be an absolute asshole.
Oh and while I’m on it, $14.99 is honestly cheap as hell for an MMO subscription. When you take into account inflation, the cost of development talent (artist and engineers), server and DB hardware, $14.99 is not that much, considering most MMOs have been charging that for over half a decade, yet the cost to maintain and publish content has certainly gone up.
Sometimes I think they throw us a bone so we would not have any ammo to complain about. While I am honestly only waiting on TOR atm; personally I do not have the time to raid, and thats the general direction of the game (EQ2) currently. I do still enjoy the group play of the game, but SOE has done murder on the small group I run with. We are all moving to TOR when it comes out, for the more group/casual friendly game play they seem to be banking on. That being said, its hard to turn your back on a game you have tons of time invested in. And on a side note, Beastlords soon? Still I hope your successful Feldon. Coming from you the critique of itemization might catch a Dev’s attention. Good Luck.
Anything’s possible. 😉