Feldon Every year at Fan Faire, we get to watch EverQuest II Designers and Developers answer some really fantastic on-topic, valid questions from the Question & Answer panels. These questions help shape the future of the game and get problems addressed that the devs may not be entirely aware of.
However, every year, we also see some of the strangest, uninformed, facepalming (is that a verb?) questions that completely puzzle us (and the developers). Hey, they paid their Fan Faire admission price too, right?
Over the years, fastidious players have wised up and managed to intercept EQ2 devs in the breezeway between hotels (or anywhere else they can find them including at the Pool Party) and get their questions posed. To quote a dev, “If you see me standing at a booth or demo all by myself, please come talk to me! I’m probably bored!”
So what can a mere fan site like EQ2Wire do? Well we’ve got an idea! We’re going to collect the best questions posted in this article (and by e-mail), and then solicit elect hot interns representatives willing to go up to the mic and ask them! So POST YOUR QUESTION! It can be about anything from Crafting to Hardcore Raiding to Avatars to Itemization. If it’s a good one, we’ll see that it gets asked at a Q&A panel or some other way. If it’s a bad one, well, that may be the subject of a future anonymous article! 😉
Remember folks, keep your question short-and-sweet and constrained to answerable questions.
- “When are you fixing Brawlers?” is not an answerable question.
- “Can you add an AoE attack to Bards?” is a perfectly valid question.
and remember “When are you adding Beastlords?” may just get a definitive answer at this year’s Fan Faire!
If you want to submit your question anonymously, use the Contact Us form or send an e-mail to fanfaire (at) eq2wire.com.
Is there a revamp for the engine currently in the works?
Can we either have multi-subscriptions per account, or the ability to link multiple accounts to the same character pool?
If/when a cross server instance lobby is implemented, will we be able to do both heroic and raid instances? All or only new dungeons yet to be created?
Is EQNext going to be PC only, or aimed at consoles?
Deefiejj,
What engine?
Now that mythical weapon effects have essentially become integrated class-defining powers, are there any plans to revisit and rebalance them?
Is there a particular reason why bards do not have any true aoes? If not could we have some added or possibly have some of our green aoes changed to blue?
Will paladins AA-Enhance:Crusade in the hero line be changed to strength or updated to be more in line with the stat changes?
Considering that Bards songs are played/sung, is there any chance of making our aoe spells true aoe spells.
Can we have flying carpets that actually fly, pretty please? I know you said it’s mostly a lot of copying and pasting to do it…
Regarding the stat change, will dieties be revamped? If so, what is the timeline?
Up till now progression has been an increase in level every couple of years and more aa each year, with thoughts of moving away from the Expansion every year model (woohoo) How do you see progression moving forward. Will it be periodic increases in AA? Bigger and bigger gear? I hope to stay away from level increases. lol.
Are there any enhancements coming to the inventory system? Given the size of bags available to characters and the number of bank slots, it would be great to have a grid-based, sortable inventory system for managing years and years worth of stuff.
Are there any plans to deal with Illusionist pet survivablity in raids with regards to AoE damage. The pet literally is not worth casting which makes the class not worth playing on most (many?) encounters. The pet should perhaps share the life and resists of the caster ?
This I am sure is the same for all pet classes. Certainly we pet users all moan about the same thing in game here. The Illy pet does seem even more fragile than some summoner ones though.
Voltaan is tired! When will he be able to sit down in a chair or lay down on a bed?
More than content, the game visual is something that seems important to me, in order to allow EQ2 to stay in competition with other games, new to the MMO market with better visual and armor design.
We’ve been promised for long now that they’ll be many improvements in flora system, trees, sky box … The world under water could also be improved. Shader 3 is still buggy, and there are not many new armor models. I mean REAL new model, not only recolored, re-textured.
Spells visual effects have decreased in quality and some of them seem blend.
Spell and combat arts animations are the same since day 1 and I’ve not seen any animation for a while. Even for dances and emotes …
Dungeons are gorgeous but outdoor zones are often empty and low level details.
What do you plan in order to give EQ2 a second breath?
Why do you feel the need to force us to attune heirloom gear? Why not just let us give our alt’s hand-me-downs when we’re done using them?
Why are the boxes the war runes come in not heirloom? They don’t unlock the rune till you open the box, and it’s not preventing us from selling or alt-looting them, its just making it a huge hassle.
Will we see a meaningful progression in mount speeds return in the near future instead of just a progression in mount type?
PVE —
1.) Any chance we will see classes get knockback?
2.) If we visit a mender and have no money, can repairs auto-deduct from our bank if we HAVE an appropriate balance?
PVP —
1.) In PVP on Nagafen, players who mentor down to a lower level to help another player can be killed, even beyond the current scope of PVP range by zone. Will Sony return to respecting PVP range or will it become the standard that players should be even more wary of helping other players as they may be attacked?
2.) Why do we have warfields where the goal is to destroy tower guards when it is called “player vs player”?
INTERFACE —
1.) Any chance we will eventually be able to mail more than one item at a time?
2.) Could we have a tool-tip that tells us WHICH of our alts on our account need a particular shiny in our bags? Makes it easier to know who to mail to rather than fill up the bank space and log 7+ alts repeatedly…
3.) Will we ever get macros that will be visible across ALL our account characters?
4.) Can we get Ignore Player Account? I hate the fact that most of wwho I put on ignore just make an alt and continue being annoying.
HARVESTING —
1.) Any chance we will ever fish up treasured items, even if it would be a rare opportunity?
2.) Fishing contests?
TRADESKILLING / CRAFTING —
1.) Will Sony ever put in a Tinkering daily?
2.) Tinkered flying mounts or more variety in vehicles?
3.) Any chance we could have a commission posting system? I place an order for feysteel armor on the broker with rares/fuel/tip and anybody can fill the order while I am offline? Incentive could be higher than normal tradeskill experience and encourage an economy.
4.) Can we PLEASE get ONE mannequin with a SELECTABLE race and gender right-click feature?
5.) Provisioning: Can we PLEASE, by ALL THAT’S HOLY, eventually be able to craft 5 items at a time?
HOUSING
1.) Will we ever get houses on, as well as IN boats ( IE ala Seafury Buccaneers ) ? The skiff was nice but having only an exposed deck is well …sucktastic. Players like ROOMS and the ability to customize said rooms…
2.) Fix see-thru carpets?
3.) Ability to set SWING direction on placeble doors?
RACES
1.) Any chance of seeing aviaks, bugbears, clockwork, gnolls, goblins, hooluks, kobolds, vultaks or orcs a playable race? Notice I didn’t ask about Othmir…
2.) Will we see more quests added that give us greater depth into the lore of each race?
Feldon,
Well the engine of EverQuest 2, as I recall somewhere on the forums one of the developers said that they were working on revamping it, but I have not heard of that ever since…
Could be that he was talking about maybe pushing as much as possible to the GPU, which would be fine as well 🙂
Back in ether November or December there was talk about a class Manifesto with the release of DoV. Well we are a few months past that, is there any plan on releasing that class Manifesto?
1) Guild Halls – Any plans to increase item count, or at least offer say 250-500 item expaders.. we have them for houses, they nerfed it so you cant use in a GH, so where is our replacement. General upping of the item count would be even better but I’d settle for a purchasable expander
2) Spell revamp.. they seriously changed game mechanics since the last spell revamp.. think its about time to look at this.. half of most classes have had thier amount of worthwhile spells getting removed off thier hot bars.
3) AA revamp.. lets not get started on this one, but its something that needs to be looked at. Perfect example, Wis lines for healers… Undead this, Undead that.. um.. really when have you been fighting Undead in the past 4 expansions.. its all void monsters, giants or dragon-isk stuff. DOF expac was the last real release of Undead mob types.. maybe make the AA lines not depend on mob types. just a single example for the revamp arguement.
Why are you people ruining the game with your over simplified itemization?
Why are some players having the collection quest journal automatically start a collection when the item has not been examined to actually start the collection quest?
With all of the changes made to gear after the launch of SF and DoV, are there any plans to make proper itemization a higher priority in the development process so the team gets it right the first time with future releases?
When we will get USEFUL targeting commands (target nearest/next foe that has more than 1 point of hate with your group/raid) rather than “hit TAB, wind up targeting the harvest node 200m over thataway —> while the other wolf chews on your ankle…
Can we ditch the forced progression? In previous expansions, we can zone into any dungeon we want. In DOV, we have to finish Dungeon 1 before we’re even allowed to click the door to Dungeon 2, and finish that before Dungeon 3…
(“Second” the questions on spending more than 43 cents on itemization, and dealing with swarm (and other) pet survivability issues.)
Will they spice up itemization at all? Are they going to bring back the secondary stats that SJ said they would. http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?start=105&topic_id=499143
I have three questions for now
1) Are there any plans for a 64 bit version of the EQ2 client?
2) Are there any plans to rewrite the EQ2 client to be optimised for SM3(or greater)? (As Imago-Quem did mention that the current structure was organised best for SM1 and not for SM3).
3) Are there any plans for indoor GPU shadows?
4) Smokejumper mentioned earlier this year that there were plans for a replacement for the live servers free trial, are there any further details?
Here is something I want asked. Why did they have to nerf the glide on flying mounts. I fall like a rock on my flying mount now. 🙁
What will become of vox???
as in will we ever be able to transfer off?
Can we please have solvent to remove adorns from gear (even if it destroys that gear)?
We were promised accurate real time xml data feeds for sites to replace EQ2players, where is that project and when will it be released?
In light of the security troubles Sony has had, does SOE intend to implement stronger security using SMS Pins, email unlocking, coin locks or even max password retry limits to protect us from hacking?
What is the dev team’s target PC setup to be able to play EQ2 with everything fully enabled to see it as they intended (at 1920×1080 resolution)
Can we get UI docking and scaling? (saying I like the way Rift’s UI docks and scales makes me taste vomit a bit…but I like the way it works and supports different screen resolutions without blowing up your windows)
I second the “where’s the class manifesto you promised us” question mentioned above.
Also, last fan faire there was talk of giving players the ability to pack outfits into a crate (just like when you buy them) so you can store them neatly in your bank for some appearance variety. Is that still on the to-do list? If so, when?
The soka models became default a while back and assets have taken on a bit more “Saturday morning” feel (e.g. The ‘WoW-hog’. Should we anticipate the WoW art emulation to continue gaining momentum under SJ’s influence (or RW’s)?
Last year I asked the question about threat mechanics that I still have: are transfer amount (eg. Amends) based on aggro generated gross or net? (ie. Should threat transfer be better for holding aggro if I turn off my threat reducers when amended?)
Can a simple system be implemented that would show (in a bag full of collection items) those which a character NEEDS differently to those they have already ? The mechanic seems to be there as the red text saying “you have already ‘blah’ this collection item” appears on mouseover. COuld the ones that are not needed perhaps get the same mechanic as armour that cannot be equipped and turn red ?
I am trying to use, in this example, items that already exists such as turning red but really anything would be a large help when looking through bags of collection items over 5-10 toons.
Oh I would like to also “3rd” some information on the promised class manifesto. i was more excited at that news than news of the last expansion. Why I allowed my brain to forget about it completely is beyond me.
What’s up with the wizard’s IceShield behaviour when multiple wizards cast it on the same target? It seems to queue, but it’s duration continues to tick down but it doesn’t remember if it got extra ticks (from Time Warp). Can it be changed to just stack?
Just like some folks have asked before.
Any plans on upgrading the game engine? which right now and as ever struggle to run maxed out on super fast pcs.
Would be great to see multicore cpu support properly implemented not the current minor one. With gpu becoming powerful, let them do some work for a bit as well. Crossfire/sli support should be there. Some mmos have gone from dx 8 to 11 now. Any plans in that area?
I hate that my system which can run games like crysis 2(dx 11 and hi-texture pack) maxed and get 70 +fps whereas under raid settings eq2 on extreme quality cripples it by going single digit fps.
Back to game itself.
I play a 90 guard and have done so since i started playing 6 years ago. I have played pretty much at the top tier raiding wise and have seen guards being MT number 1 to useless spot fillers in my time.
I know some recent changes have helped the guards (thanks to Xelgad) and some fighter taunts improvements are in the works but my question is still the age old one, dps disparity between classes. If guards are defensive tanks then we should have enough tools to compensate for dps who are these doing 300k easily. Crusaders and now brawlers are still kicking ass. Is there any plans on beefing guardian dps? Personally i do not mind going complete defense and take hits like no one else but i would also want to hold aggro by a certain mean, dps or otherwise. This is not the case and has been for 3 expansions now, pretty all other tank classes can do same, if not better.
Lastly, Xelgad posted on forums that we want to improve utility of the guardian class. Please, we are not utility we are Main Tanks and should be treated in that regards. Crusaders were hybrid classes to begin with, they should not be beating the primary classes from which they were derived from.
Arclite,
Check out the last question under the Geek Panel. The next thing GermInUSA is working on is putting GPU updates on its own thread on the second core. Right now, the game waits for the next frame update on the graphics card. This will allow the CPU to work on the next frame while the graphics card is crunching and displaying a frame.
ANSWERS to many of the Questions posed in this article have been posted in their own page After the Q&A — More Answers from the EQ2 Team.
I have 3 EQ2 accounts. Will I be able to manage Collections Banks Inventorys and Vaults of my multiple accounts by an addon or on an upgraded to the game?
Atazla,
I guess that’s your question for next year? 🙂