Commentary: Why Itemization Matters
There is a lot of psychology at work in getting a player to come back, month-after-month, year-after-year, to a single game. I wasn’t there, but I’m guessing that the designers of the original EverQuest probably didn’t have the luxury of having a behavioral psychologist on staff to tell them where to put the roadblocks, the sticks, and the carrots, let alone exactly how to balance everything to build a “sticky” audience that would still call EverQuest their ‘home’ 12 years later.
The irony of Destiny of Velious is that it is one of the best expansions we’ve had in years. There is a ton of content, the quests are well-written, and the dungeons are a bit more interesting than in the past. Sure, the creative design of the dungeons and intricate raids have resulted in months of fixes and patches which wouldn’t have been seen in more mundane zones. But above all else, most players have found the dungeons and raids interesting. The major malfunction with Velious has been Itemization.
As a textbook case of the often overdiagnosed and overprescribed ADHD — look! something shiny! — I am a firm believer in the importance of the so-called Reward Center of the brain. While researchers haven’t pegged a specific geographic location in the brain which is responsible, it is clear that our minds give us a ‘juice up’ of dopamine at just the right time to motivate or reinforce behavior, or sometimes to prepare us for a terrifying situation such as slipping on gravel on an incline, or avoiding a car accident. If you’re not entertained, eventually you’re going to switch off and do something else.
The streamlined itemization in Destiny of Velious has unfortunately stripped away virtually all unique, interesting effects and moved them to Adornments. Secondary stats have also been stripped away, removing any need for specialization of gear except for fighters who still carry offensive vs. defensive sets. Even battle priests got streamlined, with the surprising comment during beta ‘We are not itemizing for battle priests this expansion’. Except for class armor sets, most of the items in Velious are one-size-fits-all by Archetype (Priest, Scout, Mage, Fighter).
I started playing shortly after the release of Echoes of Faydwer. What stuck out in my memory is how excited players got about certain items. It was common for players to link items to each other in chat, ask where the item was acquired, talk about the unique effects, etc. Lengthy discussions on the forums about the mechanics of interesting procs included Excel spreadsheets and mathematical analysis.
At one time, there were “shopping lists” of the best items for each slot for any class, and players would make a point of visiting specific dungeons and tackling specific raids in an effort to get those items. “Where’d you get that?” was a common query during Kunark, the Shadow Odyssey, and to a lesser extent Sentinel’s Fate. But since Velious, I can probably count on one hand the number of items I’ve seen linked in world channels except for Auctions.
With Velious, each archetype has just a few upgrades in each zone and once they’ve got them, there is no reason to go back. Interesting itemization that drives players to choose has been replaced with what I call the Stats Odometer. Judging a character is done based not on individual items, but common stats that incrementally increase as you loot items, sometimes with as little as a 0.2% improvement:
- Primary Stat (STR for Fighters, INT for Mages, AGI for Scouts, WIS for Priests)
- Health Mod (STA for all classes)
- Critical Chance
- Multi Attack
- Crit Bonus
- Potency
When someone asks me what gear I have these days, I just give them a readout of those numbers above. There is no longer any reason to acquire particular items. Instead, everything is incremental upgrades. Because Adornments are where all of the unique effects have moved, looting a new item in a raid or dungeon can elicit mixed emotions, as you’ll need to replace any expensive adornments for the new item. It might cost 40 plat, and either 10 red shards or 5 yellow shards just to swap in a new item with a 1% increase in a needed stat.
One of the oddest explanations for this reduction in Procs and Effects from gear in Velious was Server Lag. I can’t personally attest to this, but any performance gain has come at the expense of making Itemization unbelievably boring. Even if there was a smooth progression of items, with Hard Mode raids being more than a 1% upgrade over Easy Mode, with Drunder items being a substantial upgrade over Ry’Gorr and Zek items, EQ2’s current itemization would still be so uninteresting as to be depressing.
Itemization matters, and I feel that it should be a prestigious job within any MMO’s development team. It shouldn’t be a stepping-stone job until a Senior Designer position opens up. I have all the respect and empathy in the world for anyone who is tasked with this nearly impossible job. But I fault the management for thinking that this multidisciplinary job can be picked up by an outsider, no matter how brilliant and experienced in other MMOs they may be. Itemization should be a promotion from within. Whoever you’ve given the responsibility to manage all the rewards for your flagship MMO should be respected!
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Comments (12)
Chris
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“Itemization matters, and I feel that it should be a prestigious job within any MMO’s development team. It shouldn’t be a stepping-stone job until a Senior Designer position opens up.”
This basically sums up what happened. You put it perfectly Feldon. Hit the nail right on the head!
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Zizzu
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It’s the main reason I left EQ2 for good. Itemization takes a backseat to everything else and that is why EQ2 is slowly losing their playerbase. Condensing stats and is a piss-poor way to fix itemization.
The last and best zone that had the best itemization was Shard of Hate. It provided super rare items (even from the first named) that gave people amazing items (and sometimes overpowered). Unique procs and stats made that zone so worthwhile.
I will never understand the thought process of the Devs working for EQ2. They never listen to their playerbase and the keep dumbing the game down for no other reason than to make the quick buck.
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Kruzzen
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maybe someone could tell them this at fan faire. 🙂 And maybe something will be done. Maybe they should just make 4 classes while we are at it since the current gear leaves no reason to have the other 20 classes. 🙁
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Steve
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I wish someone would actually stand up to SOE at Fan Faire and tell them like it is. Unfortunately though you have a bunch of people that really are fanboys of the game and company and do not seem to want to rock the boat. Fan Faire needs to start being about rocking the boat.
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Quabi
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EQ2’s team thought itemization was simply motivation to do the content. “If a zone drops an upgrade, the players will run it, and itemization will be perfect,” they thought. They didn’t understand that the itemization itself adds a signficant fun factor.
They also overlooked the demotivational side of perfectly linear gear progression and the value of situational items. Yeah, I want the ultra-hard x4 boss I just killed to have upgrades for me, but it’s disheartening and uninteresting to enter a heroic or x2 zone knowing without a doubt that no loot in the zone will be of use to me, not even situationally.
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Dethdlr
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As I’ve said in other comments, I looked into getting some custom post-it notes printed up and mailed to the EQ2 team but they were a bit more expensive than I was willing to pay:
Anybody attending Fan Faire willing to do picket signs that say the same thing? 🙂
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Ratzilla
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i don’t know were you get off saying Velious is so great i’ve been on this game almost from it’s start .there is so much i dislike about Velious it’s one the WORST expansions in my book .jest counting the days till it’s a past expansion like all the rest . from nerfing tanks gear for the first two weeks to the lag fest called a pq with it’s not so great armor that never drops for some.to the epic fights broken with game updates and so much more a long list. jest hoping at fan faire tonight they say when the next expansion is coming . i expect no demand for my money better made content in the future now that everquest is everything to soe it should happen . when the next expansion comes maybe i can finally forget this thing called Velious it will be jest a past fail i can forget .
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Dethdlr
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I find it amusing Ratzilla that two of your examples of why Velious is so bad are issues with itemization.
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Murfalad
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I agree with a lot of the article, the itemisation they produced is mathematically good and works for the game, but I really think they should have given the dev team a week just to go over it and put in a lot more oddball items to spice things up.
I just do not understand too why on one hand they remove some stats because they were assigned at the same rate as each other, and then they go and itemise up gear so that if it has +4% crit bonus it also has +4% potency, if it has 35 STR it always has 35 STA, why not vary these?
There is just too much fear of players making a mistake with their gearing up imo.
On the procs though I do agree with the EQ2 devs that they caused a problem, for example in PVP I remember once shooting one player and losing 2/3rds of my health to auto procs – thats nutty, most of the time my stoneshields would be useless because the procs were too low damage to be absorbed, yet there were 20 or them….
And in PVE watching the speed that the log file goes at due to so many procs being on gear is ridiculous. Lots of small auto procs adds nothing interesting to the gameplay, a few clickable/auto procs that people can respond to when they go off does.
EQ2 is already a bit too frantic, dialing the speed down and making for more thoughtful gameplay would be a good move in my opinion.
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Panther
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I am still shocked by how Rygorr is the next upgrade after Public quest gear.
(no one wants to lose 100 pri-stat/ 100 sta and 3% crit / potency)
And even then it is a such a small upgrade apart from the focus part on 3 of the items (because the 10 stat increase per item does not make up for the 100/100 you lose breaking up the PQ set).
Alot of casual players are not bothering with adornments on non-armour items because every time you get an item that is 0.1% better than need to spend shards or Marks up upgrade. This leaves people in limbo waiting to reach certain tier and then adorn.
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Jrel
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You can’t even use adornments to put special effects on your items when the tougher zones require full critical mitigation on your armor. Also, the procs on adornments (and the lesser War Runes) are just candy.
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camelotcrusade
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I drifted away the Christmas before Velious came out, and the boring and nearly featureless snow zone at the beginning didn’t hook me when I poked my nose into the launch in February. So I decided I needed a longer break.
I have to be honest though. I’ve been coming here weekly since then and it’s all the itemization talk that’s kept me from logging in again. It just sounds so disappointing and depressing, especially when I had so much fun lovingly gearing up in SF and saving alternate sets of gear for this or that situation.
Here’s hoping there’s some news out of Fan Faire that will overcome my inertia brought on by relentless bad itemization news…
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