EQ2 Panel #7 Q&A #2

Starting Saturday’s EverQuest II Q&A Panel…

Update: This is a video of EverQuest II Panel #7 “Q&A #2” added on July 24, 2011.

Q: what will be the 8th year veteran reward?
A: The answer is, probably nothing. What we want to do is change the Veteran Reward System. We have no idea when this will be coming, but we want players to earn points that they can spend in a little category like Marketplace. We’d keep adding new items to it. We;d like to do this eventually. We might get to the 8th reward first though.

Q: How much original EQ1 lore is coming over for Beastlords?
A: We had to do a lot of research including things that we’rent given to us in EQ1. A lot of it is from EQ1. It’s been integrated into EQ2’s lore. The Sellok line from the Mystic line. No Vah’shirs.
Smoke: Never say never.

Q: Can we have a group of ratongas running into a dungeon and stealing things in a Design Your Own Dungeon ?
A: Not at launch. We’re keeping it simple at launch because that’s complicated enough to implement. After launch we can look at other things. At launch, it will be just running dungeons.

Q: Nunchucks? (not Crabbok)
A: We already answered the question. They’re not going in.

Q: Risk vs. Reward in Drunder Zones. By the time you can do them, you have better gear. The devs should have to run Drunder zones in instance gear and post the video on Youtube.
A: We’re constantly tweaking rewards. The goal was breaking down gear. We may have overshot the difficulty. Drunder has been tweaked a few times since it launched. We’ve made lots of changes since Velious launched in zone difficulty.

Q: Prestige House: Estate of Unrest?
A: Floating barren island is coming. We know you want more prestige houses.

Q: Bridge of death in Krytoc’s working as intended? (last time it was a ranger, so it was ok)
A: It was a bug so we’ll fix it.

Q: What has a greater priority, character art types or the equipment?
A: Our priority is both. Player power is defined by abilities, AAs, and items.

Q: How important is the Racial Traits page?
A: It’s not meant to have a lot of influence. You have little bonuses here and there.

Q: Can we have more appearance petamorph pets for my Conjuror pet, etc.? More cool ones instead of farm animals, creepy stuff, etc.
A: We’ve talked about adding some more.
Q: Flaming squirrels!
Smoke: yep! Maybe not for $20 though.

Q: Placing 2 mirrors causes them both to black out.
A: It’s a bug I’ll fix it.

Q: Build Your Own Dungeon, do we have to submit them before they go live?
Smoke (misunderstood the question): When you take them down, edit them, and repost them, you start over on Ranking but they show up.

Q: Can we have items that we can’t use darken so I don’t ahve to mouse over them?
A: Writing that down.

Q: Can we do something with the EQ2 Players website or open up an API to fan sites?
A: We’re working on a new system that we can open to the public in XML or JSON. This will be open to anyone who wants to use it. It will include Static information including Spells, Items, etc. Player data, Guild data. Players will be able to opt out like they do now. We want sites to write their own mobile apps, etc. When you see the new EQ2Players, it’s just around the corner, we’ve seen it working in house and it looks good.

Q: Because the Commonlands PQ will be low level, what will the loot be like?
A: Commonlands PQ will be around level 20. We want chronomentoring when you are in the area. The items may not necessarily be gear. Maybe a token system, adornments, etc.

Q: Can we get DCUO Style tab?
Smoke: We’d love to do that, but it would just be extremely difficult to store the appearance of every item you’ve ever had.

Q: Can we open a Progression server?
A: It would be a lot of design work, and we have problems with declining population (on an established Progression server)
Rothgar asking audience: Would you play on it? How many players would come back to play it? Base game with no expansions. No transfers to it. You’d have to unlock certain achievements to unlock expansions. It’s like starting over when the game was fresh.

UPDATE: Added the clarification that SmokeJumper was talking about Population decline on a Progression server after everything’s been unlocked. EQ2X Forums Discussion.

Q: On Antonia Bayle, it’s a problem with PQs that every player possible squeezes into GD1 or GD2 while GD3 is abandoned.
A: In order to do that, we’d have to limit the number of players in each zone.

Q: We had the old EQ1 Chronoportals. Can we have some of the EQ1 graphics instead of just the EQ2 zones?
A: We would have loved to have done that. We came up with the idea of Chronoportals basically 1 week before the EQ1 anniversary. We only had a couple of days to implement it. We’d love to do more here.

Q: Thanks for the in-game appearance change window. Changing our illusions, etc. Could this window be bigger for Shave and a Haircut?
A: We can take a look at that.

Q: On a guildie’s Sarnak when he holds his weapon, the blade is in his hand instead of the handle.
Smoke: You know someone who plays a Sarnak?
Devs: It’s a specific weapon?
Q: It’s all bladed weapons.
A: Send us a PM on the forum. Probably a quick fix.

Q: More daily Mara tradeskill quests?
A: Frostfell themed tradeskill zone coming up.
(audience: Tradeskill Raids!)

Q: Any plans to help 2-handers?
A: There’s a formula. If you are using 2 one handed weapon as dual wield. You are taking a penalty of 150 instead of 200. 2-handers have a 50% damage bonus.

–silly question about underwear and snorkel? from Community board–

Q: Will there be more classes beyond Beastlord?
A: We don’t want to say never. Beastlord is the only class that doesn’t exist in EQ2 but does in EQ1. Going beyond 25 classes, heck going beyond 12 classes is crazy. I wouldn’t get your hopes up. You never know.
Smoke: Beastlords are kind of a perfect storm. We did have some gameplay mechanics we wanted to try and play around with.
Rothgar: we were talking the hairdresser class.

Q: Raid invites not working if you are in a different zone.
A: I’ve got that written down.

Q: Can we move characters around in a group so certain classes in certain slots like Tank in Slot #2?
A: That’s gonna be a lot of work. 😉 We could probably do something like that.
Q: When Linkdead characters come back they don’t always go to the same group.
A: We have some ideas about that including allowing or not allowing players to come back after an LD, etc.

Q: Can we have keybindings to target players in other groups in a raid?
A: We can look at this.

Q: In T3 guild halls up on the roof, but the door is just black and you can’t see into the room.
A: We’ll have our environment guy look at this.

Q: Can we get the iPhone app by AFK to actually work?
(devs laughing)
A: We’re going to keep working on this to see if we can resolve that issue.

Q: Can we get an option in the Broker to exclude collection items we already have?
(Rothgar groans)
A: It’s an obvious improvement, but this is a lot of work. It’s a big technical issue.

Q: (same question as earlier) Styles tab to keep all your Appearances in a bag?
A: It’s an ongoing discussion. (SmokeJumper admits he’s an appearance gear whore — his bags are full of this stuff). We want to resolve this.

Q: Are Mercenaries just going to be the 4 archetypes, or can we pick from all 25 classes?
A: That’s TBD honestly. We’re starting with some basic types of mercenaries. If we had to support 25 classes and have all those UI brains. To make all those changes would severely complicate the implementation.

Q: Is the Dragon race ever going to be part of EQ2?
A: There’s no plan currently. We have a lot of dragon stuff to do with the other half of Velious.

Q: Can Adornments get their own filter in the Broker? When you search by slot, you get tons of adornments.
A: For now, you can do -adornment.
Smoke: EQ2 is chock full of undocumented features.
Q: Can you still put in an All Armor search feature?
Rothgar: You have to convince Dave to let me do it.

Q: Can we make Collections deletable? I have a page quest since DoF that I can’t complete.
A: I made a pass on removing NO TRADE on a lot of those pages. Send me a tell on the forum and I’ll look at those.

Q: Lack of desirability with 2-handed weapons.
A: All the 2-handers in GU61 have 2 adornment slots of each type. As part of the item revamp all 2-handers will have those slots.

Q: Necro/Conjy pet appearances?
A: This came up earlier. We’re going to look into a smart way to choose the Appearance of Summoner pets.

Q: Can Raid Leader reset everyone’s zones?
A: We could do that with a confirmation screen on everyone’s screen.
(applause)

Q: TSO Heritage Quest blue item that only mages could wear. Can we have it just for appearance? I don’t remember the name.
(Audience) Robe of the Underfoot
Silius: A lot of our Heritage Items, I don’t have a problem with making them appearance equippable.

Q: With the armor revamp, can we look at the tags on faction armor in Maj’dul, City Merchants, etc.? Could these be changed to available to all classes?
A: As part of the reitemization pass we weren’t planning to do Appearance gear. We can look at it. Send me a PM.

Q: Will Beastlord Warders change appearance as they level up (a tiger cub growing into a full size tiger)?
A: We’d like to do this, we’ll have to see.

Q: Question to SmokeJumper: Is there any decision you’ve made that you’d like to take back?
A: I’d like to go back and have that Reporter not ask me that question at E3. What are you starting to see things now in GU61 and beyond are things we’ve been planning for 6-7 months. The long-term planning for this game is a lot better than it was. Less knee-jerk decisions. We have a long-term vision.

Q: Can we choose to auto-sell all vendor junk to a Vendor?
A: That’s on our list of things to do.

Q: Can we opt-out of Ready Check?
Smoke: I think the option there is, don’t play with those people.
Rothgar: Every time we add an option to EQ2, a kitten dies.

Q: Group heals cross-group on raids?
A: No plans.

Q: When I look for Transmutables and look up Treasured, I get tons of Handcrafted items.
A: We’ll take a look at it. There’s some overlap beween crafted and treasured gear.
Domino: if you do a -apprentice that will help a lot.

Q: I like when we can search our inventory. Can this be expanded to search all characters on our account?
Devs: NOOOOooooo….. This would require extensive DB queries.

Q: Search your collection window?
A: Filter for collection window?
A: Inventory clutter is a long-term plan. We will continue to peck away at this.

Q: Can we buy Bank slots on Marketplace?
A: Any time we increase space, we have to consider all the options of Performance.

Q: Will Kerra ever get racial armor in male and female?
A: We will continue to do Heritage armor sets.
A: Erudite had male and female.
Smoke: Interesting trivia stat — 5th most popular race is the Kerra. If a Kerran buys a race potion, it’s almost always to change to a Ratonga.

Q: Can we ever have a hound dog or something other than a wolf?
A: You want a Chihuahua? We can make other dogs. We can put that on the schedule. We’re getting to the point where we can make just about anything.

– question about a shard item going directly into inventory instead of currency-

Q: Shave and a Haircut isn’t changing my hair color on my Freeblood.
A: This bug has been fixed but it’s not on live yet.

Q: For appearance gear, is there any way to make the Appearance tab not class-specific, race-specific, or level-specific?
A: When we originally did this, we didn’t want everyone rolling on items for appearance gear. We wanted some of that exclusivity. With the racial armor, we already let players have armor that ignores class.

Note: You’ll no longer be able to choose Need on an item that your character cannot use. It will be greyed out.

Q: Can my gnome ride my ogre shadowknight?
Smoke: That would be cool, and that’s so not gonna happen.

Q: Freeblood swarm of bats can fly, why not Fae and Arasai?
A: It’s already coming. The Fae lore actually explains why they can’t fly. The quest to earn flight as a Fae or Arasai will explain the change.

Q: Will the slideshows from all the panels be posted online?
A: (laughter) You can check it out on EQ2Wire. (lots of people pointing at me)

-question about a UI bug with Profit-

Q: Speak as a Dragon lets us skip most of the quest. But I need to do it on another server.
Smoke: That is the most fun quest in the game, I can’t believe you don’t want to do it again.

Q: How much SC would it cost to get my Defiler out of Frostfell? I’ve made 4 phone calls and 12 petitions. She’s still there. No help!
A: That shouldn’t happen. Talk to us and we’ll get it sorted out.

Q: Instead of a raidwide heal, how about a proximity heal sort of like Inquisition that would heal up to 8 players?
A: Any new mechanics like that we’d have to evaluate.

Q: Create Your Own Dungeon. Will we ever be able to use our own players?
A: If this takes off as a feature that everybody loves, and we receive tons of feedback about it. If it’s strongly desired we’ll look into it?

Q: Will we be able to make our own Raids?
A: They will be 6-man only to start. Down the road maybe.
Q: Can I use nunchucks on them?
(applause!)

END OF PANEL

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