Feldon A few hours ago, Amnerys was kind enough to shoot me an e-mail with much better screenshots of the EQ2Players Sneak Peak from Thursday night. As I was poking around, I had a moment of sheer curiosity and checked what I knew to be the URL for the new EQ2Players site. To my surprise, I discovered that the site was up and running!
It’s February 16th, and EQ2Players is LIVE!
An Unbiased Review?
These days, I’m wearing at least two hats, one as the operator of an EverQuest 2 News & Commentary site (EQ2Wire), and as the designer of a competing site to EQ2Players — EQ2U.
We appreciate all the hard work that SOE has put into building a Data Feeds service so that EQ2Players can be just one of what will be a growing number of websites that build on EQ2 data. As Dan Kinney told me, each website will have different strengths and thus attract a different audience.
So with that, I did want to just do a brief, and what I hope is objective, review of EQ2Players.
Cloaked in Security
The first thing you’ll notice about the new EQ2Players site is that it requires a login with your Station credentials to do anything. This has Pros and Cons, as it allows players who have availed themselves of the Opt-out to Hide their characters to still use EQ2Players. However this requirement will eliminate the kind of casual item, character, spell, and guild searches that were a staple of EQ2Players in the past. It’s very possible that this is a limitation of the EQ2Players Beta and that such casual searches will be possible going forward.
Also, demonstrating an abundance of caution, I found that I was logged out after just 10-15 minutes.
Where’s My Stats?
EQ2Players does not recreate the in-game cornucopia of Character Statistics. EQ2Players seems to have a razor-sharp focus on doing a few things well, specifically Comparing two characters, their items, and a few of their key stats, etc. If you want a “display every possible piece of information about your EQ2 character”, then EQ2U is your site.
Spell Lists, Achievements, AAs
The Spell List is decidedly thorough, as they include every Tradeskill art, innate Ability, invisible AA-earned enhances/buffs, and finally Spells, including the ones you’ve outleveled.
Achievements is a robust table of every Achievement you’ve ever earned. Some back-of-the-napkin math indicates that this could surpass 60 pages for some characters.
The Alternate Advancement calculator attempts to mimic the flawless Beetny’s AA Calculator, but the white backgrounds and wide floating descriptions are distracting. Also, all 10 spell descriptions are shown in a stack regardless of how many points you’ve spent. I could not find a way to view my in-game AAs using this feature.
Item Searches and Details
Out of curiosity, I did a few item searches and I noticed that only a few items seem to come back. I searched for “Hauberk” and only got 7 results. This search returns 260 results on EQ2U. Further, when we hovered over the items, the stats were mostly missing.
Conclusions
The new EQ2Players site is a Beta. As a result, there are any number of planned features in the pipeline. For now, its main advantage is that it allows players to exercise their privacy and still view some information about their characters. Also, players can directly compare their characters to other characters. The site is also aesthetically pleasing and has crisp, clear graphics and use of fonts.
The main disadvantages we see are the information and customization could stand significant improvement.
This has to be a joke, lol. Everything looks ugly and seemingly broken, especially the AA Calculator one. EQ2U still wins.
Where are all the Ranking Category’s, like quests, and collections and the other 2 dozen or more ways to compare your toons to others, and the dozen other things the ols system used to do like Guild rankings by server and serverwide.
This took them 2 years? They need to get there money back. The old version was WAY better even if it only worked half the time.
Where did they get the character shot images? They seem to be inconsistent as my Necro is on her mount, but my SK is just a static image that seems caught in mid-AFK stance.
Only reason I saw to even look at EQ2players were the achievements, but that information is displayed very poorly. It would be nice if EQ2U could show achievements (in a much better way than EQ2players does, of course).
@Quabi: It’s coming. All the infrastructure stuff is done. Just need the styling stuff done so it doesn’t look horrid.
@Brigh: The images are generated when you log off. We show them on the Bio tab of EQ2U with a background of the character’s home city. I discovered that for the most part, you can pose yourself for the picture when you log off. If you dismount, target someone, hit ~ to turn on auto-attack, then camp, your picture will actually show you wielding your weapons.
@DethDlr Thanks! 8) I was curious as there didn’t seem to be commonality between all my toons. Great job on EQ2U!!
appearance is nice but eq2u definitely surpass in terms of functionnality š
And SIGH ! Nothing on quest and compare with other players…
On Freeport i’m sure i’m in the top 10 questers
I cheked one of my toons : EQ2players doesn’t seem to specify the quality of items.
My guy has several fabled items and most of the rest legendary : eq2players gives the stats but nothing more.
Appearance items : Am I the only one noticing they forgot the Cloak slot in there ?
“Function Tapestry.Initializer.initSOEComponent() does not exist.”
I’m guessing most of the time they were working on the API feed, not the actual site.
@EQ2Wire: any chance we can have a link to EQ2U near the top of the site? Can’t find any links besides the news items to it.
So this one will be so much worse than the original eq2players no will use it and it will fail like the mobile phone app?
The original you could upload a character image.
And those graphs are the suck. Can we stop using interns?
EQ2players site 2/10
EQ2U 8/10
I’d be willing to be plat that the EQ2players site stays in “beta”, or you can add features with SC.
no leaderboards on eq2 players major fail….
I like the comparing of stats and items and hits. It still needs some work though, and the data needs to be updated. My max melee hit is higher, and my max magic hit is totally wrong.
Hey Feldon – Can we get a link on the side bar directly to EQ2U ? The one there just bring you to this story … I know I can add a favorite to it … but I work on a dozen differing computers at home and at work and I like being able to just pop in and check things at a whim. Great site and nice work. Nice attempt at being un-biased … you did a better job at that then I could. EU2Players needs a LOT of work … I am sure it is ongoing (TM) (chuckle … CR)
I must confess that I like the interface on EQ2Players better, mostly because of the way items are handled (sorry Dethdlr & Feldon, I do’t like mouseover *blush*).
I’m highly disappointed by the fact that currently we 1/ have to log in 2/ can’t seem to be able to search for a character without having it compared to yourself 3/ is totaly devoid of leaderboards ;( (nononononono, I’m not obsessed by my discovery rank)
There were people working on the EQ2Players website, and then Dan Kinney, Adam, and others worked on the Data Feeds API. Time was not “taken” from one project by the other.
I will be adding a banner to EQ2U this week or possibly integrating it into the banner.
Oddly when I click on achievements, I get the aa calculator site.
Leaderboards do not work or at least you can not search by server. This is a major fail. 95% of what I used players for was to compare myself with the general population as far as ranking my dps and other things, can not do that now…well unless you are top 100 world wide and then I guess you would get listed but that does very little for server wide and guild improved metrics. What a waist…