f13.net

I was reading over the SK forums and stumbled across an interesting post. In response to the normal "Coming back to EQ2, should I play SK?" type post, someone wrote this:

I'll start off reminding everyone of my solo player bias :) I found this commentary interesting, because making content dependent on a lot of players (or even groups) means that someday it will get left behind as the game moves on.

Wouldn't it be cool if former group content was made solo, and former raid content group? Or maybe even *gasp* solo?

I know the raid contingent would cry bloody goddamned murder because, goshdarnit, they /earned/ that gear (that they don't use because it's 'garbage' to them now). That content should sit untouched except for the occasional guild raid when they're tired of raiding the same endgame tier ad nauseum!

Or you could make solo players very happy and allow us to get some decent gear for ourselves, and revitalize dead zones.

I enjoy that they've made a couple zones more solo-friendly using the concept that outdoor = solo friendly, indoor = group friendly (then conveniently forgetting to make higher level outdoor zones solo-friendly...), but sticking to a Vision has led down a bad path in the past. Being flexible and opening up some older raid content for small groups (or even solo players!) would be fun. Heck, even most old dungeons are just camping grounds for characters who have done it all before to get a couple drops as they race to endgame or filled with solo farmers.

I voted no, but I think it is a good idea to link new content to old content. Nothing wrong with having some RoK quests (e.g. epic weapons) send people back to old zones to trigger new mobs.

I voted yes because as someone who's just now playing, there's alot of rework that could be done to make the old zones better. I'm speaking specifically to "content" and not anything raid because I haven't done that yet.

If I want to play an Erudite, I'm stuck with Freeport or Qeynos. Both have you running all over creation to do quests. It's a chaotic mess. Sure, there's some sense of depth there and satisfaction to be gained knowing you worked for your quests or whatever. But if you've had one taste of Neriak and the way it's set up or have just plain made one run way the frig out to the eastern part of Antonica and back, it wears you down and kills your mood to play. Sure, I could just play whatever race starts in Neriak, but if I'm compelled to do that over playing the race I'd like to play, then something's broken.

I'll stop ranting about being bored to tears doing Antonica quests since that's not really what this thread is about. I'll just say that as far as old content goes, as they put in new content and come up with new ideas that really work, they should regularly go back and update the old stuff with their new ideas. Especially if they want returning players or newbies to have the best experience and continue to pay them to play. But even ignoring those people, it also keeps things fresh so that the old timers will want to revisit or play those areas again with their alts.

But re-working old zones is not an efficient use of resources from a business standpoint. The goal is retention and new subscribers. Both objectives are better served with brand new content. Which email do you think would entice ex-subscribers to come back more?"

"Come back check out the re-designed Antonica and Commonlands!"

or

"Come back and check out the new Isle of Pirate Kings!"

Actually, it's a pretty reasonable use of resources I'd think. They repopulate the zone, but it doesn't require any new art assets. They just redesigned Nektulous and TS.

I would like to see it done as group zones. I'm not sure what the loot level is on some of those, but keep it low enough that it doesn't kill the crafters.

Several zones have been changed from Raid to Group.  Sky has even played in one of them that I know of.  Deathfist Citadel was originally raid content.  There are other examples of this that I will leave as an exercise to the reader.

As far as the starting zones go, I start in Freeport, do the trial of the isle and then run my characters to Neriak at level 6 and do the residence quest.  It's not that tedious a process but they should just go ahead an make Neriak open to all, even if it does piss off the rp'ers.

Well, if you're willing to play content one tier below the current max (T7), you go pretty much the way of doing group content solo and raid content with a single group. Poet's Palace can be done solo by most classes at Lv70 (ok, my templar sucks at this, taking a 3/4h for each bugs/snakes ringevent - damn warding snakes). I've done CoAA and GoAA a few times with a group, even Pedestal of Sky. Given you got some people who play together good, you can access the old content.

If you're in for the loot, well, there are a few T6 masters, some items to be sold or transmuted and a few rares. Nothing really useful, but doing the content is the main aspect imho.

Accessing the T5 raids is a bit harder to do since they grey out, but when we want to do some of them, there always seems to be an alt in the fitting lv range :)



 

Repopulation isn't enough to entice anyone new (or back) to the game. Actually I need to correct myself. Repopulating isn't enough for zones players have seen plenty of already (Ant, CL, Nek, TS, etc.) But there are zones that shipped with the initial game that were never fully utilized that could potentially be re-vitalized - Lavastorm/Solusek, for example. The problem with changing LS/Solusek is similar to the problem with revamping any zone: what do you do about the quests there? LS is contains key steps to many important gamewide quests: 2 HQs, Druzaic Language, etc. If LS become a level 65+ adventuring zone, then those quests become impossible at their curently intended level.  Why fight that battle when you can start from scratch?

Shiz..huh? Have you seen Nek and Ant lately? I was actually able to to the SBH HQ solo because of the re-tuning, something I probably would never get a chance to do otherwise.

I think Numtini means repopulate /with players/. As in the quotes text said some zones are dead zones, and my personal experience shows a lot of old dungeons are dead except for farmers and a few quick guild jaunts as they race to the level cap.

However, plenty of people aren't on the racetrack to level cap, why not give them some  stuff to savor, since the people it was originally intended for now consider it junk?

So LS wouldn't be a 65+ zone, it would be the same level range, sans Heroic mobs.

To address your other point about making quests send you back, you can still do that with a non-aggro raid or epic mob in the zone (avatar of war outside DFC) or have the epic content behind gates so normal dungeoneers don't accidently get squished (like Lord Ree in WC).

Wahn, your post pretty much supports what I was saying.
Crafted sales for any non-rare gear sucks. If I were trying to be a 'pure' crafter...well, I wouldn't bother. I don't make money, I dump stuff on the broker just to see if I can eke out a little more than the vendor would give me. Rares tend to sell for more then the stuff they make. So long as the best stuff is no-trade, it might cut into some sales.

But think about this...to protect your crafter market (which is questionable anyway in this scenario) you would rob adventurers of the chance to get good loot by adventuring! Would it be better to open up new zones to casual players rather than hurt what is an already bad market? If I make 5gp selling something one day (my t5 armorer), the next day a half dozen people are selling that item for 1gp, and volume isn't enough to make up for it. The armor and weapon market is garbage, at least through t5, and honestly looted jewelry is so crappy I'm in almost all player-made stuff from a t4 still, so adventurers could probably use more for that side of the inventory.

Converting abandoned heroic zones to single player zones is a great idea and it would take little development time vs a new expansion, but I still argue that it doesn't serve a business purpose since you can level from 1-60 solo right now.  I am making a distinction between what existing players would enjoy vs what will draw new (or re-) subscribers to the game.  Brand new content will always be more effective at the latter so it should crowd out revamps to a large extent if the goal is to grow the subscriber base. If the business goal changes to pure retention - which is best encouraged through increasing replayability - then giving players more paths to 60 would make sense.

Re: Nek and Ant, I have no idea what they changed. If SOE is pursuing both significant revamps + expansion, then God bless them. I am constantly surprised that EQ2 doesn't have a larger subscriber base. The game is just excellent.

Just open the whole thing up. I can betray a rat to Qeynos in less than an hour I've done it so many times.

There was some talk awhile back that the EQII team might convert the older zones to the new RoK super zones by combining two or three old zones and removing the zone lines.  If they were to do that it would be a good opportunity to make another balance pass.  I, personally, would like to see Everfrost and Lavastorm and some of the dungeons there become more solo friendly.

I think the 'wimping' of content is good, not from a new player standpoint, but from a retention of veteran players PoV.  Providing me with the ability to go different routes with alt's give me much more incentive to roll a new toon rather than cancel my sub until the next big expansion.  From a business perspective you don't really care what people are playing as long as they pay and if you can find a way to revitalize existing content inexpensively that will contribute to continued subs then I think it would be wise to follow that path.

In my case I am pretty sure that if DFC had been still raid content I would never have made it past the 30's.  As it is I've mired down in the 60's because it's become too difficult to solo and the plethora of lvl 70's makes it difficult to group if you are not 70.

Merging Antonica+TS or Commonlands+Nek into single huge zones achieves very little gamepley benefit. It would also make no sense to combine Zek, EL, LS or EF since geographically they are not contiguous (my memory may be flawed.)

Changing unused raid content to solo content is new content to two groups of people: those who have never raided and those who have never played.

Good point. I could see some people complaining if it takes away their place to farm for twinking, but I would assume that they would twink from higher level zones anyhow. Mind you, I don't care if farmers get a zone taken away from them because I would much rather have the content to experience myself.

Converting a raid zone to a solo zone achieves little. In fact, since most raid zones I have run are instances, nothing actually has to get replaced. Are you looking for new maps? Many raids re-use heroic instance maps. What makes raids new content is the mob population and loot table, not the map. Where is the solo content lacking? For new players there is Darklight, Gfay, Antonica, or Freeport. From 15-50 there is the old world or EoF. Post 50, there is EoF or DoF/KoS. I don't see how a few more non-raid versions of raid instances will add all that much.

63+.  It's not lacking, it's just boring.  As in, not enough quests.  That and there aren't enough low 60's group content, but it would be silly to make low 60's group content because the moment anyone hits ~65 they start doing the 70ish group content.

I've been stuck at 63 for a month or more.  But I haven't really been playing much.

I remember the 60s being full of content. SOS, Bonemire, poets, nest? Um. There's probably more I'm not thinking of and there's some stuff I started and couldn't get that far in, even with a melee spec because I'm a mystic.

Soloing, my reaction is likely to  be that of course it's boring. It's boring in WOW, it's boring in EQ2: soloing in a multiplayer game is boring period. Given that attitude, it's impossible for me to judge whether solo content is boring or not to someone that actually likes it.

I found the 60s solo quests in Barren Sky and Bonemire decent enough, better than DoF for sure. IIRC, the KoS solo lines took me from 60-67, then I had to do the grou instances and SoS to get to 70.

You know what? Never mind. I'm tired of the whole thing. Wall off everything and make it all for 60-person raids for all I care.

I find it amusing that the idea of converting under-used zones so they get used more is somehow a bad thing. Shiz is /definitely/ in the majority opinion here.  :roll:

I've been out of solo content since I hit 66.  I've gone through LP and Bonemire.  What are you gonna do?  A man can only grind so many guild writs, even if we do need to get over the 58 hump.  Thank goodness for RoK (downloading now!)

Also, I voted yes.  Give Stormhold, Fallen Gate, RoV, and Nek Castle solo instances that scale between appropriate level ranges for starters.  Maybe just try doing it to one, if it increases usage of the zone maybe expand the idea.

I never wrote it was a bad thing. I just pointed out that from a business point of view, it makes more sense to add new zones for the reasons I cited.

No it makes more sense to make several instanced zones available as solo content. They can dynamically scale the content with several lines of code without the need to devote resources to designing new zones. I am all for new content, but underused content to some is new to others.

Well, WoW, despite their solo and casual friendliness, hasn't made any change like that. So, being able to say "we are matching and surpassing WoW in casual and solo friendliness" should make business sense.

EQ2 has more con levels that WoW, more tradeskill combines than WoW, wore spell and skill levels than WoW, more armor tiers than WoW. Everything I read about EQ2 tells me "we've got what WoW has, but more if it (and of lesser quality)". In which areas is EQ2 going a better job than WoW? None that I see.

Fun, mostly.

Amen

OK, that's enough for me to give EQ2 another try.

(patching the launcher)

...

Apparently they still haven't realized my "trial" consisted of viewing the races and then not having time to play for two weeks.

Apparently, their new account page is undergoing scheduled maintenance, no info when it will be back.

Apparently, SOE's idea of a casual-friendly game is Wheel of Fortune® 2, JEOPARDY!® 2, Bejeweled 2, Diner Dash 2™, Venice Deluxe   or Q*Bert. Don't see EQ2 in that list.

How long am I supposed to grind the account creation page until the fun starts?

Surprisingly, I find EQ2 far more fun than WoW. I say "surprisingly" because when I was playing WoW, I had an opportunity to check out EQ2's beta. God I hated it. WoW was so superior to EQ2 in my mind back then. Now? Complete opposite. Pity it's so far along in the lifecycle of EQ2.

New expansion launched today. Not a good time to access anything at SOE I imagine.

It's fucking expansion day, tkn.... welcome to the internet I guess.

Beaten to it.

Frankly, I don't give a damn.

I'll second that.

And, tkn, not only is it patch day, but it's the release of the expansion. It took me ~1.5 hours to patch today at around 5 pm EST. Quite a pleasant surprise. I don't want to start a mud slinging war, but WoW patches sucked as I recall. Oh, and the "trial" of that would lead people through multiple BitTorrent downloads worth of patching as I recall. Not exactly the most efficient patching system I ever saw. Oh, and the DoS their web site would take on patch day was always fun. But hey, issues of infrastructure scalability are not reserved for just WoW and EQ2. I think every MMOG suffers from it. But that's another issue for another time. Sorry to hear you can't give EQ2 a trial. It is much more fun than when it was released and nigh on the most fun I've had in an MMOG in a long time. I can't quite place my finger on why...

It's EQ2 who can't give ME a trial.

On a lark, I clicked my WoW shortcut to compare. Instead of a crappy Internet Explorer client I got a fullscreen 3D client. Intead of "we're down for God knows how long" I got "we're going to be down from A to B to apply a patch". And I could start patching without having an active subscription. And their bittorrent client no longer sucks.

If the purpose of EQ2's trial is to get me pick up a WoW subscription, they're doing a fine job.

O RLY? (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=11385.0)

That said, if you need the goddamn shiny even before you get into the game, perhaps WoW is more suited to you. I hate their goddamn fullscreen 3D interface. Nothing says to me "We think our player base needs their hands held" more than shit like that.


Then, by all means, head back over there. Do us all a favor.

Hey, maybe I can go over to the WoW forum and post about how much better EQ2 is.

 :uhrr:

It seems like the quest to grind ratio on XP in Kunark is really off of EQ2's norm. Numerous complaints in the forums and I noticed it as well, even in a short time.

For those of us who prefer to group, EQ2 had a really nice ratio going. I hope this gets moved back to where it was, regardless of the howling. The ability to group or solo rather than mandatory soloing (WOW) or mandatory grouping (EQ) was one of EQ2s best points.

The exp seems like it will fly by in RoK. I just did the first couple solo quests off the boat and gained about 25% of a level in about 30 mins. I have no idea though right now how long those chains will last. Already I had gone from level 65 quests up to level 68 quests so it seemed I was rapidly catching up to my level which would require me to move to a new quest area or grind exp to get to that next area.

Luckily I had all of EoF content still to explore so I'm questing there first hoping to get 2-3 levels then head back to RoK.