f13.net

I'm playing EQ2 and I'm having fun.

Sinner.

I can barely get past character creation. Should I go bushy eyebrows or no eyebrows at all?

Maybe I'll give it another shot in a couple days.

He will surely go to hell.

Perv.

I played for about five days, then the powers-that-be struck my power supply down for my temerity.

Sooooo...from the very depths of MMRPG hell I strike at thee...with 430 watts of Pentium-crushing power. All will fall to the power of a gold card and next day air.

Psst. Me too.

Can one of you all email me the Launcher for EQ2? I have a uhm, account, I just need to patch over the entire game. I think it's like 5 megs, if your outbox can handle it, my inbox can: schild@f13.net

Both my wife and I are enjoying it.  For folks who play as a duo, the bonuses for grouping are nice.  We're still very low level, so we'll see how it progresses.  The difficulty level seems more challenging and rewarding than WoW beta.   Lots to discover!

If you haven't managed to get it by the time I get home, I'll send it on over, schild.

Don't bother waiting for me to respond, just send it when you get home. I'd rather have 5 than zero and god knows what kind of traffic I'll hit on the beltway this afternoon. Oh, and thanks! :) Feel free to send over the launchers for SW:G/JtL and Planetside also. ;)

I was on vacation last week, spent a lot of time with EQ2. I initially loved the game, to my surprise, and a week with it only deepened that love. It's a great mmog.

Except the forced grouping. I don't pay to be forced to group with random mmog chuckleheads (I only group with friends and the occasional non-chuckleheaded stranger). The only alternative to that is not adventuring in dungeons or taking on named mobs. All yard trash, all the time.

Cancelled already. Doubt I'll try WoW, they just don't make those games for my playstyle.

I've started playing too, despite my plans to wait till January.  Mostly because the RL friends I play these games with had all picked it up, and were playing.  We had a group visit to Blackburrow the other night, had a blast, the 5 of us plus someone we knew from EQ1.  A fairly ideal group, warrior, cleric, rogue, predator, sorcerer, and me, enchanter.  We were there for an hour, hour and a half, and all of us leveled once.

The trick is to avoid the, uh, 'chuckleheads', as Sky put it.  I don't group much outside this group of friends.  I stopped random grouping somewhere around the high 50's, low 60's with my enchanter in EQ, where random people often tended to make my exp gain negative over the course of a night...  It'd be faster to wait for the couple nights a week everyone could get on, and group with useful people, than to gain negative or very low exp the other 4 nights.

So, yeah.  I'm enjoying the game quite a bit, but I knew I would after the beta.

Alkiera

This game seems to certainly be a "bring your own friends" MMOG. That is fine for those that have gaming groups. The very few times I have tried to do pickups have met with silence so apparently lots of people are veterans with their own crews at the ready.  

I just wish I could play more. I am getting left behind quickly and that doesn't bode well given the aforementioned dynamics.

A great majority of WoW can be done solo.  Only instances are pretty much group only.   But you're an eye candy person, so, might not be the game for you.

My favorite chucklehead so far was the one who kept getting into combat so we couldn't dissolve a quest group (that had finished the quests), we had no idea where he was, and then he died giving us all a share of his debt.

Ras, my concerns about WoW lie along different lines, though forced grouping is a small concern there, too. My concern for WoW has more to do with the entire playerbase, from blizzbois to ubers.

That was the final straw in EQ for me. It took me a year to do lvls 1-51, then another year to do 52-54. I had climbed to almost 55, then throughout a month lost experience faster than I could gain it, until I logged out for the last time with only a sliver of experience keeping me from sliding back into level 53 again (and losing some good spells).

EQ was one of the easier games for me to drop cold turkey. What surprises me is not that I've cancelled EQ2 already, but that I enjoyed it so much until I hit that artificial barrier to solo play, and if it weren't for that single game mechanic, I'd be completely addicted. Too bad, eh.

I'm also enjoying EQ2 as well although I haven't recently been able to play as much as I would like.

I've only gotten 3-4 nights into the game so far and have split time between adventuring and crafting. The problem with that is I'm now about 10 levels behind the RL people I know playing the game which is soon going to make playing catch up near impossible...

I would say you're all going to hell, but then again, you're playing EQ2, so what could Lucifer really do?

Hell isn't so bad, if you have a good heat resist buff, and a pair of jboots.

Hell is the XP Bar in any MMORPG. It is the taskmaster that spoils the fun by saying "See, you aren't good enough yet! Keep going, you pathetic worm! Everyone else is so much farther ahead. Trust me, once you reach the next level, things will get better. Just keep going until you level, then you'll see all the cool things you've been missing!"

Turning off the XP bar from my display provided a release from Hell. It's not heaven, to be sure, but it's also far from Hell.

Now, on to the new Hell: the graphics card and system requirements! This little demon has been running around my head saying things like:

""See -- actually you can't see very well here can you? Keep playing at these settings, you pathetic worm! Everyone else sees a gloriously rendered world because their systems are so much farther ahead. They never have the combat lag you have. Trust me, once you buy a system that is worthy of a GeForce 6800 Ultra, things will get better. Just put it all on a credit card -- what's a little more debt on top of the debt you already have that you know you'll never get out from under anyway -- so go on, buy the new system and the new card, then you'll see all the cool things you've been missing!"

Let the sounds of wailing and the gnashing of teeth commence!

I just found the level-up history thingy over at the eq2players.com site, turns out exp isn't bad at all. Even though I was on vacation, I was playing very casually and I was the 50th lvl 16 summoner and 44th level 17 summoner. As a catass, total failure. As a casual, hey, nifty!

Dirty little secret?  Is there some shame to liking EQ2?

Sorry to break the news: the engine still looks like ass with a GF 6800 Ultra and a decent rig.

I ran the game on a pretty decent system (which runs Half-Life 2, a game with superior graphics[IMO], as smooth as silk).

The "shadows" need to be disabled in order to get a decent framrate and all the bells & whistles need be unseen to play beyond slide-show framerates (especially in cities and battles consisting of more than 5 combatants).

I pointed out several of the graphical inefficiencies on the official fanboy forums and was shat on for my troubles.  It's a shame they didn't deliver on a decent engine they the way they claimed. :(

I only have a 9800pro, I've already decided the game isn't for me, but you can /hardly/ call it ass graphics, for crissakes. I can run almost everything maxed (shadows simple or off mostly, though) and it looks great, with a year old system. I just saw it as a chance to get a nice kick out of next year's upgrade, I'll have full shadows then. Bonus, and an intended one. It's not supposed to run at full settings, it would look horribly dated in two years.

You can debate the /style/ of the graphics, but judging by your icon you must be judging technical things by the most cutting edge graphics engine to debut on the pc in a while, when you should be judging by genre peers. Let's see HL2's engine with all the shinies render freeport with a ton of players with high polys. I'm not saying it won't look great, but it's optimized for a totally different genre.

EQ2's terrain looked great. It's models of anything not inanimate were pretty bland at best, dead ugly at worst. The fact it won't run well on even the best hardware is not a design decision, it's a failure.

I'm actually mostly convinced its a programming error.  The initial five minutes of any play session are fine.  My rig is not uber, Athlon 2100+, 512mb pc2700 ram, SATA harddrive, Radeon 9800 SE,  and if I don't zone I can play with fairly high graphic detail without video lag or disk access lag for the better part of an hour.  But then something happens and the HD starts to churn and usually by that point its all over but the wait while the game exits.

If I'm in a dungeon or outdoor zone I can sometimes extend that play period up to an hour and a half if I'm not moving around too much.

Either they have multiple memory leaks, not unplausible, SWG had several and EQ1 had one from launch that hung around until well after Kunark was released.  It was standard practice in EQ 1 to get to your camp and relog so as to clear out the mem leak for an extended play session for a very long time.  Or, they made some custom memory management utility that just really, really sucks if you have less than like 2 gigs of ram or something.  Just a guess, but the slowdowns certainly seem tied to texture use, probably the way thier routine looks up whether a texture has been loaded and the system for timing out the cache lookup and reloading it from the disk.

Other than that the game can look pretty good at times.  The outlying Freeport villages are AWEFUL though.  What dumbass made the decision to make the worst looking zones the area where new players will spend the vast majority of thier time?  Crap-tastic.  I've had conversation with several players that restarted in Qeynos just to get away from the nasty appearance of the Freeport villages.  Having progressed into the teens with characters in both Freeport and Qeynos I have to say that that is just too bad really because North Freeport is da bomb yo!  Certainly its among the better attempts at art design in a video game around.  Too bad the zone is usually dead empty compared to Qeynos at even peak hours.

The Qeynos zones are all, err, quite pleasant. They are all typical fantasy fair straight off some uninspired paperback cover, you know the ones I mean?  The franchise fiction books whose cover art is probably the BEST thing about the story?  To me anyway, it's a little tedious, the general theme is 16th century gothic stone construction but without any chance at all of conveying the heavy dark feeling customary with the gothic style.  Mostly I think this is because every building is a little island floating on a manicured green lawn.  At best it's like the too thick confection on a cheap store bought cake.  As long as you just glance at it it's fine but if you actually try to eat it your mouth ends up feeling like its covered in rancid lard (which oddly enough is what they make that kind of frosting out of.)

But, I'm still having fun playing the game, I'll let you know in another week if that still holds true.

I'm thinking it's a combination of poor programming and lack of graphic optimizations.  

The polycounts aren't all that absurd but: the techniques used to squeeze every ounce of performance out of a card is non-existent in this engine.  There's million of polys being rendered that players never even see (beneath hair, clothing, etc.), that "lets use bump maps to make new types of armour over a cat-suit that's rendered over a nude body that is also rendered" just makes for both poor performance and poor aesthtics [IMO]...I've never really liked the spandex look for mail armour and it's rather disheartening to see ass cheeks poking through a suit of protective gear.

The hair was just a BAD call IMO.  The UVW's assigned to them produce some of thoe most god-awful swears being passed off as textures and all the pixel-shaders in the world can't mask poor design.

It'd be one thing if EQ2 looked better than EVERY game out on the market right now and demanded the "hardware of the future" it seems to now but, with games like Half-Life 2 recently released, EQ2's 4-year-old engine is already starting to look dated (and still performs worse than games looking better than it).

To be fair, it'd be more realistic to fire-up FRAPS and gauge the performances of all games recently released and adjusting the bells & whistles to make each perform identically.   If this were the case: not only would EQ2 be considered ugly....but many may find EQLive's graphics superior (aka a 6 year old engine with band-aid improvements to it).

I could have modeled something in the Quake 3 engine and made it a few billion polys...and when it ran like ass, just claim it's intended for "future hardware."[/i]

I am always surprised when I read continuing complaints about how the game runs. The game runs flawlessly on medium+ graphic settings for me (2.8, 1 ghz, radeon 9800, 10k sata hd).

I know were just comparing meaningless anecdotes here.

I am playing and enjoying the game still. I have a number of friends who tried it out and all are still having fun.

It should be funny in a couple years when EQ2 comes into its own graphically and still looks solid and WoW looks 6 years old instead of just 4 years old.

I'm just glad I can run it almost completely maxed out with a crappier system, without the problems you folks seem to be experiencing and I'll leave it at that.

(I agree with you on a few points, like the plastic hair, though)

I think you're misunderstanding the point of view of those who like WoW's graphics.

I've never heard anyone - not even the most stark raving mad fanboi - claim that WoW's graphics were advanced or realistic.  They like the artistic direction, the concept, the use of color, the layout and presentation of the zones, etc.  These things don't become dated the way that the more technical aspects of graphics do.

Even at the best performance I could get out of the system, or at the worst performance but best-looking, EQ2 simply wasn't immersive to me, not in the same way WoW is. I feel part of an animated world in WoW. EQ2 just felt like a bland video game with lots of sound. It isn't the hardware that makes it bland; it's the art direction.

In musical terms, it's the difference between Yngwie Malmsteen and Alex Lifeson. The former is technically superior, yet boring as reading computer programming manuals. The latter may not play as many notes per second, but the compositions he puts together can make you cry.

I thought we were talking technical game engines. I never said EQ2 had a better style than WoW, I do not partake in processed cocaine products.

Hammy and his musical references....ok, I'll respond. It's like Yngwie (he don't like fuckin' donuts) vs Lifeson (good comparison there, actually)...but if Lifeson couldn't play 16th notes. Technically, impared at the top end from what's available to consumers in a very visible way.

Point being that WoW's style paired with a technically forward-looking engine (rather than the dated-out-of-the-box engine it is) would have been the best possible solution, especially a few years down the road when WoW's engine is really blatantly dated.

Now, if Blizz puts out a full engine upgrade with shaders and whatnot in a couple years, I'll eat my words. If I were in management over there, though, EQ2's decision seems the best long-term one. I recently found my EQ1 screenshots from release, btw, so I'm going on that mental image and analogy.

Except that EQ1 is still making money on a bastardized version of a woefully-outdated graphics engine. Dark Age of Camelot has maintained its position in the MMOG hierarchy with some upgrading as well, but nothing on the scale of "needs two generations of future hardware before it'll run correctly" shader type tech.

You don't NEED shaders to make a good graphics engine. Hell, WoW's engine looks dated NOW, especially when you see some of the armor textures. But if it's a fun game with lots of stickiness, it doesn't matter what it looks like because sooner or later, the GOSH WOW factor of seeing the graphics engine do stuff wears off. Once that's done, it's the art direction and not the pixel shaders that make the game look good.

This is a RAM issue.  I increased my RAM to 768MB, and the hard-drive grinding has stopped more or less completely, even over long play sessions with lots of zoning.  Part of the issue is that in many zones the game takes up nearly 500mb of space in RAM, and so cannot all get into RAM as the same time, due to the need for space by the OS.  So it ends up swapping something out in order to get the presently-needed meshes/textures into ram...  then when someone shows up wearing different armor, or with a mesh you hadn't seen yet, or you turn a corner to view a new building, your machine has to swap stuff around so you can see it.  It eventually gets so insanely far behind at this that your swap space drive is constantly grinding.  Increasing to 768 lets you have the whole game and the OS in memory at once, even in South Qeynos.  I can sorta actually move around in there now, and zoning times have improved everywhere.

It's not a bad engine, really, just more memory hungry than the min. reqs. really allowed for.  Minimum should really be 768.

Alkiera

IMO, I don't think WoW will ever look dated, just like Windwaker won't ever look dated.  As of right now I'd say its the best environment art I've ever seen in a video game, though the characters are not nearly as good they still are at the very least pretty good. Thats just for me though, I thought Alice looked great and just played it this year, so I could care less about polycounts and engine features.  

Actually I take that back, Source pretty much made Half-Life 2, but thats less to do with graphics and more with physics.

Though I am still enjoying EQ2 as a guilty pleasure -- it has my inner pixel collector and database geek totally addicted -- I can not see any of the beauty of the world anywhere since I keep my rendering setting low.

For incredibly beautiful and smooth engine, my current faves are City of Heroes and Guild Wars. Both of these games are smooth, stunning, have visual style and panache, and I never experience lag. I also have the settings in both games maxed out with nary a complaint from my PC.

Yes, this thread is getting sidetracked -- so to stay on thread I'll say again, I'm playing and enjoying -- only wish all of us weren't spread out on so many different servers. I wish there had been an F13 server, but alas, this group-focused game didn't attract enough of us together to actually group on the same server -- I could really use a good guild about now...

My take on the graphics discrepancies is more of an observation for the process the two camps reached for their graphics/end results:

WoW’s graphics (IMO) are dated.  They look like something I modded on the Quake 3 engine more than 4 years ago.  However, the artists’ ingenuity through the limitations within their engine is profound.  They haven’t tried for realism and failed.  They have created a Disney-esque ambience where one can be fooled into thinking they’re living in a cartoon world.  I guess one could judge the experience as: the graphics aren’t great…not horrible…just nothing our eyes haven’t feasted on before within the past few years.

EQ2’s graphics lost their luster after seeing what current First-Person Shooter engines are capable of (HL2, Farcry, Doom 3, etc).  It appears they have tried to produce realism but failed miserably (Play-Doh doesn’t make for realism on people’s heads).  Instead of dealing with the limitations in place, the art team chose to force its hand on hardware that just simply cannot endure some of the sloppiest techniques I have seen to date (it feels akin to a master artist with a crayon [WoW] vs. a 3-year-old with a camera [EQ2]).

Both systems didn’t supply anything spectacular in the graphics area but, it feels more like WoW made something work first and then worried about how it looked while EQ2 took the Apple approach: make it look nice and worry about functionality later.  The excuse that software is designed for future, untested hardware insults me as an end-user and to be honest: EQ2 at its best (2 FPS) doesn’t look all that impressive to me when compared to current titles that have less hostile hardware requirements.  

So for the people playing either of these games based on aesthetics….looks like either choice is a bad one.

I am hitting a wall.

I wanted to be able to group with my roommate (who created a 'good' character at Qeynos). So, I began the interesting Freeport to Qeynos betrayal quest. I had no idea what I was getting into.

After some pretty cool instanced missions and cutscenes, including my execution, I made the dangerous trek over to the good continent. I was excited to start playing in a new area. I then found out the next part of the quest:  Kill 500 gnolls. Kill 5 different rare named gnolls that you cannot solo.

Not long after that, I found out that my level is frozen at 17. I grinded away at the 500 but have only killed 2 of the 5 rares. Last night, i had one pulled right out from under my nose just before engagement.

So, all of the evils of Everquest have kicked me in the groin: Forced grouping, camping and grinding through hundreds of foozles, camping rare spawns, and rare mob "engagement stealing".

Adding to this, the content feels too linear and limited. The level distribution of mobs leaves almost no freedom as to exploration and finding new hunting areas.

I'm still hanging on by a thread, but I think the forced grouping is going to kill me off.

Unless you had a really strong attachment to your Freeport character, or you really wanted to do the betrayal quest, I would have simply rolled a good character and levelled it up to join your roomate.

A friend of mine recently joined in and started a cleric on Nov 22. He hit 16 two days ago with a fairly casual play schedule -- leveling to 15 or so is pretty quick given the many ways to get XP: exploring, quests, combat. The best XP is when you can hit all three -- have several quests stacked that require going to a location that gives you XP to 'discover', XP from the mobs you kill, and then XP for completing the quests.

EQ2 may be a forced grouping game, but I have been able to play a lot of time solo and am a level 19 predator. I just finished my assassin class quest (solo). Of course, things may change a lot once I hit 20.

There's no debate about whether or not EQ^^x2 is soloable or not, it's just that the solo content is garbage, yard trash. No nameds, no dungeons, no fun.

I got to level 17 summoner quite easily, mostly solo. But I also have about 30 quests I need to do in dungeons that are grey to me, too high level to get a group, too low to safely solo through the dungeon, just right for cancelling my subscription.

Honestly, I like EQ^^x2 enough that I seriously considered dual-boxing it, but I'd need a new computer, as #2 is down with a bad mobo, and it's simply not worth buying a new pc imo just to circumvent a crappy gameplay mechanic. I'll leave that for the eqholic (who asked me a couple weeks ago about building a new pc for him, dollars to donuts that's why).

That's fucking insane, and a kick in the groin.

True.

Surprising? No.

.....


There are no words.  But if there were words, "insane" and "groin" would be two of them.

I know my story is dangerously close to whining. It's just that this quest and its underlying design principles have beaten me down.

I was originally sold on the game because of the apparent depth and amount of nostalgic content, but it seems to be doled out too slowly to hold me in.

No, kill 500 anything is a square nutkick, it's not you, toasty. Hell, it's bad enough when I look at my exp progress, figure out how many mobs I need to hit the next level. I remember in SWG I had something like 1500 mobs to kill for a single box of exp that didn't grant any benefits except pad the next skill box which did. That's about the time I quit SWG, actually. Now I try not to do math in relation to mmogs, it's too depressing.

Oh, it gets better.

At the end of the quest there is a dialogue. If you answer questions incorrectly, you are "fined" 1, 2, or 3 gold pieces. You cannot proceed in the quest until this fine is paid. There is no way to waive this fine.

To put this in perspective, the "best" drops at level 17 sell for around 2-3 silvers. The most silver I have ever had is around 80 (which equals .8 gold). Also bear in mind that players in the midst of betrayal are unable to bank or do tradeskills.

http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/eq2/board/message?board.id=quest&message.id=6752

It's an interesting quest...but, I wonder what gameplay reason necessitates making this quest such a beating.

C'mon toast. This is too obvious...

EQ mainliners (my ex was one of them -- he derided me for switching to AC since it was 'too easy'), thrive on the 'hardcore' idea of a something being "a challenge". It takes a certain kind of masochist to love EQ/EQ2 designers for 'making them work for it.'

Frankly, I quit EQ1 after 2 months because it felt like a job and a chore. So far EQ2 has not made me feel this way, but I read enough about the betrayal quest to read-between-the-lines and understand they were catering to the "punish me" crowd. I mean, the whole idea of betrayal serves no real purpose other than to allow you to play a dark elf paladin or a halfling assassin or a dwarf shadowknight, etc. Basically, something to let you stand out in the crowd. Sigh. Your reasons for wanting to do the betrayal quest had nothing to do with this so, to quote The Crying Game,  "you're fucked, Fergus". If you simply wanted to play with a friend, rerolling was the way to go.

Don't get me wrong, BTW, I'm not defending the design decision that made the betrayal quest as frustrating as you've described. I think it's whacked and I don't think I'll ever attempt it, even for "fun" -- because it doesn't sound like fun. I just think you should have taken the reroll route.

This is what is so fucked up. The fact that Qeynos and Freeport are diametrically opposed to each other amounts to JACK AND SHIT in the gameplay, other than that you have to bank, live and shop in one city and not the other. It doesn't stop you from grouping with players from the other city (AFAIK), and the only difference is in a very few of the classes that are one-city only types. What city you are from amounts to less than nothing, unless your friends are in the other city.

There is a little bit of a masochistic sense of accomplishment that comes with this quest. As a troll in Qeynos, I know that I would be somewhat unique.

This is similar to the catass titles that players wear quite proudly. Killing 500 mobs of a certain type will get you a "Hunter of Foozle" title visible to other characters.

In retrospect, I should have re-rolled, but that's water under the bridge.

Funny thing is, the quest wouldn't bother me nearly as much if I were able to solo through it. I work in finance and I live in Microsoft Excel, so my tedium tolerance is high. I just detest the idea of begging strangers to group with me to kill a single quest mob. Forced grouping for the win.

Agreed.  There's supposedly all this treachery going on, and fighting, and stuff... that only happens when PC's aren't around, as far as we can tell.  It's pretty lame.  The entire point of the betrayal quest is to allow for Ogre Paladins(there are at least 2 on Guk server), High Elf Shadowknights, etc...  For the 'just because' crowd.  Wonder how many dark elf rangers there are, serverwide.


Technically, of the 12 classes, 8 have their subclass determined by city, the other 4, one from each archetype, can choose either subclass no matter their choice of city.  Those are sorcerer, warrior, druid, and bard.  The other classes are all forced to a subclass by their city.

Really, tho, I don't know why.  Other than the obviously good/evil version of crusader, the cleric/shaman, and I guess the inherent evil of necromancy, there's not a lot of lore support for the distinctions between one forced subclass and the other, or why they are different.

Alkiera

Bah, necromancers aren't evil, just misunderstood. And really, nobody is using those moldy corpses for anything, anyway.

Damn I wish I had gotten to play a necro in EQ^^x2.

Good news is that although you get 'locked' in your level until you finsih the quest once it's over you get all that exp your earned.  I've heard its usually enough to put you into your final class and that once you do that quest to level you again once or twice.  So, you dont really lose anything you just get stuck in tedium-land for a while.

Look at me apologizing for EQ II, I must not be feeling well.

We have had 2 people complete the betrayal quest from Freeport in the last week. Yes, these are 4 hour-a-day players. 500 gnolls sounds bad, but there are groups of 5 everywhere and killing 5 blues in a full group takes 3 minutes max. This is about 3 hours of "grind" including running around time. The nameds are more of a bitch, though. However, if you are betraying to play with friends, then those friends should be helping you and their quests are heavily gnoll-related anyway.

I finished the quest last night. Total time played to accomplish was about 18 hours over 5 days. Most of the 500 gnolls I killed were low level grays that gave no exp...aka pointless grindage. Experience-yielding gnolls would have taken much longer.

The killing 500 gnoll part is moot. If you are leveling up in antonica you WILL wind up killing at least 500. Hell my main has almost 1k gnoll kills and I did not even do the betrayal quest I just happen to really like black burrow.

The nameds are tricker but if you do it when the server is busy with 2 or 3 instances of antonica you can do all the nameds with one group in about 2 hours give or take.

We did this for a couple guild mates and while it was a bit of an annoyance it really isn't that bad. If however you do not have alot of friends in the side you are planning on betraying to I would not bother. Also I would say unless it is your main and you really want to for betray to not bother. You can usually find a comparable class on either side without the pain.


kaid

Hearing this kind of thing is why I'm not playing EQ2. I just can't understand the mentality of the developers that they thought this would be fun.

I'm not sure I'm following this:  Are games supposed to be bad at all in the first place?   Last I checked, I'm not forking over a subscription fee to be punished by a virtual dominatrix dressed in shitty polygons and Play-Doh hair.

It's a real shame that there's a market for total shit in pretty (to some) packaging.

I'm with Riggswolfe, this is why I haven't bothered either.  It just feels like a set back when this type of design (or lack thereof) is being rewarded by entrenched markets.

To further add weight to how lame the design aspects are (IMO): Gamespy announced a random drawing of entries for a contest involving "Design a Quest for EQ2!"  After looking over the applications and seeing no mention of writing quality or design experience as being a factor in the contest, it shows just how hard-up these people really are for making new "quests" in addition to their already brain-dead selection of Fed-Ex and Kill Mob X tasks.

I wont play eq 2 for 2 reasons. 1. any game that has a reccomended 1 gig of ram scares the hell out of me. I literally burnt up a motherboard playing eq 1 b/c of all the cacheing to my hd. And I had the reccomended 512 megs of ram 1 gig processor and the video card to go with it. 2. I think SoE blows. I finally got the picture when Gates of Discord came out in Eq1 and it dawned on me. Hmmm in addition to the 13 bucks that I pay to play this game in order to progress I will have to shell out 30 bucks every 3-6 months. That just sucks. Personally I like WoW you can solo or group and the game is just as fun. FUN holy hell what a concept a game that is fun. LvL progression is fast that way if I , heaven forbid, wanna play another class I can relatively easy and still lvl my other characters.

Meh?  Thats like saying you wore out the tires on your car by having the air  conditioner on all the time.  Sure they are both parts of a car and wear on one is fairly congruent with wear on the other but they don't directly cause stress to each other.

The data that passes through your MB from your hard drive is not even 1/100000th of the data that passes through the MB during normal operation.

FIVE HUNDRED?

Ahahahahahaha!

*points at the EQ2 players and laughs*

Bwaaahahahahahahah!

Every quest I had but one in WoW was kill X or get Y drops from X.  I woudln't get too obnoxious in my gloating.

Yeah, but when you have to kill X in WoW, it's like 15 of X.  And when you need Y to drop, every third or fourth X has one.

But then you move right onto another Kill X mob quest. What's the difference?

In WoW for pretty much every mob in the game there is a quest that is either kill them, or get stuff from them. (By - killing them!)

90% of the WoW quests are Kill X. I had exactly 2 quests that I thought were anything out of the ordinary at all:

1: Some guy is poisoned and you have collect some crap to heal him. There is a time limit. (Other than that it's just kill x again)

2: There is some treasure near some sunken ships, have to swim around and open some crates. (This was actually the best quest IMO, the only one that wasn't some variation on killing a bunch of whatevers)

So I got to about 300 orcs and decided that I would rather just go ahead and finish up the quest so I started pulling big clumps of lvl 12 grey cons (I was nominally 17 having maxxed 17 but not allowed to advance until I finish the quest) .  I would run around with my bow and pull like 3 or 4 groups at a time  turn on attack and hit tab as neccessary.  I burned through those last 200 orcs in about 90 minutes.

I imagine a wizzie with some decent AE's could probably have been faster but not by much.

1 named down 4 more to go.

There is at least one quest in WoW at mid-teens level that requires the killing of around 60 mobs. Let us not gloat too hastily.

The funny part is, someone obviously had to sit down and write all these quests.

WoW writer: "Kill ten of these for some cash, then later kill fifteen of those for a sack of potions, and since I'm really feeling sadistic, at some point kill sixty of this other thing for a cool weapon."

EQ2 writer:  "Kill half-a-fucking-thousand before we ever let you level again.  Also, at the end, you get fined a lot more money than you've ever had so far, and you can't bank or craft right now."

Of course.  I mean, naturally.

Part of the reason you kill increasing numbers of mobs in WoW is so that you consistently earn experience from them and level at a fair pace. It is all part of the plan of their pacing in order to keep the quests in line with the increase of experience per level. I'm not saying I would enjoy killing 60 of a mob, but hell, if the mob type is in a "dungeon", chances are good that I'll end up killing that many just from crawlnig through it.

60 Quillboars. I remember and got that quest and thought "F that!"

Kill 60 mobs is the quest equivalent of "go gain 1 level!" Wouldn't that be a great quest? Actually, now that I think about it Earth and Beyond DID have quests like that.

Actually doing the quillboar's quest now just to gather linen for my tailor alt. Most of the quillboars drop 2-3 tusks so it's REALLY only like 30 you have to kill...


No, you're right. It sucks. Though I will admit, it was the first quest I looked at and debated whether I really wanted to accept it or not.

There's actually a quest you can do at the same time.  I think it's killing around 12 of two different caster types and like 8 of the melee variety.  You're usually done with the tusks when you complete it (you really only have to kill around 30).

There's a lot of quests in WoW that you can do concurrently.  Reduces the amount of frustration by leaps and bounds.

That would be a standard post-20 quest in EQ2.  All my quests lately (in EQ2) have been of this nature: kill 25 double-up (similar to WoW's Elite mobs) yellow mobs, kill 50 double-up caster mobs, kill 30 grouped skeletons at the bottom of a pain-in-the-ass dungeon that you need a group just to get to, etc.

Fortunately, most of the nasty quests give great rewards, so they're usually worth the effort.

My current favorite quest in my 14 levels of WoW, something not matched for coolness in my 17 levels of E2: steal a bunch of pumpkins from a farm so you can use them to spread the Plague. Lots of cool moments in that quest arc, like trying the various results of the alchemist's efforts on prisoners.

WoW's got it's hooks in me in a way EQ2 couldn't hope to, even setting aside the abysmal encounter system of EQ2.

Yes, it does reduce it, unless you miss one of the quests, in which case IT REALLY SUCKS.

I cannot count the number of times I went to the #$#@! echo islands to basically kill the same shit again. Go collect some Raptor Eggs...gee, thanks for telling me after I just came from there killing some Hexed Trolls...

I ran into a bunch of times where I could have done quests concurrently, had I known about them, which I didn't.

I'm out. I made the switch to WoW, and I'm loving it.

My roommate, who is still doing EQ2 is pissed. C'est la vie!

Blizzard uber alles!

Anyway, I certainly don't run around slavishly doing every quest I get in WoW.  If one doesn't interest me, I decline it.  Or do it in bits and pieces.  Or throw it on the back burner and plan on getting to it next week or something.

Because WoW's system is so much different.  Aside from mobs being grouped, and there may be those in WoW, just didn't see any in the time I played, the systems are more or less identical in practice.

a) He who hits first, gets the exp/loot
b) getting agro'd on doesn't count as hitting first
c) hit some key to break encounter(in EQ) and run away.

Except WoW doesn't give you any sprint or way to run away faster in an emergency.  And lets people powerlevel by having a newb tap a mob, then having their high level buddy one-shot it.  Newb gets exp.  And failing that, you can have a heal bot follow you around ungrouped and keep you healthy and buffed while you take on mobs non-stop.

I like the fact that some mobs hang out in groups in EQ2.  Most players hang out in groups, it's only taken NPCs 6 years to pick up the hint...  It means bosses and their minions always spawn at the same time, so you can't time respawns to 'break the room' for camping like EQ1.  Frequently, 'the room' is one group, maybe two if it's a big room.

Also, it lets you have CoH-like moments of 'OMG, we just took on like 10 nasty things and their boss and lived to brag about it'.  In a group of three, guardian, cleric, enchanter took on a group of 8 higher-level antelopes in the Thundering Steppes.  Fight ran like a slower-paced CoH battle, where tank runs into middle of pile attracting attention, healer heals to keep him alive, and the blaster actually does damage...  Tho enchanter as damage dealer is kinda an odd thing to think for someone who played EQ as long as I did.

In EQ1, that fight would have been about how to split the group up to get them one or two at a time...  using Lull, or getting a monk to FD-pull or having someone kite the group around while we pick them off one at a time.  It was lame.  In EQ2, if it's grouped, and you are, then there shouldn't be a balance problem, just pull the group and go at it.  If you fail, it was either too high level, or someone screwed up on a tactical level.

Alkiera

Well, most of that's not what I'm talking about. The locked groups is, having hard-coded npc groups is a straight-up "f-u" to soloers. I primarily solo. Now is where you tell me to go play Morrowind, I think.

But the system I refer to is the other part of the "f-u" to soloers, the Group(x2) and ^^ crap.

WoW does have 'grouped' mobs, they just overlap aggro ranges, and there's at least a chance a smart soloer can break them up in some place, in others there isn't much chance, but two soloers can split the pull and whatnot. WoW gives you options, EQ2 forces you to deal with the entire 'encounter' without any help from anyone at all. That's crappy, imo.

I don't know Sky...

So far over 18 levels I have not had a problem finding a nice solo spot with non-social "solo" labeled mobs.

I have soloed probably 85% of my experience so far through hunting and questing (108 quests completed). The few groups I've had have had at least one idiot and I end up leaving the group with exp debt.

So, up to level 18 so far I've found solo + questing solo to be the fastest way to level. Maybe a good group would do a lot to change that but right now there are too many idiots.

Read group as mob level +2,
Group^ as mob level +3 to 4
and Group^^ as mob level 5+

My 18 pred can solo 14 and 15 group mobs as long as there arent too many of them (if you use the +2 rule above then thats equivalent to soloing 2 or 3 level 16 - 17 solo mobs - fair enough).  For group^ I can solo two level 13's or one level 14-15, sometimes two 14's depending on how hard they hit and what attacks they use and if the rnd is nice and gives me ringing blows on my HO's.  I.e its equivalent to soloing two lvl 18/19ish 'solo' con mobs.  lvl 14 group^^ are hit or miss for me but doable as for practicallity they are 20 -21.

This method works for me, you are getting too caught up in the color of the con instead of what it means.  Why solo green group mobs at all then?  Because they give exp and loot out of proportion to thier difficulty.  They give exp as though I were soloing 'solo' con oranges and reds but are much safer because individually they are much weaker, hit less often and hit for less plus I hit harder.

Yes -- same experience as me with my predator (now 20 assassin).



Again, same thing I have found. I also have heard from a number of people that assassins are really best class for solo, but I also find I really shine in groups, too.

Wow, I'm repeating this alot, I guess.

I can easily solo in EQ2, I'm not griping about the lack of solo-ability.

I'm griping about being relegated to a second class citizen, only good enough to hunt yard trash and nothing else. No interesting nameds, no dungeons. Because they're all artificially boosted to put them out of reach of solo players, unless you tackle it very green or grey, so heroic. Not to mention the amount of quests for grouped-only mobs (orc pawns, fer crissakes, pawns!).

It is possible to solo in EQ2, I mostly soloed to level 17 doing quests. It's just bland and boring when you are denied the 'good' content. It's good you guys have found a way to rationalize it, I cannot.

If WoW turns into the same thing post-20 with elite mobs, I'll not hesitate to cancel that, either.

I dont see what the problem is with having to wait until a tough named mob is green to solo it?  I said I solo group^^ mobs for exp and loot above.  What part of that didn't you understand?  Or, are you just bitching because you want to solo stuff when the color of the con is white regardless of its difficulty?

Anyway if you read the upcoming notes you will see that due to player response SOE will be adding more soloable content across the board.

[Sky, just a note: not trying to convince you to play EQ2 or to say that somehow your experience of EQ2 is not what it was -- you didn't enjoy it, enough said. Just adding my 2c.]

I have yet to find hunting/fighting named mobs in a group any better (i.e. more fun) than hunting/fighting solo-able content.

I have had two solo instanced events that were the best experience of my eq2 gaming so far -- the class quest at 10 and the class quest at 20. Both required assassinating someone and the second required some 'attitude' when navigating a dialog tree -- basically, by thinking like an evil assassin, I picked the correct answers the first time.

If there were more solo-able instanced content, maybe a little like missions in CoH, that could help a lot. I think SOE missed an opportunity to create scalable instanced content; maybe they'll do that down the road.

Getting into a group from time to time is a nice change of pace from soloing.

Then it's a waste of time to discuss it any further.

Whiny little dick.

So are you pissed at Wow because you can't solo thier high end stuff the second you see it?  What the fuck is the point of you ever playing a MMOG or any game iwth character progression or development?  Stick to platformers it's apparently all you want to play anyway.

This is a serious flaw to EQ2. The pacing and flow of the game is disjointed for the solo player. Level-appropriate quests are generally not achievable solo.

So, in order to do a quest, you have to either group up or carry it around in your journal while levelling up on yard trash. Then, when the quest is trivial, storm in and own the mobs.

I saw this happening time and time again. It breaks the flow of the quests and storyline by introducing the need to treadmill up.

I disagree.  Your getting hung up on con color.  What happens in WoW if you want to do a quest thats in a dungeon that you cant solo through?  You get a group, right?  Or wait until your high enough level to solo through that dungeon.

So, eq lets you know right up front, these mobs are going to require a group if you want to do them now, otherwise wait a bit and do it solo.

Soloing green 'group' class mobs in EQ2 provides exp and rewards equivalant to soloing orange con 'solo' mobs, more actually.  Why cry over the con color of the mobs?  It's an accurate and detailed system.  If its white and says group, then you will need a group of your level to kill it.  Or, wait until its easier.

WoW does nothing different - I had red con quests in WoW that I wouldn't consider trying to solo.  In a GROUP though not a problem, either that or wait a few levels for the difficulty to drop.  Guess, what?  If you wait the rewards aren't as good as they would have been either.

I'm very confused as to what proposed fix you would give Sky.

It seems you want to be able to solo mob x at level 15 and have a group of 6 also be challenged by the same mob. Some sort of dynamic mob difficulty meter based on how many are grouped?

Personally I'm ok with killing level 18^^ mobs while in a group of 6 or killing level 13^^ mobs while solo. Once I'm level 25 or so then I'll go back and be able to kill 18^^ mobs. Killing the same mob for 20 levels because it adjusts dynamically would seem fairly boring to me...

But to each their own...

You just hit on one of the problems I have with CoH...

Hey, fuck you too, buddy.

Is this a transcript from the General channel on a WoW PvP server?

You're the one who copped out with the "Well no point in discussing it thern" cheap ass tactic of people who have no real basis for the position they are trying to defend.

If you had a valid point on the color of the con being important I would conceed it.  But you don't.  Your just being a pissant little whiner who is just going "nanananaeqsucksnananaIcanthearyounanana" with his fingers in his ears.

From experiences with both games' progression/leveling systems:

EQ2: you're given a quest and have to go grind on "yard trash" for long periods of time before you're even able to partake in the task.  The instructions on finding the "Mob(s) X" is usually ambiguous and involves a lot of "WTF Mob X" until some EQLive veteran chastises you for not knowing that Gnolls always hang out at some <insert uninspiring name> section of the map.

WoW: The quests are designed to actually be what makes you gain the levels.  There's no downtime of "LFG" and all quests are pretty straight forward as to what you're needing to do and what your rewards are before you do it.

I've played both but only one has my credit card on file still.

Made 20 and assassin the other night.  Still having a lot of fun.

Merchant nerf was un-nerfed the next night.

When I hit 20 I purchased a bunch of prinstine forged iron chainmail (white con but I'll be replacing it with quested stuff over the next few levels).  Pretty much doubled my AC.  Green^^ mobs are practically givens now with the new higher AC, Blue groups and Blue^ are do-able.

The player crafter armor is MUCH better than the store bought stuff, btw.  Stat and resits +'s and more than half again as much AC (crafted chest is 142 AC store bought is 81) for only a marginally higher price.

edit:  I'm also working on a anumber of interesting quests, thrown in with about half a dozen kill X, quests I have three or four that are requiring some thought and knowledge of the game world and history (greater lightstone heritage for example)

I'm also having a great time in EQ2, much more than I did in WoW.

I have to call Resvrgam on bullshit here.  WoW seemed *much* more "kill quest" oriented than EQ2 does.  In EQ I have had quests like "run from here to Bells of Vhalen, to Fangbreaker Keep, to Ruins of Caltorsis, to Oracle Tower, back to here... you have 15 minutes... GO!"  or the bootstrutters backpack quest, that makes you find hidden little places in the zone...

Also quests like the creature cataloguing one... "find and catalogue the following creatures:"  also harvesting quests or craft quests (create 10 scrolls of soandso) for cash and craftsman experience...

EQ2 has MUCH more variety in questing than WoW did.  I played WoW beta to the 30s... i'm level 25 now in EQ2.

Basically to me it all comes down to whether you prefer to solo or group.  Soloers would prefer WoW, people who like more social interaction would prefer EQ2.  

Well, hardware requirements should also be included.  EQ2 will play like total shit on a mid-to-low level system.

I just wanted to point out that running in letterbox mode helps your framerate exactly zero. The engine draws everything behind the letterbox border. A guildie tested this extensively - running back and forth through the same few Qeynos zones a few times with FRAPS on, taking average FPS.

You want a real kicker?

I was grouped last week and at one point my camera wound up *inside* another player's helmet -- I could look out through his visor to watch stuff happening. Then I noticed that I could his his character's *eyeballs* inside the head -- it fully renders the eyeballs inside the head. Nice for making them move and look 'real' -- but a high rendering cost...

That is so fucking stupid. Jesus.