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f13.net  |  f13.net General Forums  |  The Gaming Graveyard  |  MMOG Discussion  |  Topic: EQ Next Landmark - It's Like Minecraft But Not™ 0 Members and 2 Guests are viewing this topic.
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Author Topic: EQ Next Landmark - It's Like Minecraft But Not™  (Read 332609 times)
Falconeer
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Reply #945 on: March 21, 2015, 09:58:18 AM

Apparently, upkeep for lots is gone. As long as you log in every now and then, your stuff fill never be erased.

Quote
With next week’s update, you will no longer have to pay upkeep at all. Instead, whenever you log in to the game, you will automatically reset the time to expiration on your claim. Logging in to the game will work the same as pre-paying upkeep previously did. In the new system, each day (determined as 12:00:00AM to 11:59:59 PM Pacific Time) you log in will be tracked, and the more days you’ve logged in, the greater the duration your claims will be protected. Here is how the new system works:

First, you start with an initial Upkeep Timer
New player – 7 days
Current player – Either 7 days or the maximum upkeep length you can currently pre-pay, whichever is longer
Then, for every 2 days you log in once this system is active, you get 1 additional day that you can protect your claim(s). The maximum length they can be protected for between logins is 90 days.

Previously, protecting your claims capped out at 30 days, and as you can see the new system will allow you to earn much longer periods of protection.

Tmon
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Reply #946 on: April 28, 2015, 08:24:07 AM

Logged in today to see what was new and discovered that they've buffed the lag experience.  The game used to run fairly well on my two year old system but now it seems that even running across a barren lake bed is enough to bring the game down to 1 fps mode.
taolurker
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Reply #947 on: April 28, 2015, 09:38:59 AM

Lots of things they've been doing recently have been making the lag worse, and I actually think much of it is because of how badly the code for the islands is working as the game progresses. Also, if you were in our guild's lake bed, the lag there is especially bad during daylight hours, that spot has multiple draw issues because of gaps in terrain and issues with trees/rocks, and my claims there are still massive FPS black holes.

Lots of things happening in Landmark.

The Wipe™ is upcoming, now (tentatively) planned for May 4th (had been estimated at April 29th).

They made a bunch of announcements threads about the "upcoming changes" on their forums (Update Notes and Developer Discussion), and the threads give a slight glimpse into how much this update is going to completely restructure the Landmark game.

Upcoming Wipe Answers!

Upcoming Crafting/Harvesting Changes

Upcoming Achievement/Progression Changes

Upcoming Continent Changes

Upcoming Claim Limit Changes

Each thread is pretty comprehensive on it's own, but also only a peek at systems changes.

If you venture into some of those links, you're sure to see quite a few posts by me. I'll try and summarize all of the changes here briefly:

Basically, there's no more upkeep, but there's a change in how many claims everyone will likely start with at Open/Launch.

The harvesting tools are losing any upgrades and RNG, but there's a "new" achievement system that gives new people direction (hand holding?).

Surface cave openings will be coming back (removed when it went down tiers ie "layers"), but now people can drop claims onto openings, or into first layers of caves.

There's new biomes lava and underwater coming, but they're removing all enemies from the surface.

Combat achievements will grant scaling pluses that will be needed to venture further underground in caves, the materials will still be "composites" (system created in Dec tin+silver+gems=Mithril SILLINESS) and be mostly underground in caves, and monsters will get tougher as you go lower.. So, basically, everyone will be forced to do achievements and combat in order to collect higher materials.

They also are giving infinite Stone, Dirt, Sand, Snow and Ice, removing most of the crafting terminals, along with watering down the salvaging and sifting to nearly eliminate them.

« Last Edit: April 28, 2015, 07:14:42 PM by taolurker »


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Lantyssa
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Reply #948 on: April 28, 2015, 04:45:09 PM

Your links need correcting, but thanks for the update.

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Threash
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Reply #949 on: April 28, 2015, 04:47:05 PM

EQNext is still dead right?

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Gimfain
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Reply #950 on: April 28, 2015, 05:48:00 PM


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Reply #951 on: April 28, 2015, 06:08:10 PM

They still talk like EQN is an ongoing project on the Landmark Forums, the crafting changes thread even mentions that the salvage system was introduced to test it for EQN and was being removed in the big update because they had enough data.  No clue though if this means anything or if they are just blowing smoke while they try to figure out what the future of EQN is.
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Reply #952 on: April 28, 2015, 07:24:56 PM

Your links need correcting, but thanks for the update.

I corrected them, sorry about that. They worked on other forum I copied from. OOPs

There's also a new one, that seems like it's going to cause a huge amount of drama, involving the SC purchases which are tied to the resources that are now free.

Dirt, Ice, Sand, Snow, and Stone Builder’s Bundle Compensation

Pretty funny how it's like every cent they've taken in through the SC store for this game is going to be a slap in the face to people who were paying for a better Landmark.

They still talk like EQN is an ongoing project on the Landmark Forums, the crafting changes thread even mentions that the salvage system was introduced to test it for EQN and was being removed in the big update because they had enough data.  No clue though if this means anything or if they are just blowing smoke while they try to figure out what the future of EQN is.
If the salvaging system and upgrading they had in Landmark are things being "saved" for EQN, then yah I'd really say it's dead. They seem like they are completely confused by their own systems, and also are completely losing touch with the core people who began Landmark FOR EQN. Sadly I wonder what EQN is even becoming behind the scenes with how terrible Landmark has become, and decisions that are questionable here don't bode well for EQN, imo.

Landmark's wipe and 78 hour downtime is gonna be epic levels of forum and gamer drama. I have my popcorn ready.

Smed really needs to put someone who knows about MMOs over there to lead that team, and hire real community managers. I also hope Daybreak's bad press from this doesn't cost Smed his job or anything (/me crosses fingers).


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Tmon
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Reply #953 on: April 29, 2015, 06:58:36 AM

I suspect that Smed is secure until the one year anniversary of the sale.  At that point he'll be able to collect his retention bonus and move on, or be moved on as the case may be.  For me the game has sucked since they started trying to make it more like a traditional MMO.  Heck even the forum drama isn't very entertaining these days.
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Reply #954 on: April 29, 2015, 09:32:01 AM

I'd love to play this but my relatively new computer can't without a great deal of lag, which is just silly.

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Reply #955 on: April 29, 2015, 09:55:23 AM

Yah, it's very sad that they can't optimize this game better.. They keep insisting optimizations will happen when "systems are complete" and they're "always doing minor optimization", yet I don't actually see any improvement and systems keep getting further from done (or completely restarted). The wipe is not going to go well for this game either IMO.

Their Community Manager, Dexella, obviously thinks I'm doing a better job with managing the community than her, as something I'd cross posted of hers from one post to another was just deleted because she decided to cross post it herself. I eagerly await the drama even more now (ooo maybe they'll ban me LOL), and probably will need to create additional walls of text concerning this in the days to come.



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Pendan
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Reply #956 on: May 01, 2015, 09:09:27 AM

A year ago I got a week free in landmark. One of my first comments to my friend looking over my shoulder was that sure is a bad frame rate for graphics that don't look very good. He replied "it's beta". My reply is with dozens of played MMO betas I don't think I have ever seen a doubling of frame rates from beta to release (Age of Conan might be one exception) and even with a doubling it still would be worse than any game I have played. If a year later it is still bad that is a really bad sign. As a software engineer I am quite happy if I can get a 20% speed improvement in my code. It is just hard to write code the first time that is so bad you can double the speed with a quick change. Major performance improvements take major rewrites of the entire code. Not something to put off to just before release.
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Reply #957 on: May 06, 2015, 03:57:49 PM

In case anyone is wondering Landmark is just reaching the 30 hour downtime mark, in an announced 48-72 hours for the wipe, restructure, and remodel.

I had initally bet min of 72 hrs, and expect when it is back up there'll be at least another 10-24 more hours after it's crashing with needing hotfixes.


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Rendakor
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Reply #958 on: May 06, 2015, 04:13:29 PM

I'm not sure why 30 hours of a minimum 48 hour downtime is remarkable at all.

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Malakili
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Reply #959 on: May 06, 2015, 04:16:20 PM

Surlyboi
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Reply #960 on: May 06, 2015, 09:19:06 PM

In case anyone is wondering Landmark is just reaching the 30 hour downtime mark, in an announced 48-72 hours for the wipe, restructure, and remodel.

I had initally bet min of 72 hrs, and expect when it is back up there'll be at least another 10-24 more hours after it's crashing with needing hotfixes.

I blame Meemers.

Tuned in, immediately get to watch cringey Ubisoft talking head offering her deepest sympathies to the families impacted by the Orlando shooting while flanked by a man in a giraffe suit and some sort of "horrifically garish neon costumes through the ages" exhibit or something.  We need to stop this fucking planet right now and sort some shit out. -Kail
taolurker
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Reply #961 on: May 08, 2015, 07:49:56 AM

I'm not sure why 30 hours of a minimum 48 hour downtime is remarkable at all.
Well, I actually hadn't really mentioned the wipe date with previous news, and was initially posting because even I was surprised that they'd begun their wipe. The date was changed from May 2nd to May 4th, then May 11th, and then actually started on May 5th. I was trying to let you guys know, and also give an estimate of how long it was actually offline.

It really wasn't remarkable, except that the game was down. At least now I can share a link to the Update Notes, and also report the game is still down just reaching the 70 hours of downtime mark. They've scheduled a Landmark Live stream for 11am PDT (4 hrs from now), and I wouldn't expect they'll bring the game back until after that show ends.


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kaid
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Reply #962 on: May 08, 2015, 08:41:13 AM

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/landmark/index.php?threads/landmark-islands-list.54514/


List of maps for all the new islands for landmark. I have to say they are looking WAY more interesting layout wise so you can have nice water front property without having to run for 15 minutes to get the edge of the world is a plus.
Tmon
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Reply #963 on: May 08, 2015, 09:58:15 AM

Servers are up.
Pennilenko
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Reply #964 on: May 08, 2015, 03:25:43 PM

Holy shit does this suck now. I don't know how they managed to fuck it over this bad.

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tazelbain
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Reply #965 on: May 08, 2015, 03:51:35 PM

I can't think of any other beta that regressed like this one has.

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Reply #966 on: May 08, 2015, 07:58:01 PM

I keep wanting to come back and log into this, but every time I do I just get depressed thinking about EQN.

I think it's maybe just overall MMO depression, but I dunno. Are there like, hardcore Landmark fans who weren't originally EQ fans craving a bit of that original stuff?

But that Captain's salami tray was tight, yo. You plump for the roast pork loin, dogg?

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Reply #967 on: May 09, 2015, 01:49:59 AM

Regressed? What happened? What's worse now?

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Reply #968 on: May 09, 2015, 07:48:08 AM

Regressed? What happened? What's worse now?
  • Performance
  • Crafting
  • Building
  • Gameplay

Not necessarily in that order.

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Reply #969 on: May 09, 2015, 01:27:59 PM

Performance, I believe it and saddnes me a lot. Everything else can't be worse than what it was at the beginning as there was no gameplay outside of building, and crafting was too basic to count. I suppose the regression is more perceivable if you kept playing over the many different stages.

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Reply #970 on: May 09, 2015, 05:21:11 PM

How can they possibly have made the performance worse?  I stopped playing because it was just a slideshow and my machine handles anything else just fine.

Hahahaha!  I'm really good at this!
Tmon
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Reply #971 on: May 10, 2015, 08:27:32 AM

Performance improved for me this time around, but it harvesting animations are still borked.
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Reply #972 on: May 11, 2015, 09:22:28 AM

Oddly enough my performance has improved quite a bit. Last time I played around xmas I had to turn my graphics from high to medium as it just was not handling things well and was getting really choppy. Now I am back to running it on high even near/in caves.

Overall the new player introduction to the game seems a lot better and smoother and the achievements give a good job of giving you some direction on stuff to do and about 10 minutes in the game you can start building pretty big impressive things without having to spend two hours harvesting enough stone/wood/dirt to do anything.

Monster spawning in caves is a bit wonky right now and that needs some work to spread them out a bit but me and some friends were having a good time spelunking and found 3 ruins which were all pretty well done.

There is something weird going on with the snap to grid stuff some of my normal pyramid building techniques was simply not working right so I have to test that a bit to see whats going on with that.


The starter home templates are a nice idea though to let people brand new to the game have a taste of the kinds of things you can build in game and have a nice looking home base with crafting stations.


It still has a ways to go but its much closer to feeling like a game than it had in the past.
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Reply #973 on: May 12, 2015, 01:29:58 AM

My opinion is about where Penn's is, regressed on all fronts.

Performance
My performance in the game has always been poor at best. I can say there's some things it does better than previously, but there still is way too much optimization needing to be done to this engine. It still does LOD horribly at distances, there's still massive fps lag (oceans are bad for me) and the particles/emitters make my GPU cry. I am usually at single digit FPS (sometimes up to 11!) since last July, was 20 something prior to that (from May when I'd upgraded mobo). I actually had higher fps (mid teens) with this same video card and older motherboard, but that was on Low settings. New mobo and video card has no fps change at all regardless of setting low, medium or high, or tweaking various settings. Still getting GPU heating that started when they finally patched multi-core threading, but recent Nvidia drivers did help (with additional tweaks).

Crafting
The crafting has been completely watered down imo, and basically destroyed by complaints it was "complicated". I actually think the other method with different crafting stations to evolve toward was better, made more sense and kept a player more engaged crafting longer. This new system forces all the recipes onto only 2 machines, still has a sifter (which is the only use for sand/dirt/stone you mine) and now has a "replicator" in place of tiered machines to get steadily better resource "refining" multipliers. This to me is more complicated along with being cluttered feeling. Why need to refine things at all? Why can't we just build directly with the mined metals/minerals or chopped wood? Why do I need to smelt 2 kinds of metal to then smelt those together into a 3rd? This isn't even taking into account weakening all the tools, eliminating whole resource categories, and changing former raw harvested things into composites of only 4-5 metals/gems (composites was in Dec). It's like they forgot they had a store to sell materials, and their recipe/UI teams adding things only to be stripped or made obsolete/weakened beyond usefulness.

Building
The building is nearly the same, with the same exact bugs it's had forever now. The tweak arrows and select tool have a tendency to freak out, line tool still won't make actual lines, textures draw initially as "black/empty" the first time, and using smooth is still laggy. There's also still issues where the game will become unresponsive/crash if building and having too many undo steps, props or textures. Claims don't cost upkeep anymore (you just need to log in), most resources are free or super easy to get (especially if exploiting chests in spawn caves), and now you can buy additional claim spaces to make a huge Borg cube (26 claims!! only $40). I think it's regressed though, in the fact that builders are now completely separate from the harvesting, not needing to interact with the world or players, and is eliminating having a reason to even build if no one's on the surface.  Without tools for Player made quests, Vendors or something to truly give a reason for builds, it's all window dressing and definitely not improving.

Gameplay
The achievements are nice, and might give people something additional to do (for a short while), but it's still the same crappy click combat that was introduced in Aug.. Only now you start with a 2 attack weapon until you "unlock" the 3rd attack. The animations, low fps, and particle effects make combat a chore for me anyway. With no surface mobs anymore, everyone is moving into caves which are mostly just huge caverns with ruins (built by players) that aren't connected, attractive, or engaging. Even the harvesting game is horribly weakened with removal of "rare" heartwoods, the stupid composite system and making axes able to chop every tree (+horrible animation sticking).  There's still very little game here imo, and less every time they reverse or revamp things.

I also don't think the new islands help the game at all, and if anything the new lava and deciduous biomes look like shit. Their skyfiles are completely different, with different ambient colors, and exposes how truly crappy their world design is. The world still looks lifeless, and barren, with tons of spawn bugs causing it to look even worse. The devs also seem to not even coordinate very good with one another, removing the mailbox from the spire assuming it was part of the ui and making forges (>one of the 2 crafting stations) craftable with a resource completely removed from the game.

I'm still playing, testing and submitting bugs... although the frustration level is bad, my hope for the game has dwindled immensely and I keep hoping it will improve in leaps and bound. Also still leading a guild, building insane crap, and trying to make one of the worst beta experiences I've ever had slightly entertaining, even if just trolling the forums and annoying the developers/community people.

 
« Last Edit: May 12, 2015, 01:35:39 AM by taolurker »


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Sky
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Reply #974 on: May 12, 2015, 10:03:45 AM

Life's too short for crappy games.
taolurker
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Reply #975 on: May 25, 2015, 12:10:59 AM

Happy Memorial Day you curmudgeons, grumps and wonks.



Building engine is why I'm there. Wish I could sit more or have it bug less.


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Gets
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Reply #976 on: March 18, 2016, 05:27:22 AM

Falconeer
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Reply #977 on: March 18, 2016, 05:57:36 AM

Someone has to tell you, and because of timezones, it's gonna be me:

1) The cancellation of EQ Next is 7 days old news. This happened a week ago.

2) We posted and commented widely in the EQ Next thread.

3) This is the EQ Landmark thread. EQ Landmark is still alive. For now.

No hard feelings, the search tool is horrible here.


EDIT: Since I am in the EQ Landmark thread, you should know that there's a big patch coming. The highlight to me is that they are basically increasing the size of your plot by about 20 times.
« Last Edit: March 18, 2016, 06:09:26 AM by Falconeer »

taolurker
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Reply #978 on: March 18, 2016, 08:46:52 AM

So, yes.. Everquest Next was cancelled.. But, the same day that announcement was made, they announced that Landmark would launch this spring, had a new producer, and then after that began detailing numerous new changes. The initial announcement about Landmark's launch and producer change was only in a forum post by Holly "Windstalker" Longdale, the new Producer (link) the day the EQN news broke. Since I'm probably the only one who still follows this game, or has played it recently, I'll detail all the stuff briefly for everyone, and include links for those who want to see more than just my quick descriptions.

Probably the biggest change is that the game will no longer "release" as free to play, and anyone who doesn't already own a Founder/Trailblazer pack will need to pay $9.99. This is a huge issue for current multi-account people, because most of them used their own buddy keys (for more build space) and now will be forced to pay for those in order to continue using them post "launch".

Some of the other changes coming are things that could be good, including maybe some left-over resources from Everquest Next. The big update is scheduled for Monday next week, as Falconeer said, but is also accompanied by another wipe (with more wipes possible, and at least one more for "launch").

Upcoming changes
Teased months ago
 
1. Build mode, the mega palette, and claim camera/time controls ->basically all props, emitters and build materials crammed into a single palette, removing build tools from inventory, and giving new controls to everything (again).  The post was from September, and a frustrating "building only" tease from so far out.
2. Claim time and camera controls They further expanded on the inclusion of time and camera changes in this post, prematurely teased back in September and detailed in this post from Feb.
3. Introducing Build Mode This early February post further expanded on the Sept tease of claim time changes and camera options for claims.

After the Everquest Next cancellation announcement they revealed

4. Let's go on an Adventure together Changes to the entire surface and cave systems (again), along with removing the 5 layers of caves, and making it into only two. They also are re-arranging combat areas to include specific caverns to explore and new collecting mechanics (that sound infinitely farmable).
5. Landscapes, Claim sites and Caverns oh my Claim sizes are changing (as Falconeer said they are larger -actually about 16x current size >equivalent to 3x3 of the current claims but only less than 2 high BUT limited in height and with NO attachments). The islands are also being completely revamped, now named Landscapes instead of islands, with a Pioneer "flat" claim space and them being granted to people, not chosen initially.
6. Build Softly and carry a big stick Along with the claim changes, they are finally giving the ability to add combat NPCs into claims and the videos also debut some new monsters and weapons.

They also created two new FAQ forum posts in the past week.
Landmark Launch FAQ
Landmark Wipe FAQ

« Last Edit: March 18, 2016, 08:49:03 AM by taolurker »


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Sky
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Reply #979 on: June 02, 2016, 11:09:54 AM

Early Access starts on June 8 at 10am Pacific. Launch 48 hours later on the 10th.
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