1.10 Patch Notes Leaked?

[Xanthippe]

Why the fuck does the Darkmantle set have TWO overlapping sets of shoulder pads?

That's the new "beetle" look.

It'll be interesting to see what they do for 60+ though, whether they go the EQ1 route of "hell levels" or force you to do a quest to open up the levels, or if they let you just level up easy and relatively painlessly like the pre-60 game..

Not having played EQ1, what are "hell levels"?

[Merusk]

Are these the final, real patch notes? If not can someone post them?

These notes match what was on test server as late as last night.  There might be some detail changes, but overall I'm fairly certain they're accurate.

I bought-up a few arcanite bars, stonescale oils and boe pieces from the AH last night.  (You need them for the second part of the .5 armor quests. 1 Delicate Arcanite Converter, 10 stonescale oils and a bunch of other crap. )

 I expect I'll be able to sell the BOE pieces today at a nice markup, and might do the same with the Arcanite converters I made and the oils I bought.  We'll see what the market has to say about that tonight.   Someone was already trying to gogue on the Arcanite bars.. they normally go for 26-29g and there were a few up at 46g rather than the usual price.  Devout bracers doubled in price last night, too.

[Trippy]

It'll be interesting to see what they do for 60+ though, whether they go the EQ1 route of "hell levels" or force you to do a quest to open up the levels, or if they let you just level up easy and relatively painlessly like the pre-60 game..

Not having played EQ1, what are "hell levels"?

When the game only had 50 levels there was a problem with the way they designed the level curve where starting from level 30 every 5th level required a lot more experience (and therefore time) to advance to the next. Then when they increased the level cap past 50, every level was intentionally made to be a hell level in terms of the time it would take to advance.

[HaemishM]

Why the fuck does the Darkmantle set have TWO overlapping sets of shoulder pads?

That's the new "beetle" look.

It'll be interesting to see what they do for 60+ though, whether they go the EQ1 route of "hell levels" or force you to do a quest to open up the levels, or if they let you just level up easy and relatively painlessly like the pre-60 game..

Not having played EQ1, what are "hell levels"?

It was an artifact of really bad math by the original EQ design team. They had some screwy math in their leveling system. Each level took more experience than the last, but for levels 30, 35, 40, 45 and every level after 50, you got a hell level. That meant that the amount of experience required to complete that level was twice what you needed for the last level, and twice what you needed for the next level. So at level 29, you could get the level in a good night, and spend the next 3 days struggling through level 30 while your experience bar moved like a dwarf in a David Lynch movie.

I remember spending like 2 weeks at level 35 doing the same goddamn zone over and over camping the same spots just to see the bar crawl forward. The design team, especially Brad McQuaid, kept insisting that was just the way the experience system had to work, and that it could not be fixed because of the way EQ was designed. That was a bald-faced lie to cover their own incompetence. A later design team came in and fixed the whole thing within a month.

[Jayce]

Moved to http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=6379.msg171097#msg171097

[Xanthippe]

Thanks, Haemish.

What a way to punish players.

I'm still surprised that so many people played EQ.  I understand people playing UO but never really understood the appeal of EQ.  Seems like so much of it was punishing and unfun.

[HaemishM]

Thanks, Haemish.

What a way to punish players.

I'm still surprised that so many people played EQ.  I understand people playing UO but never really understood the appeal of EQ.  Seems like so much of it was punishing and unfun.

There was nothing else like it at the time. Really. It rubbed a particularly fun spot for a lot of us, and I think we were just too desperate to have that itch scratched to quit. But it all piled on after awhile and when DAoC came out, I bolted for it.

[Jayce]

All these games are a balance of risk and reward.  If there is no punishment for taking a risk and losing, then it's a meaningless risk.

EQ definitely took this philosophy too much to heart and poured on the punishment thinking it would make the game more fun.  A little risk is fun, so a lot of risk must be REALLY fun, right?

It's obviously more complicated than that in retrospect, but when your game is the only alternative to being pwned by sweaty teenagers UO and you are wearing hats made of cash, hubris tends to set in.

(edited for clarity)

[Xanthippe]

I took a look at EQ at the time it came out, but didn't play because it just seemed to clunky to me.  I was busy playing a text mud at the time, which I had been playing for a while, and was still having a lot of fun with.

The amount of hubris shown to players astonishes me.  I understand that too much listening to players can result in problems, but being deaf seems to result in far more.

I am fairly impressed by the Blizzard team in this sense.  Mythic, which by many accounts was more responsive than SOE, still reacted too slowly to player unhappiness over ToA.

I don't understand why anyone would buy an SOE product given their history.  Especially people who were directly burned by EQ and SWG.  But EQII is doing well, (by pre-WoW standards, anyway), isn't it? (I didn't make it past the Isle).

[HaemishM]

EQ2 is a much better game than it was at release. It's about on par with WoW, though it lacks PVP except on the special servers and in the hardly-used arenas.

[pants]

SOE don't release their sub figures per game any more - but they've recently merged a lot of EQ2 servers.  I had a crack at it a couple of months ago after seeing the box heavily discounted in my local EB.  It was a lot better than what I heard on release, but the tumbleweeds rolling through Freeport and the staggering lack of chat anywhere combined with the slightly clunky graphics made me think I was playing Morrowind. 

Add all those factors up (merged servers, discounted box, tumbleweeds in major city zones) and methinks EQ2 aint doing too well - the corporate overlords in Sony must not be amused.

[Trippy]

I don't understand why anyone would buy an SOE product given their history.  Especially people who were directly burned by EQ and SWG.  But EQII is doing well, (by pre-WoW standards, anyway), isn't it? (I didn't make it past the Isle).

Probably not. According to their press release figures three months after the release of EQ II SOE increased their total subscriber base by around 50K subscriptions. Everybody else playing the game were presumably Station Pass subscribers or existing SOE customers who cancelled accounts and switched to EQ II (i.e. EQ players). And the months after that the total number of SOE subscribers stay flat and then they stopped publishing specific numbers other than to say "hundreds of thousands" of subscribers. At this point I would guess that EQ is still their biggest game.