Greetings from DragonCon...

[Grimthorn]

Well, the first of several EQ related panels has come and gone... I'll provide the highlights..

1) The general consensus of most of the EQ players is that EQ s dying. There were more EX-EQ players there than current players.

2) Sony/VI didn't send a paid representative, but one of the panelists happened to be a guide. He was nearly shouted from the room when he made the claim that "Part of the role that "uber" players fulfill is to find bugs that QA doesn't." (I was one of the ones shouting...)

3) Most of the developers on the panel (all of whom work for OTHER game development companies) agree that MMORPG economies are SCREWED up, and that "No Drop" is ineffective.

4) The biggest challenge APPEARS to be how to manage or eliminate the offline selling of items and accounts. (this is a biggie for them, I was surprised to hear that) Some games have played with the idea of selling in-game items for REAL cash on their websites.

5) Developers appear to have run out of ideas for how to make things more challenging beyond adding more HP/AC or adding abilities like DT. They spent a bit of time asking for suggestions from the audience. (which will promptly be ignored)

Overall, I was surprised to find the VAST majority of players were either about to quit EQ, or have already done so. The LoS incident was discussed, and I think I was the only player in the room who had BEEN to Vex Thal (except for the guide who was on the panel) so I spend most of the time "debunking" the things that the guide was saying. (Things like "It's an exploit to pull a mob through a wall" or "Vex Thal is designed well")

I ran into one other person from D-Ro, a guy who is a member of Ancient Collective. Nice guy who just likes to spend online time with his wife and his friends. He was telling me about some of the low level raids that they do, and I could tell that he was really having FUN in the game. I envy that. (They just killed Faydedar for the first time, with 33 people...)

Even the obnoxious little 14 year old who started his question with "I play on a PvP server and..." got to have his say. The panelists did a good job of letting everyone have a chance to speak up.

The best quote of the night...

"One of the benefits of being in a guild is that if the game developers screw up bad enough to force an entire GUILD to quit the game, they know they've screwed up bigtime."

If that's the kind of feedback that's necessary for EQ to be "fixed" then we're all screwed. (Unless Furor can talk FoH into going on strike or something. I regard that as being about as likely as me having sex with Heidi Klum in the next 5 seconds... (who's that knocking on my door?))

-Grim

[Maegwin]

Lots of people are all talk when it comes to quitting EQ..."yeah, I'm planning on quitting eq soon, just as soon as we kill mob x, and I get item x, and as soon as I see how bad the next expansion sucks."

But it's all just a bunch of "as soon as"'s and they still play. IMO, EQ isn't about balance anymore, or exploration, or magical monsters and fantastic spells....it's about seeing your friends and talking to them...and hanging out and laughing with people who like to do the same thing with their free time as you do.

just my 2c

[Eomer]

Yea Maeg, but you can also look at the sheer number of people who have disapeared in the past six months alone, people who have played EQ for 2+ years. It's a lot of people.

[Lepra]

I think they need to preform a miracle to keep EQ going for another expansion after PoP.. Most people I've talked to thinks PoP will be timesinks á la SoL on crack and so do I =|

[Rezz]

Hrm, if I could find the post I would repost it, but VI apparently had this neat idea of entire zones full of ring events of varying difficulty (so that people of all levels could enjoy or something) which all lead to some Boss, who would drop a key to open a harder ring event. Could be BS, but looking at Luclin and how ring-happy VI went after the acrylia one, I don't doubt it.

[Rika]

Yeah EQ is on the downslide? I think not.. what game JUST hit the 100K mark for online attendance about a month ago?


Maybe for some/lots of the old players, but the influx of new players is still great..

And don't forget even if you "quit", most people don't or won't let their characters just fade away and become deleted. That is a hard thing to do and VI still gets the cash for these dormant accounts.

Personally I think EQ is a long way from fading away. Look at the other multiplayer games.. Most people have no choice, and won't for a very long time (or til EQ2 comes out. same scenerio as UO they found their biggest competition to be themselves so they scrapped UO2).

Well thats my opinion on the state of EQ.. I think its high and going better than ever from a financial standpoint (and thats all that matters for the life of EQ).

Oh and I dont want to forget to mention the friends people make in everquest. One thing that makes leaving very hard, and coming back very easy.

[Zarxen]

You said it Rika, the friends in EQ is what it is all about. All the accomplishments you have endured in EQ are of things to talk about but in the end it is the friends that you shared it with that is of Paramout importance over time.

I miss my old friends Ubar, Phaera, Daisiee, Inizen etc etc and it's those people that I reflect on having good times with and they are the people that make me want to return.

[Elidroth]

Come back Zarxen.. come back..

Oh.. and as for competition for EQ.. if AC2 over the long haul is anything like my initial impression (I'm in the beta) then EQ and EQ2 had better have some seriously good shit up their sleeve.. cause AC2 is DAMN impressive (very little in common with AC1).

[Andaas]

Originally posted by Elidroth
Come back Zarxen.. come back..

Oh.. and as for competition for EQ.. if AC2 over the long haul is anything like my initial impression (I'm in the beta) then EQ and EQ2 had better have some seriously good shit up their sleeve.. cause AC2 is DAMN impressive (very little in common with AC1).

Well then... you are the first person that has said ANYTHING positive about AC2 aside from the graphics. Most people I have heard have said that AC2 looks pretty, but that it is pretty much the suck.

Still waiting on my beta cd here.

[Elidroth]

Hehe.. well it crashes a lot still.. and the servers aren't up much lately.. but it's fun I think. Of course.. what's good for one isn't always good for another.

[Illegal]

right now I have tremendous hate for this board, it ate my first TWO attempts at replying to this thread due to (<- back) (forward ->) buttons not working so well :|

my first post was huge, about all sorts of goodies in ac2, like how the trade skill system works, how easy it is to level up to high 30s low 40s (easy as in 2-3 weeks with a few friends), how screwed up the pvp system is (mostly composed of people sitting around the +pvp zone borders waiting for someone to pop up on radar so they can gank them and run back to the border), how lame the skill system is (which btw is just like the diablo 2 tree system) and how much work it needs in order to make more than one or two paths (per race) even mildly attractive to those who've seen the different templates in action. It talked about other miscelaneous things as well, my personal experiences in beta 0 and 1, any interesting bits of information I've heard about ac2 from the devs (did you know they really dont plan on raising the max lvl cap past the currently set level of 50 for quite some time after release), etc. It concluded by saying that AC2 is composed of a decent trade skills system (which needs some work, but i'm pretty sure the dev team can manage to balance it out well before release), an awesome graphics engine (ac2 runs much better than daoc on my 1ghz 512ram gf2mx comp), and pretty much nothing new when it comes to gameplay.

But the board ate that one when i accidentaly double clicked on the address bar, so I sat down and quickly wrote a second post which outlined most of the main points up there, plus some other stuff i'd forgotten to say along the way, like my prediction of how 4-6 months down the road from release, before the first expansion is out, a large percentage of players will be sitting around at lvl 50 twiddling their thumbs or farming items to ebay, or selling their characters, etc etc, and how the chat system is basically composed of /say, /group, and /tell (well, that is actually a pretty accurate description now that i think about it).

It's also worth noting that my first two posts were much easier to read (better grammar, sentence structure, so on and so forth), however I fear this one will have to do for now

I recently came back to eq (i've decided i wont be playing ac2 on release... the only thing i'm really looking for that EQ can't provide is a good pvp system, and ac2 is very far from that. I really like the sense of community EQ can provide, and its content although very time demanding, is enjoyable.), and after a few months of inactivity, I noticed a bunch of people I once knew have now disappeared :/ makes me feel ... old

[Elidroth]

You sound as though you're making a review of a completed game when in fact it's not. The fact is, it's beta.. and subject to a great deal of play tuning I'd hope before release. The ease of XP is something they're going to be addressing.

[Ubar]

Zarx,

Wanna PM me your e-mail, would like to keep in touch, haven't talked to you in a long time.

As for AC2, well Im sorry but from what I've played of it, I have disliked it. It is pretty, but thats it imo, I really do not like it.

[Forty]

Some of you haven't been paying attention....

[Rezz]

Well, honestly the skill-tree idea of Diablo 2, while extremely basic was actually a rather interesting idea. In fact, if memory serves me, the SWG skill system will be much the same, just greatly expanded. PVP.. uh, I don't play RPGs for PVP, if I wanted to kill other people I'd reinstall counterstrike, but that's a preferance. You can only do so much with a "zone" based game on PVP, there just isn't that much you can do about people who camp the zonelines. That's why PVP in EQ is so retarded, it's not designed for it and the game engine doesn't even lend itself to pvp conflicts. A quick fix and probably not the best one but somewhat applicable would be making players who zone have a flag for 15-20 seconds where they are marked non-pvpable.. as in they can't pk others or be pk'd. when the time is gone they can be engaged or engage others as normal. But that discussion is for another forum and topic entirely ^_^

Rika is very much right about EQ not dying, but there will be a steady turnover of players from it to other mmorpgs as people begin to experience the "high end." Because on average, the high end player is no longer playing the game for the game, but for the companionship or simply out of addiction to whatever aspect of high end raiding/playing that attracts them. Hell, most players I met while I played who were at the high end were generally bitter and very adamant about how EQ was dying, yet they continued to play. If a good enough product comes out and it proves to be more entertaining than EQ for this upper tier, it wouldn't honestly hurt the momentum of EQ at all, because it's not grizzled old veterans who are buying EQ, it's people who haven't been exposed to the various bugs/nerfs/politics that have the high end players fortelling EQ's doom. While the guilds who are embroiled in the bugs n' shit may bail, they'll be replaced by the lower tiers, and pretty much an even intake of players will replace those who leave. Granted, this will probably be reduced because of the increased competition, but I don't see EQ dying in the near future.

Hell, if I had never played EQ before, I am pretty certain that I would still pick up EQ2 because "it looks pretty."

Don't knock the selling power of pretty pictures.

[Forty]

Yeah, that's why Druzzil-Ro only has only one guild currently able to kill anything above AoW. Guilds that once competed for upper level mobs are basically gone. Guilds that are just now getting close, are doing so because they merged with other guilds to get to the size needed for this kind of battle. I might agree with you IF the guilds were still competeing for the same mobs but there was just turn-over from within the guilds. But that's not happening.

When you lose your hard-core gamer, in the sheer numbers that EQ is now at this stage in the life-span, that's sign things aren't going so well.

Your hard-core gamer is the rat of a sinking ship. When it's sinking the rat is the first off the ship.

You should check out the websites of some of the elite guilds on other servers. Their "inactive" list is getting as long as the people listed as "active".

[Illegal]

Originally posted by Elidroth
You sound as though you're making a review of a completed game when in fact it's not. The fact is, it's beta.. and subject to a great deal of play tuning I'd hope before release. The ease of XP is something they're going to be addressing.

That's what they always say The game has just entered public beta, in a few weeks there will probably be hundreds of thousands of people playing (or trying to anyway). The time for altering major factors of the game is long gone, and in the next month or two (which by the way is all the time AC2 has left in beta -- it's being released in the first week of november), their only major concern is selling ac2 to the people who are now getting a taste of it. Sure, some things are still being fine tuned, and I think the team has ample opportunity to address issues such as experience gain, and balance out the drop rate of trade skill ingredients (there are huge gaps in it, pissed me off when I last played). But the game doesnt foster any kind of in-game community, the endgame is composed of twiddling your thumbs, and the skill system simply doesnt appeal to me (theres 3 races, each race can go melee, ranged, or caster, and each of those 9 "classes" has three specialization trees, of which you can only choose one. each tree gives you a maximum of two optimum paths to choose from). Those things are not gonna change in the next 50 days; the developers probably have their hands full fixing the crash bugs (theres more than one or two, heh), and dealing with server lag / stability issues.

Notice I'm not bashing the game here: It's not easy to argue against those graphics, and I believe there's a lot of people out there who will like the gameplay system ac2 has to offer. I however, do not happen to be one of them, nor do I believe ac2 to be a "next-gen" mmorpg in any way shape or form. There's simply nothing new there.

[Elidroth]

Originally posted by Illegal
Notice I'm not bashing the game here: It's not easy to argue against those graphics, and I believe there's a lot of people out there who will like the gameplay system ac2 has to offer. I however, do not happen to be one of them, nor do I believe ac2 to be a "next-gen" mmorpg in any way shape or form. There's simply nothing new there.

I'd agree with that as well.. but there ARE some innovations I do like that could be further expanded into more interesting content. The skill tree is one of them. I like the idea.. but the implementation could use some fleshing out. It looks like it's geared towards the less hard-core type player and more towards the guy who wants to do something in 20 minutes.

One of the things that made AC1 so impressive to me was the CONTINUAL evolution of the game from Turbine. They had stuff developing and churning and changing all the time. New areas, new things, new stuff that just kept getting added to the game. Add to that a player involved storyline that actually modified the world (with the bitching about Sleeper's Tomb type things) and you had a world people enjoyed. I'd have probably stuck with AC1 if I didn't really dislike the magic system. It was just too unusual for me. Now.. if Turbine can put in the same level of evolution to the AC2.. it'll be worth much more than a cursory look to me..

[Eomer]

Couple things: I just checked out their FAQ on the site, and they say the release date is "Winter 2002". Now, being a canuckian, Winter means mid October... but in terms of release dates etc, Winter 2002 means December at the earliest. Have they stated elsewhere release will be in November?

And is the game currently in public beta? Where can I D/L the beta?

[Illegal]

Originally posted by Eomer
Couple things: I just checked out their FAQ on the site, and they say the release date is "Winter 2002". Now, being a canuckian, Winter means mid October... but in terms of release dates etc, Winter 2002 means December at the earliest. Have they stated elsewhere release will be in November?

And is the game currently in public beta? Where can I D/L the beta?

there has been no official announcement (afaik) to indicate that the november launch date is final. I've been told that is their plan, however. And considering everything else in beta has been going more or less according to schedule ... I'd expect the game to be out by mid november.

As for getting into beta, i believe all people with active ac1 accounts have been or are being added to it ... you may also procure one of these:



So not exactly "open" as far as being completely public, but its close enough ...

The AC2 beta community is now public also, you can access it here:

http://groups.msn.com/AsheronsCall2BetaCommunity/

I believe people who have signed up for the community will also be getting beta accounts at some point in the near future (although I have no confirmation on that, I really havent been following it too closely lately, other than the patch notes).