EQ F2P- Returning Players & Current Content

Mystrak_sl said:

Whoever plays Bowbie/zurkpuff/nurcro, you need the cash back you've spent on my vendor Namiyo?

Also, for anyone thinking of playing on test, I'm buying defiant gear and moving it over so I have pretty much all 60/70 sets except bps/legs and quite a bit of lower stuff I can give you as well as cash if you're broke on the live servers.

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Yo, that's me. No need to refund the money, but thank you for the offer! I got a plat hookup /testcopy when I made this little trio.

Sorry, hijacking a thread about EQLive for a moment.

A interesting quote from a person (Elidroth) who lurks these forums about custom content generation:

Both the zone editor, and scripting tools are readily available if you're willing to buy them.

Zone Editor - 3DS Max. Currently $3,675 from Autodesk.
Script/NPC Tools - Microsoft Office (Access actually). Currently $399 from Microsoft.

I also use Textpad as my text editor, which cost me $27.

Making content for EQ is not as simple as people seem to think it is.

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I'm not sure if you're trying to tell people that it's difficult for a specific corporate reason, but it's really not from a technical perspective.

-Zone Editor - 3DS Max. Currently $3,675 from Autodesk:
This I can understand if it's all geometry/textures/pathing files you are talking about being generated. It's quite overpriced - BUT, in the context of your quote, people are asking to submit content to SOE. Legally, it shouldn't matter where they get their version of 3DS Max as long as you provide the methods to get their content in the game. SOE can even hold the keys to generation if you're scared of people hacking zone geometry. EQEMu has been having the option for people to hack zone geometry for years on the emulator and nothing bad has happened, though. If it does, oh well, we call send_message on entering a zone and send data with a crc16 of the zonefile like you guys do with spells/client exe/skillcaps/basedata.


-Script/NPC Tools - Microsoft Office (Access actually). Currently $399 from Microsoft:
I understand EQ is a very large game and that systems may not be optimal for making a second NPC scripting system/NPC database.. but at what point do those systems become impractical for rapid content development and why hasn't moving to a new backend system instead of Access been done sooner? Surely it's not impossible as we recently moved from Perl to LUA on PEQ, and still have support for both. You could have some zones loaded with MySQL and some loaded with Access if you needed to.

Though, Microsoft Access seems like the worst possible choice for scripting when compared to SQL Server/Oracle/MariaDB/MySQL combined with Perl/LUA/Python. Using EQEmulator's base, we are able to make a pre-existing zone's geometry into an entirely new instance with its own mechanics, quest scripts, and NPCs in a matter of minutes, not days, and it certainly doesn't cost any money and the possibilities are endless on what can be done. Why wasn't that identified as a bottleneck sooner, or considered a legacy feature of the server code like S3D was depricated on the client when you guys made the move to EQG?

I can almost guarantee if I had the clientside source/database portions to EQ that I could implement an EQEmulator server that runs on the data in a matter of weeks/months using the data provided. If the code is an issue, why not just take EQEmulator's features from their github and use them in SOE's codebase? After all, you'd only have to contribute code back of what you've changed due to GPL, and it could only benefit the emulator and SOE - and the end goal, the players.

Hell, I'd go as far as to write an EQEmu-style quest editor inside the EQ client if I were you guys. You could set it up so that a very limited permissions-wise perl parser could be embedded into the server and parsed from the client's side. There's countless ways to approach this but I am curious as to why SOE is sticking away from the idea of player-made content - unless, of course, they are betting on EQNext and developers have no say in the matter.

-Textpad, $27:
Notepad++ Home<-- free & almost everyone uses it, has tons of plugin support. I'm sure everyone has their reasons but I am genuinely curious as to why you are using Textpad compared to NPP.

So just to pat myself on the back a bit. I successfully 3 boxed Murdunk's Last Stand. I've never done it before and gave it a go. 88 Necro (J1 tank merc), 79 shm (J1 rogue merc) 76 mage (J1 cleric). I know wiz merc usually beats rogue, but i figured resists would be an issue and an extra leopard target was awesome, due to using a rogue merc i didn't pet tank (although he probably tanks better than my merc). DPS wise i pretty much stayed on par, never let a mob get by and only had 2 in camp twice and the first was less than 10% anyways. The only time it came close was a veteran something (orc model) that seemed to be able to smash my merc for 20-30% when he was low (two of them did it).

Didn't realize you can get credit for Murdunk's before the solo tasks (Necro requested because he had them complete). So now im just 5 easy tasks away from having it the other accounts too. Definitely a memorable experience. Can't remember the last time something like that was memorable in WoW or the other million wow clones.

Narac01_sl said:

Definitely a memorable experience. Can't remember the last time something like that was memorable in WoW or the other million wow clones.

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Plenty of shit in WoW like that. I have people that still talk to me about Nef rushes (AQ), M'uru kills, bear runs, Immortal runs, Yogg kills, etc. They talk about other shit that I'm not familiar with as well since I've quit a while back. WoW funnels everyone into raiding and makes raiding pretty special about 1/3rd of the time. If you don't go in for that content, you miss out on a big chunk of their artistry. It's unfortunate because I've gotten tired of being a scheduled raider, and I don't go in for that anymore either.

True. WoW had a lot of excellent raiding in the past. People who knock it probably haven't played it. They lost their touch in Cataclysm and class revamps got a big ridiculous.

Their ad worked! I'm playing again!

Agraza_sl said:

Plenty of shit in WoW like that. I have people that still talk to me about Nef rushes (AQ), M'uru kills, bear runs, Immortal runs, Yogg kills, etc. They talk about other shit that I'm not familiar with as well since I've quit a while back. WoW funnels everyone into raiding and makes raiding pretty special about 1/3rd of the time. If you don't go in for that content, you miss out on a big chunk of their artistry. It's unfortunate because I've gotten tired of being a scheduled raider, and I don't go in for that anymore either.

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I remember things like that in raiding (server first Ragnaros kill (Molten Core), server first Nef (BWL), releasing Eranikus on the test server beta testing the AQ Gate quest with Furor), but those were all raid related, I'm talking about at a small group to group level. Granted I skipped TBC, so maybe there was a sense of accomplishment there at the group level.

Fight_sl said:

Dude, that was me, not Zaide. Haha, that was a lot of fun though. Necro power.

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yo, hoelab, stop posting pics of my girl and just log the fuck on homie

and atleast make my bard leader of the fellowship so i can invite #74 and #75 brah

The name Zaide was taken on Test (by my old account which I sold) so I had to use another name, Protocol.

Just came back to the game, decided to start on Test. Having nostalgic fun so far. What's a good duo to go with a ranger? Figure I should try out boxing if it makes things easier.

Been test copying over 50k plat at a time so gear hasn't been an issue or anything.

Oh also I'll toss this out there since its all I really have to offer but if anyone wants a pre-nerf CoS lemme know. I have one on the char I'm test copying over with my plat. I don't know how rare they are on test. I'll post my player name once I'm home and can see what it was changed to when I copied him over.

I dumped a bunch into the economy a few months ago. I was copying over 3mil plat, a prenerf CoS, Fungi Staff, all casino rewards etc per copy for a while there.

Fight_sl said:

Shaman is the Rangers best friend. Between the two, you have a very balanced duo that can do most anything. You don't even have to use mercs if you don't want to, but if you do both the Shaman and Ranger can go into Full DPS mode and you will have a very strong group. The only thing the duo lacks is burst damage and mana regen (which doesn't matter in this life cycle of the game).

Shaman

• Haste
• Slow
• Buffs
• Heals
• Roots
• Dots

Ranger

• Snare
• Damage Shields
• Dots
• Attack Buffs that stack with Shaman stat buffs
• Headshots, which are helped immensely by Shaman stat buffs and Haste

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Thanks a lot. Thats what I was leaning towards. Made one this afternoon and am catching him up quickly.

Secrets_sl said:

-Textpad, $27:
Notepad++ Home<-- free & almost everyone uses it, has tons of plugin support. I'm sure everyone has their reasons but I am genuinely curious as to why you are using Textpad compared to NPP.

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We use it because we have plugins written which will let us compile using EQScript (our own scripting language that mirrors C a lot) without working directly in the DB. Then when we're happy with the end result, we can just paste it in and be sure it works first time out. The scripting language was in place before I joined the team, so I can't speak to why Lua or one of the other already created scripting languages wasn't used.

Access is the interface to an Oracle back end. As for people creating zones.. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. It takes a ridiculous amount of time to create zones in EQ just to develop something that the engine can run with 100 people in it. Our artists still get it wrong sometimes, causing revision and remakes. I'm not an artist so I can't give details, but suffice to say it's a giant PITA sometimes.