Wolfen said:
This is a little worrying.
According to Scott Hartsman"s bio on his personal blog he has been with Sony Online Entertainment for over six years and his first SOE credit is EverQuest: Shadows of Luclin.
Luclin is not exactly the expansion I would want a guy to first be involved with. Kunark was a tremendous expansion, Velious was very good as far as purely high end content focused expansions go, Luclin brought in the AH, space aliens, a sickening amount of model reuse from trash all the way to bosses, obscene raid level farming key quests that even a hard ass like myself makes me want to puke looking back.
EQ2 which is another thing he was involved in was a train wreck for me with the destruction of racial starting areas, the entire world instanced including bloody outdoor zones "would you like to enter West Commons 3 or 4?". The Faydark expansion where I gave the game a second chance because I wanted to see Crushbone, Mistmore, and all that other good stuff 500 years later boggled my mind with goofy vertical cliffs and cat scratch mats you had to climb to get places. The predominant design of the landscape being "valleys and cliffs everywhere to make Greater Fay into an annoying as hell maze".
There are some qualities of POP I actually liked. The keyed raid progression was a cool thing although I think there needed to be allowances where only a certain percentage of people in the raid needed to be keyed, perhaps 50% since each person who is keyed can take one extra person or what have you. The requirement that every single person needed to be keyed through dozens of different raids ended up being a gong show and a giant pain in the ass.
What they SHOULD have done is make the keys tag not only to the individual player, but to the guild as a whole. Thus if you are on a raid and kill the key boss you get keyed, your guild also receives a guild key that allows anyone with the guild the same access. If a person quits the guild who had actually run the raid they keep the key they earned. If a person who joined the guild and got the benefit from the guild key but had not in fact been there and earned it was to quit the guild they would no longer have that guild allowed access. This would have kept that feeling of progression in POP without making people want to stick a icepick in one ear and out the other every time they got 3 new members to the guild who were unkeyed.
Anyhow, back to the point, what was this guys input in some of those brutal turns EQ and EQ2 made?