SOE Becomes Daybreak / Russian shutdown

Miele_sl said:

Soe created some of the best dungeons I have memory of and I mean the best in terms of complexity, layout, texturing, atmosphere. From the good old EQ1 to the unforgettable EQ gems, the main issue I had, especially with EQ2, is that most of the hours spent to create that content were wasted, because these places were usually skipped by the playerbase, for being a hidden place, mid level only, with no loot and no working quests in them. I always went to explore every nook and corner of the world, but I had to admit, it was just pointless and all I got was the sense of exploration.

EQ2: Obelisk of lost souls (did you know it goes down very deep and the few nameds at the bottom didn't drop shit?), the beehive in Enchanted Lands (Rivervale) where there was absolutely no loot and there were two possible events that didn't work or bugged out, and many many more places I could add to the list, like Silent City and its neighbour area, egyptian underground cities, used mostly to grind shit for the peacock line quest, but not much more, were in my opinion underused and possibly subject to an old school design (is there anything interesting spawning here? you won't know if you don't camp it for hours, cheers!).
Then we got Unrest, the EQ2 version: brilliant, fun, challenging with a storyline akin to the old Netropos Castle design (great zone that one).

I think SoE has and certainly had an abundance of talent in design, some technical issues (animations were kinda meh) and the art department could have certainly done better for character models. What crippled the game, talking specifically about EQ2, was that incomplete vanilla launch competing with WoW release and a lot of design decisions that baffled a large portion of their existing fanbase, just think of locked encounters, named camping for heritage pieces and so on and so forth (the list is way too long).

Once they pulled their heads out of their asses, some things were improved, but others were (sadly) set in stone.
I remember Scott saying they he couldn't really have gotten away with culling half of the skills causing the hotbar bloat, because at that point, the playerbase was attached to that playing style and changing it would have risked many more subs than it would have possibly gained. Nonetheless Faydwer was a very good time to play EQ2.

I tried to reload EQ2 when it went f2p, because I always liked the game, but I forgot how bad it run even on good machines and once I saw my hotbars and the stupid amount of stuff in my bags I was a bit turned off.
Then I did mouseover on a piece of semi recent gear (at that time) and the tooltip took over half of my screen. I said "fuck this shit". Logged off, uninstalled and never looked back.

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Most of what you are talking about was under Hartsman. You're basically saying it had a deep if somewhat underused world, and it did. But that was all Scott. When he left, it all went down hill. Scott actually listened to the community, unlike anyone that followed after him. KoS and EoF where the last good expansions the game had imo.

mures_sl said:

Oh, another thing about polesmoker and smedley, after taking a little over a year off from eq2 I looked at getting back into it and I'd have to pay $40 for w/e the non-content "feature" expansion was, $40 for the new expansion, $15 for a subscription, and $40 for the latest expansion coming out the next month with no option of pre-ordering so you could do the latest expansion's content while waiting on the new expansion. Not getting into semantics about how you don't have to have the new features, and I know they sold it a la carte shortly there after, but when your cost of entry for full access to a game that is over 5 years old is $135 for returning players in a "free to play game"and you are in upper management in the video game industry and you don't see this is a problem/get this shit fixed within a week well then you deserve to lose 50m.

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Byr_sl said:

i had a friend get into eq2 recently, he only needed to buy the sub and the latest xpac. total came out to around $50. If you want extra shit like mercenaries, you need to pay extra.

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I'll just reply to these 2 together (and include the hotbar thing that keeps coming up). A lot of you don't know me, but if you raided in EQ2 you probably know of me. I was Arabel or Slippery (or Isomething, Iguards etc). I was the leader of Equilibrium, basically the #1 WW raid guild for something like 5 years. We didn't always WW1 every mob, but that's more because I didn't try to. We WW1 shit that mattered, which is even funnier considering we raided PST so were always the last to raid. I ran a raid guild in an aspect of we raid as little as possible, so sometimes a guild that wanted to raid their ass off would kill unimportant/bugged to fuck things first.

Anyways, Serum is more right about cost of reentry. You basically have to reforge your gear in this game now a days, and that was part of the feature pack. If you solo Mercenaries become more and more necessary unless you have top end gear at the high levels of the game. If all you're going to do is log in play by yourself and do some low level stuff do you need it? No. If you want to play with others, you're going to. The lack of preorders lately is also really dumb. So is the "Free to Play" *except you still have to buy every expansion **Even if you buy the expansion if you want to play it when it comes out you have to sub or wait 2 weeks to a month ***When you buy the latest expansion you'll get all the previous ones, but you can't buy the expansion until the day it comes out. There is no preorder that will include the previous expansions. This is what is destroying the games profitability, if it is even still making money at this point. If botting wasn't so rampant in this game I'm pretty sure it would be really deep in the red because there are probably 3-4x the bot (or multi-box accounts) than there are really players, if not more than that.

Also as far as hotbars and too many abilities. Most classes basically have 1 bar of buffs, 1 bar of "stuff" like fun spells, call home spells, and other travel stuff, and then 2 bars of stuff they will actually use in combat (more like 1.5). If you're trying to push more than a bar and half worth of buttons in combat you're doing it wrong. The problem falls into the use of clicky items. I advocated against clickies forever, because I think it's fucking horrible design. Especially when you do have enough abilities on hotbars. The only thing that ever really got done about it was they made a useless change of making it so charms had to be equipped to use and would go away if unequipped, but then they defeated the purpose by making it so every charm has a clicky. There are people at the top of the game who have multiple hotbars of clicky items and will use a ton of them before fights. That's just fucking lazy design, and it doesn't add fun or enjoyment to the game. It adds more monotony.

EQ2 has paid for a ton of SoE projects over the years. The game has always made decent money, because they haven't kept a dev team big enough to actually do anything useful in ages. Plus they have the worst pay in the industry. Combine that with the team being a bunch of children who don't actually listen and think they shit gold and you have the clusterfuck of the game you have now. Raiding is dead, mobs are unkillable, the raid zones reset every single day (If you can do it every day that's more content right?!!?!) They have their head so far up their ass they'll never see the sun. They've circled around bad mechanic after bad mechanic and can't realize why it isn't working. You thought crit mit was bad? So did they that they got rid of it. BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! Now they are doing the same thing as crit mit but using resists instead. So now you just auto die unless you hit a resist threshhold that is only attainable by focusing and completely adorning for resists etc. GG game design. Never mind that none of them can actually play their own game.