Epitaphe

hey crychtonn how do you like the new general d'veer?

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Outside of a dog reading is man's best friend. Inside it s too dark to read...

Pacc

All the solo'ers please shut up and quit bitching about wanting equal rewards. Raiders kill and coordinate all the most difficult content in the game.

If eq2 could balance the game then you would all be happy. Since they cant, just silence yourselves by whatever means you prefer.

No, I don't care that they can make soloing as hard as raiding. As of now, raiding is harder and until they change it you don't deserve anything on that level until you can do it.

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98% of people are currently bringing sexy back, if you're one of the 2% that sexy never left, put this in your profile.

Tbiggs

You make dungeons that are voluntary to enter. Us carebear's who have the willy nilly's at the thought of such risks can just stay out, Those of us made of sterner stuff can weave our way through a perilious journy to a special dungeon.. that caters to people who want to push the limits.
Ie. Having dungeons that gave the following effects
- Permant damage to equipment
- Distruction of equipment
- Instant Death (Course, You could always just revive and give it another shot)
- Permant Stat loss
- Experience penalties.
The list goes on.

What can you gain from this? Well i'm hoping a hell of a lot more then what's offered now. Imagine entering a dungeon where failure gets you a loss of all your levels, but if you succeed - Then you can pick up a second class! (Ie. Templar/Wizard!)

Or some serious heavy duty equipment in the dungeon that permantly damages or destroy's equipment - Like +50 to all stats +250/power/health, +1k to all resists and oh, +25 dps. Make it a ring or something, Various rings, bracelets, weapons in the 150 range. Etc

And oh yeah, Exp potions that are tradeable for the exp penalty dungeon.

Poof. Hardcore baby.
-B-

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Calthine

As someone who has limited play time and NEVER hits instances and rarely groups, I can tell you those people are just whiners. Let 'em go back to WoW. There's plenty of content for a player who hasn't the consecutive play hours to raid.

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Calthine

EQ2 Allakhazam Senior Community Manager

Caswydian

Would this be a group dungeon or solo dungeon? How would you manage a game where some people have suddenly been set back years while others are substantially more powerful? What incentive does someone who's character has just been wiped out have to keep playing?

What effect would these penalties have on social dynamics? How would a guild cope with half their members suddenly being reduced to level 1?

All such a dungeon would do is assure that people have a set or two of expendable gear, stuff that is easily farmed or crafted.

Overall, would these effects come instantly, or would they be cumulative? how would you design content that is designed to be defeated the first time through? If the content is designed to require multiple attempts, how do you balance it so that a group or raid that's unable to defeat it at full power can defeat it with reduced capacity?

Echelon

Hmmm. Well I like some of the stuff said here and others are just retarded. Caswydian had a question of would we be pleased if the raid gear was raid oriented as opposed to just oh so much better then solo or heroic gear.....well yes I would.

The point is that soloing, heroic groups and raiding should not have the same outcome of loot and rewards. It's fine that soloing people want their own style of rewards to feel like they are accomplishing something......just don't give them the same shit as a raider. It's not that omg everyone who raids is so much cooler then you, it's just brings up the question....Why raid? Why raid at all and take that time to figure stuff out when i can go do mind numbing solo quests and get gear and masters like a raider does?

They just need to continue to plug away and work at making the game very defined between the three types of play. If they do that I see more people playing Everquest 2, and making it a lot more fun IMO. I would love to have solo, heroic and raid based gear and be able to do it all depending on when I'm playing. It's not like I'm people are always raiding, those people do groups and solo stuff too.

To squash the comments....yes I'm a nerd.....yes my e-peen is massive.....and yes you can go fuck yourself and jump off an antonican cliff. Thanks for playing.

Kithe/Klick - Crushbone

Dehah

The fact that raid gear is better than most solo gear all comes down to cost/benefit in my opinion. It has little to do with risk vs reward.

To fight through a raid zone and kill the boss, the cost of acquiring the reward is a lot higher than the cost of acquiring a solo reward. A raid zone takes the time of 24 people, and it also takes the repair costs of those 24 people, which can add up if it is new content that is being learned. Suppose it takes a raid 3 hours and 1 plat each in repairs to clear a zone. They just invested 72 man-hours and 24 plat to get a couple of pieces of fabled loot and maybe a Master I. The solo player on the other hand can obtain gear that is 70% as good as the fabled gear, while only having to put in a fraction of the man-hours, and they could take that 24 plat and buy something nice for themselves.

If anything, I would say that the cost/benefit of soloing is greater than raiding. That isn't to say that the best stuff doesn't come from raiding, it does. I'm saying that the cost of the raid rewards is disproportionally larger when compared to solo costs and solo rewards.

Now, I'll concede with soloers that I don't see any divine reason why solo players should not be able to obtain fabled gear while solo, but--and this is a pretty big but--the cost/benefit of obtaining fabled gear by soloing should be equivalent to the cost/benefit of obtaining fabled gear by raiding. So in other words, it should take a solo player 60 man-hours and a lot of deaths on average for each piece of fabled they acquire. I bet now some soloers would say "bring it on!" while other soloers would say "bah, why bother then."

Trepan

OMG raiders ate my pie!

Sorry, I started with a serious response and realized partway through that... meh.

big_fag

If you look at any post-WoW MMO, raiding is a featurette to appeal to the former EQ addicts. A solo player can aquire gear that allows them to dominate all other aspects of the game aside from raiding.

Raiding is an artefact of a defunct design. As the MMO market opens wider and wider thanks to the riotous success of WoW, it's abundantly clear that the 'casual' is the new king. Why waste resources on zones and content that a minority of players are going to use? Who actually *enjoys* encounters where one player's inferiority, or attention lapse, or lag/disconnect, spells doom and a wasted hour or two for 23/24 other people?

It's fucking retarded, and none of you faggots try to lie and tell me you've ever been in a guild where you even like 23 members of it. Maybe 10 at most, the rest you either don't really talk to or think are cunts. Someone fucks up, if it's one of your friends you forgive them and forget it, if it's one of the people you don't know or don't like, you loathe them even more. It's game design that breeds animosity and antisocialism. Are you really that surprised when people burn out and just want to play a game as a game instead of working at a game for 35 hours a week?

The day has finally come where the burnouts outnumber the raiders, where people who want to play the game for fun, and play when they want to play, with or without a group, outnumber the raiders and will dictate future design in the market.

Raiding is dead, adapt or quit.

pagansaint

Hey look. Another idiot who thinks it takes dozens of hours a week to be a raider.

Hasn't it been firmly established that that is such an incorrect statement that everything else the person posts is now considered irrelevant?

Raiding is dead?

Then you might want to inform all of the developers and producers for the new games slated for 2008 who did actual market studies and are devoting tremendous amounts of resources to make raid content for their games...

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