Stoic

Illuminator are you talking about the same Fireflyte who had the brilliant idea that all good healing gear should be leather cause priests don't need mitigation in her opinion? If you call that dignity, your standards are below tolerable.

The itemization across the board in this expansion is sub par, there are some neat items here and there, but for the most part no one is all that excited when they see most of the loot they get from raids or instances. The sheer magnitude of the "Diablo Style" armors is ridiculous. Skyfire Helm of Dicksuckery and Grandmasterbators Boots of Shit, how much trash loot do we need? Hell pieces of that junk is still being discovered cause there is so god damn much of it.

The Expansion Reeks of Failure.

The instances get old quickly, no one wants to go into Chardok or Sebilis because chances are your gonna come out with a whole bunch of Diablo armor and nothing else worth a damn. Rarely a group will find this 1 really neat item but its so deep in or in an area that repops so quickly you are gonna get adds, then ya got to work all the way back down there and all manner of other excuses. There just isn't enough things to do. SoE for some reason had the brilliant thought to say "Let's just forget actual engaging content and give em eh 4 instances worth doing, 7 raid zones 4 of which are just a couple trash and 1 mob in the zone that actually drops loot. " I wish MMO producers would realize that giving the community TOO MUCH to do makes the game worth playing. It gives it a sense of being big and time consuming. And well it makes sense to give your MMO community too much to do cause then they stay logged into your game. ROK does not fullfill this basic need.

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AdaM pErSOn

I just wish there was a Pre LU 13 Server that existed.

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Flight

Sad to say, I would have to agree. Not just the top end, but the itemization for the first twenty levels is far too powerful. I mentored down a decently equipped lvl 43 Guardian to work through and gain some AAs and i was getting item upgrades. Level 20-35 content is totally defunct game wide.


They need to up the anti very quickly, with the WAR beta back up and running and the imminent ramping up of their guild beta.


Might want to consider changing the name of the site to MMORPGFlames, LFG.

tomthumb

Nod, it would make a great alternative to the circle-jerk that FoH has become.

Sarron

I was catching up on some reading after being gone all weekend with family over christmas and this thread really caught my interest.Especially after seeing Caswydian posting in here like a fiend. Well I stopped at this post right here because I think you are so frickin far off base that I can't help but post a response. I love this game, but I will have to say it is a flop compaired to other MMO's. You might ask why I say that, well I will tell you, because I cannot hardly find it anywhere on store shelves. I don't give a rats ass about any of SOE's other games, I want this game to be a success. I can still find SWG on the shelves, I can also find a slew of other MMO"s that have been around for years. Heck I can still find EQ1 on the shelves, right next to WoW and Vangard. I have asked at more than one store why they do not stock EQ2 and I have been told it does not sell. They can order it for me, but they will not stock it. SWG still sells, heck, I even see Planetside once in awhile, but not EQ2. So to come here spouting saying EQ2 is a success is complete crap.

Again, I love this game, but it really saddens me that I cannot find it on the shelves of any of the major stores. Sure I can go to Game Stop and they may have a copy, but I have to dig for it.

Oh, also, I am not talking about the original EQ2, I am talking about the newly released RoK with all the expansions and original game.

Why is it in a lot of these stores I will still see a whole row devoted to WoW and alse the Burning Crusade expansion, but not one spot for the new EQ2 expansion.

The stores I am talking about are Best Buy, Circuit City, WalMart and Target. I have also kept my eye out in several major cities through out the Midwest and this game is not as easily purchased as some games that are more than two years older than it.

Again, I love this game, but it is a big goose egg in stores.

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Sarron Silverpaw-79 Swashbuckler
Serpaw-74 Berzerker
Simbarth-22 Shadowknight, 76 Alchemist
So many alts I don't know

spyderbite

While marketing is a bit of a derail from the OP's opinion on the inadequacy of the current development team. I'll admit that the marketing is a little more than lacking for EQ2.

It is sort of depressing to walk in to Best Buy as an EQ2 player and see just a single box of "Classic" sitting there.

On the other hand, I like to think that a lot of that advertising money (3 million from what I've read Blizzard spent) has been better spent in all the expansions and live content that we get far more frequently than other games.

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Caswydian

I was in Best Buy a few days ago, and they had about 4-5 copies of RoK on the shelf, along with a few other games. While it would certainly be nice to see EQ2 get more exposure, SOE's use of digital downloads is a big turnoff to retailers, since they are essentially competing against SOE for sales, and so have no incentive to devote limited shelf space to EQ2 games. SOE needs to find a way to increase retail exposure and overall advertising. Tie-ins with other Sony products would be a logical place to start - SOE is a division of Sony Pictures, so one could easily do tie-ins with movies, and do things like offer movie ticket or DVD discounts with retail boxes, or bundle game cards with DVDs.

Calthine

Three facings (and piled high on top) at the two local Fred Meyer. Game Stop didn't have it, but Game Stop had *no* SOE titles and only about 30 PC games published this year at all, they seem much more interested in console gaming. Wal-Mart was sold out - no copies but I found a shelf tag.

Used to be I couldn't find them locally at all and had to special pre-order or do DD. They're doing way better.

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Calthine

EQ2 Allakhazam Senior Community Manager

Luceus

The sad part about RoK is they had a year and 10 levels to really get things right. It's hard to add an expansion with no level cap increase because you have to give people loot that people need but at the same time doesn't completely trivialize previous content (like 1 grouping raids)

With RoK, and all they've learned from EQ1, previous expansions of EQ2 and shit, many other MMO's, you'd think by now they would at least get things 'right'. Maybe i'm nuts but it doesn't seem like rocket science to create a game with enough progression and things to do to keep casuals and hardcores entertained for at least more than 2 weeks.

I may be all over the place with my comments below, but here are some of my random thoughts on RoK..

1. Solo quest rewards shouldn't be better than items obtained in heroic quests, dungeons (both instanced and contested) and especially raids. Solo quests should be for players who don't feel the need to rely on grouping and socializing every aspect of the level grind. Also, making nearly every solo quest some part of a huge questline is stupidity at it's finest. Questlines are cool, long ones are very cool and sometimes rewarding, but that was some serious overkill. Trying to join a friend or two for some quests makes it nearly impossible.

2. Chardok, Seb, and KC are all but useless in this expansion which is so sad to see knowing how much action they got in EQ1. I zoned into KC the other day for a raid and saw nobody at the zone line, and only my guild was in the zone. I can't remember a time prior to the launch of Luclin was KC that barren.

And why is this? There is no reason to go into these zones. As pointed out in #1, the solo quests give as good if not better rewards, easy xp and in many cases you don't have to deal with annoyances like how massive Chardok is. We get the point, you guys are masters are designing massive zones with high ceilings and tons of running, trash killing so users can be 'blown away', but it's getting old.

3. There seems to have had 0 thought put into progression in the expansion. I don't know where T7 content should stand against T8 (fully fabled eof vs fully 'top end' treasured rok, etc) but I do know that there should have been more than what seems like a 15 min meeting on the progression of the expansion aside from levels 71-80.

Off the top of my head, a group/raid full of top end 'solo' quest rewards shouldn't be able to cruise through the hardest instances, any contested dungeons, or any raids. A type of progression I would have liked to have seen was like..

a. Solo Quests
b. Instanced Gear
c. Contested Gear
d. Raid Gear
-d1. Tier 1
-d2. Tier 2
-d3. Tier 3 etc

And a basic rule of thumb with that is if you have a full set of some type of armor, it's unlikely you'll be able to do much 2+ tiers ahead.. so people with full solo quest armor won't be ripping through Chardok like it's nothing, and wouldn't even dream of raiding.

This gives people more to shoot for, and stretches out the 'gearing up' progress more than a few weeks.

Then as far as raid progression / flagging. That too is a joke. Raidwide updates for progression seem stupid. What's wrong with giving just 1 person a key to the next tier from every boss kill? Make it so 2-3 people can get 'keyed' every 5 days, and that will help dramatically slow down raid progression, and make it a bit more rewarding to progress a tier instead of someone getting lucky zerging a broken script then never killing that mob again.

Anyway, those are just a few things off the top of my head. I'm sure i'll think of more but that's what has been really bugging me lately.

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Ocabs
Travian - servers 3 & 4
Pretty fun browser game, look me up!

Illuminator

That is something that can be mended, because when all is said and done and the smoke clears at least it's obvious Fyreflyte is putting in the effort. "Intolerable" was the name we saved for the bump on the log Aniksys or whatever her name was, and the reason we rush through the T6/etc grind instead of stopping to smell the roses.

You do know that this loot is intended for earning plat and transmuting and not for someone to look stupid by wearing it? Kinda like the body drops in earlier tiers that had no stats on them whatsoever, except I don't remember anyone using those in their examples of "bad itemization".

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Bow down before the one you serve. You're going to get what you deserve.