Cexi

Yup, I just tried it myself. /clap SOE

When will their QA team get a clue?

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feldon30

Griefing in the morning.
Griefing in the evening.
Griefing at supper time.
When pizza's on a bagel, you can grief people any time!

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The EQ2 Wire : All the EQ2 News that Fits, we Print

Pinski

So if they aren't procing enough, guess what that means. An increase in their proc chance obviously to balance out. Something they failed to remember to do it to balance.

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Calaglin, Former Illusionist/Guild Leader of Dissolution on Nektulos
Calaglin, Former Illusionist/Guild Leader of Confirmed on Unrest

Hoss

They might have already caught that. I went into the Throneroom of New Tunaria last night and the those fucking sentries were stunning me more than usual. I tried with dots and without them, it was intolerable.


-h

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firamas

Exactly. They "tune" what could be considered a legitimate issue (it wasn't a bug, but it is arguably bad mechanics), and completely forgot to re-tune the proc chance to rebalance the encounter back to the difficulty it's supposed to be. The big question is, is this intentional on their part (thus allowing a bunch of scrub guilds to progress past their means and fuck up the whole paradigm of raid progression even further), or are they going to fix it so the CC/DS's actually mean something again.

An unfortunate trend has been developing in EQ2 over the last year or so. The quality of the development efforts has decreased substantially. I'm giving them a chance to not completely fuck up TSO, but if that's just as bad (or worse than) ROK, then sayonara. I won't keep watching a widescale degredation of the content in the game that I used to enjoy.

I consider myself to be of the hardcore raider set, but in the last 8 months I have had have more fun rolling random alts, levelling them to 40 or 50, and then getting bored and deleting them and starting something else. That'll lose its lustre completely when I run out of classes that I have't tried yet. And it's not that exciting in the first place. Either way, it's a bullshit distraction to artificially make up for the enjoyment that I'm NOT getting through raiding. With the exception of a few exciting moments here and there, the raid content has been straightforward and STUPIFYINGLY BORING. B-O-R-I-N-G. I prefer to raid in MMO's, but I don't pay a subscription fee to be bored.

And still, the dev team panders.
They pander to the casual player who cries for more solo content, at the exclusion of everything else.
They pander to the casual player whose warped sense of entitlement demands epic+ quality gear from solo and heroic content.
They pander to the scrub raid guilds whose warped sense of entitlement demands farmfest-easy epic encounters and retarded RvR in itemization.
They pander to the lowest common denominator.
And eventually that's all they'll have left.

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Oh, no!

Kall

EQ2 has fucked up these past 2 expansions by not making 1 or 2 encounters on the brink of possiblity to keep the high, high end entertained.

The problem is I have little faith they can design something ultra hard like this without 4 AEs and massive damage shield control effects.

Grymmstone

Setting the game aside and looking at the world of economics...

For every 1% of you there are 99% of casual players
for every 1% of l33t guilds there are 99% "scrub" guilds

So, Firamas if you were trying to show profitability and viability where would you throw your R&D money?

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Kall

When the 1% collapses, there's a new 1% to replace them and when they collapse there's a new 1% to replace them, etc. What you basically have is a massive falling out effect that snowballs and snowballs until an entire playstyle is destroyed, in this case raiding.

As much as casuals like to disagree, this game can't survive without raid content.

Grymmstone

Never said the game could not survive without raid content. Only stated that they get more mileage out of casual content than out of end game raider content.

I know far more people that haven't ever raided and think that RoK is the best thing since sliced bread.

...and being that SOE is in this for the money. I am sure they would rather lose player base in 1% chunks than 99% chunks.

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firamas

Egg-zactly. There is a continuum when it comes to itemization and encounter progression, and the cap has to fall somewhere. If there were no raid content, the casuals would quickly assemble the best mix of solo/heroic gear and be left with nothing to look forward to, get bored, and move on. Note: You don't have to be a raider to "look forward to" raid gear or epic fights. Even if you never plan to go on a raid in your entire life, just having that content exist in the virtual world validates the feeling of "character incompleteness" that drives everyone to improve.

There will always be someone at the top who is bored and wants to quit because they ran out of content. That is a truism. You cannot get around that from a game development perspective. The challenge that the devs have to rise to is to take the continuum of [tradeskill / solo->easy group->difficult group->easy raid->difficult raid->endgame raid] content and make it fit together and flow smoothly based on the timing cycle of new content releases. When the content cycle is 12 months, and an entire expansion worth of raid content is essentially defeated 1 month into that, you have a poorly designed progression curve. When some of the very best gear in the game comes from mobs that can be done by pickup raids of casual players with no other raid gear or raid experience (read: first part of SoH), you have a poorly designed itemization paradigm.

EQ1 dev teams did a pretty good job at balancing these two curves. Shit, that game still has a lot of supporters who are playing and raiding 10 years after release. I don't have that same faith in EQ2 at all, and I wish they'd do what everyone has been crying out for and RESTRUCTURE PARTS OF THEIR DEV TEAM UNTIL SOMETHING WORKS. FIRE PEOPLE. HIRE BETTER PEOPLE. HIRE MORE PEOPLE. TREAT YOUR STAFF BETTER. OR AT LEAST LISTEN TO THE IDEAS THAT YOUR PLAYERBASE IS CRYING OUT FOR TO UNFUCK YOUR MASSIVELY BUNGLED ITEMIZATION AND PROGRESSION CURVES.

If I saw Test Server patch notes that said a massive revamp of all T8 gear was being worked on, and to expect across the board retroactive nerfs in many areas, I wouldn't complain one bit. Even if it was my class archetype getting hit with nerfs. Especially if it was my class archetype. I would be so fucking overjoyed that they finally realized that things are dicked up that I'd probably break down into tears and write them a saline-soaked handwritten letter of thanks...

...maybe raiding would be hard again. Maybe raiding would be fun again.

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Oh, no!