Niber

That's another point I neglected to bring up in my first post. The thesis declares that; "the owners and playerbase" are what make EQ2 unique. Yet, the whole essay is not built on that premise, instead it contradicts itself by later proclaiming class individualism is what makes EQ2 unique. Which is it? The playerbase? Or class individualism?

I, like you, also found no correlation between spell name consolidation and class uniqueness. It doesn't matter if it's fireball and firebolt or fireball I and fireball II, to me the class still remains unchanged in its functionality.

I realize I'm kicking a dead dog by critiquing this mess, but it's so bad that I cant help myself.

I'll look into getting that for you, but individual rights aren't easy. You might be better served posting an update and I can change the OP.

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Meta

You call yourself a veteran player, yet you seem to think this tiny period of EQ2's history is where it started to go wrong. If you were a veteran player you'd know the rot started looooooong before this - and RoK was probably the biggest nail in EQ2's coffin with regards to expansions being solely responsible for players saying fuck you and un-subbing.

TSO probably hasn't had a terrible impact, because nobody left after RoK actually believes that the devs will deliver a decent expansion. Ok they might know what they want an expansion to contain, but nobody actually expects the devs to be listening, or in fact capable of delivering anything remotely decent.

It's a fucking crying shame. Because EQ2 could be the best MMO out there if it was given the right attention. The money men at SoE or whoever is responsible for this should be shot.

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Diknak

QFE. RoK was the real turning point of the game imo. Before, leveling was a healthy combination between soloing and grouping. Post RoK, it is solo until max level then farm instances for gear. Until they nerf soloing or give a significant reason to dungeon crawl without quests, they are never going fix the risk/reward system. People have no reason to group at low levels because they will lose out on AAs.

If you want to write an essay that goes beyond contestation, you need to write about how the screwed up risk vs reward, especially while leveling.

Stormsinger

[quote=Kriptini;928721]On another note, what's with all the real-life money to in-game item transactions? These, more than any other additions to the game, are causing Everquest II to sail dangerously close to the Ocean of Generic MMORPGs. At first, Legends of Norrath caused the game to elevate to a "borderline" status, where buying in-game items with real-life money had a chance (but no guarentee) of receiving in-game bonus items for another game. But with the recent addition of the Station Cash feature, it now seems like the plan is to skip the middle man entirely and just have people spending real-life money on in-game items with less than fifteen clicks of the mouse.

Um... the reason SOE has implemented these things is because they don't make enough money off of subscriptions, they have money problems. This is one of the first good things they have done for the sake of this game alone because it will allow them to spend more money on making it suck less. They need to do MORE of this, because the more money they make the better they can make the game AND eventually they can even fucking advertise.

I agree with alot of the other things you've said, but SOE needs to make enough money to keep this game going and maybe even increase the player base, and that's not going to happen with them sitting around trying not to offend your roleplay experience. Think about the last 10 game updates, and think about how so many of them just made this game more like WoW.

Now I don't like WoW, I think it's too simple and too easy but it is succesful for some reasons, and one of the biggest ones is that they advertise, and another is that they've found out how to make insanely massive heaping piles of money off of their subscribers.

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OMG your vagina resists are over 10K!
By the way, reading this thread was like watching a couple of retards trying to have sex with each other...
¿

Meta

It doesn't include micro transactions. It's from massive subscriber numbers, decent advertising and merchandising. I doubt WoW will ever need to lower itself to opening an in game mall for buying stupid costumes and potions which turn you into a chicken and give you triple tradeskill xp.

WoW hangs on to it's players because it proclaims loudly that it exists, that millions of people play it and that it's a huge immersive experience. The fact that it's mediocre in terms of quality and depth are neither here nor there - no other MMO advertises like they do, so people wanting to play an MMO will largely go to WoW.

Comparing WoW and EQ2 makes the state of EQ2 even more sad. Look at character customisation, graphical detail, terrain detail (ok WoW has some pretty landscapes too but not as nice as EQ2), animation, creature diversity, lore, raid difficulty etc etc etc. EQ2 wins in every department - yet it's a miserable failure in terms of it's subscriber numbers.

There's only a few really important areas that WoW wins imo: 1) server stability and maintenance 2) stuff working as intended 3) advertising. When it comes to all the little details, like diversity and depth, it has nothing on EQ2. Unfortunately, without those 3 things running smoothly, it means fuck all. With those 3 things working you can have a fuck ugly game with terrible depth and people will play it for years.

Imo SoE had a chance to make EQ2 the number 1 MMO and they didn't have the balls to go for it. It's too late now.

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Diknak

[quote=Stormsinger;929751]You got better at using the quote function (-10)

LoN has nothing to do with EQ2. They are seperate projects, so that would be like a SWG player saying in 2004, "Whew, good thing they released EQ2 to make more money." They are seperate projects, so the income of one will not impact resources devoted to another.

Station Cash, however, does increase revenue for the EQ2 project, but they also pissed off a lot of the playerbase when introducing RMT into the game.

And RoK was the biggest WoW effect that this game has experienced so far with the monumental shift from a group/solo mix to a majorly solo playstyle. And we can see how the average player responds to that expansion. WoW is so huge only because it launched with tons and tons of Warcraft fanbois. Period. If any other company had created the exact same game with different names and without anything that tied it to Warcraft, it would not be doing nearly as well.

Meta

It still has to be stable and suck as little as possible - see Warhammer for an example of a game with a gigantic fanbase (faaaaar bigger than Warcraft) being a terrible failure because it sucked.

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Nurta

truth

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Xorlin

This is a waste of time and ironic because we wouldn't have this problem if Sony listened to their customers.

...and yet I still enjoy logging on. Maybe its blind hope that one day they really turn the game into something epic.

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gandulfy

You have titled your essay
"To the Developers of Sony Online Entertainment's "Everquest II""

So therefore I read this imagining that I was a developer for EQ2, and I have to say I got nothing out of it. The points are light to say the least, there is no large underlining point that is being gotten at. In general it seems like a mesh of things that you currently think hurt the game. You need to explain why your writing the essay and then give proving points to your general thesis.

Outside of that, I don't really agree with alot you say. EQ2 has been around 5 years alot of things have happened in that time to cause players to leave. I mean I know TONS of people that quit the game on release because it was super buggy compared to WoW, so they just went to WoW at the time. And now have no reason to come back to EQ2. And not all of us thought KOS was "great" either.