What the next Everquest 2 Expansion should look like.

Gilgame · 06-05-2009, 10:40 PM

The Everquest 2 team is running into the same problems the everquest 1 team and the wow team are running into, all of their new content is directed towards players who are already well established in the game, this is a great thing if you play everquest 2 hardcore, like if you are in a raid guild and love raiding, some of the content now can keep raiders busy for months or at least until the next expansion, its a really good way to hold onto your established players.

Unfortunately, 90% of the players wont ever get to experience the content you put out because it is way too advanced, it also doesn't drive playerbase growth because there is nothing new or appealing to new players who by the way are currently forced to suffer leveling up through extremely old and boring content mostly solo or spend alot of the day looking for a group to support them.

For that reason, the next expansion should include the following:

keep in mind this needs to be a big expansion.

35% New player content: including 2 new "cool" races and maybe even 2 new classes to help stimulate population growth through the lower levels, new leveling up content will include a couple of new zones which are like what darklight woods is like now, a smallish zone with enough content to allow you to get all the way from 20 to 35 and another zone to get from 35 to 50 and into the easier stuff like DoF and KoS, also include new triple up group content for people who just want to grind on mobs, give special bonus xp to people in dungeons such as rujark and sanctum of scaleborn.

allow players to either group grind or solo quest all the way up to the 60s and preferably the 70s, allow killing triple ups to result in a small amount of AA exp comparable to what they would get from solo quest grinding.

40%: For the currently 80 player/non raider or newly 80 player, give them several new group instances, about 10-12 would be optimal, make sure the gear is good but not better than raid gear, the first 5 instances should give pretty good gear and not require any kind of gear but mastercrafted gear, the next 4 instances would be harder and difficult for anyone to do without gear from the previous 5 instances or raiding the lowest level of content, the last 3 instances should be extremely difficult to do even with all of the tier 2 group gear, this 3rd tier of grouping would require competent players because it would be designed to be compatible to 1 man group raids, (think nizara when it first came out in fallen dynasty) the gear that drops in this zone would be extremely good, with rare chances of dropping some gear that would even be useful raid gear in some situations (think bloodthirsty choker and shield of rainbow hues), mobs in this zone would have a higher chance of dropping masters and it would encourage even non-raiders to gear out and advance the players to this level of content.

25%: This 25% of the expansion will cater to the 10% of the population which demands it and will actually experience most of it, this will mean there will be about 8 raid zones, 2 mini zones like leviathan or cheldrak, 4 real raid zones with sizes like kor-sha or halls of seeing and 2 gigantic zones like deathtoll or veeshan's peak.

this level of content will be heavily tiered and require flagging/keying to gain entry as well as having to gear out your raid just to be able to survive the new content.

the level of content should keep guilds busy until a new wave of content is released like how shard of hate was released. there should be 2-3 'free' raid zones of various difficulty before the next expansion to keep raiders interested in the content.

whatever SoE does, they should definitely NOT make an all raid content expansion such as Planes of Power from Everquest 1 or an expansion catering only to game growth like Echos of Faydwer in Everquest 2. either way it will cause people to leave the game.

Faabio · 06-05-2009, 11:54 PM

Beandip · 06-06-2009, 12:03 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gilgame

35% New player content: including 2 new "cool" races and maybe even 2 new classes to help stimulate population growth through the lower levels, new leveling up content will include a couple of new zones which are like what darklight woods is like now, a smallish zone with enough content to allow you to get all the way from 20 to 35 and another zone to get from 35 to 50 and into the easier stuff like DoF and KoS, also include new triple up group content for people who just want to grind on mobs, give special bonus xp to people in dungeons such as rujark and sanctum of scaleborn.

Races? Sure whatever...

Classes? Ya okay.. let's actually try working on making all the current ones that exist worth a fuck.

More lowbie zones? With the xp pushes they give they are trying to force everyone to enjoy endgame, why waste time with throwing in more zones that will be desolate after a while. ESPECIALLY with there being quite alot of lower tier content to sift through anyway as it is.

Euron Greyjoy · 06-06-2009, 12:28 AM

1) Any new classes would destroy the game, if a class consolidation is not done first.

2) New races are pointless.

3) SOME new content in the lower end wouldn't be bad, I guess. Ideally, 2 huge superzones (think gfay/steamfont) for levels, say, 20-45, and 40-65 with quest chains to match.

4) Planes of Power was not all raid content. Most of the xpac, sans bosses, was groupable, and most of the early flag mobs were easily two grouped.

What EQ2 needs is more dev power. A few dozen more devs should work, and the game will come together.

Illuminator · 06-06-2009, 01:31 AM

lol@premise of OP. Let them eat cake. Don't fuck with our endgame gear tho. /eq2fail

Deson · 06-06-2009, 01:40 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Euron Greyjoy

4) Planes of Power was not all raid content. Most of the xpac, sans bosses, was groupable, and most of the early flag mobs were easily two grouped.

You talking PoP at launch? And more than one group content is considered a raid.

keldo · 06-06-2009, 02:25 AM

PoP was fine once people had flags, but it sucked at launch because of it. Everyone was mashed into terrible zones like disease. Zones like PoF were great group zones, but most people never saw them.

Arabani · 06-06-2009, 04:38 AM

Quote:

some of the content now can keep raiders busy for months or at least until the next expansion

just lol. In RoK all instanced content(but unkillable Trakanon) was dead 1-2 weeks after expansion launch, in Tso it takes a bit longer. It's boring like hell now doing same zones every 3 days for shity alt loot.
What i want in next expansion and game at all-big and difficult raid content, huge zones with 10-15+ nameds and 1-2 week reset timer. I want that u can't solo anyting in this game and need grouping for all, i want back accese quests and spirit shard system. I want more house fluffys and personal castle too:p

And to hold nonhc players in this game soe should make just one thing-x2 version of same raid zones, like it is in WoW now,even if i'm personaly don't like it and want pure hc game:p

Novusod · 06-06-2009, 08:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gilgame

The Everquest 2 team is running into the same problems the everquest 1 team and the wow team are running into, all of their new content is directed towards players who are already well established in the game,

Every MMO pretty much has that problem. Unfortunately there is not much that can be done about it now. No one really wants to start fresh on a MMO that has been out for 5 years. The fact is eq2 is in maintenance mode and will be for the rest of its life cycle. There is not going to be anymore EoF type expansions where the whole game is redone. If you want an expansion like that you going to have to wait for eq3 or play some other MMO. The best we can hope for now is RoK types with maybe slight improvements.

Half the expansion will be solo quests if there is a level increase. There is no way arround it because unless you ride the initial wave of players leveling up there won't be enough people arround leveling later to make a group to do the group content. That is why there is going to be solo quest grind and it is not going away. If we are lucky the quests will at least be more interesting than kill x of such and such mob.

The rest of the expansion will be group and raid content for players at the new level cap. I would like to see a dozen or so TSO quality group instances with merchants that sell the loot you want. As for raiding just make it one big giant zone. The RoK model of flagging was just dumb because many guilds just flew past the entry stuff and never really went back. So when they got to VP they were bored there was only one zone for end game raiders. The ping-pong model of TSO also sucked it is own way. It would be so much better design to just have the trash drop the entry level loot and have the named drop the better stuff all linear so each named is harder and drops better loot until the end of the expansions' progression.

feldon30 · 06-06-2009, 12:33 PM

Moar Tank n' Spank in 2010!