EQ2 thoughts, level 1 to 10

[Lyion]

First, with a powerful computer, the game is flat out gorgeous. It really kills any MMO out right now with the settings on full. Even SWG.

The spell effects are really good, and combat is fun.

Second, the game runs fine on my second PC, a 1.5 Gig P4 512 RAM and an old 4200 Card, with settings turned down. It looks good, but the difference between a high end PC and these settings is obscene.

The voiceovers are very cool, but do not make a huge difference in gameplay. They do make the world much more immersive.

The game is fun, and like WOW borrowed heavily from AC, AO, DAOC, and SWG.

The quests are very good. Similar to WOW in duration and ease, and a HUGE improvement over EQ, and DAOC.

I hope WOW pushes their game back to Dec, so I can get a good Month and a half of EQ2 before buying WOW!

Oh, and mega thanks to Kalec

[Tacks]

This game is a snoozefest so far. Level 12 and I'm about to give up.

[Lyion]

How about give some reasons, chief.

I agree there are some things I'd change, but the game is good, fun to level, the quests are easily doable, and the graphics are unfuckinbelievable.

I'm remaking my level 10 Half Elf into a Ratonga. The graphics are too good, so the Half Elf Appears as homosexual as the boytoys so many girls on this Forum crave after.

[Naginataka]

Lol I feel the same way about WOW. It has nothing to offer that EQlive doesn't already have except better graphics, dull quests, and less content. Not to mention the super fast advancement. 6 days played easy for max level is a joke.

EQ2 is looking nice. hit lvl 15 llast night.

[Harrison]

I have a feeling Im going to play WoW and completely master it and mostly everything in it within 2 months.

And then just play casually while playing EQ2 hardcore as my main.

[Naginataka]

But its not SOE! It must be awesome!!!

[Solaar Powar]

What server are you guys on? I just got in and I'm D/L the client now


*edit* holy shit eta of d/l 8 hours and 30 minutes

[Lyion]

I'm Keio, Ratonga Mage on Beta 2.

Rondel, Half Elf Scout also on Beta 2.

[togusa]

Lyion, do you have AIM? I'd like to chat with you about EQ2 some, if you don't mind. PM me.

[Naginataka]

I am on beta 1, but I want to try out the betrayal quest on a toon anywya so lok for me as JAWAKATISHA, Troll scout on beta 2. WHo doesn't love a good troll bard?

[Arlos]

No one is going to hit max level in WOW starting from scratch in 6 days /played, unless they are SERIOUSLY twinked and power-leveled. CERTAINLY not easily. Not even close. Just look at the stress test people, the highest anyone got to was 40th or so, and that was people who were playing 24x7. Sorry, dislike WOW if you want to, but don't spout such absolute untruths like that.

One of the biggest complaints about quests in EQ2 is that there's no way to tell if someone actually has a quest or not, short of going around hailing every mob you see. That's just retarded.

Here's a list of some pretty major issues in EQ2 from someone on the monk boards who's been playing it a lot:

Alright, here's a list of the bugs/problems I think EQ2 currently has. Some of these are real mechanical issues; some are 'balance' issues; some are "it's not even designed yet"; some are just opinions.

- Poor server stability. (In fact, Beta1 appears to have been down all Saturday morning...)

- "Character stuck in world". This happens a LOT. Enough to have a thread on the message boards dedicated to let SoE know your character is stuck.

- Zoning instability. Even if both zones are up and running, there is something separate that controls zoning, and it goes down frequently. (I've sent tells to people in zones I couldn't zone to.)

- Character lists are not cached locally. So if a server goes down, it looks like your toons are all gone. You can guess what the message boards look like when a server goes down, and that's just in beta ...

- Chat windows lose settings frequently. I tried setting up multiple windows with filters, etc. Come back next day and I have 4 windows all spewing every channel at me. Rinse and repeat.

- Chat windows cannot be minimized. (In fact, I don't think any window can be minimized)

- There are icons in way too many places (e.g. market channel listings). This makes the windows take up too much UI territory.

- Client has lots of stability issues. On my wife's system, tabbing between EQ2 and Internet Explorer frequently locks the system.
(IMO, it's a symptom of SoE's tendency to poke around in the system in places they shouldn't. CoH, Horizons, WoW, etc ... none of them had this kind of issue for me.)

- Market prices are not persistent. Log out, and you get the joy of retyping all your item prices.

- The sales log does not work, at all. (In fact, I'm not sure you get any message at all when someone buys an item off you in merchant mode.) This is an entire subsystem that isn't even written!

- Market filtering is broken. Specifically, trying to filter out items you can't use also filters out a lot of items you CAN use.

- Lag is still bad in popular zones (although much better than a week ago).

- Jumping is gimpy. I can jump higher in RL, thanks.

- Shared exp debt is > 1/6th of solo debt.

- Hotkeys are broken. E.g. I set up Alt-A for assist; pressing Alt-A in combat does nothing.

- Hotkey setup is broken. I tried to set up Ctrl-A for assist. It won't, it thinks I tried to use A. (Apparently, I can't use Ctrl-anything for a hotkey.)

- Housing access is broken. When I enter some's house as "visitor" access, I get the "Collection" button that lets you pick up everything in the room. I was nice and didn't click it. Personally, I've be upset to find someone with "visitor" access had taken everything from my room.

- Monks are broken. All EQ2 "tank" classes are supposed to tank as well as each other. Monks are substantially worse.

- Shaman are broken. All healer types are supposed to be able to keep an exp group alive equally well. Shaman often have a hard time with that (because they use wards instead of real heals).

- PC vs NPC balance is broken. By this I mean they are still doing wide-scale tuning; encounters that are easy one day are often much harder the next. This occurs frequently enough that I regard it as broken. Occasional retunes are expected, but this is way beyond occasional.

- PC design is still being fleshed out. See the recent skill-tree changes.
(How the fuck can you release a game when the PC classes still haven't been fulled designed? /Boggle)

- Food/Drink are broken. Assigning "Eat when hungry" to a stack of food does not keep the food-regen icon on you until the food runs out.

- HOs are broken. Half the time when I click the flickering icon, it breaks the chain. Also, I often have 3 or 4 flickering icons ... usually most of them will not continue the chain. Finally, if an HO rotates to your character when you're in the middle of an action, it often makes you break the HO.

- Video performance is still poor.

- Most Quest NPCs do not have a "come back later" if you just need a higher level to get their quest. There is no way of knowing if an NPC really has no quests, or if you're just too low. (Other than going back and hailing every NPC at every level, which is so stupid I probably shouldn't even mention it.)

- Some Quest rewards need major rebalancing. There are many quests that, once you're high enough to complete them, the reward is obsolete.

- Some mob enounters are so badly designed noone will ever kill them. Example: the klikniks just north of NQ. They come in groups of 5 or 6 ^^ mobs. Only a group for which they'd be very grey would be able to kill them.

- CSR does not appear to be staffed. In the weeks I've been in beta, I've seen only one GM, and only about 15 GM broadcasts.

- Mob run speeds are broken. The same mob can run at hugely varying speeds depending on .. well, I'm not sure why it changes. But it does. Sometimes I outrun a group of mobs easily. Five minutes later, I come back through the same group of mobs, and have to burn an entire END bar on sprint to get away.

edit: put what I took from the Monk board in a quote, to make it clearer that it wasn't complaints I was making, but complaints from an actual current beta tester.

-Arlos

[Dylan]

They do realize they are in beta... right?

[Treehorn]

Yes, for 2 more whole weeks :P

[Lyion]

Whens the last time you played, Arlos?

They do fix bugs in beta, and if you havent played for over a month, the game might be vastly different.

[Arlos]

Yeah, and WOW is in beta as well, and the only issues on that list that apply to WOW are finishing up characters and character balance. Well, in WOW it's just 2 characters that need talents, and balancing is an ongoing thing.

There's also design decisions for EQ2 that I just think are asinine. Group XP debt if anyone in the group dies. ZERO differentiation to early gameplay, and only minor differentiation for the next several levels, and that only depending on if you go to FP or Qeynos. Needing to run around to every single NPC and hail them to see if you have a quest. Sure, that's how it was in EQ1, but that doesn't make it a GOOD system. Hell, the crafting system for EQ2 just sounds horrifically awful, and a major time sink. Anyone who knows me knows just how anti-crafting I was in EQ1, the only time I EVER did it is when I had no choice but to get smithing up, so that I could make Serubane weapons. EQ2 sounds just as bad, or worse, as compared to WOW, which actually is quite streamlined.

Also, compare CS between the games. I've gotten responses to petitions at all hours in WOW, and it's pretty rare if it's more than 15 minutes to get an answer. Usually it's about 5. No, I don't expect that speed of response on release, but it's better than what the poster I quoted had to say about CS in EQ2, when you compare beta CS to beta CS.

I also completely fail to see how you're going to balance a game with that many classes, and give each of them a unique role or group desireability. Hell, they couldn't balance EQ1 with half the number of classes. Hell, Monks have been fucked for HOW LONG now, and still haven't had any fixes made? And from posts from EQ1 monks who've been playing EQ2 a lot, monks in EQ2 are just as gimp. Despite the claims of "any tank class can tank equally well", it's just absolutely not even remotely true in practice.

-Arlos

[KILL]

Alright, here's a list of the bugs/problems I think EQ2 currently has. Some of these are real mechanical issues; some are 'balance' issues; some are "it's not even designed yet"; some are just opinions.

- Poor server stability. (In fact, Beta1 appears to have been down all Saturday morning...)

- "Character stuck in world". This happens a LOT. Enough to have a thread on the message boards dedicated to let SoE know your character is stuck.

- Zoning instability. Even if both zones are up and running, there is something separate that controls zoning, and it goes down frequently. (I've sent tells to people in zones I couldn't zone to.)

- Character lists are not cached locally. So if a server goes down, it looks like your toons are all gone. You can guess what the message boards look like when a server goes down, and that's just in beta ...

- Chat windows lose settings frequently. I tried setting up multiple windows with filters, etc. Come back next day and I have 4 windows all spewing every channel at me. Rinse and repeat.

- Chat windows cannot be minimized. (In fact, I don't think any window can be minimized)

- There are icons in way too many places (e.g. market channel listings). This makes the windows take up too much UI territory.

- Client has lots of stability issues. On my wife's system, tabbing between EQ2 and Internet Explorer frequently locks the system.
(IMO, it's a symptom of SoE's tendency to poke around in the system in places they shouldn't. CoH, Horizons, WoW, etc ... none of them had this kind of issue for me.)

- Market prices are not persistent. Log out, and you get the joy of retyping all your item prices.

- The sales log does not work, at all. (In fact, I'm not sure you get any message at all when someone buys an item off you in merchant mode.) This is an entire subsystem that isn't even written!

- Market filtering is broken. Specifically, trying to filter out items you can't use also filters out a lot of items you CAN use.

- Lag is still bad in popular zones (although much better than a week ago).

- Jumping is gimpy. I can jump higher in RL, thanks.

- Shared exp debt is > 1/6th of solo debt.

- Hotkeys are broken. E.g. I set up Alt-A for assist; pressing Alt-A in combat does nothing.

- Hotkey setup is broken. I tried to set up Ctrl-A for assist. It won't, it thinks I tried to use A. (Apparently, I can't use Ctrl-anything for a hotkey.)

- Housing access is broken. When I enter some's house as "visitor" access, I get the "Collection" button that lets you pick up everything in the room. I was nice and didn't click it. Personally, I've be upset to find someone with "visitor" access had taken everything from my room.

- Monks are broken. All EQ2 "tank" classes are supposed to tank as well as each other. Monks are substantially worse.

- Shaman are broken. All healer types are supposed to be able to keep an exp group alive equally well. Shaman often have a hard time with that (because they use wards instead of real heals).

- PC vs NPC balance is broken. By this I mean they are still doing wide-scale tuning; encounters that are easy one day are often much harder the next. This occurs frequently enough that I regard it as broken. Occasional retunes are expected, but this is way beyond occasional.

- PC design is still being fleshed out. See the recent skill-tree changes.
(How the fuck can you release a game when the PC classes still haven't been fulled designed? /Boggle)

- Food/Drink are broken. Assigning "Eat when hungry" to a stack of food does not keep the food-regen icon on you until the food runs out.

- HOs are broken. Half the time when I click the flickering icon, it breaks the chain. Also, I often have 3 or 4 flickering icons ... usually most of them will not continue the chain. Finally, if an HO rotates to your character when you're in the middle of an action, it often makes you break the HO.

- Video performance is still poor.

- Most Quest NPCs do not have a "come back later" if you just need a higher level to get their quest. There is no way of knowing if an NPC really has no quests, or if you're just too low. (Other than going back and hailing every NPC at every level, which is so stupid I probably shouldn't even mention it.)

- Some Quest rewards need major rebalancing. There are many quests that, once you're high enough to complete them, the reward is obsolete.

- Some mob enounters are so badly designed noone will ever kill them. Example: the klikniks just north of NQ. They come in groups of 5 or 6 ^^ mobs. Only a group for which they'd be very grey would be able to kill them.

- CSR does not appear to be staffed. In the weeks I've been in beta, I've seen only one GM, and only about 15 GM broadcasts.

- Mob run speeds are broken. The same mob can run at hugely varying speeds depending on .. well, I'm not sure why it changes. But it does. Sometimes I outrun a group of mobs easily. Five minutes later, I come back through the same group of mobs, and have to burn an entire END bar on sprint to get away.

It's ok because MMO's are never finished. Just ask Finawin.

[Arlos]

That wasn't my post, Lyion. That was a post I was quoting from the MB board, and it was from someone who plays right now, and was up-to-date complaints.

As I said before, despite a good friend of mine being a coder for EQ2, and getting specifically asked by the lead designer to join the first wave of beta testers, and work directly with him on the game (there are SOME perks to being one of the best-known players of my class serverwide), I had no interest in it, I was simply that turned off by the corporate policies of the SOE management.

While my friend is a great guy, and the lead designer was cool and most earnest, there are many decisions about the game that they have no control over. I would be willing to bet large sums that if either was able to speak candidly, and I asked them pointblank if the game was ready to ship on the 8th, they'd say no. That's the "get it out to meet an artificial deadline at any costs" mentality that we saw from SOE that gave us steaming shitpiles such as the Luclin release, GoD, and the SWG release, and not something either would have any control over. Similarly, they also have no control over the CS department, and I don't think I need to tell anyone here how bad SOE's CS is. True, not as bad as Horizons, but they're going for it!

-Arlos

[Harrison]

Ive never met with this "horrible CS" you people speak of...

All of my petitions were answered within the hour and dealt with promptly.

As far as the way you have to search for quests, I dont like being spoon fed my content. Having a marker above NPC's heads is a pretty lame concept. It makes life "easier" as far as questing goes, but I dont like it being that easy at all.


And PS

Kill, take your idiotic drivel elsewhere. You didnt need to quote the whole fucking thing to say your one line of bullshit.

[Arlos]

Fin, there's plenty of hidden quest givers in WOW as well. They still have the ! over their head, but the trick is finding them. I've found odd quest givers in some of the most random places, where 95% of people'd miss them.

Well, OK, not all of them have the ! over their head all the time. Example: one of the best quests I did back when I was playing my paladin, the only way to get the quest was to be in the right place at the right time, either by luck or by following this one guard. He goes to one spot, then gets attacked by assassins. Save him by killing the assassins and boom, he turns into a questgiver. No other indication that the guy gives a quest, and it's a dynamic event to get the quest. Does EQ2 have anything like that?

And trust me, I've waited hours for a response in EQ, and I know people who've had serious issues that've waited WEEKS.

-Arlos

[Lyion]

That wasn't my post, Lyion. That was a post I was quoting from the MB board, and it was from someone who plays right now, and was up-to-date complaints.

Ahh, gotcha man. I have played a good eight hours, and I have some issues, but none of the ones you mentioned are among them.

I get the feeling a lot of the EQ2 hype is either hatred for Sony, which is silly, or WOW hype due to people hearing others hype WOW and slam EQ2.

Ironically, I never had any Sony CS issues, although I quit long ago. However, my three years, 2 1/2 at the endgame running one of the top three guilds on the server left me without a lot of issues. I just grew bored of EQ.

Different folks, I guess. I thought SWG was good, if lacking in content.

[Harrison]

And I agree with lyion, Id say most EQ2 slamming is done with a blizzard cock in their mouth and not giving it an unbiased review.

[Lyion]

Let me add one thing I missed, I do think EQ2 should consider something for Quest holders.

I really don't like the ! over someones head, as it really looks silly, but it is very effective.

[KILL]

keep it clean Lyion...

[Lyion]

I see nothing, nothing at all.

Arlos, its too bad you didn't play EQ2. Your insights on WOW have been very good, and I'd like a good comparison.

[Arlos]

Lyion, when you left CS was actually still OK. It went to shit several months after they got rid of the server GM concept. By POP, it was really awful. You could go days without seeing a GM, ever. As I said, I've known people who had serious issues that went unresponded to for weeks, and that despite repeatedly petitioning in game, sending emails, etc.

As for my Sony hate, I don't think it's silly. You missed a lot of the worst of it, but having lived through what they did from Luclin on, believe me when I say they've earned it.

Luclin example: The expansion was SO buggy on release, that they literally were patching every few hours. Even when they weren't patching, it was functionally completely unplayable. Nothing worked. The new models were absolutely awful, and were not even remotely optimized. It was NOT ready to be released, it absolutely needed at least another month of work before it was ready, and since they had to do it while it was live, it took 2 months. I knew beta testers who reported many of the problems during the beta test, only to see every single one of the issues, many of them complete showstoppers, be unfixed when the expansion went live. Encounters were horribly tuned. One mob, for example, had not 1, but TWO seperate Death Touches, one on a very fast timer.

Then, I saw what they did as the expansion went on. (and this is all the corporate bosses at SOE, not the devs). The final raid zone, the VP equivalent, was called Vex Thal, and required a key quest to get in. People found the questgiver, but no one could find the items he requested. SOE swore up and down and backwards that the quest was in and working, that the zone was done and finished, and they weren't artificially blocking anything. Much time went by, and pressure on SOE built, as no one found even a hint of the quest objects.

Meanwhile, the true situation was that the quest was NOT in the game, nor had ANYTHING been done on the zone, apart from the basic 3d modeling of the zone layout. Finally, when pressure built up enough, SOE gave the project to ONE dev, just one guy, and only gave him 1 week to complete it. This was several months into the expansion. I know this for an absolute fact, because I met the dev in question who did the zone and talked to him about it.

They repeated much of the same thing in POP, where Time wasn't done, they swore up and down it was, yet changed a encounter necessary to get there (The Rathe Council) such that it was unwinnable, to prevent people from going.

Their most recent expansion, Omens of War, which was recently released was actually supposed to be released 1-2 months before it was. The *ONLY* reason it was pushed back is because for the first time ever, the EQ community spoke with one voice, and said NO GODDAMN WAY. Their sales numbers for it were absolutely miniscule, and multiple famous EQ websites were advocating a boycott against the expansion. This forced them into massive spin control, to the point where they even flew a bunch of people out to SOE HQ, including reps from the major guilds, for 2 days of feelgood happy happy sunshine. They promised a bunch of things at that meeting, most of which they've completely failed to follow through on.

As for SWG, did you play it right at release? From all accounts I've ever read, even Star Wars fanbois, it was an absolute mess when it was first released. Planetside had some pretty major issues as well, some of which I am hearing they are only now getting around to getting fixed.

Now, no one I've spoken to, or seen posts from ANYWHERE on EQ2, even people who really like the game, think that it would be ready by even the original date of mid-late November, much less the new date of Nov 8th.

So, when a company has a track record of pushing stuff out of the door, regardless of how complete or ready it is, resulting in major issues with the games, that lies outright about the state of completion of other items, and who's gutted its CS department from the early days, how can you say disliking the company for its policies is silly? Note that this doesn't mean I hate all of Sony, just SOE, which is a special semi-autonimous entity that is a bizarre offshoot of the Sony Films division. (PS2 games are not even close to the same division, actually)

-Arlos