What would it take for you to feel confident/optimistic about the future of EQ2 again?

It's no secret that things are rough in Norrath. The team has gotten smaller, content has (by necessity) slimmed down over the years, and the playerbase/dev relationship is well, a bit rocky.

What could be done to rebuild that trust? What would have to happen for you to be able to say "Yeah, things were bad, but they are really turning around and I think it's getting better"? What could Daybreak do to help strengthen the community and thus the game?

 

Open, honest and respectful communication.

Telling us what has changed, at least, even if they won't tell us why.
Telling us when something is a bug or an intended change.
Etc

 

It would be nice if bug fixes were really fixes, and not just a new bug which then needs fixing.

And I wish they would listen more when folks who enjoy a certain play-style speak up. I have a raid toon now, but there are other play-styles I also enjoy in EQ2. (I do understand that they may not be able to do everything the way it's been done before, but I wish they'd try harder sometimes!)

 

First and foremost: Communication and honesty.

Part of that needs to be admitting that the game needs a major overhaul and that it might mean putting other stuff on hold for a while.

A demonstrated dedication to putting quality first.

Unfortunately, those aren't things that the EQ2 Team, or even DBG really gets to decide - CN does, so it's got about a snowball's chance in hell.

It's nice to think about, though.

 

Sell the entire property to a company, or even small group of actual developers, not half-blind, drunk, code copiers, that actually cares.
EQ2 is dead. Strangely, even moreso it seems than EQ1.
This trend of absolutely not giving a damn shows.
The trend of relying on repeatable (and mandatory) quests because of either drunkenness or absolute lack of creativity shows.
Having a "Team" that has never even logged into the game shows.
Not having the discipline to make sure that "Team" members understand their co-workers work shows. (Domino leaving should not have just left TS in the mud, never to be looked at for example).
Having a parent shell company, that is yet another shell of a company that knows zero about online anything Shows.
Not being able to straighten out the login problems after a YEAR shows.

I think the best thing, would be for the entire code base to be tossed out into the public domain, and the "Official" servers shut down once and for all, and all associated with the game, from the brain-dead "Producer" to the janitors on site are immediately fired. At least the janitors could probably get a job somewhere else after all the hard work they have been doing sweeping up all of the content that the "Devs" were too lazy to implement.

Harsh? Yep.
True? Yep.

 

Not pulling punches.

Fire Holly with prejudice. She's cancerous, period. If MoonCast can't be bothered to make a post at least once a month, fire her too. Same for Roxxlyy. She's doing what RadarX did before - letting trolls like Wreakinn on the forums run wild because he's trolling on the side of Daybreak, letting threads devolve so she can lock/ignore them so nothing gets accomplished.

Scale back and remove any P2W micro-transaction. Include creative players to make content and quests that developers can refine and publish Live, like what Landmark was supposed to do. Delay content release if it's incomplete.

I've watched over half a dozen games turn into scams this year and they had better updates and communication to their feeble playerbase. It's ridiculous. What's Daybreak got to lose by letting players "in"? My only guess is because the current plan is dead-set on squeezing the franchise until it dies, so including the players is a waste of time.

Also anyone who bought into their Landmark scam should be given 3 months free subscription towards a new TLP server. No marketplace purchases allowed except cosmetic only. Dedicated GMs to weed out botters and rule-breakers, like they should have had in the first place.

TL;DR Players should be tightening their grip on their own game and not the other way around.

 

yup I just got banned off the forums. Pretty much given up hope there, BulletCatcher66 is a special person.

 

I would like it if they stopped pushing new content and instead focused on fixing all the systems we currenctly got all stacked up on each other. I would LOVE it if they made all zones scale like wow is trying with their next patch 3.7.5 and make the whole world relevant again. Diety points could have been useful here, but now thats also RNG....

I would love it if spell tooltips, procs and pretty much everything displayed were our actual damage and you didnt need a mSC in Advanced Combat Tracker to figure out your optimal class rotation.

I would like to see them sort out stats and especially healing, its just boring to cast any heal and see people go from 1% to 100%. Remove auto attack stats and make weapon damage rating and weapon attack speed the only relevant stats for auto attack damage and just keep potency and add +heal +damage back into to the game like we had in SF.

I would love to see new blood on the team and not just people who follow Kander and Caith in everything, but people who start challenging their, most of the time, stupid gameplay decisions.

Less overall grind and artificial timesinks. Remove Death touch.

GET A GODDAMN CROSS SERVER LFG TOOL OR AT THE VERY LEAST SERVER MERGES!

And many, many more things.....

 

...and?

 

I don't have any optimism left when it comes to EQ2 and like all of you, I think they would have to move mountains with regard to fixes and changes to win back my trust. The biggest problem for me has been their horrible attitude toward their loyal player base. That isn't going to change.

I think any one still playing should put the minimal amount of $$$ toward the game and hold their breath, because in my opinion, a sunset is right around the corner. As others have said in the past, when communication becomes all but nonexistent and hostile in nature when it occurs, you know the end is near.

Sorry to be so negative, but I don't think they have given us a reason not to be. The game is a total unmitigated disaster.

 

I dont even think it would be a good idea to sell EQ2.. I'm no programmer but I've heard horror stories about the games coding and if the people current working on it gets lost, one can only imagine what it would be like if a brand new team got their hands on it.

 

You guys have summed it up really well:

1. Respectful and earnest communication.
2. Honesty and candor.
3. Kandor and Caith SHOULD quit. Their game designs are terrible.
4. Stop slapping lazy and rushed bandaids on broken mechanics that should have been fixed years ago. Roll up the sleeves, get to work, and fix them.
5. Eliminate tithe and ascension.
6. Eliminate p2w.
7. Stop hiding behind hidden mechanics, which includes vague, nebulous, and misleading tooltips
8. The eq2 franchise has earned a reputation of shady business practices that relies heavily on deception and manipulation to generate sales. Rather than selling a quality product, they prefer to dupe people into buying something that they know is not good.

The behavior of Kandor, Caith, Mooncast, Roxxly - well, that ultimately comes back to Holly. The marketing tactics being employed, and the reputation for dishonesty and terrible quality that has been earned....Holly.

 

Nothing. Sorry. Game was great for a long while but I am done. Frankly, done with all CN properties, even some of my other favorites they have vacuumed up recently.

 

The biggest thing for me would be communication - honesty, openness, respect, and dialing back on snark and visible anger/attitude.

I can't imagine it's been easy behind the scenes for the Daybreak team. There have been a lot of changes since the SOE days and it's got to be tough. They are good people...I've met many of them in person, I know they are passionate and invested in Norrath and the game. I get that they are tired and caught in a bad spot.

But the antagonism is only creating a vicious cycle. Players are getting tired of being treated like the enemy, devs are tired of being grumbled at, and the back and forth continues. The difference is that they are the professionals...as much as it might suck, it's up to them to take the higher road.

The devs do respond in Discord, but there is no one responsible for consolidating VITAL GAME INFO and making it easy to find. Players are left to wonder if something is a bug, is intended, is going to be fixed, or is just the way it is now. This creates more chaos, more confusion, and the cycle continues.

The only way for this to improve is for the Daybreak teams to get serious about repairing the relationship with their playerbase. Stop snarking (even when they think it's a joke). Start communicating (PoP beta was an example of productive dev/player interaction). Start a "KNOWN ISSUES" subforum on the OFFICIAL game forums and keep it updated. If necessary, pull back from Discord for a while; have one person responsible for monitoring it for major bugs and mechanics issues, but don't get sucked in to the whirlpool.

Treat the playerbase like partners, not combatants.

 

1) kick/throw kander out of the windows, with the desk and chair

2) kick caith out of the door

3) Not sure what the eq2 producer need to do.. But, don't seems a good work to me. No dev "upgrade" or replacement, pretty much no marketing, very bad interaction with site fanclub, several problem with the internal daybreak network never fixed.. Very bad pay to win implementation.. If your team need more money, they need to earn it, on the long way, doing a decent job and give to the player what they wanna to play.

4) For the love of god, change the community manager.. jesus.. with of course new rule.

5) Close the eq2 discord chat.. is not for them.

6) Now.. If your team is little.. you can't pretend to do the same thing of a large team. Keep the damn "quest/mechanism/craft/ecc ecc" simple, with few but clear variable. Add layer on layer on layer.. is not very smart. Instead to put an other mechanism on top, try to fix or update the old one.. I like Uxtalzon idea to open the door at the creative player for make some quest/timeline.. I hope should be pretty ease make a tools available for us, even if not for the outside, close zone with quest/timeline should work fine (like.. uhm, dungeon marker?)

7) If you don't wanna the player know about a quest, item, ecc, its ok.. we can't pretend to test/see everything on the beta/test server, but at least test a little bit inside the team, in a clone-server with the same structure.. (because test in an other ambient is not very smart..).

8) On charge they should put someone able to understood the game.. Be able to communicate at least with the team.. Because communicate with the player is the community manger job..

9) respect the player and community. No patch note in beta with crap excuses is like throw rock on their feet.. Player prefer to have a book to read with patch note.. They should "listen" the player, but not blind follow the suggestion..

10) Eq2 is pretty much a entertainment product, the team should start to understand this little detail. Is like chef or waiter refuse to work the evening and weekend because they like drink beer in underpants on the sofà.. is not a bad thing, but you can't pretend to work in a restaurant. Like the epic 2.0 last year disaster..

 

Worth mentioning that I still love what ttobey and the art folks do.

I also think Kaitheel does a really good job with the stories and events.

I do think the team has some really talented people, however.....Windstalker.....Kander.....Caith.....Mooncast......Roxxly......they are killing the quality of the game and the trust people have in the company.

 

In my case, I think it would have to be psychotropic drugs, in combination with a lobotomy.

 

How would that be a bad thing? Excepting of course the useless bunch they leave behind... If they would ALL quit, things would be better.

I'm dead serious here. These last two "Expansions" (I'll give a small pass on ToT, as that at least was larger, had story lines, and was interesting) are not expansions. They are barely quest packs on other games. The only thing that even made KA palatable, strangely, and something that everyone hated, was the fact that if you wanted epic 2.0, you HAD to go back and do old content that you probably skipped. Even that content was intriguing, well, excepting for the idiotic, no-thought faction grinds (to this day, I want to kill every single othmir I come across). And that content made it seem like there was more to the KA expansion then one zone and a bunch of instances.

With this abortion of PoP, they gave up even pretending they gave a damn, ONE real zone. One "Portal Palace", and then instances. Most actual players were done with it the first week it came out. Itemization is also garbage. Then, there are the things that they took away. Tradeskills, Harvesters for TS. Pre-reqs (sorry, but pre-reqs are important for a storyline). Hell, they should just automagically make every toon that logs in 100 with 350 AA's.

Removing Tithe is more than insulting. During KA, Tithe tokens were constant sellers in the store, and sold for plat as "Gifts" for a good deal of money, because tithe was important. They took all of that work involved, and for some, cash, and threw it away. Unless of course, you were one of the ones that actually ground out 100 STA, POT, and CB. In that case, you can't be touched now. Also, removing the purple slot, and invalidating the purple sets we all worked towards was insanity.
Sure, maybe two or three expansions down the road, but not: "KA, these are great, you need them, work to get them" and the "PoP Oh, Forget everything from KA, We are making it all invalid". I'm surprised the Epic 2.0 wasn't reduced to the stats of a tin dagger in PoP zones. They probably forgot to do that. (My stance on the Purple Rune Sets, is that they should be usable in orange slots, to at least allow a progression, or they should have been converted or traded to an NPC for the orange equivalent at the very least).

With ToT, potency became important. With KA, Resolve + Potency was king. Now, the mobs actually have Resolve checks + Potency mitigation? Really?

What system is going to be removed next?

For me, I liked ToT, and indeed, all expansions before, as there was a natural progression for even small guilds / groups of friends... Go through interesting story lines, work to gear up to the point you could do lower group things, then higher tier group things, even if not raiders.

In KA, my guild of friends, like 7 PAYING players, just could not manage anything more then one or two heroic instances because we could not put out the required DPS. We really tried. We did. For a long time. My entire guild quit. They are not coming back to PoP.

Sorry folks, this game is in the ****-can, and there is no way to recover.

Even if they fired everyone, and put in a team that cared, there is no interest. Seriously. Just google the community. There are the official forums, and, well, this.
There are no other active communities. Period. Even reddit is dead. There is still more interest in EQ1.
CN/DBG killed this off, and they are excellent at that.


P.S. Shmogre,
Are you sorry you asked?
I have lots more, but my fingers are tired.