EQ2Wire Interview with Kander

Hey guys,


I'll be doing an interview with Kander on behalf of EQ2Wire in a few weeks.


Feel free to post some questions you want some answers to!


Disclaimers:
Troll questions will not be considered
Popular questions (judged by other user feedback on your post) are more likely to be picked than others!

 

The Server AMAs will likely cover most of the game-related stuff I'm curious about, so I'd be interested in hearing about the dev teams and behind-the-scenes things.

Questions like how things have changed since the SOE/Daybreak transition, how they view the future of the game, who is responsible for what now that the teams are smaller, what they'd like to see changing and evolving with dev/community interaction going forward, what their personal wishlists are for the team and for the game, and so on.

I know he won't be able to answer in too much detail, but it would be interesting to see what he *can* say.

 

I'd love to know how he and the devs feel about the "Pay To Win" situation and if they can express some overall guidelines on how they plan to implement it in the future. For example, one of the questions answered yesterday was that the normal spells in the next expansion were going to require the same progression as the ascension where you have to scribe every tier to gain power instead of skipping tiers like they do now. Do they consider that "Pay To Win"? Were they told they had to come up with these kinds of ideas? What are the limits? Are they going to start selling "Pay To Win" armor and equipment sets someday? Things like that.

 

I'd like to know why the SK didn't gain much in terms of surviving/aggro control with the epic2. No Max health/mit/block on the weapon, 1 spell if for making me use the offensive stance, the other is a pet that does damage. Which is nice and I'm sure that damage helps me hold aggro, but it doesn't seem to generate actual threat. My aggro spells even though I have almost a full hotbar on them, they seem fewer because the recast time is so long on them. So my question is, what was the logic behind adding these spells and stats?

 

Because the ShadowKnight does not need mitigation or block or health on our epics. We want damage, casting speed and more damage. I tank just fine. I survive just fine. I love the offensive stance spell. My pet pwns all. My agro is all about my damage. I generate so much threat that the other tanks hate me. My agro spells <3 to destroy everything. The recasts are perfect.

Do you even play a ShadowKnight Miyanaga?

 

I have a question. Back in EQ1, GM's would travel the servers as a class that they chose when they created the GM character. They looked amazing and when they showed up, everyone usually stopped what they were doing and had a real interaction with a GM who was there to see/resolve whatever the issue was that brought them there in the first place. Their GM powers were tied into armor/weapons/jewelry that they had equipped and all of which were amazingly Overpowered (something befitting of a GM).

This type of real interaction with someone that actually had powers, that you could literally inspect, was very entertaining and holds nostalgic memories for me, even today. What is the reason that they don't interact with the players in the game, in the same manner when it comes to in-game support/questions/bugs/and stuff?

 

Echoing Shmogre and Caam's sentiments.

I'd like to know where the line of micro-transactions ends concerning player progression. I don't care if another player spends $500 to become a godlike jester who fires sparklers out his butt, I just don't want that being a requirement or completely trivializes content I'd otherwise be inching through. I'd also like to think I can reach that same pinnacle of power (minus the butt sparklers I guess) through hard effort and I'd be just as happy, but with KA it seems to also add a factor of time and limits to accomplish that.

One answer I'd like to see is what can be done for new players transitioning into the new expansion who have never touched KA (i.e. me). Will I always be behind because of playing catch-up to super-inflated stats? Because I didn't buy ascension stuff doohickies, is that forever going to burden me with never being as powerful as the other guy who plopped over some dough?

 

I would like to know three things that they are going to do that will convince another gamer to play this game.

 

If some people are Ascension 10 in all 4 classes? (I don't know)

Can we do away with scrolls and just let people level them? I mean the scrolls have already 'bought' the dev time to finish the expac, the artificial gating is pointless at that time.

If no one is 10 in all 4, will they be removed after that happens.

It's terrible for 'new people' starting not just people without much play time.

 

there are players that are 10 in all four.

 

Yup, folks have been finishing their Ascension (I'm one of them). Any time you see a server message saying that SoAndSo has taken possession of the mythical Tome of the Ascended, that's someone getting the charm for finishing their fourth Ascension class. The devs have said that they are going to be implementing things to make Ascension level faster going forward, which is good news.

 

I want to know if they plan to lower the research time for spells 101-110....if they are put on the same timer as ascension we will be looking at years to research them all . I'm already seeing that it is impossible to research my ascensions before the next xpac launches and that is beyond frustrating.....we should be able to research within the current content xpac timeframe not a year after another xpac releases. I don't have hundred's and hundred's of dollars to drop on spell upgrades and then x's that by 2 because we are a 2 gamer household.

 

And you won't be able to skip right to master, you may have to do journeyman then adept then etc

 

Please can you asking about this:

Economy

Kander said on a streaming from EQ2 July of 2014 QA

link of the video here

Around min 09:13

He said they could add a new currency called "Mithril", that was in 2014 and we are still waiting.

I believe this could help us a bit for our current economy and inflation. It would help to reduce the tons of millions of plat that we hold.

Also if they can fix the UI on the broker or allow to sell millions of plat instead using a trick to inflate the million plats so we can sell above 999,999 and go beyond 6 figures on the broker?
Like selling Kronos for more than 10 millions or 100 millions if that possible or fix our economy and inflation.

 

I've seen a few people mention a new currency, but I'm curious why you think it'll help? The same amount of plat will still exist, and the rate of inflation is unlikely to change. So besides giving it a shiny new icon and an irrelevant numerically lower value, what difference is it going to make?

 

The reason people want new currency is because pricing over 1 mil on broker and putting high amounts of plat in trade window can be annoying, not to affect currency value/inflation.

 

I agree with both Malleria and Fenin: a new currency wouldn't change the economy, but it would make handling the large amounts a bit easier.

If I had my choice, I'd update the existing UI sooner to handle the millions more gracefully, then work on a longer-term plan to introduce a new currency (and all of the logic and UI changes that go with it).

(And it's entirely possible that our devs are way ahead of us on this one and have been working out various scenarios.)


Back on topic: Asking Kander about the economy and plans for it would be good.

 

Before hoping for a new currency, look at EQ1's horribly failed every-step-of-the-way Noble. It was bought for 100,000 platinum, couldn't be used on the auction/broker, and sold at most back to merchants for 90,000 platinum (10% tax upon purchase, basically). Nobody used them because it was a dumb idea only meant to try and remove coin from the game.

Instead of rectifying the obvious, they introduced an NPC merchant that sold long-removed items from the game (99% of which were useless or had no impact on current content) that specifically traded them for Noble. Imagine a dumb little single-charge bind affinity locket for 85 Nobles = 9 MILLION PLATINUM = 9 Krono (approx. value at the time). This is the list of items. Who'd spend 30 million platinum on a faction item? The best part, you can sell the items right back to her, for just 1 Noble no matter what it was priced before.

Result was a complete waste of time and the quick abandonment of the whole Noble feature. But sure, they left it in the game. People were asking for a new higher currency due to the platinum limit and that's what we got. Caveat emptor.