EverQuest II: Chaos Descending Expansion Announced

Thought about adding my life story to the thread. Decided just to drop some dinero on ya instead...

 

Great. Siggy liked a response of mine. I may just shrivel up from shame.

 

Check the calendar again, may be its April 1st and not approaching Halloween?

 

Didn't Primalz report her to a Community member for that lol?

 

Also in all honesty, it's no wonder the game is going down the drain. Reviewing half the **** on the Beta forums is ridiculous. 50% of the Class section is 'omg you're OP now you suck hahahaha', 25% is 'My class still sucks, what are you doing about it?, and the other 25% is people trying to work out WTF is actually meant to be balanced.

Nobody knows what they are testing. Any feedback on the Current situation is ignored (and has been for a long time), and we are all just playing a guessing game to see what stupid mechanic gets band-aid fixed next.

 

More data on the horror that is the healer nerf called 'Chaotic Leech'

IN LIBRARY
Umbral Barrier: 348,409,147
Ancestral Ward: 212,834,719
Oberon: 463,674,345

IN T1 HEROIC
Umbral Barrier: 144,794,017 (41% normal size)
Ancestral Ward: 55,574,322 (26% normal size)
Oberon: 73,373,182 (15% normal size)

You'll notice that the base value over Oberon is over 100m bigger than the base value of Umbral Barrier.. but the T1 nerfed version of oberon is about 1/2 the size of nerfed Umbral Barrier

So, basically, healers have NO bloody clue wtf ANY of our heals are going to do in any heroic or raid content...
Bad enough that the debuff is AT LEAST 60% in T1 zones (and, yes, it does get WORSE in harder content.. so as the mobs hit hard, healers get screwed even worse) but it's not even uniform.. some arts get nerfed even worse.
The icing on the cake is that devs won't even tell us what is actually going on with the debuff. They are INTENTIONALLY depriving healers of the information they need to do their jobs properly.

Why do they think it is a good idea to keep healers in the dark about information that id fundamental to their ability to heal?

 

Eq2 Beta Testing - The Short Story Version:

1. Pre-order and you will have something to do.

2. We want you to find bugs.

3. We do not want you to test design decisions, because we do not care about your feedback with respect that.

 

Fuli, you forgot the first imperative:

1. Pre-order and give us a cash injection.

 

I don't have a problem with people making money. I like money.

By now, folks should be able predict what they are getting quality-wise. If they want to buy it, well, go for it. To each their own.

At least the lieing seems to have been dialed back. For me these days, it's more about entertainment. In all my years, I have never seen a company so amazingly stupid about how it does business.

Note:
I can forgive the bubble gnomes for any analytical failings. What I won't look past is misinforming or mislesding people.

 

In heroic/raid zones, they might as well replace all heal/ward descriptions with either
Some kind of single target ward/heal/reactive or whatever
and
Some kind of group ward/heal/reactive or whatever

it wouldn't give use any LESS information than we currently have in those zones :S

 

Ascension class for heals incoming!

 

Nah.. that would require them to actually do something real with healing. They did give Geo's a 6 min recast ward though

 

I wonder if they just gave up on mathing and decided to use a cash shop RNG. "You may not get the rare heal/ward number you were looking for on the first try, but keep spamming and you might get lucky before Bob is laying in a pool of his own blood!"

 

Oh, it's consistent for each art... just the percentage each art is nerfed is doesn't follow any rhyme or reason that is evident to us as players.

Apparantly we, as healers, don't need to have any CLUE what our arts are going to do from zone to zone until we cast them. I'd also put good money on the values changing w/o warning or explanation at least once after the expac goes live....

PUGs weren't very healthy before, but what self-respecting healer is going to want to PUG now when they're is a decent change they're going to look like an incompetant idiot because they don't know what their arts do......
Never mind that we don't know what they do because the numbers on the tooltips have ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with the values we get out... because of the super secret debuff

 

I remember reading that article. I imagine you got buried in fan mail from the design team after posting it.

Your article does an excellent job of illustrating the fundamental beef I have with this company: welfare enhancement.

Much of the behavior I have observed from this company indicates they are fundamentally concerned with their own welfare, and customer welfare is way, way, way down the list of priorities.

For example, why as a company, are you claiming to sell people the experience of fun, and then reject (or in the case of the discord channel, punish) people for providing feedback about whether or not they are having said fun?

The simple answer is: they don't really care - if they did, they would welcome feedback about the overall enjoyment of the game by customers. What they seem to care about is selling stuff, not improving customer welfare. So we get all the short cuts, deceit, and manipulative gimmicks designed to make life better for DBG with very little concern for what customers are getting for their money.

I do believe Georgeson wanted to make a fun game. The issue with him was arrogance - the only feedback he cared about was his own, and he built a design culture that reflected this philosophy and which remains to this day. Unfortunately, it's being compounded by a new ownership that is more interested in manipulating money out of people than making a good game.

Those failings discussed in the "Black Box" article reveal a development attitude that doesn't particularly care about customer experience. In fact, I suspect that hidden mechanics work just fine for them, because adjustments can be made, and if customers don't know what they are, well, that works just fine for the staff.

Sure, if I'm buying a toaster, do I really care about tweaks made to spring technology? No. What I care about is its ability to make toast.

Gamers care about having fun, and that means understanding the mechanics of the game, having lots of different things to do, and being able to impose a sense of control on risky challenges. How can one do this when they (1) don't have much to do, and (2) can't figure out the mechanics puzzle?

I've stated on many occasions that since Georgeson's reign, EQ2 has been a developer focused culture. Nothing has changed in that regard. What has changed is a dramatic deterioration in quality since Epestien/CN/? bought it.

People are, in general, resistant to change. But sooner or later, in mental accounting terms, prices become losses, and when that happens, loss avoidance kicks in - and bye bye.

At some point people say to themselves, "This game is a waste of money, and I don't trust this company."

Edit: spelling, coherence, blah, blah, blah

 

Remember when you were worried about all heals being converted to %-based instead?

 

^^^ THIS ^^^

I can't count how many times I have heard the developers refer to EQ2 as "their game", not a game we are making for "the players." I am pretty sure that Kander said as much again in the live stream.

 

We should feel privileged they let us pay them so we can play it!

 

I'm so ungrateful that I refused to play for a long time even though they had my money. How dare I. So I stopped letting them have any of my money just to make an honest customer of myself.