2020 Ethereals

You guys are silly.

I took a look at the Brig rune, and casting Befuddle increases ADC by 15.

Time to find the flash drive I keep the game on. No way imma miss out on that ****.

 

After playing the game long enough you develop a kind of intuitive understanding of how DBG/DPG manages to push out an expansion every year and stretch it out as long as possible. To me it is laughable that Kander says with a straight face that the runes that were published to Test were placeholders. Then he doubles down and says they haven't even decided on whether the runes will go live. AFTER they've been published to Test and were scheduled to go LIVE in like 10 days.

Look man. The rollout schedule of the expansion is set before the expansion is even released. On x date the expansion goes live. On y date they add in 'new' content, usually just in the form of a copy/pasted old zone with mob stats adjusted. On z date the ethereals go live. It's all meant to give the illusion of new content. This has been the plan since last year - disable the orange runes and make the players earn them back as red runes. So please don't insult the intelligence of the community by saying that they're being tweaked and all that. For God's sake even AFTER getting called out this week all they did was remove the class effects! Like how stupid do you think we are that you would snip out some code in like 20 minutes, re-upload, and then say that this was the plan all along.

There is no one on the team who works on the current expansion once it goes live. I am absolutely convinced of that. Once an expansion rolls out, everyone on the team immediately starts work on the next one. This is why you see such surface-level tweaks in he patch notes. It's why they rolled back patches to twice a month (that's a total of 24 vs. 52 under the old schedule). And it's also why no one should still be holding out hope for a stat squish, AA re-balance, or class balancing.

 

The insulting the player bases' intelligence is what irks me the most but they will always have some people defending them and there's a certain type of personality that will brook no criticism, regardless of who it comes from, and will instead hold onto the slimmest of positive reinforcements even if it comes from someone who has no skin in the game.

 

More like his ego just took a hammer to the face and, being yet another narcissist, he's invoking the gamut of defense mechanisms (projection, rationalization, etc) to protect the remains.

That guy has major problems in the head. Then again that seems to be a requirement for employment a Daybreak.

 

More likely he's A) a massive ass kisser to the higher ups and B) no one with a shred of competence wants to try to fix a broken bunch of idiots when upper management won't let you fire them and hire new people.

 

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Ugh, dat alliteration tho. That's a good, "ugh," just in case you were wondering.

 

No, Kander has ALWAYS been exactly this way. It's nothing new, and not just giving up. He has always been absolute garbage, and the worst thing to every happen to community relations, never mind the game.

 

The whole game is in a flux, so he is not lying...

Servers going up and down randomly, lag comes and goes, client crashes.. etc

Just saying...

 

This is one of my biggest gripes with most large, US-based game development companies. While I understand that there are many people out there with terrible, terrible ideas and woefully stupid commentary, getting the "game peasant" treatment while being told what I do and do not like is extremely irksome -- especially when there's a large portion of the community telling you that your content isn't fun, regardless of the metrics. I brush my teeth and wipe my ass several times a day, but I don't list the motions amongst my hobbies.

 

Kinda hard to know what your customers want, when you have someone arbitrarily wielding the ban-hammer button whenever someone says something that offends them.

Like.... "potato." OMFG, how DARE you bad-mouth our french fry efforts!!! BAN BAN BAN!

 

They cant even seem to get a grip on who owns the company, CN bought us.... no they never did it was this other guy that works at CN, so how could they keep track what all their customers want....

/Me being sarcastic again

 

When it comes to video games, one of the biggest questions that I see come up all the time is; "Do they even play their own game?" While "fun" will always remain subjective, I can't help but wonder the same thing whenever I pick up a game and notice some sort of awful design flaw that should've been obvious to anyone -- and no, these aren't unique to EQ2, albeit Kander 'n' Crew have perfected the art.

Take WoW's current expansion, as an example. I have no idea what state it's in now, but when it first came out, the pinnacle of my armor-crafting recipes was an item (I think it was belts or boots) that not only couldn't be sold to other players, but I also had to run something like 8 mythic dungeons just to get the components. If I'm running mythic dungeons, what are the odds that I'm not going to get better/equivalent boots by the time I've gone through it 8 freakin' times?

Another situation would be for "a popular shooter" (I won't list the title for privacy's sake) game, where I actually had a chance to chat with the developers in voice and was even given alpha keys for both its and its sequel. When it comes to many shooters, a large problem is that one gun option almost always dominates all others due to poor balancing. Their thought process is that they wanted the starting guns to be "easy to use" and "friendly" to new players, but that often results in them being used as a crutch and chosen overwhelmingly -- particularly by players looking to have good stats. Sure, I could pick the later unlock that has higher power and kills better in close quarters, or I could just stick with the first "friendly" one that has zero recoil and works like a laser at all ranges.

Metrics and feedback aside, some of these issues just require common sense and a few hours of in-game time to see.

 

It shouldn't take a high paid, top quality team to 'learn' that lying to your customers is detrimental to the long term health of your company/product.

 

If they just ran a LARP group or some table top P&P games they'd know better than to so blatantly lie to and abuse their players.

The GMs that do that sort of thing very quickly don't have any more players.

 

You mean, like a quality control department?

Oh wait, they all got let go.

 

Planetside 1 and 2 by chance?

And yes that seems to be a near universal problem in game design. Or maybe a better way of putting it would be an inability to play their game outside of the tiny corridor that is their own personal likes.

 

Coming from Ultima Online for 3 years (Great Lakes) and Diablo LAN parties in the server room at work, I started playing Everquest 1 on Morell Thule back in December of 1999. My first was a High Elf Paladin, named Intoknor. Quickly replaced by a Halfling Cleric named Ceffin. I like many others at the time, made a character and bumbled through a grueling series of levels and content over the course of the next few years. Forming lifetime relationships with many people from across the country and world. Back when the internet was still new. In this amazing three dimensional plethora of endless and often times cryptic content. Everything you got in that game, especially your levels you seriously earned. It didn't matter if you were considered "good" or "not", you got to where you were by working for it and making the grind like everyone else. And as such you gained knowledge in how to play your character. Everything you acquired in that game was hard, none of it was handed to you. Stats on gear? That was for pansies.

When Everquest 2 dropped I jumped at the chance to check out a newer engine representing the game world I had invested so much time and money into already. (5 years active sub on 1-2 accounts). Sadly it required much more juice than my pc could muster at the time. So beyond solo swatting stuff I really couldn't get into anything resembling coordinated game play you would expect with an mmo. Fast forward another year and I had a brand new machine. And seriously gave eq2 a crack again. Even back then it still resembled EQ1 more in terms of how content was delivered. In its traditional sense of having places, characters, and various degrees of context for you to digest. To entertain you for various durations of time and keep you subscribing. EQ2 has sadly always been tailored to the top end play style... Raiding. As noticed by the seasonal wax and wane in game population from each content cadence. Every year content gets digested quickly, the horde moves on, and each subsequent content drop fewer and fewer people return each time. Everquest 2 has been a seasonal game for me for many years because of the dwindling amount of content and context every expansion. Replaced by randomized gimmicks.

So I decided to say my goodbye to SOE/DBG/DPG on his thread, simply because it was a fitting topic as to the reason I am quitting the "live" franchise as it exists.

They have failed to produce any sort of road map, plan or vision for the future of the game or franchise except more of the same. Gimmicks intended to be time sinks that make you login daily and click click click to get the most out of what they deem "content" these days. The only real thought out game portion of the game is locked behind a stat wall. They provide a slot machine experience for real currency, to shortcut and gain access to the only real "game" portion of the expansions.

I get that theyre short staffed... But damn. Gutting whole aspects of the game is not the way to go. That said, I will continue to talk EQ/EQ2 for years to come, especially if the emu community picks up in the future. But in the meantime, so long DPG, I no longer wish to give you anymore of my money.