Originally posted by Psycha
It sounds silly I admit, but I do love the game and I am frustrated when my friends cannot play what I love because of cross platform issues.  Apparently I must live in an area of New England where most are mac users versus pc.  Go fig. 

But seriously, my complaint is that they (SOE) MADE the statement initially that the game would be excellent with macs.  So my beef was why the change of heart??  What suddenly changed to make them retract their own statement about Macs?  I have talked to some of the creators in live forums and their basic response was and I quote "NO COMMENT"

Quote: all the newer mac's can run in windows compatibiltiy mode and run windows games just fine

Here are my two cents about SOE

1) They ARE the most greedy MMO company out there. Their approach to MMO gaming is lets make money while we can, release the game and we will fix it later.

Why I say this lets take the EQ 2 vs WOW deal.

When both games were coming out it was like battle with people taking sides which game will the masters of MMOS

EQ 2

The only good thing about this game upon release was the character costumization. After that the content, balance, class definition, zones were sub par. One more time SOE rushed the game out of the door to compete againts their rival. People ussually say that EQ 1 was teh greatest MMO ever, in my opinion  EQ 1 was awesome because there was nothign out there to compete againsts. Plain and simple other companies better than SOE in everything didnt want to produce P2P games.  Now lets talk about SOE greed, inb the time WOW released Burning Crusade which feels more like a complete game by itself. SOE released 3 adventure packs and 3 expansions. All of them for a price, the discounts for "pre-order" were like 2 bucks. What  slap in the face for those players who spend 2 years with SOE in a game with broken transportation system (cloud system in KoS) and many other bugs. The raid zones in KoS were basically clones ot itself same lame area with a different monster.

I could ramble for hours about my rage againts SOE, but if I can recommend something to a developer is that please do not follow SOE corporate greed.

In my opinion Blizzard is so succesful, is becuase they give, they constantly do new updates and zones for free. The focused in game content instead of pretty graphics. They offer more that PvE, their PvP system is fun and their world is huge.

BTW congratz 

SOE on registering your new expansion for the game.

Originally posted by Avathos

Here are my two cents about SOE

 In my opinion Blizzard is so succesful, is becuase they give, they constantly do new updates and zones for free. The focused in game content instead of pretty graphics. They offer more that PvE, their PvP system is fun and their world is huge.

BTW congratz 

SOE on registering your new expansion for the game. 

 

I really had to laugh at that.

EQ2 has added about 6x as much content since release as WOW has. And if the BC expansion was so great (after being a year late), then why are so many people quitting WOW and going to EQ2 and LOTRO?

I am angry at SONY because of the combat revamps... It is not appropriate to completely revamp the game every year or 2.  Every time they do this they inadvertently end up completely screwing one playstyle or another.

I had a very powerful templar with all legendary armor and items from farming tradeskill rares.  I could solo powerful heroics with my decent gear that other skill and spell dependent classes might have had trouble with.  Then they made legendary and fabled items practically useless and I wasn't able to solo anything.

Plain and simple, some classes depend more on equipment to do well and some classes depend more on skills.  Equipment dependent classes (like templar) were obliterated by the nerfing of high quality items while at the same time skill based classes were bolstered by reduced resistances etc.

Roots and runcasts on some items were also nerfed reducing their usefulness... 

Basically any time you find something fun and non cookie cutter in the game, or even just something that requires a lot of work but gives a decent reward, you get screwed by SOE.

Originally posted by Psycha

Quote: all the newer mac's can run in windows compatibiltiy mode and run windows games just fine

Can they really? I mean can they run it up to speed with the PCs?  The older windows Mac program last I knew had serious issues with running basic programs up to speed.. let alone games that are processor intensive. 

If that has changed all i can say is WOOT, its about time.

Originally posted by Laiina

Originally posted by Avathos

Here are my two cents about SOE

 In my opinion Blizzard is so succesful, is becuase they give, they constantly do new updates and zones for free. The focused in game content instead of pretty graphics. They offer more that PvE, their PvP system is fun and their world is huge.

BTW congratz 

SOE on registering your new expansion for the game. 

 

I really had to laugh at that.

EQ2 has added about 6x as much content since release as WOW has. And if the BC expansion was so great (after being a year late), then why are so many people quitting WOW and going to EQ2 and LOTRO?

I cant argue with this. Bliz has been horrible with adding new content to WoW. Its crazy with how much money they make every month that we get as little as we do. Pathetic.

Originally posted by Devira

I'm angry at SOE too!!

I played EQ2 since around two months after it opened. Lots about the game was great, good graphics, gameplay, nice crafting and lots of variety. Grouping was fun and i really enjoyed my class (troubador). Over the course of the next 18mths everything changed completely.. roughly every three months or so i would find my class had been changed so much i had to completely relearn it. I persisted through sheer bloody-mindedness if nothing else, but recently decided enough was enough and cancelled.

When i first rolled my troubador, we were one of the top classes for soloing and had a very respectable dps. This went back and forth through various live updates, and now we are arguably the worst soloing classes with very very low dps. Fine if that was what i wanted to play... but it wasn't. I'm not knocking class balancing, but putting all those hours of work into developing my character is frustrating when you end up with something completely opposite to what it was originally. I mean imagine in real life if you were a policeman for 20 years then got told you now had to be a nurse...

EQ2 would still be great if SOE developed some kind of vision and stuck with it. I like to have some kind of consistancy in online games, too much messing about from SOE means i'll never go back now.

And don't even get me started on the crafting revamp...

Why they keep nerfing and revamping things no1 wants? Didnt they learn with SWG? Gues not ... how can we trust and invest our time and money if theres no guarantee we will recieve what we were suposed too? SOE has no respect for customers, period.

Originally posted by Kriminal99

I am angry at SONY because of the combat revamps... It is not appropriate to completely revamp the game every year or 2.  Every time they do this they inadvertently end up completely screwing one playstyle or another.

I had a very powerful templar with all legendary armor and items from farming tradeskill rares.  I could solo powerful heroics with my decent gear that other skill and spell dependent classes might have had trouble with.  Then they made legendary and fabled items practically useless and I wasn't able to solo anything.

Originally posted by Kriminal99

I am angry at SONY because of the combat revamps... It is not appropriate to completely revamp the game every year or 2.  Every time they do this they inadvertently end up completely screwing one playstyle or another.

Uhm.. a bit late here are we not?

How long ago, exactly, did SOE nerf your overpowered character?

Originally posted by DrFod

Originally posted by Kriminal99

I am angry at SONY because of the combat revamps... It is not appropriate to completely revamp the game every year or 2.  Every time they do this they inadvertently end up completely screwing one playstyle or another.

I had a very powerful templar with all legendary armor and items from farming tradeskill rares.  I could solo powerful heroics with my decent gear that other skill and spell dependent classes might have had trouble with.  Then they made legendary and fabled items practically useless and I wasn't able to solo anything.

You could solo powerful heroics and wonder why you got nerfed?

Plate wearers were simply too powerful in EQ2 prior to the DoF upgrade and you should have seen this coming. What we have now is very balanced classes, all can solo to some degree which has to be good for the game. If you want unnecessary combat changes, just look at SWG or even WoW.

And yes, legendary and fabled gear still very much has value, why do people still raid and do instances for them?

Originally posted by lomiller

Originally posted by Psycha

Quote: all the newer mac's can run in windows compatibiltiy mode and run windows games just fine

Can they really? I mean can they run it up to speed with the PCs?  The older windows Mac program last I knew had serious issues with running basic programs up to speed.. let alone games that are processor intensive. 

If that has changed all i can say is WOOT, its about time.

Newer Macs are basically the same hardware you find in a PC so they can run Windows natively as long as a few things are set up when the machine boots.  They run a bootloader called bootcamp which is very similar to the loaders that allow you to dual boot to Linux/Windows.  

Yes this is true. Newer macs, less than a year old or so, use Intel processors and are basically PC architecture. Most even come with fairly decent graphics cards. Apple's getting a little better at that.

To install Windows on a Mac, your friends will need to download a copy of Bootcamp (should be available from Apple, though I heard the beta is closing or closed, so finding it may be difficult until the next OS release), and have a copy of Windows. Run bootcamp and I guess the set-up is fairly simple (haven't tried it myself, but I hear it's easy). Later when they boot they should have a choice of  runnng Windows or the Mac OS.

As far as speed, it's not emulated, so it runs normal PC speed. They can play any PC Windows compatible game.

A "critic" is a man who creates nothing and thereby feels qualified to judge the work of creative men. There is logic in this; he is unbiased – he hates all creative people equally.  -Robert A. Heinlein

As an ex-SWG player (pre-CU Jedi, Ahazi server) i dont really love SOE, to be very light ... but im playing EQ2 atm and i see a happy comunity there, ppl like the game and what SOE has been doing with it. Everybody says the game got a lot better. I dot like fantasy based MMOs much but i find EQ2 a very polished game. Its not perfect and not all about it pleases me but no MMO out there on the market is. SOE is doing a good job with this one.

The biggest problems I have are false promises, not listening to the customer base, bad communication with the customers, and unfinished content released with a full price tag.

Pretty much the same thing everybody else has experienced.

Sony... I should have known better than to buy a Sony game. Worse than EA! Nothing nice to say AT ALL! Hate 'em with a passion and I'm gonna kick myself twice daily until the sub runs out so I never forget again.

Originally posted by Gammit100

unfinished content released with a full price tag.

could say this about almost any MMO

WoW was released with no battlegrounds
 (despite this being in the game manual)

Blizzard didnt add the missing Battlegrounds until 8 months later

Originally posted by Bravado

A "critic" is a man who creates nothing and thereby feels qualified to judge the work of creative men. There is logic in this; he is unbiased – he hates all creative people equally.  -Robert A. Heinlein

Amen to that.

That's why I decided to join the industry as an artist / animator / programmer (I'm not great at coding, but good enough to put it on my resume)... I'm employed at Atari currently, which I'm quitting to join something else, probably THQ, Activision, NC Soft, or Take Two (Firaxis hopefully). Atari isn't doing too well, and I say that lightly.

So yeah, I have a problem with SOE. Star Wars Galaxies was fine until they utterly destroyed it. I mean, sure, there are bad patches and updates now and then, it's common... but the *entire game* gets shot to hell because someone just had to reinvent the whole thing and produce a half-arsed game out of it? I would be fine with the changes now if they spent some time to polish it, but I'm sorry, it was a mess at the NGE launch and it still is.

They're trying desperately to do the same thing to EQ2, it would seem. Right when I joined, they nerfed the crafting system. I mean, seriously, I was willing to put SWG behind me and play another game, but they just changed it dramatically for the worst right as I started playing. That's not cool. While this may be a decision on the studio's part, and not the publisher's, I blame them because they screw up enough to warrant it .

SOE needs to take some time to re-think their development strategies and it wouldn't hurt them to replace some higher-ups with more intelligent and creative people.

What did they do to nerf crafting? It seems to be the same to me as it was when I first started playing the game. Of course I took a year or so off, but when I came back it was as I remembered it.

I don't have any dates or records or anything, so really you can just assume anything I'm saying about EQ2 is a total lie.

Anyway, the crafting system was "more powerful" before I joined, apparently.

After the nerf, when crafting, you make no money selling to the vendors and quest items are much more useful than anything you can make (at the lower levels, anyway, up through lvl 35 where I stopped leveling my Berserker and quit). So, when you try to sell something on the market, or whatever it was called (it was represented by an "accountant" or "Broker" or something I think, I forget the specific name), you had to use ultra-rare ingredients in order to just compete with stuff you can find through adventuring. Needless to say, you could save time by farming mobs for an hour or so for rare items rather than collecting stuff all day.

That's quite a nerf and time-sink, and it impacted a lot of aspiring crafters. Given that I mostly play the carebear in online games (mining, harvesting, crafting, entertaining, socializing, etc.), it upset me that anything I made wouldn't be worth my effort or the buyer's money.

Combat just isn't my thing if I'm given an option for otherwise. I like options that are worth the effort, but if they're just a needless time-sink, then I resent being given that as a choice.