Back when EQ2 first came out it was hardcore.... not EQ1 hardcore but still up there.

1. You had soul shards you left when you died, you could leave up to 3. Each one you left your stats lowered and would not go back up until you got your shard back. Or you could wait three 3 days and you would get it back.

2. Group debt: one person dies and everyone in the group gets exp debt. So if you were a sucky player... good luck on getting a group.

3. access quest to get to EL,LS,EF,Feerrot... or pretty much anywhere you had to do these access quest and they were all grouped quests.

I know im missing some other points but cant remember at this time. But as time has gone by they have made this game more and more "casual friendly".....not WOW friendly but just more friendly.

With this new update... I can see it being good and bad.. but more good then bad.

Originally posted by smut

Originally posted by celline

Yeah level grinding ITSELF is not challenging. (of course it forces the players to do/experience fewer quest and contents than usual because many more contents will go gray fast... but actually I don't know whether it's good or bad) It's just grind and this exp change itself is not a real matter. 

The real deal is, how much exp requirements they will reduce in this GU (amount I say).  

 

but SOE has to reserve appropriate amount of whole exp requirements to not make EQ2 an 'easy game'

 

It already is an easy game since RoK with it's 90% solo content. I am holding out hope for the newest expansion because I did have a lot of fun playing EQ2 pre ROK but nothing I have seen so far has piqued my interest. I just saw a new video showcasing the shadow odyssey expansion and 95% of the enemy mobs were the same character designs they've been using forever, some even dating back to vanilla EQ2 launch zones. Get with the times, put new art in, fix the gimped classes that no one ever takes on raids or groups. Optimize your graphics engines for modern CPU's and graphics cards. Move light and shadow rendering to the GPU, your game will run A LOT better just doing that.

I care because the game had a lot of good things going for it and I played for over a year and a half and sunk alot of money into the game. But after Scott Hartsman left, (the guy who resurected EQ2 after it's abysmal launch period) and Rise of Kunark came out, it has been downhill since. I think Scott knew what was coming since the game has taken a drastically different direction, alienating their core player base along the way and screwing up the good will built up since they fixed the game and made it fun.

The new game director who took over for Scott is out of touch and if I remember correctly was responsible for the abomination of the EQ2 launch. He is out of touch with what the base eq2 player wants. Not to mention the corruption and exploit scandals among the EQ2 dev team. Please SOE, give me some good reasons to resub and buy this expansion and I gladly will give it another shot.

 Quick lev 70 button my ass =)

Anyway.... if   [ 1=easy, 3=mediocre difficulty(aka normal), 5=hard ] then the EQ2 is currently (even with RoK and all the misc) in 2.3 or 2.5 I think. So, there's a little more room for 'dumbing-down'  lol

All the jokes aside, yeah from what I understand SOE has removed a lot of good things from the game I agree with ya to an extent.

and it's very sad that SOE creaked from the get-go because of the unoptimized game engine.

Originally posted by smut

 

It already is an easy game since RoK with it's 90% solo content. I am holding out hope for the newest expansion because I did have a lot of fun playing EQ2 pre ROK but nothing I have seen so far has piqued my interest. I just saw a new video showcasing the shadow odyssey expansion and 95% of the enemy mobs were the same character designs they've been using forever, some even dating back to vanilla EQ2 launch zones. Get with the times, put new art in, fix the gimped classes that no one ever takes on raids or groups. Optimize your graphics engines for modern CPU's and graphics cards. Move light and shadow rendering to the GPU, your game will run A LOT better just doing that.

I care because the game had a lot of good things going for it and I played for over a year and a half and sunk alot of money into the game. But after Scott Hartsman left, (the guy who resurected EQ2 after it's abysmal launch period) and Rise of Kunark came out, it has been downhill since. I think Scott knew what was coming since the game has taken a drastically different direction, alienating their core player base along the way and screwing up the good will built up since they fixed the game and made it fun.

The new game director who took over for Scott is out of touch and if I remember correctly was responsible for the abomination of the EQ2 launch. He is out of touch with what the base eq2 player wants. Not to mention the corruption and exploit scandals among the EQ2 dev team. Please SOE, give me some good reasons to resub and buy this expansion and I gladly will give it another shot.

From what you say you want, my advice is to stop holding out for some major changes. They are not going to happen. If you do not like the look, performance, easy of play, or content then move on. EQ2 is a great game and on systems like mine plays and looks really fantastic. There will be no big graphic revamp. SOE made the wrong decision on how it optimized this game engine. WE all know this. However it runs great on many systems. You will not see a huge change in the graphics either. I love the look of the game. They will keep the look consistant with any new expansions that comes out. What you are really asking for is a new game. You will not see this with a 4 year old game. Remember EQ2 will be 4 years old soon.

I have played more then a year and a half like you. I have been in game since the first day it went live 4 years in November. I just want more expansions, more live events, and a continuation of the fun and great game I play, for a few more years. You say you sunk a lot of money in the game? Do you buy gold? If not you sunk no more into the game then anyone else who plays it. Alienated the core players? That is a false statement. It alienated you. As a 1.5 year player I would not consider you a core player. Us who have been in game since launch are the core players and I know of hundreds of core plyaer who are still in game and love it.

EQ2 has gotten better and better over the years. That is why so many of us are still playing. You want a different game and it will not happen. You should just move on to another game. EQ2 is not for you and will not change enough for you based on your post. You have well thought out reasoning but you seem to be hoping for something other then the EQ2 many of us love. EQ2 is what it is and will be around for a few more years, I hope, but you will not see the changes you hope for. Try playing and embracing a game for what it is not what you want it to be. If a game can't do that then simply move on to another one.

I hate the way EQ2 is heading. It is a great game at it's heart, with a great community, but the constant powering down it gets has turned it into a virtual knitting machine where you only have to turn up to advance (which at least is 1 step more then CoX after the nxt expansion... but thats a different thread...). I would love to play again, but the feeling of 'going through the motions' is too overpowering. It's gradual slide into a casual lite solo quest grind game has destroyed it for me.

IMO, This game needs a 'harcore' server. Just one would do. Won't ever happen, but oh well.

• Reintroduce a decent death penalty. Without meaningful failure, success means nothing, and everything becomes grey.
• Slow down the XP gain to launch rates.
• Turn all those solo mobs back into group mobs. Same with all those quests.
• Make HQs hard again.
• Make the toned down zones, such as nek forest, hard again.
• Take away the extra bells, let player TPs have value.
• Make crafting inter-reliant again. Sure, keep the higher harvest/ craft yields higher, thats not a bad thing, but lets have the craft channel bough back to life. I miss that.
• Make rares, you know, rare.
• Reintroduce the Qeynos vs Freeport dynamic. Lets have the divides rebuilt.

If EQ2 pushed itself to the huge niche of social gamers looking for a PvE challange or a great in depth craft system it would find a whole new influx of players I think. By being the same as the others, only older, it is being lost to many.

Don't you resent it when developers treat players as retards who are unable to play a challenging game, so they dummy it down?

Yeah I can understand some of the angst when developers make it easier to level.  But you have to look at current conditions in EQ2 to understand why they are doing it.

There are very few new people leveling in this game hence, it gets pretty lonely having to level to end game without much interaction with other players, many players tend to not stick around because of that.  It is simply SOE's attempt at keeping players.

My biggest problem with this is that it is being promoted as letting friends get into the end game and catch up, when the obvious main result will be that raid guilds will be able to have their core people level more alts so that they don't need to rely on outsiders to fill niche roles.

It seems to me that the primary reason one has to be 70+ is to raid...I have never had trouble getting groups, etc. at lower levels.

I guess this is part of the evolution of the game...look at what happened to EQ.  This suggest to me that the player base is burning out and declining in numbers, perhaps to investigate new games...or maybe that is just me.

Originally posted by ohreally

Why don't you go ahead and start the game at level 70? It was already so easy to get to 70 it was a joke....

 

While you are at it, just change the name of teh game to WoW 2....since this is now almost a clone of Blizzards game...

Kudo's to SOE for not listening to idiots like yourself who have no clue what it takes to keep a game healthy.

Originally posted by RedwoodSap

Don't you resent it when developers treat players as retards who are unable to play a challenging game, so they dummy it down?

As of right now i wouldnt say hardcore gamers are majority in EQ2 anymore; its your gamer/casual gamer. So to me it seems like they are listening to the "majority" of their players that are asking for this.

But i do agree making a game to easy will take the fun out of it. Because if you cant lose.... winning just doesnt mean as much.

"If you log with 0 debt...you were not trying hard enough"