Only recent sandbox MMO that comes to mind is Fallen Earth. Otherwise a large majority of MMO's don't have a lot of sandbox qualities.

Out of those games you listed I would have to say the strongest trait EQ2 has is the variety of PvE content from solo to 24 man raids (there are 12 man raids as well). Lotro is more story driven, Aion is about PvP and the grind. EvE is about economics, player politics and PvP. AoC is having massive swings in quality so its hard to pin down. No game comes close to the PvE content of EQ2 though.

To get the challege out of EQ2 you'll basically have to get to 80 and run the harder group and raid dungeons.

You also have to realize that they already tried the player crew system internally. Just because people in the general public didn't see it implemented in some way doesn't mean they never tried it in any capacity. They tried it and implemented it internally in a early build and it wasn't much fun. So much so that it didn't make it past internal testing. You've seen how much stuff gets past devs in MMO's to the point where it can reach a live server, if they caught a problem with it that early, you know its a very overt problem.

You can't just say implement the system I think it will be fun, you have to imagine if the system was implemented, then imagine worse case scenarios and assume those scenarios can happen repeatedly. So while the video may be exaggerated it is a possibility. People have come up with ideas to help with these scenarios but with those in place it again becomes a issue of what broad appealing incentive wqould being a crew member have OVER being a captain that simply isn't the fact you want to be a crewman and you can be? That doesn't have broad appeal and is more a niche.

One thing is a ship with a player crew would have to innately perform better than a player captain and NPC crew, if it was just a regular ship with the controls simply split up it would be a huge waste of time to implement and players basically gimping themselves because it would be one ship instead of roughly 4 ships. Okay so say a ship with a player crew of 4 players is 4x better than a ship with 1 player and NPC crew so they're not gimp. Shouldn't have to point out what a huge game breaking mechanic this would be for PvP. Would basically be required that you use a full player crew at all times unless you want to get trounced running your ship solo. Can solve this by only allowing solo ships in PvP or only full ships in PvP but this would rob one playstyle or the other from being able to effectively participate in PvP. Could say make sure people in solo ships are just grouped up but with a 4x ship running around if it got the jump on anyone solo in the slightest degree even if grouped would probably get downed pretty damn fast.

Then we have PvE content which has been completely built around the idea of one player controlling one ship (ship being closer to a avatar than a group). So ships with full complements and 'buffed' up systems just wouldn't be allowed to do solo quests outright since they would trivialize it, or they could and get next to nothing for reward since a solo reward would be split up amongst several players. But the one ship group could do group quests I suppose, but they would have to make it where none of the quests require multiple ships for what ever reason, like splitting up on a map or sending one person on a away team while ships fight in space. Now i know what your thinking they allow solo away teams now why couldn't one crew member go on a away team while the rest of the crew fights? Well you have to remember that the solo ship can do group content because it has a full player complement, sending a player off the ship would diminish this buff severely. I'm sure this and other problems would basically lead to the conclusion that a new line of quests just for player crew ships would need ot be designed and implemented, also taking a bunch of time when they already have basically two games in one with ship combat and ground combat.

This is all assuming that this should be implemented with the idea that a majority will equally want to be a crewman or captain for what ever reason. Unfortunately quite a lot of people would rather be a captain than a crewman, hence why the game is being designed the way it is, and being a crewman is a niche. Designing a system then content, then balancing and fixing it would be a huge waste of time when compared to systems they are working on now that have a much broader appeal.

The reason why its closer to multiple people controlling one character rather than a group is this. Even a group of say all wizards has basic functions albeit some severely diminished. They all can move, they all have defensive abilities, possibly lowest defensive abilities but still there, and can all individually assess the enemy, they all have the capacity to attack and have complete control overall. If a ship had only tactical officers you'd just have a severely crowded control console, no navigation, missing sensors and basic chaos of several people trying to shoot the same weapon.

It would be the 'holy trinity' problem MAGNIFIED. Think getting stuff done in old school EQ1 was hard without the perfect group or solo? Imagine if you could get NOTHING done without a perfect group. REQUIRING Player crews, to work, would require a true classless system by which I mean you couldn't specialize in anything and everyone had to be capable of doing every task. Only reason you would be a 'tactical officer' is because you happen to be working the tactical console at the moment.

So it comes back to making player crews optional, and while not having a player crew being able to use a NPC one. So if that is done, I ask again, what motivates me, the player, to be a crewman rather than a captain? And there would need to be a broad advantage to it that would appeal to most if not every player in some fashion to justify putting in such a system.

Problem with these arguments is your comparing a ship to a group, when it should be comparing a ship to multiple players controlling one character in a typical MMO (everquest, wow, etc.).

Having a ship with a PC crew would be like having one person controlling your swords/nukes/defensive buffs, another controlling character movement, another relaying enemy status (health, power, buffs) and yet another telling them all what to do. Now imagine the character you play on WoW, EVE, EQ1/EQ2, Aion, LotRO, WAR, suddenly not being under your complete control, but only one aspect of it while other people control the rest.

I'm not against the idea of having players allowed the option to be a crew member on another's ship, but what benefit would that be over being captain of your own ship without shoe-horning in content specifically for it?

STO content doesn't lean on archetypes as much thus not needing the 'holy trinity' to get by, forcing people to need player run crews would undermine that. In a way its the same thing that Star Wars has been going through, only a small niche wants these esoteric mechanics, but the majority want to be the recognizable archetypes. Why the hell would I want to be a faceless trooper when I could be a Commander, and why would I want to be an ensign working only navigation when I could be a starship captain?

Graphics wise they got a huge shader overhaul incoming that is going to be a free update.

Here is a before/after slideshow of them updating from 1.0 to 3.0

www.youtube.com/watch

Not only does it just look better they will be moving more of the work to the video card from the processor as the game is very processor heavy right now.

They also put in 'self mentoring' which basically allows people to de-level themselves in increments of 5 levels to experience older content they out leveled. This is mostly for getting AA points faster while at 80 but it has resulted in al ots of people going back and playing previously barren content.

Not sure where you get the idea that items are being directly sold, they haven't done anything like that, I'm looking at the SC store window right now and the only thing that could remotely effect combat is the potions like I said before. And items gotten through LoN cards isn't items being 'directly sold', that's basically gambling for a 'jackpot' of desired item or paying a certain amount to other players in booster packs you buy that still in the end have very little impact on gameplay and have in game counter parts with better benefits.

Unfortunately they aren't going to be able to tell the true reaction unless they introduce these type of things in small increments. Think about it, they can guess that people won't like getting dungeons through these methods but the chance to make a profit is too great to simply guess here. So they introduce a banign version to test the water. Either people will not even care, thus not buying cards trying to get it OR people will care and try to get the dungeon by spending more money. I most certainly don't agree with what their doing though if they end up making a significant net profit I can't blame them if they eventually keep doing it either.

You can speculate all you want about other things, how they design the game or want to, or however they spend resources, one thing they will always bend to though is what makes them more money. So if people hate it so it doesn't make them money they will stop, if it does make them money they will continue. Unfortunately simply 'unsubscribing' won't be seen as losing money because of something done in LoN but rather EQ2 exclusively, although if card sales don't go up enough to cover the costs of development of this zone or people specifically trying to get the zone in general is very low that will speak volumes about it.

It DOES trouble me about developer time spent on this stuff, but looking at whats being put out via the SC people didn't lose out on a whole lot. Mostly house furniture and appearance items already in the game just dyed or put together in sets, with at most minor changes.

The positive side is FreeRealms has hit them HARD with the reality that microtransactions aren't nearly as big as they would have liked to think at least in the western market. Making all jobs available for free up until level 5, and making all jobs require a subscription to get past level 5. Previously some of the jobs you could level past 5 without a sub. This means they weren't able to lean as hard on their cash shop and it wasn't even a 100% F2P, cash shop game.

Worst case scenario you can look at the biggest microtransaction based MMO's and they still don't sell the best stuff through their service, so speculating they will do something even remotely close to that is just downright ignorant.

I never minded it but I have been running at fast speeds most of my time playing the game having a ranger (over 45% speed increase).

Moving and traveling at 'realistic speeds' may sound neat and be kind of cool but once you have taken in all the scenary and just want to get to a specific place to get stuff done it gets boring real fast. You always have the option of taking off run speed buffs and putting your character into walk mode.

The XP potions are basically the heaviest impacting cash shop items in the game. They have various kinds that give a short term bonus to experience gain. Ever since then though they have just been offering more appearance armor and furniture for houses, and using the delivery method for typical MMO services that any decent MMO has (character transfer, name change etc).

The 'dungeon' they offer via LoN is piss poor and ultimately has no impact on the rest of the game. I think some small amount of coin drops but you can easily get better items for your character in dungeons provided in the 'actual' game, its more for LoN lore than anything else.

The graphics thing is a pain but they have been steadily working on that, especially with the upcoming upgrade to 3.0 shaders and using more of the graphics card instead of being so processor heavy.

Worst thing about Eq2 was the developer Aeralik imo, and he has recently left the company. Honestly can't see how some one taking over his position could do a worse job.

But the worst thing by far is the PvP. They offer PvP servers because people wanted it really bad but it is probably some of the worst mmo PvP around. EQ2 is a strong PvE game, last place I would go for PvP and the first I would go for PvE and raiding.

You might have had an innocent interaction with a farmer/gold seller too. Not exactly sure of everything you did, but if they saw a trial account that might have been helping out another account they know for sure is a gold seller they might have just banned you too in a attempt to squash them further (thinking you were helping them some how). but even most actual gold buyers are left alone so thats a real long shot.

Oh I agree there needs to be something to prevent zerging, But it should just be more like a speed bump, not a blown tire, messed up rim and bent axle.

People pine for the old days of EQ1 for death penalties and such, but now I look back theres no way I would have played it with what I know now. The game basically came down to getting a spot, camping it, pulling mobs to grind exp and not dying, grinding on puss mobs was more than acceptable if it meant you wouldnt die. I did maybe 5 quests in the YEARS I played the game, and those were my epic and access quests.

Restricted content is a bad idea on many levels. First it alienates people before they even get a run at it. Second in terms of business, its extremely ineffecient. If Mob A is contested, and usually on lock down by maybe 1 or 2 guilds per server, thats a HUGE waste compared to Mob B who is a instance zone and everyone can get to without interference. reason why its ineffeicent is that its takes roughly the same amount of work to make both these encounters, when one can be used by the entire population and the other is only used by a minority.

Any plan that would make a character unplayable due to approved in game actions (dying for example) that aren't optional (deleting your character being example of optional) would fail miserably. Would basically be a built in queue system with a MUCH longer wait time, and we all know how well queues go over in MMO's.

Only games that could get away with so many varied rule sets are ones with extremely high subscription numbers, otherwise the smaller pop MMO's would have a severly splintered population thats spread much too thin across these various rulesets.

Ok I should have clarified to say 'HARSH death penalty', I'm not against death penalties all together.

I remember when EQ2 first came out you would have a kind of corpse run for exp/debt reduction and SHARED experience debt. Which in the end basically penalized the whole group unless your group did the dungeon run or w/e FLAWLESSLY. Personally I consider time to be the biggest death penalty, and a MMO would have to go a long way in design to avoid that kind of inherent penalty. If I spent 30 minutes on a MMO trying to get something done but ultimately failing I would consider that a HUGe penalty and it would strongly discourage me from what ever it was that ultimately made me waste that time, be it a PUG, playing with particularly bad players, trying to accomplish something out of my league for w/e reason, or any other number of scenarios.

Best part is that this penalty also applies to the developers. For example, If grouping tools are poor and trying to get a group together wastes time, I will be less inclined to group thus lessening the MMO experience for me and others, this is something they want to avoid if they want to make money.

I see stuff like this and while a more strict death penalty might be fun short term, when you are actively trying to get stuff done and not purely concentrating on staying alive it just becomes annoying. If the designers have to resort to enforcing a strict death penalty people try and avoid. they lack imagination for content. Not going to log on a MMO and simply try and get the simplest stuff done without dying.

I just chalk this up to 'lets add 'realistic thing' here because i can't think of anything original to make a game fun' most of the time. Its a bullshit artificial mechanic to make a game 'more difficult', its the difference between a genuinely hard puzzle and someone randomly slapping the game piece out of your hand while playing candy land.

No one is stopping people from enforcing a stricter death penalty on themselves. The fact that they insist OTHERS also have to go through strict death penalties shows a different motive than simply a 'better game', you want a game mechanic that essentially tea-bags and berates people who die in PvE.

If you raid EQ2 beats Lotro no contest in terms of quantity and from the sounds of it quality, and personally i think it beats all other MMO's raiding content in general. PvP in EQ2 is piss-poor in my opinion, an afterthought, definitely heavily PvE driven.

I could elaborate more if you could provide some specifics of what you are looking for.

Originally posted by Daffid011

Originally posted by Dionysus187

The combination of things you picked are arguable the worst, necro starting in freeport on a PvP server. Should really try again, like maybe a shadow knight on a PvE server in Gorowyn.

 

This seems to be a very common response to people who have tried the game and did not find it enjoyable.  The advice seems to always center around avoiding certain content, downloading some UI fix, endless graphics adjustments or doing something that goes against the natural flow of how the game is presented.

A game shouldn't have wrong choices to make like this.  The wrong class, the wrong server, the wrong zone, the wrong settings, etc.  A good first experience shouldn't be left to random dumb luck of a few trivial choices players make at character creation.  A game should do everything it can to make a great first impression and not rely of people hitting the web to find out how to avoid mistakes made in the first few minutes of the game. 

I don't think you grasp what I am saying, While I agree with you that it should be made better where there really isn't a 'wrong choice' (qeynos/freeport areas updated would be nice) as someone who has played the game for years I really can't think of a way to pick a worse combination of factors. If he just did anything different when it came to class, server or starting area it would have definitely been better. If someone would have asked the worst possible way to start playing EQ2 it would have been exactly what this person did, plus maybe running it on a super low end machine that 'runs WoW fine'. Just really bad luck I guess lol.

As for performance, they did mess up trying to 'future proof' mainly because their idea of what the future tech would be was horribly wrong. Bascially they thought video cards wouldn't advance much and single core processor clock speeds would keep getting higher. Unfortunately what happened was more work was laid on to better video cards and computers use multiple cores at lower speeds to spread the load. So right now (but not for much longer) a single core PC with a high clock speed would run EQ2 the best. LUCKILY they have a update forthcoming that addresses this problem in a huge way. They are updating ALL shaders and moving much more of the load to the video card, you can try it on test. On my newest gaming rid my framerate more than tripled on balanced settings.

If you want to try and see high levels as a newb try and go to commonlands all the way to the west side there is a zone in to one of raiding zones that get used daily. Guilds usually meet up there before going in. (eq2players.com helps too). Also might want to join a 'all are welcome' type guild, usually at least a few on each server.

I don't deny any of the problems you people bring up, not trying to 'explain away' these things just trying to explain it more I guess.

They are actually adding a new area for free to be released with the next expansion based in 'Halas' for good classes/races, barbarian town from EQ1. They keep saying its going to be the best newbie experience to date on EQ2. They already have several well made evil ones (darklight wood/Neriak, Gorowyn). The combination of things you picked are arguable the worst, necro starting in freeport on a PvP server. Should really try again, like maybe a shadow knight on a PvE server in Gorowyn.

The game is very casual all the way to the cap unless you want to start raiding, then it does a severe 180. There was content in the game for quite a while that was only killed by one guild in the entire world up until a few weeks ago when they toned it down. Raiding kind of eases you in, maybe first couple of things are tank and spank then you start having to coordinate members better and juggle several raid mechanics on top of trying to kill the mob, failing in one of the mechanics usually means instant raid wipe in this latest expansion.

One thing people seem to forget when calling EQ2 'casual' though is waypoints for quests aren't handed to you, or marked on your map. You actually have to read directions in the quest text and find locations unless you look up the quest one way or another. Of course you could do that since the start of EQ1.

that's unfortunate. I have found the game to be interesting so far but in the end I'm really a raider. I actually raided on WoW for a while but found it boring/easy compared to raiding on EQ2.

I'll most likely keep playing, at most twice at week unless I really get into it, but I'm really not into roleplay/lore that much.

Console game comparison really doesn't work. Most console games can be played fully by yourself, on the other hand even with more focus on solo activity, you miss out on major aspects if not many people are playing.

Also while it may be a lowly, entertainment level investment of time, its still an investment of time. I actually like Vanguard quite a bit but the apparent lack of any future major content updates keeps me away. Maybe I raid for a bit, get all kinds of cool stuff, then what? With EverQuest 2 its pretty safe bet that at least advancements via expansions will keep coming, even EverQuest 1 is still getting expansions.

So for me and apparently others, the decision to keep playing a MMO is mostly or at least partly based on the promise of future updates and content. I don't want my passion to keep playing to outlive the game itself.

Seeing the almost complete lack of grasping the concept of an opinion by some of these posts sure does explain a lot about these forums.

Its an opinion unless you can measure it with proven scientific methods. Subscription numbers, games sold, and polygon count do not fall into this category, nor does the opinion of you and your butt buddies.

lol this is nothing new. I remember being able to skip quest lore in EQ1 in 2000 in its what would now be considered very piss poor UI and quest system with online walkthroughs.

Plus if you use the analogy of 'cheat codes' all a quiz would do is make it a slightly harder cheat code, which all the multiple choice answers would be on yes, a online walkthrough of quests. Unfortunately your premise that quests are like cheat codes is faulty therefore any conclusions you draw from that premise are also faulty.