GU 57: Discussion and Feedback [Archive] - EQ2 Forum Archive @ EQ2Wire

Amnerys

07-30-2010, 05:00 PM

This thread is for discussion and constructive feedback about GU57 overall, which is currently available for testing on Test server.If you have specific feedback regarding EQII Extended, please leave that feedback in this thread: <a href="list.m?topic_id=483444">EQII Extended - Feedback and Discussion Thread</a> Some other GU57 topics already have threads, so please post in the most appropriate place for your feedback:<ul><li>For feeback about features of the new UI, please leave your feedback here: <a href="list.m?topic_id=483438"> GU 57: User-Interface Changes</a> </li><li>Feedback about the new tradeskill quest lines goes here: <a href="list.m?topic_id=483456">GU57: three new tradeskill quest lines!</a></li><li>Players have started a thread for particle effects feedback here: <a href="list.m?topic_id=483625"><a href="list.m?topic_id=483494">New Spell/CA Animations/Effects</a> </a></li></ul>If you have never played on Test before, check out the <a href="list.m?topic_id=441186"> Test Server FAQ </a>to learn how.Thank you for taking the time to give us your feedback. Please remember to keep it civil and constructive. All opinions are welcome, but need to be stated in a manner that is helpful. Posts that appear to be inciteful are subject to removal.

Deson

07-30-2010, 05:14 PM

It's clear SC is front and center and Rothgar just posted how important SC is to keep the current EQ2 team. The statement however seems at odds with the rather rosy picture that's been painted multiple times over the past year or so. Given how drastic the changes are, I feel it's fair to ask where we stand. SC was given higher priority than many other functional changes to the UI and it seems the vast majority of this update is dedicated to truly new(and younger) players and a new market entirely(e.g.SOGA defaults ). What's our(current long time subscribers) value to you at this moment and how bad is it that moves this big are being made?

CoLD MeTaL

07-30-2010, 05:23 PM

Feedback: We need "1 click to cure" and "Auto attack timer" in the default UI.

Barx

07-30-2010, 05:26 PM

<cite>CoLD MeTaL wrote:</cite><blockquote>Feedback: We need "1 click to cure" and "Auto attack timer" in the default UI.</blockquote>Already addressed ad nauseum in the UI thread. He's not going to wave a magic wand and *poof* there's click-to-cure and autoattack timer in GU57 just because people keep complaining about it. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/2786c5c8e1a8be796fb2f726cca5a0fe.gif" border="0" />And we wonder why they get moderate-y with threads.

Taldier

07-30-2010, 05:36 PM

GU57 Feedback:In 250 words or less, why is the entirety of GU57 based on completely changing the game to make it hypothetically more accessible to asian RMT markets while marginalizing current subscribers?Is this in some way related to the release of a new, completely RMT based version of EQ2 at approximately the same time? *sarcasm*

EQPrime

07-30-2010, 05:41 PM

This update is a huge disappointment. All it does is prep the game for the eq2x release and annoy us with SC icons all over the place.

Amnerys

07-30-2010, 05:42 PM

Just a reminder that this thread is for your feedback and discussion. As per the entire forums, there's no guarantee that devs will be in here answering questions. It'd be great if they had a chance to pop in, but it's not a certainty.Your feedback is best reported up to the powers that be as well-thought-out statements of opinion, without too much emotion, and with reasoning and examples for why you feel the way you do. Some emotion is natural, of course, and I'm not asking you to be a robot. <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> But stating that you dislike something in a civil tone and telling us why is much more likely to get our attention than "OMG I HATE IT AND I'M QUITTING."Your feedback is truly appreciated and I know it takes time to type out descriptive replies. In advance, I thank you for taking the time to do so. <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />

Xill

07-30-2010, 05:43 PM

<cite>Barx@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>CoLD MeTaL wrote:</cite><blockquote>Feedback: We need "1 click to cure" and "Auto attack timer" in the default UI.</blockquote>Already addressed ad nauseum in the UI thread. He's not going to wave a magic wand and *poof* there's click-to-cure and autoattack timer in GU57 just because people keep complaining about it. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/2786c5c8e1a8be796fb2f726cca5a0fe.gif" border="0" />And we wonder why they get moderate-y with threads.</blockquote>People are angry and venting at the Dev's, who they see as responsible for at least *some* of this. Cant blame them honestly.

Onorem

07-30-2010, 05:45 PM

<cite>Uguv@Mistmoore wrote:</cite><blockquote>This update is a huge disappointment. </blockquote>Yep. I can appreciate all the hard work that went into reworking the UI, but without certain elements that have been repeatedly pointed out, I'll never use it.If the "GU 57 Notes" thread is in fact the entire list of changes, there is not a single thing being done in this update that I expect to have a positive impact on my gameplay. Hold on, not having to play hopscotch on griffons and sokokars won't suck. I guess that's a plus.Almost forgot, has there been any clarification on the new spells automatically replacing old spells? What checks will it make on quality (and efficiency) of spells? Can we disable this?

Neskonlith

07-30-2010, 05:53 PM

Since SC is getting more emphasis with this GU, which forum section is most appropriate to open threads to discuss SC pricing?I'd like to point out that some of the fluff items for sale look neat, but they are currently priced out of my comfort zone, and I wanted to leave feedback on what I would reasonably be happy with paying.ie: new stormy cloud mount would open my wallet if it was 500SC instead of 2500SC.thanks!

kalaria

07-30-2010, 05:54 PM

"GU57: Screw you subscribers."Thats about all I get out of this game update sadly.Worst part is it has probably been dictated from above, so the devs following orders are having to take the brunt of the recoil.

Amnerys

07-30-2010, 05:56 PM

<cite>Neskonlith wrote:</cite><blockquote>Since SC is getting more emphasis with this GU, which forum section is most appropriate to open threads to discuss SC pricing?I'd like to point out that some of the fluff items for sale look neat, but they are currently priced out of my comfort zone, and I wanted to leave feedback on what I would reasonably be happy with paying.ie: new stormy cloud mount would open my wallet if it was 500SC instead of 2500SC.thanks!</blockquote>I am actually gathering that feedback from the weekly posts with new items, which are in the <a class="forumlink" href="../forums/show.m?forum_id=11">Community News</a> section. If you'd like to start a new post though, you're welcome to do so in the <a class="forumlink" href="../forums/show.m?forum_id=2596">Items and Equipment</a> section. (Please title it so that it's clear what's being discussed in the thread. Sometimes threads with odd names get lost in the shuffle.)Thank you!

Jesdyr

07-30-2010, 06:01 PM

Comment about the overall GU -This GU does nothing for the veteran players aside from cause them unneeded inconveniances by breaking thier current custom UIs. It use to be we could at least HOPE that making the new player experiance better would help keep new blood in the game. Sadly this will no longer be the case so that benefit is gone.

Taldier

07-30-2010, 06:03 PM

<cite>Amnerys wrote:</cite><blockquote>Just a reminder that this thread is for your feedback and discussion. As per the entire forums, there's no guarantee that devs will be in here answering questions. It'd be great if they had a chance to pop in, but it's not a certainty.Your feedback is best reported up to the powers that be as well-thought-out statements of opinion, without too much emotion, and with reasoning and examples for why you feel the way you do. Some emotion is natural, of course, and I'm not asking you to be a robot. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /> But stating that you dislike something in a civil tone and telling us why is much more likely to get our attention than "OMG I HATE IT AND I'M QUITTING."Your feedback is truly appreciated and I know it takes time to type out descriptive replies. In advance, I thank you for taking the time to do so. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /></blockquote>I have seen very few "OMG I HATE IT AND IM QUITTING".I have seen alot of "I really love this game, I cant stand the way that SOE has decided to take it with these changes for reason x,y,z and Im going to finally move on before I have to watch my favorite game be destroyed like this"Many of us have written out short essay length posts related to these topics.We have gotten nothing from any representative of SOE except for a few short replies saying "we see what youre saying but we've basically been told to do this anyway"They know what they are doing. Obviously not everyone in the corporate structure is personally accountable for the actions they are going along with to avoid being fired, but they are on these forums as representatives of the company. They are going to be spoken to by very emotional people as if they are the company because when they are logged on a red name account they are an official representative of SOE as a whole. They are expected to deal with that because that is how customer service works. You talk to customers.

Amnerys

07-30-2010, 06:39 PM

<cite>Taldier@Venekor wrote:</cite><blockquote>They are going to be spoken to by very emotional people as if they are the company because when they are logged on a red name account they are an official representative of SOE as a whole. They are expected to deal with that because that is how customer service works. You talk to customers.</blockquote>Absoultely. But also please understand that the volume of players to the volume of SOE employees, and to the volume of those who work on EQII, is very heavily weighted on the side of players. The ratio of time, to number posts, to number of people collecting feedback does not leave much room for deciphering.One of my weekly tasks is to scour the forums for feedback, and put together reports on what I'm seeing. I get quotes, I make summaries, they get passed up above me in the chain. Just because you're not seeing a direct response doesn't mean we're not listening, I promise. And when I'm doing those reports, if I have to read someone's post three or four times to figure out what they're saying, I'm likely to have to pass it by and find one made by someone who speaks logically and takes time to explain their opinions.There were a lot of terse and emotional posts in the main EQ2X feedback thread. Several stating that they canceled and the like. We understand that people are emotional. But while accounted for, their lack of reasoning doesn't really help to further their cause. I'm just asking that folks take the time to explain why they're upset instead of only stating that they're upset. If there's no reason, we can only speculate and might actually be totally off the mark.

Myrien

07-30-2010, 06:43 PM

My feedback:This update does nothing to help the game's long-standing players. The whole thing is about watering the game down for new players who may or may not bring any money in. It's apparent that the entire update is to help support the RMT that Sony is pushing on us more and more. In short, the entire update is a waste of dev time.The notable exceptions to this are the new spell animations and the new tradeskill quests. Both are great. Fire whomever is at the top making decisions, and replace him or her with Domino. <img src="/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />

Xalmat

07-30-2010, 06:46 PM

As has been discussed in the other thread, if you're going to turn 2/3 of classes to neutral alignment, you might as well make them all neutral. The ones that were picked to be neutral make absolutely no sense from a lore perspective, with the possible exception of Illusionist.

Transen

07-30-2010, 06:46 PM

I think I need to have a seat <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/e8a506dc4ad763aca51bec4ca7dc8560.gif" border="0" /><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v258/Transen/EQ2%20photos/having-a-seat.jpg" />

Brook

07-30-2010, 06:52 PM

Seems to me that alot of the changes coming forward lean heavily towards the Station Marketplace, even the upcoming changes to class definitions.We are told that the marketplace is an essential part of EQ2 in order to keep the current staff and keep coming out with updates. Therefore it is shoved in our faces on everything related to EQ2...personally I am not really happy with it and canceled 3 alt accounts but will keep my main one going for now.The UI looks alot like some of the cheap f2p games I have tried and really those games have sucked.We have had 2 sub increases that I remember since I have been playing, numerous combat revamps, larger zones, heroics moved from overland zones, itemization nightmares, content removed, watched the leadership change hands a few times, scandals from test server moves and then the playerbase blamed for caring, 6 month long lagfest every expansion, developers have come and gone..and though I wasn't always happy about the things going on at SOE I chocked it up to that is just the way the gaming industry works.We have had servers opened specifically for RMT and the rules were set up fair to everyone concerned IMO because they didn't interfere with the live servers. LoN came along because they needed it to help fund operations, then Station Cash was just thrown at us one day with no warning at all it was there and we were ignored.We used to have access to the real numbers of how many people were on each server, that was taken away. I am highly suspicious of the reason that was done. The numbers I have seen posted that reflect the health of the game seem highly exaggerated from what I see on the servers. I am guessing that business ain't so hot right now.So with all the changes that have already been made to the game to bring in new life and more money for EQ2, where are all the people? Why do we need to make these changes now? You already have LoN and Station Cash and at least two rate increases yet you are laying off people because you cant make ends meet? I have always suspected that some of those people left because they had enough backbone to say "this is wrong, this in no way makes the game fun and the community doesn't want it" but I am certain that's inside politics that we really don't need to know. Some people do have integrity.So all these things that SOE has done to this game hasn't improved the gameplay experience from my perspective, if anything we are paying more and getting less. The game used to immerse you in the gameplay because the npcs would actually talk, the quest were rich with lore, when you did a dungeon crawl you sometimes got something that you could actually use, people needed each other to get things done. Not anymore, I don't have to talk to a soul through the whole game now, which in a way I guess is good because there are not that many people around.When I requested an alternate ruleset server, f2p and rmt wasnt what I had in mind.I will hang for now but SOE will lose a lot if they go through with this.

Xalmat

07-30-2010, 06:52 PM

<ul><li>Fighter heals can no longer critically heal.</li></ul>This is a disastrous change. Why didn't you do this back when you consolidated crits, potency, crit bonus, etc?<ul><li>Summoners: “Aqueous Stone” is now “Aqueous Soul” and no longer summons an item that grants water breathing. It now simply casts water breathing on the target.</li></ul>Please change it back.

awny

07-30-2010, 07:33 PM

I ran through the new starter area quests and really like what you have done. The smoother paths especially in the Fae Nursery area were very nice. This area has always been a bit confusing so this helped.No one likes change and personally I cannot speak to the class changes because my main is a 54 Inq. and I have been very happy with her so far.The new UI is nice, however, like other players have said, the SC presence is a bit 'in the face' a bit much.... will learn to block it out I guess.Thank you guys for all your hard work. I know you have to work within guidelines set forth by the powers that be.

Octaviun

07-30-2010, 07:41 PM

Feedback: I dislike the SC button situation..it's a mess. From reading other threads and seeing dev responses, I know there is not much that can be said to make this change go away. However, I figured I would state my opinion for your tally sheet. I just hope this 'strong-armed' forced change is not clearing the way for more drastic changes like adding a SC button to the loot window or something crazy like that.Any idea on the date in which this GU is getting pushed on the live servers?

Taldier

07-30-2010, 07:48 PM

<cite>Octaviun@Unrest wrote:</cite><blockquote>... I just hope this 'strong-armed' forced change is not clearing the way for more drastic changes like adding a SC button to the loot window or something crazy like that....</blockquote>Im sure that plan is supposed to be secret until GU58.

Dreadpatch

07-30-2010, 08:19 PM

<cite>Amnerys wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Taldier@Venekor wrote:</cite><blockquote>They are going to be spoken to by very emotional people as if they are the company because when they are logged on a red name account they are an official representative of SOE as a whole. They are expected to deal with that because that is how customer service works. You talk to customers.</blockquote>Absoultely. But also please understand that the volume of players to the volume of SOE employees, and to the volume of those who work on EQII, is very heavily weighted on the side of players. The ratio of time, to number posts, to number of people collecting feedback does not leave much room for deciphering.One of my weekly tasks is to scour the forums for feedback, and put together reports on what I'm seeing. I get quotes, I make summaries, they get passed up above me in the chain. Just because you're not seeing a direct response doesn't mean we're not listening, I promise. And when I'm doing those reports, if I have to read someone's post three or four times to figure out what they're saying, I'm likely to have to pass it by and find one made by someone who speaks logically and takes time to explain their opinions.There were a lot of terse and emotional posts in the main EQ2X feedback thread. Several stating that they canceled and the like. We understand that people are emotional. But while accounted for, their lack of reasoning doesn't really help to further their cause. I'm just asking that folks take the time to explain why they're upset instead of only stating that they're upset. If there's no reason, we can only speculate and might actually be totally off the mark.</blockquote>Several posts were made with several reasons. The straw that broke the back for me was in fact the UI being instituted in GU 57. I gave my reasons for that. We were told that Live and RMT would be in completely different worlds, yet the UI would say otherwise. Don't you think we have enough advertisement rammed down our throat in RL? I play the game to escape all that, not to have to deal with it WHEN I LOG INTO MY FANTASY WORLD! I probably would have dealt with the slow painful death of the Live servers if not for the fact I am in fact going to be subject to the very thing that was supposed to remain separate. Now I can't even go to a merchant to repair without having RMT shoved down my throat that I do not want. Those folks that want it know where to find it. I'm a 32 year old man still playing a video game. I know in the eyes of the "suits" running this game, I'm probably considered a loser for playing a game. There are MANY professionals and intelligent people that spend their money to play this game. Believe me when I tell you that if I wanted to spend sony bucks I could figure out how to do it, I don't need a giant icon on my screen telling me where to go. I wish I could put a custom UI on my screen telling SC where it could go.Unfortunately you just can't blanketly say that this new UI has nothing to do with the implentation of RMT servers, because your player base just isn't that stupid. We do appreciate however being treated like we are. I love this game, but I have no other way to speak my mind but to cancel my sub. For you to trivialize that is even more insulting so thanks for that.

Amnerys

07-30-2010, 08:54 PM

<cite>Elusion@Nektulos wrote:</cite><blockquote>Unfortunately you just can't blanketly say that this new UI has nothing to do with the implentation of RMT servers, because your player base just isn't that stupid. We do appreciate however being treated like we are. I love this game, but I have no other way to speak my mind but to cancel my sub. For you to trivialize that is even more insulting so thanks for that.</blockquote>I haven't made a statement one way or the other about the UI and relation to RMT because I honestly know nothing about that. <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> I've only asked that if you want to leave feedback about RMT you do so in another thread; this thread. Leaving it the UI thread is not going to make it into my reports about feedback regarding RMT. That's the long and short of it.The UI thread was started by the lead programmer looking for feeback about the functionality, look and feel of the UI, not the reasoning behind the changes. Leaving feedback about the decision to change the UI there is just not the right place. I hope that makes sense.I'm not trying to stifle anyone's opinions...in fact I'm doing the opposite. Please trust that when I ask you post something in a particular place, it's so when I do my reports I'll have all of the information that will contribute to that report in one place. It makes my feedback the best it can be, and gives your words a much better chance of going up the chain of command. <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />

Thundy

07-30-2010, 08:58 PM

<cite>Amnerys wrote:</cite><blockquote>There were a lot of terse and emotional posts in the main EQ2X feedback thread. Several stating that they canceled and the like. We understand that people are emotional. But while accounted for, their lack of reasoning doesn't really help to further their cause. I'm just asking that folks take the time to explain why they're upset instead of only stating that they're upset. If there's no reason, we can only speculate and might actually be totally off the mark.</blockquote>It's so bass-ackwards to say that people are unreasonable by cancelling and that them cancelling does nothing. Most people feel that cancelling is the best (and only) way to send a direct message about player unhappiness. Judging by your reply I guess that's a black hole as well.

bks6721

07-30-2010, 09:03 PM

I like the new hotbars, they look much nicer. I like the funtionality of F10 while making UI changes.The new map is ok, but it still isn't EQ2MapsThe default UI NEEDS.. i can't emphasize that enough.. NEEDS a click to cure and an autoattack timer. Without those the default UI is worthless to a serious player.Don't like the new exp bar. Its too big and all the buttons are redundant. Its all available through the EQII button.C is for CROUCH. (yes I know how to remap keys, shouldn't have to)The new tutorial is AWESOME! I like the pop ups that describe how to game is played for new people.Evil toons now able to be good and visa versa destroys game lore. You may as well go all the way and let all classes start anywhere. In fact, good characters shoud be able to have evil guild halls too if alignment doesn't matter.That is as positive and constuctive as I can be. EQ2X killed EQ2 for me.

docpaulpur2

07-30-2010, 09:05 PM

GU 57 : Rise of the RMT is just an insult to long-standing players (so far). From shoving a new UI without actually listening to the needs (click to cure etc), turning SOGA on to the announcement of EQ"x this just screams : "Full RMT $ellout invasion incoming". Add to that nerfs , nothing helpfully new, no tweaking and balancing (apart from travel) and you have the core of the new EQ2 management credo : We don't care at all anymore about human players, we went full greed mode.Sad sad sad. Oh, and why did you have to call in every moderator or person willing to moderate and abuse posters and chaindeleting whole pages and fill us up with "we don't know where this will lead" and "nothing is sure yet" drivel? Seems like you made up your mind already, the lack of official responses to the manifold legitimate questions is speaking for itself.

Amnerys

07-30-2010, 09:25 PM

<cite>Thundy wrote:</cite><blockquote>It's so bass-ackwards to say that people are unreasonable by cancelling and that them cancelling does nothing. Most people feel that cancelling is the best (and only) way to send a direct message about player unhappiness. Judging by your reply I guess that's a black hole as well.</blockquote>Oh, no. I agree with you completely. I'm not saying that canceling isn't a valid way to show your opinion at all. I'm just saying that you can help me pass along the reason why people are quitting or upset if you put more information in your post than, for instance, simply screaming in all caps as sometimes happens when people are really upset. I know folks are emotional. I'm only asking that no matter what you feel about the changes, just to please take a moment and give me details about your opinion, and to take a moment to breathe so that your post makes sense. It's a cheesy quote, but it's true: help me help you.So far in this thread I'm seeing good posts. Well-spoken and with explanations. Thank you for that feedback. <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />

Guy De Alsace

07-30-2010, 09:38 PM

Taken as a whole GU57 is just a strategic penetration into the asian market at the expense of current subscribers. As a current subscriber this GU reads like one long two fingered salute to existing customers.Its basically saying we are a dead loss...thanks for paying us but we no longer give a pair of dingos kidneys about you or your money any more because its too difficult to get more westerners to play.

ElnAckom

07-30-2010, 11:25 PM

Amnerys, you accurately state that the development team only has so many people, only has so much time, and only has so many resources. Rational minds accept and understand that, and we can all agree that the playerbase has a diversity of voices of varying passions. However, there is a commonality that runs through thread after thread, spanning years at a time. It is a fundamental principle, a basic request, and I for one join the throng of those very disappointed with the development team's lacking address of it:We don't want new mechanics and we don't want a different game. We want you to repair and improve mechanics where required and then give us expanded, quality, diverse content upon which to turn those mechanics, providing us with more and improved EverQuest II gameplay. Don't reinvent the game; strengthen the game.A new user interface has nothing to do with improving EverQuest II. You have a robust interface community. Open the doors wider, give them more tools, and let the community do that work. You're wasting people, time, and resources on an irrelevancy, and it's all too thinly veiled with the gigantic "Station Cash" button. Your PR skills can't be that bad. It just looks like profit over play.Battlegrounds, to me, has nothing to do with improving EverQuest II. You already created PvP for those that love it. Go ahead and expand the content for PvP if you so choose, as they are subscribers too, but how many people, how much time, and how many dollars went to develop Battlegrounds? Again, one might suggest it is ancillary to the game, and a poor allocation.SOE should have learned its lesson from Star Wars Galaxies. That development team fundamentally misunderstood the community's requests, and in an effort to address concerns about mechanics and gameplay issues, the team made a fatal flaw that sealed the decline and demise of that title: It fundamentally redesigned the game. Some loved the changes, but look at the population results. The money talks: the game died with CU/CU2. As a veteran of that experience, I am terrified that the development leadership is misunderstanding the decline in population.You ask, Amnerys, for people to express why people are pursuing cancellations. As an institutional leader, I've seen the "mass exodus" phenomenon before, and it tends to orbit around a central concept I think applies just as well here as in the real world:People voluntarily sign on to (read: subscribe to) things bigger than themselves because they have an expectation that the experience will meet their wants and needs. People stay parts of those groups, organizations, and products when their expectations are fulfilled with consistency. People abandon groups, organizations, and products 1.) when those expectations cease to be consistently fulfilled, or 2.) when a major, core expectation is breached seriously.I don't want a new interface. I don't want Battlegrounds. I don't want Station Cash. I don't want EQX. I don't want advertisments. I don't want corporate culture. I don't want to revolutionize EQ2 gameplay. I want the development team to fix the bugs, investigate and analyze and test and resolve major balance and gameplay mechanic issues, and to spend every possible waking moment of the rest of its time developing outstanding content that adheres to the premise of the EverQuest II title:A single adventurer, a few adventurers, a full group of adventurers, or a large raid of adventurers - the player's choice - undertaking daring and exciting quests, as part of an immersive and continuously-unfolding storyline that takes them through familiar and brand new environments, facing familiar and new challenges, to accomplish goals of varying difficulties with the promise that it will lead to more experience, more strength and skill, new and exciting items, and at the end of it all... MORE OF THE SAME. Because that's the very definition of an ever-quest. You have to keep working on that, and my central complaint about the direction of development for the past two years has been the seeming abandonment of that basic core concept that is the heart of EQ2.The further away from that EQ2 gets because of SOE corporate, misconceptions of the community, or somebody eating the wrong bagel in the morning meeting, the harder it's going to be to keep loyal subscribers coming back for more. There are much better ways to make a lot more money than dangling Station Cash in front of our faces.The development leadership needs to rediscover its respect for the community by rediscovering its respect for Norrath. I fear the leadership has forgotten the very storyline of this game. And that's why people are leaving... good people, loyal subscribers, and many of our friends and guildmates. Why are people cancelling?Because EverQuest II is getting less and less like EverQuest II. Work on that... not the UI.

GlitterPaws

07-31-2010, 03:55 AM

HOW is the SC button any different from the current SC button that appears when the EQ button is pressed? The real estate of the test button is smaller than the current button. The test button is tucked away in the lower right hand corner away from everything else. Hardly a "screaming in your face" presence. I don't know about all players but most action for my play is in screen center with some action up/down/left/right. I also scan the periphery and do not find myself concentrating on the lower right hand corner with great intensity or regularity.If folks are commenting about the Welcome screen and the new layout then simply hit ESC and move on as most of us already do.The new nav bar is nice. I like the selected buttons, a good general selection. The experience bar seems to have a lot of wasted space. Some of that space could be used for customized button sections. Perhaps the 'click to cure' button could find a home there. I have kept my experience bar/window at the top of the screen so this will take a bit to get used to....not too much time.What really distresses me with this update is the death of Gorowyn. I was dumbfounded when coming through the tunnel from the dock I found....nothing. The lifts and trams were gone. Movement was gone. The living, breathing ingenuity of the Sarnak race was gone. It is simply a gaping hole of dead air. Many times my characters have run up the engineer created paths to turn in relics and such and then happily caught the tram to the research assistant returning to the main platform and taking pleasure in the activity of the great city of Gorowyn. Our horns have dulled. Our spines collapse. Dried scales rustle about our feet as we move slowly, sorrowfully to perform the death ritual for our birth place.Please return the life to Gorowyn. Would it not have been easier and less painful to the Sarnak to simply place a directional sign or two to the spiral foot path?

Kordran

07-31-2010, 04:11 AM

I guess my only general comment about GU57 would be: where's the beef? I see a lot of rearranging-the-deck-chairs kind of stuff (new UI, different animations/spell effects, the ridiculous change to fighter heals, etc.) but I'm not really seeing a lot of substance here.So is GU57 all bun, lettuce and mayonaise or are we going to get some actual hamburger here at some point?

Myrien

07-31-2010, 11:32 AM

<cite>Sesketh@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote>Amnerys, you accurately state that the development team only has so many people, only has so much time, and only has so many resources. Rational minds accept and understand that, and we can all agree that the playerbase has a diversity of voices of varying passions. However, there is a commonality that runs through thread after thread, spanning years at a time. It is a fundamental principle, a basic request, and I for one join the throng of those very disappointed with the development team's lacking address of it:We don't want new mechanics and we don't want a different game. We want you to repair and improve mechanics where required and then give us expanded, quality, diverse content upon which to turn those mechanics, providing us with more and improved EverQuest II gameplay. Don't reinvent the game; strengthen the game.A new user interface has nothing to do with improving EverQuest II. You have a robust interface community. Open the doors wider, give them more tools, and let the community do that work. You're wasting people, time, and resources on an irrelevancy, and it's all too thinly veiled with the gigantic "Station Cash" button. Your PR skills can't be that bad. It just looks like profit over play.Battlegrounds, to me, has nothing to do with improving EverQuest II. You already created PvP for those that love it. Go ahead and expand the content for PvP if you so choose, as they are subscribers too, but how many people, how much time, and how many dollars went to develop Battlegrounds? Again, one might suggest it is ancillary to the game, and a poor allocation.SOE should have learned its lesson from Star Wars Galaxies. That development team fundamentally misunderstood the community's requests, and in an effort to address concerns about mechanics and gameplay issues, the team made a fatal flaw that sealed the decline and demise of that title: It fundamentally redesigned the game. Some loved the changes, but look at the population results. The money talks: the game died with CU/CU2. As a veteran of that experience, I am terrified that the development leadership is misunderstanding the decline in population.You ask, Amnerys, for people to express why people are pursuing cancellations. As an institutional leader, I've seen the "mass exodus" phenomenon before, and it tends to orbit around a central concept I think applies just as well here as in the real world:People voluntarily sign on to (read: subscribe to) things bigger than themselves because they have an expectation that the experience will meet their wants and needs. People stay parts of those groups, organizations, and products when their expectations are fulfilled with consistency. People abandon groups, organizations, and products 1.) when those expectations cease to be consistently fulfilled, or 2.) when a major, core expectation is breached seriously.I don't want a new interface. I don't want Battlegrounds. I don't want Station Cash. I don't want EQX. I don't want advertisments. I don't want corporate culture. I don't want to revolutionize EQ2 gameplay. I want the development team to fix the bugs, investigate and analyze and test and resolve major balance and gameplay mechanic issues, and to spend every possible waking moment of the rest of its time developing outstanding content that adheres to the premise of the EverQuest II title:A single adventurer, a few adventurers, a full group of adventurers, or a large raid of adventurers - the player's choice - undertaking daring and exciting quests, as part of an immersive and continuously-unfolding storyline that takes them through familiar and brand new environments, facing familiar and new challenges, to accomplish goals of varying difficulties with the promise that it will lead to more experience, more strength and skill, new and exciting items, and at the end of it all... MORE OF THE SAME. Because that's the very definition of an ever-quest. You have to keep working on that, and my central complaint about the direction of development for the past two years has been the seeming abandonment of that basic core concept that is the heart of EQ2.The further away from that EQ2 gets because of SOE corporate, misconceptions of the community, or somebody eating the wrong bagel in the morning meeting, the harder it's going to be to keep loyal subscribers coming back for more. There are much better ways to make a lot more money than dangling Station Cash in front of our faces.The development leadership needs to rediscover its respect for the community by rediscovering its respect for Norrath. I fear the leadership has forgotten the very storyline of this game. And that's why people are leaving... good people, loyal subscribers, and many of our friends and guildmates. Why are people cancelling?Because EverQuest II is getting less and less like EverQuest II. Work on that... not the UI.</blockquote>^^^ This is a fantastic post. It's a shame that the people who need to read and act appropriately on this post will probably not do so.

NorrinRadd

07-31-2010, 12:42 PM

Sesketh, you've stated quite eloquently what I think everyone wants to and/or tries to convey to the Developers of EQ2 in regards to the current and future direction of the game. I'm hoping that If they do nothing else they take your post to heart and redirect their energies in the manner you described from here on out.

Taldier

07-31-2010, 02:18 PM

<cite>Arandar@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote>I guess my only general comment about GU57 would be: where's the beef? I see a lot of rearranging-the-deck-chairs kind of stuff (new UI, different animations/spell effects, the ridiculous change to fighter heals, etc.) but I'm not really seeing a lot of substance here.So is GU57 all bun, lettuce and mayonaise or are we going to get some actual hamburger here at some point?</blockquote>Im sure they are all working double time to create new "hamburger meat" to sell on the Station Cash Marketplace.

Lantis

07-31-2010, 02:27 PM

My personal impression: EQ2 tends to have various types of game updates:- New content (zones/quests)- New features (voice, new map system, etc...)- Mechanics balancing- Bug squashingNow, I think a new type is just born:- Business and marketingTo me, the general feeling is that this whole GU is dedicated to the marketing department's wishes. The majority of those changes aren't made to improve the game for the current players, but to increase SOE's revenues, by pushing the game, as a whole, in a direction that is constantly getting farther away from the original game a lot of us joined and loved in the last years. F2P, SC button, SC content on merchants, simplified 1-20 spell/skill progression, changing the default characters to SOGA, revamping the spell FX (so far the playerbase seems divided on this one, I cannot comment myself as I haven't seen these yet). All of these are targeting a new, more profitable market. And it all ties up nicely (...) with a few other recent changes: disabling access to the original starting cities, the so-called "Golden Path" that seems to be the brainchild of the marketing department (I have a hard time believing that it was a developer who came up with such a name to describe a couple of tweaks surrounding a subset of the game content)This wouldn't be bad if it wasn't for the fact that a lot of those changes bring the game further away from its roots. Too many of these changes aren't improving the game for the current players, but are more meant to attract new players. And where the problem lies is that, the targeted audience is not the same one as the majority of the current EQ2 playerbase. The typical F2P/RMT player is a completely different beast than the ones that were attracted by EQ2 in its first few years of existence. Plus, the removal of the 14-days trial seems to imply that SOE wants to have any potential new player to shoot for the F2P version of the game. As if the "legacy" version was just that: a legacy feature, mostly meant to those already playing on it, or having friends they want to bring along, through the RAF program.What makes us even angrier is that, while these unpopular changes are being brought, a lot of important issues still remain, and seem to have been pushed down the list of priorities. Class balancing, broken spells/AAs, etc... The one class/mechanic change that targets the existing playerbase that I see is the fighter heal crit change. While I can see what SOE is trying to fix there, you have to admit that this fix is more like a patch than a real balance fix. By having one single exception to the +crit chance mechanics, you are going to confuse a lot of people (old and new players alike). How will you explain that "+crit chance is the chance for your spell and combat art to score a critical hit, EXCEPT if it's a heal and you are a fighter."? This will be confusing for sure.The one positive thing we've seen lately is unfortunately going vastly unnoticed and isn't related to GU57: looks like the Nagafen server upgrade is a major victory in the fight against lag. I can't wait to see how it will work out for us AB'ers. If it works as well as it did for Nagafen, then thumbs up.Bottom line: so far, GU57 is all about attracting a new, more profitable audience. Existing players: move along, nothing to be seen there. Too bad we might have to wait an additional three months (the increased development cycle - another debatable topic) to see anything that will cather to us.The playerbase did want a revamped UI. While we wanted features such as click2cure, we are being given an increased SC presence.The playerbase did want better marketing to attract new players. SOE tried to attract a different player type, and removed the 14-days trial.Aimed, and missed both times I think.

Morrias

07-31-2010, 02:52 PM

<cite>GlitterPaws wrote:</cite><blockquote>HOW is the SC button any different from the current SC button that appears when the EQ button is pressed? The real estate of the test button is smaller than the current button. The test button is tucked away in the lower right hand corner away from everything else. Hardly a "screaming in your face" presence. I don't know about all players but most action for my play is in screen center with some action up/down/left/right. I also scan the periphery and do not find myself concentrating on the lower right hand corner with great intensity or regularity.</blockquote>I dont know about anyone else but my whole problem with the SC button is that is DOES NOT belong on the exp bar, it just plain doesnt.. nor does the EQ2 button, they both need off the EXPERIENCE bar.. >.<I personally wouldnt care at all if it was in the new character window or its own button, but it has no place on the experience bar..I keep my xp bar in the upper left btw, so it is kinda in the middle of my screen up there.. o.o

Roslyn

07-31-2010, 03:29 PM

EQ2X doesn't bother me unless it uses up so much development time that the normal game suffers. Some could argue, that with this 'meatless' update, that's already happening. I do look forward to having something I can go to when I need a quick EQ2 fix without re-subbing. For the last four months I've been looking for another MMORPG anyway. The only thing that keeps me subbing to EQ2 at the moment is the great fluff this game has (city festivals, mushroom rings, SoL, etc). Unfortunately, that fluff might be going the way of SC, in which case I'll be extremely bored - and gone. Overall though, if Sony is capable of keeping EQ2X away from the other servers, I won't be bothered by it.The station button doesn't bother me either. I actually couldn't care less about the UI unless it breaks Profit, in which case I will no longer be playing my healer or any character that requires me to see an auto attack bar (so there goes my three lvl 90s.) That leaves leveling a spell caster. From a design standpoint, the UI looks fine, but I care about functionality. It's still lacking that.The thing I feel this game needs addressed is the complete lack of sub-80 groups. The game is incredibly top heavy, and the only time I see people doing lower level content is when they're boxing their SK and whichever toon needs to be powerleveled. This isn't a dramatic or exaggerated statement. If there were perhaps some benefit given to people who mentor within 10 levels of their group and do older content... I don't know.

Lantis

07-31-2010, 03:41 PM

<cite>Roslyn wrote:</cite><blockquote>The thing I feel this game needs addressed is the complete lack of sub-80 groups. The game is incredibly top heavy, and the only time I see people doing lower level content is when they're boxing their SK and whichever toon needs to be powerleveled. This isn't a dramatic or exaggerated statement. If there were perhaps some benefit given to people who mentor within 10 levels of their group and do older content... I don't know.</blockquote>I vaguely remember Smokejumper acknowledging this issue in an interview or a post, and mentioning that they had A Plan regarding this. Unfortunately, the Cylons, too, had A Plan. Look how it worked out. <img src="/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />

GrunEQ

07-31-2010, 09:27 PM

Off the top of my head - What's wrong and why I cancelled my last remaining account:1) Defaut character creation change2) Bad UI decisions that make huge Exp bars with SC button, and ignoring your player requests for click to cure, etc.3) Bad decsion to go F2P/P2P, which I am SURE will be brought to live servers soon, because you have created a demand for it.4) By not listening to pleas to advertize, fix problems, and instead add unwanted/undesirable features like BGs, LoN, SC.5) Crafting has practically been brought to their knees with SC and LoN and as much as I love them Moonlight Enchantments and City Festivals. Eventually there will be no need for crafters at all other than roleplay. God knows, Domino has done her best to make crafting desireable and fun.6) in total, you have changed the play experience so much it is not the game I love anymore. 7) SOE has turned a deaf ear and is unresponisve to it's player base, has been for a quite awhile, and is totally unapologetic about it.

d1anaw

07-31-2010, 11:56 PM

<cite>GrunEQ wrote:</cite><blockquote>Off the top of my head - What's wrong and why I cancelled my last remaining account:1) Defaut character creation change2) Bad UI decisions that make huge Exp bars with SC button, and ignoring your player requests for click to cure, etc.3) Bad decsion to go F2P/P2P, which I am SURE will be brought to live servers soon, because you have created a demand for it.4) By not listening to pleas to advertize, fix problems, and instead add unwanted/undesirable features like BGs, LoN, SC.5) Crafting has practically been brought to their knees with SC and LoN and as much as I love them Moonlight Enchantments and City Festivals. Eventually there will be no need for crafters at all other than roleplay. God knows, Domino has done her best to make crafting desireable and fun.6) in total, you have changed the play experience so much it is not the game I love anymore. 7) SOE has turned a deaf ear and is unresponisve to it's player base, has been for a quite awhile, and is totally unapologetic about it.</blockquote>Well if you don't like the game or the way it's being run, then quitting is exactly what you should be doing. Not sure I get why people feel the need to announce it to the world when they quit. It would be more effective to send an email directly to Sony. But if you don't like it, then you should not pay for it. As for the interface, I'm not a fan, most likely because I'm not used to it and I had to rearrange a bunch of stuff, which irritates the crap out of me. But it's majoring in the minors to get all worked up about it. Eventually I will get used to it and it will be diffiicult to remember what it was like before.

Nevynmysti

07-31-2010, 11:59 PM

Overall Feedback... hmmms.LIke the Area mapping thingy... haven't exeperienced it much but know its there. Like the changes to F10 functionability. I like that you were trying to give us a more modern UI.Dislike the fact that the best game I have ever played is being devauled because of a bottom line and limited work force. I see all these changes being about the "NEW" players, and have to agree with others... what about us that have been loyal paying subscribers for YEARS?I dislike not being able to be in game and not have advertising in my face. Part of why I quit Frearealms was because of all this rmt crap in the face... it breaks the illusion we are trying to create/live when we play.All Game Update 57 is to me is for EQ2Extended functionality. NOT SUBSCRIBER Servers... U want to use these things you brought out, fine. Use them were ther ment which would be in your new game EQ2 Extended. Not on the server I play.

Gladiolus

08-01-2010, 12:19 AM

I find the new UI rather intrusive. It's too loud and too brash for my liking. If I wanted to buy something from the marketplace I would do so, and that big ugly button in my way all the time isn't going to make me more likely to use it. There is far too much red for the view to be relaxing and I can't see myself sitting looking at it for hours as I've done in the past. Somehow the new UI keeps drawing my eyes back to it, and my focus keeps changing from where the action is to where the buttons are, which is tiring. Overall, I find the new UI uncomfortable.

Adaeon

08-01-2010, 01:23 AM

My wife and I have cancelled our accounts due to the inclusion of the Station Cash button, Marketplace items appearing on in game merchants, and being informed that both of these decisions were not open to debate by Rothgar in the UI thread.While we are aware that the number of SC items appearing on in-game merchants was reduced according to Smokejumper's posts, we are not prepared to tolerate any at all.Thank you for years of entertainment.

Vesai

08-01-2010, 01:39 AM

I am most upset by the alignment change honestly. I would like to think it's not directly a result of EQ2X but it is and therefore should be in this thread about GU57 which is when the alignment change will come in.I am a Swashbuckler who has chosen to live in exile for the Anashti miracles and blessings and until this point felt it was fair as any evil/good class would only have that option should they choose to go this way. GU57 turns this on it's head, basically all other dps classes other than swashie and conj will have the option of Anashti without the heavy pricetag of having to live in exile. This is a direct effect of F2P if you have logged onto EQ2X you will see what I mean the only scout class that can be made freely without any upgrades to the matrix are you guessed it swash or brig. Exile is of course my choice what do I get for that choice atm I get no shared bank, no alt loot two cities that want to kill me and I would happily go along my way knowing others are doing exactly as I am for some added benefit to their raiding guilds. Believe it or not there are a lot of players who do play this way and now I feel like we have been totally left out in the cold. I feel like EQ2X could have been implemented without sacrificing the choices of long time players.Please if you are going to make the alignment change have it include all classes or keep the lore intact and have it remain as it always has. There are other ways to do this without a sweeping alignment change that is both wrong in lore and current players personal decisions for whatever reason.

Iskandar

08-01-2010, 02:56 AM

While GU57 introduces a lot of changes to EQ2, it lacks the feel of a true GU and feels rather incomplete. The gameplay elements could have been introduced in one of the weekly patches just as easily. And as so many others have pointed out, most of the grand sweeping changes appear to be simply for the future benefit of the EQ2X servers rather than for the current game.To quote myself from the EQ2X thread, "Before you try to convert the game en masse into FreeQuest or EverRealms, look at what you already have... look at it because it's working. There are thousands of players who have stuck with EQ2, year after year. Look at what you have now, and what works -- because something is obviously working quite well, or we wouldn't all be here."

isest

08-01-2010, 09:53 AM

<cite>Xalmat wrote:</cite><blockquote><ul><li>Fighter heals can no longer critically heal.</li></ul>This is a disastrous change. Why didn't you do this back when you consolidated crits, potency, crit bonus, etc?<ul><li>Summoners: “Aqueous Stone” is now “Aqueous Soul” and no longer summons an item that grants water breathing. It now simply casts water breathing on the target.</li></ul>Please change it back.</blockquote>What is most disturbing about the fighter crit heals, from what I can see its for F2P. After all the only tank class is Guardian so it looks like they are trying to level the playing field for the tanks. I don't like this Nerf, and no red name anywhere has even said one thing about it. I would love to know why they felt the need to do this at this point.To me this entire update points at the extended servers, and I have to wonder why it even needs to hit the live ones.

Deson

08-01-2010, 11:41 AM

<cite>Xalmat wrote:</cite><blockquote>As has been discussed in the other thread, if you're going to turn 2/3 of classes to neutral alignment, you might as well make them all neutral. The ones that were picked to be neutral make absolutely no sense from a lore perspective, with the possible exception of Illusionist.</blockquote>This.<cite>Xalmat wrote:</cite><blockquote><ul><li>Fighter heals can no longer critically heal.</li></ul>This is a disastrous change. Why didn't you do this back when you consolidated crits, potency, crit bonus, etc?<ul><li>Summoners: “Aqueous Stone” is now “Aqueous Soul” and no longer summons an item that grants water breathing. It now simply casts water breathing on the target.</li></ul>Please change it back.</blockquote>And this.Reminds me though, why hasn't the defiler crystalized essence gotten the dark heart treatment? Also, if anything needs changed with summoners(all casters really), the level limited spells that used to generate items(i.e. mortality mark) need to have those limits removed.

TheSpin

08-01-2010, 02:46 PM

<cite>isest wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Xalmat wrote:</cite><blockquote><ul><li>Fighter heals can no longer critically heal.</li></ul>This is a disastrous change. Why didn't you do this back when you consolidated crits, potency, crit bonus, etc?<ul><li>Summoners: “Aqueous Stone” is now “Aqueous Soul” and no longer summons an item that grants water breathing. It now simply casts water breathing on the target.</li></ul>Please change it back.</blockquote>What is most disturbing about the fighter crit heals, from what I can see its for F2P. After all the only tank class is Guardian so it looks like they are trying to level the playing field for the tanks. I don't like this Nerf, and no red name anywhere has even said one thing about it. I would love to know why they felt the need to do this at this point.To me this entire update points at the extended servers, and I have to wonder why it even needs to hit the live ones. </blockquote>I can't possibly see how nerfing the classes you have to pay for on EQ2X would be a change to favor EQ2X. If anything they should make the paid classes even more powerful to give you even more reason to purchase them.Fighter heals simply got way out of hand. A raid geared berserker going into Sentinals Fate instances and soloing the entire thing in offensive stance... pulling multiple encounters at a time? If that doesn't scream broken then what does?I'm really torn about the class thing....I have a hard time wrapping the idea around the majority of classes being neutral. I think the non neutral classes should be given a few extra perks if they have to face such discrimination... especially the rogues because I feel like they just aren't as fun to play as they used to be. They used to be the top soloing melee classes, but now fighters can both dish out the pain and take a lot more of it.

MysidiaDrakkenbane

08-01-2010, 02:52 PM

Yep. If you're going to toss out lore, fine. Then complete it with ALL the classes, not just a random few. Assassin is neutral? Interesting... and is there a reason why a Paladin can't start out in Neriak? You're Crusading for Hate.<cite>Xalmat wrote:</cite><blockquote>As has been discussed in the other thread, if you're going to turn 2/3 of classes to neutral alignment, you might as well make them all neutral. The ones that were picked to be neutral make absolutely no sense from a lore perspective, with the possible exception of Illusionist.</blockquote>

MysidiaDrakkenbane

08-01-2010, 02:53 PM

<cite>Xalmat wrote:</cite><blockquote><ul><li>Fighter heals can no longer critically heal.</li></ul>This is a disastrous change. Why didn't you do this back when you consolidated crits, potency, crit bonus, etc?</blockquote>What's to be done with the Crusader AA line, then? This makes it dead in the water.

TheSpin

08-01-2010, 03:19 PM

<cite>MysidiaDrakkenbane wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Xalmat wrote:</cite><blockquote><ul><li>Fighter heals can no longer critically heal.</li></ul>This is a disastrous change. Why didn't you do this back when you consolidated crits, potency, crit bonus, etc?</blockquote>What's to be done with the Crusader AA line, then? This makes it dead in the water.</blockquote>Crusader AA line had heal crits removed a long time ago. The AA that increases base healing on a percentage of your strength is staying in I believe.

MysidiaDrakkenbane

08-01-2010, 04:17 PM

<cite>TheSpin wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>MysidiaDrakkenbane wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Xalmat wrote:</cite><blockquote><ul><li>Fighter heals can no longer critically heal.</li></ul>This is a disastrous change. Why didn't you do this back when you consolidated crits, potency, crit bonus, etc?</blockquote>What's to be done with the Crusader AA line, then? This makes it dead in the water.</blockquote>Crusader AA line had heal crits removed a long time ago. The AA that increases base healing on a percentage of your strength is staying in I believe.</blockquote>So then they're going to put a cap on the strength to heal ratio, then? If yes, they might want to look at fighter itemization.

Xethren

08-02-2010, 11:28 AM

1. First off: I like the new UI. It has a better color, feels more modern, and the consolidations make for less windows having to be opened and keyed for. The merged Charater and Inventory window is well done. I like the new XP bar and the buttons on either side that bring up windows with a click. Those that whine about the SC button you can still hide the xp bar window, but it will take the buttons with it.2. BUG- On character selection, choosing Shadowknight class doesnt show the armor, only the wire frame of the armor.3. BUG- GPU shadows and/or new spell effects are causing critical game lockups. I went to Kylong to test the new spell effects and the game was locking up for upwards of 10 seconds, sometimes one lock after another occured. After I turned shadows off the game ran fine. Casting a spell appeared to also cause a lockup with the shadows on, so there is probably an incompatibility between GPU shadows and the new particle effects somewhere. This was with Shader 3 enabled.4. Gorowyn- the surveyors must have brought in the construction crane from Freeport because all the plaforms are on two even levels now. The city cant be streamlined much more than this lol. Good change for those that were still having navigation issues.5. The streamlined character creator is well done. Those that dont like the 'default to SOGA model' thing, there is a Change Appearance button on the right side <img src="/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />6. The combat animations from myself and mobs seem to have been slowed down slightly, but look more fluid and realistic. Good job!

Cecie

08-02-2010, 11:45 AM

Kelethin Travel ChangeNot liking the change to the teleporters in Kelethin. You used to right-click, select destination from the list, then you would be instantly ported there. Now, you click - wait for the loading bar - select destination from a map - then do a complete zone out-zone in process. I could just run to most destinations faster than using the teleporters now. What's the deal?

Yimway

08-02-2010, 11:48 AM

<cite>MysidiaDrakkenbane wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>TheSpin wrote:</cite><blockquote>Crusader AA line had heal crits removed a long time ago. The AA that increases base healing on a percentage of your strength is staying in I believe.</blockquote>So then they're going to put a cap on the strength to heal ratio, then? If yes, they might want to look at fighter itemization.</blockquote>No, Potency remains uncapped, so the str/heal conversion remains uncapped.You simply will no longer crit on the converted amount, then multiply it by crit bonus.I'm sure the reason things have happened this way was cause the guy that consolidated crits was no longer at soe durring the last 3 months of beta, and someone new had to jump in and try to learn the job, finish the work, and try to make previously promised changes he wasn't apart of.Now that Xelgad is more up to speed, it isn't surprising (atleast to me) that he's making some changes to classes where they were exceeding reasonable outputs on non-archtype core abilities (fighters healing, priests dpsing, etc).But, just cause fighters lose crit heals, doesn't mean your heals are unmodifiable, you simply have a higher weight on potency if you are a fighter with heals going forward.

Xethren

08-02-2010, 11:57 AM

The Coercer particle effects are nice and pretty, with runes floating around and flashes and color. I especially like the little white flashes on your forhead and the mob you have charmed! Makes it feel like it is under your control.However the Berserker effects are pretty boring. Nothing but yellows and reds, a little streak here, another one there., maybe a flash. hopefully these can be improved <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />

Skeez1e

08-02-2010, 04:18 PM

I bought a horse in Qeynos last night, hadn't realized the SC mounts were available on the vendors on Test til I did that - wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, given all the related feedback. I liked that the SC items sorted like the rest and the only thing I did think was the SC icon could be a bit smaller, looks out of place as it is. Glad to see the possibilty that Test might have the new SC items - there's no doubt I'm in favor of impulse shopping!Edited because I forgot! I was glad to see the change to the zoning to the Marred Plateau instances.

Valdaglerion

08-02-2010, 04:36 PM

Honestly, I think the LORE relating to races and classes started to get tossed out with the betrayal mechanic and got seriously hosed with the Race change potion. At this point it is nothing more than a slap in the face to the few classes being restricted now. As a summoner who gets over looked on about every kind of mage love this is another twist of a rusty knife.Just change all classes to neutral and lets update the mechanic of betrayal. You get to pick good or evil to start and if you want to betray you shouldnt have to change classes or lose masters. It has always boggled me anyway. Why would another faction want to recruit a high end power of an opposite faction then lose all the reasons they recruited them in the first place?? Wait, I thought this was a high level XX class toon from Freeport, now they are a YY class with no knowledge and utterly junk skills? Thrown them back and try over . . .Seems the stage we are in the game this mechanic change makes sense, at least to me.

KerowynnKaotic

08-02-2010, 06:45 PM

CHARACTER CREATION<ul><li>More classes are now neutral.</li><li>Neutral: Troubador, Dirge, Ranger, Assassin, Templar, Inquisitor, Fury, Warden, Coercer, Illusionist, Wizard, Warlock, Bruiser, Monk, Guardian, and Berserker</li><li>Good: Swashbuckler, Mystic, Conjurer, and Paladin</li><li>Evil: Brigand, Defiler, Necromancer, and Shadowknight</li></ul>I've taken a while to think on this 'cause I didn't want to just get mad and say something I'd regret or not .. But, in the view of continuing to 'help' all these, apparently dumb & dimwitted, new players coming in and what not .. Why not just go back to EQ1's class system? You're pretty much there with this change, already. Lord knows you people have trouble with the 24 classes and have watered them down so much through the years till they are barely a different class in some cases and if you do differentiate the class it's to the point of negating the alternative class(es), anyway... Original EQ classes:<ul><li>Neutral: Bard, Druid, Mage, Monk, Wizard, Rogue, Cleric, Enchanter, Shaman & Warrior</li><li>Good: Ranger & Paladin</li><li>Evil: Necro & Shadowknight. </li></ul>Now, am I serious on this? Eh .. truthfully, I'm not sure. The only thing I am sure about is that when my Subs come up for renewal next year that I'll be changing them to a Month to Month basis, assuming I renew them at all. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/c30b4198e0907b23b8246bdd52aa1c3c.gif" border="0" />But at the very least .. maybe the Devs should just consider making all classes neutral except Paladin and Shadowknight, which should retain their Good vs Evil status & give each City Faction a 'role-model' of sorts. And, making Good vs Evil simply a matter of choice on how we do & see things for our chosen City. You know ... people are evil or good by their actions .. not their titles. That kind of thing. *shrug*

Valdaglerion

08-03-2010, 04:43 AM

<cite>Sesketh@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote>Amnerys, you accurately state that the development team only has so many people, only has so much time, and only has so many resources. Rational minds accept and understand that, and we can all agree that the playerbase has a diversity of voices of varying passions. However, there is a commonality that runs through thread after thread, spanning years at a time. It is a fundamental principle, a basic request, and I for one join the throng of those very disappointed with the development team's lacking address of it:We don't want new mechanics and we don't want a different game. We want you to repair and improve mechanics where required and then give us expanded, quality, diverse content upon which to turn those mechanics, providing us with more and improved EverQuest II gameplay. Don't reinvent the game; strengthen the game.A new user interface has nothing to do with improving EverQuest II. You have a robust interface community. Open the doors wider, give them more tools, and let the community do that work. You're wasting people, time, and resources on an irrelevancy, and it's all too thinly veiled with the gigantic "Station Cash" button. Your PR skills can't be that bad. It just looks like profit over play.Battlegrounds, to me, has nothing to do with improving EverQuest II. You already created PvP for those that love it. Go ahead and expand the content for PvP if you so choose, as they are subscribers too, but how many people, how much time, and how many dollars went to develop Battlegrounds? Again, one might suggest it is ancillary to the game, and a poor allocation.SOE should have learned its lesson from Star Wars Galaxies. That development team fundamentally misunderstood the community's requests, and in an effort to address concerns about mechanics and gameplay issues, the team made a fatal flaw that sealed the decline and demise of that title: It fundamentally redesigned the game. Some loved the changes, but look at the population results. The money talks: the game died with CU/CU2. As a veteran of that experience, I am terrified that the development leadership is misunderstanding the decline in population.You ask, Amnerys, for people to express why people are pursuing cancellations. As an institutional leader, I've seen the "mass exodus" phenomenon before, and it tends to orbit around a central concept I think applies just as well here as in the real world:People voluntarily sign on to (read: subscribe to) things bigger than themselves because they have an expectation that the experience will meet their wants and needs. People stay parts of those groups, organizations, and products when their expectations are fulfilled with consistency. People abandon groups, organizations, and products 1.) when those expectations cease to be consistently fulfilled, or 2.) when a major, core expectation is breached seriously.I don't want a new interface. I don't want Battlegrounds. I don't want Station Cash. I don't want EQX. I don't want advertisments. I don't want corporate culture. I don't want to revolutionize EQ2 gameplay. I want the development team to fix the bugs, investigate and analyze and test and resolve major balance and gameplay mechanic issues, and to spend every possible waking moment of the rest of its time developing outstanding content that adheres to the premise of the EverQuest II title:A single adventurer, a few adventurers, a full group of adventurers, or a large raid of adventurers - the player's choice - undertaking daring and exciting quests, as part of an immersive and continuously-unfolding storyline that takes them through familiar and brand new environments, facing familiar and new challenges, to accomplish goals of varying difficulties with the promise that it will lead to more experience, more strength and skill, new and exciting items, and at the end of it all... MORE OF THE SAME. Because that's the very definition of an ever-quest. You have to keep working on that, and my central complaint about the direction of development for the past two years has been the seeming abandonment of that basic core concept that is the heart of EQ2.The further away from that EQ2 gets because of SOE corporate, misconceptions of the community, or somebody eating the wrong bagel in the morning meeting, the harder it's going to be to keep loyal subscribers coming back for more. There are much better ways to make a lot more money than dangling Station Cash in front of our faces.The development leadership needs to rediscover its respect for the community by rediscovering its respect for Norrath. I fear the leadership has forgotten the very storyline of this game. And that's why people are leaving... good people, loyal subscribers, and many of our friends and guildmates. Why are people cancelling?Because EverQuest II is getting less and less like EverQuest II. Work on that... not the UI.</blockquote>Really valid points in this post about allocating resources appropriately and letting the mod community do its part where you dont need to.Let's face it. The only reason the UI rework was necessary was to make the Station Cash marketplace front and center. I absolutely am a fan of Rothgar and the work he adds to the game but honestly I havent seen anything in the new UI yet that improves in any way over the custom UI I work with now and am quite concerned this is going to break parts of my UI that will take additional time from me and others to fix.The player base has been asking for years to be included on the priority list and know whats on the boards. Honestly, we dont even need specifics. It could be as simple as :<ul><li>Fighter Revamp</li><li>UI Revamp</li><li>Introduction of F2P model</li><li>Extend SC Marketplace</li><li>Elude to a much broader race and class consolidation to follow</li></ul><div>We could have stopped you from wasting that time and pointed you in the directions we wanted you to focus on and would have been open to discussing new subscription plans based on things people have asked for now for years.</div><div><ul><li>Upcharge for additional character slots</li><li>Upcharges for additional bank and inventory slots</li><li>Ability to log in multiple toons from same account</li><li>Ability to link multiple accounts to pass items from one account to another</li></ul></div><div><ul><li>Fix broken quests</li><li>Stop removing game content</li><li>Continue interesting lore lines with additional questing options</li><li>Scale dungeons to play style not level</li><li>Stop reworking things which arent broken and thereby removing content</li></ul><div>There has been way too much focus on the new player experience and honestly, I have yet to see 1 advertisement to attract a new player in the last 12 months since SOE decided they needed to spend tons of dev time reworking content that we power level alts through in a matter of hours anyway. Very poor use of time. </div><div></div></div>

isest

08-03-2010, 08:37 AM

<cite>Artemiz@The Bazaar wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Sesketh@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote>Amnerys, you accurately state that the development team only has so many people, only has so much time, and only has so many resources. Rational minds accept and understand that, and we can all agree that the playerbase has a diversity of voices of varying passions. However, there is a commonality that runs through thread after thread, spanning years at a time. It is a fundamental principle, a basic request, and I for one join the throng of those very disappointed with the development team's lacking address of it:We don't want new mechanics and we don't want a different game. We want you to repair and improve mechanics where required and then give us expanded, quality, diverse content upon which to turn those mechanics, providing us with more and improved EverQuest II gameplay. Don't reinvent the game; strengthen the game.A new user interface has nothing to do with improving EverQuest II. You have a robust interface community. Open the doors wider, give them more tools, and let the community do that work. You're wasting people, time, and resources on an irrelevancy, and it's all too thinly veiled with the gigantic "Station Cash" button. Your PR skills can't be that bad. It just looks like profit over play.Battlegrounds, to me, has nothing to do with improving EverQuest II. You already created PvP for those that love it. Go ahead and expand the content for PvP if you so choose, as they are subscribers too, but how many people, how much time, and how many dollars went to develop Battlegrounds? Again, one might suggest it is ancillary to the game, and a poor allocation.SOE should have learned its lesson from Star Wars Galaxies. That development team fundamentally misunderstood the community's requests, and in an effort to address concerns about mechanics and gameplay issues, the team made a fatal flaw that sealed the decline and demise of that title: It fundamentally redesigned the game. Some loved the changes, but look at the population results. The money talks: the game died with CU/CU2. As a veteran of that experience, I am terrified that the development leadership is misunderstanding the decline in population.You ask, Amnerys, for people to express why people are pursuing cancellations. As an institutional leader, I've seen the "mass exodus" phenomenon before, and it tends to orbit around a central concept I think applies just as well here as in the real world:People voluntarily sign on to (read: subscribe to) things bigger than themselves because they have an expectation that the experience will meet their wants and needs. People stay parts of those groups, organizations, and products when their expectations are fulfilled with consistency. People abandon groups, organizations, and products 1.) when those expectations cease to be consistently fulfilled, or 2.) when a major, core expectation is breached seriously.I don't want a new interface. I don't want Battlegrounds. I don't want Station Cash. I don't want EQX. I don't want advertisments. I don't want corporate culture. I don't want to revolutionize EQ2 gameplay. I want the development team to fix the bugs, investigate and analyze and test and resolve major balance and gameplay mechanic issues, and to spend every possible waking moment of the rest of its time developing outstanding content that adheres to the premise of the EverQuest II title:A single adventurer, a few adventurers, a full group of adventurers, or a large raid of adventurers - the player's choice - undertaking daring and exciting quests, as part of an immersive and continuously-unfolding storyline that takes them through familiar and brand new environments, facing familiar and new challenges, to accomplish goals of varying difficulties with the promise that it will lead to more experience, more strength and skill, new and exciting items, and at the end of it all... MORE OF THE SAME. Because that's the very definition of an ever-quest. You have to keep working on that, and my central complaint about the direction of development for the past two years has been the seeming abandonment of that basic core concept that is the heart of EQ2.The further away from that EQ2 gets because of SOE corporate, misconceptions of the community, or somebody eating the wrong bagel in the morning meeting, the harder it's going to be to keep loyal subscribers coming back for more. There are much better ways to make a lot more money than dangling Station Cash in front of our faces.The development leadership needs to rediscover its respect for the community by rediscovering its respect for Norrath. I fear the leadership has forgotten the very storyline of this game. And that's why people are leaving... good people, loyal subscribers, and many of our friends and guildmates. Why are people cancelling?Because EverQuest II is getting less and less like EverQuest II. Work on that... not the UI.</blockquote>Really valid points in this post about allocating resources appropriately and letting the mod community do its part where you dont need to.Let's face it. The only reason the UI rework was necessary was to make the Station Cash marketplace front and center. I absolutely am a fan of Rothgar and the work he adds to the game but honestly I havent seen anything in the new UI yet that improves in any way over the custom UI I work with now and am quite concerned this is going to break parts of my UI that will take additional time from me and others to fix.The player base has been asking for years to be included on the priority list and know whats on the boards. Honestly, we dont even need specifics. It could be as simple as :<ul><li>Fighter Revamp</li><li>UI Revamp</li><li>Introduction of F2P model</li><li>Extend SC Marketplace</li><li>Elude to a much broader race and class consolidation to follow</li></ul><div>We could have stopped you from wasting that time and pointed you in the directions we wanted you to focus on and would have been open to discussing new subscription plans based on things people have asked for now for years.</div><div><ul><li>Upcharge for additional character slots</li><li>Upcharges for additional bank and inventory slots</li><li>Ability to log in multiple toons from same account</li><li>Ability to link multiple accounts to pass items from one account to another</li></ul></div><div><ul><li>Fix broken quests</li><li>Stop removing game content</li><li>Continue interesting lore lines with additional questing options</li><li>Scale dungeons to play style not level</li><li>Stop reworking things which arent broken and thereby removing content</li></ul><div>There has been way too much focus on the new player experience and honestly, I have yet to see 1 advertisement to attract a new player in the last 12 months since SOE decided they needed to spend tons of dev time reworking content that we power level alts through in a matter of hours anyway. Very poor use of time. </div><div></div></div></blockquote>I will be quite honest here. I have guilded many new toons over the past 2 years. All on new accounts. However these new account belonged to guess who, vets who wanted more toon slots.In the past 2 years, I have never guilded a person who was new to EQ2. If anybody told me they guilded a new person my eybrows would raise up and I would go what!!! New players, I find this funny. Were 6 years old and getting older, most folks came and left for various reasons, you cant even find a box for this game on store shelves, except the xpac. and only then at best buy. I honestly don't think were getting many new players. Once again sacrificing your vets to get potential new customers who don't exist. This entire thinking process is flawed.

MysidiaDrakkenbane

08-03-2010, 10:14 AM

If you're going to make classes like Assassin neutral, there's no reason why Paladins can't exist in an evil city. (Crusader for Hate, for instance.)Just do away with alignments all together. It's obvious that, as the game progresses, the veil of "good" and "evil" was just for show to begin with and it wasn't about alignment, but more wi"th the way you survived the Shattering.As for this: "Amnerys, you accurately state that the development team only has so many people, only has so much time, and only has so many resources." ... if they stopped firing developers to begin with, that wouldn't be an issue. Just sayin.

Whilhelmina

08-03-2010, 10:41 AM

<cite>Jesdyr@Unrest wrote:</cite><blockquote>Comment about the overall GU -This GU does nothing for the veteran players aside from cause them unneeded inconveniances by breaking thier current custom UIs. It use to be we could at least HOPE that making the new player experiance better would help keep new blood in the game. Sadly this will no longer be the case so that benefit is gone.</blockquote>What he said<cite>Sesketh@Everfrost wrote:</cite><blockquote>Amnerys, you accurately state that the development team only has so many people, only has so much time, and only has so many resources. Rational minds accept and understand that, and we can all agree that the playerbase has a diversity of voices of varying passions. However, there is a commonality that runs through thread after thread, spanning years at a time. It is a fundamental principle, a basic request, and I for one join the throng of those very disappointed with the development team's lacking address of it:We don't want new mechanics and we don't want a different game. We want you to repair and improve mechanics where required and then give us expanded, quality, diverse content upon which to turn those mechanics, providing us with more and improved EverQuest II gameplay. Don't reinvent the game; strengthen the game.A new user interface has nothing to do with improving EverQuest II. You have a robust interface community. Open the doors wider, give them more tools, and let the community do that work. You're wasting people, time, and resources on an irrelevancy, and it's all too thinly veiled with the gigantic "Station Cash" button. Your PR skills can't be that bad. It just looks like profit over play.Battlegrounds, to me, has nothing to do with improving EverQuest II. You already created PvP for those that love it. Go ahead and expand the content for PvP if you so choose, as they are subscribers too, but how many people, how much time, and how many dollars went to develop Battlegrounds? Again, one might suggest it is ancillary to the game, and a poor allocation.SOE should have learned its lesson from Star Wars Galaxies. That development team fundamentally misunderstood the community's requests, and in an effort to address concerns about mechanics and gameplay issues, the team made a fatal flaw that sealed the decline and demise of that title: It fundamentally redesigned the game. Some loved the changes, but look at the population results. The money talks: the game died with CU/CU2. As a veteran of that experience, I am terrified that the development leadership is misunderstanding the decline in population.You ask, Amnerys, for people to express why people are pursuing cancellations. As an institutional leader, I've seen the "mass exodus" phenomenon before, and it tends to orbit around a central concept I think applies just as well here as in the real world:People voluntarily sign on to (read: subscribe to) things bigger than themselves because they have an expectation that the experience will meet their wants and needs. People stay parts of those groups, organizations, and products when their expectations are fulfilled with consistency. People abandon groups, organizations, and products 1.) when those expectations cease to be consistently fulfilled, or 2.) when a major, core expectation is breached seriously.I don't want a new interface. I don't want Battlegrounds. I don't want Station Cash. I don't want EQX. I don't want advertisments. I don't want corporate culture. I don't want to revolutionize EQ2 gameplay. I want the development team to fix the bugs, investigate and analyze and test and resolve major balance and gameplay mechanic issues, and to spend every possible waking moment of the rest of its time developing outstanding content that adheres to the premise of the EverQuest II title:A single adventurer, a few adventurers, a full group of adventurers, or a large raid of adventurers - the player's choice - undertaking daring and exciting quests, as part of an immersive and continuously-unfolding storyline that takes them through familiar and brand new environments, facing familiar and new challenges, to accomplish goals of varying difficulties with the promise that it will lead to more experience, more strength and skill, new and exciting items, and at the end of it all... MORE OF THE SAME. Because that's the very definition of an ever-quest. You have to keep working on that, and my central complaint about the direction of development for the past two years has been the seeming abandonment of that basic core concept that is the heart of EQ2.The further away from that EQ2 gets because of SOE corporate, misconceptions of the community, or somebody eating the wrong bagel in the morning meeting, the harder it's going to be to keep loyal subscribers coming back for more. There are much better ways to make a lot more money than dangling Station Cash in front of our faces.The development leadership needs to rediscover its respect for the community by rediscovering its respect for Norrath. I fear the leadership has forgotten the very storyline of this game. And that's why people are leaving... good people, loyal subscribers, and many of our friends and guildmates. Why are people cancelling?Because EverQuest II is getting less and less like EverQuest II. Work on that... not the UI.</blockquote>And what she said too, and better written than what I could have written myself in my broken english

Juravael

08-03-2010, 11:13 AM

<cite>Transen wrote:</cite><blockquote>I think I need to have a seat <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/e8a506dc4ad763aca51bec4ca7dc8560.gif" border="0" /><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v258/Transen/EQ2%20photos/having-a-seat.jpg" /></blockquote>I saw this too when I was on Test and was very pleased. I am also pleased with the new spell effects and audio that I have seen so far.<img src="/eq2/images/smilies/e8a506dc4ad763aca51bec4ca7dc8560.gif" border="0" />Overall though I am not pleased with the general direction that the game seems to be moving in since GU#56. Like many folks have pointed out there are several "key" things that players want to see in the default UI such as Click to Cure for example. It is the little things like this that have been looked over by the Devs even though many of us have been asking for this feature for a very long time now.As far as the new EQ2 Extended goes I do not see any issues with this after I read over the pricing and what people will get for the different pricing plans. I actually think that it may bring some new folks to Norrath however I do wonder if it will bring new blood to the subscription servers that currently exist?

Murryha

08-03-2010, 11:14 AM

Constructive comments..I popped onto Test to take a look at this.Please put the SC advertisements back the way they were. We know about it. No need to rub our noses in it. Don't short change or insult your players. Those interested in this feature are smart enough to find it. Really they are.It would be appreciated if Dev focus would at least consider adding in some of the options that have been frequently requested by players for some time (i.e., a "click to cure" option would be greatly appreciated due to the "cure bot demand" currently in game)./erases all the personal rant stuff about how these UI changes really do nothing to improve gameplay for anyone, but are extremely helpful to the SC marketing offices./goes to check in hopes that those wonderful individuals who create, maintain and update the custom UI's are at work to override these changes. Bless you all!

NrthnStar5

08-03-2010, 11:57 AM

Is there an estimated launch date for GU 57?

drakkenshie

08-11-2010, 10:59 AM

Having played on test for a bit, a few comments:The XP bar is pretty terrible. It just eats way too much space. The SC button is pretty bad in itself, but that's really not the biggest problem: it is just ugly.The new spell and combat effects: wow, these are really terrible. In the current game I can tell what other players are casting visuall, and that's very important in a fight for me. It also looks really nice. The new effects are ugly, too small, and I can't tell what they are. The animation is just bad. I really, really hope these changes never go live. They are just really bad.The minimap may have reduced some screen clutter, but it is itself highly cluttered now. I'd like the option to keep the old one or at least turn some things off. The icons for quest NPCs and ROIs to me were hard to see and just blended in with the background in several areas.The clock should be a seperate window.The new character screen (C) is nice. However I much prefer the old seperate windows. I frequently make use of two of those screens at the same time and now I can't. Can we have three windows? The old two available for remapping and the new one for those who are OK with it?The hotkeys/hotbars are too far apart. One reason people use custom UIs is to get them nested together a little closer to use less screen real estate. It would also be nice if you did something like make a hotbar size 34, if all new ones would also be that size. Not a huge big deal, just a neat feature.New F10 command: I really like this. This is one new feature I've wanted for a long time. However, I really wish it did not block out the windows content. I find it far preferable to be able to see the content of the windows when I'm moving them than to just have black squares. This is particular true of hotbars where the content is how I know which one I'm moving and where I want to move it. Not sure if this is an easy fix or not but something I'd like to see changed. Otherwise I really like F10, move, cycle back.Station Cash in vendor windows. This is pretty bad. We have a /marketplace windows for buying things if we want. Putting that stuff in the game ruins immersion and will no doubt lead to mistakes. I personally hate F2P and to be honest I see it as a failed business plan for EQ2. But at least if we have it, can we keep it off live so it doesn't look like a TV sitcom?Otherwise the new UI seems pretty clean, and I hope the new shader 3 options indicate that shader 3 will eventually be fixed. As it stands it still seems to have missing or incorrect colors and textures.

ccarro

08-17-2010, 09:34 PM

The new key mappings are horrible. The only one that makes sense is the 'C' for the character window. (imo, this should have been mapped to 'I' as the inventory window, then 'C' kept as "crawl". Oh, and seriously.....the big "Station Cash button on the far right bottom of the screen?!?! Seriously? Get rid of all this Station Cash crap cluttering our screens! It's all over the welcome screen and the merchants, we dont need a big ole button for the garbage too.With all the Custom UI's out there, and all the feedback given to what players actually want why would you spend all this time working on a new UI and leave ALL THESE FEATURES OUT!I would love to see what this game could be like if developers actually started listening to what the players like and stopped pushing real money transactions on us everywhere we look.Also, Some of the in zone travel takes you in circles before taking you to your destination. This is horrible. I flew from Toxx in SF to Eye of dartain and literally flew in circles 3 times (flight time was so long I did a /exit from the game)

lemey

08-17-2010, 10:02 PM

tbh the reason all my accts are entering cancelation after 57 hits is simple, EQ2 (note not EQ2X but rather EQ2 subscriber variant) now has more promanent RMT than half the F2P games i have actually played which is frankly insulting. The point that tipped me over the edge was having it on merchants the clearest violation of smeds "promise" that RMT would not affect my gaming if i didnt want it to and now it will frequently... you have EQ2X (soon) for that crap yet you ram it even harder down our necks than ever before? you need my money that badly? hate to disapoint you but this level of greed will bring this game down. so far just from me alone this push has cost you £30 a month, enjoy not having it, you realy earned it.

Gumshun

08-18-2010, 11:05 AM

Dear whiney gamer01. Take a look around the MMO world for a second? Notice what's changed in the MMO Community in the last 2 or so years? F2P MMO games are now EVERYWHERE and gaming industries that once held the majority of the market find themselves not only unable to meet their plans for future growth but no longer meeting their operation costs. This is what happens when there is saturation. And while you whine that you hate everything they're doing now these people are doing everything they can to find a way to pump more money into the system to keep it going for you. I know that Sony is no where near running out of money, but a business is not a business if it cannot make a profit and keep itself running on it's own revenue and with the losses that Blizzard and Sony have seen in the last 3 years I'm sure that these changes won't be the last of the changes made to combat that struggle. This is the progression of Everquest II and has been for some time now. It will continue regardless of your whining. It's what the development and production team have to do to keep the jobs they have and continue to keep this game alive. The changes they are making are changes that have been proven to generate money and increase subscriptions. Dear Dev Team,Thanks for the efforts.

Gaige

08-18-2010, 12:29 PM

<cite>Gumshun wrote:</cite><blockquote>This is the progression of Everquest II and has been for some time now. It will continue regardless of your whining. It's what the development and production team have to do to keep the jobs they have and continue to keep this game alive. The changes they are making are changes that have been proven to generate money and increase subscriptions. </blockquote>So I'm sure they just forgot to announce the F2P server for the original EQ then, right?

isest

08-18-2010, 12:35 PM

<cite>Gumshun wrote:</cite><blockquote>Dear whiney gamer01. Take a look around the MMO world for a second? Notice what's changed in the MMO Community in the last 2 or so years? F2P MMO games are now EVERYWHERE and gaming industries that once held the majority of the market find themselves not only unable to meet their plans for future growth but no longer meeting their operation costs. This is what happens when there is saturation. And while you whine that you hate everything they're doing now these people are doing everything they can to find a way to pump more money into the system to keep it going for you. I know that Sony is no where near running out of money, but a business is not a business if it cannot make a profit and keep itself running on it's own revenue and with the losses that Blizzard and Sony have seen in the last 3 years I'm sure that these changes won't be the last of the changes made to combat that struggle. This is the progression of Everquest II and has been for some time now. It will continue regardless of your whining. It's what the development and production team have to do to keep the jobs they have and continue to keep this game alive. The changes they are making are changes that have been proven to generate money and increase subscriptions. Dear Dev Team,Thanks for the efforts.</blockquote>Just because it work for turbine in ddo does not meant it will work with eq2. In fact over the past week 5 of the free to play games folded up shop with them announcing this over at mmorpg.I'm just saying that putting your eggs in the free to play shop, might or might not work, and just because one company who was failing pulled the rabbit out of the hat does not mean that we can get it right here.Also you got to ask yourself why they not tried this for vanguard of for eq1 both of those are struggling as well. Why take you top gross product and star messing with it, and call it an experiment.

Cyliena

08-18-2010, 12:48 PM

Finished running the DLW series last night--why were the werewolves completely removed from the zone (unless I'm very blind)? That was the only place to find them prior to about level 60. =

EndevorX

08-18-2010, 03:47 PM

<cite>drakkenshield wrote:</cite><blockquote>Having played on test for a bit, a few comments:The XP bar is pretty terrible. It just eats way too much space. The SC button is pretty bad in itself, but that's really not the biggest problem: it is just ugly.The new spell and combat effects: wow, these are really terrible. In the current game I can tell what other players are casting visuall, and that's very important in a fight for me. It also looks really nice. The new effects are ugly, too small, and I can't tell what they are. The animation is just bad. I really, really hope these changes never go live. They are just really bad.The minimap may have reduced some screen clutter, but it is itself highly cluttered now. I'd like the option to keep the old one or at least turn some things off. The icons for quest NPCs and ROIs to me were hard to see and just blended in with the background in several areas.The clock should be a seperate window.The new character screen (C) is nice. However I much prefer the old seperate windows. I frequently make use of two of those screens at the same time and now I can't. Can we have three windows? The old two available for remapping and the new one for those who are OK with it?The hotkeys/hotbars are too far apart. One reason people use custom UIs is to get them nested together a little closer to use less screen real estate. It would also be nice if you did something like make a hotbar size 34, if all new ones would also be that size. Not a huge big deal, just a neat feature.New F10 command: I really like this. This is one new feature I've wanted for a long time. However, I really wish it did not block out the windows content. I find it far preferable to be able to see the content of the windows when I'm moving them than to just have black squares. This is particular true of hotbars where the content is how I know which one I'm moving and where I want to move it. Not sure if this is an easy fix or not but something I'd like to see changed. Otherwise I really like F10, move, cycle back.Station Cash in vendor windows. This is pretty bad. We have a /marketplace windows for buying things if we want. Putting that stuff in the game ruins immersion and will no doubt lead to mistakes. I personally hate F2P and to be honest I see it as a failed business plan for EQ2. But at least if we have it, can we keep it off live so it doesn't look like a TV sitcom?Otherwise the new UI seems pretty clean, and I hope the new shader 3 options indicate that shader 3 will eventually be fixed. As it stands it still seems to have missing or incorrect colors and textures.</blockquote>Everything you mentioned is a good highlight of issues that I agree with.<cite>Seliri@Nagafen wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Lhunara@Guk wrote:</cite><blockquote>Well, I'm sure this won't be considered helpful, courteous or constructive given the responses we received (or didn't receive) in the testing forums. But with all due respect to Hemophobe, this spell effects change has really missed the mark on all levels. I'm afraid that unless you add an option to toggle between old and new effects, or simply revert the change in favor of restoring the old spell effects, people just aren't going to be pleased with this, regardless of tweaking. Personally, I'd like to offer my opinion on what can be changed and fixed, but suffice it to say, the new spell effects look so incredibly underwhelming and simplistic, that overall they would need to be completely beefed up across the board. Tubby posted a perfect illustration of what is wrong with the new spell effects, and it appears that that information went largely unheard. I'll re-quote it here in case it was simply missed:<blockquote><cite>Tubby@Venekor wrote:</cite><blockquote>Have mastered out 90 SK I copied over to test to check these new animations out. Review below.Unending Agony: Green bubbles at your feet, fine. But practically unviewable on the mobs, I have no idea which have been hit. Its way way too fast, and the animation has your shield/weapon disappear instantly as you raise your hands, only to pop back into existance when the arms warp back into place. Horrible.Death Cloud: See Unending Agony. Only thing better is at least your weapons don't disappear.Tap Veins: What is this even supposed to be? Again, no understandable particles on the mobs. You have green streamers that spin? I am a SK, not a cheerleader with a ribbon wand.Doom Aura: Losing my black spinning cloud of horror made me want to weep, revert this. This spell used to be so awesome I would just spam it to see it when bored.Grave Sacrament: Used to be instantly recognizable, unmissable, a ghost would rise from the ground and grow huge on each enemy, amazing. I don't even know if this has particles on the mobs anymore, it looks kind of like a like pink/red blink of maybenothing now.Shadow Coil and Malice: Both now look like an instant puke green 2d crayon quality line that connects to the mob. Upside, unlike the rest of the effects I can actually see this one on the mob. Downside, no one in their right mind would want to see this one at all. Bring back the bluish spinning bolt of energy that flew in an arc to the mob.Taunts (all): All taunts now seem to just bloom a 3 prong 2d pink/red spike above the mobs head, it reminds me of the fireflowers from Super Mario Bros. And every taunt does this, including reactives and procs it seems, its incredible annoying, as a group of mobs will be procing this above their heads every second of every fight I am every going to be in. This effect alone will probably make me want to kill myself from repetition boredom.Mana Sieve: The PINNICLE of old SK graphics, the blue/purple neon-esq lines that actually seems to be alive as they twist from the mob slowly enough to be appreciated back to your hands. You could tell that one was made with love when they revamped the spell before. Now you just glow a little blue, and if anything connects to the mob its impossible to notice. The guy who made the old effect must be crying right now.Dreadful Wrath: Old - a giant bolt of lightning slams into the target from the sky. Nobody could miss it, you knew they just got hit with the snare nuke, period. New - nada so far as I can tell, the mob glowed a bit red for a split second.Harm Touch and Devour Vitae: Before, a huge glowing skull appears above you as it pukes out flaming orange life down onto you for like 5 seconds, a wonderful effect. For HT a skull eats at your target and an identical one opens puking purple lifeforce back on you. Also amazing. Now, a terrible looking tiny 2d green skull ubiquitously appears for a second above the mob for every lifetap. They are tiny, boring, ugly, and identical for every darn lifetap, inlcuding procs it looked like.Devouring Mist: No longer has any spell particles on the mobs, the SK glows blue and does a small sparkly thing, not sure what it was. It used to make a mist of blue/purple particles literally explode out from each target.Unholy Blessing: Used to actually see 3 deathly colored wards/runes go up, and ominously appear and disappear for the duration of the ward. Now you just fountain out a few 2d green spikes a foot into the air and then blink like pac-man getting immunity for a second. I feel like I'm seeing an 8-bit nintendo effect from metroid or final fantasy 1. I am nostalgic as the next person but this change is just mind blowingly bad.Death March: A plethora of neon purple/pink stick figures identicle to those seen on resteraunt bathroom doors flys up from my head...[Removed for Content]?! Used to be you glowed a more and more intense orange red as your floated up into the air arms splayed, character shaking in anger or something, you literally seemed to vibrate. Boggle at the change.Pestilence: Such a unique effect before, black and dark blue expanding bubbles of oil appear, grow, and consume the target. That is the old one. The new one is a neon green glowing mob for a moment with a few more neon green fuzzies leaving it at angles.Grim Harbinger and Unholy Hunger: Not bad, not great, but not bad.Unholy Strength: I glow neon blue while a blue bear foot symbol appears above me...not sure i understant that one. Meanwhile my feet glow red in a red circle. I guess I at least look like an American Flag for a moment...Offensive / Defensive Stances: Total letdown. No more animation at all, zilcho. The animation was so expressive before, your toon looked like someone you don't want to F with when he slammed the sword into the ground. And now you've replaced that in favor of a 2d crossed sword or blue shield for a split second above my head, with ZERO character movement. One screamed what you are doing using body language, this just assumes you are too stupid to know which you pressed.Feign Death: This one looks kind of cool, I am unsure though what is covering your face. Looks like tenticles, wish they lasted longer to tell. And the body changing colors for a while isn't bad, you can tell its hit you.I know I missed a few, too dishearted to even bother with them at this point. Overall you cannot tell what is being cast, what is landing on whom, or if things have even succesfully been cast in some instances. I don't know if my taunt landed, or if the taunt spikey thing I'm seeing was from my damage shield taunt, and that makes a huge difference in things like PVP.It really took losing them to appreciate how amazing the SK effects were, I mean I always like them, but in hindsight you had made some truely fantastic spell effects. Its a tragedy what you are doing to them. Yeah, I can see them in a raid now maybe, but I don't want to, in fact I'm sure I'll turn them all off full time now. It WILL kill my immersion into this game, at least on my SK. Haven't tested the brig and conjy yet.Revert all of them fully, just scrap this, its a joke, but its not funny.Sadly signed,A disappointed SK.</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>QFE. +7.<cite>Seliri@Nagafen wrote:</cite><blockquote>I don't like how keyboard shortcuts no longer show on hotbars that have an icon size of 22 (pixels?).They used to show, and now they don't.Keyboard shortcuts appear on hotbars with an icon size of 26 at least, but I dunno if they appear within that point differential from 22-26.I also don't like how the cowering animation wasn't fixed for heals like they said it would be.Aaand I'm not fond of how the Doom Judgement or Consecrate spells didn't keep their default effects.The new effects are a LOT worse and it kinda sucks that development time was wasted on these things, but, meh. O_o</blockquote></blockquote>

Phurrin

08-18-2010, 04:18 PM

I'll let other people comment on the other changes, but in particular the first thing I noticed upon logging in...The welcome screen is no longer disablable.There was a line, "cl_show_welcome_screen_on_startup 0", that could be added to eq2.ini to prevent it from showing... using tab for command search, this has been totally removed from the client. Considering that the welcome screen is now a giant advertisement for the marketplace and not modifiable through UIbuilder (any changes I tried would cause a client crash), this is a huge slap in the face to me.I already pay $15 a month, I already buy every expansion, heck I've even bought a few marketplace items.But I refuse to be FORCED to look at advertisements in a service that I already pay for, and words cannot express how upset I am with the removal of this option.

Maroger

08-18-2010, 04:33 PM

The DETAILS button missing from Character screen

Xill

08-18-2010, 04:34 PM

<cite>Draakthor@Permafrost wrote:</cite><blockquote>I'll let other people comment on the other changes, but in particular the first thing I noticed upon logging in...The welcome screen is no longer disablable.There was a line, "cl_show_welcome_screen_on_startup 0", that could be added to eq2.ini to prevent it from showing... using tab for command search, this has been totally removed from the client. Considering that the welcome screen is now a giant advertisement for the marketplace and not modifiable through UIbuilder (any changes I tried would cause a client crash), this is a huge slap in the face to me.I already pay $15 a month, I already buy every expansion, heck I've even bought a few marketplace items.But I refuse to be FORCED to look at advertisements in a service that I already pay for, and words cannot express how upset I am with the removal of this option.</blockquote>Its all part of the plan man, better get used to it...

Qanyena

08-18-2010, 04:35 PM

Game breaking or at least raider breaking bug. 2 things one leaving a group the group window still shows player (self) in a group.2 No implied target. Period

Hamervelder

08-18-2010, 04:42 PM

The paladin spell Demonstration of Faith: I can't believe that you all put in the cowering-in-fear animation. What's wrong with you all?! How is it a demonstration of faith to cower down with your hands over your head? I don't care how many times it's been said before me: This needs to be reverted. Forum rules prohibit me from saying what I really think about this change and the person who made it. <img src="/smilies/9d71f0541cff0a302a0309c5079e8dee.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />

Alezrick

08-18-2010, 04:50 PM

<cite>Amnerys wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Thundy wrote:</cite><blockquote>It's so bass-ackwards to say that people are unreasonable by cancelling and that them cancelling does nothing. Most people feel that cancelling is the best (and only) way to send a direct message about player unhappiness. Judging by your reply I guess that's a black hole as well.</blockquote>Oh, no. I agree with you completely. I'm not saying that canceling isn't a valid way to show your opinion at all. I'm just saying that you can help me pass along the reason why people are quitting or upset if you put more information in your post than, for instance, simply screaming in all caps as sometimes happens when people are really upset. I know folks are emotional. I'm only asking that no matter what you feel about the changes, just to please take a moment and give me details about your opinion, and to take a moment to breathe so that your post makes sense. It's a cheesy quote, but it's true: help me help you.So far in this thread I'm seeing good posts. Well-spoken and with explanations. Thank you for that feedback. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /></blockquote>No offense Amnerys but are you really that ignorant as to WHY people are quitting the game? It doesnt take that much to figure out that the current subscriber base is obviously upset with the current changes that are being made to the game and the direction its been heading for sometime now,I being 1 of those upset customers. With the constant additions to SC and the push to RMT with EQ2X, seriously watered down spell effects/animations, serious lack of content for the past few months with the GU's, you really honestly expect paying customers who are paying your salery to be happy? Quit beating around the bush, its blatantly obvious.People are flat out quitting without voicing their reason as to why because its been proven in the past that you guys at SoE do not listen to the playerbase nor do you guys have any intention on doing so. Its all about the dollar, Its really that simple. No loyalty to the customer and its a slap in the face to those who have been playing for many years such as myself and many others.Oh, and dont get me started on the terrible expansions.. TSO and SF were absolutely horrendous in terms of content, design, creativity, etc, etc, etc. Could go on and now that the all mighty Velious which was THEE best expansion Ive ever played with the most content in EQ1 being released on EQ2 which seems to be basically following the same path as the past 2, My dollar will be going elsewhere. 1 or 2 new zones with everything else as instances? Are you kidding me? Thats not an expansion... I had HUGE hopes for Velious cause like I said, it was my favorite and the best expansion to date for me personally.SoE is all about the quickest way to a buck, short and simple. You want people to play and stay? Show some respect by not beating around the bush and give the players what theyve been begging for for months now - Content... Not this RMT crap. This update may very well be the SWG NGE version for EQ2... sadly to say but they may have just killed their own game... what can you expect from SoE...

isest

08-18-2010, 04:56 PM

Now that this has gone live, guess what the default blue settings does not work, You close eq2 and open it back up and its back to red.

Barx

08-18-2010, 04:59 PM

<cite>isest wrote:</cite><blockquote>Now that this has gone live, guess what the default blue settings does not work, You close eq2 and open it back up and its back to red.</blockquote>That's because /loadui is not the proper way of setting it, not unless Rothgar stealth-changed it this GU to persist. In the pas that command has always loaded the specified UI for the session only, not permanently changed which UI you use. To permanently use it, you need to edit your EQ2.ini to have:cl_ui_skinname Default_Blue (or whatever the folder is called) cl_ui_subdir UI/

Lantis

08-18-2010, 07:26 PM

<cite>Illiam@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote>The paladin spell Demonstration of Faith: I can't believe that you all put in the cowering-in-fear animation. What's wrong with you all?! How is it a demonstration of faith to cower down with your hands over your head? I don't care how many times it's been said before me: This needs to be reverted. Forum rules prohibit me from saying what I really think about this change and the person who made it. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/9d71f0541cff0a302a0309c5079e8dee.gif" border="0" /></blockquote>It's actually a bug. Ttbey posted in another thread that it had been fixed insternally, but for some reason the fix didn't get pushed to Live. They are going to revert this change back eventually.

Amnerys

08-18-2010, 08:22 PM

Quick note from the art team:<a href="http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?start=75&topic_id=484753#5393074" target="_blank">http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/...=484753#5393074</a>UPDATE:We are very sorry for the confusion, but it turns out that many of the fixes we made did not get loaded to Live as intended. We will have all of these issues resolved and a Hot Fix will be implemented on Tuesday next week.We did listen to your feedback and we did make many of the changes you asked for. Some of them made it in, and others did not. Most obvioulsy the casting rings are missing, and some of the casting animations are still incorrect. Again we apologize and we will get this resolved. In the mean time please hold all feedback until after the next Hot Fix. We will then revist your feedback and adjust them as needed for future game updates.Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Amnerys

08-18-2010, 08:23 PM

<cite>isest wrote:</cite><blockquote>Now that this has gone live, guess what the default blue settings does not work, You close eq2 and open it back up and its back to red.</blockquote>Check this thread for more info: <a href="http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?topic_id=484725" target="_blank">http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/...topic_id=484725</a>

Amnerys

08-18-2010, 08:25 PM

Just realized this is the thread from the "In Testing" forum. I'm going to point you all to the new feedback thread for live. You can still see this one to pull quotes from, but I'm going to lock it so we have one central place for feedback. <a href="list.m?topic_id=484800">GU57 Feedback</a> Thanks!