Not Exactly Excited
stargrace 
While the choice of gems in the above picture may not exactly be something you’re into, we all love free things! EverQuest II has a very short promotion right now where players can claim these items from the station marketplace for no cost – and you can’t really complain TOO much, since they’re free. This is a pretty good marketing tactic, although I’d rather have a choice of free things to claim that’s just me. Players who have perhaps never opened the market window before will be drawn to do so. Those who were not even aware of it existing suddenly have a reason to peek at the other goodies that are located in there. Will it increase sales? Probably.
There is another promotion much like this one taking place on the days around the release of Halas, an ice cat that will be ‘free’ in the marketplace for players to claim. That one I’m quite excited about, even though I haven’t shown much enthusiasm for Halas in general.
Why am I not excited about Halas?
- It’s a starter zone, and I can create no more characters thanks to the very strict “7 or 12” character limit depending on your subscription plan.
- I have no motivation to grind aa since I have everything I want on my main character, and SOE scrapped the idea to add an extra 20 aa so that players could finish out their lines.
- Halas is great (starter zone) and with it comes two new raid zones. Except I no longer raid, so that means for players like me there is very little about this update to get excited about. A starter zone and raids. No mid-level content.
I think that I’m simply in a phase right now where I’m bored of EQ2. I’ve been playing other games (EVE and WoW) and content doing so. No, I’m not leaving EQ2, I never do, but it’s been a while since I’ve taken a break from it and I’m embracing the idea while I have it.
There are a few things I would love to see implemented that would refresh this burnout feeling I have but number one would have to be:
- Allow players to gain thousands of aa even if it’s for meaningless goals. Examples of these would be removing the racial abilities and character traits and allowing people to grind aa towards them. Things like Enduring breath, extended food, drink, poisons, and potions. Allowing characters to select more then one craft default. Allowing us to grind aa towards innate run speed. Silly little things that we all know are just a meaningless grind but keep us motivated and working towards a goal. Currently, in EQ2, if you are not a raider, once you hit level 90 (unless you’d like to constantly grind battlegrounds) the only thing left to do is create a new character. What happens when you’ve created all of the characters you possibly can.
Perhaps I’m a little bitter this morning, but in the mean time EQ2 is simply on the back burner for me. Though I did add another 6 books to my player written book collection, which was fantastic. 326?! Yes please!