2012

Still Not Quite There Yet #EQ2 #EverQuest2

stargrace July 14, 2012 5Comments

Sony announced last week that players would be able to complete dungeons as their characters instead of having to pick an avatar to play, and I thought that this would be a fantastic way to motivate players to actually complete the dungeons – I was wrong. It’s not enough.

Player created dungeons are great in theory, but in practice there is still too much missing from them to make them worth while for players. Number one, you barely get any experience from completing them. If you run a player dungeon and then go run a regular zone or even quest for the same amount of time, you will find yourself quite far behind. As an example, I took my 90 shadowknight through a dungeon that was 90 minutes long (and rewarded 300 tokens) – gaining not even 60% of a single aa. In that same amount of time, I was able to gain 10 aa mentored down to 65 and running through New Tunaria.

Now lets take a look at the tokens. The shop is located in the station cash shop, and there’s very little motivation for players to actually spend the tokens aside from picking up the mount (500 tokens) and maybe some repair kits. The gear available is sub-par compared to items you can solo quest for, and also random from chests (and flagged as no value, so you can’t even sell it or transmute it).

There are no shinies in player created dungeons. There’s no trash loot. There’s no chest drops, no spells, no craft recipes. All of these things are reasons why players should (and will) continue to quest and explore through regular overland zones instead of the creations of other players.

You can argue that this is a good thing, forcing players to explore “the world” instead of being stuffed inside of solo dungeons – however, with the introduction of mercenary a lot of players are already exploring on their own and doing dungeons alone. Why not have them at least partaking in dungeons that are created by other players.

I really think that user generated content is incredibly amazing to have in games, but I also think SOE missed the point of them in this round. Players need more than a neat dungeon layout to entice them to do them more than once. It’s simply wasted resources other wise.

Exploring Anew #EQ2 #EverQuest2

stargrace July 9, 2012 3Comments

Ah how things have changed. I’ve been spending a bit of time in EQ2 as of late – I know, big surprise right? It’s been a few years since I’ve played the game to any extent, but I found myself missing some of those game aspects that EQ2 does very well, such as crafting and housing as well as user generated content.

Game Update 63 brought about a lot of changes, and so (of course) has time. The new level cap for both adventuring and crafting is 92. There are now ‘prestige’ points, which are in your alternate advancement tab but use their own point system. The cap for aa is now 320 – and everyone was granted a bunch of ‘free’ points because they lowered the amount of experience it required to get any. This means a few of my characters (without having even logged in) found themselves at 320 already.

There’s still a few things I don’t understand. A lot of people are running a sinking sands Skyshrine dungeon for mythicals – and I don’t know what that means, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out with time. (Edit: huge thanks for the comments that cleared up the one mystery) There are new dungeons to explore, including a solo / duo one in Skyshrine (I believe). There are new crafting quests, and new crafting apprentices. I haven’t managed to pick one up yet, but I hope to soon.

In a future game update players should be able to use their own characters to run player created dungeons, which I’m pretty excited about. One of the major turn offs at the moment for me doing a player created dungeon is the fact that the avatars are rubbish. I can solo them perfectly fine as a healer avatar, but not with anything else. They’re also quite boring to do alone. The rewards that you can use your tokens to purchase are also a bit lacking (imo).

I hear that PVP is also getting an overhaul, much needed. I’m excited about that, I used to love running the pvp instances when they first came out. I’m not an enormous fan of PVP but some times you just get that itch.

While everyone is off playing The Secret World (and let me tell you, temptation is hard to resist here) I’m eagerly waiting for Guild Wars 2 to come out. I’ve pre-ordered and can’t wait. Even though I should be working on my Guild Wars 1 achievements, I know. I did manage to get a few more missions done in it. I should really buckle down – but those distractions! They’re everywhere!

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

Remodeled Starter Cities #EQ2 #EverQuest2

stargrace July 7, 2012 1Comment

I really like the newly designed Freeport. It takes a bit of time to get used to it, especially since we’ve all gotten used to having to zone from one section to another, but the transition was smooth and it’s much easier to get around now.

The newly designed Qeynos is in the works and should be out when the next update goes live (I believe, I could be wrong). I don’t know that I have any characters who even live in Qeynos any more, but I’m sure I can find one or two to use to explore the area.