EQ2 Lead Designer Rich Waters is seeking player feedback on why players stick with Exile despite the huge disadvantages. He posed the question:
Exiles were definitely a side-effect of the betrayal quest, and not an intentional feature. Some support was given to them in the past, but I wouldn’t plan on anything new.
Other than a wider deity choice, what motivates players to stay as exiles on the PVE servers?
With now 16 neutral character classes, available in both good and evil alignments, and with recent expansions rarely distinguishing between good and evil when handing out quests, it’s not a surprise that the question of Alignment and the painful (and costly) process of Class Betrayal gets revisited on the forums frequently.
However thus far, the official response as been “We have no intention to make it easier, or take away any of the consequences. Betrayal is supposed to have a cost.”
Why Betray?
A particular point of interest in Betrayal has been lack of access to the shared bank while in Exile. And upon completing Betrayal, characters have always lost all their spells, even if they were keeping to the same class, but merely changing alignment.
A primary motivation for Betrayal has been the poor choices of Good-aligned Deities (most seem healing and protection aligned) compared to Evil-aligned Deities (most seem DPS based, with Anashti Sul, the former prime healer, confusingly being an excellent deity choice for Coercers).
Another reason players choose to betray is the array of low-level quests available in the opposing city/alignment. Completing all of the Freeport/Commonlands quests, and then completing all of the Qeynos/Antonica quests gives one a noticeable AA advantage.
So with that said, before anyone panics, there are no changes to Betrayal happening in the immediate future. *exhale*
What Rich Waters is doing is soliciting feedback to gauge player reaction on revisiting and thinking about the Betrayal process. Thus far, he has laid out an outline of the reasons people currently change Citizenship, do an alignment/city Betrayal, or might swap sub-classes (Monk to Bruiser, Fury to Warden, etc.) which no longer result in an alignment change.
We’ve been talking about city betrayal quests on the design team recently, and it’s likely we’ll make some improvements.
There are three different things you might want to do with your character:
Citizenship:
- Change your home city from the current one to another friendly city (Qeynos to New Halas)
- Never changes your class or alignment
- Should be relatively easy and painless
Betrayal:
- Change your home city from the current one to an enemy city (Qeynos to Freeport)
- Always changes your alignment
- May change your class (offers you a change if you’re neutral, requires a change if you’re an aligned class)
- Should require some effort
Sub-class Change:
- Swap your neutral sub-class to its counterpart (Monk to Bruiser, Berserker to Guardian, Fury to Warden, etc)
- Never changes your alignment
- Never changes your home city
- May only swap to the other sub-class in your pairing – can NOT go from Monk to Warden, for instance
- Should require some effort
- This is a new quest type that we may offer
As part of the update, we could see if it’s important to strip master spells or not. Right now, it adds a big cost to betraying for some players (high-level characters with many master spells) and is inconsequential for other players (low to mid-level players, or players with few master spells). I’m not sure such a big cost is critical to balancing city betrayal. Anyone have thoughts on this?
Please keep in mind that this is still under discussion, so it may change greatly before being implemented. As it’s still in the idea phase, I’m not sure when this would go live.
Nothing in here is a guaranteed or planned “change”. Only a possible alternative if player reaction is positive.
And a followup post by Waters:
In theory, you could do this today if you were okay with not having master spells and didn’t mind running the betrayal quest twice a week. That doesn’t sound like much fun though.
Not really an idea I was thinking of when this topic came up but it is a funny one. What would you like or dislike about raiding as a templar during the week and grouping or soloing as an inquisitor on weekends? I’m curious, because if we didn’t wipe your master spells during a betrayal, some players might consider betraying more often as you described in your post.
It’s good to get a sense of how people feel, so we can keep it in mind if make any adjustments to betrayal in the future. Thanks for the feedback on this everyone, interesting thread so far.
Live blog from Fan Faire with q&a on EverQuest II.
Q: crusader gear with INT. DFC armor worse than master crafted. Can it be reworked?
A: ask me later
Q: crafters wanting to reset their adventure class?
Rothgar: we have been talking about this. Considering.
Q: monster npc masks?
A: it was taken out of eq1 because of griefing. not sure for eq2. This type of stuff is fun though.
Q: self mentor item?
A: no because it is exploity
Q: appearance slots for mounts?
Rothgar: we would love to do something here and more progression with mounts. Just have to find time.
Georgeson: YES
Rothgar: guess I know what I’m doing when I get home.
Q: class change potion?
A: No plans.
Q: LON boosters become heirloom not attunable?
A: we can talk about it
Q: if we have 6 toons can we get 60% xp bonus?
A: we cqn look into it. If you are crazy enough to get 6 90’s.
Q: fix call of the veteran?
A: this item has caused all kinds of problems for us. We know it needs some love.
Q: exile shared bank? (hollering from audience)
A: we probably won’t have a good answer today. But we can talk about it.
Q: why are crusaders so OP?
A: crusader and fighter balance are ongoing. We are adjusting guardians next. Tune into class balance tomorrow.
Q: share items between accounts? We will pay money.
Rothgar: we want to do this. Have to talk to other depts. We don’t want your money. We want your love.
Q: can we have a training dummy for healers? So healers can practice cure curse and healing.
Rothgar: we might be able to do this. We could do like a sad looking diseased dude.
Q: can we reduce amount of brawler in raids?
Q: can we do something about raid looting
A: we will look into ideas. As for brawler loot, that’s RNG. (audience outcry) (our monk throws his gear away instead of mending!)
Q: thanks for fixing fury class. And can we have a tinkered flash bomb tinkered?
Domino: that sounds kind of violent.
Q: sky blade skiff?
A: access through portals in s qeynos and s Freeport. Can’t do 2 houses on 1 character.
A: to exit, you can use the exit or jump off the side to go to a random zone. Including Veeshan’s Peak. 
Q: optimize for graphics cards?
A: definitely. We just did the flora upgrade which is an 85% performance boost.
Q: why did you nerf mystic/fury mythical?
A: there was a mechanical problem with a percentage because an addition problem. The mystic mythical is a full heal full power. With jesters cap you could maintain that for 20% of the time.
Q: crit scales against mobs but there seem to be bugs because 100% isn’t 100%.
A: probably a bug. Looking into it.
Q: if cure curse is cast but not needed can it just act like it was resisted?
A: can look into it.
Q: auto attack bar and click to cure?
Rothgar: looking into it. Hopefully not too soon.
Q: if paladins can’t crit on heal anymore why can healers crit on spells?
A: so you are asking why warriors need healers? Just because it was broken for years we still need to fix it. you can still do a lot of self heals.
Q: too many quest items.
georgeson: we know there are too many mount whistles, quest items. We want to do something.
Q: too many appearance items
Rothgar: I’d like to come up with some solution for storing appearance items. Like a wardrobe in your house or crates that take 1 slot.
Q about free to play on all servers.
Georgeson: there are too many people who don’t want powerful items in the marketplace on live servers. Attitudes change but right now we are being conservative and putting up a fence. It’s an experiment. We know folks are worried about losing players on subscription servers. So many people will be trying free to play that even if a small percent choose e subscription servers instead it will be more than you guys are getting now.
Q: lower barriers to entry on guild halls and status?
Q: can we see some way to not have to start over on test copy when it is wiped? Guilds and guild halls take time to set up.
Q: did most of the classes becoming neutral have to do with f2p? This is disruptive for
A: no. We wanted to do this before. Just like allowing good ratongas.
(lots of arguing)
A: we give you the option to role play it how you want.
Q: why lose 14 day trial?
A: most players we get are returning players. Free trial is bringing very few players. Etc. We think the % of players who choose the subscription service based on the advertising ilk be more than the free trial. And also having a free trial is confusing along with free to play.
Q: chat channel colors beyond /10 ?
A: should be easy to do. Will look at it.
Q: daily adorning quest for tinkering?
Domino: tinkering doesn’t have the same material costs. No plans at this time.
Q: arena pet system hooking up to battlegrounds?
A: we want to improve this system but nit hooking to battlegrounds.
Q: bards and enchanters needed per raid?
A: we are always investigating. We have seen successful raid guilds with 8 support classes and some with just 3.
Q: arrow levels? ranger vs assassin dps?
A: see mechanics panel. Arrow levels tweak and mechanics changes to ranged weapons for rangers.
END Panel
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