Starseeker is another new contributor to EQ2Wire and wanted to share a viewpoint on the aftermath of EQ2’s F2P announcement.
This is my commentary on Free to Play. I have to get it off my chest.
EverQuest 2 is an old game, 6 years, that is a long time for an MMO. I have been playing this game since launch. I remember the days when you would have spirit shards, and experience debt that would take away XP instead of just give you a % penalty. I remember when your guild could lose levels, and when there was heroic content in overland zones.
Things change. It is the way of life that nothing can stay the same forever. EverQuest 2 is no exception. It has changed and morphed and gone through its trials and tribulations.
The rest of the article after the jump…
I started this game as a solo player with a friend. We played that way up until the Echoes of Faydwer expansion pack, and then we got into raiding. Our raid guild wasn’t that great — a casual guild with alot of problems — but it was always fun to log in on a raid night and joke around with 24 other people. To banter in teamspeak, to have duels before the raids, in which some folks would get feared off the islands and we’d all have a good laugh.
Currently, I am in a different casual raid guild that I lead. Being a guild leader gives you a different perspective on how things affect the servers, the game, and the community.
As the expansions went on, and the days went on, the game changed. It became more about loot, more about stats, and min/ maxing. The gear became inflated, but it was and still is a good game. Just not the game it was originally.
They made leveling easier, they made raid mobs harder. They came out with more instances, and less overland zones.
Now they have changed the game again, to free-to-play. It is understandable why they have done it, they need subscriptions. However, all of those memories I mentioned above, that are experienced by the new player when they first wander into EQ2 will be experienced on a new server. With new support, new people, and a different rule set. A server that tells them that they do not have to work for their game play experience. They only have to spend a few dollars, and they’ll have everything at their fingertips.
One of my best memories of the game, is when I finally earned 4 platinum, to buy myself a horse. Even though it was ugly, and looked like a blob, I rode that thing everywhere. It took me nearly a year of saving. Now for $12.50 you can buy a mount at level 1. Have I bought the station cash mounts? Yes. I like the look of them, but for a new player, who doesn’t have 3 accounts, and 8 toons over level 80…perhaps earning things would make them stay in the game longer, like it did for all of us.
It saddens me that the game has been reduced to this level. When free-to-play was announced, the outcry from players like me — veteran players — was like a death scream of an era that only we remember. The outcry was loud, fierce, and largely unheard. Our words are twisted. We now have a gun to our heads that basically is “accept the SC marketplace or watch the game that has gotten you through 6 years of your life die slowly.”
What choice do we have? Quit?
I imagine that is the route a lot of people are going, several people I have known for a long time have gone this route. I have also canceled my extra accounts. I’m holding on to that last one with hope that something will save us, but I think the boat has left the harbor. We are now in a “conform or die” stage of this game.
The veterans remember what the old game was about, and what it has become. This knowledge, this “lore” so to speak, will be lost on the new servers. It will be lost with more and more people canceling. Eventually, perhaps no one will remember the plague that took over Norrath, or when the gods came to us, or when avatars were present. It makes me sad and disappointed.
It will be a different world, one where you can buy your way through. One where you can purchase access to the things you want.
EverQuest was supposed to be an escape from real life. A fantasy game with no limits. Now the limit is your wallet. A lot of us are wondering — where will our next escape come from?
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Devil in the Details: Velious Progression
Destiny of Velious introduced an unparalleled strict progression to both its group and raid zones. Players wanting to group up in Velious instances have discovered that there are 3 sets of group zones which each require completing the one before it in progression before being granted access.
For instance, you must clear Tower of Frozen Shadow: Shadowed Corridors to gain access to ToFS: Umbral Halls, which must be cleared to gain access to ToFS: Haunt of Syl’Tor. And aspiring raiders must clear all 3 of these group zones in order to gain access to the Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 raid zone. And as we also saw in The Shadow Odyseey expansion, raiders who wish to take on the most difficult x4 Raid content in Velious must first acquire a clickable debuff item by clearing the Tower of Frozen Shadow x2.
With such a daunting interdependency on all Velious zones from group instances through x2 raid and onto the x4 raid zones, you would think that Progression Quests would have been fully tested through QA and ready for players on day 1 of the expansion. Alternately, you would expect that if bugs were discovered, some of these quests would have been passable through other means. Any MMO is going to have adjustments, tweaks, nerfs, etc. after the launch of an expansion. But it’s quite another to release content that MUST all work smoothly end-to-end, yet doesn’t.
Necretia the Widowmaker
Tuesday’s Update restored Necretia the Widowmaker, a boss of Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 nearly a week after she was removed from the game due to two problems. First, it was noticed several weeks ago that she could be killed and respawned. However it was when an extraordinary item on her loot table, the Necretia Bow of Webs was discovered that she was despanwed. This bow had inflated stats and effects such that it was equivalent to a “level 300 item”. However the issue here is one of progression. Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 cannot be completed without her.
It took several days to get this resolved, and guilds who had already started the zone must wait for their zone to reset and start over to get a chance at fighting her. Until then, certain guilds remain unable to raid Velious x4 content through no limitation of their own.
Six Weeks Later
Destiny of Velious’ progression structure ended up concentrating players into just a few certain dungeons, trying to ‘open up’ the game. Yet due to a variety of bugs, players have been flummoxed in their progression. This started right from the beginning with Lord Doljonijiarnimorinar (Lord Bob). He was at first nearly unkillable, and also bugged so that he could be killed repeatedly by raid guilds. He had to be removed from the game, thus making it nearly impossible for players to complete any group dungeons at all unless they had raid gear from Sentinel’s Fate.
In the past weeks, we have continued to see a high volume of progression bugs and script problems with locking and unlocking doors in dungeons, and the mobs themselves despawning, bugging out, or being unkillable.
Progression bugs have not been limited to new zones either:
By many accounts, Destiny of Velious is a good expansion with lots of great dungeons, challenging encounters, well-written quests, and lots of things to do. Although the itemization has been widely panned for boiling down EverQuest II’s 24 class system to a 4 class system, and graphical glitches have partly tarnished the otherwise great artwork, it is these progression bugs that have prevented some players from just logging in and enjoying the content.
Six weeks after the launch of Destiny of Velious, bugs still remain in the progression and completion of the 9 group dungeons and 4 raid zones in this expansion, presenting additional challenges for those players who wish to enjoy the entire expansion’s content. It seems fortuitous that Velious also brought Public Quests with powerful gear as a distraction while bugs with the instances were resolved.
Your Feedback
Are we making a mountain out of a molehill? Have you been able to find plenty to do in Velious with faction grinds and questing and public quests such that a few bugs here and there in instances and raid zones don’t affect you that much?