Flob, your concerns are valid .. but take a look at this :
Cao, Lead Designer writes (
link)
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EQII has changed. A lot.
While there are opinions of every kind about each individual change, the fact of the matter is that we've had to make some pretty significant alterations to the game. Our goal with all of these changes has been to provide long term, sustainable fun for our customers. But that's meant a sometimes bumpy road as fundamental features of the game shifted. We understand that change in and of itself is unsettling. And we also understand that many of the specific changes have met with varying levels of enthusiasm.
But if it's not fun, it's going to change.
And online selling isn't fun.
That means we need to change how players sell to one another. The new system will let everyone sell items from their house inventories whether they're online or not. And since everyone gets a house for free, everyone can participate in the broker market.
Those changes, however, create a situation where there are a lot more items for sale at once. Because of this, we had to evaluate what players were putting up for sale. Quest rewards turned out to be a large percentage of the market. That made us think about quest rewards again.
When EQII initially launched it had a lot of quests. Thousands. Some were big and required a lot of effort. Others were small and could be finished in minutes. At the time, a lot of the quests required groups to complete. This meant that, while quest rewards were on the market (especially weapons and jewelry), they didn't dominate the market completely.
Our recent changes for soloers and small groups (as well as the upcoming downtier change), mean that a lot more people can complete quests. This is a good thing. But it also means there are going to be a lot more quest rewards in the world.
More rewards plus the ability to sell them all the time means that quest rewards have the potential to dominate the market. Since they tend to be better than most other kinds of rewards at a given rarity level, quest rewards have even more potential to be the major type of item players sell to one another. And that creates an imbalance between loot, crafted items and quest rewards.
That imbalance made us question quest rewards further. Philosophically, we realized that quest rewards were the most character-specific type of reward in the game. Loot drops randomly for everyone. Crafted items can be made on demand. But quest rewards are different. They are the guaranteed results for a specific character's action in the world. Story-wise, they are often the personal reward of an NPC to a character for aid and effort. Systems-wise they are an appropriate reward for the time and risk involved. Essentially, more than any other type of item in the game, they are meant for the player who earned them.
So that left us with a lot of reasons to make quest rewards No Trade. It also left us, however, with some new problems and while accentuating some existing ones:
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What do I get for the quest? If quest rewards are No Trade then, more than ever, players need to know what they're getting themelves into.
We need to show quest rewards up front. *
Do I have a choice? Many quests offer only one reward.
We need to make important quests have more than one reward. *
Is this quest appropriate for me? Right now, there are quests that have the wrong level.
We need to make sure that quest levels are correct.That means we need to take a look at the quests in game. All of them. Over the coming months, you're going to see a lot of changes coming to the quest system including displaying rewards up front, additional quest reward choices, appropriate leveling of quests, balancing of quest rewards, sorting of quests by zone of completion and a whole lot more. The initial change to make quest rewards No Trade was a necessary step due to the market changes, but it wasn't made in isolation. It's a first step toward making EQII even more accessible, rewarding and fun.
So, at the end of the day, the No Trade changes to quest rewards means that you won't be able to sell or give these items to other players. That is a significant change, but it results in the ability to sell offline, an improved market for crafted goods, a soon-to-be vastly improved quest system and long term value for your character's accomplishments in the years to come.
That's a lot of change. For the better.
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