Tamat's Review from Community Summit

[Gninja]

The EverQuest II Community Summit took place this week from 9/29 - 10/02. During this event in addition to our safari at the San Diego Zoo we had a roundtable panel with various people in the community. During this time we were given a chance to voice our opinions and provide EQ II Developers with feedback to assist them in making changes that the game needs. The following are the topics from all three of our roundtable sessions and some of the highlights of what was talked about.

Roundtable Discussions

Expansions and the High Level Game

# Scaling - Content scaling will continue in some group and solo content. Content scaling in Splitpaw was a huge success and very much loved in the community by casual and more hardcore players.

# Old world revamp - There very well may be a revamp for a lot of the old world content. Solusek’s Eye for example, mob diversity in this zone was a concern. The main point was that a zone so beautiful and amazingly designed should not have 4,000,000 giants, but instead quite a few different kinds of mobs to keep it interesting.

# AA’s - The question on a lot of people’s minds was “when are we going to see an alternate form of advancement similar to the AA system in EverQuestâ€￾. Scott Hartsman commented on how in the future they would like to implement a system of advancement like this, only they want to do it right. The system sounded like it would be something less tedious and mind numbing then the EQ AA system. You would be able to advance your character but the upgrades you earn wouldn't be essential to the future development of your class but rather something you can do in addition to leveling to help make you a little better and more importantly, unique. There was no comment on if we will see this in the next expansion (rumored to come out around February) or not.

# Massive Raid Dungeons - One of my biggest questions was if there would be more hardcore dungeons like Spirits of the Lost in Desert of Flames and the future. While I didn't get much detail about these places, I did get a for certain “Yesâ€￾ answer.

# Rival Cities - Possible change to the way the original two cities work and how faction will play a big part. For example, in the future when a Qeynos citizen sneaks into Freeport the guards may be able to not only aggro but instead of just banishing you … they will strait up kill you leaving your shard in town. This is how it should have been in a lot of people’s opinions and getting banished when you sneak into a town and get caught is truly not punishment enough. This would also make it so that if you do get aggro you will be able to run away and have more of a chance to escape to another section of the zone.

# Betrayal Quest - This actually came up during two sessions but the most detail was given during this session. One of the things they would like to be able to do is redo some of the newbie experience like the betrayal quest. Instead of doing a few mini quests, getting killed by Antonia / Lucan and then going over to the other continent to start your week of hell camping random names, the quest might be changed in a way that will remind a lot of us of EQlive. The brainstorming that was done is that you would be able to cause enough mayhem (like destroying boxes and shops around town as well as maybe even killing some of you own towns NPCs that your faction would drop to KOS and you will by doing that raise your faction just enough with the other town that you can move over and start killing mobs around the outside city as well as doing quests around town to raise your faction. It would also be great to possibly eventually see people past their final Archetype quest having the ability to do this as well. I know in my guild we have half our members in Freeport and half in Qeynos. Much like the factions in Maj’dul it would be great to be able to pick a city faction for your entire guild to be on.

# Armor Graphics - Armor style is something the community is in an uproar about right now. People simply don’t like that fact that your T5 Ebon set looks almost the exact same as your hard earned T6 Cobalt set. This is something that is being worked on quickly and I believe it was mentioned that these should be starting to appear in the next couple of Live Updates.

The Combat Changes

To everyone’s surprise this was a relatively mild topic of conversation. It was anticipated that Jared “Lockeyeâ€￾ Sweatt would be carried out of that particular session on a stretcher; however it was more like a throne! I would personally like to take this time to thank Lockeye and his team for doing such a magnificent job with the revamp.

# Classes - There were a few concerns on how the Wizard / Warlock balance not really working as intended and from what I understood that was something that was going to be re-evaluated. Warlocks will more then likely be changing a little bit more here in the next few months.

There were a few Templar concerns but for the most part they were about things that were currently not working as intended, for example, Focused Benefaction not working when it is casted on self, so we Templars can rest at ease.

There were a few guardians at the event as well and even the Guardian discussion was pretty tame and very constructive.

# Old world raids too hard - These raids such as Darathar, Meeting of the Minds, Deception Drakotas and other usually farmable mobs are currently for the most part impossible. They are working fast to fix these and it was said key raids like Darathar crucial to guild progression are being tuned and should be fixed in Live Update 14. Keep in mind there are a lot of these encounters but they will all be tuned over time.

# Expansion RaidsOne of the very reassuring things they told us is that all of the Desert of Flames epic encounters were all very extensively tested with the combat revamp so these should be realistically possible when guilds are ready to start trying unlike current old world content.

# Levitation - When the conversation was dying I threw in a question mostly unrelated to the topic but I wanted to know anyway. “Will we ever see levitation of any kind?â€￾. Unfortunately the game was not really designed for levitation and to fix it so that it would work, every single zone would need to be redone. It was said that it is possible to see levitation working in the future in certain zones programmed for it but if ever introduced it is going to be a very situational type spell.

The Newbie Experience and Open Discussion

# Beginning progression - During this session the key focus was input and suggestions on how the beginning of the game should be revamped. Were talking about from the Tutorial all the way to where you finish your citizenship quest (possibly even more). There was lots of feedback but how or even when this revamp might be taking place for sure wasn’t touched on in any great detail.

# Examine Quests - Collections quests and others that start by examining the item was talked about. Many felt that a lot of new players don’t have much of a way to learn about how these quests work until they are told or find out messing around.

While I certainly left out a great deal of what all was discussed, I wanted to make it a point to share as much of the key information with you as possible. EverQuest II has in the last couple of months changed quite a bit. Expect to see even more changes here in the very near future.

-Tamat Damat