According to the EQplayers website this weekend will be double experience weekend. It will run from Friday at 10 a.m. PDT to Tuesday at 10 a.m. PDT.
Enjoy the free experience everyone!
|
*** Highlights *** - EQ’s 10th Anniversary celebrations continues. All the raid events will remain until May 25th. Lower Guk and Unrest group encounters kicked off on the 11th and end on the 25th as well. Enjoy the rest of the celebrations! *** Items *** - Added a missing heal focus to the Protective Gorget of the Deep. *** Spells *** - Triggered PC spells with large dummy values in cast time have had that time reduced or removed. *** AAs *** - The Berserker AAs Blur of Axes and Precision of Axes have been increased in power. *** Raids *** - Added Fractured Coeval Luminessence and Fractured Coeval Incandessence as a chance to drop from the chest that the mini bosses in discord tower drop. This also reduces the chance for stat and weapon augments from this chest. *** Tradeskills *** - The first set of changes to poison have been made. Strike of Ssraeshza poisons have a 10 second recast on them. Bite of the Shissar, Strike of the Shissar, Solusek’s Burn and E’ci’s Lament Poison remove about half the hate they give on each strike. Quellious’ Trauma removes about half the hate it did before. Quellious’ Trauma, Myrmidon’s Sloth, Messenger’s Bane, Fighter’s Bane, Warlord’s Bane, Archer’s Bane and Monk’s Bane have had their “proc count” increased so they last longer. *** Pets *** - Fixed some typos in the pet help window. *** Miscellaneous *** - Campfire summoning has been turned on for the following zones (note that all usual restrictions apply): Crystallos, Mansion, Qinimi, and Tipt. A couple months ago I became very bored with Everquest II - my desire was like a light bulb that just burned out. I found myself bored of all the questing to level up. Honestly, it reminded me a lot of how WoW does it…go kill 10 of creature x and come back. Then go kill another 10…it drained me. I occupied my free time with some Starcraft - I became half-way decent. I was really enjoying my time away from MMOs; I think the break was exactly what I needed. Eventually the MMO bug got me again. To change things up, this time I decide to reactivate EQ1…there is just something about that game that keeps bringing me back in. I think it is some combination of it being my first MMO, the hardest one I have played, and good game play. Despite how much I like EQ, Rawrzor didn’t feel quite the same way. It took some convincing for him to reactivate - I had to level a Druid to 70 for him. All of the EQjunkies kick in and we got him a 70 Druid, Lulz, in a week’s time. We spent a month or so exploring SoF and some of the other zones we missed while we were gone. I then started to do the SoD progression stuff, which is coming a long…but taking some time. I also got the linux bug again…I installed Ubuntu 9.04 and began to play EQ in Linux (using wine). It was really easy to setup, the wine HQ page for EQ gave me all the info I needed. I also moved away from Ventrilo and started to use mumble because it works across all platforms…something that Ventrilo can’t claim. The sound quality is good and also the push to talk actually works in linux. The only disadvantage linux has to windows is that 4 boxing on an old P4 isn’t as smooth in Linux, but that should be expected…EQ wasn’t developed for Linux. This morning I finally got EQ2 working in Ubuntu under both wine and crossover games. I haven’t had a chance to see if the voice chat works correctly since none of the other junkies were online. I will post a comprehensive guide once I get the voice chat working! I just wanted to remind everyone that we do have forums at EQjunkies - we just rarely use them. Feel free to stop by the forums and see what is going on. It seems like a lot of people like the previous post about EQ3 and what I would like to see out of it. (It even got mentioned on the EQ2 site!) That being said, I apologize for the lack of consistent posting. I had been busy with my graduate courses late last semester and then was traveling over break. I should be back in the EQ2 posting groove now… The major thing that I am working on now is a comprehensive guide to getting Everquest Two working in Linux. I have seen several posts on Cedega’s website, the EQ2 players website, Crossover games support site, and also on the wineHQ site. I plan to merge all of the different tips and make one walk through that will get you up and running. I gave crossover and wine a shot the past couple of days, and of course nothing worked immediately - what else can you expect? Hopefully over the next week or so I will have things working stablely and be able to help others get things working…I will keep you posted. To give you an idea of my rig: P4 3.0 1.5 GB RAM 7800GT video card USB Logitech Headset — I plan on writing the guide for Ubuntu Linux since that seems to be the most popular for the user base. I will explore getting EQ2 to run consistently as well as getting voice chat to work well. I will keep you posted - keep checking back for updates! As I mentioned before, Landuran and I returned to Everquest Two over the summer. In theory, so did Myclawz and Greldor, but we haven’t seen them online…at all. Anyways, over the past few months I have found myself wishing that Everquest Two was more popular than it is. The reality is that a success of an MMO is determined by its launch (and maybe the following month). Everquest Two had a horrible launch. On top of that - the game was horrible. Sony spent so much time making sure that the trade skill system wasn’t trivial that they made it so complex it wasn’t even fun. The graphics were out of this world. The combat was ok, but it was lacking that EQ1 feeling we were all looking for. Everquest Two, as it exists today is a completely different game than it was at launch. They completely redid the trade skill system to make it a little less painful, added guild housing, improved the solo and small group quests. Also, they actually go out of their way to have events and seasonal things in the game, which makes it fun. The graphics continue to improve as systems become more and more powerful. They even have in game voice chat that works (unlike WoW - which is horrible) …I haven’t seen any of the raid content yet, so I can’t comment on that. The problem is no one wants to buy a game that is 5 years old and start playing it (unless you are an EQjunkie, of course). I understand that - I don’t blame you. This brings me to the point of this entire post - what about Everquest Three? With all of the lessons learned from making Everquest One and EQ2 image what they could do with Everquest Three. I realize Verant actually made Everquest One, but Sony supported it long enough that they know the ropes. Here is what I propose for EQ3: OS independence: With consoles basically acting as computers today I don’t think it is unreasonable to support EQ3 on the Playstation 3, OSX, Windows, and Linux. In reality, the first three I think could happen, but for whatever reason no one likes to develop games for Linux (Thankfully, there is Wine). With OS independence Sony would have a larger pool of people to buy their game - that is never a bad thing. Graphics: Keep the Everquest Two style. I really like the realism that comes with the graphics. I also like how the graphics evolve as hardware becomes better and better. I hate how cartoon like WoW is. Basic Classes: Steal this from Everquest One and WoW. The more classes and specialization you add into the game the more complex balancing, gearing, raiding…everything becomes. Go back to the original classes in Everquest One and try to revamp them. Make things more simple and straightforward. Solo and Group Content: Continue upon what Everquest Two is doing. Create solo and duo versions of the group dungeons so casual players will have a chance to experience most of the world. Scale the loot and difficulty of dungeons dynamically based on how many people are in a group. This will make things reasonable no matter how many people are in their party, while encouraging people to group together to get better loot…this is an MMO after all. Keep currency the same. Everquest one had LDONs and other dungeons that used special crystals to buy things. It was annoying that each time a new expansion came out your old currency was worth nothing. At the very least have an exchange NPC that will let you convert one currency to another. Raid Content: Make things difficult. Raiding is not for the casual player and never will be. Raiding is about putting in lots of time to develop a strategy and coordinate with many other people to defeat an epic monster. If the fight isn’t epic, it wouldn’t be believable. Bring back open air raid content. Everquest One was well known for having dragons in the middle of a low level zone. This was really cool for a couple of reasons: 1. It brought us back to low level zones we haven’t seen in awhile. 2. It gave everyone a sense of community - the low level players needed us to kill the dragon to make the zone playable. Quests: Make quests change. Nothing makes an MMO more boring than following a guide from Alla or EQ2i. Imagine if quests were dynamically created and there was no guide. This is the most complex of all of the proposals, but it is still manageable. At the very least have a few thousand versions of a quest that are randomly assigned. Zones: Create a set of zones for each tier of players 1-10,10-20, etc. Once you have a set of zones stop. When you release expansions only release content for higher level players. Everyone will get a chance to work through the low level stuff if they keep plugging. By limiting what they can do you push more people towards the level cap which will make finding a group easier on everyone. Trade skills: I like the harvesting on Everquest Two. I would definitely keep that. I would add a request system into the game so players could create their own writ and place it on the auction house. Anyone with the right trade skill could fill the writ to earn coin and experience. I think this would relieve some of the repetitiveness of trades skilling as it exists today. Events: Have events going on in game as much as possible. Best of the Best tournaments, Seasonal quests, anything. Events are the polish that makes a good MMO great. Difficulty: Raids should be hard. They should make you want to pull your hair out. They should require lots of communication and dedication. The solo and group content should be manageable. Things should be challenging (so it doesn’t get to boring), but not insanely hard. What suggestions do you have for Everquest Three? |
|
Entries (RSS)