MobHunter Says: Exp Nerf will be UNnerfed

[Licasia]

Read the complete article here (http://www.mobhunter.com/article.jsp?articleid=-1881449117) .

But here is the part that has them excited on the Mage's Tower

Quote:
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Another impending change that will make high-level players happy is more options for gaining experience. As we well know, Planes of Power saw the level range of mobs that players can get decent exp from shrink from 15 to 10, thus making all but a handful of zones useless for exping at 65. The level range will be opened back up again, giving players much more room to spread out. This should breathe new life into unfortunately abandoned places like the Temple of Cazic Thule.
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Sound fun?
Casi

[Kalthanan]

This is great news.

The fact remains, however, that PoP zones still give almost DOUBLE the experience of other zones, because of the ZEM (Zone Experience Modifier).

It's a 145% experience bonus, versus most zones being 75%, with some exceptions like The Hole (100%).

BTW, that link isn't working for me. Maybe the site is being inundated.

[Licasia]

It took me about 4 times to get it to open...but it finally did. They talked about the xp zones and other plans they have.

[Kalthanan]

Monkly Business mirrored the article:

http://pub147.ezboard.com/fmonklybusiness43508frm1.showMessage?topicID=37500 .topic

Moorgard's Version of the visit to Soe
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I am copying it HERE - so that we do not overload Moorgards Server. THANK you moorgard your article is WAY better than what we have seen from any of the others. (btw if you want me to take this down and replace with the link just shoot me an email and i will)
A Little Chat

After lunch (pizza, what else?) we went downstairs again to the computer room to have a sit-down discussion with the EQ team. This included familiar names like Rod Humble, Rich Waters, Scott Hartsman, and Absor, along with numerous other devs and designers (Smed came in and said hello during lunch, but went back to work after the food ran out).

What followed was a casual Q&A session. Think of a FanFaire discussion panel, but with devs outnumbering the players. Allakhazam posted his own article about what we learned, so be sure to check that out as well.

Fears that the success of the Legacy of Ykesha extension signaled the end of more free zones can be laid to rest. Both totally new zones and revamps to existing ones are in the works. The two nearest on the horizon are a completely revamped Plane of Hate and the long-anticipated arrival of Kunark's underwater dungeon, Veksar. Hate gets new artwork and (gasp!) totally redone pathing--the only questions remaining are whether the zone should remain in its current level range or be upgraded to something harder. Veksar will be geared towards levels 50-65 and is close to finished. Expect other zones to receive tuning to make them more usable. For instance, Nurga will likely see some named mobs added and a reduction in the number of casters to make the zone more appealing to adventurers. There will be other partial zone changes in the future.

Oh, and for you Mischief fans out there, PoM was indeed partially revamped, but Rich Waters didn't feel the changes did enough to take the zone in the direction he wanted to go. In other words, don't expect to see an updated zone go live in the near future.

Another impending change that will make high-level players happy is more options for gaining experience. As we well know, Planes of Power saw the level range of mobs that players can get decent exp from shrink from 15 to 10, thus making all but a handful of zones useless for exping at 65. The level range will be opened back up again, giving players much more room to spread out. This should breathe new life into unfortunately abandoned places like the Temple of Cazic Thule.

The subject of game bugs came up, of course, and Scott Hartsman clarified why fixes can be slow in coming. In case you hadn't realized it, the team working on EQ these days is *completely* different from the guys who created the game. As in, nobody from the old team is around anymore. So a lot of what Hartsman and the coders have to do is go back and figure out what the old code is trying to do before it can be replaced. Since you can't just rip out lines of code without first knowing how they interact with the rest of the game, the process can take a lot of time.

Archery was brought up as a specific example. Clearly there are many bugs present in the current system--mobs being partially in walls makes arrows not hit, there are line of sight issues, etc. But fixes to just parts of the system won't work; the whole thing is being redone. Rangers should take note, however, that part of the fix lies in the way a mob's hate list works, which is currently very broken. Expect to see rangers become responsible for the damage they do--the days of launching an endless stream of arrows without drawing aggro are numbered, my fine woodsy friends. Fixing the way the hate list works could make other changes possible, such as limiting the number of people affected by AE rampages and such. Please note that nothing was promised in this regard, but at least the possibility is there.

Another criticism commonly made against the team is that major changes are made without testing the impact they will have upon the average player. Hartsman pointed out that, until very recently, the company had no means of accurately sampling the player population to test changes. There are more than 11,000,000 (that's eleven freaking million) characters across all the EQ servers, and discounting mules, most players fall into the 45-55 range. Determining what exactly constitutes the "average" player can be tricky. But the team is finally getting some systems in place that allow them to more accurately determine how changes will impact players, and hopefully we'll see less and less of those "whoops!" kinds of mistakes that throw the game out of whack.

I asked about the way the global file works, and what exactly prevents the addition of more global models and textures. The limit is imposed by system requirements, which would have to be raised to accomodate more stuff. The team is working on ways to compress the data that's in the file, and is hopeful that new armor textures can be added sometime over the course of the next year. This would provide a much-needed boost to player looks, which are fairly stifled right now, despite the introduction of the dye system.

And yes, the team knows that Luclin animations suck. They said they were under an enormous time crunch to get those done, and they aren't any happier with them than we are. They would love to redo them, but it's just a matter of priorities and how many hours exist in a day.

You can expect to see more scripted events, a la the fall of Grobb. Planes of Power introduced a new scripting engine for the team that is orders of magnitude more stable than anything used before. Remember how broken the whole Sleeper's Tomb script was? Well consider that the change to Grobb involved hundreds of NPCs across multiple zones, and it had zero live actors. It was run simultaneously across servers, and worked flawlessly. Mobs can actually move from one zone to another just like players can, and the script keeps track of them. The team called the fall of Grobb a conservative first step, so now that they know the system works you can expect even more ellaborate events to take place. No zone is safe!

One of the most interesting and reassuring things I learned that day was that SOE has no plans to end EverQuest. None. While many of us have been seeing EQ2 as an intended migration path for EQ players, that's not the company's intent. Rod Humble pointed out how competition from other games has only ever made EQ stronger and gain more subscribers. Rather than positioning EQ2 as something that takes away from the original, it's intended to be an alternate game that is designed to appeal both to existing players and to those who may have tried the original EverQuest and didn't like it.

I still think EQ2 will have a bigger impact upon EQ's player base than any RPG released so far, and I think SOE will be smart enough to encourage existing players to try the new game while still keeping their classic EQ accounts open (can you say "package deal"?), but it's obvious that the company intends both games to be vital.

The team made it clear that more expansions are definitely on the way for EverQuest. In fact, there was a meeting that very day discussing some possibilities, but the team wasn't allowed to talk about it. Nor would they answer any questions about EQ2, despite my best efforts to weasel responses out of them. Cagey bastards!

Oh, and you know how message boards buzz everytime SOE registers a new domain name or copyrights a new title? Well, such actions don't really guarantee anything. The team kicks around a lot of ideas for future content, and pretty much anything that sounds promising at all gets locked down just in case they decide to develop the idea further. So don't think you know the name of the next expansion just because you see a Web site reserved for it.

Finally, we talked a bit about class balancing. As has been stated numerous times before, this is an ongoing and neverending process for the game. While Waters stated that he didn't think any classes currently qualified as being "brutally broken," he did acknowledge that monks are probably most in need of some love right now. But even though he admitted the infamous mitigation nerf hurt mid-level monks more than intended, don't expect any huge changes to the way monk defense works at present. In fact, he indicated that the most valid gripe monks have right now is their damage output relative to other classes, especially in PoP. The team is well aware of the current disadvantage melee face and is considering the best route to take, so you can expect to see some tuning to the relative damage output of the various classes.

Jumping Ship

After our Q&A session, some of the team took us on a tour of the Ykesha zones. To facilitate this, Absor had whipped us up some level 60 frogloks on Test server. I played a warrior, and let me tell you that being main tank is every bit as simple as I always knew it must be. Attack, taunt, go eat cookies... yep, that's the life! Of course, having a GM buff that gives 32K hitpoints didn't hurt, either.

Our merry band of froggies stumbled through the LoY zones, eventually ending up aboard Hate's Fury--the first zone that's also a cruise ship. The zone has great artwork and nice attention to detail. I especially liked the way the background was used to give the illusion of being on a turbulent, restless sea.

Eventually the GMs took us to fight the boss of the zone, Captain Krasnok. The fight itself went just like most of these things go, but the ending had a very special twist. Rather than just falling over dead like your typical mob, Krasnok has a very cool animation sequence in which tentacles come up from the deck of the ship and pull him downward. Krasnok struggles against their grip but loses, eventually being dragged down, leaving only his massive sword sticking out of the deck itself. Kudos to the design team on this one.

The new LoY zones are definitely worth checking out, even if you're already too uber to gain much from them loot-wise. There is a lot of attention to detail--flies buzzing around skulls on the ground was a particularly nice touch--and even the models that have undergone seemingly minor changes have a lot of new artwork and animations. I think PoP and LoY combined show that zone design keeps getting better and better.

Wrapping Up

Something you hear time and time again is that the EQ team doesn't play its own game or that they only care about making a buck. You don't have to talk to them very long to realize how completely wrong those assumptions are.

These guys *do* play EQ. A lot. Many different classes, many different levels. In fact, a lot of the current team were people who played the game when the old guard was in place, which is partially why we've seen so many sweeping changes to the Vision (TM) in the past year or so. Many of the same things that frustrated us as players in the early days frustrated the current team as well, which is why you see things like soul binders and fast modes of transportation being introduced. It wasn't a case of "Brad is gone, now we can screw around with the game;" it's a matter of "What aggravated us as players and how can we make the game more fun?"

I got a good chuckle when I jokingly mentioned how I was missing my guild's Rallos Zek raid in order to be at this event. Shawn Lord, Assistant Lead Designer for EQ, chimed in that he was missing his guild's PoP raid that night, too. I chatted with an EQOA team member who had just gotten his monk to 65, and we commiserated about our class being broken. These guys *do* play the game, and in fact are as passionate about it as any players I've ever met.

Before we left that evening we also got a peek at PlanetSide, a kind of Quake-meets-strategy game where you get to shoot your buddies while tooling around various zones (continents) and flying different kinds of ships. While I'm not an FPS guy myself, it looked pretty promising. The game is in beta right now.

Anyway, that's about as VAKish as I can get in one day. What can I say? It was a lot of fun, and I'm glad I went. San Diego is freaking gorgeous, the people there were really nice, and I think we'll be seeing a lot of positive changes for EverQuest in the next year and beyond.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to figure out how to take my revenge upon Absor for threatening the well-being of my foot. Oh, I know... pictures! Enjoy.