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EQ2 Dev John Smedley speaks on BETA 'Complaints' and possibly hints at open beta
Gargamel175
Member Posts: 7
in Everquest II
I wanted to address a few of the issues I've seen raised here. We've been beta testing EQ since July, and it's really been exciting to get to see the discussions that go on here. Our developers really do pay attention to these boards and a lot of the comments that our testers have made have resulted in changes to the game while it's been developing. Even if you don't see responses to every thread, rest assured that this feedback is vital to EQ2.
I wanted to directly address a few concerns that people have:
1) Lag - the team is hard at work addressing the lag that's seen in a few zones (Antonica and Commonlands are the main ones). They know exactly what the problems are and are simply banging down the list addressing them. This will go away soon. We have very deliberately been pushing larger numbers of people through a smaller number of beta servers to specifically handle performance issues on the server.
2) Class Diversity - One of the things about EQ II that everyone should realize is that it is NOT EverQuest Live... nor is it intended to be. This isn't watered down EQ, EQ Lite or any such thing. It's just a fundamentally different experience from the ground up. It's designed to grow from less diversity at the lower levels to much more diversity at the higher ones. We think that we've been able to capture the soul of EverQuest and add some new and interesting twists to the overall experience. We've focused a massive amount of attention on Quests and storyline around the different classes.. and what we're seeing is the testers seem to like that focus. Our goal is to get players through the lower levels of the game quickly so that they can reach the point where the classes really diverge. We have more distinctive class features that we'll be adding in the days and weeks ahead (traps on chests were just added for example). The team is working around the clock adding content and is this is really the fun part for them.. getting to make new and unique skills and abilities AND ways to use those in the game.
3) High-end spec - I've seen a lot of posts about how the game is pretty CPU and graphics card intensive. One of the things I've been the most pleased with is the amazing amount of options we have that can give the players the ability to fine-tune the frame rate for themselves. We run well on lower end machines when you turn down things a few notches. We've made this very simple for the players to do, and we have a utility that can check out the players machine and reccomend the best specs based on the results. Our thinking on this is long term. We wanted to make an engine that would tax even high-end machines *NOW*.. because we're in this for the long haul. When you buy a machine a year from now, we want you to be able to take advantage of the speed increases in both graphics cards and CPUs. I feel like this is the right way to go.. we don't want to look outdated 3 years from now.
4) State of the infrastructure - we have 4 Beta servers currently accessable to the public - a total of 22 are up and running, but most are not viewable by the beta testers for now (this will be changing shortly).
5) Station Players - I know many of you saw that IGN preview of Station Players (our new web based community tools).. we'll be opening this up to the beta testers sometime next week. It's a pretty amazing collection of tools and fun stuff for our players. We've spent a lot of time focusing on how to help the community with tools for managing guilds.. a knowledge base of items (the list actually grows on it's own as new items are discovered..), player web pages. I think what we've got is pretty cool, but you be the judge.
6) Misc. Bugs - remember, we're still in Beta. Obviously there are bugs, but the team is fixing things at an amazingly fast rate right now. Anyone that wants to can feel free to post the patch notes from the past few months. See for yourself!
John Smedley
President, Sony Online Entertainment
Comments
[quote]Originally posted by Gargamel175
[b]Smed SOE Management Posts: 2Registered: 09-21-2004
[url=http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/eq2/board/message?board.id=general&message.id=216327#M216327]
4) State of the infrastructure - we have 4 Beta servers currently accessable to the public - a total of 22 are up and running, but most are not viewable by the beta testers for now (this will be changing shortly).
John Smedley
President, Sony Online Entertainment
[/b][/quote]
I have been seeing all those servers when making a character... they are locked but there are like Beta 3 - 22
Playing: Vanguard SoH
Played: EQ, Planetside, SWG, WoW, EQ2
Moorgard posted something about this, as some people had also been seeing them at login.
They were mostly just internal test servers. Some of them weren't even real 'servers' in the normal sense of the word if I remember right. Some I think were simply workstations running the server side app for the devs to do a quick check of something without having to deal with the normal mucking about bringing a server up and down.
It's been a bit since I read his post about it, but that was the gist of it.
I figured Class Diversity would be lite at first, even with 50 levels. The actual max level is suppose to lvl 200 and if things are suppose to feel more different at high levels I bet it won't happen for quite a while though.
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EQ2 Qeynos Guild- http://www.imperium-arcanum.com
This is true , im sure with expansions and other things down the road there will be almost more diversty and distinction. Because if enough people start complaining about how the classes are so un diverse im sure they'll be an expansion that would change that somehow.
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EQ2 Qeynos Guild- http://www.imperium-arcanum.com
No the maximum level is 50 but the developers have stated that the game mechanism can easily handle level 200 without any tweaking.
I am guessing this is to make room for further expansions .Though i think it will be some time before they even make maximum level 100 as it does get rather slow past the half way mark.
200 levels is great and all, but from playing sitting through 50 levels of no diversity who is going to have the strength to go past that. Look at Anarchy Online it has 200 levels and class diversity was started at level 1. Before anyone flames me I REALIZE theirs more to it that that, and they are very different games with much different income levels. I WANT EQ2 to succeed, just a tad worried that I will be filing for Social Security before I see the end game.