Really don't get what you are trying to say... I'm not sure what you are trying to draw out of Freliant's post and I'm not sure what the middle class means. What I read was him talking about the game being solo till the end then changing to groups. I guess I'd ask what is the option? I have though about this and kinda think not only is it inevitable but I can't think of any alternative that would be fun and work. Reguarding exploration eq2 both encouraged and rewards exploration more then any game out. So again you have completely lost me. In eq2 you get xp/aa for exploring new areas. You special AA rewards for killing every unique boss. You have various books with lore and goals to fight special mobs requiring exploration, tagging special mobs, or just finding unique locations. Again I'm at a loss as to what you would do more to encourage exploration. Upper echelons have always wanted members to have masters. The research assistants haven't changed anything. Masters are still selling for a high price and people are still not 100% mastered. At lvl 80 it takes 1 month to research a master. I'd guess most high lvl people probably have around 20-30 skills they need to master. Thats a lot of work even with the research assistant. Anyway I haven't seen any impact from research assistants except perhaps the highest prices Masters have come down some. And casual players are likely to have more masters over time then they ever could in the past. Not a bad thing In my opinion. As to leaving in a month I'm not sure how any of they points would effect a new player other then that they would spend a lot of the starting game soloing. Again being able to solo to max level is I'm affraid a requirement for any game past the first 6 months of life. You just won't find the population at lower levels to support setting up groups easily.
Just want to clarify my "month once more" line. It should read I've tried out another month again.
More clarification. I once started the game in December of 2004 and playing on/off through the years with almost a whole year of play during 2005. Sporadic times of play occurred through the years. My play time this year is 1 month.
(I should note I a have a 80 shadowknight)
Don't have the ultimate exploration solution, not a dev obviously, but I'd say more surprises and more lost civilizations couldn't hurt.
The "upper echelon" was meant to show how things would trickle down in a negative fashion.
(Just look at groups requiring certain classes just for single group dungeons like RE2 and such ex; plate healer/leather healer/raid equipped tank)
About all I have to clarify at this time. The rest of my "no comment" is allowing opinions to flow respectively and freely.
Thank you for the response of course.
Edit: Sorry about my error but I had to edit my post to read, "I have a 80 shadowknight"
Why do more people play wow? what the hell is wrong with gamers? do they like to play shitty games or what?
WOW is the perfect PVE mmo. It is player friendly, you have fast levels and all your friends play it.
EQ=WOW=EQ2, so why not play the one your friends play. This is also the reason why AOC, Lotr, War, Aion and the rest of the clones fails.
Fail?, the other games fail?, LoL, last time I looked they were still being played by a lot of people!, enough to be rentable businesses, enough for their companies to create more content to them. It seems based on your last phrase that people only play WoW, the other games dont exist anymore or are played by ghosts. Many of the games you cared to mention are very well these days. The only failure is not being the top dog Wow is... for now
Me and the Wife were asking ourselves this the other day. Not about why others aren't playing EQ2 but why we weren't. What it boiled down to was while it is very nice looking game and seems to have a lot, deffinetly like a lot of the classes and races (My fav is a froglok monk, just so kewl to play lol) it just had to much grind in it. There weren't a lot of people on the lower end content so we couldn't really find many people to do stuff with. We looked at what it would take to get a mount and decided then and there to quit. It really should have been our game, seemed almost perfect for a husband and wife duo but the grind was a bit much for us. I don't care if it's xp grind or quest grind, grind is grind lol. What we ended up doing was going back to UO.
Truly wanted to like EQ2, deffinetly a neat game in many regards.
There not playing it because they are better games out there, I recently started playing eq1 again, and it blows eq2 out of the water. eq2 after kunark= garbage
If you would like to try a fun game check out eq1 and the new server which starts you at 51 with 50 aa's, Tons of people on the server and loads of fun.
Egads, I am glad I ran into this post. I've been thinking of trying for EQ1 for a long time but always held back due to the "left behind" feeling I often find in MMO's that have been out for extended periods of time. I will definitely get EQ1 a try now that I know there's a server that lets you start a bit ahead so you can actually catch up!
That bit of gratitude aside, these are my complaints from when I tried EQ2 about a year and a half ago:
1) I felt that there were almost too many classes. It wasn' t necessarily the fact that there were a lot of classes that irked me, but moreso the fact that many of the classes felt so similar to each other that I believed they could have been merged into single classes and divided more by talent trees or another mechanic, rather than cluttering up the character creation with so many undiversified classes.
2) A biggie here, as has been said many many times in this thread... The loneliness factor. I played for a full month at about 4-5 hours a day, and I rarely found people to interact with. The chat was mostly dead except for "grats" whenever an announcement of someone getting a legendary item came across (which I must admit, I like that system on all the games I've seen it in).
3) The combat felt very uninvolved. The two classes I tried the most were paladin and druid. Both of them felt like I was doing little more than auto-attacking and using occasional spells to heal myself or do a little extra damage. It definitely wasn't as slow-paced as I found LotRO to be, but it just wasn't particularly involving either.
4) Group mobs. This was one of the biggest turn-offs for me, in fact. After I hit level 13ish, most of the mobs I started seeing were actually groups of 3-5 mobs all acting under one "mind." I really didn't like this aspect and would have preferred to see one CHALLENGING mob rather than a group of mediocre mobs which do nothing short of prolonging the already humdrum fight.
I didn't really have a problem with the art style and the game ran fine on my computer, with maybe 2-3 CTD's during my month of play and no lag to speak of. All in all, the game didn't hold my attention, and I think the "left behind" feeling of the lower level gameplay caused most of that. However, since I did list what I didn't like, it's only fair that I list what I -did- like in the game:
1) The crafting system. While it felt more like a gimmick than anything, I enjoyed it. I would have liked to have seen an auto-craft option for more materials or lower quality items or something for training, though. The mini-game system was neat, but I really didn't see it making an impact on the results of the item. Vanguard utilizes a much more complex crafting system and has a lot more variables in it that can affect your end result, and it would have been nice to see more of that in the EQ2 system. But EQ2's is still leaps and bounds better than the common crafting formula seen in games like WoW and LotRO.
2) Race diversity. I really liked seeing options for a lot of different races, each of which felt distinctly unique. A big plus on that one.
3) Housing. While the housing isn't as big a deal as in UO simply due to the fact that it's instanced, it was nice having something to do when I was winding down and getting ready to log out.
4) Hovering. I got an unusual amount of enjoyment out of fluttering around with my Fae... Let's not try to analyze that any further.
5) Items. As I mentioned further up, I like legendary find announcements. And even though I didn't play into it long enough to get any amazing items, I felt that the game's rarer items truly felt like treasures to find.
Anyway, off I go to research the EQ1 server mentioned.
Comments
Just want to clarify my "month once more" line. It should read I've tried out another month again.
More clarification. I once started the game in December of 2004 and playing on/off through the years with almost a whole year of play during 2005. Sporadic times of play occurred through the years. My play time this year is 1 month.
(I should note I a have a 80 shadowknight)
Don't have the ultimate exploration solution, not a dev obviously, but I'd say more surprises and more lost civilizations couldn't hurt.
The "upper echelon" was meant to show how things would trickle down in a negative fashion.
(Just look at groups requiring certain classes just for single group dungeons like RE2 and such ex; plate healer/leather healer/raid equipped tank)
About all I have to clarify at this time. The rest of my "no comment" is allowing opinions to flow respectively and freely.
Thank you for the response of course.
Edit: Sorry about my error but I had to edit my post to read, "I have a 80 shadowknight"
AC2 Player RIP Final Death Jan 31st 2017
Refugee of Auberean
Refugee of Dereth
WOW is the perfect PVE mmo. It is player friendly, you have fast levels and all your friends play it.
EQ=WOW=EQ2, so why not play the one your friends play. This is also the reason why AOC, Lotr, War, Aion and the rest of the clones fails.
Fail?, the other games fail?, LoL, last time I looked they were still being played by a lot of people!, enough to be rentable businesses, enough for their companies to create more content to them. It seems based on your last phrase that people only play WoW, the other games dont exist anymore or are played by ghosts. Many of the games you cared to mention are very well these days. The only failure is not being the top dog Wow is... for now
Me and the Wife were asking ourselves this the other day. Not about why others aren't playing EQ2 but why we weren't. What it boiled down to was while it is very nice looking game and seems to have a lot, deffinetly like a lot of the classes and races (My fav is a froglok monk, just so kewl to play lol) it just had to much grind in it. There weren't a lot of people on the lower end content so we couldn't really find many people to do stuff with. We looked at what it would take to get a mount and decided then and there to quit. It really should have been our game, seemed almost perfect for a husband and wife duo but the grind was a bit much for us. I don't care if it's xp grind or quest grind, grind is grind lol. What we ended up doing was going back to UO.
Truly wanted to like EQ2, deffinetly a neat game in many regards.
doesnt this game have 75-100k players?
Thats pretty good guys.
Sony turns a huge profit with EQ2 and it shows by how they continue delivering content.
Playing: EvE, Ryzom
Egads, I am glad I ran into this post. I've been thinking of trying for EQ1 for a long time but always held back due to the "left behind" feeling I often find in MMO's that have been out for extended periods of time. I will definitely get EQ1 a try now that I know there's a server that lets you start a bit ahead so you can actually catch up!
That bit of gratitude aside, these are my complaints from when I tried EQ2 about a year and a half ago:
1) I felt that there were almost too many classes. It wasn' t necessarily the fact that there were a lot of classes that irked me, but moreso the fact that many of the classes felt so similar to each other that I believed they could have been merged into single classes and divided more by talent trees or another mechanic, rather than cluttering up the character creation with so many undiversified classes.
2) A biggie here, as has been said many many times in this thread... The loneliness factor. I played for a full month at about 4-5 hours a day, and I rarely found people to interact with. The chat was mostly dead except for "grats" whenever an announcement of someone getting a legendary item came across (which I must admit, I like that system on all the games I've seen it in).
3) The combat felt very uninvolved. The two classes I tried the most were paladin and druid. Both of them felt like I was doing little more than auto-attacking and using occasional spells to heal myself or do a little extra damage. It definitely wasn't as slow-paced as I found LotRO to be, but it just wasn't particularly involving either.
4) Group mobs. This was one of the biggest turn-offs for me, in fact. After I hit level 13ish, most of the mobs I started seeing were actually groups of 3-5 mobs all acting under one "mind." I really didn't like this aspect and would have preferred to see one CHALLENGING mob rather than a group of mediocre mobs which do nothing short of prolonging the already humdrum fight.
I didn't really have a problem with the art style and the game ran fine on my computer, with maybe 2-3 CTD's during my month of play and no lag to speak of. All in all, the game didn't hold my attention, and I think the "left behind" feeling of the lower level gameplay caused most of that. However, since I did list what I didn't like, it's only fair that I list what I -did- like in the game:
1) The crafting system. While it felt more like a gimmick than anything, I enjoyed it. I would have liked to have seen an auto-craft option for more materials or lower quality items or something for training, though. The mini-game system was neat, but I really didn't see it making an impact on the results of the item. Vanguard utilizes a much more complex crafting system and has a lot more variables in it that can affect your end result, and it would have been nice to see more of that in the EQ2 system. But EQ2's is still leaps and bounds better than the common crafting formula seen in games like WoW and LotRO.
2) Race diversity. I really liked seeing options for a lot of different races, each of which felt distinctly unique. A big plus on that one.
3) Housing. While the housing isn't as big a deal as in UO simply due to the fact that it's instanced, it was nice having something to do when I was winding down and getting ready to log out.
4) Hovering. I got an unusual amount of enjoyment out of fluttering around with my Fae... Let's not try to analyze that any further.
5) Items. As I mentioned further up, I like legendary find announcements. And even though I didn't play into it long enough to get any amazing items, I felt that the game's rarer items truly felt like treasures to find.
Anyway, off I go to research the EQ1 server mentioned.