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EQ2 Combining Servers
Darniaq writes "Scott 'Gallenite' Hartsman, Senior Producer for Everquest 2, has announced the pending combination of ten servers with ten other others. Normally, this sort of announcement would be met with immediate derision, a collectively vindictive sneering about a game that wasn't successful or is dying. However, because of when this combination is coming, and how it is being handled, I have a slightly different view." Additional commentary at Aggro Me.
EQ2 is dying. Frankly, it was DOA.
ten other others???
fix that.
Don't release a game too early. You end up scaring off potential players. I played the game for possibly a month and it didn't take long for me to figure out how badly programmed the game was. Bugs were everywhere in the crafting system.
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
Its not that it was a bad game. It was amazing! the graphics are great (if your computer can handle them).
The issue they had was that they rushed the release. They are slow on bug fixes. and they're trying to attract the WoW crowd by making it easier. The problem is that EQ2 already had its core gamers! By making it easier to attract new gamers fromw WoW they in turn have killed of the original EQ2 crowd (ie Me). I don't enjoy everything being handed to me. I don't enjoy solo'ing all the way to 60 (much like WoW its getting to be the easiest way to get to 60 instead of risking pickup groups) I want to be grouping, I want to know that if someone is lvl 60 they actualy KNOW THEIR CLASS AND HOW TO USE IT. You have no idea how many people that are 60 still don't know what their class is used for and how to act in a group.
They also are SLOW TO FIX BUGS! High end raiding content is suppose to be their crown jewell. But yet when you go to try and kill a mob that has been in the game since launch, (Drakota in The Ferrot) He still has bugged adds! At least the last time I attempted him which was 2 months ago. I had a neighbor that was in a High end raiding guild that was usualy one of the first 2-3 to beat the new content. They had to wait 2-3 weeks to even fix zoning and agroo issues with mobs. So many issues with the game that they are slow to fix, and they never have fixed. I can understand a few bugs on release. I can understand that. But this many and after this long they still aren't fixed...
I'll give EQ2 one more try on the PvP servers (Although i wish they had a sullon zek ruleset...) and after that I just will have to wait for an MMO to suit my needs. I'm still hoping Vangaurd will live up to its promise... It is a Microsoft game though, so time will only tell.
You mean like it has bouncing pixellated boobies?
That might actually help its sales...
(ba-dum - rimshot)
I quit WoW and bought this a month ago. It is a good game now, far far better than it was when it first came out. They've gotten rid of the stupid penalty for death (although there remains a small XP debt and item decay for dying, which is very WoW like), revised the combat spells and moves, and now they are getting rid of one of the worst starting zones in the MMO genre and streamlining the character creation process, which was a blithering mess.
It's not WoW, but then again, it isn't the pile of garbage it was when it was released. It's come a long way, and it's certainly worth $20 for a look at this sleeper of an MMO.
Us Guild Wars players don't have a world at all, we just have a bunch of instanced 8 player or less zones, that we can't even rejoin if we're disconnected. The only place you run into other people is in the chat rooms, err cities.
Too bad Guild Wars isn't an MMORPG, and EVERYTHING in that shitty ass game is instanced except for the social centers.
Oh, nevermind!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
No MMO restricts the number of players because the world if too crowded, they do it because server architecture limits the amount of people on a given server/world. That's just how it is.
The only reason to combine servers is because it will cost them les to run the whole show on fewer boxes and the servers arent handling the max capacity of people yet.
Good luck to the poster trying to sell the SoE spin as a good thing. If people buy it move to Washington as I'm sure there will be lots of work waiting for you there on both sides of the policitcal fence.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
*cough* Anarchy Online came before GW *cough*
It looks like EQ2 is following the same path as AC2. Buggy release, eventual merger of servers despite bug fixes over time, and eventual shut down. Odd that the original AC is still in good shape and showing no signs of a server merge.
Back when I played EQ1, the exact same problem existed. MMORPGs are meant to cater to the lowest common denominator, and to achieve that their game mechanics favor time spent by the player in the game world over skill of the individual player. The time-over-skill value in MMORPGs is the reason why you see horrible high level players. "Hard" MMORPGs aren't hard inthemselves; they just take more time to get anything done than "easy" MMORPGs. More time investment doesn't always lead to increased skill or understanding, especially when the game in question requires little of either to be successful. MMORPGs are among the few games that low-skill people can actually thrive in, especially if they pick a valued class. In EQ1, it was cleric, warrior, or enchanter. I've seen many players of the three aforementioned classes that are the "top" people in a guild who have phat lewt and all that, but really they're terrible players who will get lost in the easiest to navigate of dungeons, who will fail miserably at any sort of platforming or careful character navigation, but they are just online all the time and people needed their class abilities...so they were successful.
Oh, and EQ1 had changes to its PVP system where they added the ability to attack player opponents directly behind you. Know why? Because crappy high level players that put tons of time into the game and had elite gear were getting beaten by lower level, lesser geared individuals that had fundamental skill in videogames in the best of the best tournaments. So they dumbed down that aspect of the game just so time spent on your character would be the deciding factor, not skill, in a PVP match.
Anarchy Online has three separate servers (although one gets the benefit of the doubt, because it's for European players).
Now, a year later, I have done WoW retail - 0-60 in three months and now what? Total boredom with running the same few instances night after night. And so a few weeks ago, I returned to EQ2.
And I am LOVING the game as it is now. I'm having a blast. I started over so I could get used to the changes a little at a time, and also to be a more useful class than a troubador (the "no, no, please don't group me" class when I left originally).
The game plays wonderfully. I am having fun just making stuff for my characters - necessary, since I can't afford anything on the brokers - and playing the game casually. Fun evaporates with the pressures of a raiding guild. It just seems more a world and more open to possibilities than WoW.
Even given EQ2s improvements, I still think Vanguard will decimate both this game and World of Warcraft. So many people in WoW are bored and looking for a challenge. It was a few people in my WoW guild deciding to check out EQ2 that led to my own return.
I have some pictures from the recent Fanguard (Vanguard Fan Fair). It looks really nice.
Shardless worlds and connected worlds are not the same thing. The point is that Guild Wars doesn't force you to take it in the behind to get to play with your friends. Everyone can move their character around the different districts, and the international districts allow for gameplay with Korean, European, and (now) Japanese players.
Once again, yes it is instanced, but that's not the point of my comment.
And is probably the same population as a full WOW server.
I played from release up until last September. I haven't really paid attention to what's happened in the past few months.
The problem is that EQ2 suffers from a few structural defects.
1) Zone layout - Way back in the mists of time there were supposed to be boats and getting between the islands was supposed to involve a boat ride. As a result of this early design, all of the zones in EQ2 are mostly on separate islands. Then they took the boats out and added magic bells on all of the docks to allow you to click to get to another destination.
End result: The world feels tiny. There's no sense of vastness like you had in EQ1 where getting from Qeynos to Freeport was a 6-8 zone run that took a goodish amount of time. (30 minutes?) Worse, there's only one way to get from Qeynos to Freeport.
2) Too tightly scripted - Some of this has been addressed over time. Such as the removal of level-based zone access and the simplification of picking your end-class.
3) Too many quests, not enough journal space - It became a major chore to get quests complete in a group. Due to the limited size of the quest journal, you'd spend a few minutes at the start of a night just trying to figure out what quests you wanted to knock off just to free up some space in your journal. Instead of doing whatever came to mind, a lot of folks became slaves to the quest journal (or gave up on quests).
4) Quests that aren't group-friendly. The best example of this is the level 20 armor quests. Due to the way that the quests were structured, you couldn't start working on AQ #2 unless you had completed AQ #1. Which meant that unless you stayed in lockstep with your friends, they'd either have to wait for you to play again, or go back and help you fulfill the quest requirements. (Including having to take a break and run back to town.)
5) Poor zone design. Too many zones are laid out in a maze fashion with long dead-ends (Nek Forest, Zek). Others are more open and more enjoyable (Thundering Steppes, Antonica, Commonlands). Nektulos Forest in particular was excessively annoying because there are a lot of spots where you have to go all the way back to a main valley just to go 50 meters in a particular direction.
6) Buggy zones. Nektropos Castle, Zek Citadel are the two that come to mind. Both of these zones suffer from poor pathing or too much packed into too small of a space. (Nek Castle would've been much better if all the rooms were sized up about 33%.)
7) Constantly removing reasons to travel back to your home city. Instead of making it easier to get back home at the end of an adventure, the devs went the other direction. As a result, they emptied out the cities and made them wastelands.
Some of this stuff is fixable, but some of it requires a major overhaul of the entire gameworld (such as the geographic layout).
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?