09-26-2003, 02:25 AM
I never touched on why the game is truly horrible. There's no risk at all anymore. The concept of Risk vs. Reward is purely Time vs Reward.
The lunar expansion, Luclin, was the worst thing of all time. It was about when the original big names dropped out and formed Sigil. It brought new character models, which while higher polycount, look out of place and are animated horribly. The new engine raped the game and made it impossible to play on computers that rocked it a couple of years ago. It also doubled to tripled the numbers required for raids. While you could have successful raids with 30-40 people, it became necessary to use 60-100. And you suddenly needed keys. Lots of keys. Keys that took 100 man hours each on top of weeks of raiding to equip your guild with good enough gear to kill the big badass to finish the key (who he himself needed a couple of keys to get to, and dozens of hours of farming to make weapons that could hit him.) These keys let you get to that expansion's end game zone.
This zone was known as Vex Thal, the City of Shadows. Why? Because every other mob cast an unresistable AE blind. Only, in EQ, while blinded, your entire screen goes black - as if the game crashed. You can hear sound, but you can't see anything. Not text, not your ping, not anything.
They then stuck 10-40 mobs in each room, and you sloughed through them to collect the phat lewt. After a few months, they removed the blind.
For the next expansion, they removed keys. They replaced them with flags. Kill a notable god or demigod and you get a flag granting access to the next planar area. Only, every person in your guild needed every flag in the expansion to reach the final end zone, which was not complete until 9-10 months after the expansion was released. To prevent people from getting to it, they made the final encounter before it impossible with less than 200 people. They slowly, over a period of 3 months, weakened the encounter, before finally making it winnable with real numbers.
Also, the difficulty of gaining flags prevented 90% of the population from getting access to more than about 5 zones. Again, later they opened up many more zones and allowed people to 'piggyback' into flagged zones if enough people in their raid had flags, and allowed them to gain flags out of order. Originally, if you forgot to hail someone for a 'pre-flag' before killing certain npcs, you could not get credit for it.
The new expansion is supposedly OK. It is basically timetrial adventures with 4-6 people in a group, or 18-30 people in a raid. Which considering that guilds now sport rosters of 200+ people to function in the previous expansion...
But, the gear is excellent for the non-uberguild players. You just need to spend a few hundred hours of winning adventures for each item you want to upgrade.
The lunar expansion, Luclin, was the worst thing of all time. It was about when the original big names dropped out and formed Sigil. It brought new character models, which while higher polycount, look out of place and are animated horribly. The new engine raped the game and made it impossible to play on computers that rocked it a couple of years ago. It also doubled to tripled the numbers required for raids. While you could have successful raids with 30-40 people, it became necessary to use 60-100. And you suddenly needed keys. Lots of keys. Keys that took 100 man hours each on top of weeks of raiding to equip your guild with good enough gear to kill the big badass to finish the key (who he himself needed a couple of keys to get to, and dozens of hours of farming to make weapons that could hit him.) These keys let you get to that expansion's end game zone.
This zone was known as Vex Thal, the City of Shadows. Why? Because every other mob cast an unresistable AE blind. Only, in EQ, while blinded, your entire screen goes black - as if the game crashed. You can hear sound, but you can't see anything. Not text, not your ping, not anything.
They then stuck 10-40 mobs in each room, and you sloughed through them to collect the phat lewt. After a few months, they removed the blind.
For the next expansion, they removed keys. They replaced them with flags. Kill a notable god or demigod and you get a flag granting access to the next planar area. Only, every person in your guild needed every flag in the expansion to reach the final end zone, which was not complete until 9-10 months after the expansion was released. To prevent people from getting to it, they made the final encounter before it impossible with less than 200 people. They slowly, over a period of 3 months, weakened the encounter, before finally making it winnable with real numbers.
Also, the difficulty of gaining flags prevented 90% of the population from getting access to more than about 5 zones. Again, later they opened up many more zones and allowed people to 'piggyback' into flagged zones if enough people in their raid had flags, and allowed them to gain flags out of order. Originally, if you forgot to hail someone for a 'pre-flag' before killing certain npcs, you could not get credit for it.
The new expansion is supposedly OK. It is basically timetrial adventures with 4-6 people in a group, or 18-30 people in a raid. Which considering that guilds now sport rosters of 200+ people to function in the previous expansion...
But, the gear is excellent for the non-uberguild players. You just need to spend a few hundred hours of winning adventures for each item you want to upgrade.
*Pren_LL-AB
USEast HC
Dark_Mutterings (Necromancer)
Doug_Winger (Wearbear)
Heroic career and 1.10 aspirations cut tragically short because NOBODY CAN DO ANYTHING WITH A 22.2K CONNECTION WHY DOES GOD HATE ME.
USEast HC
Dark_Mutterings (Necromancer)
Doug_Winger (Wearbear)
Heroic career and 1.10 aspirations cut tragically short because NOBODY CAN DO ANYTHING WITH A 22.2K CONNECTION WHY DOES GOD HATE ME.