veeshans-peak
Latest
The Daily Grind: Devs behaving badly
Last week, EQ2Flames admin "LFG" told us about the SOE Community Influencer program and how he came to be released from it. It was a story of broken promises, SOE developer involvement in player guilds, a disenfranchised player community and heated emotions...Feeling he had nothing to lose, "LFG" mined the developer's private messages, and found some more juicy tidbits. The developer, Aeralik, had taken a bug report that told of an exploit that trivialized the killing of one of end-game raid dungeon Veeshan's Peak gateway dragons, and passed that to his player guild leader. He added that he would "look away" while his guild exploited the encounter so that they could finish their epic weapon quests.How much influence should game developers have in the guilds in which they play? When does a developer cross the line in feeding a guild strategies? If an encounter is too tough to complete, is it acceptable to exploit if a dev gives permission? Discuss!
Does Rise of Kunark offer enough to keep people playing down the track?
The question was raised by Ogrebear, in an article entitled "Rise of Kunark will hurt EQ2 in the long run": are the hardcore players burning through the EverQuest II expansion's content a little too fast? Of course, you always expect there to be a fraction of the player base that will race through a new expansion, hit the level cap together with their guild and storm the premier raid content. However, Ogrebear notes that some top guilds have already finished all but one of the raid zones -- meaning six other raid zones have been fully cleaned out. Surely the one remaining raid zone will not keep these people occupied until the next expansion?There will undoubtedly be content updates along the way, but for the core gameplay of this major expansion to have already been busted wide open comes as a bit of a surprise. Perhaps the last remaining raid dungeon, Veeshan's Peak, will be dramatically more difficult to conquer. But even still, how long will players be able to stand being stuck in the same dungeon if it is tuned to be stretched out so long? The average player is going to be well behind this curve, but with the speed at which everything has been trailblazed so far, the most obvious conclusion is that the raid content has simply been made easier than we've come to expect.
