Too much is changing

[Ghismonda]

Am I the only one with this horrible knot in her stomach?

It's not just that tradeskills are undergoing a giant overhaul. It's that every standard ruleset server is merging with a completely new community. If you're like me and keep up on your server boards, maybe you're experiencing the same thing we are at 7th hammer. That is, their board trolls looking for nothing but drama have come to the 7th boards starting pissing matches with the mods of our server boards. Granted, I know that not everyone from Lanys (the server we're merging with on April 11th) is going to be as immature as these guys, but I had just gotten used to all of our trolls quitting the game. This culture shock is making me uneasy.

And what about these massive collision changes I'm reading about on the Sony forums? So they changed something with the DON expansion that has caused handfuls of raid zones to crash, and now they're having to do a rather intensive fix to restore normality. Is anyone else scared about this and what it may mean? What are the chances that it only fixes fire, the zone they've focused on the most, and compounds other zones with similar but different causes for their zone crashes? ugh ugh ugh...

Don't get me started on class reinvisioning. I'm sure it needs to be done, and I've read over Brenlo's descriptions of the "pie" and bigger and smaller slices... but you can't do something like this without causing unrest in at least some of the classes. How is this going to shake out? How will it affect my guild, and my friends?

What about these spell changes set up to take effect with this next patch? I'm not aware of any spell-casting class that isn't affected. Some of the changes are just a simple matter of DPS, or DPM changes, and seem to be positive. But some classes are crying nerf, and some classes (healing hybrids, mainly) are getting such an enormous boost as to be considered for having their group and raid roles CHANGED as a result of this patch! So much change...

And of course theirs the black cloud hanging over tradeskills right now. I don't know about you good folks, but I've been sinking every spare second and every spare plat into maximizing as many of my 250+ tradeskills as possible. Tradeskilling is my compulsion, but it is often a labor of love. It is hard to explain, but this is changing... having this feeling in the pit of my stomach that the rug is about to be ripped out from under me has gotten my nails chewed down to the nub, and is keeping me up later at night to get as much done as I can before April 12th.

I suppose all of these changes have their positives and negatives, and given in seperate doses I would likely be able to find the silver lining in all of them. But at the moment, at least for me, it just seems like too much change at one time. I suppose a little communication on ALL fronts would help to ease my mind, but I don't know... I've never been so close to just walking away from EQ. I hope that doesn't make me a fairweather customer, but I'm not a fan of growing pains. I'd rather cancel for six months or a year, let the servers and tradeskills and new spells and rebalancing and collision system and everything just settle in, while I'm painting my house or getting a tan at the beach.

I hope this knot disipates after the patch...

[Cerpicio]

Don't be too concerned about the Lanys / 7th Hammer merger. From what I remember, there are a lot of jerks and immature brats who like to start things on the Lanys server board. But that's just the boards, the server itself is pretty friendly. I've been playing on it for 3 years and have met many friendly people.

I assume from your sig-pic that your main is a gnome? I'm involved with a guild on Lanys that only allows gnomes, and it's alot of fun. There's only a few people in it and they are only level 50-something, but they meet every week. I was thinking of taking a break from all the TS-ing and hunting and maybe conentrating on this guild. It could be a lot of fun to build up an all-gnome guild. It's certainly something different and might bring a little new life to the game.


-- C.

[Aphreal]

Well, I probably can't help you much with anxieties about tradeskill changes and class reenvisioning, but hopefully I can unknot you a bit on one score.
I'm from Lanys, and I can assure you that it really is a very friendly server, despite the people who love causing trouble on message boards. Everyone I've talked to in my little family guild is really looking forward to having some more people around to get to know, group with, and maybe even have as a market for tradeskilled stuff. (Hey, a girl can dream, right?) I haven't played anywhere else really, but I get the impression that we're a pretty easygoing little server with no more than the usual share of idiots.
I admit that I'm not always a big fan of change either, but since this one's pretty much out of my hands, I've been trying to accept it and look at the positives. Other than having a couple characters at risk of getting a dreaded x, I'm looking forward to the merge as a chance to be part of a bigger community with more people who share my casual, tradeskill focused view of the game. I'm Gwen from Circle of Knowledge, and I hope to meet you sometime after the 11th so I can be in awe of your 250+ tradeskills in person

*waves at the post above her* Hey Fenbin!
Fenbin's right, the gnome guild is a ton of fun for all involved, enough so that my friends in it convinced me and my husband to make new baby gnomes to start up Akanon's Destiny: The Next Generation!

[Rissenn]

Meh, just have a look at the different message boards and you will see that they do all have one thing in common: Board trolls who get their kick out of infuriating people.

These people are usually a very, *very* small percentage and can in no way be said to represent an entire server. I think you should not worry, but instead see the server merger as a way of getting to meet new people and make more friends..=)

[Sylphan]

Great post. I feel the same horrible knot. Because this is a rant thread, allow me to add my comments to your topics.

My server is being merged *today*, as I write this. The title-suffixes aren't even live yet so A) we won't get to use them and B) I wonder if there will be bugs because that code is missing. I definitely feel this anxiety, especially today... but I'm optimistic.

There have been a whole series of changes to pathing and collision and movement beginning about a year ago (or possibly beginning when DX9 became required). Besides the little bugs that go live and get fixed later, there's the lag issue. The new movement code is so much slower and less efficient that you need a much faster computer with more memory to play EQ now, even in the old zones with old models let alone the new graphics-intense zones. The zone crashes just mean it will continue to get worse.

My class was the only one to have nerfs announced in the first round of class re-envisioning. Some classes got glossed over with 'no changes for you, but we have good intentions', only enchanters actually got nerfs. More to the point, the nerfs were specific items we'd asked about a few months ago and they'd specifically promised would not be changed.

Spell changes? Egads, the enchanter class is changed so much by the aggro and dps changes that we're sticking our heads in the sand and shooting any messengers that come to tell us about them. It's much more to us than a change in nuking DPS (and ironically, our high level nukes did NOT get the damage and mana cost improvements that everyone else got). Seriously, it's a strange time on the enchanter message board. The message that's trying to get through is that on test server, mages (the class that doesn't even have root for gosh sakes, let alone mez, stun, or snare) can do more effective crowd control than the new enchanters! Also enchanters are becoming more bottable than ever, as if there aren't already enough KEI-bots in the world. Suffice to say, we aren't too thrilled about the second round of class re-envisioning either.

I also see the tradeskill cloud darker than you do. 1) The reduction in tradeskill trivials seems to have the specific purpose of making you need drops from level 65-70 zones (or maybe raid zones) to skill up to 300. Catering to the high-levels, don't you know. 2) Rushing to skill up has put special strain on the vault space of all my alts, and my guild bank, and even some friends' alts... and even at that much of what I make won't ever get sold because I can't afford to wait, I'm trying to skill up as much as possible before things change. But really, all of that is just a side effect of the inherent inequity of letting some people get to 300 on old trivials while others will have to do it with the new trivials. 3) I have a hunch tradeskills now have softcaps. For instance, skill-315 jewelers with all AAs are reporting much less than the expected 95%+ success rate cutting radiant augments... more like 70%. Could the success-rate formula have a softcap above 250 skill? More generally, if some recipes can have a minimum-skillup-chance, might not certain recipes get a maximum-success-chance?

I wish I could skip over a lot of the growing pains, but only some of them. Some change in a world is good, such as... wars occur, cities get conquered (like Firiona Vie or Grobb). First there was nothing north of Lavastorm, then a new expansion opened and we found a tunnel to a new area. Guild halls open, where before there were none. New weapons and armor are discovered and people sell their old weapons. Drop rates increase or decrease and some items become stackable. Certain mobs stop spawning, or only appear for one month per year. These things are game changes.

But then there's the immersion-killers. Change I can accept, but altering the laws of physics is a whole different thing. It really messes with your characters and your roleplaying and your perception of the world, let alone game balance. Changing spells to every level instead of every five levels. Changing the dps of the spells themselves. Changing tradeskill caps and the effect of focus items, and even the trivials of individual recipes. Changing xp formulas, NPC immunities, AA effects, AC calculations, factions, and other fundamentals is serious stuff. These types of changes are frequent in EQ2 and are the reason I have no interest in EQ2. As they become common in EQ1 I'll lose interest here too.