New Upcoming Updates @ eqlive

[Ruldar]

From here:

January and Beyond
Upcoming for January and February 2004


We want to wish everyone a happy holiday season and thank you for continuing to be a part of EverQuest. We have some exciting times ahead with our 7th expansion in the works, http://www.gatesofdiscord.com, and there are many more exciting things to come. Here are a few of the new features on the EQ team's large and busy schedule.




Melee Enhancement, part 2

Melee classes are currently enjoying the first part of the improved Melee system and the feedback we are receiving has been great. Early in 2004 we plan to move forward with the rest of the melee enhancement, the reaction abilities. The enhancement gives Monks, Rogues and Warriors the ability to use special skills in response to a mistake made by their opponent or an exceptional move of their own. This enhancement will be in addition to the existing system, allowing players to use the skills for more involved game-play and to improve the abilities of their characters.

A more detailed explanation and the transcript of a chat with the EQ Live team about the system can be found on the Developers Corner.


Graveyard Zone

Tired of losing your corpse? The current EQ system removes corpses from the game after a week to reduce clutter and potential video lag. But we know there are times when your character dies and you just can't get it right away. Next thing you know a day turns into a week and BAM! Your corpse is gone. Since we can't leave the corpses sitting in game indefinitely, some inventive folks here have come up with another option.

We plan to create a "graveyard" zone that will only work if your corpse has decayed and disappeared. If you have lost your corpse due to decay in other parts of Norrath, you will be allowed to enter this zone and reclaim it.


Tradeskill Interface Upgrade

Tired of all the clicking and dragging needed just to make a type 1 wood arrow? We know that the current tradeskill interface is cumbersome, so the UI guys have come up with some new ideas.

Opening a tradeskill container will now open a new user interface. In the window you will find an area that has all recipes that are currently available to you. This includes recipes that are at your skill level as well as some above it. Clicking on a recipe will display what items are necessary for its completion. Clicking the "combine" button will extract those required items from the player's inventory, and perform the recipe combine, placing the results on the player's cursor. The new system is nice and neat, with no dragging and dropping unless you want to try a combine that is way out of your league, which uses the old style of combination.



These are just a few of the things slated to come out of the EQ Live laboratory. Watch for other exciting announcements in the weeks ahead.

[Lilosh]

Tradeskill Interface Upgrade

Tired of all the clicking and dragging needed just to make a type 1 wood arrow? We know that the current tradeskill interface is cumbersome, so the UI guys have come up with some new ideas.

Opening a tradeskill container will now open a new user interface. In the window you will find an area that has all recipes that are currently available to you. This includes recipes that are at your skill level as well as some above it. Clicking on a recipe will display what items are necessary for its completion. Clicking the "combine" button will extract those required items from the player's inventory, and perform the recipe combine, placing the results on the player's cursor. The new system is nice and neat, with no dragging and dropping unless you want to try a combine that is way out of your league, which uses the old style of combination.

Son of a...

But...

Everyone, hurry up and sell your MTP and such soon.

Not only will making them be a moot point shortly, due to ease of making them in bulk, but this will make everyone a 250 Baker, or brewer, or what have you.

I know that they're ****ed if they do, and ****ed if they don't, but this is going to make skillups VERY easy on the combines that were just repetitive.


And goodbye selling CE for any kind of profit. :-(


-Lilosh

[Renjah]

I dont think 250+ trivials will be included it sound slike only trivial recepies will work that way,

[Itzena]

...

(tries to think of a polite way to phrase my reply)


I'm not convinced that this is necessarily the way forward for tradeskills in EQ, with the (almost) 5 years of extant development and balancing. I was always under the impression that one of the reasons why tradeskill items were decent (in the era when each item/line of items was introduced) compared to mob drops was that the repetition and tedium of skilling up put off a lot of players, thereby limiting the amount of crafted goods entering the EQ economy. This change looks like it may remove that restriction, with possibly unforseen consequences.

(There, that works)

Ah well, at least tailoring can't be powerskilled to 200+ with vendor items...yet.

[Tudamorf]

Originally posted by Renjah
I dont think 250+ trivials will be included it sound slike only trivial recepies will work that way,

Read again: "This includes recipes that are at your skill level as well as some above it."

Everyone and their brother will now be able to GM all skills except tailoring and smithing with one very simple macro. Good going SoE!

Next, why not include an option where you can buy 1750 club membership for a $50 fee. Would sure save a lot of the headache of getting there.

[Renjah]

What Im saying is I HIGHLY doubt they will automate the skill up process. That would do way more harm to thos ein the trade skill community than good. I would assume any combine which can be automated AND yield skill ups would be those that are not nrmally used for skilling up. (pop combines which require RARE components)

Heck if you can get a good enough run of pop combines to skill up on you DESERVE a fast way to combine them


P.S. Where's Absor when you need him to calm our nerves...


ABBBSSSSOOOOOORRRRR WHERE ARE U!?!?!

[Tudamorf]

Originally posted by Renjah
That would do way more harm to thos ein the trade skill community than good. I would assume any combine which can be automated AND yield skill ups would be those that are not nrmally used for skilling up. (pop combines which require RARE components)

You're assuming that (a) SoE actually has a clue as to what recipes are used to skill up, and (b) SoE actually cares about not harming the trade skill community. I doubt either statement is true.

What I'm guessing they will do is copy DAoC's trade skill system, where it brings up a menu of things you can make and you click and wait a loooooong delay (dependent on the skill level required) and get the item in your pack. That system bites the big one for legitimate players but is a macroer's heaven.

The big question in terms of macroing skill gains is, of course, what is the biggest differential they will allow between your skill and trivial to use the new system. Since many items have trivials around the 300 range, they would need to allow a 50 point differential to allow a GM to make the item using the new system -- and a 50 point differential would allow for massive macroing.

[Lilosh]

Originally posted by Renjah
P.S. Where's Absor when you need him to clam our nerves...

My nerves are clammy enough thanks.

-Lilosh

[Dory]

Hmm...

Is this going to include all possible recipes? Only a few? Only those that are confirmed on EQtraders?

I'm not going to panic and claim the sky is falling because tradeskills are easier but I am vaguely bothered that the fun of testing and discovery of new recipes might be removed.

[da_erck]

"This includes recipes that are at your skill level as well as some above it."

Right, so you can use the "quick combine" once you reached 250 or close to the trivial of MTP, but most likely not at 200 where they are interesting for skill ups.

I would also guess that the combine isn't "instant" as it seems that they just put in a combine delay for certain recipies on the recent patches. So I expect that the combine button will add the items to the tradeskill container one by one with a small break in between and then hit the combine button, so that the combine process is still a time sink, just less intense on mouse clicks.

My only concern is that showing all recipies by default will spoil all the fun of discovering new recipies and finding new books. I hope that you will have to "learn" the recipie first, either by making the combine yourself or by reading the appropriate recipie book.


PS: Absor is gone. Brenlo is Community Relations dude now

[Renjah]

Originally posted by Dory
Hmm...

Is this going to include all possible recipes? Only a few? Only those that are confirmed on EQtraders?

I'm not going to panic and claim the sky is falling because tradeskills are easier but I am vaguely bothered that the fun of testing and discovery of new recipes might be removed.

They didnt say if the items needed would be displayed or not. It may have the finished product name and not list all the items needed. Of course this would FINALLY settle once and for all if hot sauce IS in game!

[Twistagain]

Clicking on a recipe will display what items are necessary for its completion.

Actually, it DID say.

[Renjah]

has to be listed to be clicked on I assume they wont list all receipies but what do I know...

[Doremi]

I'm sure others sent in similar suggestions, but for what it's worth, here's what I sent in to the various feedback addresses back in July 2003:

Subject: EverQuest idea: Recipe book

EverQuest developers,

It'd be *really* nice if you added a recipe book - or books, one per
tradeskill - to the game. The primary goal here is to cut down on the
amount of carpal tunnel aggravation suffered by EQ tradeskillers, who
currently have to do a *lot* of click-click-clicking to make even a single
recipe. Recipe books would work along the lines of the recently
implemented spell sets, with a few important changes:

* Add a right-click ability to an open combinable container to load a
recipe from the appropriate recipe book. This would open an
alphabetically sorted list of known recipes in that tradeskill, where the
names are the products of the recipes.

* For recipes with more than one result, e.g., elemental bolts and gears,
use "product1/product2/..." to describe the recipe.

* For items with more than one possible recipe, e.g., Clump of Dough, make
mousing over the recipe list the required ingredients. Thus you'd have
several "Clump of Dough" recipes in the recipe book, but each would have
unique mouse-over information.

* Left-clicking (selecting) a recipe would automagically move the required
number of items from your inventory into the container and do the combine
for you. If you lack a sufficient quantity of any particular item, the
combine gives an error message: "You do not have the right items in
sufficient quantities to craft [recipe name]."

* Recipes automatically get added to the recipe book after a successful
combine. Some recipes could get added ahead of time by completing a
quest.

If you wanted to be really swanky, you could add a display toggle to show
which recipes have become trivial at your current level in that
tradeskill.

Hoping to see this in-game soon!

[Gello]

The recipe book should start out empty, and have an entry added only when an item is attempted by that player. Never played it but isn't that how EQOA tradeskills work? Seems like it'd be a more reasonable way to do it than a drop down eqtraders. So there'd still be some "discovery" and stuff.