http://eq.stratics.com/content/hoclogs/20051214.php
Brannoc - Welcome to the another great Stratics house of commons with the developers of Everquest! Tonight will be a general chat so feel free to ask any questions about the game.
Brannoc - Please send those questions to [QT]Cale - to do so type /msg [QT]Cale My question here. Please only send questions to our QT's as those sent to myself or the developers will not make it into the lineup.
Brannoc - The full logs will be posted on http://eq.stratics.com after the chat. We'll begin with a quick intro from our guests...now would be a good time to send in those questions!
Kytherea - Good Evening all, I am Christina Delzer the EverQuest Community Relations Manager
Rashere - Evening folks. I'm Travis McGeathy, Lead Designer for EverQuest.
Raghnell - Howdy, I am Chris Lena, the brank spanking new Producer of EverQuest
Dev-Maddoc - Welcome everyone, I'm Jason Mash, an Assistant Lead Designer on the EverQuest team.
Rytan - Hello! I'm Ryan Barker, Assisant lead for Everquest.
Ngreth - Hello, I am Adam Bell, Associate Game Designer for Everquest
Brannoc - *Nolrog* Are there plans on adding recipes for Taelosian Wheat/mountain wheat? They were added to the game with GoD, but never used in a recipe. There is an ongoing thread on the artisan-2019s way titled Gates of Discord Tradeskill still not complete if you need recipe ideas.
Dev-Maddoc - Yes, we will be adding recipes that use the Taelosian wheat in future recipes.
Brannoc - *Loral* How does SOE feel about the popularity of monster missions?
Rashere - We've been very pleased with the popularity of Monster Mission. People have really flocked to them, but most importantly the missions have remained very popular after the last patch which removed the incentive for afk players to tag along while others did the missions.
Brannoc - *Loral* Care to elaborate on the rumors of a "Prophecy of Ro" expansion?
Raghnell - We cannot confirm nor deny the rumors of a future EverQuest expansion. I can't imagine where you would get such a notion.
Brannoc - *Loral* When might we see improvements to the point costs for LDON equipment from levels 20 to 50?
Rashere - We don't have a time frame for that change currently, but its definitely on the list of things we want to do. More likely, the change will be to the point rewards coming out of the adventures rather than the cost of the items.
Brannoc - *Phillip09* Is there any possiblity of adding extra aa abilities for those who are maxed out on all the others?
Rashere - I'm sure we'll be adding more AAs in the future. They seem to be somewhat popular with our players.
Brannoc - *Nolrog* Are there plans on increasing the stack size on selected tradeskill items, such as blue diamonds, celestial essence, spider silks/swatches, spiderling silks/threads, etc?
Dev-Maddoc - Yes, this is something that's on our list of things to review and is partially the reason we got the stackability changes made to begin with.
Dev-Maddoc - Making this adjustment for ammo was a relatively easy and painless change. Items that are used as source-items in tradeskills are not as straight forward, so we'll need to look at them on an item by item (and likely on a skill by skill) basis. It's not an overly difficult thing to do, it just takes a little time. It's entirely likely that these changes will make it out in smaller chunks, likely on a skill-by-skill basis.
Brannoc - *Deltree* With OMM exploit that have been found to beat him up easier, I still haven't seen that many guild who beet him up, any chance or nerfing him maybe now that 2 expansion have already been out since him.
Rashere - OMM still gets beaten fairly regularly. We don't have plans to change his difficulty right now. He's likely tougher than he needs to be, but if your guild can take him down, you've earned the bragging rights. I like him in that state, particularly because he's not required to progress further into the game.
Brannoc - *Loral* Few groups seem to hunt in DoD overland zones these days. Why do you suppose that is? Should it be fixed, and if so, how?
Rytan - DoD was definitely designed with a large amount of mission content involved, and the layout of the zones reflects this. I don’t think the disuse of the overlands zones means theirs anything necessarily wrong with them, but rather that the mission content is so good.
Rytan - However, there's a balance to be struck between static and instanced content and we're taking the time to decide where exactly the balance should be for future content.
Brannoc - *Skottee* is there any plan to continue the class reenvisionment? any estimated timeframe on the next phase of that?
Rashere - The re-envisioning doesn't really have phases. It's an ongoing process that we are continually working on. It's also not something that is likely to ever be done. As long as the game is evolving, we'll be continually tweaking and tuning balance between classes. On this note, the new Mana Burn for wizards will be available on test after the next test patch so please hop on and check it out.
Brannoc - *Nolrog* Are there any plans to address the ever growing shortage of bank space? Tradeskillers are notorious pack rats, keeping anything that has the tradeskill tag for future use, which eats up bank space quickly.
Dev-Maddoc - This is something that has been mentioned before and seems specific to tradeskill-components. The first thing that we plan on doing is increasing the stack size on tradeskill components, such that what you do have stored in there will take up significantly less space than it did previously. Once that's complete, we'll re-evaluate the need for bank-space on a more global level.
Brannoc - *slacklikeme-DB-DRo* What type of information will be in eqplayers.com? Will there be rankings like eq2players, and will those include the nifty stats like NPC's with the most kills?
Raghnell - Yes indeed. EQPlayers will have leaderboards and rankings on things like highest HP and Mana by class. Lots of cool stuff. And we will be adding a lot more in the future.
Raghnell - You will be able to check it out tomorrow.
Brannoc - *Nolrog* Are there any plans to allow mass (bulk) combines (say 5 or 10 at a time) for certain combines (celestial essence comes to mind.)??
Dev-Maddoc - There have been some discussions on this subject that have ranged from a "quick-fix" to a more in-depth change that we've been discussing. Neither of them have been decided on just yet, but it's something that we're looking into. In the short term, we may look into adding a couple new recipes for the biggest offenders, but it's not something we'll do for all refinement recipes.
Brannoc - *Nolrog* Are there any alternative ways planned to help tradeskiller find rare items on vendors, buy allowing stock to rotate, so that the most recent items sold to them are kept?
Dev-Maddoc - Tanker spent some time looking into this not too long ago and discovered a few gotcha's in the Merchant code that make this more than a one-day project.
Dev-Maddoc - In talking about it with his lead, it was decided that the solutions to these problems were both too time-consuming for right now, and contained side-effects that would need full review before this was done. The alternatives to these solutions also need to be discussed and reviewed for potential side-effects before deciding upon the best course of action. It's certainly something that we've not forgotten and are still looking into.
Brannoc - *Jetfire* Are there any plans to add in Racial or Religious AA's?
Rashere - This comes up quite a bit. The current system doesn't support the ability to give out AAs by race or religion, but it is something that we keep thinking about doing so I wouldn't be surprised to see it show up some day. No plans at the moment, though.
Brannoc - *Nolrog* Are there any plans to revisit the Omens task system to make the tasks more appropriate for the classes and levels that get them?
Rytan - The current mission system is an evolution of the original task system. Any upgrades we do on the content that exists in the old task system would be time better spent creating new content using the new system. We’d definitely like to update as much of the old content as possible, but it’s down to time constraints limiting how much we can undertake.
Rytan - There's a lot of functionality in the new system that we just can't replicate in the task system, so we don't expect to be making further use of it in the future.
Brannoc - *Nolrog* Have you considered opening up Kunark and Velious (and perhaps Luclin as well) to everyone that doesn't already have it, so that you can start to build expansions off those zones instead of the old world?
Raghnell - We have already started building content off of Kunark and Velious. The stats show that 99% (give or take) of folks have those expansions.
Raghnell - And Titanium in January should make it even easier.
Raghnell - There is a lot of world out there and we plan to use it.
Brannoc - *Deltree* Any chance that the drop rate of the Zun tongue drop more often in Tacvi...I've seen guild that clear Tacvi all teh time and only one tongue drop on about 3-4 clear sometimes...
Rashere - The Zun tongue dropping in Tacvi was mainly to help out people who didn't want to farm the Txevu Zun. The drop rate is already a decent amount, but randomness being what it is, you're going to have some streaks where you get it off all of them and some where it doesn't show up for a while.
Brannoc - *Loral* Who is the endboss to DoD? Tell tell!
Rashere - We were going to keep it a secret, but since you asked...Fippy Darkpaw! (You really expected an answer?)
Brannoc - *Skottee* are you able to comment at all on whether subscriptions are up recently? there's a lot of talk of old players coming back (myself included) but still many threads on the eqlive forums that say 'eq is dying' which it clearly isn't, we're just wondering if subscriptions are up since DoD?
Raghnell - We can't comment on subscription numbers (I have bosses too!) but I can definitely say that we have seen some old players return.
Raghnell - EQ is most definitely not dying. The community and the game is very strong.
Raghnell - Not to be too corny but I am very excited about seeing EverQuest grow over the next decade.
Brannoc - *Deltree* Any plans of doing something with LDON points that are rotting...maybe a way trade them for something or being able to resale them for money or something like the way DoN Crystal work....Thanks
Kytherea - Also remember that people love to complain so you may see many more negative posts then positive ones on the boards. Keep in mind too a small portion of the EverQuest community frequents and posts on the boards.
Rashere - The LDoN reward system was designed and balanced as a closed system. The rewards you got were based around doing LDoN adventures just like the DoN rewards were based around doing DoN missions. It's why we used two different reward systems. At this time, we don't have any plans to set up a way to change points from one into points for another.
Brannoc - *player24523* think there will be a fabled velious this march for 7th anniversery?
Rashere - It's quite likely that the Fabled NPCs will make a return for the 7th anniversary and may well expand their way into Velious.
Brannoc - *Phillip09* Is there any plan to revamp home cities to make them a center of questing and advancement rather than the ghost towns they are today?
Raghnell - We are going to continue to revisit the existing world and that includes cities. I can't say much more on that right now....
Raghnell - Just keep in mind that redoing a city is a HUGE task.
Brannoc - *slacklikeme-DB-DRo* How is the anti-hacking stuff you were working on progressing along? And once it goes active will we begin seeing like a # banned this week type thing?
Raghnell - The anti-hacking work we are doing is going very well. We do want to be methodical about its application to make sure we do not punish our virtuous and loyal players.
Raghnell - I'm not sure we will be publishing exact numbers in the future but it is something we will be looking at.
Brannoc - *Nolrog* Are there any plans to revisit the drop rates for DoN cultural (grandmaster cultural quest items, glossy drake hides, metallic drake scales)??
Ngreth - Yes, we do plan on reviewing the drop rates of the Don cultural items. We have no exact timetable for it, but it is on the top of my list.
Brannoc - That's it for this chat folks, thanks for joining us here on Stratics IRC - the logs will be posted shortly on http://eq.stratics.com
Kytherea - Thanks for coming everyone! Have a great night.
Rashere - Thanks for coming everyone and have a good evening.
Ngreth - Thanks! Have fun in Norath!
Raghnell - Good night everyone
Rytan - Thanks for coming everyone!
Dev-Maddoc - Thanks for dropping in.
Dev-Maddoc - Have a good night.
OMG, why did I even put that out there... if that happens, at least we will KNOW that Rashere reads here anonymously!
