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Question about Storm Expansion

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  • strangiato2112strangiato2112 Member CommonPosts: 1,538
    Originally posted by Hrimnir
    Originally posted by strangiato2112
    Originally posted by Vannor

    People who are there for the leveling experience tend to leave once the leveling is done no matter what endgame content a game has. Catering to these people is not a good investment. 

    Catering only to current players when you have a small population is a worse investment.

    No, it really isnt. Putting in new leveling content might attract another 10% of the current playerbase,

    so you are saying 0% is better than 10%?

    but it will only do so for a month or two at best because that type of player isnt the type of player who stays around in an subscription based game. 

    WoW and EQ2 beg to differ.  If those games werent extremely alt friendly their sub numbers would be DRASTICLY lower.  Its not just people that intend to play alts, its people that get bored at cap (and every does at some point or another).  Most people enjoy alts at some point or another.

    Those are single player MMO'ers who are there to burn through some content and then go find their new fix. 

    No, the type of people that dont care about the content and just want to be max level are those type.  the eople that enjoy a variety of leveling content will...stick around and level a variety of alts

    These are the same people who bought 2 million copies of SWTOR and left the game in 2 months because they had nothing else to do in combination with other issues like bugs, etc

    SWTOR is even less alt-friendly than Rift.  The class story quests are great but its a tedious bore inbetween them.

    You put a robust leveling experience in, you attract more people.  Plain and simple.  Yeah, you may not understand it, but then i dont understand the people who actually enjoy currency gear grinds and would rather acquire gear that way than via drops.  I dont understand the people that raid 3+ days a week.

    Once again, the people you attract aren't long time customers. 

    Again, tell that to SoE or Blizzard

    As for "not understanding it", its simply. Token/currency drops remove the random number generator.  As someone who has been raiding in MMO's since EQ1,  i see both sides of the coin.  Currencies make it seem more grindy, but they remove that "man, this stupid item has dropped 6 times in the last 10 raids for guild Y, but Guild Z hasn't seen it once.".

    And they, to me, make it significantly less rewarding to get an item.  Oh boy, I have 88% of my next pair of pants!  That is not fun to me, and I dont get why anyone would prefer it personally.  But I do at least understand that many people do like the mechanic.

    Provide a good leveling experience, and if people start to get bored of their main (happens in ALL MMORPGS) they will roll an alt to keep them occupied and a change of pace for a bit til they go back to their main.  A game like Rift people will just unsub, and their retention shows that.

    And a HUGE mistake to make for your first expansion is when someone asks the question:  whats in it for new people and the answer is 'nothing'.  EQ2 was on a downward trend after its launch, it was a dissapointing launch in the shadow of WoW.  Their first two expansions were endgame focused.  Kingdom of Sky was a pretty good expansion, but it wasnt until they released EoF with a new race and new 1-70 content that the game rebounded and hit a growth period.

    EQ2 was plagued by a HORRIBLY bad graphics engine at release.  The game ran poorly even on top end systems and was all but unplayabable on systems even only 1-2 years old (I know this because i spent 1200 at the time building a reasonably high end system just for the release of EQ2).  There were myriad other issues with the game that made a lot of people leave as well.  Like not being able to explore/go to certain zones unless you reached a specific level.  Poor use of instancing with overworld areas.  ETC.

    Oh I know eq2 was plagued with a ton of launch issues.  Not to mention it was so drastically different from EQ that it put people off.  But by the time KoS rolled around it was a very good game.  But people didnt really come back until EoF.

    At this point I would be willing to bet that more people have played Rift than have played EQ2.  Its not just new players a more robust world would attract, its all those old players that left because of the linear leveling experience and tiny world.  People dont like needing to be high level to experience everything.  for someone under 50 the world is still tiny.

     Since they have the mentoring system, it just didnt make sense to not make at least 1 alternate leveling path.  Who knows, maybe Planetouched Wild is being devloped for that task still.  But low level content can be current content for high level players, but the reverse isnt true.  If, say, Cape Jule was a level 20 zone I guarantee it would be crowded still.  

    Personally, my only 50 was a cleric.  Both tactician and Harbinger are far more interesting to me than anything in the cleric tree (in fact I only made a cleric because I was upset at launch there was no melee mage, cleric offered the closest thing).  But I dont want to slog through old content to level them up, no matter how fast it may be.

     

  • FoomerangFoomerang Member UncommonPosts: 5,628


    Originally posted by Torvaldr
    Originally posted by nate1980 Originally posted by Khebeln They actualy had it way before Gw2, and the first game to use lv scalign was Eq2. Get your facts straight ^^
    SWG and CoX had it before EQ2
    This article on WarCry from 2005 doesn't support your claim. http://www.warcry.com/news/view/43160-Everquest-2-Mentoring

    According to wikipedia City of Heroes didn't get time travel until 2007.

    The earliest reference I could find to mentoring in SWG was late 2004 when they mention a new jedi to mentor young jedis.  Do you have a reference for when SWG added mentoring?

    So far EQ2 still holds that title.


    When the combat upgrade came out in SWG (april '05), you could group with higher level players and your level would match theirs. But there wasn't a way to take your level down. It was sidekick up only. Thats the opposite of GW2 and doesn't have the flexibility of Rift.

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