Performance and Pain

[Flunkie]

The size of the beta appears to be ramping up to a maximum level. The effort is probably geared toward finding the performance issues and eliminating them. The developers are being inundated with information by now, hopefully they will fix the lag issues quickly. A second beta server has been mentioned as being available at some point for the flood of new beta invitees.

Here comes the pain... Previously, I mentioned the trade skill system as being complex and tedious (and even dangerous). It is all those things, it's also really boring for the average player. As it turns out, when an item goes from being good experience to trivial, the time requirement to produce the item does not. So if it took 1 hour to produce a stack of items that previously gave very good exp, it will still take 1 hour to produce that stack even when it gives little or no exp. This is not such a problem for the starting crafter, but for a crafter beyond level 6 or so, this becomes a huge time sink.

The reason is simple; you much somehow acquire the low level components in order to create items that give better experience at the higher levels. You might think you can just buy them, but think again. The lower level components are not for sale on vendors. No doubt players will sell them, but they will be very expensive, mainly because the player would have had to spend an entire hour or more creating a single stack of 20 low level items. And these are the lowest level of basic components or what is essentially "level 1". Imagine level 20 where you need level 19 components, made from level 18 components, made from level 17 components and so on. Actually, it probably doesn't go quite that far, but it would not be unreasonable to say that the production of one level 20 item could take several man-hours of subcomponent production at little or no experience gain. All of that just to get one combine on an item that will give 1-2% of a level toward 21. Eventually this issue will come to a head. There are a hard core few that will love the system no matter how tedious or difficult, but I suspect the majority will not.

The EQ1 trade skill system was indeed tedious, mainly because you had to pray for luck and do huge amounts of combines in the hopes of going up one skill point. EQ2 eliminates that element of chance in favor of creating things over a specific period of time, literally one piece at a time. They have made it easier to handle recipes and you don't have to manually move things around, but the process is far, far from automatic. If it is left as complex as it is currently, I suspect efforts to cheat the system will be made in this area first.

Originally Artisans were to be a separate class from adventurers. It's not a bad idea to combine Artisans with the adventurer classes. They seemed to have intended for adventuring leveling and artisan leveling to occur at approximately the same rate with a similar level of interaction. What they ended up with is a system that levels you over an exponentially increasing rate of time, level to level, rather than a more linear pace. There also isn't near the level of discovery, indeed everything is written down in recipe books or texts that you buy or acquire during your adventures. There is some influence in the quality of an item, but very little control, as a result no matter how much you concentrate on performing the correct actions at the right time, you will seldom create an item that is better than average. More luck is involved than player skill.

There don't seem to be any crafting type quests built in right now, but supposedly there will be. If they add crafting quests and speed up the process for creation of trivial items, they would go a long ways toward making the crafting system more palatable.

On the adventuring front, it appears that kiting mobs will probably not be possible, or at least not very worth while, not even in the higher end game. The ability to use buffs that increase your running speed during combat has been eliminated again. The buff now stays up in combat, but your running speed goes down to the default until you "yell" to get out of combat mode or win the encounter. Up to level 20, at least, kiting wasn't possible anyway because the casting classes don't get anything that slow the mobs running speed down.

There is the possibility that higher end spells will allow you to slow the mobs down to a very slow speed, in that case you could potentially kite a mob at normal running speed. Perhaps this is what the developers have in mind, then again maybe it's simply not in the design plans. It's been said that SOE hates quad-kiting. It's not hard to believe that after playing EQ2. You are much more likely to have to play in a group than you would in EQ1. Soloing for INT casters is a root and nuke game or nuke/melee and heal game for WIS casters. Fortunately there is now a good facility for creating a group or finding players via filtering that are looking for a group.

A little annoyance has cropped up that will probably become the next faux pas. This is players that die and then promptly quit a group. When you die in a group in EQ2, everyone gets a piece of the experience debt. It's annoying for someone to just quit when they just died, because the whole group has to work their debt off. It especially annoying when there is a full group wipe or close to it and then half of the group decides to log off for the night. Some of your debt is wiped out over time when you don't play, so it is enticing to just bail out. But the rest of the group gets stuck working it off if they want to stay. I predict that this will lead to some rants in the future. Maybe the developers will change this a bit so that if you bail out right after death, you take some or all of your experience debt with you. I guess it wouldn't be easy to program something like that.

Another little annoyance is the lack of a "/random 1 6" type of command that can be picked by the group leader instead of the "lotto" system. The lotto system allow players in the group to select what they would like to "roll" on out of items that are available to loot. However, each item is rolled as a seperate roll. So with lotto in effect, if 3 items drop, all 3 items could got to a single person. In practice, this has been seen more than once.

There is a Leader Loot Only option which allow the leader to loot the items, but there needs to be some ability for the leader to select who can roll on items and one at a time. In a high end encounter you certainly would not want one player to roll on item after the said player had already won something. For trash loot, the lotto works perfectly fine, but switching between systems for boss mobs isn't a natural thing to think about or do and Leader Only Looting without some special rolling or lotto options won't likely be very popular. The lotto system could potentially be modified to simply have some check box options like "Win only once per looted encounter", etc.

Performance and pain aside, the game is still going to be great. It is expected that tweaking at this point will be required, I only hope they get it righted soon. Until EQ2 goes live, nobody can say for sure whether these issues will exist. I predict a large DVD installation, and a massive patch download on the opening day of go-live though.

[Flunkie]

Bah! Let this post die, didn't mean to start a new topic...

[Faol]

/bump


Sorry just being a little bitch.

[conanb]

in games without /random i have seen people use a /time command to do the same thing...

[Flunkie]

in games without /random i have seen people use a /time command to do the same thing...

Doesn't quite cut it, I might as well roll some dice and tell everone what I rolled. Nobody would know the truth, but me.