Concept Survivor

EQ2 is in some ways ground-breaking. Several new concepts, (and some old ones) were brought into the adventuring system. These concepts, while quite possibly wonderful on their own, do not work at all well together. The ones I’m looking at today are:

• Trivial loot code. An idea which EQ dabbled with. Upon being a certain number of levels above a foe such that it becomes grey, you can no longer get access to it’s chest loot. It is quite useful for preventing the farming of loot by high level folks.

• Multiple tier con system. A level 18 epic encounter is several times more dangerous than a level 18 heroic encounter which is several times more dangerous than a level 18 solo encounter, yet all will turn grey at the same time.

• Solo friendly. The meaning of this one is subject to debate, but is tending towards: That grouping shouldn’t be necessary to get anything done. I’m not going to debate whether I think this is a good idea today, just that it is part of the current ideology of EQ2 design.
  

The multiple tier /con system never made any sense to me. Apparently it was added in late beta. If a “group” level 18 is as tough as, for instance, a solo level 20 then why not just have it con as a level 20? The multiple tier system causes zones to go grey long before they had any need to. It is true that a group encounter currently is no better at hitting you than a solo one of the same level so in fact a freshly grey group encounter is no challenge at all, but that is a matter of designer choice regarding the mathematics of combat, rather than something necessarily set in stone.

In recent patches the decision was taken to reduce the difficulty of the world, rather than to increase the capabilities of the weakest classes. This was a big mistake and has led to a situation where my guild’s paladin is quite capable of soloing certain epic encounters, while there are still many classes which really don’t want to be soloing any group encounters until they become grey, in which case they get no loot.

Insisting on all three of these ideas is causing EQ2 development to tie itself up in knots. I suspect one of them is going to have to go, in the long term. Solo-friendly isn’t going anywhere, I’m quite sure of that. The trivial loot code is probably here to stay also, mores the pity, though it may be relaxed somewhat by an increase in the level variation permitted.

Really though, most of the problems are being caused by the multiple tier /con system. The devs seem to be slowly edging away from it, but it’s hard to be certain. The fact that the new loot was only given to solo encounters suggests that they didn’t want to waste time changing something that was going to be going away anyway, or at least thats my charitable suggestion for the reasoning of it. They could have just forgotten though.

So that’s my long-range forecast. Once internal resistance is overcome (as multiple tier /con is undoubtedly someone’s beloved baby), the /con system will be reverted to it’s original tierless system. As multiple /con tiers were added in beta, then presumably the original data still remains, and only the more recent areas would need to have the changes done from scratch. A big job, nevertheless, but necessary to return internal consistency to Norrath.

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