If you want gear that’s of raid quality solo that’s fine by me, but the difficulty of getting it has to match the same difficulty of the raid gear with progression (actually be harder then raid gear to get since you don’t have to cooperate with 11 to 23 others to get it) and no chance of exploiting to get it. If you connection lags out so bad that you cannot raid, then this gear too would be well out of your grasp.

Besides, if you cannot raid then don’t raid, its not the only thing to do in EQ2. I don’t myself and instead run dungeons, it took quite a long while to gear up enough to be able to take on Guk : Halls of the fallen. Again though, if your connection is crap then you won’t have a chance there either because its hard.

In short, if you want to solo for stuff there is a lot to do in the game but for reasons above you really need to group up to get the best gear. The game is there to have a challenge, if you cannot beat the challenge then you don’t deserve to get the best gear.

If you have a problem with that then go play WoW.

I would suggest groups can be done ANYWHERE in the game. And, since they wont revamp the game engine to make it smoother for us on the low end o’ the bandwidth… at least add content that drops good gear that can be solo’d. If ya lag, you cant make the raids.. no raids, no coinage. No coinage, no high end stuff. No high end stuff…. its a stupid endless grind.

Marketing and Sales are often the drive for new features in products in any industry. They supposedly have an idea what the consumer wants, via surveys or direct contact with them, and pass those ideas along to their higher ups. Those higher ups have no clue about the products – they just manage a business. They take marketing research and whatnot and tell the senior producer of the game (Brenlo in this case) to implement some new feature, as specified by Marketing/Sales. That feature might pretty vague, like “Something like WoW Battlegrounds”. It is then up to the developer team to come up with something that fits the bill.

Developers can come up with novel things or changes, provided it isn’t taking away from working on whatever projects have come from on high. If management likes the changes, they go in. If they don’t, they don’t, regardless of how the developer feels about it or how good it would be for the game.

To Sony, EQ2 is not a game. It is a product for which they have an intended demographics, sales projections, expected revenues and cost estimates.

And WoW is rubbish for battlegrounds, WAR does them much much better.

What EQ2 needs, and from what I understand has not provided in this expansion, is something that will draw new players in, something that is so compelling that Fry’s and Best Buy would want to display more than a box or two of the game on the shelves. Will PvP for max level players bring people in? It will not. If they had rolled it out for players of all levels, it might have had a chance.

Creating content ONLY for max level characters essentially cedes the new player market to any other game — and in this genre, that means WoW. Where they have battlegrounds from level 10.

Well PVP has existed on Nagafen for many years and its a popular server so it must work to some extent, unlike WoW abilities work just differently in PVE and PVP so there will be less problems breaking one to fix the other.

And maybe a little class balancing isn’t such a bad thing, why is it that a SK has a ability that hits for 4k plus unmodified when a guardian’s max hit is 1.2k unmodified? If its justified due to other considerations (mitigation etc) then fine, otherwise its a glaring imbalance that should be fixed in the PVE world let alone the PVP world.

They have copied the WoW route though on PVP armour with a PVP stat, I’m not keen about this but if its done as a way to differentiate pvp and pve armour without making PVE armour useless in PVP then I’d be all for it, otherwise if its needed to be able to compete like WoW’s resilience then its just an added grind.

grind = boring = me not playing WoW PVP = me getting bored of just the PVE = me quitting WoW.

“Assuming the new EQ2 arenas copy well from WoW, we can expect arena fights to consist half of mad scrambles to kill anyone they can, and half of players trying to find a quiet place to AFK so that they can win their emblem/token/shard at the end in order to earn the coveted PvP armor that is the system’s main draw.”

Or not. WoW isn’t the only MMO out there with battlegrounds, how about WAR? I was pleasantly surprised there that even though they had the best gear available only by PVP in battlegrounds that there was none of this AFKing going on, WoW had to tone down BG rewards to reduce the problem.

My guess here for the reason is simple, PVP in WAR is fun at all brackets because they effectively mentored people to be high enough level to compete, in WoW its not fun until you’ve ground out enough resilience stat.

Personally I’m really keen on these battlegrounds, before the arena thing came out and resilience I used to really enjoy BG’s in WoW, they were unbalanced, I didn’t get many rewards from them, but I just enjoyed the action, especially the 40vs40 AV which was a mixture of PVE and PVP (storyline and action combined with NPCs – fantastic). Battles there would literally rage for days on end, and then some retard decided that people wanted to farm tokens faster so limited the maximum length down to what we have today – 18 minutes of zerg.

So in short I think BG’s can be a good fun diversion, done right (no one does PVE+PVP properly now so EQ2 could stand out from others by adding storylines and NPC’s to its battlegrounds), WAR is the best I’ve experienced so far, Guildwars a close second although the gameplay was too simple. Copying WoW isn’t too bad but just so long as they don’t copy its mistakes, copying WAR is a much safer option since for PVP they haven’t made any mistakes I could see.

I do not think that it ever was a good idea to restrict PvP to tiny arenas. Battlegrounds are better, more people, imbalances are not as obvious and all that.

Now let’s take a look at Guild Wars – small arena combat got perfectioned there. But what does the majority of people? The most popular format is the more battleground like alliance battle. And 90% of the population of this PvP game play… PvE.

They should either forget completely about this PvP stuff or make it part of the world, dammit. In this case offer PvE only servers for those who just cannot stand it. INTERESTINGLY… see Ultima Online – the PvP side (Felucca) of the world was almost devoid of any player life.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/96113-Blizzards-Rob-Pardo-Talks-Five-Years-of-Warcraft

Of course, Sony has to copy them. /facepalm