EQ Things that should be "undone"Follow

I agree on Freeport, as well as Misty Thicket and pretty much every zone they revamped. I'm an ole traditionalist that way.

They never should have removed Leadership AA's.

All the changes to the Bazaar, and not necessarily for the good. Since the previous versions exist only as memories of long-time players, newer players have no clue as to what I'm talking about. But once upon a time all the player-vendors were lined up in "stalls" in one big room and it made it a lot easier to make buys. I can't imagine how much time has been wasted running up and down those tunnels in the current Bazaar. Sure you can buy now via parcel but who wants to blow 10% of the purchase price (or two tickets) on every purchase?

Pet peeve of mine: move the Shard's Landing portal closer to the action. What's with locating it in such an out-of-the-way place? Just more time wasted.

Be more consistent with binding locations. It's very annoying when one zone is bindable and another is not and there's really nothing to explain why. "Go find a city" is a lame error message since city binding really doesn't apply to casters who can cast Bind Affinity.

Allow everything tradeable to have a vendor value. Usually I just want to empty out my bags of trash and junk just by dumping them on the nearest vendor. It's a pain when they won't offer even 1cp for a drop.

Allow dyes to overwrite the inherent color of items. I stopped bothering with dyes completely when I noticed that often you can't get the color you want due to this problem.

Lift the 2million pp limit for Bazaar sales. In this day and age, at least on FV, lots of stuff sells for over 2million.

Raise the Bazaar search return limit above 200. Or at least make VERY clear that if you search for a category which returns over 200 items you're only going to see a random 200. More than once I've bought something off such a search and then realized that cheaper versions of the same item were available but the cheaper ones weren't displayed because of this cap.

The Bazaar search has a bug where sometimes augments are returned when you're searching for armor and jewelry by slot. This clutters up the listing and sometimes runs you into the 200-item cap problem. Augments should never be included in search results unless you specifically filter for them.

All the mechanics of storing items in your real estate need to be entirely revamped. It's hopelessly confusing and why can some items be put into your house, your vault, your boxes but others can't?? I mean when I spend some time studying it I sorta figure it out but since I don't spend much time on/in my "properties" by the time I get back there later I'm totally confused again. They SHOULD be handled like giant bags between which you can drag and drop items.

Similar gripe with powersources. Man, what a complex mess! I make powersources and have sold a ton of time and even I don't always fully understand how they work. God Help a noobie trying to make sense of this.

Allow players to pipe loots directly to their bank bags, if they so desire. I mean players can BUY from the Bazaar while out in the field XPing. Surely the same concepts of game lore which support that could be modified by clever gnome technicians to allow loot to be banked from the field. I'd go further and allow specific bags to be allocated to specific loot types, especially tradeskill, lore items, etc. Maybe they could even manage it so you can flag certain items to be immediately sold "magically" to a selected vendor who becomes your "fence" for the crap that drops in the field.

Campfire fellowship kits! Talk about something that's been neglected to the point where it's entirely useless! Even worse if you use one of these for whatever modest stat enhancements it provides your group, your campfire is of short duration and always seems to die out (with NO warning, of course) right before your group wipes in a fight and therefore renders it impossible to click back to the campfire. For this reason I only use the primary un-statted campfire since it lasts for hours and hours. These fellowship kits were needlessly complex to begin with, with an excessively and unnecessarily huge variety of stats. (Has ANY group seriously ever needed to boost their CHARISMA during a grind session?!) Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the basic campfire, that was a flash of genius from whichever dev conceived it. The rest is gross overkill.

Man, I can't agree more with Snailish concerning his comments about shrouds and monster missions. God I hated both of those! Only used them in the very rare cases where there were no other options to accomplish a goal. Nothing is more tedious than setting up your aa's and hot buttons for a monster and I don't even care that in theory you could save your setup for use the next time, because frankly I always prayed there'd never BE a next time! This is one concept which I'm forever grateful that it's been forever abandoned in game development.

Give summoning mobs other options for their battle cries. I'm sick of hearing "You shall not escape me, Sippin!" or whatever it is they say exclusively now. Summoning is a weak "deus ex machine" already; at least make it vaguely interesting by injecting other witticisms such as "You didn't bring me a nice shrubbery, eh? Now you die, Hobbit!"

Fast camping was a great innovation, although it should have been there from Day One. What I would like to see reworked here is to allow fast-camping in Guild Halls.

Randomize spawn timers for every mob. On a bell-shaped curve. Ex: the majority of the time Emperor Crush respawns in 11 minutes but he can spawn almost immediately (rarely) and 25 minutes later (rarely) and every number in-between (variable frequency.)





Edited, Aug 17th 2016 7:12am by Sippin

Edited, Aug 17th 2016 9:26am by Sippin

Adding "the fellowship fire begins to fade/turns to ash" text prompt warning prior to a fire de-spawning would be helpful. Basic firewood component kits should replace all the item clutter on the fellowship vendor.

Edited, Aug 17th 2016 4:33pm by Trappin

From Sippin:

"All the changes to the Bazaar, and not necessarily for the good. Since the previous versions exist only as memories of long-time players, newer players have no clue as to what I'm talking about. But once upon a time all the player-vendors were lined up in "stalls" in one big room and it made it a lot easier to make buys. I can't imagine how much time has been wasted running up and down those tunnels in the current Bazaar. Sure you can buy now via parcel but who wants to blow 10% of the purchase price (or two tickets) on every purchase? "

I'm surprised you don't remember the absolutely out of control lag in the old Bazaar. That was why they changed it in the first place. I did like the feel of the old Bazaar better, but I'll take the new one any day, if I can get in and get out without lag.

The lag was so bad, that you could make a seller go linkdead just by having 5 or 6 people inspect them at the same time :)

Tat

I don't remember that box being available. If it was, I imagine people wouldn't have complained so much.

I used to move the camera down to stare at the floor, until I got close to the trader I needed, then I would look up :)

Tat

It"I'm surprised you don't remember the absolutely out of control lag in the old Bazaar. That was why they changed it in the first place. I did like the feel of the old Bazaar better, but I'll take the new one any day, if I can get in and get out without lag."alic Text

The lag was so bad, that you could make a seller go linkdead just by having 5 or 6 people inspect them at the same time :)


Well that was one problem, but there was also a more ominous issue that many folks are either unaware of or have forgotten about.

I pulled this off of the internets;

"Back when luclin was current and the nexus/bazaar had replaced EC/Gfay as the hangout spot of choice, a mage friend and I went into the bazaar arena and started dropping random junk on the ground. Of course, everything just showed up as a bag. We had a ton of bags all over the place, and we shouted out that we were retiring from the game and leaving all of our "stuff" in the arena.

The massive tidal wave of low level traders that ran into the arena to start picking up bags was hillarious. People were killing other people for picking up bags, then dead people had to run back in to get their corpses because that was back when you still had to loot your corpse or you lost all of your stuff. That was a double whammy if your trader died because it was all of your sellable stuff and probably a lot of your cash too. Then, traders were being logged off and main characters were being logged in to come back and get revenge. Total chaos."

"I also remember a story about a trader getting levitate cast on them and being pushed from the merchant stalls down to the arena so they could be killed while they were afk. That guy must have really ticked someone off!"

The way it worked was like this; if there was a seller you didn't like for some reason, you could levitate them, and, inch by inch, 'push' them by bumping into their avatar. Eventually, you could push them into the bazaar, where you could then kill the seller, wounding their pride and sending them a message. Even if your goal wasn't to kill them, you could still push them out of the stall, removing them from 'trader' mode.

Ten or twelve years ago, I saw a hilarious collection of screenshots explaining this very method; a troll character complained about a merchant who was suspected of scamming and spamming levitated the seller after he went afk, and pushed him into the bazaar. This apparently took over six hours. The first time he got away with it, but when he pulled this trick a second time, a GM was watching. Some say this incident and the backlash that followed was the real reason for the zone revamp. This incident is also (as I recall) why they revised lev so that you could no longer 'push' someone while they're levitating.


Edited, Aug 18th 2016 10:00am by zirumkin

The new bazaar layout is a bit annoying, but not terrible IMO. I can see how the idea was to break up line of sight lag, and it does seem to do that. Of course, these days, there's so much fewer people trading stuff that half of the rooms are empty. I also remember the old configuration, and honestly it was just as annoying in certain ways. Not even the lag though. Sometimes you couldn't find people because the find path would get confused with the stalls, and since they were all in a row, you often could not figure out if the person you were trying to find was in this row, or on the other side of the same row. I remember spending a lot more time finding people in the old style than in the new. The new design at least ensures that there's nothing "behind" the person you're looking for, so find works much better. The big flip side is pretty much needing a map to find your way out of wherever you found that trader though. I'm sure someone thought the layout was clever, but it's also really annoying. They could have accomplished the same thing by having just single direct spokes from a center that each entered into the same sort of circular rooms they have now. Only with just one way in and out of each room. Would be much much much easier IMO.

As to banking while in the field, they have several veteran awards that provide that capability. A banker, a basic stuff vendor, and an augmentation distiller vendor. So you'd have to figure out what to replace the vet award with if you gave the same ability to everyone for free.

Oh, Sippin. The binding thing is based on whether a zone is flagged as a "dungeon". Now, what criteria they use for that is a whole nother thing. As a general rule, if it's outdoors, it's not a dungeon. If it's indoors and not a city it may be a dungeon. Except, of course, for indoor zones that exist in expansions where everything is indoors (say Underfoot or DoD). Then, it's more or less whether the dev thought of the zone as primarily being a nasty place with an organized set of NPCs to deal with versus just a random zone with random stuff in it. The presence of friendly vendors in a zone also tends to have an effect on this. Um... but I'm not sure if that's always the case.

Don't really care about the summoning message. I'd prefer they focus on not having anything that isn't a raid level mob summon. Ok. Maybe some named mobs. Basically anyone that drops significant no-drop type loot at least falls into the "maybe can summon" category. But there are just too many mobs that were flagged as summoning quite obviously just to make it harder on kiters. And while I almost kinda sorta get that motivation, the problem with it is that classes that kite (or root/scoot, or any other method) usually use those methods because they can't stand there and take a pounding while fighting the mobs. And while the introduction of mercs has helped this a bit, after a certain level range (low to mid 80s maybe?) the tank mercs by themselves can't survive against mobs without healing, and healing mercs can't keep up with healing on robe wearers. So in the interest of stopping kiting, they've also made whole sets of content more or less impossible to do solo/molo for some classes. Wizards are particularly hurt by this. Druids can heal sufficiently to use a tank merc. Necros and Mages have pets (and ways to heal their pets) that make summoning content doable. Chanters have a few techniques they can use to get around this as well. But Wizards more or less have only one option: Nuke the mob faster than it can kill whatever it's beating on. So yeah, I can recast my much weaker than a chanter's rune type spell each fight, and then hope that between that and a healer merc, I'll be able to take the mob out before it kills me, but it's iffy even then. And it's slow because I'm burning through mana faster than I would against other types of mobs, so I'm having to stop and med up every other fight. Why go through that pain? And it's so arbitrary. Yeah, total pet peeve. I get not wanting people to deal with content too fast and too easily, but this "fix" goes too far in the other direction IMO.

I like the idea of the circular rooms in the Bazaar being simply laid out on arms of a triangle, rather than the convoluted mess they have now.

All the other problems could be fixed with coding. They could have simply blocked lev spells from being cast in the Bazaar and prevent toons from being able to "push" other toons in the Bazaar. I remember one of the older Bazaar designs had an entrance so small you could block it by sticking an ogre or two right at the zone-in. Everyone zoning in would find themselves stuck behind an ogre's.... er, behind! This COULD have been fixed simply by "phantomizing" player toons in the Bazaar so they could just pass thru each other.

My POINT is, really, that devs seem to enjoy making designs needlessly complicated just for the sake of.... who knows? Like the portal stone in Shard's Landing. I don't really play that xpac much anymore but when I did it was a real PITA always to zone in so far away from everything that mattered in that zone. End of the world problem? Of course not. Especially for a druid with secondary and tertiary binds.

Little annoyances like that make me think some devs are slightly sadistic. Another example, when they first introduced augment tables (the "bird baths") there was none planted in the PoK or Bazaar. Obviously, a lot of tradeable augments would be acquired in those zones. So you'd have hustle to go find a table to do your augment business. I could think of more than a dozen other examples if I put my mind to it. Look I'm firmly against "care bear" treatment of players because I think a game that's too easy to play will rapidly lose its appeal. This is why I mourn the loss of Leadership AA's which I thought was a great idea to motivate players to BECOME leaders, stimulating more groups to form. But the annoyances I talk about here are NOT the kind of game CHALLENGES which motivate players to tough it out and dedicate themselves to overcome the challenges. They're the kind that frustrate them and eventually contribute to their leaving. Making the Bazaar harder to navigate than it needs to be is an example of that.



Edited, Aug 19th 2016 7:51am by Sippin

I've been amazed, over the last couple of years, at the really whacked-out placement of succor points in a lot of the newer zones. I went to PoHealth for the first time last night, and looking at the map, saw the succor point way off to the edge of the zone, apparently not near quest givers, or other zone lines. So WHY would I ever want to go there?

Tat

Any fast travel point that isn't that convenient...

PoK book for Crescent Reach should have been near the spawn-in (for newly created characters).
Blightfire Moors should of had it's own PoK book where it was originally located (mid zone, as a hub...)

The way it was done was bad for lowbies, the change is better but it is still a silly long run --in the newbie zone all F2P born characters have to use.

Also, my old incorrect mapfiend map that has a PoK book in Lake of Ill Omen... yes please!

Gulf of Gunthak book added to the bow of a ship? So immersion breaking... put it by the lighthouse on actual land please.

and so on.

Smack dab in the middle of the spawn point for level 25-30 briars and gnarl thorns.

Quite the nasty surprise for freshly made toons zoning in.


The book currently sits just north of the zone in tunnel to CR in BFM. Completely safe (unless someone runs a train to it right as you zone in).

I'll likely be on a lonely-island on this one:

I think mercenaries as-implemented were a mistake.

Mercenaries should have been tied to specific zones. No charge involved, rather using a mercenary would be a quest task that provides additional XP. Healer/tank/dps options would still be fine. Not every zone would have this option, but 2-3 good leveling options for each level bracket would. The mercenary NPC in PoK would tell you the options for your level and port you to the quest NPC in the zone.

Returning to the NPC in the zone (giving back your hired mercenary) would offer you a port back to PoK.

This would be independent of the Hotzone system.

Yep :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kbgjmmr5vw

As a player who boxes, and can port and buff a lot, I hate the idea. I move around a LOT, and to waste time going to the merc NPC in every zone, and then having to take time to buff the new merc, sounds horrible.

Tat

Mercenaries are an unremovable thing at this point anyways, so not really something I should have put forth in the "things that should be undone" thread.

Auras and traps as implemented always seemed like kind of a mess to me. [There, something that is back on topic to the thread[.