Surveys available for EverQuest 2 players

How is old EQ2 doing these days anyway? Everyone has been so busy hating Warhammer in AoC....

What are their sub numbers like? I know the game that launched and the game that is EQ2 today are not anything alike. How did that Station Cash thing work out for them?

well I was a day one player and I loved the game but fell out of it back during the sky expansion. I went back on a trial recently and could not believe how poorly the client ran for me. quick disclaimer not a bragging point but to back up why I was confused. I have a quad core at like 2.8 or what not with a GTX 280 and 4 gig of ram. So there is no real reason for it to run poorly. I also game on a 12 mb connection. But all the quest updates would take like 3 seconds to "ping" and update it was so frustrating to me. Also the graphics engine is getting really dated. I tried playing a fae and also a sarnack or what ever those lizards are called. I really wanted to get back into the game since I had such fond memories of it. My templar still has her prismatic weapon from the first expansion. We got that pre expansion also had the first frogloc on the server. Poor froggette rests in the vaults waiting for me to resub. :( I think I would love to go back but I think to much time has passed for me to get into it again. Personally I'm feeling a little lost since I quit playing WOW. Just waiting on the next great thing to come along and give me something to do.

There is an option shoan, for nvidia cards because of the way the engine and the Nvidia driver handle texture reloads that you have to select to fix that issue. I have about the same system (3.0 core 2 duo, GTX 280) and I had the same problem until I corrected it using that selection.

The problem with the EQ2 engine beside that is that they figured back when they created it that CPU's would be the thing to keep on growing in terms of overall pure power instead of the GPU. So most of the processing effects were sent to the CPU instead of GPU (like shadows, most textures and particles). Instead the CPU's just added more cores, not raw ghz and the GPU took off to the races in terms of gaining power.

They have said multiple times that it would require a complete engine re-write for them to really fix it, but I assume we will see EQ3 before we see a new engine in eq2.

As for the game itself, well, I too was an avid eq2 player and would love a race change option. But in the end I quit playing the game because the pvp was just a mess. I don't mind open pvp, I actually prefer it, but gear is so overpowered in that game you can have people who gear up in twink gear and basically are unable to be killed. Me and a buddy both non twinks tried killing a blue to us twinked paladin and his regen from his gear let him sit there afk while we couldn't even get him past 75% health as a defiler and sk combo (low 20's).

At 70+ it isn't any better. PVP is all about who has the best gear, if you don't have great gear your skill won't matter.

I also played the pve game, If I loved pve like I used to I would really enjoy the game but I don't. I am not a raider like I was in EQ1 days when I was in Phantom Raiders and Divine on Bertox. So for me, the game was kinda fun until I hit 80 then it just became a gear grind. But it still was still fun. One of the better mmo's out there as long as they would redo the engine imo.

so do you think they will drop eq3 on us or just let it ride out its time and forget about it. Not saying that it has been forgotten about considering that they are adding a new x pac to it. But I think you know what I mean. I never knew about the option to do that with the video. Might make yet another trial account and see whta it does for me. I personally was a raider I never really got into the PvP aspect of the game. I just felt it was not right for the game. But most likely I will wait for a new game to come out and get into the ground floor again. Most likely will try Aion next. I like my MMORPG's to be fantasy based. never did really like LotRO it was ok for me but not for me. WOW started losing me with this argent crusade thing and had a few people that drove me nuts in my guild. Oh well. For the present time I just waste time with console games and red alert 3 : /

Keep in mind that "your" suggestion maybe taken in by the devs....but they go to a pile of "we might do these but we are going to stick to schedule and plan and maybe do some simple things that dont affect our plans"....long quote but its the truth.

Devs react, they dont plan ahead when a game begins to fail for some mysterious reason (a humerous aspect unto itself).

To date i have seen one game being currently in development that is taking all the ideas of its potential sub base and making plans that way.

As for the bottom line that you have any direct impact in the game you are currently playing by making suggestions, unless you have created some magical third party app that makes the game bring in more money, your just sucking gas and light headed thinking your contributing anything.

The plan remains the same, the short 30 day plan, the medium range 60 day plan and the long term 90 day plan are all standards, "they" will not deviate from them because of monetary costs, your ideas are just that ideas that unless they make money in a business model in their eyes, wont see the light of day.

Hmmm... This is an information gathering exercise for Everquest 3, they would be stupid to invest to much resource in this game, given the date of it, and the fact they already compete against themselves, with the older and more popular original Everquest.

....that or they'll just figure out which items they should add items to their Station Cash store, rather than just be loot drops ;)

I am not a big fan of the proposed (read in development) racial change potions.
Assuming that it is just a straight race change, then we will get a flavor of the month scenario for races in EQ2. If they make it like the betrayal quests, where you would lose all your current masters and certain class specific gear is no longer usable then I might be a little more in favor of it.
To me this is just to appease a vocal minority of "end game" raiders who want to their scout based toons to Dark Elves becase some of the racial abilities for DEs are so over powered when compaired to other races.
It just becomes a min/max'ers paradise where people will change races to the flavor of the month when racial abilities are tweaked.

And as for the comment about race tied into class, that is not really a factor / problem with the betrayal quests that were briefly mentioned above. Since people can at any time change their class / city affiliation through a series of quests.

Potions for changing races? This sounds like a "what can we get away with selling via Station Cash?" poll.

The race changes have been asked for because they occasionally tweak the racial abilities and races that previously had nearly useless abilities suddenly have great ones. What this does is give them the freedom to improve some of the really crappy ones without people whining about having to re-roll to take advantage of them.

The graphics engine is being improved, slowely. In the past years they have added dual core support, GPU shadows (previously handled completely by the CPU) and offloaded some of the partical effects to the gpu as well.
The update in September-ish will introduce 3.0 shaders to the game and, judging by the screeen shots I have seen, improves the game's look a lot. The engine programmer has stated that the 3.0 shaders have been coded in a way that it should not effect the framerate of people that have 3.0 capable video cards.

As for other content, the next expansion for EQ2 is in Feb10 (it's 6th since launch). Hard to say they aren't supporting the game with a expansion cycle like that.

Not going to say the game is flawless but it is far from being left "high and dry", waiting for EQ3.

Maybe if enough players complain SOE'll make the player character models look like something other than grisly, unnatural-looking homunculi.

Personally I welcome the possibility of being able to change races. For example my wood elf used to look nice in SOGA and then they made changes to the face sliders and now she looks like an expressionless fatty lip doll. (some would say they always looked like this, but I do swear the eyes had more expression and the lips used to be a lot smaller..)

I have never played her since those changes and I don't really like the old models, so being able to morph her into a fae or half elf would be really cool.

Merge Servers anyone? I think its time personally.