Bru

@(Unverified) "Being a dirge, my solo ability is piss poor."

I hate to be one of "those" people, but I'm going to be in this instance. You're doing it wrong. I recently leveled a dirge, and had absolutely no trouble whatsoever at those levels while soloing. If you're having trouble surviving, you might consider buying some crafted gear. If you have any alts with void shards, then the shard armor will easily take you through both SF and DoV solo content straight to 90. Also, try to get two weapons that have the same swing timer (though it's harder before 90) as having synchronized weapons will increase your dps in the long run.

Seriously though, soloing in EQ2 has never, ever been easier for any class, let alone dirges.

I played for a long time on a MUD that had a similar idea, with different worlds having different things, like a hot jungle world and an ocean world. Each world had playable races unique to it, with different stats and advantages. There was multiple ways for you to cross between worlds, with each planet having it's own unique form of transportation. And it was basically impossible to level without jumping between them.

All in all, it was a fairly solid concept, but it was horribly executed. It was hard to stay interested in a game where the devs basically threw up their hands and said screw it, because they couldn't keep themselves interested in it for more than a month or two at a time. That's my worry with an MMO like this. How do you keep the guy creating the world invested in it? I'm sure that's a question every MMO has to face, but this is a fairly unique situation. This is one guy with a lot of ideas, and so far he doesn't really have anyone with qualifications to bounce those ideas off of. When Curt Schilling set off to do the same thing, he didn't sit around on the internet going, "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" He actually hired some people that could actually do some work on creating the concept and went from there.

The way this guy is going about it, I'd honestly be worried that he'd get a concept firmly in his head, have a bunch of gamers amped about it, THEN hire a dev team that isn't really invested in the idea. At which point he gets bored and wanders off to do something else, leaving this dev team who doesn't really care to finish things up.

It's worth pointing out that EQ2, a game that's run slightly longer than WoW, and in most ways (though not all) is worse than WoW, has had Veteran rewards for a very, very long time. Included in those vet rewards are experience potions, titles, a mount, a house, an object that will teleport you to any raid member, or teleport any raid member to you ever couple of hours. An object that let's you reset your rested experience to 100% once a week. And then a few more little frippery things, like an illusion that shrinks your size, and a silly little pirate flag. And to top it all off, each character you have at max level gives you an experience bonus to the alts you want to level - 20% for each character up to a 200% bonus.

WoW doesn't really offer much to people who consistently keep themselves subbed. Really, the closest thing would be once off world events that drop items that you can't get anywhere else. But the sad thing is, even EQ2 has WoW beat in that regard. Not only do they have these world events, but they have more of them. Not to mention the guide events that happen at random times that's sanctioned and supported by SOE and run by player volunteers.

EQ2 is honestly terrible in many respects, but there's still some good ideas that wouldn't hurt Blizzard at all to snag.

@(Unverified)

I'm quite sane thank you. Yes, it does look very much like sarcasm. Having read many posts by Bashiok over the years, and it's well within his style.

Honestly, what is up with all of the dunderheads making much ado about nothing?

@Professer Nah, Bashiok hasn't been fired. He was probably told to watch himself a little better, but they honestly love the guy. And yes, it was obviously sarcasm. I'm not sure why people are so bad at seeing sarcasm in text, because that whole thing about not seeing tone in text is honestly BS.

It would be more honest to say that some people are bad at detecting sarcasm, period. I knew a woman that you could use the most over-the-top sarcastic voice, eye roll, etc, and she would not pick up on it being sarcasm at all. Completely oblivious. Sadly, there are many who are like her, in various degrees. And I think them not being able to see sarcasm in text is actually a function of them not seeing sarcasm at all.

The best part of the mission was the side mission to break up the fights between klingons and bajorans. Each time you told a klingon to go do something more constructive, he held his hands up in the "Watch out guys, we're dealing with a badass here," stance.

@Malvious There are such things as stalkers on the internet. I agree that many of the reasons given for paranoia are usually silly, but stalking is the one thing that will always trump.

Well, a third faction could work, but it would basically mean being kept out of PVP while you're a part of it. In WoW, I think it could only ever work like the Exile faction works in EQ2. Basically an in-between faction where that you have to go when betraying from one side to another. WoW's exiles would severely limit you, only letting you quest with those flagged neutral, bind to neutral cities, and using the goblin's AH. Probably LFG and LFR would be unaffected simply from a gameplay aspect. You want to make it rough, but not impossible if you decide to betray and stay at the halfway point for a while.

The only problem with any of this, is that WoW will never allow betrayal, and will never let you learn the languages of the opposing faction. Frankly, I've always felt those limitations were incredibly silly, because who's to say that there isn't a dwarf that is disgusted with the mutton-brained human running the alliance? Or a tauren druid that wants to study with his night elf brothers in peace? Race silhouettes in pvp basically went out the door back in Vanilla when gear started getting crazy looking, and will only get worse now that both sides will have the exact same race on their teams.

As for a third faction for anything else in this game... It'll never happen. It -can't- happen, unless everything is rebuilt from the ground up to keep three factions in mind. PVP would change completely, and would be more of a balancing nightmare. People still can't agree on which side has the bigger advantage in Alterac Valley, so how would that go down if a third faction was mixed in? And what about world pvp? It's entirely dead in WoW now. It would get worse unless you changed the world to have objectives to fight over, and that's something I don't think Blizzard will ever try again in WoW.

@Ragemaster9999 How is that in any way Socialism? Rich person with a lot of money to burn plays game, wants the easy way to the top. Poor person who doesn't mind grinding a few hours to get good gear sells said good gear to Rich person.

Sounds exactly like Capitalism to me.

@Saker Considering WoW is the giant of the industry, hoping that they make a game completely unWoWified is pretty silly, especially since it's SOE.

I just hope they take the good aspects of WoW while keeping the better parts of both EQ and EQ2.