Q: What are some of the dev's favorite things they worked on this past year?
Kaitheel: Sirran the Lunatic’s dialogue and quest involvement in the Ballads of Zimara signature quest line. I like finding those perfect characters of lore and bringing them or their stories back around when they fit. Especially, if they can be a fun surprise.
Kander: I enjoy most things I work on, but I do miss doing nothing but dungeons, like back in the old days. Skyshrine was probably my favorite anything I worked on ever.
TTobey: The German Shepherd was a lot of fun. The Hooluk came out really nice too, but my favorite thing I worked on last year hasn't been released yet.
Chrol: All things Aether Wroughtlands. It’s a beautiful zone, and making content for it was a blast. Also, Every Which Way in Vaashkaani.
Denmum: The D.I.R.T.Y. questline was a fun little challenge for me, and I was glad to make a set of updated crafting gear for higher level crafters
Haohmaru: Aether Wroughtlands because it was so different than any zone I’ve worked on previously. Was nice to not feel grounded in strict reality, play with color a lot more and sculpt crazier looking terrain.
Gninja: My favorite thing I worked on this year would have to be the Masquerades of Divinity event for Year of Darkpaw. Avatars have always had a special place in my heart since I was running into them as a player so many years ago. It was great to bring them back for the anniversary events.
RickR: I loved working on the Djinn Dungeon because we had to make this place super magical. The whole Kaleidescope look was very challenging. Using colors and effects that are much different than previous zones, and mixing lots of flora with architecture was really interesting. Working together with the art team and the design team to come up with the final "look" of the zone was really fun as well. In the end, seeing the final product and hearing how much the players loved it was extremely satisfying and made me proud to have making making this game for so many years.
nJavi: Making all the new spells for Ballads of Zimara.
Muted: Working on the sound effects for the Prismatic Labyrinth mini game. It was a lot of fun getting to take an old arcade game style approach when designing all the different sound and music cues.
Q: What are the devs favorite zones and/or expansions? Do you have a favorite EQ2 moment, in or out of game?
Kander: My favorite expansion was probably Rise of Kunark or Altar of Malice. As to favorite moments, probably the 2014 Fan Faire where we all sat in a room for 2 or 3 hours signing things for our players and meeting and discussing things with them. It was a great time.
Ttobey: The zone where Kerafyrm shows up took a lot of work. That little scene took six weeks to put together, but it's still one of my favorites.
Caith: Tower of Frozen Shadow during Destiny of Velious launch was one of my all time favorite zones, it was challenging and engaging.
Chrol: High Keep Contested! Goblins running amok + orc skeletons crawling amok = fun times!
Denmum: As a player, I loved Echoes of Faydwer for the grand variety of zones it added and all the new crafting content that went in. As a designer, Visions of Vetrovia was my first crafting signature line, and I had a lot of fun not only with the tradeskill storyline, but with coming up with names for most of the collectibles in the expansion. As far as my favorite EQ2 moment, I'd have to say the moment when, as a player helping test Anchorage crafting content, I got to (accidentally) kill Gninja.
Haohmaru: Expansion - Altar of Malice as it was the first expansion where we showcased our new zone Art pipeline (at the 2014 Fan Faire too!) after years of hard work and experimentation. Moment – When chunks of Luclin crashed into Thundering Steppes, completely submerging it and removing it from Norrath, forever. Oh wait, that still hasn’t happened… yet. Favorite Zone – clearly Thundering Steppes! Jokes aside, I’d say Oakmyst Forest is up there as it was one of the first zones I worked on. I still enjoy the small, more intimate feel of it as you explore around, the secret cave, the waterfall and sunrays...
Gninja: Favorite zone… That’s a tough one! I would have to go with Echo Caverns: Expedition Precarious [Raid] I had a ton of fun with that zone and got to be a bit silly with the gnomes! Tower of Frozen Shadow comes in a close second though. My favorite moments have to be at the Fan Faires over the years. It is so much fun to meet players in person and hear all their stories, especially if it’s a fond story of something I created.
RickR: Two of my favorite zones (that I've worked on in the past) are Maldura and Plane of Innovation.
Muted: It’s a toss-up between Echoes of Faydwer and Rise of Kunark, I can’t decide. Favorite moment? Far too many to recount. It would honestly be a lot like sitting through a mental slideshow of all the pictures your parents took on their last trip to the Poconos.
Q: What is each Dev's favorite food?
Kaitheel: Panang curry or chicken jalfrezi. And all pastries.
JChan: Is this a security question? <wink> I've always been a fan of pizza of many kinds, but in the past few weeks, after my decades on this planet, I found out I like lobster.
Caith: Sushi. Particularly, all of it. I miss all you can eat spots, not for the bulk, but for being able to have a wide range of Nigori so I can have a bit of every flavor.
Kander: I don't have a favorite food.
Bunji: Spaghetti and meatballs.
Ttobey: The olives in a martini.
Denmum: Sushi and chocolate. Not at the same time, mind you, but they are both major comfort foods for me.
Haohmaru: Chicken Wings, naked. No wing sauce, no ranch or blue cheese on the side - just, naked.
Gninja: Just about any kind of seafood!
RickR: Mongolian BBQ
nJavi: Korean fried chicken
Muted: Toasted Ravioli with a good rich meaty marinara sauce to dip them in.
Angeliana: I am not a dev, but my favorite food is Pad Woon Sen, extra spicy...with sides of Spring Rolls and Gyoza! And for dessert, coconut ice cream.
Q: Are the "suburbs" ever going to be returned to at launch state?
Caith: This is extremely unlikely to happen on a live server due to the amount of quest and NPC updates that have been made over the years, NPC’s have been moved and quest dialog updated to reflect the move, much less the quests themselves updated to function in the new zones they are in, etc.
Kaitheel: Our newly announced Origins server will allow you to step back in time and experience the cozy neighborhoods and all of the quests they had to offer!
Q: Tradeskill quest line was the shortest that I have ever seen it any expansion. It also has the least amount of daily content this time around. Are there plans to do away with tradeskills or increase this in the future?
Caith: There are a myriad of factors that go into what gets put on the schedule at any one time, including availability of dev time, competing content, etc. Unfortunately, that meant this year’s tradeskill signature line wasn’t as impactful or engaging as we would have liked, but we have no plans on “doing away with” tradeskills. Just take a look at Game Update 125!
Q: What is the deal with the Maedjinn/Djinn that are friendly with the Hooluk in Petalcrown Perch?
Kaitheel: Oh, the rusty Maedjinn? You’ll be interested in reading the Maedjinn mastery book, titled “Of Mice and Maedjinn”. That was a fun book to write, utilizing two different narrators at the same time.
Q: Is there any intent to provide a current tier Aggressiveness or Fading adornment to provide a way for proper positive/negative hate mod management?
Caith: There are no plans to add new Aggressiveness or Fading adornments at this time. Currently hate management is in a place where we are happy with it overall.
Q: Is there any intent to upgrade the collection meta rewards for Ballads of Zimara? On a related note - Why does '0.X all attributes' exist as a bonus?
Caith: There are no plans to upgrade any of the rewards from the Ballads of Zimara collection or its attached achievement.
Q: With the change to raid gear to allow the conversion of all regular raid drops to CBOC at will, there is a lot less interest in running regular heroic content - is there any intent to increase the drop rate for double purple slot/darkfeather items, or potentially have divine relic drops increased in order to entice players to do more heroic content to give raiders a reason to return to groups?
Caith: There are no plans to do a blanket increase in drop rates for the rare drops in heroic dungeon, which would shorten the period of time that those dungeons can be relevant.
Q: Chrono Dungeons. Can you broach the future of these? Is the intent to leave them as is, or make them more enticing somehow, or... what?
Caith: We will undoubtedly reexamine Chrono Dungeons again in the future. To be clear however, Chrono Dungeons missions are just shy of 20% of all missions released in Ballads of Zimara.
Q: When will cheesecake mount be released?
JChan: Mmmm.... cheesecake, but what kind? (New York? No-Bake? Japanese? There are so many to choose from!)
Q: When will we get to play Chains of Eternity expac all the way though VOV or up til whatever the current expansion is when we hit it in a TLE style of play?
Caith:We don’t have any plans for the near future to update Chains of Eternity and beyond for Time-Locked servers. The time investment for converting an expansion to be Time-Locked ready is immense, and devoting several months of work for multiple developers is not something we can fit into the schedule at this time.
Q: Why was the HP so absurdly high on all the Bosses in Rise of Kunark on Varsoon, and furthermore, WHY is the HP STILL so absurdly high on Varsoon in that Expansion compared to literally the entire rest of the game?
Caith: Kunark was the first expansion that had a stat explosion, with both crit bonus and potency being readily available on gear.
Q: Are there any plans or discussions involving a game wide stat/number squish? Is it just too much work for the team you have now or is it something that may possibly happen in the future?
Caith: There has been much discussion, but there are no plans for a game wide stat reduction for a variety of reasons. One of the primary reasons it is unlikely to happen is how content is designed in the game. EverQuest 2 was designed in a way that gives developers a lot of freedom in how they implement content, which allows them to make the content more flexible and unique. The downside of this is that developers can implement things in innumerable ways, and any rebalance of that content would be a manual process. So in short, a stat reduction would require hand tuning of almost every encounter in the game.
Q: Can we add a few more tiers of currency so we can once again transact on the broker and trades in a number that is easily discernible?
Caith: We have no plans to increase the broker limits.
Q: Are there any plans to merge IoR with a more active server?
Caith: There are no plans to merge Isle of Refuge at this time.
Q: What is the process of balancing classes on the Dev end? What happens that results in a new set of Meta classes almost every expac and little to no changes to bring other classes up to par?
Caith: This: https://forums.everquest2.com/index.php?forums/class-skill-suggestions.88/
Q: Besides the few interactions with Twitch streams, are there any other plans to advertise more for the game?
Angeliana: We have some ideas bouncing around, but nothing concrete yet. Stay tuned later though!
JChan: A little bit of inside baseball here, if you're already actively engaged with the EverQuest II community, you're unlikely to see a good chunk of our advertising (surfaced trailers, banners, promoted posts, and etc.) as the algorithms have gotten better over the years to try to focus on lesser engaged members of our community. When we first started, even I was getting bombarded with our own advertising, but it's been a long while since I've seen our advertising out in the wild without doing some crazy things to make the internet think I'm not me.
Q: Are there any plans to encourage new players to start playing and to make the game more accessible for new players?
Kander: You should check out the news and announcement of our new Origins server.
Q: Are you ever going to disconnect a server from the series and give the players a true TLE that matches the original release rather than the versions we have now where the stats are out of sorts due to the Live servers being tied to them for updates?
Caith: That seems like a lot of work!
JChan: ... but we did take it on to get close for the Origins server.
Q: Year of Darkpaw items and other items like the Ratscallion cloaks, are you going to make them available again down the road to players who were not here at the time?
Caith: Without addressing any specific one, limited-release items are prestigious specifically due to their limited-release status. So, while some may be made available in some form in the future, some will also remain unavailable once their initial release has ended.
Q: With status being so high on so many items this expansion, does this mean you are considering it the new form of main currency going forward with Plat being a side currency since it is so out of control?
Caith: Every currency has its place, be it plat, status, or expansion specific currencies.
Q: Is there any chance you will consider adding mercenary training and mount training to the research tab in the last page of the knowledge book so we have 1 spot to check on all our stuff going?
Caith: There are no plans to migrate mount or mercenary training into the Knowledge book. The art and code resources can better be spent elsewhere, and custom UI’s have the capability to re-arrange the windows for those looking for a different layout.
Q: Camel mounts. When are we getting them?
Caith: Camel mounts and Cheesecake mounts are currently in a fight to the death to see who is the strongest of potential mounts. However, Cyclops bearing palanquins have been spotted chortling in amusement at the presumption of being excluded.
Q: Will we ever be able to search for MAX HP items on the broker?
Caith: Probably, yes.
Q: Why are Character Slots not Giftable, and could you change that?
Caith: Fraud reasons, so unfortunately, no.
Q: Are there any plans to open up any parts of the game to the player community who also happen to be software developers, either in a full open source on GitHub with pull requests way, or via some sort of NDA?
Caith: There are many legal hurdles to such an endeavor, so it is exceedingly unlikely.
Q: Is there a possibility of opening up some art assets for community contributions as well?
Caith: Nope, for the same reasons. The player studio project that many of the Daybreak games had going for a long time were both legal headaches as well as not viable financially. The amount of art resources (hours) required to work with a contributor far exceeded the amount of resources the teams could have simply allocated to an artist to complete the same work.
Q: To help reduce the grind, can we make some leveling processes more universal?
Caith: While we are always open to specific suggestions, the leveling up process is a fundamental part of the game and the RPG genre. If we wanted everyone to instantly and always be max level, well, that is what we would do.
Q: Can we add a way to sort Mercenaries by Battalion in the Merc window?
Bunji: We can investigate it! Will make a ticket to do so.
Q: What was the reasoning behind pots, poisons and temp adorns, especially from overseers, changing to heirloom this year, even on free trade servers such as Isle of Refuge?
Caith: Crafted potions, poisons, temp adorns, etc are a thing. Overseer rewards are not intended to completely negate the entire servers crafted expendable economy, and with how easy it is to obtain overseer rewards having them be tradeable would flood the broker.
Q: Any chance of real life events coming back?
JChan: Fippy Fest! Plus, we were just at PAX East and are looking into other events later this year.
Q: Would cross-server dungeons/grouping be possible?
Caith: We have some versions of this in mind, however there are no current plans for doing so.
Q: Is there a way you can make the mercs sort by their training levels, like you do with the mounts. If so could you please do this?
Bunji: We can investigate it! Will make a ticket to do so.
Q: Is there a reason why fighter taunts are not affected by fervor? Is there some mechanical reason why they can't be? If they can, why aren't they?
Caith: Because NPC’s do not mitigate against threat, and threat otherwise functions the same way damage does. Using a fervor multiplier in the threat calculations would do two things: First it would completely negate all threat management other than tossing a basic taunt to permanently shift threat until a hate position effect was applied. Secondly, threat would overrun the 64 bit INT and then roll over into a negative value.
Q: Any plans on a Tradeskill Epic Item Series?
Denmum: There are no specific plans, more like vague thoughts flitting around as proto-ideas for the future. This year has enough going on with the Year of Darkpaw Crafter achievement on top of normal content.
Q: Any chance the Familiar Appearance change to require Flying for Flying and Grounded for Grounded ... be revoked?
Caith: Unfortunately no, the way the appearance familiar works is it just applies the art file of the appearance familiar onto the in game character of the equipped familiar, and there is no way for the game to know of that art file has animations for a set movement type when doing that, and we do not want non-flying familiars running (or just doing the electric slide) through the air.
Q: Any chance we can get Four Favorites Slots for Merc Window? Ok, 5?
Caith: We have a task for this, but no specific schedule for when it will be worked on at this time.
Q: Can the previous expansion's prestige houses get added to the marketplace?
Caith: Some previous expansion collectors or premium inclusions may be found in “Special Edition Rewards” packs released on the marketplace.
Q: Will you bring back LoN?
JChan: Legends of Norrath was great when it was here, but we have no plans to bring it back currently. Spinning back up a whole new development team or taking away current developers to work on it would put stressors on the team right now that are just plain unhealthy for our long-term future. That being said, there's always the possibility that our situations will change in the future.
Q: Can we get our guilds that we are trustees of added to GH call and Housing & leaderboards?
Caith: No, sorry. The checks for the potential number of places you can get too are astronomical. Call to the home city and go into the housing portal for your destination.
Q: Can we make it so if a toon on an account has maxed out mount, merc, familiar, that other toons IF they have the same mount, merc, familiar it is automatically maxed out as well?
Caith: This isn’t something we have any plans for at this time.
Q: Are there any future plans to utilize community development, or more tangibly incorporate veteran and high play-time player's feedback?
Caith: We have just recently released a way for players to actively participate in their class balance. As for segregating it to only specific players, no. No single individual’s feedback or vote is any more important than any others.
Q: Can we get an appearance gear depot that maybe removes all stats from a piece of gear and makes it tradable (so it can go in a depot) and maybe renames the item so it is readily seen as an appearance item?
Caith: We have no plans to add a depot for this function, however you can make use of the Wardrobe functionality to store a piece of gear’s appearance for use on the Appearance tab.
Q: What if anything is going to be done about the Crono issues. Taking away our only ability to get any meaningful amount of coins. And charging exorbitant amounts of coins for anything and everything we want to buy?
Caith: The Chrono dungeon income is where we want it currently.
Q: Finally, when is DBG/DarkPaw going to seriously address tradeskilling. You know how long it has been since there has been new craftable bags or boxes, or totems? Not to mention, at one point in time we could craft the beginning gear and Jewelry needed and make a bit of change. Other than food/drink, spells, not much else anyone wants.
Caith: Bag space is a DB and systems issue, a ton of the functions in the game iterate over every single item that a player has in their inventory, including every bank slot, every house slot, etc. We are, and will remain, extremely stingy when it comes to increasing inventory space, because as soon as we do the next question becomes “when are you going to fix lag and decrease loading times”.
Q: How about a Heirloom Depot that is tied to one account, kinda like a shared bank, but only holds heirloom items, or even just heirloom gear, though I think the player made dungeons could be done away with if you had heirloom housing depots that would also hold pets and such that won't go in a regular depot? Or for that matter, a pet depot would be helpful too?
Caith: This is exactly what your shared bank is for.
Q: Is it possible to add XP to the signature questlines in prior post-100 expacs to allow them to be viable places to level, rather than being forced to always do Planes of Prophecy > Blood of Luclin > VoV?
Caith: We have no plans to add giant experience jumps to previous content quests.
Q: Will the Coldain's Linked Armor Set, from the New Halas city vendor, be tweaked so the Leg, Feet, Hands, Head, and Forearm slot items match the Chest and Shoulder slot items?
Covic: Ya looking at the file, all the pieces seem to be pulling from the same folder. So if you are seeing something that looks incorrect, it is best to open this as a bug in the bug forums with images and we can take a look.
Aaron: When art makes a set of armor, it’s the whole thing from top to bottom (depending on the set since some armors don’t have helms and robes don’t have feet, they’re added after). We can check on that and see if something was missed in art or if it was just designed that way via design.
Q: Will we be getting corrected water tiles this year? Also would it be possible to get a search function by keyword for moving crates?
Bunji: We can investigate adding a search function to moving crates. I will create a ticket to do so.
Q: Are there any plans to increase the font sizes in the other windows?
Bunji: We have and are still looking into some ways to increase font size, like in the main chat UI. The issue is our UI does not scale with text size changes, so we would have to manually modify individual UIs to support larger size text.
Q: Can you create a hardcore server where 1 death results in permanent death without resurrection?
Chrol: I don’t know about an entire server but hardcore dungeon where one wipe locks out your group for a day sounds fun. Wait, no it doesn’t. Wait, for me it does…
nJavi: Sounds like a great idea following what Hardcore has done for other MMOs out there. I believe the bandwidth folks have to create such a system is a big chunk of time to put aside for. I imagine there is more higher priority systems, but hardcore could be something in the future.
Q: Will Census ever get some more useful data for Overseer Agents/Quests? Or just an update in general to how some data (or lack thereof) is returned?
Bunji: We can look into adding more Overseer related data to the census export. We would need to determine what data makes sense to export, for there is a ton of data on characters already exporting. I would suggest making a post on the forums of specific data you are wanting to see in census.
Q: Can someone elaborate on the reason for doing DirectX 11 and not DirectX 12?
Bunji: Ultimately, DX12 is a completely different beast compared to DX11 and would have required much more time to integrate, with little benefit in our game. Our player base has a wide range of hardware, and DX11 tends to play nicer on more varied hardware.
JChan: Additionally, there are a notable number of players that are still playing on hardware or OS'es that do not support DX12 at all. We tried to find a good balance of compatibility while being able to use the benefits of newer technologies.
Q: Why is there a 5 day long timer on Overseer loot items and can you guys get rid of that please?
Caith: Exploiters and cheaters, so unfortunately, no.
Q: Could you all please bring back the map help for npcs, quest items and such?
Kaitheel: We have no plans to remove the current map system in game, where the quest givers and quest update conversations are given specific quest icons, but the short-lived blue regions on the maps that give direct locations of quest steps are not something we plan to bring back. They were useful, we agree, but they had some significant downsides. Downsides that outweighed the usefulness.
These blue regions presented every active quest target possible at that moment on your map, naturally drawing your attention to the map. We observed how little attention was being paid to the dialogue, the story, even the characters to fight and the world one was traveling through. It was not helpful for building the world, telling the stories of the world, or your immersion therein. Even I found myself paying more attention to the blue splotches on my map than I was to the quest journals or NPC conversations. The quest I was doing, my motivation, the quest givers – all of it was buried behind the ease of these blue regions on the map. So, coupled with the significant amount of time that they took to create, we chose instead to give more helpful journal text, with more specific points of interest, and labeled sections of the zone on the maps.
Q: The exp gain in zimara went from one extreme to the next, could you all please balance that some?
Caith: The experience gain in Zimara is an example of where we would prefer it to be. It takes actual work to level up, and you have multiple routes to obtain experience, some requiring more attention (questing) and giving larger rewards, some requiring little attention (grinding mobs) and giving much lower rewards.
Q: Could we please get a double status as well as xp week or weekend and please more cash shop sales?
Kander: We currently have plans to run bonuses at least every quarter. We have many marketplace sales planned annually.
Q: Being forced to use Heroic Opportunities is not really a good thing, since it prevents from using skills some of us prefer to use in a fight.
Chrol: Some encounters require Heroic Opportunities to overcome, but do not restrict the use of your other abilities you prefer to use.
Q: Any chance a change could be made so we can have just one tradeskill fuel per class?
Caith: Nope.
Q: Can we please get the ability to put heirloom things in depots?
Caith: Depots are a shared container with everyone that can access the home, so, no.
Q: Will we ever get a search function for the quest journal especially completed quests?
Bunji: This is possible; we added similar functionality to various UIs. I will make myself a ticket to look into this!
Q: Will the character models themselves ever get another remake like when SONY revamped them to the SOGA models?
Covic: No not currently, we have looked into this many times and have looked at many ways to lessen the workload. It is a gigantic task and would require us to take away from many other needed art tasks.
TTobey: There are no plans to update the character models in the forseeable future.
Aaron: Personally, I don’t see this happening. A full character “revamp” is a *HUGE* undertaking that needs a lot of hands and time to accomplish. Really, it took a whole team a long time to make the original models. The art team at the time being is tasked primarily with making new content for updates, live events, and expansions with no added time (even the request list that is submitted must sometimes be pared down so that we can get the best “bang for the buck” with our present capabilities). On the other hand, this doesn’t exclude a possibility that we could take bites out of the whole list of character models we currently have available (regular as well as SOGA models) as we have time, but getting assets in for live updates, events and expansions always takes precedent, so it’s not really on the horizon within the foreseeable future.
Q: I noticed with interest that you intervened around Christmas on EQ1 Server when Exploits happened which negated the economy. Further the EQ1 Roadmap showed that You wanted to implement more measures to prevent this from happening. Why did this interventions not happening in the same scale / way on Eq2 Server ?
Kander: We are constantly working to fix exploiters and address cheaters.
Q: When are we getting the long demanded RadarX plushie?
Aaron: I wish we had lots of plushies of Norrathian fauna and flora! I remember that we had a plushie of a Gnoll once, I wish we could get Goblins and an Ogre.
JChan: RadarX? That's pretty specific. Are you RadarX? Long time no see!
Q: Can city instances like The Willow Wood: besieged Hamlet be altered so mercs can enter it?
Gninja: When these zones were made, they were very specifically set up to work with a solo player in mind. It may be something we can do in the future but at this time they will remain as they are currently.
Q: Do you ever plan to add more prestige houses (aside from the xpac houses,) like many of the ones we all have requested? Like The Shard of Love instances (especially the prettier holiday only version.) It's been so long...it is time.....why don't you want our money?
Denmum: We want to add more prestige houses when we can fit them into our schedules. This year has been rather extra busy, so we just haven't been able to fit anything into the schedule yet.
Q: This is a big question for Kander as I know he will like it: When is Dungeon maker 2.0 coming? Can someone take a pic when he's asked the question (It will be priceless)?
Kander: We have no plans to return any form of dungeon maker.
Q: Will you EVER go back to the old way of expansions/tradeskill/housing method of grinding up faction, so that we may buy a vendors housing items in unlimited gold/plat costs?
Caith: Few things are ever set in stone, but it is unlikely in the extreme. Pricing something such as a house item to make it accessible to a casual, yet still impactful to a more aggressive player is a daunting task with the extreme wealth gap between those playstyles.
Q: Can we take adornments (white, purple, red. blue etc) out of game and just make the stats part of the equipment each expac ?
Caith: Removing the adornment system to reduce amount and type of rewards people seek out would not correlate to making items even bigger bags of statflation.
Q: Can we get an official stat write up? Examples: increase effectiveness? what is the formula for attributes and what exactly do they affect? what is the "DPS Formula"?
Caith: Potentially, but it all comes down to time investment. Do we do this, or that, or that other thing?
Q: Do you have any plans to reduce the number of spells? we have to use 3rd party addons to get an additional hot bar because of the honestly absurd amount of spells/clickies/buffs some classes have? Maybe allow us to combine some buffs to 1 button?
Caith: We’ve talked about it, and introduced some ways to reduce the amount of spells players need on their hotbar or rotation, but the resulting pushback from the playerbase has always been more negative than positive. Everyone wants less abilities, but not this ability, or that ability, or any of MY classes abilities. Ultimately, with the amount of UI performance degradation, less abilities on hotbars showing cooldowns, etc, the better as far as I am concerned.
Q: With going 64-bit and an engine upgrade are there any plans to push past the 100 character per zone limit?
Bunji: The problem here is not memory limitations, it is CPU limitations. We have so many systems that interact with each other, that nothing is a simple calculation. When a PC / NPC attacks something (for instance) we have gear, abilities, etc., that could have effects that are triggered and need to be processed. We also have an expectation any “effect” (heal, damage, stun, etc.) is processed in the sequence in which they occur (so a character does not die due to a damage effect being processed before a heal, even though the heal was cast first). Ultimately, we have VERY complicated effects associated with our gear / abilities (more than any game I am aware of), and this comes with limitations.
Q: I know it is impossible to make everyone happy and I love that H3 is difficult and not for everyone. Can we get a raid equivalent?
Caith: It is comparatively easy to find six likeminded players that enjoy an extreme challenge to get them into a challenging heroic dungeon, when compared to the task of finding a raid guild who all agree that they want the same level of challenge, failure, regroup, retry. The larger number of players seem to drastically increase the likelyhood of a player or subset of the players are frustrated and angry and only here because they feel like they have to be, thus leading to overall dissatisfaction with the content.
Q: Can we get a better heads up of incoming changes and ideally consideration for those most affected by them?
Caith: We announce changes as early as we can do so as is. While we could certainly dial back changes and delay implementation, doing that also leads to the exact opposite feedback. The diametrically opposed feedback of “why does changing x take so long” along side posts of “you changed x, how dare you?”.
Q: Can we free the rogues? If an assassin can live in either faction, so should a swashbuckler.
Caith: Signs point to no. While I personally, I think the lore reasons for classes being restricted to specific cities have always been silly. A Paladin working for Freeport makes sense to me, because a Paladin can be blind and ignorant, or a Necromancer working for Qeynos, because ultimately, dead folks to raise as servants exist everywhere! But at this point we are unlikely to open the classes up any further than they are.
Q: Is there a timeline for when boosts will go to 125?
Kander: We typically release boosts for max level when we raise the level with an expansion release. So if and when we raise the level to 135, a level 130 boost will be available in some form.
Q: Will the cost of a Heroic (100) character be lowered at some point?
Caith: We have no plans to reduce the cost of heroic characters or level boosts at this time. As for the future? The future is vast and varied, so who knows!
Q: Could you please come out with the lifetime membership again during Year of the Darkpaw?
Caith: Signs point to no, so says the magic eight ball.
Q: Why is "Minty Green Baby Dragon" only a pet wand? Please make a bundle where you get a full set of PLUSHIES of each color you make of the baby dragons (not random but all) and also each color as solo purchase of baby dragon plushies.
Caith: We try to add a multitude of choices throughout the year, but unfortunately there will always be some that do not make the cutoff, for a variety of reasons, even if that reason is “out of these 10, we need to choose 3”.
Q: Could you please make it easier to use the quantity field on marketplace?
Bunji: I was not aware this was an issue. We can investigate it.
Q: Will we ever see a bigger house item expander to marketplace and/or can you make all prestige houses have the same item count as Court of the Masters house?
Caith: We have enough headaches with people on slower connections crashing on loading into a packed house or guildhall because their client is trying to load up all of the assets that are packed in the same room as they zone into, so doubtful.
Q: Will we ever see an increase in how many houses we can own even if it is something we have to purchase for entire account (not individual characters)?
Bunji: It is possible, but it is a bit complicated. Essentially, it adds to the “weight” of a character as far as data associated with them and adds to the amount of data that needs to be carried over with services like character transfers.
Q: Could you add option to purchase prestige houses for just one character or entire account (that is reasonable to afford)?
Caith: I’m not sure I understand the question, but if you are referring to purchasing a prestige house account wide, that is not something we have any plans for in the near future.
Q: Could you please make all prestige houses available all year long instead of just during a holiday since all of them have been out many years?
Caith: We do not have any plans to make any seasonal marketplace items always available.
Q: Will you ever make it so you can gift someone the expansion without buying the Family & Friends version?
Caith: That is specifically what the Family and Friends version is for, and is unlikely to change at this time.
Q: One person asked about being able to set the size of all text, could you also include making stuff you are typing in chat window be the size text it is set too?
Bunji: We are investigating this.
Q: Could we please get wigs for our toons? I got a head piece for one of my Ratongas with black hair and snakes, so wigs are doable.
Covic: Great idea, maybe someday, but not anytime soon. We focus most art resources on expansion content and our other updates throughout the year. But good idea.
Aaron: A fantastic idea! The way our system works though, is that we can’t make items for *just* one race/gender, it would have to have versions for everybody. Now, making something as complicated as hair means getting it exactly fit onto 40+ character models (unless it’s a discount wig, which then having seams, tags and lace fronts hanging out might be fun). Certainly, something I’d love to try making at some point when I am not at the weapon forge. All of our energy as a team though, is presently put towards supporting live events, game updates and expansions.
Q: Could you let us know if you have any strategies to attract old players back to the game or new players to try it out?
Kander: Take a look at the plans for the new Origins server!
Q: Would you ever consider adding a free trial (say maybe allow players to level to level 20 with a 2 character limit) for TLE servers?
JChan: With our TLE servers we try to replicate the early experience and that also means memberships were a thing back then. It's a thing we could consider, but it's unlikely that we'll do it because of the imbalances it would provide.
Q: Any chance of increasing voice acting in the game?
Caith: Voice acting is extremely expensive, in both a dollar amount for hiring voice actors, as well as in a technical capacity, having our sound team dedicate a large amount of their time iterating with the voice actors to get things correctly done. And then we have the issue of changes, where a designer needs to change a dialogue line, and now we need to not only re-record the line, we need to make sure that the original voice actor is available.
Q: With the year of Darkpaw (which is wonderful by the way), is there any efforts being made to grow the game or is the focus to keep long time players with continued lower budget expansions (I understand why they are lower budget) and TLP servers?
Kander: Take a look at the information for the new Origins Server.
JChan: The whole Year of Darkpaw is designed to grow the game and encourage people to come back while also giving long time players and increased amount of new things to do.
Q: Are you able to go into any strategies or information for/about the future of the game?
Caith: We share what strategies we can, when we can, throughout the year, particularly in the producer’s letters.
Q: Will an ascension AA tree ever become a thing to bring back old adorn effects and buffs for them?
Caith: We have no plans for an ascension AA tree nor any plans to bring the old ascension adornment effects back into current gameplay.
Q: Will we ever see unique class based adorns or gear procs to customize our character further in builds like we use to in set adorns?
Caith: I won’t say never, but it is unlikely. Making 26 unique effects for an adornment is a massive investment of time that could be better spent elsewhere.
Q: Why don't we have more interesting gear with unique procs and stats? Can't we bring back cool equip effects unique stats and procs?
Caith: Time investment. Pure and simple. The amount of time to make interesting and even remotely balanced unique effects is monumental. We are well past the time when a change of 2 points of potency on a specific ability is an enticing reward, and the complexity of the current game systems means any unique effects make a focal pivot on player power, and feelings of class contribution.
Q: Can we ever get resistances/mitigations added to detect weakness?
Caith: Potentially, we’ll look into it.
Q: When a AA says "increases spell by a potency modifier of 3" does that mean it's basically as if you added 3 potency to your stats? and if so why is this a thing on live servers when we are over 1mil+ potency? shouldn't all of these be converted to effectiveness if thats stronger?
Caith: It means that spell is increased by the same amount as it would be if you added 3 potency to your character, but the modifier only effects that individual ability, or group of abilities. This recent update to the wording of those effects was to make what they have always done more clear, as the majority of the effects said something along the lines of “increases the damage of blah, by x%”. And while this was sort of true back then, before players had potency, it is patently untrue once players have potency, as it is just, and always has been, an additive potency modifier.
Q: Why can't we have all the stat adorns just merged onto gear as a unique gear pieces to chase or get?
Caith: Because then you would only have a single item to chase and get.
Q: Is it possible to ever see a revamped reforging system to allow more build freedom?
Caith: Extremely unlikely.
Q: Why can't dps mod and weapon bonus damage be merged into 1 stat?
Caith: They probably can be, but the same can be said for crit bonus and fervor, or potency and ability modifier. We don’t have any plans for tackle such a thing in any near future, as it would be very complicated and time-consuming.
Q: Why can't flurry and multi attack be merged into 1 stat and just add 2 extra hits to the flurry if its high enough?
Caith: Previously answered, but I want to address the flurry portion of this question separately. Flurry no longer does extra hits, and won’t again, because hit calculations are extremely expensive when it comes to performance.
Q: Why can't we have auto attack stats affect combat arts and the non auto attack stats affect spells to make class typing be more focused?
Caith: First, combat arts when it comes to “this is on the CA page of my spellbook” are not actually handled any differently in code than spells. Essentially, the page of your knowledge book is just a descriptive/display thing. So I will assume this question is more “can we make auto-attack stats affect melee damage abilities?”. And the answer is, probably not, no. First off, it is pure insanity the complexity that comes from having two entirely differently scaling effects (modifypool damage/heals, and meleeAttack effects) bring to the table, expounding on that complexity by introducing damage multipliers in the way of stats that were never planned out to affect abilities, much less how those stats are currently obtained. Would it have been better if they were planned out this way? I think it would have been, but it isn’t something we will implement at this point.
Q: Would the concept of adding aa point overcap ever be a possible feature to come? or items/gear/adorns that add aa points to certain nodes?
Caith: Not really, if there is ever a call for adding more AA’s again, it will just be more AA’s, not adding the ability to increase ones that already exist, thus requiring me to re-write the AA for the new functionality anyway.
Q: Will we ever get rid of the pesky aa point requirement system so we can just spend points where we want?
Caith: We have already reduced the requirements for the AA trees as much as we intended to at this time.
Q: May we please get some deep storyline quests in the expansions for solo/small group players. I love questlines that have a real story to them?
Kaitheel: You liked the Shard of Love! Thank you very much. That's a great compliment that you appreciated the depth of story in there, and I hope you've played on to then experience the ripples and connections to that zone story that happen elsewhere in the world (Drinal's Steward, Ulkurruuk, (Smith) Zek, Erollis, Aaronolis, the Coliseum of Valor).
I’m a little confused by your question though, as the deepest stories we’ve been telling over these past years are the signature quest lines of the expansions. We’ve made a very conscious effort to make the signature lines be solo/small group. They start in the overlands and go through dungeons that all have solo/small group versions available. No signature line has required completion of exclusive Heroic or Raid content in ... years (more than 10 if my memory serves). Though, raids and heroic content is still being created as part of our expansions, and participating in them can reveal even more story, again, they aren’t required. Perhaps, my interpretation of “deep storyline” is different than what you intend? And if so, then I apologize for having seemingly gone off on a tangent. Or maybe it’s that you are playing on a TLE server where the experience differs from that of live? Then again, you could be on live but the issue isn’t the stories, it’s that you’ve found the dungeons too challenging for solo/small group? In any case, you'll be glad to know that our goal is to have fun, rich stories being experienced by you, whether you like to solo, group up, or raid.
You're welcome to PM me and elaborate if you're comfortable. I cringe thinking that I might have misunderstood the issue at hand when you clearly appreciate the stories and want to experience more of them.
Q: Can you please add a search category to the broker to search for OAs?
Bunji: We can investigate this. I will make a ticket to do so!
Q: Are we EVER getting some fresh, fun, cute mount models?
Kaitheel: Don’t let Kiao and their fellow stratos aralez hear you say that, or the families of plumedrakes. They might take offense! Cute is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.
Q: Why does every zone not have a map?
Kaitheel: Ah, dungeons tend to be the zones without maps. My theory? I suspect it has to do with the challenge and excitement inherent to exploring the unknown. Yes, every zone becomes known and can have a map drawn for it, available to follow from external sources, but to have one given from the start, no matter if you’ve sought it out or not, removes some of that chance at the unknown and the thrill it holds.
Q: Any chance on TLE servers that veterans rewards can be compressed to a timeline that represents the expansion releases for accounts that have actually been around as long as it took to release a given expansion?
Kander: Not everyone has access to veteran rewards, so we do not plan to have these available on the TLE. It could be considered an unfair advantage in an environment we want everyone to be on the same footing.
Q: Will we ever have the ability to "paint" our character home walls/ceilings/floors?
Haohmaru: This would be an enormous undertaking and one of the reasons the very original housing setup (wall/floor texture swaps) didn’t translate to future player homes. Instead, we focused our time on trying to create more interesting and diverse player home themes. And along with that – the hundreds of tiles, props, etc to decorate them with instead! There would be but a handful of homes given the technical setup of the original homes had we decided to stick with that direction. So in short – no that option won’t be happening, but I can guarantee you that more tiles/props and thematic homes will always be on the horizon!
Q: Why are harvested food 'rare' items so so so SOOOOO rare compared to other 'rare' harvestables?
Caith: Originally? Because the rare food materials go to making a single item as opposed to a multitude of items. Now? We can take a look at the current drop weights.
Q: Can the various kilts be made to look better on more races?
Covic: Look better in what way, is it broke and has horrible clipping issues? Is it bug related and not in the correct place? Or is this anesthetic issue and not liking the style of current kilts available?
Caith: Without some indication of what you think is wrong with them, no, not really! Personally I love how the pink kilt flatters my Iksar’s knobby knees.
Aaron: “Looking better” is a wide request. We could always try to make better textures for any future kilts and wearable options. In regard to how cloth moves though, we have only so many “influences” for skin weighting game geometry. This is the reason we don’t have full dresses because there are always going to be a stretch or pull somewhere. Earlier art teams alleviated this issue with the plated fronts and split sides of the robes and one dress we do have available. The present “cloth sim” we have works well in some cases but isn’t 100% usable (horse riding is problematic).
Q: This is actually a question that dates back to the original EQ: according to EQ lore, the Vah Shir are descended from the Kerrans, and they actually got stronger after being teleported to Luclin. If Vah Shir are cats - and they're a sub-species from the Kerran, who CAN track - then how come the Vah Shir are unable to track?
Caith: My theory? Space cats cannot hear the subtle heartbeat of those that are terrified that the kitty is going to push their glassware off of the counter. Because, you know, space.
Q: Why is there for all these ages not a single one rideable dragon as a mount in the game?
Caith: Dragons have a spray to keep them free of pests.
Q: Could we get the 2 week holidays last 3 weeks please?
Kaitheel: Sometimes we wish a holiday could last longer, what with all the good memories and special events that surround them but stretching them out comes with a loss of some of what makes them stand out from the everyday. I don’t foresee us extending any of the present in-game holidays. Beast’r is the only one I am on the fence about, but with the overlap of other events and the inconsistent dates involved with the holiday, I am leery of even that one.
Q: Real 4k support? Addons are great but I do love the normal game interface.
Bunji: There are no plans for this atm. Our UI was not designed to scale, and this would be a tremendous amount of work. We are looking into specific UIs, like the Chat UI, to make it better support larger text.
Q: Can we get bigger player made bags?
Bunji: This is a tricky issue. Various activities, like being offered / updating quests or checking for LORE items when looting, require us to check bags. The more bags/ slots, the more checks are required which can affect performance.
Q: Raise mount limit we can carry on our persons?
Caith: Similar to many other things that involve “can we have more x inventory”, this is performance issue. Mounts have gear, mounts have levels, every mount you have ever owned and added gear or levels too is increasing the size of your character, which has to be processed by the servers when you zone.
Q: Dye Packs so we can change our clothing color please.. that would be so cool?
Covic: This would be cool, but we don’t have the tech to set that up for player facing. We have always thought this could be a cool idea to allow for some customization but don’t have a way to implement it.
Aaron: That would be pretty cool to be able to dye your own armor as you desired in game on the fly. At the time being, there’s no system in game to enable adventurers do that. Even if it were added, we’d have to go through the thousands of past armor sets and enable an ability to tint. Some armors *ARE* made tintable so design can pick and choose a color range without art making lots and lots of armors, causing even more files in the system (and for you to load) but that’s a very small fraction of armors overall.
Q: More fur options for ratonga's, kerra, vah shir, etc?
Covic: Would be cool and doable. But not a simple task since it is more than just art creation time. Setting up the UI with added values and make it all work correctly is probably a bigger time sink. So is it possible, yes, but probably not happening anytime soon.
Aaron: A great idea! Going along with the same train of thought from the “Wigs for Toons” question, if we made new hairstyles for the furrier races, then the other races would also need options since we can’t really offer one off options for one race and not others. I’d think differing options of tattoos or other skin markings might be cool for the races to match. The only setback of this is the dual blade of time and person power, though. Our time is 100% scheduled with getting assets in for live events, game updates as well as expansions with very little additional time for other projects. I’m happy to add it to the wish list, but can’t promise anything for the foreseeable horizon.
Q: Can we get depots to store horse patterns or let the harvest depot hold these?
Caith: It depends on the mount gear pattern, if it has certain types of data they cannot be put in depots, but the current expansion doesn’t have this issue, and hasn’t since early in the expansion beta, so we can look at it.
Q: Can we get depots to store heirloom Overseer potions/temp adorns?
Caith: While you will never get a depot to store any heirloom item, there are several organizational optimizations in the current pipeline.
Q: When are the aa trees for all the classes going to be updated?
Caith: On average, updating an AA takes between 45 minutes and an hour, per ability. So, when I learn the secret of cloning myself. AA abilities will now be updated based off of the class update request process and voting on the new forums.
Q: Can we please remove the locked barding slots and just auto unlock them?
Caith: We don’t have any plans to auto-unlock these slots, no.
Q: Can we get an exp nerf on celestial familars?
Caith: We don’t have any plans to reduce the amount of experience a celestial familiar grants when consumed.
Oh, also, no plans to reduce the amount of experience they require for leveling.
Q: What happened to Ballads of Zimara’s stated bonus exp for alts on finishing the sigline and it being 50% faster?
Caith: It was working fine when I last looked at it, which granted was in the expansion beta, so we’ll take a look.
Q: Can we please get mercs allowed in old past expac raid zones?
Caith: No plans for this in the near future, sorry!
Q: Can we remove the need to have to do old siglines to fly in old xpacs?
Kaitheel: It’s not something that we are open to at this time. Changing the existing prerequisites means going back into working content to make edits, requiring testing and often removals of miscellaneous items, dialogue, and other tracking files. These are all pieces that help either communicate with you or pieces that help communicate progression to the server. Going back in and editing all that is a matter of time investment. And removing existing and functional progression points is not something I personally feel is a good investment of our limited time.
Q: Can we please unlock blueprinting for current ts sigline completion or make it account wide instead of having to backtrack to vov for it?
Caith: We’ll discuss ways we can allow players to get this that do not want to go back and obtain it through its questline.
Q: Why can’t Arasai and Fay Wings be a selectable graphic for the mounts?
Covic: We don’t have a way for players to change wings on a mount. Players can pick wings on their character but not mounts.
Q: Since overseers are seemingly connected account wide, not to each set of characters on separate servers, why can we not have a special overseer stash box that spreads out among all characters on that account?
Caith: First, there will never be an inventory across servers, ever, for a ton of reasons. But as far as essentially a “shared overseer bag” that functions similarly to a shared bank, it’s potentially something we can look at in the future.
Q: Could you give us a rundown on the sort of improvements we are expecting to see with the DirectX update?
Bunji: The main reason for switching to DX11 is to future proof our game, as future hardware may no longer support DX9. It also allows us to move away from requiring users to separately install DX9 related files to run our game. There are other benefits as well, such as better MSAA support.
Q: Are there any thoughts about trying to ease newer players into getting into heroics upon hitting max level? Perhaps a GM or NPC manged leveling guild you can join at low level allowing people to chat and hang out with other levelers?
Chrol: [Heroic I] encounters is the equivalent of entry-level group content at max level. I’m sure there are folks on your server willing to help you along the way.
Q: I loved the zones that Chrol did... diaku corral was great. Chrol, I was wondering if you were considering doing more of those in the future and if you could chose any theme what would be your choice?
Caith: If he’s at all as smart as I think he is, he’ll go for killer clowns from outer space.
Chrol: Thanks! Diaku Corral was one of my favs - shooting hats off heads, saloon doors, rousing sleeping cowboys, singing cacti, /westernsalute, mechanical bull (meatbeast), gatling guns! The list goes on! What theme would be my choice? I love veering off into 4th wall territory, similar to Diaku Corral, as long as the lore backs it up (yes, there’s a reason the diaku dress like cowboys). I’d love to do a theme where high elves are the idiots and trolls and ogres are the high-falutin aristocrats. Wait, I take that back. Cats. Just cats.
Q: TToby, are we ever gonna get frenchie mounts? What was your favorite mount to design? and least favorite?
TTobey: The lore doesn't support riding Frenchies. They would never take you to where you need to go and they are always grouchy.
TTobey: Every new mount is my favorite for a couple of weeks. Covic and I try to top the last one, so each new mount is better than the last. My least favorite is probably the first original flyer we did, that weird looking gryphon? It doesn't hold up to what we are doing now and probably could use a redo.
Q: Kaitheel, if you could add a new holiday event to Norrath what would it be?
Kaitheel: Am I picking from real world influenced holidays? Diwali would be super colorful and full of fun foods to see. Though I’d be challenged to find quests and adventures to fill it with. But if I’m not limited by real world holidays, then I’d choose something small, a celebration only held in one spot by the people of that area for reasons even they have lost. But oh, there’s a dark reason for it.
Q: Denmum, since joining what has been your favorite project?
Denmum: The crafting quests that added ways to get advanced recipe books that had been left out (40's, 50's and 60's) were a LOT of fun to both research and write. I got to learn about home-made dew collectors and turn it into a small story, etc. They may have been small stories, but it was fun to let my mind run amok.
Q: Could the city neighborhoods be turned into potential Prestige houses?
Denmum: That was done with the Baubbleshire, sort of, but to make it a viable home, a lot has to be trimmed down and changed to make it more house-suitable. Given the time requirements, I'd say that they aren't currently at the top of the list of possible prestige homes to consider in the near future.
Q: Is there, or can there be, a way to transfer ownership of a "no trade" item to one of my other characters? if my character is deleted and has left a book (for example) in my other characters home, why can't she take ownership someway? If there is already, please tell me how? [Link] RE this question: Like, buy something off the Marketplace to turn a No-Trade thing into an Heirloom thing (and that way, we still don't have to worry about speculators flooding the Broker/Auction chat channel with them at outrageous prices)? The way the F2P folks have to buy something to enable them to sell on the Broker? There is precedence for that; why not?
Caith: Potentially, sure. But ultimately this would only ever get implemented to function with very specific items.
Q: I created a "Great Library" for publication (not avail yet) but realized no visitors can read any of my books. Is there a reason for this?
Caith: From the question I am not sure if you are experiencing a specific bug on your zone, or if you have player books that are not functioning properly, for this sort of issue you shoud create a post in the bug forums so we can look into it.
Q: Is there a way that we can get a house voucher back in our packs, maybe heirloom for purchased houses and no trade for expansion houses, when we relinquish a house?
Kander: We would like to create some form of way for people to get house vouchers back for relinquished houses. It’s being discussed.
Q: Why do so many classes have abilities that are designed for auto attack, even though auto attack is no longer relevant?
Caith: Auto-attack is a complicated issue. First, it’s passive DPS that is just “free” because you don’t have to participate in making it happen other then just not being dead, and targeting an enemy mob. Second, it functions mathmatically completely differently than every other damage ability in the game, because of course that is how the codebase should have been designed. Next, the encounters are tuned with mitigation, which means a specific encounter can be set up to be more resistant to auto-attack damage, and finally whenever an auto-attack build starts to shine we get a slew of complaints that auto-attack builds shouldn’t do a significant amount of a parse.
Q: Would we be able to have a tab added showing what adornments we have equipped instead of having to go over piece by piece?
Bunji: It is something we could investigate; we would need to find a way to parse all a character’s gear in an efficient manner for displaying all this info on demand.
Q: What are the odds that we can use all AA's instead of having to pick and choose?
Caith: As close to zero as zeroes can zero.
Q: Can you all please bring out more veteran rewards? could you make it account wide vs just 1 toon can claim it?
Kander: We have no plans to alter or change any of the veteran rewards. We stopped doing these because the number of people who do not have access to them was growing and the overall implementation of them from the beginning was not great for newer players.
Q: Would you please consider making windows and double doors that fit into the frames that we can buy/craft?
Aaron: I’ve made some of this very thing recently when I made them off schedule. I’d be happy to design up more options of windows and doors for future content when I have a free moment! It makes me super happy that there’s that much of a desire for house items like this.
Q: Could we please have more hair styles?
Covic: This is something we talk about every once in a while. A new hair style is cool for a bit, but adding creatures and content give a lot more game play. Although new hair styles would be neat, if it didn’t take away the time needed to make great expansions.
TTobey: There is no plans for new hair right now.
Aaron: I’d love to make more hairstyles! I’ll be happy to add it to the wish list when there’s a free moment, but it’s an intensive task making hair (or other accessory options for the non hair styled) for 40+ character model options we presently have. Adding more accessories to armor it’s complicated getting them fitted to shoulders, but hair needs to tightly fit on a slew of varying scalp shapes (not even taking into the equation the many ears we to deal with).
Q: Would you every consider adding support for players to be able to mod (on client side) fan made voice work or AI generated voice lines as an addon?
Caith: Much like the player studio questions, this is a lot more complicated and expensive resource wise then folks probably expect.
Bunji: I am not exactly sure how you would want to use these voice lines (emotes?), but something like this would be a lot of work and not likely to happen.
Q: How about a new 'pack' for purchase?
Caith: New packs are coming out all the time!
Q: What are the chances of getting some itemization reviews for the later TLE expansions - specifically ROK/TSO/SF?
Caith: There have been many itemization reviews for all of the Time-Locked server expansions, and there will continue to be reviews of specific portions of each expansion’s itemization.
Q: Class balance forums?
Caith: The old forums unfortunately just didn’t have the capabilities we needed to do them, so it took us longer to roll out than we wanted it too, however, they are in the new forums!
Q: At the risk of making a request in the guise of a question, would it be possible to change familiars so they obey the "/pet hide" command after zoning?
Bunji: We can investigate this. I will make a ticket.
Q: Can a feature be added to name our hot bars? Could we name our hot bars too?
Bunji: We can investigate this.
Q: What is the reason for the "event" slot just above ammo?
Caith: To fill it with a plume. Plumes will only be obtained via live events, thus "event slot”.
Q: Can we get racial cooking in this game similar to EQ1? Example; Hot and Spicy Toeling!
Denmum: Of course you'd want to chop off my toes for your vile meal! Bad ogre! No treats for you! Seriously though, I will keep it in the back of my mind, but it wouldn't be high on the priority list.
Q: Is Luclin like a giant Egg that is going to hatch one day in a future expansion letting the Sleeper out?
Kaitheel: Who knows? Perhaps the one with inherited powers from the goddess of Prophecy knows the answer.
Q: So what's up with Nagafen and his lady? She got all life/earthy instead of freezy and flew away like she didn't have a care in the world for her main lizard man that went through a whole lot of trouble to bring her back. Where are they for the story line?
Kaitheel: Good question. I doubt we’ve seen the last of Lord Nagafen or Lady Vox. He was not pleased with her restored state, that is for sure.
Q: Can you add the ability to have mercenary appearance sorta like we can place a mount or familiar we want for appearance regardless of which we use for stats?
Caith: It’s possible, and something we have discussed, but would be a significant time investment due to how mercenaries work.
Q: When will you update Deity altars abilities we can select from. Most have extremely little impact with their 30+ minute reuse.
Caith: No current plans, no.
Q: Any plans to update ascensions? Ascensions that do damage are very weak. Don't want to see them go back to the days where ascensions completely ruled, but it would be nice if they actually hit for what they say they hit for.
Caith: Unless we decide to offer a new level increase to ascensions, no. As for things hitting for what they say they do, they do hit for that, an encounters mitigation however reduces the damage that encounter takes, you can use a training dummy in a guild hall to hit a creature that doesn’t have any mitigation.
Q: Do you plan on adding more AAs in the future?
Caith: Not immediately, but eventually, yes.
Q: If a bear barks in the woods and no one saw it, but everyone heard it, does it make it a dog?
JChan: You need to take that bear to the vet if it's barking. It's likely not a bear.
Q: Can we get the Zakir Maedjinn as a playable race?
Kander: Playable races require a massive amount of time and work, that we would probably be better off using to create new content for our players to experience.
Q: Will we be getting back a World Bell (Voyage Through Norrath) in West Freeport?
Caith: Boats don’t travel on streets very well.
Q: When will we find out about the ruleset and implementation plan for the new TLE due in June?
JChan: Soon. (tm)
Caith: This question is like, so last week, man.
Q: In Terrors of Thaumbra, and as well as Kunark Ascending, there was a rare portal that would spawn on a player while they were in the overland zone. How exactly can we spawn these "hidden" duck/cow portals in Thalumbra and Obulus Frontier?
Caith: Telling would go against the point of them being hidden.
Q: In Renewal of Ro, players were led to believe their epic spell NPC could be spawned by various methods, instead of waiting every 22 hours. How exactly can players spawn these NPCs?
Caith: Led to believe by whom, and what, and how?!
Q: The Reign of Shadows expansion included significant AA revamping. Why was rank 5 Tower of Stone AA changed to not have the effect that allowed the guardian to cast the Tower of Stone ability with no power ? Can the AA please be changed back to its original effect ?
Caith: Sounds like a request for the class update request forums!
Q: Why was the shoulder of burden AA transfer % changed from 16% to 15% ? Was 1% really game breaking ? Can the transfer amount please be changed back to 16%?
Caith: This was probably a shared lerp table that got corrected, and had nothing specifically to do with this ability.
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