Queued spells

On the other post I criticized some elements of the UI, like the lack of a graphical mark to see which spells I have queued.

Someone then commented stating that THERE IS, in fact, a graphical mark. So I thought I had messed with some options and I went to double check everything again, without success. I forgot the issue since then but today I finally noticed the effect for the first time:

Look. Then look better. That image shows the icon inactive on the left and the icon active on the right. See the fucking inner border SLIGHTLY brighter? That’s the effect. It’s FUCKING INVISIBLE! That “effect”, assuming that you are able to discern it even in that example, pulses on and off, where “off” corresponds to the icon on the left and “on” to the one on the right. Just try to imagine how usable it is in the game, where your attention goes to a bunch of things and you have at least two or three hotbars each with twelve of those slots to manage.

I swear I’m not joking.

This is one of those situations where I would like to look the UI designer in the eyes and ask: what the fuck were you thinking?

Then I also wonder what all the rest of the team was doing. Aren’t they playing the same game? Haven’t they played from the beginning of the development till now? Don’t they see these problems either? These are really very basic and simple functionalities. The very basis of design. Something that is suddently noticeable. So, what they were ALL thinking?

If the answer is that they didn’t see any problem with these issues and if this is working as intented then, well, it means that WoW truly deserves that disproportion in the success. Because if you cannot understand something as simple as this, you cannot understand ANYTHING about game design.

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The pacing is all wrong

The gripes don’t end here but the rest is about something more conventional, like the pacing all wrong and other odd things that don’t work quite right.

My character is currently at level 9, with the combat exp till disabled. I still wanted to check the crafting side of the game so I tried to figure out how to access it. I already complainied about this part being quite obscure if you happen to “miss” the beginning quest on the noob island like I did.

You have very little direction when you leave the island and I had to resort to spolier sites since I couldn’t figure out how to start crafting. I found out that I’m supposed to join some sort of crafting guild/shop. I had already found some of these on the game but I couldn’t undserstand what were my options and on which assumption I was supposed to choose between one and the other. Anyway, once you join one of these shops you’ll need to complete a basic quest before you can start crafting.

My starting quest wants me to collect fifteen pieces of “severed maple”. Okay. I wish I had a clue about where to go get them. Right now I only know two zones beside the city itself: commonlands and the cemetery zone. So I went to the commonlands to discover that all the things I could gather were about the generic “gathering” skill and not what I needed. I noticed a few pieces of wood to harvest but my skill was too low. So I explored much more, hoping to find something at a lower level but without success. Then I decided to move to the cemetery and try there.

Here I could finally harvest the wood, but not the type of wood I needed. I had to rely again on a spoiler site to figure out what the hell I was looking for exactly and I discovered that the maple I needed could be found on the commonlands, from those pieces of wood beyond my level. So what I had to do was to harvest stuff in the cemetery to skill up till the point I could be able to harvest stuff in the commonlands.

The pace is all wrong. I passed two hours walking around the cemetery and just harvesting the pieces of wood. After those two hours I was at 13 in “Foresting”, starting from 7. Exactly as in WoW (they are cloned, not similar) for each level you can up your skills by five points. Being at level 9 my maximum skills would be at 45. What I got was six points in two hours. Barely more than one level in progression. From level 2 to level 3. Doing just that. The rates of failure on harvesting are EXCESSIVELY HIGH, so you have to repeat and repeat with the “Nothing Found” pop-up appearing continuously. Despite the high failure rates I managed to collect 41 friggin pieces of “severed elm” and even one rare. But my skill only went up by six points and I needed at least 20 (level 4) so I could finally go out in the commonlands and be able to START my newbie quest (and that was another 15 pieces of stuff to collect). This revealed to be one hell of a grind. For a level 9 characters collecting level 2 junk.

As I said, they got the pacing all wrong. The high failure rates, the excessively low rate of advancement. It just didn’t feel good and I finished to log out even if I actually had more time available to play and had planned so. But the grind and bad design got in the way and my interest in playing decreased.

I wouldn’t compare every inch of the game with WoW, but the game BEGS you to do so when the mechanics are absolutely identic.

EQ2 not only uses the exact same skill system, just paced wrong, but even the exact same resource system. Around a zone you can find roots, pieces of wood and other types of junk that you can “harvest” and obtain resources from. With the difference that the resource system made sense in WoW while it is once again inconsistent in EQ2. In WoW the resource nodes spawn where it makes sense, the minearals near the mountains, the herbs scattered around, the skins on the mobs you kill. In EQ2 these spots are scattered without a sense, they are just random dots on the map without an attempt at an excuse. On top of this each spawn point is also not unique, so that the minute before you can find a “wood” resource and the minute after a “stone” resource. Totally inconsistent.

I was disappointed when I tried to sell the resources I gathered after my bags were filled because I discovered that the NPC vendors just don’t buy them, not even at a low price. And speaking of consistence and another direct comparison with WoW, I also found a player mnining a resource on top of an horse, without even the need to dismount.

Why WoW must always outclass every system in the game? Wrong pacing, high failure rates, generic spawn points, inconsistence, impossibility to sell to vendors. I feel like I’ve scratched just the surface.

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Hallucinations

Is this all? Hell no. While running around the cemetery it *continuously* happened something that freaked me out. I was getting hit by “something”. I was just running around and getting hit by something. I could see the animation, the sound and a “-9” or so damage popping on top of my head. So I looked around but there were no monsters close to me or chasing, my health bar didn’t move and my combat log didn’t register ANYTHING AT ALL. But every five minutes or so I was getting hit again, sometimes even with multiple hits, with damage numbers popping up all around me. Still nothing around, nothing in the combat log.

I double checked everything, I examined the effects on my character to see if it wasn’t some sort of odd DOT or disease but nothing. I was being hit without a reason, without my health bar reacting. I even thought it could have been because of falling damage but again I wasn’t able to reproduce that, and the falling damage WAS registered in the combat log.

Still now I have no clue, but I’m pretty sure it’s some crazy bug and not something intended that I wasn’t able to figure out (you never know with this game). I actually think it could be because of a graphic bug of the client going crazy and “burping” some events out of synch by 4-5 minutes. Which is still really odd and that I never seen happening anywhere.

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To conclude, a tiny but positive thing I found. I noticed that there are small objects around the world that you can click and “flag” with your name. Before the flagging these objects just highlight on mouse-over, but without any kind of feedback. But if you click on them the object will be flagged with the name of your character: “Gaen was here”.

Initially I though this was a per-character thing. Like landmarks that you have on different accounts, but I found later another of these objects that was flagged with the name of another character. So it seems that these are little “discoveries” that are shared between the whole server. You can go around and hunt for these little object and flag them with your name for everyone to see.

This is really a good idea, something I never seen before. I don’t know if the flagging decays after a set amount of time (I hope not), either way it is a nifty feature for the explorer types.

For them EQ2 is a much better game than WoW, even if the environments are much better in the latter.