It's official.  I've broken SOE's code!  Using my vast knowledge of steganalysis, which has only come in handy when trying to decode Kubrick films, has finally payed off.  After careful study of the released EQNext wallpaper image, I've found startling new info that needs to be released to the masses.  Let's begin.

1:  The forearm plate armor on the Kerran clearly shows a (5 2).  This obviously indicates that beta for the game with begin May 2nd of next year which will last through the summer before the eventual release that August.

2:  You'll also notice 5 swords and 2 hammers in the picture, again hinting towards a May 2nd beta date.  You may be saying to yourselves that you see at least 1 or 2 more swords but those are obviously daggers.  An easy mistake to make to the untrained eye.

3:  Staying on the same path, Firiona Vie has 5 arrows in her quiver and is holding 2 weapons.  See the pattern?  It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to see everything's been right in front of us the entire time.

4:  Firiona Vie is also tipping us off  to the use of a multi-class system.  It's clear that we'll be able to shoot swords with our bows and possibly melee with our arrows once we're out of sword ammo.

5:  The female mage using a 2-handed hammer also shows off the use of the multi-class system.  At first it appears she's wearing pants, which would be a direct violation of EQ code according to this post.  Fear not though, they are actually thigh high leggings!

6:  Everyone in the picture is running around willy-nilly which leads me to believe that the rumor of the trinity being gone is true.  We can distinctly see a depiction of a zerg based clusterfuck goin on.

7:  Clearly every server will have FFA open world PVP, according to the image.  Nestled around the map will be dragon statue safe spots that you can see 2 players taking advantage of right before the scrum ensues.  This is evident in the fact that the Kerran has nothing in his right hand while wielding only a sword in his left, which would normally be weird.  He's obviously been defeated in a battle nearby and lost his main hand weapon to another adversary.

8:  Finally, and most importantly, we can deduce that all these players are basic FTP'ers.  I see no signs of world building or destruction which can only mean that the option to do either is for cash shop purchasers or premium members.  This should keep the riffraffs at bay for a while.

I hope I've opened a few peoples eyes today.  This is meant to be taken absolutely 100% serious and in no way a stab at all the nutjobs out there coming to their own conclusions with little to no info to back them up.  Well done SOE, well done.

I, along with most of my community, were hit with the dreaded 3102 and 90000 error.  While fortunate enough to not be hit with this until late Saturday night, a lot of our players have been less fortunate.  I did manage to hit level 20, which is the cap, on my Marauder before i went boom.  We completed the first three dungeons and were on our way to the Ifrit battle when the dreaded error occurred. That's what beta is for i suppose so it's not a big deal to me.  Beyond this issue, i do have a few other ones that bug me.

Despite what some people are saying, there really is not enough content to get players to the first dungeon level beyond their first class.  I should say, there really isn't a non-boring and grindy way.  FATE's will get you there if there's are a lot happened constantly, which depends on the zone and population.  Hunting logs, which are fine as a supplementary form of exp, really stink as a required way to level.  I have fun doing stuff like that for achievements and bonus rewards, but i have no fun doing them for needed exp.  Leve's, or dailies, are what they are and have a limit of course.

My second class hit level 10 rather quickly with the 50% bonus i received from my first class.  That's pretty much when i hit a wall and had no quests or leve's left.  Well, i planned on saving the 3rd city quests for my 3rd class, so i could have done those but that would have just caused the issue to wait a day.  I can manage running around doing hunting logs and FATE's but i fear the average player will not.  After a point, say my third or forth class, i don't think I'll enjoy it either.  

There just needs to be something more in this level area to get players to level 15 and the dungeons a bit more efficiently.  More regular quest hubs are not the answer as I'm so tired of them.  What the game needs is more diverse events, similar to GW2, happening constantly.  I loved leveling in that game mostly because it didn't feel like leveling at all.  It was just fun.

It's either that or what i would prefer is elite or heroic area out in the world where i can take a party and go level old school.  Put one of these on every map and lets the players have more options.  While i understand most newer players probably won't use this option, i would personally be all over it.  It's all about options and FFXIV needs more currently.

If the EQ Next reveal did anything for me, it had me hopping back into EQ2 for a few days.  Despite never having a max level character, there's just something about this game that always has me hopping back on from time to time.  It's usually the fantastic housing system that gets me but this time it happened to be a few public dungeons.  I love them despite their obvious limitations when it comes to providing every player an opportunity.  I enjoy seeing other players out in the world instead of sitting in town or in some instance separated from everyone else.

I hopped on my 75 Shadowknight, which i absolutely love with a passion, and headed to Sanctum of the Scaleborn for some exp.  The dungeon itself being level 65'ish allowed me to chronomage down for the first time.  Yet another mechanic i love which is essentially a solo level sync option.  I really had no idea what to expect with this being my first time trying to solo a heroic public dungeon.  I'm sure my terrible FTP gear and skill options didn't help either, but my class made up for any shortcomings.  SK's are just ridiculous solo tank and AoE machines with tons of life leeches.

After getting the hang of things, i headed over to my proper level dungeon in Palace of the Awakened.  The general consensus was that this would be the best place to solo grind at my level.  While that seemed to be the case, i found myself more interested in exploring the layout than anything else.  I really enjoy the wall climbing aspect of all things!  After clearing my way to the top floor, i was greeted with a little surprise at the end.

All in all, i really enjoy the public dungeon aspect of the game.  I'd love for this system to be made at least an option in future MMO's.  I'm also realistic and understand this cannot be the main concept of dungeons moving forward as it would be abused to no end.  It's still a nice option that I'd like to see in every "zone" as an alternative to solo questing and instanced dungeons.  Call it an elite are or heroic area if you will but incorporate it into my game.

It's impossible to visit any forum or online gaming site without running across thread after thread about the holy trinity.  This was of course brought up with the reveal on EQ Next a few days ago and it's been fueling since.  It's a touchy subject for a lot of players and will only continue to be even after the existence or nonexistence is finally confirmed when players get their hands on a playable build.  

I personally stand in the middle of all this mess.  I can and have adapted to both but i do have a preference.  While i tend to lean towards having a trinity, I'm not a fan of the current popular iteration of it.  As it stands, it's a pretty dumbed down version of the kind of system i would prefer and have enjoyed in the past.  Let me explain!

     Tank + Healer + DPS 

This is the current popular system we've had in place for almost a decade now and it stinks.  Not only do i find this boring and repetitive but it also limits what kind of classes players are willing to bring to dungeons or larger scale content.  Now it's an issue of encounters being built around only requiring these 3 pillars which is also part of the problem.  Your tanks do their thing while healers play whack-a-mole and dps pew-pew until mobs are dead.  I'm personally tired of this model.

Lets get back to the way group content used to flow!  It was so much more involved and specialized and in turn a lot more fun to me.  I'll use FFXI as a point of reference since that's what i have the most experience in.  Your average group, during the games prime, consisted of 6 players:

This was the tried and tested group setup everyone used to level up, since the only way to level up was through group exp grinding at camps.  Let me first state that i like having camps as an option and do not want to go back to it being the only method of exp.  With that out of the way we can examine what made this such a fantastic setup.  Keep in mind that while all these classes were not required, they made a night and day difference to your party's efficiency. 

You had the tanking, heals, and off heals covered and really needed it as we took a lot of damage.  Crowd control was there in the form of the black mage, red mage, or bard which could all sleep mobs in case you accidentally pulled or aggro'd an extra one.  Support came from the red mage or bard which could off heal, restore mana, and debuff mobs.  And lastly the dps were their to do their thing and whittle down mobs.  They did have the important task of performing skill-chains for the black mage to time nuke his magic bursts.  This allowed for huge amounts of damage which was almost required in order to keep mob exp chains going.  The interdependency of all these classes made for a great community.

     

Another aspect that seems to be lacking in current gen MMO's is the utter lack of class diversity.  I'm sure this ties back into the current trinity system's pitfalls, but it needs to change.  I like having a lot of classes, and i mean a lot.  EQ has 16 of them, FFXI has 22, and EQ2 has 25.  I've made it no secret that i believe FFXI has the best class system of any MMO out there.  I'm a huge fan of only having one character, one name and I'm not a fan of alts.  This goes back to everyone knowing who everyone else was on a server and reputation actually being everything.  XI's subclass system, along with the large number of them, allowed for everyone to play any role that was required (provided they had the class leveled).  This didn't eliminate the need for all those roles, it just made everyone more flexible.  Alts were still possible for players that love doing that, which i know there are a lot of.  It's really a perfect system, well, until the level cap is raised!

Oh how i hate when party sizes are smaller than 6.  To me it just feels like the absolute perfect group size and not just because that's what XI had.  When you have 2 spots already tied up in a healer and tank, what exactly do you have room for?  I'm assuming you want at least 2 dps, so that brings up the total to 4.  Is there room for another dps or do you want CC or support?  Does the content even require CC or support?  More often than not the answer is just to grab another dps and that's really the fault of the system more so than party size, but it does factor into it.

The majority of players are dps, which I'm sure is nothing new to anyone.  When you limit the party size to something ridiculous like 4 as The Old Republic did and Elder Scrolls is doing, then you're essentially only grouping 2 dps per tank/healer.  Now I'm not sure about anyone else, but in my world tanks and healers don't grow on trees.  This leaves a ridiculous overabundance of dps out in the cold and waiting around.  While the 5 man group alleviates this a tad, i feel the perfect solution is to go with 6 because it just plain works.  You still have to build a system around using CC and support effectively otherwise no one will bring them regardless of group size.

Force taunts are stupid.  There i said it, now get over it because it's true.  We didn't have force taunts in XI, we had "Provoke".  This was a warrior ability on a 30 second cool-down that raised your enmity level.  While it was used for tanking purposes, it wasn't very efficient when compared to almost everything else.  You see, every spell had an enmity number associated with it.  Heals and paladin abilities were more efficient means of building enmity but so were debuffs and sleeps.  This is also why AoE sleeps would usually get you killed if not used correctly.  Enmity also decayed over time and also decayed from taking damage.  What this meant is that tanks had to work their butts off to maintain a mobs attention through timing their heals and popping abilities just to stay at the top of the enmity table.  If someone pulled threat off of them, it generally meant they were dead.  This made for complex combat where everyone had to know their limits.  Unfortunately, the encounters themselves were not very complex but that's another issue all together.

I'm a minimalist so i like my screen free of clutter.  I enjoy the focus moving away from staring at the UI and instead to playing the game itself.  This doesn't mean I'm satisfied with only having 8 abilities.  This typically leads to spamming 2-4 of them while the rest are longer cool-downs.  In contrast, having 30 abilities by level 20 is also unacceptable.  Nothing is worse than having dozens of useless buttons on my bar that are completely situational except for that one time something may happen.  A 5-second attack buff on a 5 minute cool-down?  Get that junk out of my game.  I'd like a happy medium of 20 abilities, or 2 full bars, of actual useful stuff that I'm going to be constantly using. 

This is what i don't want!

I'm a huge fan of how GW2 handles their actual combat.  I don't like being rooted to the ground unless I'm doing some long cast spell or channeling a melee attack.  It's just super fluid as a melee and feels good.  Where i find it lacking is of course in the trinity department, which i know is the point of the game.  I'd love for a system that incorporates a 6-man group size with the full trinity model (including CC and support) and content that requires the use of them all.  Wrap that up with GW2's smooth and fluid combat, 20 hot-bar abilities, large diverse class system, and grouping to actually be important to leveling.  I'd be a happy camper.  No pun intended.

I've been waiting on the reveal of EQ Next, much like everyone else, since the news of it restarting as a sandbox.  I was excited mostly because i was interested in what SOE had up their sleeves and not so much because of the IP.  I never really got into the franchise mostly because i was a hardcore FFXI player.  That game was essentially the Japanese version of EQ with better art and class system, so i never felt the need to venture into Norrath.  I did however play EQ2 briefly, which i enjoyed for what it was.

I do also admit that the other reason for my excitement was because i absolutely knew the reaction old school EQ players would have if anything diverted from their personal expectation of what this game should be.  It's the same exact players that I'm used to from FFXI.  They're extremely loyal, unwilling to change, extremely stubborn, but also community driven.  Now some of those qualities are great and some get in the way of progress.  It's a daily discussion we have on TS where we compare how things used to be and how similar players and situations from both those MMO's really were and still are.  

None of us were surprised that as soon as the art was revealed, the cries of "cartoon art - this game is dead to me" started pouring in.  I could only imagine what kind of backlash we'd get if Square decided to change things like that in FFXIV.  It would be a complete catastrophe.  I absolutely understand because it was that exact reason that i couldn't make it past level 5 in WoW.  If i don't like what I'm looking at, no matter how great the combat or content is, I'm not going to bother spending time there.

Here lies the problem i have with this thinking for this game, and keep in mind it's all my opinion.  EQ and EQ2 had not only terrible character models but also really bad art style.  If you go look at FFXI today,  you'll be blown away that it's an 11 year old MMO.  It still looks great.  What I'm trying to say is, i feel the art direction is a huge improvement over the old one in the EQ world.  I know this won't be a popular opinion, but it is what it is.  I think it's a perfect middle ground between the terrible WoW art and something like Black Desert.  At the same time, i understand all the hate it's getting.  You really can't win when you're creating something new for die-hard fans.