Quote:
Originally Posted by Tuurin
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IDK- I think you could make the argument that while of course game designers always want to sell expansions, they equally valued keeping customers happy (and paying monthly subs). They didn't accidentally make PC and some of the other expansion newb zones with a high ZEM. That was done intentionally to give people a chance to quickly get through the early stages of leveling and get a new character up to the point where it'd be relevant with raids, higher level content etc. where the larger concentration of players were. No grinding needed. Hell, WoW took it to the next level with WOTLK and let you just spawn a DK at like level 50, right? No need to even bother with Levels 1-49.
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Well kind of yeah. Oh DK was worse offender than that during entire time-frame of WOTLK it was the most overpowered class ever, which Blizz refused to acknowledge (to this day btw), because they wanted to sell the expansion. What I am trying to say this wasn't a game design philosophy move to "we change the game-play because we believe it will be better this way", it was "how do we make the most money the easiest way possible"?
LORE wise starting DKs at 50 did made sense. DK being insanely imbalanced was cheap money grab.
Going back to Luclin, I see it as a lot of good ideas, and more than a lot of poor or even lazy implementations. SOE was pushing to get the expansion out ASAP which resulted half of the zones being super-crappy, while another half badly underdeveloped. End game was also non existent at release, and VT had to be re-itemized 6 months later because it was super crap.
And the end game only had 2 full raid zones and few single raid targets here and there. It actually had less raid content than Velious.
On casual player level, once you left Paludal - the 20-50 range were mostly poorly made and poorly placed zones that people were very disappointed with.
Or lets take Luclin version of class armor quests for 30+ range - they were placed in Twilight Sea, a 30-40 zone that was sandwiched between 3x 45+ zones on all sides. So you are lev 30 player looking to start these quest how the heck you suppose to get there? Or better yet WHY would even bother???
In short- Luclin brought us like 2 dozen zones, out of which people used:
1-20 Paludal
20-35 Echo's (tiny zone with like a dozen mobs that were over-camped 24/7 because of zem and cash loot)
and raids. And nothing in between.
People keep saying Bazaar ruined Luclin. Well no, empty and useless 20+ zones ruined Luclin. Placing far out of the way zones with poor design, and no good incentive to go there was a growing EQ problem. And Luclin was a pinnacle of this. Each next expansion SOE would try to fix this by creating NEW HUBS for specific new content, first with PoP (which was good expansion otherwise), then with LOY, and finally with LDON - level from 20 to 65 without ever leaving one zone.