So I Went Ahead and Pre-ordered The Broken MirrorFollow

I ordered it... time is hard to play beta but I have not been able to load launcher?????

I've bought every expansion as soon as available and I won't break this streak now. Don't want to think how much money that has meant, especially playing multiple accounts, but it's still "chump change" compared to a lot of other hobbies, such as my neighbor's golf obsession. (I don't even consider golf good exercise, which is somewhat of a rationale to spend money on sports. Neither is playing MMORPG's but I do own---and use---a treadmill. ).

Long ago, I was an officer in a guild for which the best description would be something like semi-casual-raiding. Sure, we raided but we didn't require on-line members to raid and we still allowed members to sponsor newcomers who were only interested in casual play. Every time an expansion was announced this always resulted in friction between the serious raiders who insisted everyone who wanted to raid needed to buy it, and the casual raiders who objected to being "forced" to spend their hard-earned money. This led to arguments about WHERE to raid since when 40% of your raid force doesn't own the current expansion it greatly complicates the decision where to go with said raid force. I was a strong advocate for requiring anyone who wanted to earn DKPs on raids to maintain a current subscription, meaning every expansion. I warned that it would hard to get serious about raiding---and to recruit new serious raiders---if we took such a casual approach to member subscriptions. I think I was right because ultimately the guild folded a year or so later and the hard-core raiders all moved en masse to a "real" raiding guild.

Of course, you can enjoy this game without buying this xpac, or even the last couple of xpacs. Karana Knows this game has so much historical content that barely gets touched these days. It's actually quite mind-boggling to scroll down the list of expansions and zones. While I've played them all and visited just about every zone even I sometimes have to think long and hard to recall what a particular zone looks like---or how to get to it. Norrath is not just a world, it's a universe!



Edited, Nov 7th 2015 3:50pm by Sippin

Good 'un!

Now if I could play EQ while running ON the treadmill, now THAT would be Nirvana!

I have not pre-ordered it, but I probably will get it eventually operating on the "keep them in business" theory.I'm such a latecomer to the game that a new xpac is wholly unnecessary to maintain my interest, but I recognize that development isn't free and lack of development means eventual extinction.

This link to the official Daybreak site presently details out the 3 versions of pre-ordering you can do. Each comes with benefits. Remember that all-access subs get a small discount (10% I think).

My highest level toons are too low to play in it. It looks very limited for the money.

I had 3 paid and 2 ftp accounts until I retired. Then I went to 1 paid. I currently have 3 grandfatherd silver accounts and 2 ftp accounts. Retirement doesn't lend itself to having much money. So all of my accounts are 3-4 expacs behind. I might buy it for 1 account just to get the previous expacs for that account.

Edited, Nov 18th 2015 7:59pm by Geroblue

For druids a LOT of new AA's, more than I expected from reading the beta forums. But I don't see anything of great impact. A bunch of them cost 27 or 30 AA's per level so it will take some XPing to buy them all. I had about 700 AA's "saved up", between HA's and achievements where I had not yet accepted the AA reward, along with keeping the last collectible "un-clicked" for about 25 sets. Blew through all of those and I still have a bunch to acquire. It's nice to have something to spend AAXP on, I just wish they were more enticing. Another level or two of Storm Strike (mana-free instant AA nuke), for example, would have been nice.

The new warrior AA's are also pretty mediocre. Haven't checked the other classes I play yet but I don't expect anything earth-shaking. The problem is without a level cap increase they can't allow new AA's to become overpowering.

3 new druid spells and none of them seem to be very useful at all.


Edited, Nov 19th 2015 8:30am by Sippin

You left out Visage of the Tyrannosaurus Hatchling which takes a ridiculous amount of time and effort to acquire!

Unless they are inept programmers, I don't see how that could happen. They did create bigger bags though, 36 slot max now isn't it ?

I think the issue was, not programming (obviously fairly trivial), but due to the massive storage upgrade they would need with everyone having a LOT more storage slots. Fast forward several years, and storage is much cheaper, and there a lot fewer players, so it hasn't been an issue to create bigger bags.

Tat

The first bags were max 8 slots. I remember reading they couldn't expand this without some significant reprogramming because the field they used in their database could only accommodate a max value of 8. This is a base-2 issue with old style coding: 8 = 2*2*2. This is analogous to the old Y2K problem where old programs used only 2-character database fields for "year", thus maxing out the year as "99" for 1999 and only being able to designate "00" for 2000, thus potentially causing all kinds of problems in applications.

Nowadays I'm sure they could make bags of any size they want but as a person who does some programming myself I can well see where, depending on how they store their data, it could take some work to produce, say, 100-slot bags, without potentially generating unexpected bugs. I have employees regularly ask me for program changes which they think "should" be as trivial as putting a new ink cartridge in the printer and I have to make clear programming doesn't always work that way.

What's interesting is that we've also managed to keep pace with that in terms of the rate at which we process and generate data, thus making the overall effectiveness of the data space about the same as it was back then (from a user perspective). I sense a George Carlin joke about "stuff" in there somewhere.

Hmm... More a pointer to a list. Person with bag A which has 75 slots. You don't need to store the game items in the bag, but a reference to the game item.

Like mapping software I have. The symbol for the house or mountain is stored in the map. Then every one of those you place in other parts of the map reference back to the first one. No need to store the symbol for every time you use that item in the map.