the Gates of Discord controversy

[guineapig]

I was reading this wiki article during lunch:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gates_of_Discord

I just found it a bit funny that much of crying involved the guilds not being able to complete raids (because they were tuned for the level 70 cap prematurely).

Now granted, maybe the very first Gates raids should have been doable by Planes geared level 65's. But hell, didn't both Velious and Luclin come out with content that was very near impossible for most people until the following expansion came out? In fact even classic had content that was tuned for a level cap that didn't exist yet (Plane of Sky anyone???). I don't see a problem with having the end game of an expansion near impossible till the next expansion.

So yeah, just had to share my opinion on this.
I can see people bitching about all the technical glitchy shit but to complain to the company that the exclusively raid content was too hard made me laugh. (I was not in a top raid guild when Gates was released in case anyone is wondering.)

Anyone else want to share their thoughts?

[Yoite]

Gates and OoW should have been 1 expansion. I feel like they release gates 1st as a separate expac just to milk money b/c they are hookers like that.

i never even went to any of the GoD zones, i didnt even buy that expansion, just waited for OoW. But all i heard were terrible things about it. went from PoP mobs that did 500s of dmg to trash mobs that were quading for 1000s

[girth]

Considering that only 1 guild still to this day ever beat that expansion before the one after it was released, I'd say they had reason to bitch about it.

Uqua alone was tougher than anything EQ had ever come out with it up to that point and that wasn't even very far into the expansion. You needed tons of people for GoD raids, you needed them extremely decked out in at least PoTime gear, and you needed to actually pay attention on raids and have skilled players or you were done. I still remember that Ikkinz raid(I think) where you had to have certain arch types or classes get the kill shots. Man it was great when it was cleric.

[Lucrio40]

The thing I hated most about GoD was the box art...It made turn from a pretty elf chick to looking like a post op tranny.

Then they even shrunk her boobs in OoW.

[guineapig]

Gates and OoW should have been 1 expansion. I feel like they release gates 1st as a separate expac just to milk money b/c they are hookers like that.

Yeah this about sounds right.


i never even went to any of the GoD zones, i didnt even buy that expansion, just waited for OoW. But all i heard were terrible things about it. went from PoP mobs that did 500s of dmg to trash mobs that were quading for 1000s

I had guildies that were frequenting those zones but they weren't traditional groups to be sure. One popular spot I recall was some arena where there was a named or two that spawned quite frequently. It was usually necros, chanters and wizards that would ping pong the mobs in the arena or some crazy thing like that. I know tanks were a nono there. I just remember people getting very rich in that area soon after the expansion was launched.

I know I was usually scared to death any time I had to go meet up with people in any of those zones. If nothing else the exapnsion had a hefty fear factor.

There were a couple other spots that I remember being popular camps but I spent so little time in that expansion before I quit, plus all the zone and mob names were ridiculous.

[guineapig]

The thing I hated most about GoD was the box art...It made turn from a pretty elf chick to looking like a post op tranny.

Then they even shrunk her boobs in OoW.

The hair on the dark elf bothered me even more:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/11/EverQuest_-_Gates_of_Discord_Coverart.png

And where's the cleric in that group?

[guineapig]

Considering that only 1 guild still to this day ever beat that expansion before the one after it was released, I'd say they had reason to bitch about it.

Valid point.

But nobody killed the Sleeper during Velious
Nobody finished Sky during classic.
I'm pretty sure nobody finished Time before LoY (could be wrong about this).

Just a personal preference here but I for one enjoy the mystique that "unbeatable content" brings to a game.


Uqua alone was tougher than anything EQ had ever come out with it up to that point and that wasn't even very far into the expansion. You needed tons of people for GoD raids, you needed them extremely decked out in at least PoTime gear, and you needed to actually pay attention on raids and have skilled players or you were done. I still remember that Ikkinz raid(I think) where you had to have certain arch types or classes get the kill shots. Man it was great when it was cleric.

Sounds pretty badass!



Now I read about how EQ has the exact opposite problem. All content is beaten within a few weeks of the expansion going live. I could be wrong about this as I'm just reading about it but that's what it sounds like.

[Tronjer]

Now granted, maybe the very first Gates raids should have been doable by Planes geared level 65's. But hell, didn't both Velious and Luclin come out with content that was very near impossible for most people until the following expansion came out? In fact even classic had content that was tuned for a level cap that didn't exist yet (Plane of Sky anyone???). I don't see a problem with having the end game of an expansion near impossible till the next expansion.

The problem occured if your guild was on par with current content, farmed everything to death and got nothing left to do anymore. GoD was great expansion once it got fixed, but in the earlier state not only Uqua was messed up but also Tacvi, the endzone.

Progression from Kunark over Westwing/Kael --> ST --> Ntov --> SSR --> VT was easy doable in comparison.

[Akame]

GoD really separated the wheat from the chaff when it came out. My guild wasn't geared enough to be raiding in there, but just grouping in there was hard enough, after a few weeks people just stopped going into the zones and what was left was the brave few.

I actually enjoyed the release of GoD for that purpose, the other people around me were just as precise and crazy as I was, all the rest had run away.

But by the time we got geared up and into the raid content the level cap was raised to 70 and most of the other raiding guilds had quit or collapsed.

[Teeroyoyort]

GoD was nerfed time and time again. The original GoD was more intense. I'm not sure how they would have linked those 2 expansions together. I'm pretty sure they were all made separately. But I won't deny that the content wasn't exactly trivial at 65.

[frefaln]

Unfortunately GoD was right around the time I quit so I didn't venture into that content, but I will say this: if there were zones/content that were only reached by a small fraction of the player population, I'm okay with that.

I'm about as anti-SoE as they come, but even I can recognize the impossible situations they found themselves in. If people conquer an expansion too quickly, accounts are cancelled and/ or there's constant griping on boards about how there's nothing to do. At least with GoD it sounds like some people were humbled a bit and that's a good thing.

[guineapig]

I'm about as anti-SoE as they come, but even I can recognize the impossible situations they found themselves in. If people conquer an expansion too quickly, accounts are cancelled and/ or there's constant griping on boards about how there's nothing to do. At least with GoD it sounds like some people were humbled a bit and that's a good thing.

That's pretty much how I feel about it too.

It's either content completed too fast or not enough content, and with this it was "too hard, make it easier". What can you do?

[Reiker]

The difference was that the expansions before GoD had something to do for everyone. When Luclin released, Emp and LIS where considered nearly unbeatable encounters, but there was a ton of raid content that was easier: Shei Vinitras, Greig, THO, etc. Even the very first introductory raids of GoD: Ikkinz 3&4 were hard as fuck. Whereas a low end guild could complete the first few tiers of PoP progression, even Time guilds could easily wipe in Ikkinz. Shit, I remember near-wipes just clearing trash to get to the zone ins. And the next tier, Uqua, was infamously about 10x more difficult than anything before it. To make things worse, you were pretty much stuck in elemental/Time gear until you beat Uqua and unlocked Qvic. Things actually got a little bit easier once you gained Qvic access and began farming that gear. But very few guilds could get that far in the first place.

Not to mention the style of the expansions really hurt a lot of classes. The game completely switched from calculated, marathon raiding to fast and furious fights. As a shaman, I felt more useless than I ever had before. If a mob miraculously wasn't immune to slow, it was at 25% before you could even land a slow anyways. And forget dots. Anything that wasn't melee dps, heals, or buffs was basically useless.

So 95% of the playerbase that purchased GoD either a) couldn't utilize anything in the expansion or b) wiped repeatedly to every raid encounter they came across. Pissing off 95% of your playerbase 9 months before the release of WoW wasn't the best move on SoE's part. Especially considering the large amount of players who read FoH daily at this time. Furor was on his mission to get everyone to leave EQ for WoW during the end of PoP, which was a way more popular expansion than GoD.

[Sparkin]

Considering that only 1 guild still to this day ever beat that expansion before the one after it was released, I'd say they had reason to bitch about it.

No guilds beat it. If you're talking about the progression server that doesn't really count because all the raids had been nerfed many times over by the time it came around.

Yeah, you can't really compare GoD to any other expansions that might have had one impossible zone. The first roadblock (Uqua) came way too soon when you look at the overall scope of the expansion. It would have been like the equivalent of being unable to do anything in Kael, Skyshrine, West Wastes or ToV because you can't even obtain the key to get to them due to some impossible boss. I mean how many more raid zones did you have to go through even after Uqua? Inktu'ta, Qvic, Txevu. Then when you finally get through all that your reward is the rape that was Tacvi. You figure maybe you get in and you're rewarded with a boss or two that are just loot pinatas right? No, even the first boss was rape. You had to be nearly perfect or have superb dps to down that guy. I think more people probably quit my guild once we reached Tacvi than from Uqua, the zone that caused many guilds to leave EQ altogether.

Add in the fact that holy trinity was as necessary as ever for the group key stuff, and this expansion just wasn't fun for a lot of people.

[Reiker]

As difficult as Tacvi was, it was a hell of a lot more fun and less tedious than Uqua, even.

[RKromwell]

GoD was the last expantion I bought. Only thing good about it in my mind was the fishing, once they nerfed that I never went back.

[Humwawa]

I thought the Barxt fight in Uqua was a lot of fun, actually..

The thing I hated most about GoD was how... un-Norrath it was. The mood of that expansion was entirely unlike anything that came before.

EQ up to Velious involved a large world ripe for exploration. Travelling to the Moon wasn't even that strange to me, and I don't think it was terribly done. My biggest gripe with Luclin was how it became the only place worth going, once you had the expansion.

I liked PoP. I hated the end of it, but I liked it, from a raiding standpoint.

But GoD? What the hell did that have to do with ANYTHING AT ALL? We caused a crack in reality that allowed the Bondage Goat/Dog-Baby/Marilyn Manson Monsters to attack some frail, vaguely Babylonian-themed midgets on yet another undiscovered continent? Please.

[spoolie]

WRU OP POOKAS!!!...WTB a enchanter to push me through the trials.

[Humwawa]

http://i904.photobucket.com/albums/ac249/Daishelo/5817b616986fb9f68c84b5e34e0d5182.png

http://i904.photobucket.com/albums/ac249/Daishelo/glenn-close.jpg

[Rael]

Gates and OoW should have been 1 expansion. I feel like they release gates 1st as a separate expac just to milk money b/c they are hookers like that.

I didn't spend much time in either expansion, but aren't their lore completely different? Isn't one set in Taelosia and one in some sort of parallel universe? Could someone who knows the lore shed some light into this?

[Yoite]

i thought the lore was directly related? GoD epac was them trying to invade Norath, and then OoW is Norath invading this place the discordians have taken over and setup as a base of sorts.

the discords are like time traveling parallel universe jumping conquerors. or something like that.

[Rael]

GoD epac was them trying to invade Norath, and then OoW is Norath invading this place the discordians have taken over and setup as a base of sorts.

Makes sense. But that still seems to be two separate storylines to me. Kinda like saying Kunark and Luclin should be linked because of the Shissar connection.

[Molitoth]

GoD was one of my favorite expansions.

It weeded out the pussies.

There were some bugs which made it tougher than it should have been, but at the same time my guild became stronger and better players because of it.

[Kainzo]

I remember raiding the crap out of GoD, before OoW was released, my guild (top on the Rathe and top 5 in the world) was stuck on Tacvi, it was brutal to say the very least. Though I think GoD/OoW were the "last good" expansions EQ had.

[Tronjer]

Ikkinz group trials were great. Could acquire potime-level loot for no dkp with a single group.