The number one issue that turned a lot of people off, in my experience, was you could be in a group, have a member die, and it would punish the entire group. Inexperienced players would piss off an entire group and douche bags would use it to troll.
They changed this soon after release but the damage was done.
I have played EQ2 since it came out, and still play. I agree with what some others said about Daybreak, they ruined it. My beef with it is that EQ2 takes place in the same world as EQ1, yet there is no similarity. Wakening Lands was my favorite zone in EQ1, and in EQ2, it is a small area of a zone with raptors. Really?
I never liked that the classes felt cut and paste. There was no difference in classes, everyone used spells, a melee attack was a "spell" making all classes feel identical. the casting graphics were uninspired and every time you cast a circle appeared around your feet, every class did this it was just a different type of circle. I got the cut and paste feeling a lot in that game.
As some in this thread have stated, Daybreak is the cause of it. It wasn't doing incredible before they took over but Daybreak put the game into Life support mode which guaranteed it's death. Daybreak is a complete joke. They took most of the team working on the EQ franchise off of it and/or fired them. EQ2 literally has less than 5 people working on it now. That should show you just how shit they are now. Its sad too because EQ2 was one of my favorite MMO's, even with all its graphical issues and its horid engine, it still was an incredibly fun game to play and a fun community.
The biggest issue with EQ2 was the performance. <snip>
LOL! Performance wasn't the issue at launch at all! Maybe for some, but the servers were packed with players the first year.
Performance became an issue much later in the games life, since their engine was developed based on the premise that CPU´s clock speeds would keep on increasing year over year.
Instead, the CPU took a radical new direction a couple years after EQ2 launch and went from single core to multi core. These new multi core CPU´s suddenly had half the clock speeds of the last gen single core CPU. Couple this with most of EQ2´s engine graphical tasks were tied to the CPU (since graphic cards weren't powerful enough to support that level of graphics) and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what happened.
So you suddenly had people upgrading their systems to new multi-core CPU´s and suddenly saw their performance in EQ2 crippling, since it couldn't use more than a single core. So you had people with older Single core CPU systems running the game at Max, while people with these new multi-core CPU systems had to dial the GFX settings back to performance setting.
Since their core engine developers had long left the company at that time, SOE couldn't do anything at that time and wasn't until years later when Ryan came onboard, was assigned to EQ2 and put a hell lot of time and effort rewriting the Shader engine and try to offload heavy GFX tasks, like shadows to the GPU. This helped enormously and Ryan was hailed by the community for his efforts! Sadly, Smedley being Smedley suddenly pulled Ryan from the EQ2 dev team without notice and before he could finish the Shader upgrade, so it was ditched! This was for many the final straw of Smedley misshandling the game, especially after all that effort Ryan had put into the Shader upgrade (it was a massive task to begin with and he had come so far), just to have Smedley just pulling the plug on it.
Since then EQ2 never got any optimizations anymore. Though luckily the later expacs could make use of Ryans upgraded Shaders (sadly not the older zones, since Smedley pulled the plug before he could finish it).
If it weren't for Ryan´s efforts at that time, EQ2 would have shutdown years ago.
EQ will forever hold a spot in my memories even though today it is severely outdone & if it released today with better graphics I probably wouldn't play it because as a game I want to have fun & EQ had a few more difficult mechanics that took away fun. EQ2 was a good game a few months after it's release with some tweaking, but never was able to capture the "magic" for me that EQ had done once so I play it for only a year. There were a lot of mechanics in EQ2 I liked, but going back to EQ I was never a fan of SOE's CS methods whenever there was an issue & that corroded over into EQ2 too. I played WoW for a couple of years. The artistic appearance of WoW never bothered me, but I do prefer the more realistic approach. WoW was fun when I played it, but just like in most of the mmos I've played there's a point where I decide it is no longer worth the effort to keep playing at a slow progressive pace, & it delved more & more into PvP & raiding centric content where I don't mind an occasional raid, no interest in PvP, but when less & less of the story line questing is completable by soloing I toss in the towel.
I want 1 space themed mmo & 1 fantasy themed mmo & the balance of those usually I find fun.
Well, I never played EQ2 ... and why would I ? Back then I had Vanguard and was very happy with that. EQ2 in comparison just looked very conventional and boring.
Still missing Vanguard. Pantheon seems to be more of a EQ 1.1 with very little if any Vanguard genes. Vanguards new class concepts like Dread Knight, Blood Mage or Disciple are completely gone and wont make a return even in the long run. The whole class design is much more like EQ 1.1, too.
Comments
They changed this soon after release but the damage was done.
Performance became an issue much later in the games life, since their engine was developed based on the premise that CPU´s clock speeds would keep on increasing year over year.
Instead, the CPU took a radical new direction a couple years after EQ2 launch and went from single core to multi core.
These new multi core CPU´s suddenly had half the clock speeds of the last gen single core CPU.
Couple this with most of EQ2´s engine graphical tasks were tied to the CPU (since graphic cards weren't powerful enough to support that level of graphics) and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what happened.
So you suddenly had people upgrading their systems to new multi-core CPU´s and suddenly saw their performance in EQ2 crippling, since it couldn't use more than a single core.
So you had people with older Single core CPU systems running the game at Max, while people with these new multi-core CPU systems had to dial the GFX settings back to performance setting.
Since their core engine developers had long left the company at that time, SOE couldn't do anything at that time and wasn't until years later when Ryan came onboard, was assigned to EQ2 and put a hell lot of time and effort rewriting the Shader engine and try to offload heavy GFX tasks, like shadows to the GPU.
This helped enormously and Ryan was hailed by the community for his efforts!
Sadly, Smedley being Smedley suddenly pulled Ryan from the EQ2 dev team without notice and before he could finish the Shader upgrade, so it was ditched!
This was for many the final straw of Smedley misshandling the game, especially after all that effort Ryan had put into the Shader upgrade (it was a massive task to begin with and he had come so far), just to have Smedley just pulling the plug on it.
Since then EQ2 never got any optimizations anymore. Though luckily the later expacs could make use of Ryans upgraded Shaders (sadly not the older zones, since Smedley pulled the plug before he could finish it).
If it weren't for Ryan´s efforts at that time, EQ2 would have shutdown years ago.
I want 1 space themed mmo & 1 fantasy themed mmo & the balance of those usually I find fun.
Couldn't really kite anymore and the whole encounter lock really stunk.
And the animations were/are really bad. And melee combat is a light show.
Still missing Vanguard. Pantheon seems to be more of a EQ 1.1 with very little if any Vanguard genes. Vanguards new class concepts like Dread Knight, Blood Mage or Disciple are completely gone and wont make a return even in the long run. The whole class design is much more like EQ 1.1, too.