EverQuest Next: Landmark - Catch All

What resources will get sold?
All resources will be available for sale. Even the super-common resources like dirt and stone will be available. Resources will be in small and large SC bundles, but the number of resources within each bundle will be scaled according to rarity. (In other words, there is far less obsidian in a resource bundle than there would be in a copper bundle of the same price.)

At this time, there are no “in-game only” resources.

https://forums.station.sony.com/eqnl...

This is really depressing. That means you can buy anything in game with station cash. Kind of ruins the game for me.

Bummer. That means they'll have no interest in reducing the amount of grinding required to farm resources manually.

Yeah, not the best news to me either, but I don't care if others pay to build, I'm fine playing how I want.

And I am fine with making everything out of stone and dirt

fangblackbone wrote:

And I am fine with making everything out of stone and dirt :)

So if I were to tour the region I'd see tons of stone and dirt hovels made by players with one giant castle made out of diamonds and gold on the hill that was commissioned by a player with too much real cash on his hands? Interesting. The dirt farmers and nobility relationship recreated in free to play MMOs. Man if I were still in college I'd have definitely written a paper about that.

Well the key I think is to make the templates and experiment with them with dirt or stone. Then once the template is saved, it is my recollection that someone can buy the template and make it out of whatever material they have on hand provided there is enough of it.

So someone can make an awesome wizard's tower out of dirt and someone else can buy the design and recreate it out of tourmaline, copper or obsidian.

So you could still have free to play architects making in-game currency off the paying players? As long as creativity isn't linked to some kind of pay wall it doesn't seem as bad... somehow.

It is tied into player studio so f2p players can make real money and game money off of their creativity.

Kehama wrote:

So you could still have free to play architects making in-game currency off the paying players? As long as creativity isn't linked to some kind of pay wall it doesn't seem as bad... somehow.

Everybody has access to all the materials. So anybody can make a diamond castle. It just takes play time to collect all the materials, where as a person with disposable income may save that time and spend money on it instead.

Yep. My concern is that if there's a way to buy resources to get them quickly, there's a disincentive to make them fast to acquire manually. Landmark already feels pretty grindy for acquiring resources. I was hoping it would be come less so, not the reverse.

Maybe they'll have worlds where you can't build with stuff you buy, though i imagine thatd be bad for business.

garion333 wrote:

Maybe they'll have worlds where you can't build with stuff you buy, though i imagine thatd be bad for business.

When EQ2 first introduced a cash shop they had split the servers up into those you could buy stuff on and those you couldn't. Of course that was also during the time when they were still charging a subscription. So while it's possible they could do the same thing here, I doubt it. Back when they had the cash and non-cash servers everyone was still trying to get a feel for how real money transactions would work in an MMO.

I've got a few unlimited Closed Beta keys to give away, if someone wants. PM me if interested, but they'll go to longtme Goodjers, over new Coffee Grinders.

Many thanks to Propagandalf for the beta key. After 2 hours of playing, I still don't have enough materials to make a claim flag. I can see this game is going to be pretty grindy. It would be better if I had a claim. At least I could feel like I was working on/towards something. I guess that's the strategy to convert the free-to-play folks into paying customers.

Yeah, still liking the game design, but the grind was bad enough in alpha. It's utter bullsh*t in beta so far.

I jumped into this as well now. Mostly for my son to poke around in. He likes games in general and building and tearing things down, but is still too young for these kinds of things.

I'll have to catch up on this thread to see what people have going on. So far I have only created some kind of trinket and upgraded my pick to Iron.

Getting familiar with the mechanics will take some time. I am kind of disappointed that they dropped the EQ element to the name as I have been involved in that franchise since Kunark on EQ1.

I was really hoping this would include quest elements. I would love a Rust+Minecraft+WoW (or Oldschool EQ) game--but it does not yet exist. MMORPGs generally drop the Phat loots still with dramatic geometric progression of skills or bonuses.

I jumped into this as well now. Mostly for my son to poke around in. He likes games in general and building and tearing things down, but is still too young for these kinds of things.

I'll have to catch up on this thread to see what people have going on. So far I have only created some kind of trinket and upgraded my pick to Iron.

Getting familiar with the mechanics will take some time. I am kind of disappointed that they dropped the EQ element to the name as I have been involved in that franchise since Kunark on EQ1.

I was really hoping this would include quest elements. I would love a Rust+Minecraft+WoW (or Oldschool EQ) game--but it does not yet exist. MMORPGs generally drop the Phat loots still with dramatic geometric progression of skills or bonuses.

I jumped into this as well now. Mostly for my son to poke around in. He likes games in general and building and tearing things down, but is still too young for these kinds of things.

I'll have to catch up on this thread to see what people have going on. So far I have only created some kind of trinket and upgraded my pick to Iron.

Getting familiar with the mechanics will take some time. I am kind of disappointed that they dropped the EQ element to the name as I have been involved in that franchise since Kunark on EQ1.

I was really hoping this would include quest elements. I would love a Rust+Minecraft+WoW (or Oldschool EQ) game--but it does not yet exist. MMORPGs generally drop the Phat loots still with dramatic geometric progression of skills or bonuses.

I did a little poking around with the basic build tools in alpha, but even then it was such a slow grind that I never unlocked the interesting tools (line tool, smoothing tool, etc) so was pretty limited in my building attempts.

Beta is proving to be an even worse grind. Here's hoping they realize that the draw of the game is to actually get hands-on with the build tools and build things, not to run around for hours and hours trying to incrementally -- and painfully -- work my way through the progression of tools before I have the tools necessary to build interesting things.

[edit]Yes, I specifically meant the word "painfully", because the mining and tree chopping is causing pain in my mouse hand & wrist. Even Diablo doesn't cause that much discomfort.

Farscry wrote:

[edit]Yes, I specifically meant the word "painfully", because the mining and tree chopping is causing pain in my mouse hand & wrist. Even Diablo doesn't cause that much discomfort.

Just want to make sure you realize that you can just hold the mouse down. You don't have to continually click.

Otherwise, yeah. It's still a long grind.

Coming from SWG I don't see this as a long grind at all. I'm surprised at all the folks saying it's long because to get things built back in SWG took a LONG time.

Granted I've not played Minecraft, but I like the pacing as it is now.

Tkyl wrote:
Farscry wrote:

[edit]Yes, I specifically meant the word "painfully", because the mining and tree chopping is causing pain in my mouse hand & wrist. Even Diablo doesn't cause that much discomfort.

Just want to make sure you realize that you can just hold the mouse down. You don't have to continually click.

Oh, I realize it. But while that's a great option for trees, it makes a complete and royal mess out of mining. But either way, I can't quite figure out why Landmark hurts my hand when plenty of other pc gaming has a much more subdued impact on me.

ranalin wrote:

Coming from SWG I don't see this as a long grind at all. I'm surprised at all the folks saying it's long because to get things built back in SWG took a LONG time.

Granted I've not played Minecraft, but I like the pacing as it is now.

Minecraft is much more reasonably paced, but Landmark's advanced tools (which I haven't successfully done enough grinding to be able to access and use) allow for much more intricate and interesting structures.

The original presentations for Landmark really emphasized the building and only made a little bit about the gathering side. Alpha revealed a lot more gathering than I anticipated, and beta is getting into all kinds of super-long grinding and rare ingredient bullsh*t and so on, which is changing this from the casual-friendly building game I was led to believe it would be into the hardcore-gamer gathering-timesink approach that ultimately led me to quit Wurm Online (I simply don't have enough free time in my life to make a second job out of gathering/grinding just to be able to have fun building stuff).

I'll admit I'm partially extra peeved because I basically kickstarted one game (because the product that was being discussed was one I VERY MUCH want to play) and now that it's too late for a refund, it's been changed into something else that I would not have chosen to support as readily.

Disclosure: I've played around 8 hours in beta so far, and all I have to show for it is a bunch of basic ore and wood in my inventory and a few iron picks I've crafted in an effort to get an iron pick that isn't godawful slow and inefficient (and thus painful to use).

Eight. Hours.

I have to say this is falling slowly out of favor for me. I upgraded my pick a few times, then stumbled across a higher-level zone where some kind soul had put a public treasure chest of higher-end picks/axes and whatnot out there to help people.

If you can buy/trade/find some things in order to skip the whole tech tree (and only real concept of leveling) that the game has--there are both good and bad aspects to that.

This is great, in that I can just go hand or mail Farscry an "uber" pick if I want and he can jump right in to higher tier stuff; but also bad because I imagine at some point I can just buy from the Sony Store that same high-end pick as well. That purchase option robs any accomplishment out of crafting these things on your own you might feel if you are into that; while simultaneously creating an annoying grinding "skinner-box feeling" if you are not.

In Kerbel I can play as a sandbox with all rocket parts, or I can play in career mode. Maybe this game needs both kinds of servers: one for people who want to grind-through and find rare items; and another for people who want to stretch their imagination to the limit and create interesting items and structures unbounded.

I do not know if I really feel like putting 8+ more hours into mining random things and upgrading stuff, just so I can get "the line tool'.

I've got 7 days to play around in the beta and logged in for the first time last night. First thought was that I love the art style. It's just a pretty world to run around in. I didn't want to read up on anything first so I just hopped in and starting testing out the menus and commands. After a couple hours of play I still have no clue about how to stake a claim. I did, however, figure out that anything I've built or excavated that is not on my plot will apparently disappear after an in-game day. I'd built a huge tower on top of a mountain and was building a fairly lengthy walkway to hang out over the edge of the mountain when suddenly the sum came up over the hills ad my tower was gone. Luckily I still have the last few feet of the bridge I'd built so I was standing on a hovering platform a few hundred feet from the ground. I was also a little sad to see the fairly deep mineshaft I'd excavated completely refilled. It makes perfect sense since I wasn't on a claim but still a little depressing. I'd hoped that by simply building something it would flag that area as my claim. Guess I'll have to do a little reading today.

I can definitely see this game as being a huge grind though. I was able to upgrade to a copper pick but the amount of resources it took to build that one lone dirt tower, with no real frills, took all my resources from a couple hours of mining. I can only imagine if I was trying to do something fancy with multiple types of resources or even just a specific resource that wasn't the throw-away dirt I was getting.

Yeah, making a claim is definitely step 1 before you start building anything.

I can't watch this vid because I'm at work, but it should help as it's from the beta (I believe):

If you want, let me know and I can mail you a claim flag and a better pick I think. Otherwise it is quite a grind just to get to claim some land.

Welll, I wasn't able to play yesterday because half the day the servers were down for maintenance and then when they came back up I kept getting a no servers are active error from game screen. Since I've only got 7 days to play around and I'm about halfway through those now I think I'm just going to explore around and see the sights. Putting time into building anything right now seems like a bit of a waste. If nothing else this has really gotten me excited to see what they do with EQ Next.

We’re working around the clock to ensure these account issues are resolved as quickly as possible. In the meantime, to show our appreciation for your patience and understanding, we offer the following:
...
Landmark – Adding 7 additional days to any 7-day Closed Beta keys that were active during the downtime. This will be applied on Friday, May 2, 12:00 noon PDT
...

Looks like you get 7 more days.

It still keeps crashing on me constantly either before logging in all the way or a minute or two after logging in. Hey, if nothing else I've gotten to write up a few bug reports so at least I feel productive.