Why must EQ waste so much energy?
chunkyb
Member, Content Creators Posts: 1,453 Content Creator
Almost every EQ quest this month has unnecessary, energy-wasting path fragments. Why? They serve no purpose except to waste our energy.
This has been a problem in the past and it's been happening more over the last few months. Please stop doing this. You're taking away a resource (even if it is renewable) for absolutely no reason.
It's simply bad form, bad map-making, poor game design, and anti-player in a weirdly passive aggressive feeling way lol
This has been a problem in the past and it's been happening more over the last few months. Please stop doing this. You're taking away a resource (even if it is renewable) for absolutely no reason.
It's simply bad form, bad map-making, poor game design, and anti-player in a weirdly passive aggressive feeling way lol
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The monthly eq energy numbers have always fluctuated, going back to the first monthly eq. It has been discussed here for years. Those discussions are what pushed kabam to make eq more "standardized" as far as numbers of paths per quest.
Now, if it is the "same" amount of energy... The posted path fragments show the absurdity of that type of map building. If they have to add random teleports and paths to hit an energy quota, they're doing it wrong.
BTW, a quick search shows that sometimes eq varies by as much as 200 energy. I'll see if I can find some archives on energy counts.
36-40 energy for the first four quests. 3-4-5-5 paths.
63-69 energy for chapter 3, 6 and 7 paths.
It's 24 energy to get into and out of this ridiculous set of 2 path fragments with one defender. And the other side has the same (symmetry ftw!).
You people are hilarious, but pls keep going. Tell them you want a 45 energy path with one defender on it. For anesthetics. That'll be great. Maybe @RichTheMan can make another video about the energy problem.
Each path in chapters 1 and 2 costs around 35 energy and each path in chapter 3 roughly requires a full energy bar. It has been this way for years and it hasn't changed this month. Those "wasteful" paths are just there to give the map layout a nice design but if you actually compare them to previous EQs the amount of energy is approximately the same.
Gw remembered those 2 times they made an x for xmen, applies that memory to every month, and sees something in this panned out picture.
It's just wasted energy for no reason. It's sad so many people don't want a better quest every month. Qol changes happen, that's not a bad thing.
Lowering the energy costs is a QoL change that probably would have been easier to fight for in the past, probably unsuccessfully, but today the added hurdle is the shift in *stated* policy to essentially eliminate the completist argument. This game has *never* explicitly promoted a "do everything" play style, but it used to informally accommodate it. The current design philosophy seems to be making a very deliberate and explicit break there: it is no longer considered valid to claim the costs to do everything are too high, because the response is there's no implicit design right to do everything.
The reason for the blank spaces on the maps is itself a QoL change. On the one hand, the maps have an energy budget that the map designer cannot simply ignore. But on the other hand, over time they devs have also standardized on fewer fights per map path than we used to have, and it is now very rigorously consistent. This means the total energy cost per map and the total fights per map are no longer linked. Fewer fights is a simpler and less grindy experience for the player, with the difficulty concentrated into fewer fights (and weighted towards the boss in most cases). But this doesn't automatically drag energy costs down with it, because there is an energy budget, just like there is a reward budget.
Personally, I think the energy costs are a bit higher overall than they should be, but not so high that it would be a slam dunk to ask for them to be reduced. I don't think that map aesthetics are a route to successfully lobbying for that, however, because that would in effect be punishing the devs for a QoL benefit they provided to the players. The distribution of rewards is probably a better angle towards that one, and it is actually something I've been looking at recently (recently as in the past six months). In particular, it factors into my deep dive into the ISO economy that I've been posting about for the past few weeks.
There's a bit of game design Judo here, or is in Aikido? The devs now argue that you can't complain about the energy costs for doing all of EQ, because you're not supposed to do all of EQ. But then if we aren't supposed to, should the rewards be distributed in such a fashion that a player is compelled to do more than, say, the top two or three difficulties? I think there's something there, I just haven't gotten quite there myself yet. My posts aren't monetized, so there's no advantage for me to get there quicker but shoddier.
Give us break! Pure and simple! Longer so you will do fewer of them. Longer to slow down or stop farming. Aesthetic?
So increasing gradually paths on each quest, along with attack/health points increase, translates to difficulty escalation.
Or at least that seems the intention.
Anyway ch3 paths being 6 and 7 are too much anyway.
Repetitive boredom in my opinion.
This game has years of ridiculous things existing simply bc they've always existed. When kabam finally allows a change for the better, players almost unanimously sit back and say "man, it was really stupid that it wasn't always this way". Ppl need to get over their knee-jerk water-carrying tbqh.
Dr. Zola