Tobold's Blog
Friday, March 28, 2014
 
Not warming up towards Landmark

If you work for a company in Europe, you'll most likely have a lot of holidays, anything from 4 to 8 weeks per year. Americans tend to have a lot less. For me that is the explanation for a curious design feature of EQN Landmark, now in closed beta and not actually having Everquest Next as part of the name any more: You lose your claim and everything you built if for some reason you don't log in for 5 days. So a week of holidays without a laptop, and you're wiped out.

While I was considering the Landmark closed beta, because it has more features and is much cheaper than the alpha, I am not going to play a game which doesn't allow me to leave for a week. If that stays in for the release version, I can't see me playing this for long, or paying money for it. Maybe SOE is planning to sell claim protection for real money, but otherwise I have a hard time to understand this short claim period. 

Comments:
I believe they template your claim and then mail that, and all the materials, to you.

I agree, it's not ideal, and I don't like it, but you should be able to just reclaim and rebuild in a couple minutes.
 
I'm jealous of the long holidays Europeans get. I'd love the chance to take another 6-8 weeks off a year, even with the lower salary.

That seems a curious game feature. Does that mean gamers who only play on the weekends can never hold a claim till the next weekend? o.O
 
So, here's the issue; when they went live for Alpha a ton of people logged on, claimed a spot, and never logged on again. This caused a lot of "prime" territory to be unavailable for people. If you played Star Wars Galaxies, remember all the ghost towns sitting unused on planets?

One thing most people don't seem to realize about this upkeep fee is that the length of it will increase as you pay upkeep. So, the next time you pay upkeep the time will increase to 7 days, then 9 days, and so on.

I think it's a fairly feasible system for what they're trying to do. If it doesn't work they'll change it, they've been incredibly good about changing things due to community discussion so far.
 
It is not a game. It's a beta. They need testers, not players. The game will surely be much more friendly towards casuals.


 
It's beta. Much will change. Chill.
 
Considering they'll probably change claim payment to Station Cash in the future (rather than the copper ore it is now), I'm fairly sure they'll let you upkeep it for as long a period as you want when it goes Live/Free 2 Play.
 
Hehe Tobold...I'm sure they will increase that number in the future. I definitely need to be able to be away for 3-4 weeks without losing my claim but now that it's just beta and busy servers and debugging, I understand why the upkeep duration is shorter.
 
Although SOE's being a bit cagey on why they set this the way they did, my suspicion is this is actually intentionally kept short in order to test claim lapse.

Yes, SOE is actually using Beta to Test Stuff.
Unheard of right?
 
First of all, while US vacation times could certainly use an increase, even we tend to get more than 5 days a year.

Personally 5 days seems a bit low to reset your land, but since the entire point of these games is work people into a frenzy over their useless crap, putting people on a 5 day clock before they lose everything they've worked so hard for is in keeping with that.

Look at it as a guild cohesion thing; you have to trust someone so much that you give them your password and if they screw up you lose everything. Everyone loves all these horrible features from old games, and this seems in that vein.
 
Post a Comment

<< Home
Newer›  ‹Older

  Powered by Blogger   Free Page Rank Tool