Not too familiar with him. Why do you say that? Was he on EQ2?
Alternate Advancement in its current form with EverQuest-Retail can go eat a dick. Thats terrible game play in my opinion, to stop at certain levels and just stay in a zone like "The Hole" for a week grinding several hundred AA's. The idea of AA's on paper sounds awesome, though. I just feel that it needs a system similar to what you have in mind for skills or tied to achievements. Skill points in Guild Wars 2 was handled pretty well. You just journey across the zone and do those challenges. Or instead of that system, link AA's to achievements. You clear a dungeon for the first time, you're granted an AA. Solid ideas that keep the amount of AA's at a very reasonable cap and keep the players moving and exploring.
Why shouldn't AA reflect the amount of time invested on a character? There is nothing wrong with grinding per se. We grind for gear, achievenemt titles etc. AA should be no different. It puts new players at a disadvantage but you have to have some way to entice players at level cap even with a slow leveling curve. If all your game offers capped players is running 5 mans, raids and PVP then you've failed.
Raided end game in both EQ and WoW, would much rather have EQ's form of personal advancement. Dailies and having nothing to do but raid and honor grind is what eventually killed WoW for me.
WoW is free to disagree but it's an anomoly. All the others who have tried to copy WoW with that formula have went down in flames. Its no secret that almost everyone who plays EQ clamours for more depth than WoW offers. I want to set my character apart, not just through gear, but through time invested and AA if necessary. I'd like to assign my skill points to tailor my character to my playstyle. WoW works but they sacrificed character choice for homogenous convienience. But thats what their target was. They have a lot of games like that now. I would kinda like to have a game with some depth back now.
They just found a different way to keep players busy. I think AA's should be just what they say they are Alternate Advancement. It should be just another way for a player to hit content that they might now otherwise be able to play in. The causal Player should be able to build their stats up to a level where they can run the same group zone as the decked out raid gear player.
Plus 1 for us.. Any comment that kills the possible idea of EQN being casual is good in my book
I said the same thing in one of these EQN threads lol. I hated how expensive my high level Wizard nuke was but my guild needed my DPS on raids so they bought me it. You just can't find all those factors coming together in a game anymore.
This plays into my biggest wish for EQN: I want the game to feel like a world, and class design is the area I most want serious improvement in. Classes ought to feel like simulations of the fantasy archetypes they're named for, and not just have that archetype be a skin slapped on the same old class mechanics. That means being faithful to that archetype in the abilities it has, how it gets those abilities, have mechanics in place that drive the player to act more-or-less in-character, and so on.
Thats exactly my point.
Be cool if they rewarded both ways. Like you said.. clearing a zone and possibly a form of XP. I don't think many would argue with that.
I am not as big a proponent of time invested as you have made me out to be. I just don't like the idea of any players time being meaningless or made trivial by eazy mode stuff. In a gear based game, gear resets are inevitable. Skill based is all well and good but how do you implement that on a large scale MMO? The majority of players couldn't hack it in a skill based game. Add to that things like lag, latency etc and you have a problem.
I don't think anyone really cares about spending money though, none of us are cheap, we paid a monthly subscription for EQ back when that was unheard of. And I think most of us would be happy to pay it even today. All we care about is that they monetize it in a way that earns them money without harming the integrity of the game. The subscriptions was perfect for that because everyone paid equally, and then everything in game was equal too. The way it works now in games like Vanguard is pretty horrible, because what you get out of the game and what your character becomes, is exactly proportional to the amount of real life money you spend. And that sucks.
I absolutely agree, I am on the side of "would play $20/month for an immerisve world" instead of playing the latest theme park. Thing is, SOE already said the new vision is F2P, so it will be F2P. But they'll want to earn money too.