I was just reading back through the Group Blog I was in for Star Wars Galaxies. What I found most interesting was this post I made on November 6. I’ve been trying to figure out why I stopped playing. Was it because Joe didn’t play much? Did I burnout on the game? Or what?
I still had things to do. I had professions I was working on mastering. I hadn’t been to the geo caves or successfully completed the Death Watch Bunker. I think the problem was with missions. The missions for my level were too easy. I had no risk of dying, with buffs and armor. I could have fought without them. I had done it before and it was much more interesting. But I didn’t just want to kill things, I wanted to get XP to progress in my profession. In order to get a mission that offered good XP and was more of a “challenge” for my level (and often wasn’t much of a challenge), I had to be in a group of 6 or more people (approx.). Since I didn’t want to share the XP by fighting in actual group, this meant joining a solo group. Sometimes solo groups were easily available, but sometimes they weren’t. I started getting frustrated. Mindlessly fighting huurtons and pikets wasn’t much fun. Then they announced the solo group nerf. Previously, solo group missions gave out about 40k credits per mission, on an average. The highest mission I could get for my level was 9k (these were both on Dantooine). There’s a big difference. They changed it so you got a percentage of the mission reward based on the # in the group (so 40k/10 or so = 4k…less than one I could get on my own). It wasn’t so much that I wouldn’t be able to afford to buy anything anymore…the inflated economy would lower eventually, I would hope. Plus I could get discounts from my guild. It was the maintence costs for my harvestors and my houses. I wasn’t selling anything yet to make money that way because I didn’t have a vendor and my products weren’t good enough to sell yet. Pretty much all my money went into my harvestors, collecting things to use to make things. [By the way, I had amassed a decent collection and kind of feel sad that I'll never get to use my meat, flora, etc. ]
And so, I think what I just talked about was the reason. If I could have gotten missions on my own to fight bull rancors, maybe I would have stayed. But I couldn’t and random spawns were very rare. You had to search all over the planet for a non-mission spawn and everyone else was doing that to grind Jedi (actually, they were killing your mission spawns too). It just wasn’t fun. Plus, I don’t think that I should have been able to solo a bull rancor in the first place. Everything just got so unbalanced combat-wise. I didn’t feel like sticking around waiting for the combat rebalance, whenever that’s finished. Maybe I’ll come back then if I hear lots of rave reviews. But I don’t know. Most everyone in my guild has left and it wouldn’t be the same.
Part of why I like Everquest II is that I don’t have that problem. I don’t need a “mission” get to get something for my level. There’s plenty of random spawns and once you start fighting, no one can take it from you because of locked encounters. Sometimes it can be hard finding something I need to kill for a quest because someone else has killed them all, but they respawn eventually. It can be frustrating, because I’m not the most patient person, but I usually just go find something else I need to do. But I can attempt to kill anything I want to. There are access quests for certain areas, but pretty much unless you can do the access quests, you don’t belong in there. I can fight things below my level, at my level, or above my level. And I can do so without having to find a solo group for it or spend 30 minutes running around a planet looking for a spawn that was a challenge, but wouldn’t kick my butt (Nightsisters).
