Rewarding

Yes, subscriber loyalty rewards are here. This is one marketing idea I think is a winner. Sure there will always be someone who says "OMG SOE is making fireworks and paintings while my class problems are being ignored!1! Why?? Why, SOE, why???" But I think it just makes sense. Customer loyalty programs are winners in other areas and I think they work here as well.

And yeah, the rewards are basically fluff but they're fun fluff and some extra xp is nothing to sneeze at. I think all of the rewards are nice without being unbalancing. Well, one small issue.

The titles were an obvious and good choice but I do have trouble with the wording selected. Is anyone honestly going to use "the Loyal" or "the Dedicated?" It just doesn't seem like that would catch on. I know they play off of the time of play but they don't seem appealing from a player standpoint. Oh, wow, there's Bob, he's really, um, dedicated.

Speaking of rewards, Live Update 16 also makes the dungeons of Blackburrow, Runnyeye and CT more rewarding by improving the item drops. While I'll have to wait and see if this change is effective, it does attempt to provide a nice motivation to return to some of the dungeon zones which have taken something of a back-seat in EQII. And it will give people something to do instead of repeatedly running Harclave.

How about rewards for guilds? Well, it appears that the guild raids earned when gaining guild levels may actually be worthwhile now. The level of these raids will now scale to the average party level. Finally. These raids were totally worthless in the past (at least in my experience) since they were all greyed out by the time we got to them. I'm glad to see this problem has been addressed though the itemization is apparently not done yet.

Still hanging on those guild level 40 rewards though...