Hi everyone.



I made a long post previously about possible changes to the Classic Missions. We've read a lot of posts and had a lot of discussions since then, and we have decided on a course of action.



First let me explain the intention of those missions. First and foremost, they are meant to be good, fun peeks into the past. Hopefully we've met that goal regardless of the rewards. Secondly, we want to provide a bit of a boost to folks that are having difficulty getting past some pre-Underfoot content. For group players we want to get them gear that can help them get through the end of Seeds of Destruction group content before Underfoot. For mid-tier guilds we want to give them a shot at getting through the harder Seeds of Destruction raid content.



To assist with the first goal, we will be fixing as many bugs and exploits as we can find. We expect most of those to be in for the October update.



Toward the second goal, we will have to make several adjustments. Until those adjustments can be made, we will be removing the raid items from the chests and the merchant until the update on October 7th. In place of the drop items we will be dropping two sets of 15 Brew tokens.



Important Note: Please remember to Reclaim your Brew Tokens before you leave the instance or you will lose them!



We will also be doing the following with the October update:



· Current "raid" items would be "zeroed out", reducing all stats on them to 0, all augment slots will be removed, and the items will be renamed. This will pop out all augments on the items, returning them safely to players at no cost. Please be aware that the augments will appear on your curser when you log in after the update. Don't zone until you place them into your inventory.

· The "zeroed out" items can be handed to Old Man McKenzie for their full original value in Brew Points. We also plan to offer an additional item from a list of "free" items for those turning in these old items. Exactly what those will be is not certain yet, but may include Golden Casino Tickets and an illusion items.

· Then we will recreate the original raid items and put them back on the vendor.

· Requirements will be added in order to obtain the raids, to enter the raid zones and to loot any items off the raid chest. That same requirement will be added to purchase the raid gear from the vendor. The requirement will be that the player has completed all Crystallos raid events. The gear will be very useful for guilds that have completed Crystallos but have been unable to move forward from there.



The restrictions on the raid gear are important. It is obvious that it is this gear that has caused all the commotion. The raid level gear is intended to help mid-tier raiders do a little catching up, not to invalidate the group level gear for most of the group content in EverQuest, including Underfoot and future expansions (http://forums.station.sony.com/eq/p...topic_id=155683 you can read my other post about why this is a bad thing).



We are pretty confident that this solution addresses our concerns as designers.



Once again, let me apologize for any trouble this has caused. It's become clear to me that most of these issues would have been discovered had this content been on our Test server, even for just a week or two, we would have been able to recognize and correct many of these issues before the content went Live. This is a case where the desire to surprise our customers with something cool and unexpected should probably have been tempered with a bit of caution.



Thanks for your patience in this, and we all hope you enjoy the experience of the olden days as we all remember them. If you haven't tried them out, you should. They are a blast, especially if you remember those days when we had to walk up hill to school, both ways. When it snowed constantly and our shoes were made of paper and duct tape. If you weren't playing then, this is a really interesting chance to see what it was like. Sure, you still won't have to sit behind your spell book and hope not to die just to change a spell, and when your bard plays a healing song the entire zone won't try to kill him. But even if you don't get the entire experience that use old fogies had, you really will get a feel for those days.



Thanks for playing our game.



Alan "Absor" VanCouvering

Assistant Lead Designer - EverQuest



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