Just been listening through your podcasts and come across this one, its surprising how many got granted

1) Cross Server Arena
2) Cross Server Who
3) Cross Server Group

None of the above that I've seen, PvP seems to be ignored by SOE and is a kind of weakness compared to WoW, it would
be good to see battlegrounds you could sign up to and teleport to maybe and do other things while you wait for the queue to
fill. But on the other side I'm pleased EQ2 doesn't suffer from all the pvp class balancing WoW does, since I started playing WoW
all the classes are slowly looking more or less the same as each other.

But there is one big addition, the in game voice chat they implemented (GU46?), its certainly done properly and from what
I've read it uses separate servers hence runs more like Ventrillo. It fits well into the game too since you can just stand next
to someone who has it enabled to talk to them. In comparison WoW also has had voice chat for ages, but it feels like they
implemented it on the cheap since the audio quality is really very varied sometimes being on the unusable side (no idea why
for example I cannot talk at a proper volume to people).

4) Tell button in friends list

I can click on friends and send them messages, so I guess they fixed that.

5) Name limits

None I've seen, I think that naming restriction is actually enforced more in WoW to a degree, I think the EQ2 people seem to
have a bit more imagination when it comes to naming then WoW with less "IpWnYoU" type ones, the naming is policed more on WoW
too (forcing people for example to change drug related ones), I've not seen any bad EQ2 names yet actually, Runnyeye where I am
kind of feels like a roll playing server sometimes.

6) Overhaul of crafting

As I understand it changed a lot and I'm guessing after you requested it in podcast 14 :) Comparing it to WoW it is far more involved
although I'd like to see more variety in the results (maybe random lucky breaks), its also way more involved then Guildwars, although
that's more of an aside add-on to the game and really just relies on getting rare drops.

7) Underwater Zone

Nope

8) In game alcoholic drinks

Way too many now :D, not sure if you can accidentally buy them and stick them into auto consume though :)

9) Guilds changed to frats

Fortunately not ;)

10) Cut Scenes

I hear there are some sort of scenes for end game raiding content, but none I've seen in the older stuff so not really sure.

11) Handheld link to EQ2 for PSP

Nope.

12) Less Crashing

Its only crashed just once for me now, compared to WoW its more stable server side too (get the occasional hangup) so either both
my machines are lucky or they've improved things (I run it on both XP and Vista).

13) G15 keyboard support

GU47 had it finally implemented, and its good. Lots of pointless statistics like ping, upload bandwidth etc monitored on one
screen (its interesting seeing how little is used when you are stationary), all three XP bars on one screen is neat (and actually
useful since they give you a extra digit of accuracy so you can pull that 5 mob group and time a level on the first kill), plus
general stats and something with groups I've not looked into while grouped yet, there might be more but I spend too much time
looking down at those three XP bars.

Not sure if it has the other thing WoW did well which was monitoring Whispers (EQ2 tells), as I could use the screen to remember
messages from people long after that Chinese gold farmer had spammed the trade channel to death (they always post ASCII art ads twice in
WoW probably just to cover the whole chat box, as an aside so far I've not been spammed once in EQ2, and I'm liking that too).

Superb podcast there by the way, its inspired me to add more beer to my EQ2 sessions too.

Its wishful thinking that they were listening to us to get ideas though ;)

Not soon enough it seems :)

On the PVP objectives though its clear that at some point WoW did get it right, all they had were fun games (10v10 capture the flag, 15v15 king of the hill and 40v40 all out war to kill the opposition general) and to add to that some decent loot (pre-raid quality) and titles. The formulae apparently worked well with people really grinding away for the titles, although I think it was always going to be limited since I think once you earned them that was it, as there was no idea who was a current champion or just someone who did a lot 6 months ago.

Now they've been chasing the E-Sport money for the past year and started small scale 2v2, 3v3 and 5v5 arena battles which a lot of class balancing going around explicitly for it, they are popular but with so many playing the game I'm not sure if they were only riding on the success, Blizzard have never had Arena only servers which would have been interesting to see. As you can guess I'm a bit biased here so can't really comment fairly ;)

What I'd like to see though from a game would be a minimal attempt to balance classes in a game, and just have top of class titles to earn, then based on the past say 3 months fighting compare how well X class does generally and try and keep a league table for people who really stand out, not sure if this will work for the favoured classes though since they'll have to work real hard to get anywhere. But it would be a challenge to pick a class that is bad at pvp and then excel.

On top of that I'd have two sets of titles, maybe with just one saying "Current" in front of the other to give people who have gotten to the top something endless to achieve.

So far all the MMO's I've seen have been going the opposite route and instead trying to balance everything out fairly, Guildwars for me has gotten there and it does play well with some in depth tactics, but it does feel a bit bland at times, I guess I like a bit of randomness and some imbalance in my games to respond to.

Also thinking on it, powerful healers can be a big killer in pvp for me, in guildwars you just need a team of 5 randoms with 2 healers and you will steam roller pugs constantly, ditto for WoW where it gets to the even sillier point where certain DPS classes cannot even out damage a healer focus firing them, from what I've heard of WaR it sounds like they aren't all powerful so I have my hopes up here.