EverQuest II: The Shadow Odyssey Interview

Ten Ton Hammer has published an interview they conducted with EverQuest II senior producer Bruce Ferguson and design supervisor Noel Wellen following the release of The Shadow Odyssey.
A significant part of TSO hasn't seen much press, that is, quests and even dungeons where tradeskillers have to work together to complete a crafting goal to earn faction and purchase recipes. Noel explained: (All the tradeskill stuff is totally new, and actually a lot of the crafting stuff is based on the new tradeskill dungeons that our Tradeskill Designer, Emily Taylor, has been working on for this expansion.)

(Also a lot is going on with the voidshard system. Tradeskillers are actually able to produce versions of the voidshard armor for a lower voidshard cost than what the players can buy at the vendors themselves.( So players can save shards by looking up the appropriate tradeskillers, but if none are to be found, it's still possible to get the latest armor. This is an elegant solution to a problem as old as MMORPGs - how to support the player economy without gimping players when the player economy isn't supporting them.

(We want to make the relationship between players as strong as possible. The more people you interact with, generally speaking, the more fun you're going to have. I hop between single player and multiplayer games and I always feel much happier when I'm playing with other people.)

(With the expansion there's over 500 new quests, and those vary from collection quests to solo quests in the Moors of Ykesha, to group quests that take you through the dungeons, to tradeskills, also our mission system, which allows players to collect void shards for completing missions.) Missions, you say? (The mission system is sort of like a set of repeatable quests which can only be completed every so often.)