Rant: How Everquest is killing itself for me

[Destinae]

Don't forget every single trash mob enraging.

[Ming]

You know what a lot of you people are really asking for?

It begins with a click on a portal in the plane of time. You enter a round room with many stone obelisks. You are naked.

(All of your old Norrath items are safe and will appear when you emerge, but as long as you're in the parallel universe the only gear you have is that which you collect. Oh, and casters- sorry the old spellbooks don't work in this plane as magic is different here.)


Parallel universe (PU) items cannot exist in Norrath and visa- versa. You come back to PU naked each time. If you die in the parallel universe you re-appear fully equipped in you Norrath gear at your original level 1 bind point. You may return to the parallel universe at any time by clicking on a new portal stone in PoTranq which is now unlocked.


At first there is only one portal stone in this round PU room that will work. It will take you to plane one. In this beginning plane the mobs will have to be beaten down with fists, so better bring some hand to hand people. In order to progress beyond this zone, you have to kill a boss mob that will require casters, healers, and melee just like in the normal world. So as your force moves deeper into this zone and the stuff gets harder the drops improve. The first mobs will drop the basic needed spells, ie. lower lever heals, nukes, etc and some basic weapons for the armed melee users... and it could go on like this eventually with armor, magic items, etc. While retaining all skills/levels/aa abilities you have nothing. This level would be scaled for 2 to 4 groups but viable for 1 group up until the boss mob.

All items would be both "lore" and "no drop" and only exist in this parallel universe. That way you couldnt keep mules up there to restock returning players. Upon defeating a boss mob, flags would be automatically given to all players on the agro list and they would automatically progress to the next plane and permanently keep all gear from the first.

(Death in the parallel universe is slightly different in that you don't autozone to the bind point. You become a ghost ala UO until you click on a "stone obelisk thingy" that returns you to the normal universe at your level 1 bind point. This is so, in boss mob encounters if your raid force beats the boss, you all (even the ghosts) get to progress with your new gear to the next plane.

So you beat the boss mob of plane one, and are all sent to the hub room again. Maybe a mysterious figure appears there and says good job, blah blah (and steals the cosmic forge.. mm nevermind idea would never work.) Anyway now your plane one gear is locked to your character and the plane 2 stone is open.

Warning: Gear progresses upward, but not backward. If you click on plane one to get your slacker buddies through it after having passed plane one, you will be allowed to enter plane one, but with no gear.

The whole thing could be called Everquest expansion VI: The Tests of Time retailing for 29.95 at a Walmart near you.

Like it? I'm gonna go eat dinner now, but just an idea.

[Borzak]

No when you complete Plane of Time you go back in time. Back to a time when the game was fun. You are completly stripped down to lvl 1 no gear. A new world exist without cross server tells, new loot, new mobs, and real quest...

oh wait I just woke up.

[Iannis]

...sony has the power to give you 4 RL years back? OMFG EVERYBODY TO POT!!!

=) Kreugan is evil for starting up this new fad of "Rant: xyz" threads

[Clericnon2boxed]

What would be if the mob loot table was based on the amount of people that fought the mob (dont ask me how to program that, maybe something based on hatelist).

Fight the mob with 90 people - 1 loot

Fight it with 50 people - 2 loots

Fight it with 30 - 4 loots

Do it with 3 groups - 6 loots

1 group - 12 loots

[Satine]

While I can certainly relate to the hideousness of chasing around mobs and seeing half the time I can't even get to the mob, that's about all that the original poster said I can agree with.

It might be worthwhile to note that penis size, and therefore your value to society, is not inversely propotionate to the size of your raid. Just because Guild X has jumped through every bloody hoop that SOE ever put out there a thousand times over to outfit everyone with the best crap there is, does not somehow give you the right to dictate how large of a force should take down a given encounter. Guild Y and Guild Z might have more casual players that just don't have the time to build to your level, it'll take them more folks to master the same encounter.

Does that mean they're less deserving to play in the same experience zones you play in? For god sakes, they pay exactly the same price you and everyone else does. If they don't get their money's worth out of this game, why the hell will they want to go on financing more uber-exclusive playlands for you and your friends? Reality check! They aren't going to. PoP stretched most of us "average" players to our limits of tolerating that pandering to uber-guilds. Another expansion like PoP is going to finish alienting the masses and probably spell the doom for this game. It certainly proved to most of us that SOE is totally out of touch with their customers.

Fortunately the bean-counters at SOE are probably a little more in touch in reality than most uber guild players. Despite the notority and voluability of certain uber guilds, they know most of their customers aren't in FoH or AL or any other uber guild. Most of us have to depend on alliances or perhaps some of those large raid forces to get the job done.

And while you may be doing your little "superior" dance over your ability to do more with less, I assure you that doing less with more is probably more difficult than most of the stuff you've ever undertaken.

I'm not impressed with your suffering and angst. It's like hearing a millionaire lamenting about about a nickel that rolled down the street and into the sewer.

[Furor Planedefiler]

Originally posted by Borzak
No when you complete Plane of Time you go back in time. Back to a time when the game was fun. You are completly stripped down to lvl 1 no gear. A new world exist without cross server tells, new loot, new mobs, and real quest...

oh wait I just woke up.

Don't forget the Delorian with the Flux Capacitor. Also, the Arabs are selling Plutonium for dirt cheap. All when you go back in time...

Can't wait

[Attrib]

VI will never ever put a limit on bosses or high end encouters unless they want to create a sort of bottleneck like for the PoJustice trials.

The reason is simple :

First of all, as Kreugen said, we have now mass group buffs, focus effects and incredible mana regen items. So buffing 90 people is exactly the same as buffing 6 people besides maybe regeant loss. So the time taken is exactly the same whatever the number of people you bring.

Secondly, most of the 'zergling' guilds bringing 90 people have a very basic to no strat (maybe because they have no brains but also it is impossible to put a strat live with so many people who can fuck up everything at any time because an idiot moved to the wrong place). So most of the time, versus high end encounters, the fight turns into a slaughter where the average number of people in the zone is 50 while the rest are LD / dead / beeing rebuffed / AFK.
So in the end, an organized guild using killer strat will succeed with 50 people staying alive almost the whole fight while zergers will bring 90 people but only 50 people beeing efficients. Conclusion : it takes (for the hardest mobs to kill) the same time in average for a zerg guild to kill the boss as for an organized team (well in fact zergers may go a bit quicker to kill but they take more time to have everyone ready so in the end its kinda the same).

So the idea is simple : why VI would bother rethink the encounters and put a limited number when they can entertain 90 people with one mob as long as if those were 50 ?

Because the issue is if you decide to put a number limit on encounter, lets say 45, then you HAVE to be sure you have another mob to entertain the 45 people left in the meanwhile which means considering how crowded are most of the servers : twice more bosses, so twice more high level zones, so twice more quests, so twice more work, so twice more CASH to spent for zone designing, so, in the end, less CASH earn ...

As a proof : VI is always working on improving connections so we can be more and more in raids (raiding with 50 people without pbl has been fixed since Velious but they keep trying to fix issues for 100+ people raids), but don't spend time trying to put more interesting encounters designed for a limited number of people (nor put many 60+ new zones, ie the new expansion with zones up to lvl 60 only...).

[Gevarien~SolRo]

Throw in some more fights that with adds that you must avoid agroing, or mobs that you have to push in a certain way, mobs that randomly go into an autoriposte from all directions disc with a 1 second warning. mobs that pop an ae for 5k every time someone dies, etc etc.

In short if they don't want to limit raid sizes, they should at least make sure a bunch of AFKing people running around like headless chickens can't kill anything.

[Chopsewy]

This is nothing SoE can patch fix anytime near, i feel sad for the melee's out there. I actually think the elemental planes are quite fun, and the rewards are ok, but what does the endless trash mobs clearing do? I can feel the headache from the melee's running up and hitting red texts cant see target etc.

If you look at most encounters in PoP esp in elementals the perfect team would be hand full of warriors, and 40 casters 10clerics and 2,3 debuffers / buffers.

Almost all boss encounters has something like a 100 ranged PB AE's, the healing power mana used to heal trash melee's usually create more ping pong and healing agro on classes that do stay away from AE. Not even to mention weapon upgrades, that create more agro than before, the warriors having a hard time keeping agro even if they wield a 2hd'er from RZ himself with the 65 agro SK spell on top of his ass, Blade of WAR.. come again?

As a result of this, there are more and more encounters you could just say fuck it, all melee's except war's go afk eat a sandwitch and just stay out from AE, get the 3 war's ready with discs and switch them when disc runs out and hope that the casters can do enough dmg.

The worst encounter any melee can be part of is a 100 ranged PB unresistable ass raping spell, i mean fuck we dont have 20 clerics so dont pretend doing a encounter where that kind of healing power is needed if you gonna use all melee's on the fight.

PoP: Bow's for melees and FT for casters

Lifetapping PB AE's? I dont know, but there must be someway to make the battle more of a pain the more hobbits you bring along.

Chopsewy
Prophet of Darkwind

[Jaytee Bushwacker]

I never played a melee with any real earnst. I got a twink to level 29 woo woo. Seeing as how you guys have to put up with all that BS I feel for you I really do.

[Fendryl]

The irony of this thread is amazingly rich, if you know the history of EQ, especially the first Vox killings.

None the less, it is a problem, the esculation of encounters between expansions hasn't been a slow progression, it's been an exponential explosion.

Why is it a problem if some guild will throw 60 people at an 18 person encounter? If that's the way they want to play the game it should be fine right?

There's 2 problems here, the first, knee-jerking designers. If you've designed an encounter for 18 people, and see people throwing 60 at it, the next encounter you designer, you're going to make for 80. Of course, then the players will throw 100, so the next encounter you'll make for 150, and so on & so on...... Obviously the problem here is that the designer is overreacting to players, in time the players will scale their numbers back, originally people would do the Ghoul Lord with 2 groups, over time it all settles in nicely... Resorting to weak design tools like Deathtouch, Teleports, or other things don't serve to make encounters difficult, all they actually do is encourage more numbers.

The second problem, the main reason why players have a problem with a guild using 60 people for an 18 person encounter is EQ's flawed system of competition for content. Of course it angers you to no end to see some guild zerg something with 60 people instead of 18, they're taking that content away from you, at no real risk in trying. If raids were instantiated, so that everyone had their own version of content when they wanted it, you really wouldnt care if someone else used 60, 80, or 2000 people to kill ubermob_00 -- you still can kill your guilds version with 6, 12 or 18 and get the challenge you want.

Instantiated virtual spaces, once you actually 'get' the idea - you realize how many issues within EQ are derived from problem of competition for content.

[Szlia]

Competition for content results in frustrations but also in excitement. Competition for content generates social interactions, even if they are negative ones, while virtual spaces reduce them.

Let's make an analogy with musical chairs. How many chairs make the game the most enjoyable when there are 10 people playing: 10 chairs? 1 chair? 3? 8?

[Jadaki]

My guild usually raids with numbers in the mid 30's to low 40's. I remember the first time we tried Grummus we had 60+ going (about 48 guild, rest appies and friends) and we were making comments about how we were zerging in guild chat. Well, with 63 or so we wiped to Grummus, as we ressed and regrouped for a second run we had about 15 people leave and went back again. We killed him on that second try fairly easily with fewer numbers.

Some encounters it dosen't seem to matter how many you take, but some of the newer encounters taking to many does seem to be detrimental to the effort.

I read on Drinal (suprise) they did a 200 man Grummus raid, now thats zerg....

[Apokk Berzerk]

It really is about Shared content as the core of most of the issues surrounding EQ.

None of the top guilds are generally zergers, why? because there was no real rush, no extra push to get people online. For guilds in the middle, they play a whole different EQ where they must have all the people on at any time for when good ole Tormax or whatever decides to spawn. Risk of a wipeout? can't happen because there's usually 50 people buffing up waiting for you to lose. That's why you get more so that you don't lose. That's the real problem with eq, competition. Games are supposed to be fun right?

Once SoE sees guilds doing this, they increase the difficulty of the encounters in the future, thereby increasing the need for more people.

If every guild had their own spawns, raid inflation would rarely take place (given spell balance issues like rez sticks) and it will be in the hands of the guild's recruiting. You can take skilled players not just more bodies who might be online when a mob is spawning. Nobody likes to raid with too many people, if they had a choice they wouldn't.

I do agree though, that competiton has it's advantages and certainly helped EQ out in the early goings. I think ultimately though, it's what's destroying EQ in the end. What comes around goes around I guess.

I like the dynamic loot idea too, where the mob drops more items with the fewer people you have.

-pok