Rant: How Everquest is killing itself for me

[Kreugen]

I haven't enjoyed Everquest much lately, and I coulden't figure it out up until now. We're making progress, getting great items, not having any internal or attendance troubles; everything is pretty much going smoothly. The zones and bosses are cool and challenging and the expansion overall was well made. Yet not only haven't I made as many sacrifices to play the same amount as I always have, I have found myself outright bored virtually every night. Not just bored - I mean falling the hell asleep at the keys.

This started as just me trying to puzzle this out for myself, to a message I was going to send to my other officers, to this - a public post about something that I feel many people might be trying to figure out themselves. This is for people that are generally happy with everquest - not the rant-a-minute doomsayers that are all over this board - yet find themselves inexplicably bored.

Well on with it.

I hate, hate, HATE - trying to melee one tiny ass trash mob after another all night long with 25 other mother fuckers in my face doing the same. Oh my god. All night its pages and pages of red scrolling text - you know, "you cannot see your target" or "target out of range" It's so fucking annoying. Now, as you know, FoH doesen't exactly do things with massive zerg numbers. In fact, by god I swear it, we average less than probably every guild you have heard of. The best we can hope for is mid 50's, often its more like mid 40's. And yet even with those "low" numbers, its just too goddamn many. I can't take it. Chasing some stupid ass mob around in circles to hit it for what, a few hundred damage - while our wizards and such are chopping it down 5k at a time. What's the fucking point? Most nights during these trash mobs I either a) sit back and heal b) nod off to sleep (more and more often lately) c) do something non-eq d) actively try to melee it while I cuss in frustration.

I'd do anything right now to not be a melee. Shit I even have the option of casting pissant heals, or stunning the mob so it runs to me. (both of which usually result in my death no matter how sissy the mob is, because the best we can hope for out of our two boxed cleric brigade is to target warriors) I don't see how a pure melee stays awake or sane during this shit.

Basically, at the moment the only zone I truely like is Fire, because everything is BIG, as a level 65 home of the gods should be. Air, water, earth drive me NUTS. Other zones have been good too, like Drunder and BoT. But for the most part, EQ is endlessly frustrating.

Now the reason for all this shit: Verant designs encounters for X number of people, where right now X is about 50ish and in the past generally around 36. Unfortunately there is no way to hold players to this amount - you can bring 300 if you want to, and they aren't oppossed to the idea. I'd give anything for a reversal to this paradigm - to go back a couple years and come up with some way of actually limiting the raid size.

Instead they have made it even easier. Originally, a haste buff was single target, lasted 10 minutes and would run an enchanter oom after about ten melee. Now you can group buff, group buff other groups, mass group buff a whole fuckin raid, all with buffs that last for an hour or more. You can raid with 900 people as easily as a group of six. As a result, mass mobs of dozens of players is infinately more effective than it was in the past, where large numbers was actually more detrimental than helpful.

There is a coalition of guilds on my server that regularly raid with around 95 players. This is not uncommon - many major guilds that lots of people have heard of and that like to brag on their websites do the same, so CoE etc I'm not singling you out. How the FUCK do they stand it? 50 other melee trying to hit some pissant mob? Holy shit I would lose my mind. And its killing Everquest for me and others. There is no accomplisment anymore, no challenge. If something is hard, throw more numbers - there is nothing stopping you. Everquest used to be about that feeling of accomplishment for me and for the most part my guild. We overcame a challenge using brains and hopefully some individual skills. Now I feel like I could die and have my corpse dragged around through an entire raid and contribute about the same amount, because with 50 people there isn't a whole lot of individual skill involved. And 90? Holy fucking shit. I watch them get the absolute SHIT kicked out of them by bertoxx - I mean people falling down all over the place, looking like Sauron in the intro to Fellowship - but he simply can't keep up with the horde of people running back in to rejoin the fight. The zone drops from 99 to 55 almost instantly, but then holds steady. And victory is had. That's Everquest today. Bragging rights are GONE, accomplishment is GONE. I don't know why Furor even bothers. Yay so and so is dead, so what if we did it with 52 people and 0 deaths? The next guy is just going to bring a hundred. Dead is dead, is it not?

Well I hate it. You can say what other people do shoulden't impact my enjoyment, and logically you may be correct. But that's not the case. Not when I have to share zones with a hundred fucking skillless button pushing monkeys whose individual effort equates to looting their own corpse and pushing A. VI has made EQ so friendly to the zerg that I honestly hate logging in at times. Now here is the imporant part, and why this complaint about zerging is different now than it was in the past: It used to be that having more than 40 or so was suicidal - the lag, the framerate, and buffing was a logistical nightmare. Now there is no reason NOT to use 90, 200, 300.. other than the things I complained about above, how goddamn miserable it is to be a melee in a crowd of other melees. It sucks. I hate it. And this is what Everquest has become. If I had my way we'd have ten melee and thrity wizards, but that just isn't going to happen.

I wish I could change classes - not because of any class balance issue, not because I don't enjoy my own (I love it in xp groups / late night 30 man raids) but because I absolutely despise meleeing tiny mobs with 50 other people around, and that's how I unfortunately have to spend most of my time. And herin lies the problem - it is in all practicality impossible to start over as another class. No way in hell. Level a cleric or wizard to 65, get a few hundred AA, and get every single pop flag again? Har de fucking har. The only choice anyone has now is to take over another character that might have recently quit - which is both illegal and not very satisfying at all. So all these "death of the alt" posts on this board are not just senseless whining. It really IS a major problem with Everquest today - if someone is suddenly very unsatisfied with their character, their only sane choice is to pack up and quit. Yes, this is a problem. Boy would a $50 "level 65 character only" class switch option be appreciated about now. The game has never really needed it before now. After flags and AA's, I think its damn near neccessary for the life of the game.

But back to the ranting. 95 man raids. God. We used to laugh at them, because they were always doomed to fail. Now its no different than haivng a few dozen. Sure, most of the melee can't hit the mob until those in front of them die, but how hard is to click people back in and buff them up with the next mass? And what individul talents does it take with so goddamn many? Practically none. Hell that is true with FIFTY people, much less 90. I hate it enough even in my own guild. The level of play, the indidual skill and attentiveness in my guid is lower than it has ever been. Its embarassing. And yet it really doesen't make much of a difference most nights. Its just become that trivial - you can have every single cleric two boxed and half your raid asleep at the keys and have just enough left to win, in this age of numbers-friendly raiding. If your guild is full of lazy, slacker no talent players you can just add more and more until its enough to make up the difference. Their individual talent does not matter in the least when there is no limit to the number of players you can use. Do you get it yet? By allowing - encouraging - infinately large raid sizes you have destroyed the talent base completely. There's no reason to even bother to try to be a good player. Any group of idiots can do the same things as anyone else, as long as they have some semblance of cohesion. (as in they mostly all agree to be in the same place at the same time, nothing more) This wasn't really true in the past as much as it is now. This is sad, sad shit.

Where all this is going is just to say that it was a mistake to not put a system in place to limit the numbers that can be used. Of course, I don't know HOW to do this - I'm not pretending to have the answer - I just wish it could have been done. I wanted to suggest something to ease my pain - like increase melee range, especially for two handers - but all I'd be doing is making it even easier for the people who bring 90 fucking morons to a raid, and why would I want to do that?

This whole situation just plain sucks. When I saw that the /raid feature was limited to 60 people, I thought to my self thank JESUS, salavation has come! But it as it turned out of course it wasn't any kind of limit at all. It could have been - and most undoubtable SHOULD have been - but they pussed out for whatever reason and instead we have to put up with 90 man armies who by god must be BORED TO DEATH. /clap

Anyway, back to sleeping through another raid until something big enough to melee comes along.

What I do enjoy: Xping, up until the xp zones had over 90 people in them, such as my favorite BoT. Late night/early day "ninja" raids with 30 people. I love those.

[Zurren]

Welcome to how I felt about 2 years ago. Some of my funnest raid-memories were pre-RoK before AL started to raid with more then 30 people. In some situations it was done because it was needed, but it was largly done because that is how many people wanted to show up (now, its done mostly due to need).

Raids were far more fun/entertaining and challening when you only had 24 people. Each person felt like a cruicial part the the raid, a part of a fine-tuned machine. But slowly, as the numbers balooned from 24, to 30, to 36.. to 40+ ... that fine tune machined slowly turned into a mass of sheep. The sense of indiviudal gain to the group quickly faded.

About the closest I get to that feeling again, is if we are running with a skeleton crew and I get the yell to "unload". However, I think EQ is to far gone to really backtrack on the way it's started to go now. Perhaps they could of saved face and backtracked a bit after RoK, but instead they worsened the problem with SoV.

VI still could limit the numbers a raid could use, just make any boss-encounter a click to get to, or hail to get to type thing which ONLY takes like, 42 people at once, then locks off. They allready got a few events which hard-limit the number of people you can take (ring event in PoS).

If it was possible to go back to the day of the high end-24-man raid, I'd be quite happy, but its just impossible to do now I think.

[Tuco]

Maybe make 'encounters' where something limits it to a certain number of people? I still wouldn't want to see all the encounters like this, but coming from an anti-zerg guild, I know where you're coming from, Kreugen, when you say that bragging rights are gone.

It would be interesting to see a few bottlenecks(for flags etc) that involved limiting the numbers of players to 24, to see which guilds have it, and which don't.

[Scorpvenom]

This is part of the reason while I recently quit. My guild, which had people whom I liked, would have massive numbers on most all attempts we ever did. In areas such as VT and crypt of decay, I just got bored, felt useless (because there were so many people), and I'd watch divx movies on my comp and put someone on autofollow. I'd hope no one would notice, but I had no fun until we reached the boss mob. Then once we reached the boss mob, it started to kick in more and more how boring this game was. All I did was hit A, and if shit got freaky, battle rez time! I wish the cleric epic were removed from the game. That might help prevent zerging somewhat. I was a pretty good warrior by my guilds standards, but there were two warriors that were definitely better equipped. Secondly, I could have been close to them, but I no longer felt like raiding 24/7 for massive dkp. I tried doing so because I really did want to become better equipped for the guild. However, I finally came to the realization that I was useless.

[Nikkohung You]

there are some places that dont allow more than such and such number of people. Trials are one but those are gay imo, another much harder one is the tree thingy in PoN =p 6ppl vs an unslowable tree that double 700 and slowly brings in adds that are also imunne to slow.

[toobad]

You complain that you are bored because you are fighting a mob along with 50 other melee then in the same breath say that FoH has 40 to 50 at raids. So you are saying FoH has a total of 5 to 10 non melee at raids at your best raids?

Those numbers don't add up. Forgive me but it sure sounds like like another "stop them from zerging" so we can say we are L33tness posts. You continually talk about FoH raids being boring but then talk about 90 people in a zone. FoH never has 90 in a zone so what are you complaining about other than the fact that other guilds are zerging things to death?

The game is boring for you now because other guilds can zerg things and dead is dead?

[Tooth]

Way back when we would do our dragon raids, I remember we had to keep the raid size to 24. I also remember Furor asking any one else that was in Permafrost killing goblins or whatever to leave the zone for a few minutes to help keep down lag. Seemed like a pain in the ass at the time, but it turned out to add to the difficulty a little. Also remember the buff lines. Have all the melee line up in a single file line, and Me and Zamtil go down the line buffing em up. And if anything went wrong at all, having to repeat the process over and over. Had a lot of mana stone death's back then trying to get as much mana as possible.

Still the best Nag kill ever. Was a late night attempt of about 15 FoH. Only about 5 of which were melee. Took about 2 hours to get the kill, and ended up being Furor and a group of 5 nakkid clerics healing him to down Nag. Think I lost over 1 level of exp on that raid, but got a Scourge hammer out of it. Which you can now buy for about 400 pp.

E

[Hena Hacksalot]

I enjoyed doing the trial-style raids. PonB flag in hedge maze can really bring out the best in a class when your doing it with 12 ppl or so. 18 ppl can make the event trivial especially with extra certain classes.

why dont they have trial-style events in the upper tier zones? or do they.. this limits the raid size/number of groups that can participate and brings back the fun of makng an accomplishment when all is about to go to hell. Imagine most Bosses with 6-8 groups.. or slightly more depending on difficulty, instead of the GIMPATRON of 90ppl-combined guilds.

WHAT THEY SHOULD HAVE DONE to limit the raid size etc, add trial-style beginnings to most upper level mobs, a limit to the number of groups that can enter the ring/zone/area.. they did it with pon, 3 groups max per maze, a total of 3 mazes running at once. when it isnt bugged it works nicely.

Being a BARB warrior, i know what a PITA it is when theres too many melee on a mob in a small area with a small hitbox range.. i rely on items like cobalt bracer. but even then im a large class and i easily get stuck on peoples feet, so im again relying on another item to give me human illusion which is the only way i can manage to stay in range of the mob without pulling my ponytails out ;

[Kjia]

Everytime I raid now I step back and say.. "could this exact same raid force have done it if I wasn't there" and 90% of the time that answer is yes.. and im a cleric! I imagine meelees have 99% to that answer :P

A really enjoyable raid recently was vindi lol, he spawned and we took a few people there and there was only 2 other clerics one an alt so i HAD to be in the complete heal chain.. that actually felt better because I knew at any point I could go afk and the raid would wipe.. thats the suspense I love in raiding so much..

I imagine on stuff that does 6000 dp/s almsot no class could say that really..

[userr0101]

everquest is just a cash cow now, more rancid than ever. customer service sucks ass, and the dev team is busy pumping out more and more expansions to even fine tune the material in the game now.
the player base has gone down is what im guessing, and sony is trying their hardest to keep the game alive. give it another year or two, who knows maybe a lot of people will leave the game and it will be like it used to.
as a pure melee yes, fucking OOR and "cannot see target" is annoying as hell. i think your just burned out from EQ kreugen. take a break from eq for 2 weeks or something, ive done it in the past and it makes things moderately exciting when i get back. maybe wait until you have all your PoP flags until you take a break so you dont miss out on content. if i raided 6 days a week i would be going insane.

[Qassack]

While I am not in a top end guild, I have played EQ since beta. I used to pride myself on my skill as a cleric. The fact that clerics are so broken they were nothing but bots really pissed me off for a long time. Not because I couldn't get a group of any stupid shit like that, I have a guild for groups, but because it reduced all the skills I had learned into nothing.

The fact that EQ is turning into such a no skill needed environment really sucks. I have noticed even my skills starting to slip badly since they no longer seem really needed. I would prefer there were more 'trial' type encounters. Limit the number of people allowed into any one situation so that everyone you bring has to be skilled. Or make the so called virtual dungeons for people. These have lots of problems such as what happens if someone goes LD or whatever , but damn, a true dungeon crawl in a challenging environment would kick some serious ass nowadays.

[Kjia]

a true dungeon crawl in a challenging environment would kick some serious ass nowadays.

The zone would be empty if it was a real 'challenging environment'.. the players too need a wake-up slap in the face

[[X]]

Wouldn't it be great if you could /follow mobs? Then you could just go AFK :P

[agoz_rz]

scienceofwar.net

[Hena Hacksalot]

some zones already could easily be switched to trial mode for encounter. take bertox, replace the chair with a thelin-style npc that will allow a minimum of 6 groups (so ppl dont intentionally bug/gimp the event) and up to 8 groups to zone down to the bert ring. 48 for bert is intense if you win, where 90 is just trivial. god 90 ppl trying to melee a mob that is corner tanked haha

other zones would take quite a bit of coding to do this