When Guilds damage the social fabric of a game.

Adventure should be rewarded. Instead, EQ increasingly rewards non-adventure.

Wen players hide out in the safety of a guild hall soaking up Overseer XP, relying solely on a guild as a means of progression through increasingly easier raids where all challenge and fear of loss and punishment for mistakes has been removed, then the world and sense of adventure has been lost.

Perosnally I did the same as I do now, group with friends regardless of which guild they are in. 20+ years on and we still aren't all in the same guild!

Listen man, build a guild of you and like-minded players. Gather the threads and weave your own social fabric.

The game can't design everything, and you have to be willing to meet them halfway. The threads are there for you to gather and create your own community.

Sorry to note that, but I think that guilds do add to the social fabric, instead of damaging it. Overseer has nothing to do with guilds and is one of the worst concepts ever as it is. Idk what the reason for the loss of adventure is, but a reason could be that the players got older over the years, do have less time than before, and that today's players are less likely to take risks, because of being spoiled and being grown soft. In the good old days we used to say: "Only the go0d die young."

He can't find anyone who wants to play with him is what it all comes down to.

Well, don't blame me for pointing out the obvious.

Players can sit in the guild hall, soak up Overseer XP, and loot is increasingly coming from easy raids where guilds feel no fear of punishment for challenging the monsters that should be most challenging.

I didn't turn EQ into Animal Crossing, developers did.

I looked for a guild to join up with.

I think your real complaint is that there is not a healthy enough population to support PUGs anymore and you're misdirecting that frustration at guilds because you see people who only group within their guild or established friends group.

This sounds like something that is for a very niche crowd. Maybe start an emulation server and try it, it wouldn't work here in EQ.

The biggest reason for the loss of adventure is the lack of content. For 1 month every year everyone is out adventuring and comunicating with players in the latest zones as they complete the lastest quests and missions and also completing hunter.

After the first month, many just log in for missions to get the lastest evolving item and level it up, you also have a lot who are only logging in to raid. Many don't even bother with Overseer at this stage as they don't need the exp.

There are some who want more of an EQ fix and play on TLP servers outside of raids, until the next expansion.

That server would have a guilds worth of people on it. Hmmm...

Hmm, I think I agree with Strawberry.
The game is set up so that you can be completely isolated within the comforts of your guild. Why trade outside the guild? Why speak to anyone outside the guild? There is certainly no reason to group or raid outside the guild. It is like you log in to play in the guild, rather than EQ.
So rather than being a social game, it becomes a collection of guilds, that can become separate little islands.
It is interesting, and probably true.
Maybe there should be some content added that forces more solo adventuring, or even more cross-guild cooperation. Eg quests etc that require some solo take downs or raids that require the whole server. I dont have any answers, but I do think it is an interesting point to be made.

There is no challenge to be completed by an adventurer in the current era that is rewarding to the solo player at all. No rewards for soloing likely means individuals don't seek it out. It requires grouping or forming a guild, especially with how "over-tuned" mobs are when it comes to an individual.

The people you are searching for aren't in current content and are stuck somewhere back in level 85+ trying to eek out levels to join the rest of the "adventuring" population.

From what I am trying to understand, you are saying that those in guilds sit in the guild hall, get buffed up by others so they don't have to be social and go ask for those buffs from strangers. Those players do their overseer tasks every day for their exp and sit in the hall getting quest adds for progression from a few cliques in the guild doing the hard content with three mercs and therefore 3 spots for quest adds? It has been a while since I've been active, but that is kind of my understanding.

You are wanting everyone to go back to a more social or intermingling environment where you have to run by that enchanter and ask for a clarity buff. You have to ask that random cleric, enchanter, and rogue if they want to go work on a quest or hold down a camp? More pickup groups and less stability?

You are missing the initial exploration and wonder and believe that everyone mindlessly grinds the same camp, the same instance, the same raids over and over? While I'm not sure about those that are sitting in the hall and getting quest adds, I thought the purpose of a guild was to just have a smaller pool of more trusted people that you have worked with and built relationships with. You log on and ask in guild instead of PoK, the lobby, or LFG.

I would say that I might agree with some of that. Quality of Life and efficiency may have killed some of the wanderlust, however you also have to understand that as you play the game you experience the game and become better at the game. Eventually you explore almost everything and experience almost everything there is. With only a few zones added every year, that sense of adventure can't be preserved forever.

I feel like I'm reading a definition of "social fabric" from one of Hugh Hefner's Playboy Philosophy columns in the '70s. And we all know what Hefner thought of fabric...

Is this thread a turn-on or a turn-off?

Even if they didn't have official guilds in the game, people would still develop groups of people that they do things with in order to complete the raid and group game.

On top of that, you do not need a guild hall in order to do Overseer. You can sit right there in PoK, or the Guild Lobby and Overseer to your heart's content.

Guilds is the reason many of us are still here. After 20+ years we have formed a solid community of friend who enjoy playing together. Without those attachments many would have stopped playing years ago.

I know I play more to spend time with friends and help them do stuff than I do to acomplish anything for myself. But my groups are with friends and friends of friends who soon become friends. These days I'm grouping outside of my guild with friends in 3 or 4 different guilds.

I'm sure most people have friends in other guilds.

True. When I played Ultima Online we had a guild before the game supported guilds. We all wore guild colors instead of having a title saying we are a guild.

People will naturally gravitate towards the friends they make in the game. Its human nature.

I do think that EQ has a grouping problem. After you gained level 125 and completed all the quests, what is there to do?

1. Repeat the 2 missions over and over to get currency to buy your type 5 augments.
2. Camp specific named mobs to get the drops that you need for your character.
3. Raid stuff.

Let's ignore #3. For #2, the fastest way to get the items that you need is to camp the area with as few players as possible, so that if the item you want does drop, you have fewer people to roll against. So, adding additional people to your group is a net negative to getting the item you are camping.

For #1, they are by their nature, difficult missions, so you want a strong 6 man group. Having a random person in your group increases the risk that you will get one who doesn't know how to play their character well, or at least isn't as well geared as other raiders in your guild.

So, for grouping that leaves general AA farming, and anyone that hasn't completed all of their quests yet in the new expansion. It doesn't help that it takes about 10 minutes to do Overseer. People log on, do Overseer, and then just log off.

One thing that would increase the number of groups would be the implementation of the TBM model. Don't lock the group currency behind the hardest missions. Have all of the partisan quests in an expansion provide currency on completion. Include some simple missions where you crawl through a dungeon instance and kill 20-40 mobs. Make the group currency tradeable, aka sellable. It gives people a reason to redo the partisan quests, they are easy enough that you can carry a weak, random player, and after doing a few quests, you might find that you have a full group and decide to tackle one or more of the harder missions. I loved TBM, and am sorry to see how the game has changed since then.