EverQuest Producer’s Letter April 2023

I realize that if the DEVS want to make it so you cant train people then that means FTE would have to lock on 'aggro', regardless of damage dealt. But, how does this work with raid targets?

Under a train-less FTE system this would mean players can "Hold" raid targets hostage. To combat this situation some players have suggested using health of 97% to trigger FTE for raid targets. This method would still give players the ability to train competing guilds with nearby raid mobs that are above 97%.

A hybrid approach may be the best implementation where you allow the raid target to trigger FTE on aggro but only for a certain amount of time before resetting. How much time? Should it reset to bind to give everyone a fair shot at engaging? NO IDEA!

The main concern i see is 'open world' competition and how not being able to kite raid mobs around for to long would change or negate ability to defeat the encounter. Can we beat OW raids, all the way up to live, under this system? If not how about classic-GoD where OW competition is most common. After that do we do away with FTE?

Any changes would take a careful comb through. My guess is this would offer increased challenge and less cheese, but again careful comb! These types of changes can create a lot of extra headache for the dev team down the road.

Those would be ignorant folks who don't want to wait for the facts. Those are not good people to listen to.

Can it be that DB didn't think it through and it should be removed? Sure. But we need to get an idea how the system would work. Now the one sure thing is that after seeing all the folks here go crazy with worry and anger that they need to preview the system before they sink too much dev time into it unless they are 100% sure they an satisfy most of the concerns.

That's the keyword "potentially".

List these details you talk about? Did we read different posts?

And whether it is brand new people or people who haven't played in years and just come back your points still hold weight. Ignore Tappin I don't think they are willing to listen to anything except the idea should be abandoned. Apparently their game play would be extremely affected somehow.

I am really interested in how this would ruin "your game experience". Are you worried that your named mobs will be stolen by FTE fast autobots? Or do you like PLINg toons a lot out of group? I think its very easy to put in a fix that allows out of group help. They just add an Ally tag that lets you tag folks as friends who can then dps on the mob. They would have to have an answer to the autobots but I have no idea what the solution would be other then you have to have been killing the PH that spawn the named.

I have seen extremely few "championing it" more just saying lets see the details first. Is that championing?

If you are buffed with higher level buffs and dying maybe pull a bit less. I think most folks can handle not dying with good buffs Assuming they have some idea of playing their toon and if they don't it will be a good learning experience.

Maybe they plan a big crackdown on the cheaters in advance? Maybe they made a deal again with the folks that write the programs?

They have talked a lot about cheating (well for DB a lot) and fighting it so I would think they are taking that into account when designing this system. Now maybe they didn't think of this. While it is seriously possible I would like to hope it is not the case.

And lets think of what is more reasonable

1) they just randomly decided to develop FTE for a TLP without any complaints about KSing so like zero data to support their decision.
2) they have information telling them there is a problem and to be honest they may have been worried it would cause them more problems then it solved. If they are going to do it now they either think they have it figured out or they are willing to use 1 TLP to test it out and see if the juice is worth the squeeze..

So if its number 1 I am afraid very afraid. But 2 seems a more reasonable assumption though it is possible the ones making the decisions on FTE got some bad drugs I guess and 1 is indeed the answer.


At this point, if I were them, I would ensure the FTE code can be disabled and then throw a poll at some point on whether to keep it. Just add an off switch to the FTE code. Since they talked about some features possibly coming to Live they may have already coded things with the idea in mind of being able to turn on or off modules being used in the new TLP.

I'd personally like to see no OOG healing or buffs for the entire time that a character, group or raid has an NPC locked.

This whole "holding mobs hostage" notion fascinates me. Playing a Bard I'm imaging slapping a mezz on a mob and standing there waiting to be paid. Now let's say that there's another Bard or an Enchanter standing there waiting to aggro and engage despite someone else paying me off.

I suspect that attempting to pull a stunt like that will get some CS action and it'll be a lot more actionable than some yoyo training people since the hostage taker is obviously having to use /tell or something to communicate ransom demands and likely will be standing there right up to the point where the GM's kick them from the game and suspend or ban their account.

I have to assume they have data (because it would be too scary if they were doing this without any data to support it) but yes it would have been nice for them to say " So we want to try an FTE server and this is what we are trying to do and why". But there seems to be some rationale at DB that tells them it would be bad to spell things out too much in advance. Part of the concern could be that they would only hear from the vocal minority here on the boards. Though for something this big I would have sent an email out to all registered accounts with either details or linking back to the forums.

I dream of learning the rationale of all their decisions on changes they have made with the game. I find it fascinating, yet frustrating, because we rarely have enough data to make an educated guess.

I wonder if some one has ever written a book comparing how different game companies make decisions in design and ongoing support of games?

Its a 2 for 1 deal for me. I get to play EQ then also play at figuring out why DB does what it does with EQ. Both are fun tho having some data in the figuring out game would be spiffy

My concerns have nothing to do with KSing. Later expansions they added 2 groupable mobs, currently anyone doing that content can still use mercs with FTE that will no longer be possible.

I don't think they thought FTE through.

Pretty disappointing that they haven't posted any further information yet. I think it took 4 days for them to amend the mangler ruleset. Even if all they said was 'no significant changes to the ruleset are forthcoming' then we could plan for next month

To give DPG/DBG some grace here, they posted the original letter last Wednesday. The following weekend was the Easter holiday in America / other countries that recognize it. Having worked in all kinds of different office environments, I can tell you that the Friday before a holiday weekend is usually a wash and some companies give it off as a holiday (ie: my city didn't do trash pick-up that day). If Friday's a holiday, that means for some people Thursday is the perfect day to take off. So now we're into this week where Monday is also a holiday in some territories—like the UK—so it's possible their whole team wasn't back in office until Tuesday at the earliest. (I know DPG is based out of San Diego, but I'm not sure if their remote policy extends beyond the US.)

However, even if the entire team was there Thursday, Friday, and Monday, that would still only make this a week and some change since the announcement. Accendo commented on Thursday that they were reading all of the feedback and would be coming back with more information. Presuming that DPG doesn't work weekends, they probably spent at least all day Mon/Tues reading over the commentary from the weekend since there were still new ideas/new comments/new feedback coming through.

It also just takes time to make sure these things land properly. There's almost 150 pages of posts between this thread and the thread in the TLP Forums. If they just rush out some half-baked response to appease the wait crowd, then it could be even worse in terms of player sentiment. Additionally, this is a fairly involved change they're making to a central game system with Encounter Locking. There's been tons of discussion on the topic just from forum-users, imagine how much there's been internally. I could be wrong (and I definitely am on occasion), but I think that the response we'll end up seeing will have a good amount of discrete detail to try and address as many questions as they possibly can mechanically. They want to make sure it lands correctly so the success of Oakwynd isn't impacted any further.

When Mischief was announced released there was many people complaining.
Today it is popular server.
I remember people complained as well for AA autogrant, the new loot system…
I don’t understand what so precious in the PL system.
The fact that you can level toon using damage shield for folk not in the group does not sound an intended gameplay.

The Mischief ruleset announcement has a grand total of 11 pages of discussion on it - by the way a super popular server with tons of interest. This one and the Feedback thread have crossed over 100 for Oakwynd discussion. To say that there was a similar number of people complaining is just an outright lie.

There have been things people have been wrong about in the past, sure, but those things that added to the gameplay they did not detract from the gameplay or take away things we previously had entirely. Pickzones, AoCs, AA autogrant, advanced loot. So far the only possible addition anyone has been able to tell me about this change to FTE is it "may" stop AoE powerleveling.

No one cares about open world mobs. There hasn't been actual competition for these mobs in years. Every server there is one guild who kills the open world stuff and the rest just stick to instances. Though I will say, my guild did kill the occasional open world mob on Mischief because it happened to be up and on our way to our next raid and yeah, it had been up for hours because no one cares about open world mobs anymore.

Holy crap, you just invented FTE-arbritrage (barditrage?)! Its like a synthetic CDO of a CDO. I'm going to go out and create some new short positions right away. I wasn't planning on playing a bard again but now I might have to!

Fjord - Yelinak bard

I'm thinking Bard/Wizard duo. Wiz tags with Staff of Temperate flux and maybe drops a snare then the Bard can perma mez almost immediately.

if this is implemented as written, we’re back to sitting on raid boss spawns in window for hours and hours. what would once have been “first to present a sufficient force” ie rewarding organization, large groups, and batphoning, would now turn into rewarding those guilds that contain members who can go the longest without sleep and exploit (macros, stacking insta nuke clickies, kiting all over geometry) better, while they wait for their force to arrive. the thing is, these two winners are more than likely the same guilds

huge step backwards. the old way was flawed, but this idea doesn't address those issues

just make it so we can dz on alts if you want to make it more accessible, or allow us to create picks or something. those aren't great ideas either but I just can't see what fte is trying to solve that required such a heavy handed gamewide change