Raid instancing - an expansion behind

Ok, I know there's technically already a thread regarding Holly's recent tweet about the raid zone populations and whatnot (https://forums.station.sony.com/eq/index.php?threads/hollys-new-tweet-about-raid-zones.223628/) but that thread has somewhat nosedived into rants about TL and all sorts of other nonsense. But if there's a need to ball this in over there, I get it, I just figured it'd be missed with all noise unrelated to the actual topic.

When we had the massive "raid instancing" discussion shortly after this round of TLPs was announced, one idea that got tossed around a bit was instancing raids an expansion behind. It's somewhat understandable that instancing current (for us) content that has never before been instanced might be an issue, especially when a sizable chunk of the community wants the race and competition from open-world targets.

Let's leave that alone, as it seems the devs want the competition aspect of old-school raiding to be in game. Many of us were also already content to sit an expansion behind for raiding.

The problem is the number of us wanting to raid, and even the number of us planning on raiding an expansion behind. This was going to be a problem no matter what, but is worsened by the size of the server (more than double the number of simultaneous logins of any other EQ server ever).

People who want to raid want to see, experience, and get loot from the raids while they are still relevant. Not "wait until Luclin releases and then you'll be able to maybe kill golems in Fear, but probably not" or "wait until PoP to raid Hate, when all of the loot is obsolete due to current group gear"

I'm bringing this back up as a possibly palatable solution to the hardcores (who really won't be affected much by this), the devs (who want to keep the race/competition aspect alive for old stuff), and the "midcores" (who want to raid but either don't want to or cannot compete with the hardcores) Because this idea seems to have been completely dropped to the wayside in recent discussions but was a completely sensible idea and had some support before instancing was removed as a possibility (until recently)

I'd be fine with this.

Edit: I would whip out my credit card and buy all of the stuff from the other thread and wod send Holly a fruit basket if this is announced.

Completely equitable solution and I think it kills a lot of the drama.
Racers get to race and casuals do not have to put up with the drama but can still do content while it is relevant.

This was suggested also months before the TLPs actually went on line and of course ignored in favor of "its not classic"

Lets see if they take their heads out of the sand this time around

Another thread about stuff that's already been mentioned, can't wait for this one to be locked.

its not equitable at all. there is no reason to instance behind the current expansion that cant be applied to the current expansion.

It's a compromise that might make the idea more palatable to DBG. So maybe not perfectly equitable, but definitely something I'm comfortable with.

Apparently you think you can speak for all the developers, do you work for DBG or something? The only person who I've seen say what you are saying is Roshen. And I do not believe he can make any decision like this on his own. Please don't put words in other peoples mouths; peoples minds and opinions change as they see the current situations unfolding in front of their eyes.

Not only does implementing raid instancing but only an expansion behind mean even additional work on top of raid instancing, it does not fix many of the core problems that plague the server (that will become even worse in future expansions). What makes you think people on a progression server want to progress behind everyone else? I don't know about everyone else, but I think this idea is terrible.

I do support full expeditions/dynamic zones for raid targets/zones so we can have proper instancing of levelling zones with raid targets and to reduce the ever increasing toxic atmosphere of this server.

Inb4 lock.

It doesn't solve any of the logistical problems nor does it solve the problem that it takes a lot of dev time to create the instances. And if you are going to spend all that time and effort to create the instances, there's no reason not to do it for the current expansion.

I haven't seen anyone (dev) say that instancing was a logistical or capability problem in quite a while. The only objections from DBG are "should" rather than "could" in the past few weeks.

I agree. This idea does nothing to alleviate any dev time problems. Instancing an expac back only serves to help with the cognitive dissonance on the dev side. If that's all we can get, I'll take it

I do agree with that, but preserving "the race" seems important for some reason, and that's apparently (?) not preserved with the expedition system.

I'm not putting words in anyone's mouth. Roshen's comment when he locked the big instancing thread back in April:

Roshen didn't say "I feel," he said "we feel".

DBG has said SEVERAL times since the announcement of new progression server that they wanted to keep the the open world competition in game to keep the server as close to how EQ progressed originally as they possibly could.

So IF, for the sake of argument, that is indeed the case (and if you look there is plenty of evidence to back up that claim without direct quotes) and the devs are categorically against instancing current expansion raid targets, then isn't Bandok's rehashed proposal the next best option? It's the best option I have read and is the option that is most likely to please the most amount of people.

Who really cares what devs have to do to please their customer base? If anything I blame DBG, who really is Sony with a new name since all the people are the same, for not learning from the last time they tried to launch a game more than a decade after original launch.

MMO players have matured, and gained skill, and have found every little crack/nook/questionable practice there is to advance their toons and have done so in every game that's been released since EQ was originally. DBG really should have known better considering they have mountains of data from Fippy and Vulak....

They have already delved away from classic by allowing Kronos and instancing of classic zones. The economy of Ragefire is already disgustingly screwed up due to the instancing and use of kronos as currency. There is already too much gear on the server for it's age. They have already broken away from classic. It's time to please the majority their consumers like every other company out there.

I think it's fair to say that the community is certainly divided between those that want to have access to the content without having to go through another guild to experience it and those who play with the intention of making sure that those players are denied that access, which is leading to confusion as to the PvE aspect of the server.
I don't think Daybreak can please one group without upsetting the other and they can't co-exist on the same server, Whatever Daybreak does they risk losing subs or at least witnessing a bunch of "I'm cancelling my x# of accounts over this" posts on these forums.

OP's idea was suggested before and I thought it was a good one, it was also suggested that content become instanced after 2 or 3 months to allow players to attain server firsts and farm/lock down/compete for a period of time before opening the content to everybody. I liked this idea better, I believe it would keep more people interested/subbed for a longer period of time.
I truly want Daybreak to make money of this, I'd like to be playing here 5yrs from now with a healthy population. It would be awesome if these servers are still attracting new and re-subs in 5yrs but the way things are now, it doesn't look so good but Daybreak are making changes to try and please more people and keep them around longer, something that didn't happen on 2.0

As far as instancing screwing the economy, I have trouble understanding that statement. Instancing should be driving the price of in-game items down as more people have access to actually going and getting the items themselves. I guess that over time and as the community levels up and realizes that they can get it all themselves then the economy will stabilize and prices will drop. What you're seeing now is a mad krono grab with people trying to fund their accounts/teams for an extended period of time.
When prices drop (as they should) then it will get harder to fund your account using krono so right now they are the hot commodity. On 2.0 we had triple station cash and half price weekends that allowed people to sub yearly at a ridiculously low price, cant do that this time so it's krono

Instancing 1 or 2 expansions behind is something most of us would agree on. I know we've talked about this idea a lot on team-speak in TL. In all likelihood it's the best solution possible. But I really doubt they're going to set up the infrastructure for it.

I am an anti-instancer. With that said, if it is ONE or more expacs behind, I wouldn't mind.

Really pumped to hear you say that.

I'd argue for a 1 expansion back though. No trak till luclin is

I think it should be 2 expansions behind, but start in Kunark so it's temporarily 1 expansion behind. Since typically the most current and second to most current expansions often bleed together as 'top tier'

IMO make it 2. Up until... SoFish (maybe an expansion sooner) raid loot from the previous expansion surpasses group loot from the current. Aka it is still relevant to raiding guilds (esp mid tier raiding guilds who need the extra power from new spells/lvls to beat content) With a 2 expansion delay this isn't as noticable.

I remember top Zek guilds being 2-3 full expansions behind live when I started playing again during TSS. IMO that was a good thing for them. The raid gear they were obtaining was still better than group gear and they had a plethora of content ahead of them to tackle. Remember one of the guilds beating the King to access FC the day before the lvl cap increased and it was a big accomplishment to them. Also raiding top tier of previous expansion + starter tiers of new expansion to gear up faster.

*EDIT*

ya beat me to it.

Please use the existing threads available to discuss this topic. Thanks!