It's time to remove group xp penalties.

1: Making a new server restricted to single account owners is not only ludicrous, it wouldn't do a thing to encourage grouping. There is already a bonus to experience the more characters vs mercenaries are in a group. IF one wants 100% of the experience, one gets it when soloing! Grouping means SHARING the experience! It doesn't mean treating each character as if they were playing solo! What next? Each mob drops 100% of the loot for each character in the group?

2: As a single account owner, I have absolutely NO objections whatsoever to other players multi-boxing their characters! I have NO budgetary constraints and could afford 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Gold accounts, yet I choose to maintain a single account. Why in the world ANYONE would actually object to other players who choose to utilize multiple accounts to play Everquest is not only mind-boggling, it is utterly ridiculous! I play with players who multi-box. I play with players who have a single account. I play with those players because I choose to do so! I choose to do because a) I've played with those players and trust them to put effort into the group and b) when I group with a player for the first time presuming the grouping was fun, that player is added to "friends" list for future play.

3: IF a player isn't willing to expend the effort to make a circle of friends, be it in a guild setting or merely by broadening a "friends" list, that player has NO one to blame beyond themselves. Intimating that it's those "nasty, old multi-boxer's" fault is downright laughable.

4: EverQuest has ALWAYS had players with multiple accounts who multi-boxed their characters! Always. Intimating that "back in the day" things were different is simply not true.

5: The complaint "I cannot find a group!" also dates back to the very beginning of EverQuest. Fourteen years later it's still there; usually for the same reasons it was there fourteen years ago! To dispel a myth which may still be extant. Groups do NOT fall from the sky! One has to put in an effort to seek them out! One also needs to put some effort into the group one joins! That means doing something to help the group! That does NOT mean joining a group and then immediately begin looting every corpse before it hits the ground! That does NOT mean joining a group then going AFK unannounced for the next 30, 60, 90 minutes! That means joining a group and actually KNOWING how to play the character you're playing! Casting Dispel Magic on a mesmerized mob repeatedly will NOT win you a lot of future group mates.

6: It has already been said, but I shall say it again. People play this game in a myriad of ways which suit their play style and their play time. People who have difficulty finding a group possibly need to take a critical look at themselves, perhaps question themselves about just what it may be that seems to prevent them from finding and re-finding groups. Question yourself! Tossing the "blame" on multi-boxes, or those who choose to solo or molo is just plain silly.

Did you read the OP?

I suggested leaving solo exp EXACTLY how it is right now.

This is not an argument of it being too hard to find a group. This is an argument of there being no reason TO group.

I'd just like to see group xp more similar to solo xp. This is not a discussion of loot, multiboxing, etc... this is a discussion of whether grouping is a viable alternative to solo exp, and in it's current state my opinion is that it is not.

The math behind the group exp split is sound, but there are not any zones with sufficiently densely populated mobs to make the increased kill speed overcome the decreased xp per person per mob. Pick a zone, any zone, and I guarantee a half decent group will have it cleared to the point of 30-40second pulls (even with a bard pulling) within 5 minutes. Now it's not a question of exp per mob, but instead a question of how long it takes the mob to get pulled to the group, or how long it takes the group to move to the mob.

You can not have a serious discussion about grouping without including loot and multiboxing.

They're both big reasons why people don't group. XP is just a small part of it and likely a part that isn't as askew as multiboxing or the fact people are unwilling to share loot.

For groupers, solo XP is actually quite low compared to the past.

My druid that gained plenty of XP solo a few expansions ago would have a whole lot of issues trying to solo in some of those new zones.

Raiders is another story, solo raiders benefit from very high AA XP when they solo because the AA system allows people to exploit their raid gear way too much.

A raid Wizard or raid Necro has no reason to group for AA at all.

I don't understand why you insist on talking about multiboxing when this thread is about exp splits.

I don't play a druid so I'm sorry I can't help you solo better.

Because you make a story that is very complex into a simple story and think a simple solution like increasing group XP will make people group more.

The same multiboxers will multibox.

The same guild cliques will clique.

The same family cliques will clique.

The same people who don't need to group will solo. Raid wizard, raid necro, raid beast.

Increasing group XP will not give people who didn't group before suddenly the opportunity to group. You need to be willing to look at the real reasons, and those reasons are not XP. Group XP is actually fine outside of a few specific raid classes that can solo much too easily.

Sure. But XP is certainly the reason I DONT group right now. In it's current state I don't even LFG, because there's no reason to. I don't care about multiboxers, cliques, and families, what I care about is the fact that if I could join a group with 5 clones of myself, I'm going to get less exp per hour than if I play solo. That's just wrong on a fundamental level with Everquest.

From my experience this is only true in a very few specific cases.

-low level characters with a merc, maybe they should increase grouping XP at those very low levels

-high level raid classes that can solo too easily, wizard and necro specifically

I know that soloing on my bard, warrior, enc, cleric, rogue and druid (all group gear lvl 90+) yields much lower XP solo than in a group. The only exception might be my wizard, but again, these are exceptions and the issue is the class in combination with raid gear.

Why do you keep saying that? For many classes in group gear ... solo XP is exponentially higher than group xp. It isn't just solo raiders who xp faster, it's solo groupers. Including my group geared soloing: necro, sk, bard, ench, druid, wizard, and ranger. Solo/moloing is also faster for the group geared ber and rog.

Oranges ... please re-read the above.

Your insistence that only a few select RAID GEARED classes solo for fast xp is disingenuous at best.

You must not play your druid, bard, ench, and rogue very well then ....

None of my characters have raid gear ... and I have 3 of the 4 classes you just listed.

They solo remarkably well in GROUP GEAR - enough that they get xp faster than grouping. They don't solo xp as well as my ranger, necro, wizard, or SK ... but they still take a massive XP hit every time they join a group.

I quit playing EQ in early 2007, mostly because I got tired of sitting in the GLobby for 3 or 4 hours a night LFG. Now I didnt have to be LFG, I'm a necro and could have solo'd every night for excellent exp. I didnt want to, I wanted to group, not for social reason, for loot. Cause at the time a group geared necro wasnt gonna solo jack that dropped level appropriate loot.

Two things brought me back to EQ last year, Mercs and getting access to my ex-wifes account. Multiboxing with mercs has made the game fun for me again. I group some too, but I don't HAVE to. I flatly refuse to group with strangers, I don't have time for the drama or incompitence. I expect everyone I group with to be as well or better geared than me and to know their class inside and out. Therefore I group with friends or multibox. I pay for two accounts, I have the right to play them any way I want within the confines of the rules.

Sadly any players who want a grouping experience like existed in 1999 or the early 2000s are just out of luck, that game is gone and it's not gonna come back.

Man, I'm a telepath.

How else could I know you played multiple characters and wanted an unwarranted big boost to group experience?

Solo experience is faster? Oh really? How do you propose to molo up to 6 characters at once?? You can't, not effectively. But if SOE unfairly increased the already existing group experience advantage you'd be golden.

No thanks. Your situation us exactly why IMO there needs to be more instanced solo content, more takes a group but only one gets flagged events, more situations requiring players to continuously attend to characters rather than engage macro cruise control.

It's hardly a character advancement game through in-game effort RPG when some BUY advantage with RL money. And then ask for even more advantage? Lol. Too hard to level or AA your box crew? Play one character at a time - it encourages grouping unlike your scheme.

BTW I'm in raid gear and grouping to do the Partisan, Merc, Hero, and collection kill tasks to accumulate huge amounts of exp and AA (I'll be throwing away AA for the rest of this expansion) is so much faster than soloing it's silly.

There seems to be some insistance that this idea was to increase experience gained for people who box and/or a nerf to people who solo. Which isn't true. It's simply a way to reward people for grouping. That being said, some restrictions may need to be placed so that people dont just add someone and afk them to recieve said bonus.

Yeah I read the OP... I wasn't speaking in reaction to any one comment, just making a general comment based on the topic.

Oh please, a group bard, war, rogue or enc gets way better XP in a group than solo unless the group is terrible.

I can hardly kill a single mob solo on my group warrior without dying, and it sure as hell is not because I don't play well, I know perfectly well what classes are capable of.

Don't bs people, I have had my characters long enough to know when someone is saying bs, and you are. You are straight up telling lies here.

In fact even when my warrior had raid gear I couldn't kill anything solo, and if I did want to solo I would need to go several expansion down to even kill a mob. And that was with all stops out, furious with a 2 hander hoping the mob dies before I do.

And while a rogue can solo somwewhat against dark blues if the expansion lends itself to it thanks to assasinate, it's not exactly good xp, a good group is again way better XP.

A bard, again, group XP is way better. Charm kiting or swarming is pretty dreadful XP compared to a good group.

A druid would be the only class out of those you named that can get XP that is somewhere close to an average group if they're lucky, a good group will net you more XP. But this requires a good zone with animals to make charm work, like Alkabor, which in fact many expansions don't even have.

Stop lying.

You apparently don't know quite as much as you think, because bard and chanters are amazing soloists, rogues can assassinate. Warriors can probably xp faster in a group but the others, not even close.

That's right, rogues can assasinate. You know how many levels and zones you have to go down to do this?

Let me give you the most beneficial example. Blackburrow from SOD, you can assasinate almost every mob there.

But here's the kicker, the moment a rogue could actually assasinate there was not in SOD, but one expansion later, in Underfoot because of the level AA uncap. At that time you were killing mobs several levels below you and even raid geared rogues were FAR better off getting a good underfoot group or Old bloodfields group than soloing in BB.

As a matter of fact I leveled in Blackburrow for one level, I had max rogue's fury, max assasinate, and max knave's return and double riposte to fire the backstab, I pulled whole trains of mobs with LOTD, and used my riposte disc every time it was up, group XP was still WAY better XP than solo.

And this is with the best example of a zone I can find, there is no other zone where assasinate works so well as in blackburrow I know of (thalassius would be a close second), it's an excellent zone for assasinate, and still group XP was way better.

You obviously do not know how to charm kite properly. Charm kiting is some of the best xp you can earn in the game when done correctly.

Having said that, group XP is still amazing when you have a full group going full bore with a bard chain pulling so that there is always a mob in camp and the mana classes ooc med through a mob or two when the go oom. Especially if a chanter is in the group with their amazing xp aura.

People in this thread complaining about group xp has never really been in a good xp group.

Double riposte doesnt give you two backstabs on a riposte, just two pierces.

Assassination has been an excellent way for Rogues to level and AA for some time now. Anyone who claims it isn't clearly missed how completely worthless as a solo class Rogues were for like the first decade of EQ (or they have been spoiled from being PL'd)

The only real hang-up since then was during VoA you had to complete significant group progression before you could grind your AA's. I'm glad that horrible blunder was not repeated.