Sense Heading - Progression Server Changes

The non-GoD player is going to play PoP/LoY, and then LDoN and then OOW when GoD/OOW comes out.

If GoD comes out with LDoN, then the non-GoD player is going to play PoP/LoY, then LDoN when LDoN+GoD come out, then OOW when OOW comes out.

How does the above negatively effect the non-GoD player in any way?

Because 15 pages of people saying they want to expansions seperate...is 20 people....

On the contrary, allowing 20 people (the estimated amount of people posting that want this to go through) dictate the entire server would just be absurd.

Biggest issue with delaying luclin is making an xpac with no non-raid progression one of the longest.

Saying that GoD is because it's geared toward raiders is like saying PoP is for the very same reason. I'd love to experience GoD as a stand alone expansion... Even if it's a bust and makes me hate life.

We are getting ahead of this. This post is over a year in advance for any change that would affect progression servers as they unlock Gates of Discord and Omens of War.

We DO believe that by both increasing the level cap and opening more areas for players to spread out it would provide a better player experience in that era of content. That being said, the team is aware of feedback from this thread, and we're discussing things internally. While it's entirely possible we won't have an update this week, we are reading posts to gauge how players feel about these updates.

^ this. And the time frames listed are specifically just for the Phinigel server.

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The point of a Sense Heading post is to give you all a sense for where we're heading. We appreciate those of you who have provided constructive feedback in this thread, and been part of discussions about where we're all looking to go with EverQuest progression servers.

can you provide examples of how you believe increasing the level cap and opening more areas would be beneficial? how far do you take that example? the point of these servers is to experience each era of eq, which is almost universally separated into each level increase. no one talks about the PoP to TBS era for example.

the best places to exp to level 70 are in omens of war, and perhaps plane of fire. GoD has its areas to grind out AA in, but once omens hits they are all obsolete. you aren't really opening up any areas, you are simply shifting the player base to a different set of zones.

almost all of the notable raid content in each expansion is instanced, so theres not a real concern in spreading the population out there. in fact, I believe the only open world bottle neck in omens is the signets required for anguish. everything else is raid flagged. in GoD, most of the raid content is instanced, but there are a could of open world choke points. while giving players away around those chokepoints is a good intention, opening omens would just ensure a large chunk of the player base bypasses GoD all together, whether they were for this change or not.

by the time planes of power and GoD hit, the playerbase is not confined anywhere close to the point of needing room to breathe. in fact GoD opens up a slew of great group content with fitting rewards. all while PoP is still relevant, in both the raid and group scene.

To my mind, the best compromise on the Gates/OoW issue is probably something like this:

1. Unlock GoD separately (without raising the level cap yet), but have the time between its unlocking and the opening of OoW be very short (maybe even just six weeks or something).
2. Possibly, cut this period into LDoN's time a bit (so say, 8 weeks in LDoN, then 6 weeks in GoD, with the cap still being 65). With 65 still being the cap, casual groupers will tend to stay in LDoN and PoP regardless during this time (if what I experienced with my server's community on Live in-era was any indication), while core gamers and raiders will sift through into GoD to start attempting the content.
3. Once that time has elapsed, open OoW and continue as planned.

Something like this would give the ahead-of-the-curve raiders an organic window of opportunity for pushing through the content at 65 (and outfitting themselves with some nice new toys for heading into Omens), without enforcing a long wait on people who would rather approach GoD with 70 unlocked instead.

I say this because, if I were playing casually with friends, I wouldn't ask them to touch GoD until 70 was the cap, but if I were in one of the major raiding guilds of the server, I absolutely would crave the chance to approach it with 65 still being the cap, even if we didn't quite finish before Omens got unlocked.

Incidentally, I would recommend something similar for the progression from Seeds -> Underfoot -> HoThule, although since I didn't raid at all during Underfoot's era I would defer to the judgment of other players on that point.

If new special ruleset servers are coming in the next year I could see a lot of people liking GoD + OOW being bundled if they plan to switch to the new one. Its hard to tell how many people want each since no one knows the entire situation a year from now. 5 year exclusive progression servers are long gone. The people playing on phin now that moved from LJ/RF probably would of liked to play velious on LJ/RF before moving here. Never got a chance. Also no one knows the AA rate. Could be a massive 2 expansions worth of AA with slow aa xp or super fast aa xp and not a big deal.

I really dont like the six months of POP because of ldon getting 3 months personally.

Roshen, your quick response is greatly appreciated. I personally do not want to continue to invest time and money into Phinny if DBG is seriously considering opening GoD/OoW together. There is not a single item that justifies this decision. the EQ crew has been around this game for a very long time, and I know for a fact some of them play this game in guilds and raid and do their thing, and for anyone on the team to think that opening them both is a good idea must not be paying attention.

It's pretty obvious at this point how upset just mentioning the possibility of opening both expacs at the same time a lot of the player base is. Please for the love of god have a statement out sometime soon ( like a week or 2) giving a firm stance to where DBG is on this specific topic. I already know a ton of people who are ready to walk if DBG stands by this, and these players are players who have dedicated 10+ years to this game.

As mentioned, it's greatly appreciated that you and the team are stepping up and giving the member base an idea of future plans, and from feedback just about all responses are "great job DBG, extend a couple expacs to make sure PoP is correct, but holy crap please remove all existence of the god/oow expac group release comments and never consider this again, thanks!"

I'm pretty ambivalent about the whole GoD/OOW thing, from talking in my guild most of them are too. Maybe it's because many of us didn't do it the first time around, we don't have that strong desire to re-live it like we did with everything up to PoP. (I personally disliked GoD, but didn't play it post revamp.) Bundle it, don't bundle it, it's not going to upset me either way. Most of the folks I talked to felt the same.

The true irony here is that after the rebalancing and other game changes GoD may be one of EQs best overall expansions for groupers and raiders alike. However, if GoD/OoW share the same unlock schedule then people will almost have to skip over GoD to level up, get two expansions worth of AAs, and gear up to be ready for the next unlock. Like everything else in modern EQ, everything in OoW obsoletes everything before it and the next expansion/unlock assumes you are max level, AA, and in the prior expansions top raid/group gear.

The other irony is that in their current iterations, family/casual/mid tier guilds will find OoW raids much more difficult than GoD raids. Not only will guilds lack GoD gear and AAs, but OoW is when events start punishing entire raid forces for one person missing a mechanic/emote. Then there is time management for raid guilds. Spend too much time in GoD gearing up for OoW and you'll find yourself out of era and falling ever farther behind the lead pack as the servers progress.

Why not having a vote to resolve this issue when the time has come ?

Lockjaw and Ragefire do have a voting system to unlock expansions, it shouldn't be very difficult to organize a vote (including Phinny) when a server reaches end of PoP era to know if the playerbase wishes or doesn't wish to unlock GoD and OoW simultaneously. The quasi-unanimity of the answers in this thread should be reflected in a massive vote. And if one of the three servers, for any unforeseeable reason, accepts a GoD-OoW bundle, it will become an experimental field which will provide interesting feedback and "on the field" testing of issues or points fellow players have raised in this thread.

Democracy wins in the end, and DBG can honestly say they are listening to their playerbase, which is good for business. A true capitalistic dream !

I keep seeing this sentiment or similar expressed in this thread and it makes me sad. Everyone needs to understand post tuned Gates is amazing. It's a super fun expansion and it would be more fun, imo, to do it without Omens tempting you simultaneously. A huge amount of the player base is playing through these post PoP expansions for the first time on Phinny and you should let them experience GoD as a full expansion and not the red-headed step child of Omens.

GoD and Underfoot were my two favorite expacs. I would be really disappointed if I don't get to do GoD in era. It would be nice to attempt it pre-nerf even though that is impossible.

If your goal is to spread people out and give people things to do then bundle LDoN with GoD. Casuals get to mess around with LDoN and raiders get to enjoy GoD.

That is as win/win as it gets.

Roshen I would be in the group that WANTS to know if you want to "keep that plan" or not, if you keep it, then I am gone. I was looking forward to raiding GoD, not to have it watered down. Then I will just play something else. I am ONLY here to experience the expansions while they are still current, else I might as well just play on one of the "dead" live servers and their low pops.

While I appreciate the response, I do feel strongly that something is being held back. I think it might actually be a lot easier for us to give you valid responses that could help you out if we knew what the real motivator is - because most of us just can't understand it as it stands. The idea that players need to spread out in GOD just doesn't make any sense to me and most others, because this expansion - being the last in its level bracket - is backwards compatible, where players can grind its aas even better in pop xp zones, still do LDON, still raid potime and hard ldon raids for meaningful rewards, etc.

Is the problem that you think people quit during GOD and want to prevent that? This concern would hardly be invalid and I don't think you should feel you have to keep that a secret. If that's your concern - so be it! Let's talk about what might make people want to stick it out. I think for some, they intend to finish with POP, and I don't know that they can be saved shy of another TLP server. For some, they don't think they like GOD but they will once they try it - many of the people who find they enjoy the buffed raids should fit this. Finally, for some, hard as it is for me to understand, they don't and won't enjoy GOD.

My contention is that for people who don't enjoy the GOD raid scene after having given it a chance... they won't enjoy OOW much either. MPG trials are even more complicated, and OMM's encounter is more difficult in-era than Tunat post-GOD-fixes. This will creep back with the Vish encounter, and the final Lethar encounter, and encounters really only become more complex on from there. There simply may not be a decent way to save these subs without sacrificing even more who don't want to play on a locked server parked pre-GOD.

For people who do enjoy the GOD scene but may not realize they will or have bad memories, I think the bundling is going to really miss them. They aren't going to suddenly enjoy it more now that it's been made into a trivialized stepping stone to get some qvic molds in order to just jump on to another expansion's superior rewards. Doing the epic BIC questing after OOW's already unlocked, much like doing the LDON aug would be if DON was already unlocked, is not going to feel rewarding - it's going to feel like pulling teeth to get help in places nobody wants to go anymore.

If I am off here, and you are not considering this as a way to alleviate lost subs during Gates of Discord, is there something else I have not thought of? The idea that the expansion is "too difficult" does not mesh AT ALL with the entire direction that these servers have taken. You've buffed Gore to be a real beast at 54 players. You designed a POTM feature that seemed specifically intended to add actual challenge to mobs (rather than regen adding number requirements), and despite all the backlash against it, I think most see the intent behind POTM as to make raids more mechanically tricky and therefore difficult. GOD is already mechanically sound with Inktuta usually at the top of lists of "favorite all time raids" for vets. If you are against GOD's challenge, why are you trying to make pre-GOD content similarly challenging? I, and many others, do not think that you're just dumb or hypocrites - I think you don't actually think the mechanical challenge of GOD is bad, but rather must be worried about something else instead. If that is not people quitting once they're finished POP... just let us know what it is, so we can brainstorm a solution.

While you have time before this change hits, what I'm afraid you don't have is that much time before people's current subscriptions fade. If players are convinced that you are going to take the game in a direction against their wishes. Many players are currently slogging through a Kunark they don't particular enjoy in the anticipation of a Velious they hope they will. I personally intend to trudge my way through a POP I do not think I'll overly enjoy... unless there's no GOD to tackle in era afterwards.

See, for me I've only ever played the original version of GoD. This is my first round of TLPs so I never went through the re-vamped versions so I don't even know the changes that were made. GoD was probably my all time fav expansion, if not probably top 3 for sure. The question is why, well it was an insanely hard expansion, it took very dedicated players to push through it and beat it let alone in a timely manner. GoD was one of the first expacs that really tested my abilities as a monk, and for that it will always be something that stands out in the nostalgia aspect of this game for me. It was super hard, but GoD and a couple other expacs I think are what allowed me to play a monk as good as I do now. One of the main reasons I came over to try TLPs was I wanted to relive some of those nostalgic moments I had so many years ago, and GoD was one of the biggest ones.

As many have already mentioned, by releasing oow with god, you basically eliminate god completely as there just wouldn't be time to prepare for the following expac 12 weeks later.

It's ironic but Velious is actually one of the few expansions that does not raise the level cap but completely trivializes prior raid content. Nobody farms prior raids, you do what you need for epics and move on. Luclin, however, does not actually trivialize Velious - the raids are still worthwhile and can/should be farmed for useful gear, armor farming is valid, factioning worth your time, ring and shawl useful...

Most everyone wants Velious in spite of its effect on classic raids because there just is not enough to do before it to justify waiting. Most rational people recognize that the level jump expansions (POP, OOW, TSS) and basically every one 80+ inflate the game and trivialize earlier stuff. Meanwhile, expansions that do not bump the level range (except Vel) do not remove the value of other content at their level. You want to do Velious while in Luclin. You want to raid Time while in LDON and GOD. You want to do Anguish while in Demiplane and Deathknell.

As a general rule, I always support the last expansion in these larger sets (Luclin, GOD, POR) as the point where you would want to extend the unlock delay IF you're going to extend that unlock.

What would help (a little) is if they allowed players to accumulate AA's in Velious up to 60 or so, so when Luclin launches they can have a nice jump start on them.

No, god no. There are way too many people that are already voicing their opinions on this change who haven't experienced GoD since version 1.0 in 2004 and don't have a full grasp of all the changes and balancing that have taken place to improve it over the years. The devs need to be one the ones to step up and say "This content is balanced for this era, play it", not try to skip over it for some unknown reason.