Don't Nerf Mearatas (yet)

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by gotwar, Feb 12, 2019.

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  1. Rowanoak Elder

    Words of Wisdom to help with the final 25 percent....
    gotwar likes this.
  2. Gherig Addicted since Aug 1st, 1998

    Underfoot was really hard for Casuals even at the entry level zone. Mob density was crazy packed, pull one get 3-6 every time in most zones. Each mob had crazy high AC and way too many HP's. This was the era the killed the game for anyone wanting to solo or duo. So those people quit and went to EQ2 or WoW. You lost a big chunk of loyal players because someone at SOE thought raid boss quality trash mobs in the very first exp zone was a great new trend and you haven't learned your lesson even to this day.

    If you haven't figured it out yet you have a captive audience. You dont need to make trash and EXP mobs mini raid mobs to keep them playing. They didn't quit 10 years ago they wont quit today. Stop chasing your casual players away every expansion.
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  3. Maedhros High King

    There are probably dozens of posts about this. There is no way you will ever get me to agree that it would be good for the game to reduce the player limit on raids. Just as I assume I will never convince you that the guilds that struggle to recruit are a victim of their own inability to beat raids. Good guilds that beat content do not struggle to recruit. Simple as that.
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  4. Cicelee Augur

    Hey I never said it was a good idea to reduce 54 to 42 or 36. But I would be nieve to not understand the issues of guilds 16-50 who struggle to field 54.

    And yes I agree that those guilds can do a number of things (combine guilds or form alliances being the easiest to get to 54 ASAP) but that doesn't mean they want to do it. It is hard for many to change- humans, in general, prefer the status quo and do not care for change. My point was that a 42/36 man raid force helps guilds 16-50, and hurts guilds 1-15. That is as close to a statement of fact that a guess can be...
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  5. Kamilah New Member

    Mercenaries were introduced in the SoD expansion, which hurt the game all by itself. More people were able to box/molo, killing the community somewhat. I can remember some people leaving the game just because of mercs.
  6. Whulfgar Augur

    Way I see it .. Nothing's wrong with the number of players per raid .. or the raid content ..

    And absolutely nothing's stopping raid guilds 16-50.. from Merging .. guild raid alliances or the like ..

    Way I see it most officers of guilds (16-50) simply don't want to merge nor guild raid alliance because they want that "officer" tag .. no matter what .. an if a merge does anything to jepordize said "O" tag, they will do / say anything to negate that as an option. Thus putting their own ego's want of power in a game .. over some one some where some time .. over the actual guild's benefiting..
  7. Schadenfreude Augur

    Without mercs the game would have ended up in a comatose state possibly even terminal long before progression servers were a thing and the nostalgia crew who don't like them or hadn't ever used them were catered for.

    Even in the current expansion, I am staggered at the number of healers who got all - or most - of their progression done either by being boxed by someone else or entirely from TAs while stood in the guild hall. Others simply ignored progression and didn't bother logging on outwith raid times at all.
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  8. Quill Augur

    SoD -> UF was Fippy for a lot of guilds. You had one raid that was the gatekeeper to get into the raiding of the expansion, while at the same time the game started to move into straight more dps checks(Hi Brath). There were two types of guilds… those that went balls out dps on the high-end, and more control guilds that played regular and didn't exactly push the envelope.

    In a dps guild, you had specialized ways of setting up your keyboard, macros, items and spells to jack the game up, in combination with the normal ADPS stuff, and then the devs thought tuning the raids to require absolute optimal output and that level of play was a good idea. Those that went to the trouble could do it, a lot of others just found other games or things to be doing. Its sad too, because UF raiding was some seriously fun stuff once you got into it. But it walled a lot of people off from the get go.

    Either way, We had a Ranger that explained for everybody on our forums how to roll hard DPS for that class, and it rivaled the wiring schematic for a dynamo. Usually this was prefaced by.. its so easy.

    I wasn't really around for the DoDh -> PoR transition, but didn't that require quite a bit of keying just to get into anything? And Death Knell was about as fun as a root canal. Nothing could log people off faster than calling a DK raid.
  9. Smokezz The Bane Crew

    Please... mercs were a necessary thing. People were already quitting because waiting for a healer for 2 hours sucked. Waiting for a healer for 2 hours then having them be a horrible healer sucked. Waiting for a healer for 2 hours then having them leave 30 mins later sucked.

    Mercs were introduced, then the horrible players had no groups anymore? Wah. The good players still had groups no problem, because mercs were no match for them.

    Oh, and people already boxed prior to Mercs... they just rolled their own healer to avoid the wait for someone logging in. LOL
    Slippry likes this.
  10. Drogba Augur


    I guess that experience differed from person-to-person, server-to-server, guild-to-guild. I built or joined groups all day, every day back then, /w all in any zone i entered, chatted to ppl that i saw hunting alone or in groups that appeared to have an open spot to hopefully later join in. I had friends on the same server that had troubles finding groups though, might have been how energetic you were at making it happen. Certainly had more opportunities as a tank/puller/cc class.
    Jondalar likes this.
  11. Orbital101 Augur

    PoR was some what over tuned for a long while. Assent was the first guild to beat Sullon Zek and spent weeks trying to beat the Tolling of Dissonance Bells before anyone could get in there to support our claim that it was over tuned. But as a non betaing guild I guess we dint had enough impact and had to wait for other guilds to catch up which I think was the main reason Kaidman disbanded Assent lol.
  12. Smokezz The Bane Crew

    On E'ci (not sure if it was merged with Tunare yet at the time), groups were fading fast at the time. A Rogue was that "Person you added once you had the required people".
  13. Bamboompow Augur

    Merging guilds is never fun. Usually we are talking about former rivals/competitors now having to be under the same tag. There were reasons members of guild ABC didn't join guild XYZ and vice versa. Plus there tends to end up being more than a raid requires with people sitting more often. Alliance raiding aleaviates some of those issues to a degree but ultimately there will still be a large amount of sidelined players. Not enough sidelined to keep the guilds autonomous and independent but enough for alliance raids to end up being quite a bit of continual cherry picking. Especially if both guilds are heavy on any particular archetype of classes.

    So being nonchalant about mergers or alliances? Yah, please don't. Both options are last resort desperation for the most part.
  14. niente Developer

    You are right that the chart doesn't have everything. Contrary to popular belief, for the past few years, EQ's population is relatively stable. The game's population graph over time does not look like this raiding guilds graph.

    We do have some advertising spending for EQ.
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  15. Whulfgar Augur

    Yes, there will no doubt be even in guilds 16 - 50 .. players who perform better then others. This is the nature of the beast.. And as such those with higher skill in class should be the one's who get the raid invites again it should never be any other way if you want a successful guild of any raiding type.



    You do understand in games such as these you do not get a "participation" trophy right ? In most if not all Raid guilds / Raid alliances .. those with more talent then other's as I've said SHOULD .. be the one's getting the raid slots. If you build any other way. You .. your raid force / raid force alliance .. won't be doing anything outside of couple year old content at best..

    Why would you ever want to purposefully handicap yourself like that ?

    Only in the eye's of leadership who want to hold that leadership over others..

    If the price for being able to successfully down TBL raids .. mean's to join with another guild an you lose half your officers they lose half their officers .. an each has officers that stay officers ..

    Why would you ever put the ego's of those who want to maintain their officer status .. above the vast majority of raider's who would like to see current raid content ?
  16. Tucoh Augur

    I'm not one of those people, but there's a lot of people who just want to group up with their buddies and go kill something together and don't really care what they kill. And would rather do that than progress through relevant content with a bunch of new people.

    Personally I think any raid group that doesn't have an eye toward progression is inevitably going to wither, but communities in EQ are very durable.
    Whulfgar likes this.
  17. Aurastrider Augur

    I think some of this is just the nature of things. Someone with better mmo or just gaming knowledge or time to research things could tell you how much competition there was during these drops. I am sure that had something to do with it. It certainly seemed like 2000-2010 era in gaming was mmo after mmo release with everyone trying to cash in on the market. Then you have changes on individual levels that were bound to happen such as marriage, kids, college and the such. I work in healthcare and I can tell you that around the 5 year mark is when we see a lot of nurses go to part time due to having kids. This decline kind of follows this trend.

    Ok obviously these are things you guys mostly have zero control over so how do you keep these players here is the real question? I don't have a good answer for the raid game other than cross server raiding maybe? In terms of just keeping those around with limited playing time I think every expansion needs a good T1 starting zone or two. If casuals can play in at least some of a new expansions content without feeling like they have to go back and do hundreds of hours worth of progression that they don't have to play I think you will get more expansion sales from these folks and keep them engaged longer. Hopefully this will result in more future raiders should these individuals RL situations change and now they have more time to play.
    IblisTheMage likes this.
  18. Whulfgar Augur

    Yes, however the discussion me an the other poster are having, does not include them..
  19. NameAlreadyInUse #CactusGate

    But who is counted in your EQ population graph? Any account? Any account (including free) that has been accessed in a the last year? Only current All Access accounts?

    Raid guilds pretty much require All Access, so I wonder if there isn't more of a correlation between the raid guild graph and a graph of the population of All Access toons?
  20. Aurastrider Augur


    This might be true but I think there are multiple other factors that come into play. Its difficult for your average gamer to continually raid for 20 years. I know a lot of players that have gone back and forth throughout the years from raiding to being more casual due to RL changes that effect their playing time. Also with 20 years worth of content with a lot of it required for high end raid guilds to be completed it starts to narrow down the potential for new blood into a high end guild. Someone ten years ago could catch up to the pack much quicker and show that they are willing to put in the time to be a serious raider than in current EQ. It is still a rather large mountain to climb for someone who is behind on content to try and race through the important milestones needed to be considered for a spot in many raid guilds and this does not even touch on the skill aspect of a player who is willing to put in the time.

    Another factor to consider since it has not been mentioned is are these numbers in relation to the live servers or EQ as a whole? If its just EQ as a whole which includes the TLP servers that population does nothing for end game sustainability as it relates to this discussion. So if overall the player population of EQ is stable but the live servers are declining while the TLP servers are increasing this wont help out any raid graphs on live.

    So how exactly do we get that graph to trend in the other direction is the real question? Some things we have no control over such as individual players moving on for personal reasons. There are two solutions to getting more players at end game to provide more raiders.

    One is in content design which would require something like a fast track quest line that would give the important rewards from an expansion much quicker, a currency to buy important augs needed by a class, and increased xp to help people get caught up. This idea would not sit well with a lot of the players who will basically say people are just being handed things and it goes against the "spirit" of the game.

    The second solution is for raid guilds to try harder in terms of reaching out to lower level players, leveling them, gearing them and trying to get them raid ready. This also comes with its own setbacks such as people quitting before they are useful to the guild, players leaving the guild after the guild helps them, or the player might not actually turn out to be a good raider.

    I think the solution lies somewhere in between something with the design and how raid guilds approach new recruits. DBG needs to create a reasonable solution to get players into end game content and raid guilds need to do as much as they can to get these people there that want to raid. If neither side budges that graph is only going to keep heading in the wrong direction.
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