Mangler Player Stepping Out (Cancellation)

This is absolutely untrue, and at this point is becoming some sort of overwrought nostalgic myth. There were plenty of toxic people back in the day. There are plenty of wonderful and helpful people still playing. The community largely does not feel any different to me now than it did in the early days. The only difference now is the technology involved.

Was pretty sure it wasn’t $9.99, thought $9.95 but the $9.89 is logical!

The mythical community of EQ players that have all died out and went to a better place. Yet everyone on the TLP always claims they have been playing for 15-20 years and miss the good old days.

Gets confusing, because both groups would be the same players.

I don't want to give the impression I don't think there are real problems currently. I just very clearly recall people being petty, KSing, training, griefing jerks as far back as I remember ever playing.

Also people hanging around newbie zones just to hand out minor upgrade gear and give advice and toss out buffs for free and what have you. I think most people who play this game are decent people who just want to have fun and are willing to help others. I just don't agree that the bad people have only shown up recently since SOE/DBG/Krono/Whatever is the bugaboo of the moment.

Also, as ever, there is far more petty, jerk, troll nonsense here on these boards than there ever is in-game heh

Yes, a million times yes! The sad irony of this statement is of course the exact people that NEED to reflect on their immaturity are the same ones that never will. It is exactly WHY they are 40yo manchildren. They never figured out how or cared to self-reflect and treat others kindly.

It is crazy how many of those people play EQ though....

I feel the OP's pain on this - there's nothing worse than camping Frenzy only to have a group of 3+ mages pick hop into your camp and insta-burn the mob you've been waiting hours for. Obviously, this is a result of an over-informed EQ community and also an unintended consequence of picks, but something that I doubt DBG will ever really look to resolve.

The best idea I've been able to come up with for how to resolve this would be some sort of in-game feature that recognizes a particular person or group at a particular "camp" and gives that person or group exclusive rights to the mobs designated in that camp.

The "camp" could be defined as a rough area that encompasses a group of mobs. The game mechanic would give every mob in that "camp" a specific tag that it can only be attacked by members in the group that "have the camp". Now, this defined "camp" wouldn't be exactly like the camps we roughly agree upon today, but they would protect the high-value mobs and maybe some others - but not all of them.

Since Lguk is everyone's favorite griefing zone, I'll use that as an example.

So, for the "Frenzy" camp, we almost all agree that the camp consists of obviously the frenzy area, sentinel area, and all of the randoms until you get to the main hallway by the safehall.

Now, my solution would be that the game would recognize the area roughly around Frenzy and Sentinel as a "camp" and all of the mobs that fall within that camps' bubble, would only be available to the group that "has the camp".

So, in order for a group to "attain a camp" they need to park themselves, and stay, within that camps' particular boundary - obviously there would need to be some timers and whatnot setup to prevent stupid stuff. No group can attain more than (1) camp at a time and you cannot loot anything from mobs designated as being in that "camp" unless you were in the group at the time the mob was killed.

Below is kind of an idea of what I would do for Frenzy and Hamlord:



Now, all of the mobs located within the shaded ovals will be protected for each camp, but the ones not in the ovals will be up for grabs.

Also, maybe, say you are at Hamlord and there is no one at Frenzy, their mobs are all FFA until a group moves in.

Just my 2 cents.

Unfortunately its a sign of the times. People do not treat others with the same respect they treat themselves with, or in some cases people do not care about how they treat others at all due to many factors not worth listing here. All this has carried over into the internet and EQ(and any other online gaming community).

Pretty sure this would just make bot armies harder to detect as they could now hold down camps with appropriate force instead of needing overwhelming force to overcome people trying to KS them.

The solution to this problem is better enforcement. Is that possible? I don't know. It seems a large ask at this point in time.

Fundamentally changing game mechanics has both the problem of unintended consequences (like simply making it easier to permacamp a spawn in this case) and of utilizing development time that could be more effectively used elsewhere.

Sure, if someone wins the lottery, buys the company, and changes the way they fundamentally via EQ.

I know and spoke with many of the individuals who were banned. Yeah, I have shady friends, some of them got mulitple groups of 6 accounts perma banned and were eventually IP banned. Other individuals also came forward and admitted they had botted and were perma banned. The Devs are also very active on the EQ2 Discord and stated that botters were being perma banned. The EQ2 folks aren't messing around.

They used to turn a blind eye to the botting in EQ2 as well, but they saw the damage it does to the community and cracked down on it on the TLEs. They still basically ignore it on live servers.

You can join the discord server for the EQ2 program pretty easy. Ask them what they think of botting on the new EQ2 TLE and they will start taking bets on how long it takes you to get perma banned. 2 weeks seems to be the favorite. If they can do that there, they could do it here.

You're last statement is so true. One game i play off and on with EQ is CSGO (Counter Strike Global Offensive) and that usually makes the EQ community seem like a bunch of nuns. CSGO is tooooooooxic. But you got to learn to let people go. Mute them. Ignore them. Whatever to separate yourselves from the toxic manchildren or children. If you can't, the next best thing is leaving the game and playing single player ones for a while.

Not being a jerk, but that's a terrible idea and would be extremely tedious to implement. Besides, DBG (nee SOE) has said repeatedly that they don't recognize camps.

Not sure how people haven’t figured it out by now

Lots of people prefer and are so obsessed with Classic start TLPs because they’ve been playing this game 20 years and know exactly how to exploit the economy to their advantage, and many of them do it for RMT gains. They don’t care that you’re upset or unhappy, they will keep doing this until EQ1 is a smoldering hole in the ground and then move on to the next game.

How anyone could think it’s fun to have a level 50 cap and be stuck in a relatively small game world with only 2 or 3 legit zones to hunt in at high levels, with hundreds/thousands of people competing for the same limited content is a strange and difficult concept for me

Selos had a Luclin start, I still leveled in Guk, SolA, the hole and countless other zones. You don’t need a classic start to hunt and experience those things, so unless your a simpleton or an RMTer, I don’t understand the appeal to be honest.

Then when you factor in that you have some of the worst of the worst players sprinkled into that, with no jobs and infinite amounts of free time to play and exploit the situation, it’s just crazy to me why anyone would willingly participate in that when there are better options

You can also play a role in making it harder on the RMTers by simply not buying things from them. My guild does this successfully on Selos, you see the mouth breathing neckbeards exclusively selling all types of items they’ve monopolized. They made a fortune and then use that fortune to buy up any and all of that item type so they can control the market price

We simply don’t buy from them and just use the auction/ooc to find items and buy them.

Selos isn’t all roses either mind you, its the first server I’ve ever seen where the bazaar only ever has a few of 1 item, even though it’s a server that has higher rare spawns, and the price of some of those items goes UP over time because of market manipulators

When you look in bazaar you see it’s the same mouth breather selling them, 2 or 3 at a time. I caught them with screenshots a few times where they were organizing their Bazaar mule and suddenly I see like 15 of an item for sale from them, then you refresh 15 seconds later and they took all of them down and you only see 1 or 2 listed at some absurd amount of money. The second someone else posts one, they buy it and stash it, forcing you to pay like 8x what the item is actually worth if you want to use the convenience of the Bazaar

Spined seahorse hide belts were like this for awhile, some days you can’t even find one for sale. On coirnav those dropped in price down to like 1200pp, on Selos they’ve gone up from like 3-4K to 9500pp now because of these handful of market manipulators. They’ll even eat losses on items just to keep their hold on the market

They did it with cobalt bracers for awhile too, but now they’ve moved on from Seb so you see tons of those items available now at reasonable prices

But where Selos has the advantage is that you can just simply wait them out with 1 month expansion releases. There are better haste items to get in PoP and even Luclin if you raid, so we simply don’t buy their gear for these insanely artificially inflated prices

They’re trying to do it with Ornate molds too. Higher rare spawn rates and quicker AoC resets mean more items flooding in, but to the casual observer you’d never know it because they’re intentionally hoarding all the items and then massively inflating the prices

You can pay like 30,000pp in the bazaar for ornate leg mold, or pay a normal player 5000 in ooc/auction

It’s literally the same handful of people that are hoarding these items in the bazaar, so it’s easy to avoid buying from them. If you treat them with the disdain they deserve and don’t feed their little RMT scheme, their little virtual empire will collapse

It’s the impulsive, gotta have it RIgHt NOW mindset that keeps these people in business

Selo has the best shitposters, too.

Some people play this game to raid, some people play this game to group, some people play this game to trade skill, and some people play this game because they like economics and it provides an interesting environment that doesn’t work the same way as the real world economies where people who are into that stuff can play with economics. It’s just a different kind of game for them. I’m not sure why someone who likes to play with the economy should be treated like they are a jerk just because they are interested in other things from people who like to raid group and trade skill. It also doesn’t automatically make it an RMT scheme. It’s quite possible that they just like playing an economic game and paying their own subscriptions that way, and in my opinion more power to them. Consider that if they are ‘buying up the market’ that you can still go try to farm the item yourself and it also provides you an opportunity to sell the item you farmed for more than you would have otherwise, so you can actually benefit from them doing this.

Also, some people seem to think that if you just buy things with platinum and not krono, that you can have an effect on krono farmers. It doesn’t since they can just sell you the item for platinum then turn around and buy a krono with they platinum. So unless you decide not to participate in the economy at all, you can’t really prevent it or have a real impact. It would be a shame to isolate yourself that way too, as the economy is one of the cool things about an MMO that makes it a dynamic living world.

Pretty sure I sold those for 3-5 krono on Phinny. I planned on cashing in again on Agnaar but the word was out and they were perma camped by farmers (and maybe botters at that).

You’ll be shocked to learn there are 100s of players that enjoy experiencing the game from the start. They also level, farm, raid, etc. all without any profit from RMT activities or buy items from people who do so.

There is plenty to do for a couple of months before the expansion beside farm hill giants and make posts about farming hill giants. People playing forum quest just don’t try very hard.