Players input is often detrimental to the health of a game.

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Strawberry, Jan 29, 2020.

  1. Strawberry Augur

    Warcraft III Reforged, an update to the original game, has been met with disdain online due to a lack of updates to the game.

    Yet at least some elements of the game were not updated in response to #NoChange veteran players who don't want to see the game change in any way.

    It reminded me of EQ. There have been many proposals and mechanics cancelled in the game due to player feedback of veteran players who simply oppose changes to the game. Partly because they feel it would alter the spirit of the game, but also often because they think it would negatively affect their status in the game.

    Developers wanted smaller raids in EQ, bringing it down from 54 to 40, but veteran guilds vehemently opposed this idea. But now you have many guilds who can't yield enough players and many guilds went belly up since then.

    Developers implemented 30 minute monster missions and OMM missions, which allowed casual players to gain some loot and AA in a short amount of time. Yet veteran players opposed this idea, monster missions were not expanded upon and OMM missions were made useless, and many casual players left as a result.

    There have been many times throughout the history of EQ, that a vocal minority of veteran players, have changed the course of EQ...for the worse...often against the wishes of some developers, and against the wishes of the silent majority.
  2. Puzzling Journeyman

    “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.”

    John Lydgate
    Jhenna_BB, Drogba, Pano and 2 others like this.
  3. Verily Tjark Augur

    It's 2020, and we're still getting new content so...
    Xianzu_Monk_Tunare, Xanadas and Duder like this.
  4. Beimeith Lord of the Game

    I'm pretty sure monster missions were cancelled because they were:

    A) exploitable
    B) difficult to create
    C) generally not that fun


    OMM missions were not made useless. The items are just as good as they always were. The rez stick is practically a required item for healers. What was nerfed was the XP gain, and realistically, the amount of XP you got for those missions (about 5 AA iirc) is less than you'd get killing 5 mobs in modern content.


    And as far as raid sizes go, had they reduced sizes plenty of players would have quit rather than get benched.


    Any decision has consequences and it is always a question of how to please the most people. Trying to invoke the "silent majority" is disingenuous. You have no claim to speak for them and even if you were right, if they want to effect change they need to *stop being silent* and let the devs know what they want.
  5. Strawberry Augur

    I remember the day when the OMM nerfs went in. We went from over over 200 players in PoK doing missions, to 0 in a matter of days. Many people I know quit the game over it. OMM were made ueless to the people actually doing them, full stop, to suggest otherwise is dishonest.

    Actually, casual players did speak out, I actively participated in those threads and warned developers that listening to veteran players, like yourself, like battleblade and several other veteran players, players who have little understanding of how casual players play this game, would ultimately prove to be determinetal to the long term health of the game and cause bleeding of casual players. Yet they listened to veteran players, nerfed OMM, and as a result, EQ did lose many casual players.

    Not only have the large raid sizes required to complete raids caused massive bleeding and collapsing of smaller guilds. It has made tuning those raids a nightmare. One of the reason I no longer partake in beta tests for Everquest, is because of the clear lack of developer manpower to manage complex raids that should have been reduced in size years ago, were it not for veteran players blocking the reduction in rade size, to the detriment of the health of the game.
    Aenvar and Nennius like this.
  6. Strawberry Augur

    How is it in any way disingenuous. The largest bleeding of players in EQ happened among casual players. We went from grouping being the focus in EQ, to raiding being the focus in EQ. We went from socializing being the focus in EQ, to gear progression being the focus in EQ.

    Veteran players have actively shaped the game by blocking quality-of-life changes that would have allowed a more casual audience to thrive in this game. They have moved it in a direction that has put pressure on casual players, casual guilds and the social fabric of this game.

    A direction that has hurt the playerbase, financial stability, and health of this game.
    winspearean likes this.
  7. Szilent Augur

    Choosing monster missions as your proverbial hill to die on is hella peculiar. The rewards were massively out of scale for the time of their release, so out of scale that players were bribed out of playing their own characters to collect those rewards.
  8. Beimeith Lord of the Game

    I remember the day the OMM nerfs went in too, and what went down was the number of people *selling taskadds* to OMM missions. Plenty of players were still doing them for the actual items. The augments and clickies were still very good for that era of content and as previously mentioned, the rez stick is STILL a desired item a decade later.

    To say they are useless, when several items are still useful today is dishonest.


    I have plenty of understanding of how casual players play this game. I'd even go so far as to say that I probably know *more* casual players than you do. You have no idea who my friends are nor who I talk to or play with in EQ.

    Every change they make upsets someone, but you are not the supreme arbiter of what is or is not a good change, and you have no idea how many people actually quit over OMMs, but I'd bet heavily it wasn't nearly as many as you think.


    Large raid sizes are not the cause of smaller guilds collapsing. Any guild out there can recruit enough people to have 54 players. What they can't do is ensure those 54 people are experienced and well geared enough to be able to do them correctly, and that is a whole other conversation.

    Likewise, having 54 player size raids has absolutely nothing to do with how complex the raids are or how much time it takes the devs to create them. The complexity of raids is about how complex the mechanics are, not the number of players.


    It's disingenuous because you have absolutely no idea how many people are casual/hardcore/groupers/raiders nor what they all want. What you have is a *belief* of what *you think* things are like, a belief that is limited to your own personal experiences and not that of the entire game.

    There are a large number of reasons for why people quit, most notably the fact that EQ is no longer the only game in town. When EQ launched it was the only game of it's kind. Now there are dozens of like MMOs for potential players, and literally dozens and dozens more have COME AND GONE while EQ is still here.

    You also have the aging of players. Most people who started playing EQ were in their teens and early twenties...high school and college age. Now those people are mostly grown up, married, and have children and a job. I've lost waaay more friends in EQ to them getting *girlfriends/wives/children* than to EQ having 54 person raids. And then of course there is the fact that EQ has been *growing* the last few years, not getting smaller.


    I will actually agree with you that *some* quality of life changes have been blocked, but they are not the ones you are claiming, and they certainly weren't blocked by players.

    I find it ironic that you talk about the "social fabric" of this game while opining about the loss of cheap and easy OMM XP. People buying/selling taskadds is NOT conductive to the social fabric of EQ. People actually grouping together IS. In the early days of EQ it took players YEARS to reach max level and it was the constant need to group with others that created the "social fabric" that you so desire. What has put pressure on that fabric is a combination of easy XP, boxing, mercenaries, and limited time to play (the aforementioned aging of the players).


    As for the financial stability of EQ, EQ makes plenty of money, and if it has ever suffered in that regard it has been because the management has endlessly squandered the money EQ made on other projects. EQ has funded literally over a dozen other FAILED games, including at least 3 separate attempts at EQ3.

    With EQ spinning off into Darkpaw Games there is at long last *hope* that a larger fraction of the money EQ makes will actually be reinvested in the game. Only time will tell.
  9. Smokezz The Bane Crew


    I'm not sure where you got this idea, but raiding has always been a very big focus of EQ. Right back to the original game. In fact, the early game had a lot MORE raids to do than the game has now.
  10. Bobokin Augur

    I disagree that any guild can recruit enough people to have 54 players. It is relatively easy to have 54 characters, but 54 players is extremely difficult for casual guilds on many live servers where there are a few heavy raid guilds and one or two massive casual guilds that soak up players. Good luck even trying to get half that many casual players on at one time in smaller guilds.

    I believe 54 player raids are a good thing. That is classic Everquest and should be kept. I also believe that having small raids with an 18, 24, or 30 character cap would be fun for players who do not wish to be in those massive guilds. Of course, the loot would have to be scaled lower to reflect the effort.
  11. enclee Augur

    Stop trying to lower the cap, just keep the cap the same and tune down to that number. All you're accomplishing by shifting the raid cap is creating the issue at a smaller number. For example, another game has a raid size of 10 players, and they face the same issues as the larger EQ 54-man roster. If casual guilds can't find 54 competent players, then they won't find 30 either. The bench will migrate away to other guilds or different games.

    Also, it's a misconceived notion to blame player feedback for the problems. People want more of what they enjoy, and are passionate about it. It's the company's responsibility to correlate the forum feedback with in-game metrics, like zone usage, session time, class population, etc.
  12. Sancus Augur

    This is essentially what they did with ToV, at least from what we've seen so far. We did all of T1 with two splits of ~30 in each raid this past Sunday with no wipes, and I'm sure at least some of the raids could be done with less. I think this makes a lot of sense for T1 raids, and you can see pretty different results compared to TBL.

    Back a while ago I made a post about in-era raid completion rates by expansion here. TBL wasn't finished at that point, but the other issue with TBL is that significantly fewer guilds completed any raids than in the preceding few expansions. 40 guilds completed a raid in TBM, 39 completed a raid in EoK, and 38 completed a raid in RoS. All of those expansions had at least one raid that pretty much any active raid force could get through within a year. I don't think the same can be said for TBL. Between relatively harder T1 raids and many guilds struggling with Drusella's Vault in RoS, only 30 guilds reported kills on Plane of Fire. To capture this, I decided to create two graphs. First, completion rate by raid in-era (prior to 12/18), as a % of the most completed raid:

    [IMG]

    If you just look at the above graph, it doesn't actually seem that bad. Seven of the eight raids in the expansion have completion rates of >75% relative to the number of guilds that completed at least one raid. That's higher than any of the previous expansions (back through TBM) that I looked at. That's definitely a skewed picture, though, so I decided to add TBL raids to the RoS graph as a % of the number of guilds that completed Gorowyn in-era:

    [IMG]

    What stands out to me here, which matches my personal impressions, is that TBL did not have much of a difficulty curve (Mearatas notwithstanding). Fight Fire and Reparm were somewhat easier than the other raids, but most guilds that killed 3 raids killed 7 raids. You could consider the Tier 2 raids hard I suppose, and they probably could've been tuned down a bit, but more guilds were able to get through them than got past Vault. The main issue I see is the expansion started out too difficult, on top of RoS's issues.

    This is why a number of lower/mid tier guilds saw struggled during TBL; neither the current expansion nor the previous expansion past Crypt Robbers had content for them. You could also consider Mearatas' completion rate an issue, but personally I think having one very hard raid at the end of the expansion was positive for many players and wasn't significantly harmful to others (it probably could have been nerfed more/quicker, but guilds lived on with 7/8 raids completed).

    One other thing worth noting is TBL had GMM, which EGL doesn't track. I wouldn't be surprised if a few guilds beat a GMM event without beating a TBL event, but Rustbottom was not a great event for lower DPS guilds so I don't really know. I don't think it was nearly as easy as Gorowyn or ToV T1 for lower tier guilds.

    It's pretty clear to me that the tuning of ToV raids was a response to this. As of today, 26 guilds have completed two ToV raids and 25 have completed T1. ToV T1 launched on January 17th, so we're only 13 days in from raids being available. Compartively, at this point in TBL, 17 guilds had completed two TBL raids and 13 had completed T1. In RoS at the same point, only 15 guilds had completed two raids and 14 had completed T1. To be fair that's kind of a bad comparison, because both of those expansions launched just before the holiday season, and in RoS people had to level up (in ToV people had a month to do that before raids). That said, as many guild have completed ToV T1 in thirteen days as completed TBL T1 in the entirety of TBL.

    We'll have to see how ToV plays out, but the new time-locked raid release system combined with the tuning should help lower tier guilds. It's a bit disheartening to me that, at least from my experience in beta, it feels like all of the raids lack sufficient mechanical complexity to challenge top guilds. I'm a big fan of having one raid per expansion like Vault or Mearatas so long as it doesn't block progression like Vault did (ideally it should be the last raid).

    I do think the tuning in ToV will be healthier for the overall raiding game than that of TBL, I just wish things weren't so binary.
    Elyssanda, Zarzac, Repthor and 7 others like this.
  13. Tutankamen Augur


    SOD had "normal" and "hard" versions of each raid where with normal you could bring the typical 54 and "hard" you could only bring 32. Like Queen Malaran for instance. So it's not like that isn't SUPER easily fixed. They could have a version for 32 people , easier, but scaled to the number of players. This is a trivial problem, if DB cares to fix it it won't be hard.
  14. Prathun Developer

    I don't disagree that it would be cool to have multiple versions of raid events aimed at different raid sizes and/or difficulty levels, but it's not a trivial problem to solve.
  15. Yinla Ye Ol' Dragon

    There have been many times where players interaction has been a positive thing rather than the negative.

    Players got to keep Dzarn. :)
    Players got the reversal of a lot of HA changes
    Players got hotbars to have a similar function to the potion belt after it was removed
    Players got Nektulous Forest returned to look similar to its original (Failed with Freeport :( )

    That is just a few that spring to mind.

    Players input has also got a lot of bugs fixed and improved.

    The change in raid numbers is still debateable. They listed and gave us Fear, Hate and Temple of Veeshan raids which were aimed at smaller guilds, so while not restricted to 54 players they were easily completed with less. The devs have listened in ToV and made the raids so far easier this time round. Tier 2 maybe different story, really don't like ToFS raid 1, but then we haven't seen the final cut yet. Fingers crossed its not too rough.

    As for the changes to Monster Missions, as many hated them as loved them. They were completable with 1 char, something the devs didn't want. Some were fun to do when nothing else was going on, but they have pretty much been replaced with the HA system.

    Sometimes the devs make changes we like and agree with sometimes they don't, sometimes they do other things instead of what we would like. Sometimes they make changes to their original decissions, sometimes they don't.

    Remeber "Your in their our world!"
  16. Derresh Augur

    i kind of want larger raids, up it to 72 imo, but fix raid lag first.
    Xeladom and Elyssanda like this.
  17. Ravanta Suffer Augur

    As Sancus recently so expertly memed, a lot of raid lag has been blamed to be procs. At the time, I took that to mean that in the future we would see less proc augments, and buffs.

    The number keeps going up though! They have even added proc augments that go in slots that we previously could not have procs in.
  18. enclee Augur


    The dev team has this habit of knowing there's an issue, and then just continually adding on top of it.
    Tucoh likes this.
  19. Laronk Augur


    While they can be fun, monster missions are diametrically opposed to everquest and standard MMO play. One of the things I get through play is my character becoming more powerful relative to older content. Monster missions remain the same difficulty whether or not I increase the power of my character, but at the same time I don't actually have a problem with monster missions I just avoid doing them =)
    Xianzu_Monk_Tunare likes this.
  20. yepmetoo Abazzagorath

    SoD hard raids were 36 or less
    Proposed lowering of raid cap was to 42

    Just to correct weird wrong numbers posted.

    This thread though, seriously, /facepalm.

    Thing that is also true about raids, is look at the time they changed the group gear to be almost as good as the last expansion raid items, then look at when raid guild kills serverwide fell off. Not a coincidence.