Proposed QoL Epic 1.0 Changes

Which dev said that? There hasn't been a single dev who ever worked in the TLP era who went all the way back to launch year. Prathun was the longest running, and he didn't start until 2002.

EQ subscriber base at the end of 1999 (launch year) = 50K. Average server population at that time = 5K (10 live servers). EQ subscriber base at EQ2 launch in 1994 = 550K (source: Wikipedia). Average server population at that time = at least 10K, there weren't more than 50 servers ever.

Current player cap on Aradune, the highest-pop TLP = 3K. There may be as many as 5K players total who rolled on Aradune, but quite a few left due to the queueing issues, as has been discussed at great length.

As I said I am fuzzy on where I heard it, can't recall where or who only the what.

You don't need to be a dev who has been around since the start to have a handle on server populations through the ages - though I think Absor would certainly qualify (Alan Vancouvering was EverQuest's Community Relations Manager in 1999 and became a credited game designer some time prior to 2004).

Subscribers isn't the same as concurrent users, EQ might have had 50k Subscribers, added to that they were then from a far broader global demographic where today comparatively much less play from outside of the USA. Also those subscribers weren't all on at the same hours of the day every day.
We used to have guilds from the USA, Europe, Australia, Japan, Korea, Russia & Eastern Europe, now on TLP its pretty much a 10:1 ratio of USA to EU on TLP servers.

Even if the population was similar (which was definitely not my experience on Prexus) you also had the knowledge blocks back then. The end game was not as top heavy as it is on TLPs.

Let's say for the sake of argument this is all true.

Nobody cares. The devs have made alterations to epic respawns in the past. They could do it again, and they choose not to.

The amount of time spent nerfing the Necro 2.0 could have been spent alleviating bottlenecks, but that time was allocated elsewhere. Are you telling me that nerfing the Necro 2.0 was not also a matter of a global code base change?

There's simply no excuse for this issue to persist that I can see, other than the devs wanting to perpetuate really awful game mechanics for specific classes.

Socking epic 1.0 mobs in Omens of War is unacceptable.

The fact that EQ TLP is also a cheat-infested autoclicker wasteland is also unacceptable, but it's what we have. At the very least, mitigating the need to cheat against innumerable cheaters to complete a simple turn-in would be a step in the right direction.

Why Marl and not Duriek? The world may never know.

And here I was about to argue that Chinese players outnumbered EU players on pre-PoP TLPs.

There still are active EU guilds on most of the live servers. The first non-US-based servers weren't launched until 2002, and ping times from EU to US prior to that were for the most part unplayable, so it's understandable that the Classic-era nostalgia factor is less on their side of the pond. Be that as it may...

I'm comparing era-to-era based on subscriber count rather than concurrent player count, in part because the latter is all guesswork really, and the former compares the proportional size of the player pool that is actually trying to get an epic. It doesn't really matter what their personal prime-time hours are when the wait in the queue for a critical spawn is several days long. The vast majority of players back then understood it was going to be necessary to time-shift their regular play as necessary to complete these particular quests.

IMHO, if we had moderated queues for these spawns today, there wouldn't be nearly as many QoL complaints. The true fault lies with the dumbing down of GM/guide support and the switch to the principle of "DPS wins all". We're stuck with that. It would be nice to re-develop the entire game around these new rules, but as I've said before that isn't going to happen, the dev resources simply aren't there. Right now I'm sure they're focused on trying to get a new expansion out before the end of the year, if at all possible. Prathun was our primary TLP tuner, and he's gone. The current state if this isn't nearly as bad as the complainers make out. EQ is a MMO. Make friends. Get help.

You've created a strawman here. Nobody wants the entire game redeveloped. We simply want less than a dozen database entries (respawn timers) evaluated.

This isn't a massive undertaking. Nobody is asking for some groundbreaking change. I refuse to believe that it is that difficult to change these things.

I'm not sure why you're so dead set on defending the devs here. All of the time allocated nerfing the Necro 2.0 could have been spent alleviating bottlenecks that will improve the game experience for hundreds (thousands?) of players now, and on future TLPs.

You're ranting about an issue with a necro epic in a thread where the OP said no necro epic changes were necessary. (Of course he said that 2.5 years ago, and this is a necro'ed thread.)

Necro spells have been getting revamps across the board over the last few patch cycles. Adjusting the 2.0 epic goes along with that, I assume. The necro revamp matters a great deal to players on Live servers, and it's something for which they have been lobbying for a LONG time. If your personal preferences don't coincide with theirs, I don't know what to tell you. Live server players far outnumber TLP server players, and it has always been my sense that dev resources are allocated proportionally. I don't play a necro, so I am not in a position to argue relative merits of buffs or nerfs to that particular class.

And yes, I do defend the devs. They take a lot of abuse on here that they don't deserve. Respawn timers are part of the game. They're not going to turn EQ into a single-player RPG. If you're having that much difficulty getting your 2.0 epic, why aren't your guildmates helping you?

No offense, but I'm not convinced we're even a part of the same conversation. This has nothing to do with 2.0s. The facts are that the resources are there, but they are allocated seemingly at random. It simply is not a valid excuse.

I'm not abusing the devs. I'm asking for them to allocate their resources in a specific way to the benefit of potentially thousands of players.

Respawn timers are part of the game. 3 day respawns timers should not be part of the game.

If a dev spent 30 seconds replying to this post telling me that it is too resource consumptive to fix, I will let it go. However, the only people making that argument are random people on the forums. Nobody here knows.

You're arguing this in a game where raids have seven-day lockouts? You're not going to be very happy here.

You also had a much larger portion of players who only logged in a couple nights a week. Super casual was very common. If you have 10k players on a server, but they average 5-10 hrs a week, that's a lot less load than 5k players that average ~30 hours a week. Purely anecdotal but I am pretty confident the modern TLP player averages much higher play time than the player base of 1999.

This is intellectually dishonest and you know it. I would happily accept a guaranteed 7 day spawn, which is how a 7 day instance lockout works.

A 3 day contested spawn being surrounded by 10+ players autoclicking for a turn-in is a very different scenario.

There is no way you're actually trying to equate these two things.

I think most players with these severe bottlenecks would be more than happy to pass up socking these turn-ins for a guaranteed 7 day timer if it was possible for that to happen, but it isn't.

At this point, I would be very happy if we could simply create personal picks of any zone with non-combat NPCs only, and for turn-in NPCs with combat flags to have that changed.

This probably requires more effort than simply altering the respawn timer of less than a dozen NPCs.

If you're being victimized by automated gameplay, that is an entirely separate issue. Did you /petition it? With evidence? I would expect a GM to give you credit for the turn-in (they have the ability to do this) if confirmed evidence of disruption due to unattended game play was presented; it's been done before.

Personal picks are not an option due to server performance issues, as has been discussed in the forums many times. And to correct a misperception from earlier in the thread: it's not simply a matter of changing a few respawn timers in a table. These events are all scripted. The script code has probably not been looked at for year and years. Changing one timer in one quest script could be an entire day's work for a dev (not Prathun) who hasn't looked at any of this before. Multiply that by a dozen classes and multiple quest pieces per epic... big project.

Galaras I mean no disrespect but I'm concerned you're imagining a past you wanted to see, not what players experienced in the Classic, Kunark, & Velious era.

This just isn't true, epics weren't even in "Classic Everquest" (i.e. no expansions). The 1.0 quests were originally Ruins of Kunark content with some drops later being added to a few Velious mobs (the first real QoL change to accommodate population). By the time Ruins of Kunark was being designed, EQ had already launched and surpassed expectations, the design team very well knew the server populations were much higher.

The TLP's are perceived to launch with very high populations because everyone is starting at the same time, unlike in the real EQ launches where players would gradually learn of the game and buy it (usually in retail). Servers starting with a large number of players is what's unique to TLPs in terms of population, not so much the population itself. AoC instances generally address the raid bottlenecks and because of how contested the raid targets got.

Camps were very much that large, sometimes larger back in the "McQuaid" era, even for non-epic drops. Let's pull some past Dev. commentary into the discussion, please read this interview with Holly Longdale where she describes maintaining a list of 85+ people just for Drelzna's spawn in Najena, this camp wasn't even for an epic drop, just the jboots.

https://www.shacknews.com/article/110494/better-together-stories-of-everquest?page=10

The 2nd raid bottleneck workarounds were mostly implemented early 2015 (again, 1st wave of workarounds were really Velious mobs getting certain epic drops). Oddly you're refuting yourself to some extent in that you point out that these workarounds related to raid targets and spawns of about a week.

There's a huge difference between hardly anyone in the community progressing in the epic 1.0 because the necessary raid mob(s) are only up weekly, and a single player needing to wait ~ a week to do their turn ins or get their turn at the drop. Most of the QoL changes I see proposed are the latter category and my response is that you just need to be more patient or move over to Live where the mobs aren't contested. The point of the TLP servers was to give an approximation of what EQ was like back in the day & when the content was in era. Making the epic items & turn ins easier defeats the purpose of the epics being "epic".

Again, in some cases like Selo speed TLPs I can see the argument for some more tweaks, but not on a typical TLP or server because it just fundamentally breaks the design philosophy or point of the epics being much harder to acquire in era.

Sorry, I just noticed a typo near the end, the raid target workarounds were from 2005, not "2015". My bad

I fully support these changes. There is simply no consistency in how long it takes individual classes to get their epic. I'd even make the argument that while the sk and enchanter share horrendous bottlenecks, the sk has the worse deal as their mobs are out of the way. Plus, overall, people are more eager to show up to support their local crack dealer than a knight.

But there never will be consistency and its unreasonable to expect the devs to account for epic completion rates in their patches. A lot of it is always going to be driven by how many people want to play a class which will inevitably change every time the Devs re-tune the meta.

Likewise its not fair that some epics are blatant generic fetch quests (mage epic, collect a, b,c to get a quest to collect x, y, z) with few meaningful story elements or mob fights unique to the epic. Yet we don't write out and demand a ___ number of unique quest triggered battles in each epic.

There will never be perfect consistency, but nobody is asking for perfect consistency. Several of you who post in these threads are obsessed with posting these easily refuted strawman arguments.

Nobody is asking for some drastic retuning of the game. There are 3 classes with extreme bottlenecks for absolutely no valid reason. Nothing needs to be re-tuned beyond the adjustment of respawn timers for less than a dozen NPCs.

When certain classes have zero expectation of seeing their epics in-era, it is a problem. The overwhelming majority of classes will have their epics in-era if they desire to.

Now this is a strawman argument. The mere fact you are referring to bottlenecks means there are SOME people who are getting their main class epic in-era. This is true for every class in the game. No class is completely prevented from obtaining an epic 1.0 in-era. Are some harder than others? Yep. That's how it was back in the day, and the TLP is re-creating that experience. If you want a different game, play on a Live server.

I feel like we've gotten the wrong impression of each other here. Maybe not, but I'm starting to sense some hostility, so let's try to dial this back a little bit.

This is absolutely true, and I will not contest this statement because it is not the point I'm making.

The point I'm making is that epics on TLP work like this:

For almost every class in the game, epics are varying degrees of easy to obtain while they are relevant for most/nearly all players of those classes.

For a very small number of classes, epics are borderline impossible to obtain for most/nearly all players of those classes.

Some level of disparity is to be expected, but "some level of disparity" is not the point. For the overwhelming majority of the playerbase, the Enchanter/Wizard/SK epics are not able to be obtained while they are relevant.

TLP has never been about re-creating the way things were back in the day. The developers have already fixed the Marl Kastane bottleneck, among other things like VP keys. This is evidence enough on its own that these servers are not trying to recreate the classic experience.

TL;DR: The developers over the years have made numerous changes to improve the player experience (AoCs, pick zones, certain epic bottlenecks alleviated), but some glaring issues still exist.

Most people do not care that the Monk epic is marginally more difficult to obtain than the Rogue epic. People care that only 1% of the playerbase of certain classes will ever see their epic in-era.

Except 1% is a number you're pulling out of a hat with absolutely no empirical evidence. It could just as easily be 5%, which I assert would be a higher % than was actually the case in-era. Plus, you claim it's only three problem classes; another poster claims it's 12 problem classes, and from there it is a matter of where you draw the line. It has to be drawn somewhere: there aren't the surplus of dev resources you seem to think there are, and the one experienced dev who was giving some attention to TLP loopholes (Prathun) has recently left the company.

AoCs and pickzones were major development undertakings, without which the entire concept of a TLP server wouldn't work, because the codebase from original era is a mess. This work was done at least five years ago now, when the team was much larger than it is today. The simple truth is, there are higher priorities in play which you are choosing to ignore. A lot more players, and I mean a >LOT<, care much more about getting the next expansion out the door than they care whether or not you get your epic in-era on a TLP.

Oher QoL improvements on TLPs, such as the advanced loot window, the extended target window, custom UIs, custom maps, /autofire, /melody, etc etc, are there only because the TLPs share a common codebase with live servers, and it's too much work for the devs to go back and take them out. These weren't added in to make TLPs play more like the modern game. The overall intent is, and has always been, to have the TLPs be some reasonable approximation of what the game was like in-era. If it was cracking hard to do then, it's probably still going to be cracking hard now.

TL;DR: A reality check is definitely in order here.