I would also like to see a new feature introduced which allows a player to "playback" a pre-recorded sequence of casts or abilities, so that a stinkin' cleric can ninja AFK and take an urgent bathroom break. I'm not talking automation or intelligence. Just give me an opportunity to cast a select set of spells for about 3 minutes every hour or so. Kinda like I had a 4-year-old sit and mash a key while daddy ran for the head. A tank version might check Xtarget and turn on attack and mash the taunt button continuously for the same 3 minutes. Just a method so that if you need to suddenly afk like there's a knock on the door or something your group doesn't have to perish.
We called this a "Raid Can" and you keep a coffee can by your computer for going to the bathroom when you can't leave your computer. Might want some TP along with that. That's how this used to be done. Not sure what people do now.
Grouping: Agree with making Campfires a Group ability: Whether it is removed from fellowships or not is irrelevant. Disagree with reducing Campfire no of players requirement: You form a group & you move as a group to your desired camp site or plow-path, campfires are an insurance policy for accidental wipes & for filling up your small group or re-filling it after someone left. Reducing the current requirement is way too open to abuse & circumvents choke-points & "opportunities for adventures" the devs may have built in, players often refer to such things as pains in the backside. Side-kicking - covered this a lot lately. An ability that can create a "null space" around your campfire which lasts for up to 10 minutes and has a 1 hour cooldown from the time it ends, whether tha is by running out or by being cancelled. What that allows is for your whole group to take a tea/smoke/bio break and not get smashed by some random idiot (who may or may not be a group member) dragging a train over you, your group are only immune to stuff (like mob aggro) while in that null-space no aggressive actions may be taken, you can buff & heal players in your group who are in that area (and have not left it), summon pets etc, but pets are deactivated while you are in that area & any mercs in use are passive & cannot be used while their owner is in the area, were any player to exit that space & rejoin it they will not be protected. Soloing: "Quad-kiting" I am okay with, 4 mobs at a time while you slowly beat them down with whatever DoT, Song or DD you cast is ok. But pathing generates a lot of processor load, pathing a lot of mobs around is just uterly stupid from a performance viewpoint, making the kiting of swarms of mobs rewarding is therfore shooting yourself in the foot if you want stable servers & zones that don't ruin the gameplay experience for everyone else around them, it is disruptive. So un-nerfing wizard/mage beam-kiting, sk swarm-kiting, bard vainglorious shout kiting etc. - no way in hell.
So that everyone who was in the group was actually participating, having one player complete all the steps in a quest while the rest sit back & relax doing nothing is not how quests should be completed & some would be like that. However making mobs drop items for solo quests should drop one for each player with the quest active. I would like to see some for of "quest sharing" as in one player can go get a quest & the whole group have that player share it to them, all players would still have to perform their own hand in step for these though.
I remember WoW had the ability to share solo-quests, that were not part of a quest chain. That meant, that if you spontaneously joined a group, but didn't have the quest they were doing, then they could "share" it with you. A bit like a task-add but not restricted to group tasks. You still had to actually do the quest, but you did not have to run to the quest npc first. Missions are actually good for the grouping game, but not mercenary/partisan as they don't give rewards for repeating them. Tradeskill-farming/collection farming/plat farming is more effective as a box as a real group would compete for drops. Therefore I think it would be neat if quests(and not only missions) gave a reward, even if you had already beaten it once. For example mercenary and partisan quests could give some currency(for the aug5 vendor), or a collection dispenser fragment, or other "overseer-like" rewards from the current expansion(tradeskill mats, ornament dispenser etc), each time you completed it. It could motivate people to help each other with something else than just missions.
Other than the really rare progression task that just involves running and hailing, I don't know of any group progression task where one person can solo it all while everyone else just sits back and watches. So, I'm not sure where you're going with that. Maybe a fully raid geared player might be able to solo everything, but for group geared players, that's just not happening. Even on merc tasks, I certainly can't go solo everything as a cleric, so I'm not sure where the idea of people sitting around not doing anything comes in. Besides, if you're running a progression task and someone isn't participating, you boot them and get someone who wants to actually play. The problem will fix itself.
If not the whole quest then at least significant portions of it, location updates where you can just use a Rogue to go get in 100% safety.
Yep solo tasks run against the grain of EQ's design. I also think they should revamp the rewards for completing partisan/merc tasks so that people have a reason, besides charity, to do them more than once for an achievement. Right now the only worthwhile repeatable group content is missions and to a far lesser degree named camps. That's not really enough content to keep people interested beyond a month or two.
Have an extra group bonus based on the number of IPs or subnets in the group. These groups will be the groups which are more likely from different individuals. Multiple people in the same household wouldn't get this bonus since they typically share IPs, but that's no big deal. They'd still get the normal group bonus. This extra bonus is to encourage grouping in the larger community. It would also be nice if there's a way to pull someone to the camp. As it is, it can take a while to try to get to a remote camp, which discourages random grouping. Perhaps they could also have a campfire option for groups made up of multiple IPs and subnets. Again, households wouldn't get this bonus, but they wouldn't need it as much. Households are likely to travel together to camps. PUGs are going to be adding people from across the world at random times and would benefit from having a way of pulling someone to a camp. For missions that require 3+ people, have a way that they can be anywhere in the world and be teleported to the mission. Don't make them go to the mission giver to get into the mission. This way one person can be LFG for the mission at the mission giver, form the group from randos around the world, start the mission, and everyone else gets in the mission from wherever they are. Boxers could use multiple VPNs to spoof IPs, but oh well. That's a lot of additional cost and trouble to go through. Only a small subset of boxers will actually try to exploit the system with VPNs. The greater benefit of encouraging community grouping would still make it worth it.
So, I noticed on multiple threads you only want to shoot down ideas, no matter how fanciful they may be. What I would like to know is what you would do other than just say "no, it can't be done."
They could make a way to find out which zones have the most people around my level range. With the world so big now, the people at any level range are pretty spread out. The /who command is sort of like that, but it doesn't show anon people and it doesn't sum up people by zone. If I wanted to find out which zones have the most people in the range of 80-90, maybe I could run a command like '/who zones 80 90'. The system would print out the top zones populated with that level range and a sum of the number of people in that range, like this: 12 Ferrott, The Dream (12 people in the range 80-90) 8 House of Thule ... The system can add in anon people, which are normally hidden with '/who 80 90'. Now if I want to find people in my level range, I know which zones currently have people about at my level. I can go there and try to get a PUG.
We need more varied levels of difficulty. People group up to do things they cannot do alone. People still want the ability to molo at the same time. The game needs to do both.
I don't see that as being lazy or freeloading...I see that as a benefit for having a rogue in the group. My guildmates and I do all the progression together, and one them runs a rogue (I have one too), and that toon always runs and does any location/ground spawn updates on group tasks. Just add currency (5 or 10, like anniversary tasks) to the progression/merc tasks and put them all on 6 hour replay timers (if they're not already).
Exactly, I really don't think it would take much, In addition to currency, adding more things you could buy with that currency wouldn't be a bad idea since it increases the value of the currency which in turn increases the value of the content. I do think replay timers should stay generously short, locking people out of the tasks reduces the available pool of people to group with. We want as few barriers standing in the way of people forming pick up groups as possible.
Perhaps they could use the number of IPs to reduce the task timer. The more IPs, the shorter the timer. If you're doing them yourself or with your boxed crew, the timer is normal. It may encourage a boxed crew to drop a box and pick up a person just to reduce the timer.
Instead of engineering ways to discourage people from boxing, incentivizing people to form groups by having more rewarding content is a more straight forward path. Creating some kind of IP scaled lockout timer requires different resources than adding currency to quest rewards and items to vendors. As a boxer myself I can tell you that reduced timers won't encourage me to drop a box, I have all group content available to me, however feeling like I am missing out on a good time with other real people would get me to drop a box or go solo on occasion.
But I think you would need a way to reward grouping between actual people as opposed to boxing crews. Many of the reasons people mention for boxing is that they don't like having to deal with the randomness of other people in terms of organization, skill levels, personalities, etc. If the grouping benefit doesn't have a way to differentiate between real people grouping versus boxers, then it seems like the boxers would just continue to box and get that bonus benefit. For something like currency from group content, it seems like it would be more efficient to box to get it rather than group with random people. I don't think the ideas I presented do anything to discourage boxing. Boxing would still have the same rewards and benefits regardless of if my ideas were implemented. But keying additional rewards to IPs means that people are more encouraged to group with other people rather than create a group from boxed accounts. I would think the point of enhancing the group game is to get real people grouped with other real people rather than encourage boxers to create groups. If so, then there needs to be a way to distinguish a group made up of people versus boxes.
