After evaluating all of the existing progression guilds out there (and deciding none were quite right for me), I began thinking about how difficult it is to foster a meaningful progression experience on a live server these days. Some guilds try their best to enforce a litany of rules that often require players to reject something that is dropped in their lap (mercenaries, defiant gear, etc). Others take a more lax approach which usually results in pre-farming, overgearing content significantly, and just generally having the experience ruined by higher level players. What if, instead of creating another time-locked progression server (as fun as they are, we see their flaws over and over again), we create a "Progression Friendly" server. A special ruleset server where the goal is not to have a strict classic experience in one era or the other, but a standardized ruleset that provides a slightly more "classic" experience from the very beginning, to the most current of expansions. A sort of merging of new and old EverQuest that is approachable for progression enthusiasts, and also a great new experience for players in more current expansions. Now, the details of this ruleset would need to be brainstormed and hammered on by both the community and the developers. I won't pretend to know what is or is not possible from a time/resource, or gameplay perspective. Some of these ideas may have gaping holes, some may need to be altered and changed. This is certainly not a complete list of what this ruleset would need to be, but I hope that it captures the essence, and provides us something to chew on. "Progression Friendly" Ruleset Server General Details Core to the flexibility of the server, allowing many different play modes and era-specific progression opportunities. All levels available All expansions available Experience/Grouping Related Removes a controversial addition to EverQuest, and tries to re-emphasize the importance of grouping. Also tries to deter pre-farming/flagging. No mercenaries Beginning at level 60: Cannot form/join tasks, expiditions, instances, etc with players >= 10 levels above you. (Trying to figure out best mechanic to further deter pre-farming/flagging with high levels, not sure what can be done Classic through Luclin). Zone Related Tries to eliminate/lessen policing of era appropriate zone usage, as well as limit pre-farming. Tutorial disabled All characters begin in traditional starting zone All applicable zones now require full keying or flagging Certain zones now have a level requirement 1) If a zone is intended soley for max level usage, it requires max level to enter2) If in a level increasing expansion, a zone is intended for the max level of the previous expansion, it requires max level of previous expansion +1 (for example, Wall of Slaughter would require level 66). Item Related Tries to eliminate/lessen policing of era appropriate gear, while maintaining in game economy and availability of prestigious droppable items. All defiant items removed All newbie gear quests removed All hot zone augs removed If an item has a "recomended level," then turn the recomended level in to a required level All items with required levels have the required level of the zone's required level, or the mobs level. (May be certain exceptions to this where overpowered items could slip through to a previous expansion). Add a visible Expansion Tag to all item inspections What if you could then check against a 1 point AA that opts you in for that expansion's gear? Could a similar concept be applied to zone/AA checks? Tradeskill / Potion related Remove items that make low level adventuring, and raiding less challenging. All "new" Rogue poisons require level 81/85 (were these released with underfoot?) All potions require level 70 (were these released with DoDh?) Spell/AA/Ability Related Restore the hunt for class and era defining spells, while maintaining the convenience of a central location for general spell purchase. All standard spells available in PoK UNLESS they were originally the result of a quest or item turn in (parchments, runes, etc). Lots of variations and tweaks you could make to this one. So what do you think? Could it work? Would you play on it? What am I missing in terms of mechanics? Again, the goal is not to go full classic, but to eliminate most debilitating mechanics that make creating a progression guild on live a nightmare. Remember, we have to remain conscious of the playability of current expansions, as well as what is doable from a time and resource perspective from the Developers. Go ahead, rip it apart.
Definitely not easy. I assume a similar amount of work went in to tweaking existing TLP servers. The idea though is that this could have nearly infinite re-uses of a progression like environment, where as eventually the TLP servers run their course and are no longer interesting.
Ew, no thanks. The idea behind progression server is you relive previous expansions as they happened with everyone else. Having all expansions/levels enabled is seriously gross as heck
Change spawn times on all mobs to under 6hours... for all expansions. This would highly benefit everyone as well.
Wall of Slaughter isn't really a 66+ zone to begin with... MPG was a 65+ zone... WoS was a 62-63+ zone and north of the wall you could stay til 70 if you wanted, but south of the wall mobs were camped when ppl where level 62-63+ (down to 60 if you grouped with friends).
I've reached 80 from wall of slaughter. Granted this is from it being a hotzone and daily quests help also.
I do like the idea of removing the tutorial and putting people back in the starting cities. Though with Crescent Reach, would have to use the quests there I guess? Nothing really bad with the newbie armor in the cities. They are not overpowered and are weaker than the stuff in the Mines. So keeping those would be okay I think. As for grouping and mercs? This is a very touchy subject. I like having mercs because some days I want to play but don't have alot of time (life of a married person), so being able to throw my tank merc out there instead of waiting hours for someone interested in grouping in the place I want to go and with what I want to do .... Yet grouping is a great way to make new friends and meet new people.
The tutorial was a nice addition to help players learn.. and Im ok with it staying as long as they remove the rewards and make it like Cloth/Padded/Ringmail/Bronze armor as the rewards. Take away the defiant and defiant like armors and newbie quests.
When I started, we had the Gloomingdeep tutorial. But the early rewards were burlap (cloth) armor, and you ran Valara's mission over and over, trading in spider silks for enough cloth armor to outfit yourself. The best gear you could get was the Gloomsilk/leather/chain/plate: a step up in protection from cloth, but little if any added stats. No defiant-class super weapons either; you really wanted those bronze and iron bars to trade in for a better noob weapon.
Should not be any tutorial on a progression server. None of the "decent" Gloomingdeep starter armour for toons that level in there. A lot of that stuff is better than a lot of the gear that most people got up into luclin. "I WANT A NEW PROGRESSION SERVER" " I want the classic EQ experience" BUT, I want good gear given to me. I want classic EQ, but I do not want to have to find my corpse, I want classic EQ but I want aa's awarded to me for nothing. IF you want all this free dumb the game down garbage, go to a live server and play from the beginning. Stop trying to get the progression servers to change to what YOU want to make it easier for you.
On a new server the tutorial zone would be absurdly over-crowded. I recall fondly the spam-fest that was nektulos forest. When people quickly found out that you got exactly the same amount of exp in a 6 man group as you did solo, it kind of changed the mechanics of leveling completely.
It's my understanding that the tutorial spawns more than one instance once the population gets over a certain limit? I notice that the first quest guy there mentions that you can go to another 'instance' to find your friends and offers to port you there. Or did I dream that?
That would make sense. At the same time, a classic server would feel weird without newbie areas that are part of the world (non-instanced).
I really like the OP's suggestions. This is somewhat what I've been calling for in both Everquest games. I differ in an important way: it should apply on all servers. It should come in the form of a progression character and guild-customizable achievements (viewable in a window), in my estimation. However, I'm not against the idea of an inclusive progression-friendly ruleset server that would effectively allow players to progress at different stages, rather than it being server-wide. This is a very complex topic. It's hard to know where to begin. I think we all know the feeling when you go to older content and kill something and you get an inferior item as reward. This effect can be felt in the tutorial when you receive items from quests and kills that're superior to the vast majority of content in the original launch of Everquest. It can be felt when you start in CR and progress in TSS. The items you'll receive from level 25 quests are defiant-quality gear and better than raid items you'd receive in the original launch and are only slightly worse than raid items in Kunark. Consider how much easier it's to get the items in TSS! All a player has to do is make a concerted effort to complete the quests. And moreso, defiant up to elaborate is as good as many of the raid items in the given level range. For example, if you have elaborate defiant gear then it's better than luclin raid gear and on the level of the best POP raid gear. However, defiant gear past elaborate degrades substantially, so players see increasing reasons to gear up without defiant - this prepares them for the late-game. (it's clear defiant gear is meant to help leveling players reach the late-game, not to replace it) I know WHY it's easier to gear up in newer content. It has to do with mudflation. It can be boiled down to something simple: it becomes increasingly, unbearably difficult and time consuming for new players to reach the max level and/or max stats. This happens because additional content (read: new, greater powers) are increasingly added to keep the old players playing. So the level cap increases and/or other stats increase, and old players become increasingly strong. As the years pass by, the amount of progression from start to finish becomes like a mountain. Soon it's Mt. Everest or even Olympus Mons. Developers learned a long time ago they had to trim this mountain in order to keep new players playing. If they did nothing, new players would face a mountain too high to climb. Likewise, old players would accumulate vast wealth and stand like unapproachable gods. They solved this by trimming the time it takes to reach max level and/or by giving leveling players more powerful items at earlier levels. The key to a progression-friendly server lies in figuring out how we can populate older content WITHOUT also making the mountain too high. There're other concerns too, like how to treat alts of ultra-powerful mains. Should alts be granted a means to reach max level more quickly? Otherwise, old players might have to drag their feet through content they've already consumed. The ultimate goal is to return value to the mountains (and mountains) of old content in Everquest. There's so much! This is especially apparent to old players who KNOW it's there. But how do you give it value with so much mudflation in its midst, drawing people away from it? The risk/reward comes into play and compels people to move into newer content. If mudflation is not on the table for review and as a consideration in all this, it's doomed to fail. Creating a progression-character feature would solve this somewhat, as you'd only need to resolve it for progression characters, but it would still require limiting access to newer content (read: rewards) for the progression character. Say, for example, you created a progression character. How would this affect things? Well, you couldn't just jump into Kunark and/or wear Kunark items. To gain access to Kunark, you'd have to either reach a certain level, like 50, or you'd have to kill certain targets in pre-luclin content. If this were not true, mudflation would rear its ugly a** and compel players to gear up with Kunark items and/or level up in kunark zones. We'd end up right where we started: with a broken risk/reward ratio that compels players to move into newer content, away from older content, thus decreasing its value.
(Edit to the last paragraph in my previous post) Creating a progression-character feature would solve this somewhat, as you'd only need to resolve it for progression characters, but it would still require limiting access to newer content (read: rewards) for the progression character. Say, for example, you created a progression character. How would this affect things? Well, you couldn't just jump into kunark and/or wear kunark items. To gain access to kunark, you'd have to either reach a certain level, like 50, or you'd have to kill certain targets in pre-kunark content. If this were not true, mudflation would rear its ugly a** and compel players to gear up with kunark items and/or level up in kunark zones. We'd end up right where we started: with a broken risk/reward ratio that compels players to move into newer content, away from older content, thus decreasing its value. The idea here is to preserve risk/reward, but only for progression characters. Of course, how high of a mountain should it be for progression characters to reach the pinnacle of progression? That's another important topic. If it's too high then you shoot yourself in the foot and nobody will have a chance to ever finish. And it may be the eventual reality that progression characters will want to reach the top faster to join their friends, just as they would with a normal character. I'm wagering that people who play progression characters are the types who want it for the experience of going through older content. However, it's not out of the realm of possibility that the progression character experience will mudflate with time, in response to the need of new progression characters to reach the pinnacle of progression (for whatever reasons). Evenso, I expect it'll grant far greater value to older content, even if it does mudflate in spite of all the efforts to counter it.
One other comment.... What if they designed expansions so that the items were not easier to acquire than past expansion items? In other words, there'd be no TSS that replaces the 1-70 game. There'd be no dsh. There'd be no low level superior zone for easy gearing up. Instead it'd be something like Underfoot, whereby it's a STEP UP, but without the boomerang/brells rest/etc i-win button. But you say "It'd punish the lower level players!" My reply is upon the release of each new expansion they'd increase the INNATE defense/offense of ALL players. Thus, if a new expansion is released, your power is increased. This compensates for the increased size of the progression mountain, and it also preserves the value of the older items. Instead of giving lower level players superior items via dsh or paludal caverns or brells rest or old man mckenzie instances or defiant gear, players would have to instead go through the older content to get new items. The difference is they'll be stronger with each expansion, thus more able to acquire them. The above would still mudflate the game, but it would better use older content to gear up players. This way you don't have to recreate the lower level game in content like tss or dsh or brells rest or old man mckenzie missions. As it stands, the current design philosophy is to recreate the lower level game everytime an expansion is released. This shepherds everyone into the latest content and away from the older content. It can come in the form of a new zone or just some new instances. The idea is to act as a bridge to level/gear up players so they can enter the new areas. I think it also encourages players to buy the expansion asap. So rather than waiting a few months to play in older content, everybody scrambles to buy the latest stuff.
The amount of dev time needed to implement this would be prohibitive. There are tons of code changes and some things just couldn't be done (EQ Lie servers all run off the same data, and while they could turn them on and off for a specific server, they don't have the ability to change the requirements from one server to another (with the exception of no drop for FV.))
