Progression... Something Else?

Discussion in 'Time Locked Progression Servers' started by drew0987654, Nov 24, 2014.

  1. drew0987654 Augur

    what if each player was automatically placed in "guild X" when they started a new character? hear me out, they can leave the guild whenever they want anyway....

    this guild will only allow the character access to classic content - until they're part of a group that takes down the raid targets in classic. they can then progress to the next guild whenever they want - "guild X 2," which will allow them access to kunark content until that's completed.... and so on until they're in "guild X 21" for TDS.

    pros:

    + they can stay in any guild they want - so if you don't want to progress past the Planes of Power guild, you never have to.

    + these guilds should always have soooooo many ppl in them.

    + no more need for progression servers!

    + anyone who wants to start progression can do so at any time - they just have to make a new character on any server. this is how a whole lot of ppl like to play characters anyway.

    + starting alts would be so much more fun.

    + more ppl would get to end game content (hint: they'd buy the most recent expansion), as those of us who are like me want to get caught up working through all of the content instead of jumping into new stuff past over a decade's worth of great stuff. more money for SOE (at least from ppl like me).

    cons:

    - WoW-like, hand-holdy, "the game's doing the work of putting you in a guild now?" blaaaah blaaaaaaaah....

    - this would take a lot of coding time

    - you might not like the ppl in these guilds or how much harder it will be to recruit new members to your player-made guild.

    - you eventually lose your friends who progress slower.

    - you eventually lose your friends who progress faster.

    - ppl who find that they don't like anything past "expansion Z" stop paying altogether b/c they only need a free account for it. less money for SOE (from weirdos).

    I think the pros outweigh the cons here. if you don't like the guild, leave it. if you don't like how hard it is to recruit new members, well I guess it's b/c this was a success! the social aspect of the game might lose a lot of value until you reach the 21st guild, but this guild is completely optional anyway... maybe once you're caught up with the content you're just not part of any guild and you're on your own, as you are now?

    while for some ppl it might mean less money for SOE, I think any improvement to the game which gets more ppl into it and having more fun will eventually lead to more money for SOE. the problem with progression guilds failing on here is b/c .1% of the players read the guild recruitment forum - just look at its views. this would change if this completely optional guild system was implemented, if you leave the guild to join w/e player made guild you want then you have access to all the content. what do you guys think? I think it's great but will never be done b/c it's too much work, agreed? good, good, have fun copy/pasting that last sentence and have a crappy day too! :(
  2. oisjafoij Augur

    stop trying to reinvent the wheel. People enjoy classic progression to a point. That point for Fippy seemed to be planes of power, possibly oow at most. Seems easy enough as has been said in 1000 other threads here.

    Most threads go like this about a new progression server or the current ones:

    people want a new progression server
    the current ones are dying / dead / devoid of players
    kuk will claim otherwise
    people like progression to PoP
    Elskidor likes this.
  3. Kukgrol Elder

    You know, I think you have a great idea there. It's definitely a different approach, and something that might provide a much easier 'fix' to the need that people have for wanting new progression. If the guild could be locked from content outside of the era it has unlocked, it would help keep everyone within the limits of that era.

    It would take some serious work to code it. But then it could be done on any server, continuously.
  4. Argosh Augur

    It's an interesting idea. It would take a lot of code work for sure but would only have to be done once. I'm not a huge fan of automatically being placed in a guild but the idea of having a guild able to flag it's members to a specific expansion could be really great. That way, if you started your own guild, the guild leader could choose an era and everything up to that expansion would be available to the guild's members and everything after locked until completed. This way different guilds could choose where they want to begin their adventure and people can search for a guild that's where they want to be. If they decide later to change their mind, leaving the guild would remove any limitations placed on them by joining that guild and they can find another that is where they want to be at any time.
  5. gcubed Augur

    There are 13 Standard ruleset servers. There is also the PvP server and the Roleplaying server. All expansions are unlocked to anyone on all 15 of these servers that owns a license for the latest expansion.

    These people, at present, can play in pretty much any expansion that they want. They can create and alt character and level them as fast as they want and can take them wherever they want, whenever they want.

    These people do not currently have to be in a raid guild to zone into the current expansion. Any alts they create do not have to be in a raid guild to zone into the current expansion. Even small family style guilds can, and do, have people running around in TDS.

    Most of these people will not tolerate being forced into another playstyle. Now we aren't talking about End-Game raid guilds here, since they have already killed every raid target prior to TDS. We are talking about everyone else. I can't think of anything that would kill this game faster than telling everyone that in order to do group progression in TDS or even just level to 105, their guilds are going to have to take down all the raid targets in CoTF. These people will have to be given the OPTION to play the game your way, forcing them will not work very well.
  6. oisjafoij Augur

    The best way to get something you want done is to throw a bunch of ideas out there that require hours upon hours of development work for a small slice of the players. Good way to get a new progression server going for sure.
  7. Elskidor Augur

    Slightly faster idea.

    Just reset Fippy but remove the newb armor and close expansions after a PoP...done.
  8. Machen New Member

    Throwing a bunch of random people into a guild together with no leadership or structure sounds like a great idea. What could go wrong...
    Elskidor likes this.
  9. drew0987654 Augur

    that's why I already said, they could just leave the guild and then everything would be unlocked for them....

    again, you could just leave the guild if you don't like it.... I would love the chaos. leadership wouldn't be necessary, there would be so many ppl in the guild that SOE would probably have to cap the amount of ppl in each one, easily enough ppl to get a group for w/e you want to do. with a need for multiple automatic guilds, this would create epic conflicts too besides just the in-guild fighting.

    b/c he locked the one where I wanted to know how often ppl checked this forum? btw, how close to HoT are those progression servers, anyone know?
  10. drew0987654 Augur

    so the ppl who like PoP can stay at PoP with everyone else who only likes PoP if this was implemented..... you underestimate the amount of ppl who want to progress through all of it.

    1) all servers lose ppl

    2) the further a prog server goes, the less likely it is to get new members, but it still loses ppl.

    do the math.... no matter how good later expansions are, you're still not going to join a progression server that's 80% through it all. live servers lose players every month too, they just get more ppl coming in to compensate.... the progression servers' decline in popularity the later they go isn't necessarily due to the quality of later expansions. the way these guilds would work, each later guild would still have potential new players.

    if 90% of the players stay from one expansion to the next, you can see how progression servers will eventually fail. but if anyone who joins this hypothetical guild at any point in time has the same 90% chance to stick around, the population of the later guilds will still be rising b/c new ppl will join every day. day 1 of progression servers: thousands of ppl show up, but how many have joined this week? 0, right? b/c they don't want to start from underfoot. in this hypothetical guild, that isn't a problem.
  11. Croak Augur

    I am not sure you realize just how deep the changes go between expansions.

    Whole interface elements are different such as bag slots
    Which recipes result in successful combines
    Which items drop from mobs (though this is a little broken) - potential for exploit is huge on all the pre-nerf stuff from early expansions.
    How much experience you get from a kill or mission completion
    Which NPCs appear in zone, what they sell, what quests they give and maybe which version of quests
    The whole player <> player economy - just think of kronos which might be 20-30k @ classic to 800-1m when parity with live (currently)
    Zone flagging & levels would be fun - e.g. a "lv 65 PoP guild" raiding PoF for the first time competing against a lv85 warrior riposte killing all of c2

    It can't be mixed

    p.s. expect House of Thule maybe February
    Malachi likes this.
  12. Mulerien Elder

    Idk how many people have started from scratch on Fippy this week, but four people returned who were in their 50s and 60s in our guild alone (same thing as starting from scratch really; 1-60 is like a 2 hour PL max). You underestimate the people who have played the prog servers 3 times now and realized they want to do something different than play a game where tank n spank and auto attack were the norm. Vanilla eq is easy and boring in my opinion; having 7 pages of hot keys w aa abilities and clickies and tweaking how you string them together during 10-15 raid encounters to maximize dps while following intricate scripts is what's fun for me. I'd never play any prog server again after going through the fippy grinder. I want to see content I've missed in VOA+. And there's plenty of us on fippy who want the same thing. Regardless of what you hear on these forums, there are people joining fippy to play.
  13. oisjafoij Augur



    The problem with going past pop is gear and the general way the game is now played. The reason people enjoy planes of power and the era's prior is that the gear in these expansions is good for the entire game. You can go into kael, hunt armor and go into pop and kill with that armor. You can use luclin raid gear to raid pop, you can use ntov raid gear to raid pop. You can get gear upgrades from many many expansions and there is a plethora of content for people at maximum level to enjoy as well as those at lower levels.

    Now we're later on in expansions and the way the game is designed changed thus the way you play changes. You don't need to raid to experience end game zones, you don't have to raid to get gear and you don't have to raid for any reason at all. Also you don't need anything from prior expansions to do anything in the current one, also everything in prior expansions is obsolete outside a few augs here and there. They cut the content down and made gear easier to farm and more powerful to please the casual gamer, doing this they made any prior expansion to the one you were playing useless. Nobody in Underfoot goes back to exp or gear in seeds of destruction but during planes of power you could exp in luclin and still get aa. You could be level 60 and group with a 65 without issue.

    The game started to WoWify itself after planes of power and gates of discord. It's why the population dropped and has continued to drop to what it is now. You aren't experiencing a total game like the classic to planes experience, everquest now is a single game over and over, cut and paste doing the same things with a level bump its not a collective experience, you have no reason or need to explore anything but the current expansion. The depth of the game isn't there anymore and thats what people miss.

    Instances keep you away from interacting with players, and people want player interaction as you can see in the "Classic" everquest era. Another reason why servers fall apart like they do after planes, instances keep you out of the way of other people and limits the human interaction of a mmorpg, cause nothing like a multiplayer game keeping you away from multi players.

    It's painfully obvious that if they started a new progression server it would be full of players until planes of power just like the last time. You don't need to come up with inane ideas to let everyone know what they already do. People love the classic to Planes of Power Everquest experience and lore more than any other part of the game.
    Elskidor likes this.
  14. Croak Augur


    Do you actually play the game?

    During UF everyone levels up through SoD at least partially because
    1. Merc J2-J5
    2. Spells behind faction
    3. Emblems
    4. Current Type 3 augs
    5. Various farming/camping

    I am excluding those who are PLed or just buy their way 80+ with taskadds

    Gear to cope with UF for those playing catchup came from OMMs & tradeskill stuff, then boomerang
    Those who were 85 already had SoD grp/raid gear to cope

    Tanks typically need augs from 3-4 expansions back, & don't forget trophies. I am sure most during Underfoot still use augs from TSS, maybe also DoDH & OOW.

    Fippy was unique as the first server to benefit from Metal power sources for all as soon as Underfoot opened. As a grouper I had to raid to use them on Vox (1 SoF raid did the trick).
    For pure power sources you either farm Solteris (if you have raid unlocks for pure augs) or SoD zones for dust.

    Up to 81 I was grinding AAs in PoP and occasionally OOW & SoF (dsh)
    @85 I still grind AAs in Vald, Thal, Mech Guardian, Beza, Zeka etc

    The huge unpopularity with exp changes with TDS is because people expect to be able to drop back 3-4 expansions to grind AAs/exp, not just because of HoTzones (which often are a poor choice other than the daily)

    People used to grp with a wider disparity in levels - they still could. The mechanics haven't change.
    A lv55 with a grp of 65s is effectively being PLed and slowing down the grp.
    A lv90 with a grp of lv100 is effectively being PLed and slowing down the grp, even worse if the grp is 3+3 mercs as you end up with 2x lv90s

    A level 60 tank in Kunark gear isn't going to walk into plane of fire and tank it
  15. oisjafoij Augur


    anyone actively playing on the server has all the things from SoD done during SoD. you have no reason to back during underfoot. There are 2 augments casters use from SoD at most, melee get a whole new round of ac augs from every zone in underfoot.

    spells behind faction can be bought by anyone with faction and traded, no reason to go back and do this unless you need a type 3 augment, which you would have done during SoD because you had no reason to go to SoF.

    there are new emblems with better power than any faction emblem in SoD available for purchase off the brells rest vendor.

    gear in brells rest blows away anything in SoD by a long amount, you aren't going back to SoD to camp or farm anything.

    During UF nobody levels up in SoD, exp rates in underfoot are twice that of SoD zones for less effort.
  16. Croak Augur

    Obviously you are not playing, and maybe the experience you have of UF is steamrollering the group content in raid gear.

    Most who were already max level / most useful AA from SoD were done grinding exp & group progression within a few weeks of Underfoot going live, a large chunk of that grinding outside UF.
    The hardcore were in convo within days.

    Someone with a lv75 toon can't just skip to Underfoot content actually playing the game (some buy their way to convo / lv85 + gear), and don't think it is easy to persuade people to buy faction spells (though there is one trader in bazaar who has most for a good markup)

    The content isn't obsolete - the gear isn't useless.

    I see plenty of raid & grp Convo geared players who aren't max AA grinding outside UF zones - that doesn't mean they are exping necessarily in SoD zones, but some certainly were (e.g. rangers in FoS)

    There really isn't a huge difference between Emblem of Scale (field of scale) & Emblem of Soothing Clay (tier 6) if you are wearing a full set of group gear, and you can get it as a side effect of levelling up.
    The emblem from DSH is useful before that for many classes and doesn't take too many chained clears of the farm with tasks to get.
    If you are a tank, your first emblem isn't after you have completed T6 UF progression unless you buy your way there.
  17. oisjafoij Augur


    You're assuming new people play on progression servers at this point, I wouldn't go that far.
  18. Behee Augur

    I guess it just depends on the server. On Vulak we only have SoD as an option. But at the same time we also have a steady flow of new people to the server. It's not huge, but it is common to see new people rolling in.
  19. gcubed Augur

    Why should I be forced to leave my guild, a guild I have been in for years, just to level up from 100 to 105 and group in current content?
  20. drew0987654 Augur

    in the very first sentence of the op....... read it........ key phrase "when they start a new character." this is the 2nd time I had to point something out to you which is already in the op. at this point....... just don't bother here any more.......... [edited to shreds]