Pre-amble: I started playing the game in 1999, took a few breaks here and there. Currently I play on one of the standard servers. I am going to list concerns regarding the health of the game going forward. One of the premier aspects about playing EQ is the end game/raid content. This MMORPG has always had that "special" niche for providing exciting and rewarding game play. 1) Guild play - in order for guilds to be successful, they need to be able to recruit, train, equip, players for current expansion completion. Currently, due to lack of server mergers, more and more guilds cannot "continue" due to lack of a numeric player base. It is my assumption that DBG has no intention to "server merge" the standard servers.... because they are creating "purchase-able" content on the preferred servers... to wit - they have no regard for the health and overall integrity of the game. (They may say different in promotional media). But the proof is in the overall lack of population distribution and player base on the servers. People are leaving the game -- and one of the contributing factors is.. not being able to raid (field a solid raid force within the specific population dynamics of a server) 2) Raid content vs kronon price leveraging. In it's true essence EQ (for the purist) is an "earn your raid gear" (which means it cannot be purchased) game. With the inclusion of the "current expansion" CHASE LOOT... (exact stats at the expansion "raid loot"), this has "chipped away" at the integrity of the game. As additional content/expansions are released, we will probably see more "krono leveraging" at the expense of the game. An example would be (for next expansion)... lets allow players to "purchase" the class-only specific weapon (once the player base becomes "used to" this)... it will basically morph into a "duder game"... you basically buy your gear like the standard mmo (vanilla games) that are in the marketplace today. Once this happens... the purist in the game will not play (IMHO). 3) Additional Content: I very much enjoyed the Sebilis content for the HH this year. DBG took sufficient interest in making the content enjoyable and applicable for this current expansion level. Kudos to them on that content and release. It is my wish that DBG takes a more "healthy and sustained" view of the game for the standard player. There are still people out there that want to play and experience this game and the specific enjoyment it provides, Regards,
I'm curious on this, as I haven't been able to play much lately and am very out of date on the current EQ economy. Has it really become that affordable for people to gear up their character by purchasing chase items with Krono? And are chase items in that much of an abundance? When I was playing a lot, the supply vs demand for chase loot made it a HUGE investment for anyone to actually gear up their character with it. Maybe a piece or two, but unless you wanted to sink a thousand bucks into Krono, you just weren't gonna gear up that way. Not to mention if there were a lot of people willing to do that, the supply just wasn't there to make it possible for more than a handful to do this.
#1 - Players can self merge by moving to a new server if they pay the transfer cost. As for a complete merge, that depends on what population is considered healthy. It wouldn't surprise me if DB does decide to do a server merge in the near future. #2 - COTF also had chase loot. I think it is premature to assume that this is the new standard going forward. As others have noted, it is not a viable replacement for gearing a player. Maybe you get a piece or 2, but not a complete set.
Nope, it would be very expensive unless someone has hoarded Krono for a long time. Then they'd blow their wad of Krono. They're really not that common.
#1 if current guilds cant field a full raid force make an alliance with other smaller guilds or create or join a public raid force. On Tunare this has been pretty successful and I imagine other servers utilize. It is an MMO and as players of our community we need to communicate to make things happen instead of depending only on DBG to make the game more enjoyable. #2 I could not disagree more with you. The pure cost alone to equip a toon off of chase loot is insane and I don't know anyone who is just out killing hundreds of thousands of EOK mobs and getting all the chase loot their toon needs. Further I have only met one person to date in game who has a full set of chase loot and it came at an incredibly steep price which your average gamer wont or cant afford. TBH I never understood the whole "elite gear should only be for raiders because they put in the time" concept. There are players who put in hundreds of hours a month but never have the chance to raid due to no raiding during their play time. Chase loot at least allows them a chance to be rewarded for their time investment in the game. I think the current system of leaving the visible gear strictly to raiding works just fine. That's still over a third of a toons gear not accessible to the non raider and probably the most important pieces as a whole. I have made the argument before that the people who stand to profit the most from chase loot are raiders themselves who obtain it. Even if they get a piece they don't have as soon as they get the raid version they can unattune it and make a killing where as your average joe has to decide between an upgrade or a nice payday.
That's viable for players that have nothing keeping them on their current server. Friendships are one thing that keep people playing. You need to be prepared to leave those friends behind. Also, server transfers are per character only. If you have lots of alts you actually play, transferring can get really expensive. There are barriers to transferring that prohibit many from doing so. CotF and TDS chase loot was equivalent to the previous expansion's raid loot. EoK took it a step further and made it current expansion equivalent. This is something that server merges might actually be able to help with. Nearly every raid guild follows the same east coast centric schedule. So far as I know, there is one remaining west coast guild and a European guild or two struggling on AB with the lag there. Concentrating more players on fewer servers might make guilds that play different schedules more viable by pooling together more players in different time zones. Right now they're all spread really thin and the only options don't work well for west coast people that work full time or have families they want to spend time with in the evening. Then there are the remaining Asians and Aussies with no real options. People aren't going to pay for server transfers/leave friends in the hopes of some upstart guild succeeding on the basis of getting people to transfer from 5+ servers to form.
This still would not fix the issue unless say they had a server targeted for the specific time zones. I am on the west coast and had to stop raiding once I started having kids for the simple reasons you mentioned. Spending my evening with my wife and children are more important to me than a game. On my server there are no raid times that work for someone on the west coast with a family all of them are aimed at folks on EST. There is a public raid that starts at 8pm my time but even that is to early. The fact that people who play in basically one or two time zones have a significant advantage to being able to raid and obtain raid gear over everyone else makes chase loot make even more sense to me. Lets be honest the amount of time devoted to obtaining actual raid gear vs trying to obtain chase loot is not even close. Unless you are someone who runs an illegal bot program, a master farmer/reseller, or have no job, family or anything going on in RL and can devote all your time to playing the game odds are the average person will not even see a single piece of chase loot and at best a couple. The call to remove it because it destroys the incentive to raid is blown way out of proportion imo.
