Replace private instance runs with /pick in new expansions

There is no doubt that EverQuest of today is very little like EverQuest of 1999.

Some of those changes are great, and some of them are not so great.

What Made EverQuest Special
One of the things that defined EverQuest was it's big open world. This included dungeons, and any nostalgic EQ gamer could tell you the names of their favorite dungeons from back in the day because they left such a lasting impression on them.

Going to a dungeon meant getting a group, finding a camp, and pulling mobs to that camp until such time that a named spawned, and you got a chance at some uber loots. It was game design pattern that defined a generation of MMOs, and EverQuest was arguably the best of them all at it.

The Problem That Arose
Space was limited in these dungeons. Even the largest of dungeons could not hold the number of players that wanted and needed to be in them.

This lead to a lot of fights, and the ever popular term was coined; train. People were territorial, camps were stolen, revenge was taken, and a new term was coined; farmers. Because drops were so rare and so hard to come by due to the lack of availability of the camps where those drops were obtained, people began farming those camps. Eventually, the only way to get the items you needed was to pay a farmer for it.

The Solution
With the Lost Dungeons of Norrath expansion, the developers had a solution; instanced dungeon runs. The idea was simple. Separate everyone off in to their own instance of the dungeons, so everybody would have the opportunity to get what they need.

The New Problem
There was only one problem with this idea... well many, but one big one. Since everybody had a copy of the dungeon anytime they wanted it, that meant that rare items coming in to the world would flood the servers, so to combat that, the best rare items no longer dropped off of mobs in the instanced dungeons.

That was the beginning of the era we live in today where Dungeons are not fun and exciting, but rather a means to an end.

The whole point of what made EverQuest fun originally was the thrill of camping a dungeon, and getting that rare mob to spawn whom in turn dropped that rare item you had been needing. Instead, now you got a mission for your group, went to the dungeon entrance, zoned in, killed from point A to point B, killed the boss mob (or completed the objective for the mission), and got credits given to you for completing the mission. You collected up these credits, and then turned them in back in town for equipment.

In one fell swoop, everything that made EverQuest fun was destroyed, and it was all in an effort to deal with farmers. In essence, we hurt every single EverQuest player to thwart the farmers, but here's the kicker. The farmers just found new ways to do what they do. The only people that got hurt in the whole ordeal was the players.

Fast Forward To Today
Thanks to the innovations of the developers, the /pick system was implemented in to the game which allows a new instance of any zone to be spun up at such time that the current zone's population of players is too large. Now you can have 2, 3, 10, or more instances of a zone running at any given time based on the population in that zone.

New Solution
The developers and designers of EverQuest could bring the game back to it's original greatness by abolishing the use of private-instance missions and instead going back to designing large immersive non-instanced dungeons with rare mobs that drop amazing rare loot and utilizing the /pick system to handle the fact that multiple groups will be going after that same content at the same time.

There's no need for the instance-run credit system where you take the tickets you earned back to the prize booth in town to get your equipment upgrades.

If you support replacing private-instance mission runs with /pick-based open dungeons in future EverQuest expansions, please let the developers and designers know here. Let your voice be heard. The systems are already in place. We just need the designers to choose to use them.

Thank you.

TL;DR... Replace "private instance mission runs" with "open world /pick-based dungeons" in future expansions to bring the old feel of EverQuest back to the game.

Any room to object?

Risiko - very much appreciate the thoughtful analysis, but I personally don’t find camping open world mobs as more fun than missions. Also, I think the biggest challenge was the transition from very lengthy fights to fights that can last as little as 5 seconds. It used to take a minute to defeat the Ghoul Lord, or perhaps even 3-5 minutes to clear out the Frenzied Ghoul room in lower guk. Groups consumed far less content and therefore a full zone of spawns could satisfy 40+ players. Nowadays, with super quick kill rates, invis, fades, and all that good stuff — it takes massively more content (in terms of mobs) in order to satisfy a single group. I don’t think this fight style / speed would enable designers to recreate the old dungeon feel.

Furthermore, I think examples exist in the latest expansion. Howling Stones and Veeshan’s Peak are both mob dense zones that offer great rewards in terms of loot (type 5 augs), rare items, and augments. Yet both of these zones are two of the least populated zones from my experience, trumped only by the wasteland that is Skyfire. From my experience, when faced with the option to camp items in open world zones versus trudge through a mission, folks nearly always elect the mission.

There is always room to object. This is an open forum, and I certainly am not perfect nor should my opinions be taken as fact or correct on face value.

I believe that the idea behind the missions could be applied to an expansion based on the /pick system.

For instance, there's no reason you couldn't get missions (quests) to accomplish certain things that simply were things you needed to accomplish in an open world dungeon. That's perfectly fine. In fact, that system could award you tokens that could be used to obtain gear as it is today.

The thing that I dislike about the modern system is the instance clearing, point A to B, leave, and do it again. It feels less like a world and more like a game to me.

To me, being able to enter a dungeon, and choose where you want to go kill mobs (and having those mobs respawn) felt more like a real living world.

Edited to add:
This is also why I choose to play on TLP servers currently. If new expansions were made that relied more on the /pick system rather than private instance runs, I would switch back to my level 100 characters and continue playing modern EverQuest.

I think the bottle neck of VP key camps was a refresher course for many on sharing open world spawns. There was much angst and whining in several zones as folks fought and argued and cried over contested spawns. Good for the feel of EQ, I guess. I personally enjoyed flagging my 6 box crew through all the contention. Even went back to VP key my 2nd line group. Much easier second time through months later, all the contested spawns were barren.
Conq

Based off this statement, why would they change anything? Right now they provide content that satisfies you and satisfies the rest of the community who likes instanced missions.

Even in current content there are items that you have to camp in open world dungeons to obtain. However, I agree with Aurmoon. Those zones aren't very populated now, and if folks are there, a lot of times it is someone multi-boxing from what I have seen.

Not trying to shoot your idea down just giving my perspective from a live server player.

This structure you describe is actually exactly the way live EQ expansions implement the majority of quests. Mercenary Tasks and Partisan tasks, which account for the bulk of quests in any new expansion, are completed entirely in open world zones. Additionally, the much more involved quests, such as Crestra’s Earring, are also done entirely in the open world. There are just four missions that are completed in private instances, whereas the entire rest of the expansion content is open world. Currency is earned primarily for completing missions, but can also be earned through Crestra’s Earring open world quest as well.

I believe the struggle you’re describing is a dislike towards Heroic Adventures, which have mostly been phased out in the last two expansions. There are no Heroic Adventures in Ring of Scale and very few Heroic Adventures in Empires of Kunark. Live EQ may be more on track than you last experienced if your characters are level 100.

I was unaware of that. I very well may need to dust off my 100s, and give the last two expansions a try.

Thank you.

Your entire rant is based off of TLP and going through the evolution of the game with a ten year delay. They're not going to completely rework old expansions before they open them up on TLP. If you want to give opinion on the direction of current game play, you really need to do so based on the perspective of playing current content. Not based on the transition to LDON.

I think you completely missed the point if you think I am asking anybody to go rework old content. I was only suggesting that the design concept used for creating new expansions going forward be re-evaluated. I'm not completely sure what gave you the idea that I wanted anybody to go re-work old content.

Oh, and it wasn't a rant. It was a conversation. I feel like maybe you're upset, having a bad day, or something. This was just a friendly conversation.

It sounds to me like you quit Live during CotF when the expansion was largely designed around instances, and are making some inaccurate assumptions about what modern EQ is. Some expansions are instance heavy and some aren’t, and it tends to vary year to year.

The last few (TBM, EoK and RoS) generally had a few instanced missions, but they were the smaller part of, not the bulk, of content.

Just like LDON was, instance heavy expansions elicit differing responses from the playerbase. I hated ldon/CotF personally, it was repetitive and bland. But some people rave about LDoN and thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

The problem with your assertion about being able to “choose” what mobs to kill is also what was wrong with the totally open world game in the first place - there was never enough to go around, especially at expansion launches. Everyone knows where everything is now, so the best spots get taken/monopolized constantly to an almost ridiculous degree (looking at you, TLP) and it often leads to a lot of douchey behavior that’s not particularly fun gameplay.

/pick helps a little, but even if there are 5 picks of Sebilis, the crypt is still camped in all of them when one wanted to camp their box of nil space this year. And on live there usually aren’t enough bodies outside of the first month or two expansion launch to actually spin them up, let alone keep them from collapsing.

Instances provided a way around this. For example: many name camps that drop augs in the last few expansions are often the places people congregate at. That sometimes creates bottlenecks early on, but those augs also have a chance to drop from a mission chest as an alternative. So if I show up in OT to camp something that’s camped, I can go another route and try and get it through an instance chest. This is a good thing and let’s people play the game more to their liking.

When I EQ, I like to pick things to do and go try to accomplish them. The game has always had natural bottlenecks at desirable camps, and when I show up to one and it’s perennially camped, that's not fun. I don’t want to play the EverQuest line ride.

Or worse is the TLP style wild wild West of training, monopolizing and permacamping the same things for profit. There’s a reason why the no drop tag became as prevalent as it did, FV rules are basically restricted to one real live server, and why “chase” items of the last few expansions have been random trash drops and not dropped from specific mobs/camps. To a lot of us the everything-open-world feel wasn’t worth the toxicity that came with it, especially considering the lack of PnP now, too. I much prefer the in the middle style, where I can instance some things if I want, or open world is an option too. I’m usually in the open world more than not, fwiw.

TL;DR - you’re making some poor assumptions, and might want to check out how EoK and RoS progression and gameplay. Both are a lot more open world content oriented than instanced. The only thing that’s been exclusively instanced lately has been raids.

LDON's were fun because you could quickly get set up, accomplish something within an hour, and then leave. Part of the problem with Everquest is that we're missing that now. The Dead Hills HA's were nice because it was a return to that old "do something in 20 minutes-60 minutes" time frame window that people have to play.

Two AM Vex Thall runs and such, no one really wants to do that anymore.

LDoN was the height of Everquest, while Gates of Discord threw away everything that LDoN did right. You did a dungeon crawl and got a reward.

You are making valid points, but the LDON design also supported other features and addressed other issues. For example, the randomized nature of "rare drops" in regular, non-instanced, zones meant that an unlucky individual could spent dozens of hours waiting for a rare drop. I remember people quitting the game before (and sometimes after) completing their Epics because they were burned out.

In LDON and subsequent instance-heavy expansions you were guaranteed the item that you wanted as long as you could consistently win certain missions. It may not have been as exciting as finally looting that uber-rare drop, but it was also less frustrating. It also created incentives for players to group because there was always something that you could spend LDON points on as opposed to "nah, there is nothing for me at that camp."

Later expansions like COTF had other features which were meant to encourage grouping. For example, you could buy gear and, more importantly, augments from earlier expansions with HA points. It meant that you would be grouping between 75 and 100 instead of camping empty zones in TSS, SoF, etc.

Personally, I love me dungeon crawling and a moderate amount of camping, but missions were originally created to address very real design issues. Depending on how the game evolves, they may become relevant in future expansions again.

Some very valid points being made here in this thread, and I appreciate the open discussion greatly as opposed to the typical forum wars that some threads become.

I think there is always room for improvement in any MMORPG, and I hope that our discussion here gives indication to the current design team on what works and doesn't work for the current EverQuest gamer.

As for the CoTF comment. You are correct. CoTF was around the time I hung up my hat in Live content. From the replies in this thread, I am getting the impression that EverQuest has taken a turn for the better in the last two expansions.

So... you quit quite a while ago on the live servers, and have come back to the "live server" forum to make suggestions on how live should be based on your TLP experience? Whatever man.

I am not sure why we need to have one or the other. Both options would be optimal imo and here is why.

Open world dungeons that require more risk appeal to the more hardcore players. The players with more physical time to spend playing EQ and those that like playing zones more in line with classic EQ.

Instanced missions and zones appeal to the more casual crowd. They provide a version of EQ that allows them to use their limited playing in what they consider a productive manner. Even some of the hardcore players will utilize instanced based zones between lockouts to get to end game faster so they can move into more challenging content faster.

Having both systems in place provides better balance for the game in terms of player retention. If you make the game to complex and difficult you kill off one group of players. If you make the game to easy and repetitive you kill off the other group of players. Giving both options is the healthiest solution from a business standpoint assuming the cost to design both falls within the budget for each expansion.

Time to tell the TLP folks that we use boats in The Darkened Sea.

Drawing lines between TLP and Live players is not helpful to the community at all. Last time I checked, we are all EverQuest players.

I disagree based on the fact that this being an open world RPG one players problem is not another players problem. That's also the great thing about EQ - it takes all kinds

*I also only read this thread because I read it as being about Private Insurance....too early.