Phinigel: Long expansion unlock timer suggestion(s)

The whole thing is more to do with the fact that from SoF you require raid drops to progress. Not like blast out group flagging or solo flags in 24 hrs and raid end zone. Tiered raiding and designed that you progress slowly over a 12 month period why it was so few flags. Now we have a 4th of the time in some these expansions 12 weeks as compared to 12 months. Some guilds can split this with the fact they have loads players and loads of boxed players, but for most even getting a 54 man raid full is tough and splitting raids is not the way game was ever intended to be. Just increase drops to 4 times what they should be so it makes it possible to actually progress at a decent rate. If you make it even in SoF to take 8 weeks to flag for end zone and only have 4 weeks of gearing up, lots of people will quit

It would be nice to get an official response to the flagging issues going forward. We know from Omens that raid flagging can be changed to achievement based as with anguish. Though changing the loot tables is probably easier/faster and would use less dev time.

Either way it will be a #dedserver playing a version of WoW and not the early EQ that people loved. Hopefully the FV Phinny clone drops soon.

This is true in an even greater sense: the game was never intended to be replayed as "progression".

It's great that they have offered such, and it has been such a cash generator.


We spend a lot of time on the forums about what should be "as it exactly was" and such. Really progression is a new/different game built out of the same bones. The goal should be enticing gameplay that retains players as long as possible. Eventually the goal should even be using the progression servers as the route to recruiting players into the live game.

We're not there yet. AoC and how easy most content is has made raiding viable for far more guilds (otherwise we'd lose most raiders once they got blocked by a top guild or 2 in early content). Non-raiders get pinched a bit Luclin-LoY mostly because of the massive gear gap. LoY has always been terribly under-itemized in respects to the quality of the gear for the level to obtain for example.

The live game also needs work, some of which they have been doing in reducing bloat/clutter. They need to do a better job with the "85 is the newbie level you need to be 100+ to find population" state of the game if they want to recruit/retain new & returning blood.

Some of the grander notions of the game design may need re-envisioning, particularly things that were moved away from later because it was discouraging population. Getting us all to agree on what those changes should be can be lots of fun discussions, though we will rarely reach even a 75% consensus.

For what it's worth with FV loot rules and probably Faster Exp. The only "early" EQ expac I enjoyed on these latest TLP rides were Luclin.

My TLP Money to DBG stands or falls with the longlivity of Phinigel. If they keep on making phinigel enjoyable for this wonderful community to play. I will keep playing. Simple as that.

And there's probably a good amount of the playerbase on Phinigel that feels the same way. Of course, there's always those wanting to jump on the latest TLP server - but for many of us, Phinigel is our last ride.....

but who knows - if it all goes well with future progression, we'll keep riding with Live content in some way or the other.

People should be less concerned about whether the top guild on the server can complete the content in era and more concerned about the experience of the average guild. Having players with less than 100% attendance compounds the issues raised. The fact is that trying to have 40+ people geared, flagged, and online in this game is a very challenging human resources job.

Is the concern about the top guild(s) doing content in era, or that unless you have attendance issues or extremely poor tactics every semi-trying-to guild is easily completing content in era?

If everyone is in-era, then everyone needs all the keys asap. Thus we get content bottlenecks (as in silly key spawns/drops) of trying to do content in 3 months (or whatever) that was intended for less players to do in much longer timeframes originally.

One can want content to be harder to beat in era, yet want keying/flagging/access to be simpler as well --a better experience for all guilds (except those that want to steamroll with no risk/doubt I suppose).

None of the current 20 raiding guilds will accept out of era raiding. If SoF comes and goes and guilds don't feel like they are finished with SoF and ready for the new expansion, Phinigel dies.

Both of these, 100%. It would have been a LOT better if Phinny's schedule was 'Content Complete plus 2-3 months' instead of 'flat 2-3 months' from the beginning. (this would have added basically no time so far, since every expansion so far has been beaten in 0-1 days)

The very reason Phinny is successful to this point is that unlocks have been in the Goldilocks zone of not too long to make people quit, while also being long enough that people can actually finish the content in era.

We're moving into an era which is different enough from the first 15 expansions that 2-3 months is no longer within the Goldilocks zone anymore. Changes should be made to preserve the fun of this server. There's many options and many people have expressed flexibility as long as the core tenet that expansions need to be finish-able reasonably in era is met.

No one can compare Phinny or Cornaiv with other TLP's, as they all require a vote to open up next expansions. Phinny and Cornaiv open no matter what happens so time andflagging speed is if great importance.

Would be nice if one of the devs actually read this and could comment tho.

I mean well yeah, it’s clearly the gold standard for TLP servers and the main reason I won’t even spend time making or playing toons on other TLP’s (other than Agnarr as that has a specific niche) because time is money and if you feel like you’re playing on a server which you can almost count on being a graveyard soon, than that takes away most/all incentive to login and spend any precious time on the other servers

Dunno you guys but I was sad to see that the test patch notes didn't include any fix to key drops in SoF. We really need that bottlenecks pulled out to enjoy phinny's fast peace.

I've paid attention to the forums enough to be convinced that some expacs need a key/flag adjustment and/or a slightly extended timeline to keep Phinny robustly progressing.

For progression overall, they still need to keep working on adjustments that will make some things more era-balanced though. Someone completing something the first day or two is fine, multiple eras being basically trivial for most to do in-era fast should be upped a bit (without breaking the casual dabbling game).

The next expansions are not going to be dictated by the average skill level and dedication of each guild, but by how much you can grind out of your members to split raid to the nth degree to get enough flags quick enough for a fraction of them to get in.

This is wrong on all accounts.

Guilds that split to the nth degree, as you put it, will be fully done with flagging in 1-3 weeks tops and able to put a full raid into Crystallos. At that point the only ones sitting out will be due to the 54 man raid cap. We did almost zero splitting on Fippy and had a full 54 man raid into crystallos in about four weeks (iirc the only split we did was a single Meldrath split on the final cycle.)

And, you are just wrong on the skill level required. Events like Vyskudra or even Meldrath take a much higher level of skill compared to anything that has come before, and there is going to be a pretty large separation between skilled guilds and unskilled guilds. The lower skill guilds will likely not finish the expansion till SOD/level 85, not because of lack of flags, but because they just won't be able to beat some of the events at level 80. Especially the guilds that are both less skilled and running with <54 on raids.

It's completely irrelevant if some guilds will fail some events. In fact, if anything, some guilds being expected to struggle is an argument in FAVOR of fixing the drop rates.

If the progression was intended to take 1 month out of 12 months, then how is it reasonable for it to still take 1 month out of 3?

The biggest issue is that SoF is only the beginning and future expansions will ramp up the issue even worse, to the point where it isn't even theoretically possible for Underfoot, for example.

Progression wasn't INTENDED to take 1 month out of 12 months. At launch in 2007, it took over six months for any guild to beat it, according to EGL, and most guilds took 10-12 months, many longer.

If it takes most guilds 1.5 months out of 3 months now, and it originally took ~7 months out of 12 months for a single guild to beat the expansion, and most guilds only had a month or two to farm with many guilds not even that, I'd argue that's working as intended. The average guild will still get the same amount of time to farm that live guilds got.

And yes, this is why I have been arguing and trying to persuade the dev staff since before the server even launched that they should do something about Underfoot and the 3-4 expansions that follow it. Maybe you missed me being the only one to bring it up three years ago.

I'm just saying it doesn't make much sense to use your energy fighting against any changes to SoF just because it doesn't rise to Underfoot levels of impossibility.

Everyone agrees that the "flag drop problem" starts relatively small in SoF and gets quickly worse until Underfoot where it reaches a crisis point.

At the end of the day the devs will decide if they want to make changes to SoF and it sure as heck looks like they won't be.

So lets talk about SoD where it gets worse, and underfoot where it gets even worse.

See, this is exactly the sort of sky is falling nonsense I am talking about.

SoD does not make it worse. SoD is easier to flag than SOF. In fact, of the next ~10 expansions, SoD is the fastest one to flag for, as long as you can beat the encounters.

We should not be wasting the devs' time asking for changes that are not needed.