Does Phinny need exp boost?

As we turn towards expansions with 1000's, vs 100's, of AA's does phinny need a exp boost to compensate for the reduced 3 or 2 month expansion life? The number of AAs released with each expansion continues to grow, and the 3 or 2 month time frame simply seems out of sync when originally players had 12 months, more or less to earn AA points.

I don't believe anyone can complain about the burden of leveling up to max at this point, seeing as after nearly a week of SoD, it seem the majority of active players have achieved lvl 85, or are very close. However, 1000's of AAs are available for purchase thereafter, and only a short time to grind them out. While i agree all of them are not necessary except for those chasing the 1%, the burden of AA grinding is becoming a sever impediment to anyone considering rolling on Phinny (i suppose we can always hope for new blood) and more practically for anyone thinking of rolling a new box or changing mains.

I feel it comes down to this. Those players at the 1%, who had max AA prior to SoD, will again do what they do, and max in SoD and bank 170 prior to SoD ending. However, for everyone else, that AA grind is real, unending, and the burden will only grow exponentially. If the expansion is designed to have a lifetime of 2 or 3 months, than that follows that experience gain, AA gain, and keying requirements, should be proportionally adjusted. No one wants free cookies, they can go to other games for that, but trying to do what was originally done in 12 months in 2 or 3, just isn't feasible for the majority of the player base. Levels still need to be earned, AA's still earned, and keying tasks completed, but the time to acquire these achievements should be proportional to the life expectancy of when those achievements are relevant to the servers point of progression.

No

Phinny is in SoD so you have live exp rates, I'm not familiar with anything that would justify a "normal" server having > live rates unless it was a very limited duration "special event server" or something along those lines. All the servers that have > live xp rates have some special ruleset (FV-Roleplaying server, Test-Test server) etc.

For inscrutable reasons, all SoD zones have TERRIBLE exp. It's actually better exp by far to go back to SoF zones, which is really sad because they are boring and the new zones are much more interesting.

I definitely will be falling behind on AAs this expansion regardless of what I do because it's just impossible with the current XP rate and the number of AAs to get.

And I don't see it getting better with a 2 month expansion coming afterwards...

Also, 3 month unlocks isn't a special ruleset? cause it is...

Honestly, I don't see the SoD+ expansions being compatible with this release schedule, although it was perfect for everything before SoD.

Most of us will. As it gets compounded, it'll turn to futility and finally to resignation. C'est la vie.

It’s a truebox and instanced raid server, which was a special ruleset but they then shipped this onto Agnarr and Coirnav.

FV loot code was shipped onto the Brekt server as well, so that isn’t unique to FV alone any longer.

I’m of the opinion that while it’s expected of players to progress and complete content within the 2-3 month windows each expansion remains current, the EXP rate on the server should be increased to allow players to complete a decent amount of the AA content each expansion offers while they remain current.

For reference using druids as an example over the next year these expansions will unlock on Phinny:

SoD - 1206 AAs - 3 months
UF - 1188 AAs - 2 months
HoT - 1492 AAs - 3 months
VoA - 2359 AAs - 3 months

That’s 6245 AAs in a years time. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m glad that we have AAs to the point where we can’t just buy 100% of all the useful ones immediately upon launch with the out of era AA banks players are allowed like was the case with most expansions up to around TSS.

Also let’s be fair. Players don’t need max AAs to be effective.

I did a count of what I would deem to be the useful AAs for druids trying to fill their primary/secondary group and raid roles from SoD. I threw out all the defensives, stat cap increasers, misc things like charms/resists/Regen. I kept in all the healing, and damage focused passive and most of the useful activateables (excluding some of the junk ones). It came to about 641 AAs. That’s roughly half of what is offered total in the expansion.

In a 90 day expansion cycle you’d need to get about 7 AAs per day to hit this as the expansion comes to a close. For people who can play daily and hit lesson every day, it’s doable. For people who can only make it on a few times a week, and may need to throw up LFG or settle on a Molo EXP spot, they’re going to fall behind in critical AAs quickly as the expansions continue to release.

One solution would be just a raw EXP bonus for the server to offset the rapid influx of AA content coming from 2-3 month expansion Releases. Another option would be to lean into the truebox nature of the server and increase the EXP bonus from grouping with full groups of real players. Another would be to accept that retention of players is a difficulty on later expansion TLPs and perhaps modifying how autogrants work on the server to maybe allow every expansion but the most current to be autogranted would help the more casual members of the server without impacting the play of the more hardcore members.

I’m not sure but I do think it is something that deserves looking into.

Phinny should have the best XP rate in the game.*

This makes it the "preferred" server upon reaching live status while maintaining all of its other special features --helps them justify keeping it sub only.


[I'd toss in extra spawns, + faction, etc. --basically a more workable "Legends Server"]



*But I also believe that XP could be higher at any era on all progression. Slow XP is not a sell, slow unlocks arguably is to some --and replay on slow unlocks with high XP would be fun (means some level 1 character casually while others get 9+ slots levelled).

It gives people a reason to go out and group though so it should make the server more active.

I've not done those expansions on a TLP, have done some of them when they were live. I have to think you're probably just in a lull period for XP that will probably work itself out. I want to say I remember in the 85-90 range I could pop Lesson and get like 50 AA at a time from it. When CotF comes out and you can do HAs that'll be ridiculous AA generation, with no Lesson or anything I think those were like 30ish AA per HA and you can do an HA pretty damn fast, 30 minutes "casual pace" and the hardcore speed clearing groups can do in like 15 minutes. They also add a "Daily Hotzone Task" that is usually a lot of xp for little work, I know Hotzones release with TSS but I'm not sure if you guys have the Hotzone Task yet.

Even though you are on a compressed timeline, having gone through some of these eras on live a lot of people who played back then never got close to max AA even after a year in the expansion, and many of those people were raiders. A lot of the AAs are functionally useless or of minimal value.

I don't have a big horse in the race since I'm playing on Ragefire now which has slower unlocks, but part of what I sign up for when I do a TLP is basically doing content a lot faster than it was intended, that to me is supposed to actually make it harder than it was. I don't feel like there's an entitlement that TLP means "you have the ability to complete all keying, all raiding, all group content, all AA XPing that was available in era by casually playing during the period of the expansions initial unlock window on the TLP", I expect that I'll have to actually play really hard to get that and that if I don't I'll not do some stuff. I didn't finish DoN progression on Ragefire until last week (we're now 1 month into DoDH) because I had been too lazy to farm the Dark Reign faction, and I never finished my LDoN charm aug and never intended to, to be honest.

This is a big problem with TLP servers in general, the older the server gets, the harder it is to catch up, which very quickly leads to player decline in numbers. I just came back to Phin, because mercs were added, and at least I have a chance to molo a character and try and catch up, but I'm guessing when I hit that wall at about 65 where the mercs become sort of useless it's going to be tough.

One simple idea for all these TLPs, every expansion that's released gets a faster exp rate. Even if the xp rate was doubled on Phin, grinding out those AAs in a couple of months would still be a chore. EQ is a really fun game, when you're changing scenery often enough to keep it interesting. It quickly devolves into ultimate boredom when you're stuck sitting in the same camp, pulling the same mobs, for thousands of pulls.

I would give it a wait and see how it goes with SoD and UF exp-wise.

I also think a lot of us is currently working on the sub-quest and SoD augs atm, which seem much more simple and fast than the ones in SoF. So once those are done, a lot more hardcore exp grinds will happen on the server. OMM missions is also a source of exp but I think against a super-grind group it's still a slow way of getting AA's?

So all in all, exp is slow atm because we all are busy questing our off in one way or the other.

As long I can keep my main AA'd up with the useful ones I'm happy. But if you want your 1st and 2nd alt AA'ed up to date without resorting to a full isolated box group for yourself, I think you need to play a lot to maintain all those characters.

Please note the HA's were changed a year or two back? So the endless Gribble grind won't be as turbo as before afaik.

Make AA easier
Gib free flags
Increase loot drops
Phinny still has 1000s of players

thread theme song

Didn't think I would end up liking one of your posts, WaitingformoreEQ, lol.

While I do think flags are the biggest issue here on Phinigel. The rest are basically the luxury thinking of having too much stuff to do in an expansion - that you won't be able to do it before next expansion hits.

Sit back and think about the no AA expansions that we've been through with months of basically being able to do nothing productive.

This is a non issue.
With AA autogrant you're going to keep a base level of AA's just fine, and remain competitive. You don't need to finish all the aa's in an expansion to be viable.

Just use your earned AA's on the important stuff and let autogrant take care of the rest.

I'd actually like to see them slow the release schedule down a bit. These expansions were in are meant to have enough content to keep you busy for a year roughly... so why not add a month to each xpac... so 4 for level increase ones, 3 for others. It would help the flagging situation in underfoot a bit and .. well VoA is still going to be a language mess but that's a year off still...

That and lowering the threshold to get missions from 3 to 2... some of us are soloers and just have to ignore anything that requires more then 2 (Merc counting as 1, ofc.)

Yeah, to be frank when I finished up on Agnarr the reason I went to Lockjaw (and now Ragefire as my guild transferred) even though they had lower populations, was I wanted to actually experience some of the middle expansions. Phinny was already so far ahead of RF/LJ at that point that I'd miss out on GoD/Omens/DoN (although missing out on DoN isn't really a bad thing), and the 3 month/2month unlock scheme was kind of daunting for someone who was starting from 1. The older TLPs aren't as robust as Phinny but I think the pacing is a lot better.

I think part of the issue too is really there's no standard good unlock. Some expansions like DoN it hardly feels like you need more than a month with, in fact it should probably be treated like PoP/LoY and released with Omens, other expansions 3 months doesn't feel like enough.

Only problem with adding month/s to the expansion releases is that it just won't change the drop in players and might actually increase the player loss cause it seems every expansion that is at least a 3 month release that you see a sharp drop in players who log in once you get to like month left til the next expansion cause people seem to get "bored" with the current expansion... I mean maybe it won't happen cause of the sharp number of AAs people need to grind but I doubt it

As an outsider I'd say the bigger issue is definitely the very low number of flags per event that drop from some of the later expansions. Combined with 3&2 month unlocks it means a lot of guilds will barely finish or won't finish raid progression during the time when the expansion is current, which will lead to dissatisfaction and attrition. The AA thing really isn't that big a deal, being "max AA" was honestly almost always the exception to the rule for most normal players for most of EQ history.

Bring back Recruit a Friend!

They need to up the ZEMs on the SoD zones because they are terrible like others have said. They also need to go back to 3 months per expansion regardless of level increase like the server was originally launched as.

Also when does the AA catchup exp come in on TLPs? Where you get more AA exp the less AAs from cap you have? Would be nice to have that.