VP key the current cancer of Aradune

Brad would be rolling over in his grave if he saw the amount of toxicity involved with the VP quest. You have a 1 hour ground spawn in Swamp of no hope with 30+ people sitting around waiting for it. Then you have 2 picks of Dreadlands/TT with 3 different guilds trying to KS each other. This is causing an insane bottleneck for 100's of people who are forced to participate or quit the game.

This isn't 1999 the key quest needs to be changed so it can be obtainable by 1000's of people without this happening. Fix your game Daybreak or sell it to someone who can.

The VP quest is terribly outdated. It was designed to be done over a period of months while people are still leveling. It wasn't intended to be done by thousands of people at the same exact time. Update the quest so it's actually obtainable. We only have 3 months in Kunark. It makes literally no sense to spend half of that time working on a quest to do 1 raid. People are just going to quit trying and you will lose subs.

VP loot is terrible, just skip the quest if you're frustrated by it.

That's not even argument you're essentially telling me to quit the game . Phara dar also has amazing loot. https://wiki.project1999.com/Phara_Dar.

It's more about experiencing the content and not being blocked by an outdated quest.

This quest has already been adjusted a few times to decrease the bottlekneck parts.

Spawn times have been decreased, etc etc. If all you want to do is "experience the content" whats the issue if you get it with 3 weeks left of kunark, you still get to experience the content.

At least there is only one more key quest similar to this in the game (vex thal) and it is for an equally horrible raid zone imo. Then you wont have to worry about being blocked for content again.

It's a 3 month expansion. You shouldn't have to worry about keys for 2 and a half months to experience VP. because of an outdated quest.

Honestly anyone arguing otherwise is an idiot and should be ignored

No game designer would ever advocate for something as dumb as the current VP key situation

This is also a huge money maker for EQ so it makes sense to support it with QoL improvements.

There exists a non-zero number of people who will just quit playing because of things like this - and that would be remedied by a competent game designer

The math just doesn't pan out, the spawns need to be far more common than they are. SONH will give you 24 key parts a day, assuming a few folks that's 720 key parts in a month, Let's call be generous and say that some guild pop a pick and hold it open for a short time. So we can get 800 key parts in a month. There are several thousand characters on this server who want the key part. 800 a month is not meeting the demand.

And then you have to ask, why is it rare? Is there really a significant population on this server that enjoys the competition between players? A quick poll of 90% of the player base will let you know that they all hate the keying process. It is not fun, there is no "sense of accomplishment for hard work" at the end because it's not hard work, it's just getting lucky enough to click on something first, or to not get out DPSed by a bigger group.

I have basically already decided I am not going to do it. I am certainly not going to fight for the key pieces or get in conflicts over them or sit things for hours on end. It will mean a hit to my raid attendance and DKP going into Luclin, and there were a few items in VP I wanted, but it's a miserable, unenjoyable part of the game and I'm not subjecting myself to it again.

No one likes this part of the game. There is no reason to restrict access to VP with artificial bottlenecks. Make the darn things spawn ever 5 minutes and be done with it.

I would like to be enjoying the game, working on my epic and leveling my alt's but instead I'm toxicly farming VP key pieces for a raid that is not really worth it because it is the only raid zone for this entire 3 month expansion. Fighting against 30+ people for key spawns for weeks is not a smart or fun way to gate content. The VP key is largely the same as it was back in the day go look at the P99 wiki to see that the named mobs have the same spawn times its just the 2 ground spawns that was altered.

Sure there are some nice pixels to collect from VP but none of it is essential to progression, let the top handful of guilds fight over it, second tier guilds should imo just tell their membership not to bother unless it's fixed, plenty of instanced raid content to do in Kunark + doing classic stuff for epics will continue.

So you are doing something you dont enjoy, to raid a zone you also dont enjoy? "im guessing you dont care for VP cause you said it wasnt worth it....

Go do what you enjoy? then farm VP keys when the heat has worn off?

I play EQ to play with friends and guildies. Right now all my friends and guildies are farming VP keys. I do want to experience VP once because I have never done it before because of this dumb key quest. Also there are plenty of things like epic pieces that I need my raid attendance to get. By skipping vp key I will be delaying getting mine behind all other people in my class that do their key because they will have higher raid attendance. With DZ's now in the game any guild can do VP if they have the key. There is no exclusivity to getting into VP besides toxicly farming for the key to enter the zone.

I'll argue otherwise. The game designers AT THAT TIME which include the man supposedly rolling over in his grave considered it extremely important to have gated content that carries with it some level of prestige. VP was deliberately designed to be an elite zone and had things like no zone out and no GM assistance to try to make it challenging. The designers did not advocate for every active player on a server getting into there in era.

Now, personally, I don't think that sentiment is very good to keep alive anymore given the TLP setup and think chase quests are a much better way to add a long term challenging goal to seek than a raid zone bottlenecked like VP. But that's not what the devs believed back then.

It was never designed - even then - with the kind of numbers we have now

Yerm you're right, at the time it made sense. It also took 6-12 months to level from 50-60 so the VP keys were rarely contested at all.

The numbers were there. The numbers almost entirely seeking to raid current end content were not. That's basically what I'm saying - the devs didn't want a situation where everyone felt entitled to roast phara dar before velious was released. Now, on a tlp, I think that attitude is no longer good and frequently argue here that things like epics should be where the bottlenecks are while the raid (aka cooperative multiplayer) content are highly accessible. But in the kunark era, where there WERE tons of players, the devs most definitely wanted VP to be highly restrictive to all but a few!

The idea of TLP servers is experiencing the content, while the key quest is absolutely part of that content I think the quest is also an onerous bottleneck on TLP that is far & away worse than it ever was on live servers for two reasons - accelerated expansion unlocks & a far larger proportion of the server's population is made up of raiders.

Back in the day on live servers you only had 3-4 top end guilds who would/could be raiding the current content in era, on TLP you have 20-30, we're looking at a 10 fold increase in players attempting to flag themselves for VP and they are trying to do that with 1/4 of the time available to be able to do so in-era.

The whole thing needs a proper evaluation for the servers today doing it, same goes for VT key.

Realistically that means this quest is near 80 times harder to do albeit reduced a bit by some of the changes to it that clearly aren't big enough changes. I've said this before, the developer Team did not fully appraise the knock-on effects of accelerated unlocks and neither did they properly take into account the larger numbers of full-on raiding guilds on TLP. Even Pick zones don't really address this adequately.

I don't want the keying to go away, but it does need to have the choke-point factor even further reduced on TLP.

More key piece droppers, more places for groundspawns to appear.

Posted by Brad McQuaid, October 8th, 1999:

Ok, time to clear a few things up
(we'll be updating the .txt message you get when logging on with something
similar soon)
Soon (sometime early next week), Rubicite will no longer spawn. If you
already have it, you keep it. This only affects the spawning.
The no shaman/rogue rumor is false (I was misquoted at the LA player
event). The stats on Rubicite remain unchanged.
Rubicite turned out to be too general purpose, and so we've created a series
of class specific quests that result in class specific items to replace
Rubicite. Because Rubicite was a static spawn and usable by most classes,
it was heavily camped. Creating class specific items to meet strong demand
and associating them with quests is our primary anti-camping campaign
(Crafted Armor was a prototype and worked out pretty well). It also
strengthens the Quest in EverQUEST. It would not be unreasonable to assume
we will continue to address heavily camped items in a similar fashion in the future.
We will be patching the first of the new zones we're working on: The Temple
of Solusek Ro. Some, but certainly not all, of the new quests may be linked
to this new zone.
Jboots will also no longer spawn where they did, but rather will be the
products of an involved quest.
-Brad

Brad wouldve halved the spawn times by now. RIP brad. Aradune server really lettin you down