Hot Take: TLPs

If you look at the rest of the documents you'll see that both DCUO and LotR have a lot of free riders in their populations. I suspect getting some sort of leverage to entice those players to spend more is considered a top priority

I saw that too. Highlighting projects specific to other games doesn’t necessarily mean all of eq’s surging revenue is being dumped to them and there will be no new resources for eq.

If you want to have a serious discussion about this. you probably to pull of the active players on TLP's vs active live. Also see what you can find out about what % of the those live accounts are F2P. Base the discussion around percentage revenue TLP bring in verse the live servers.

As for something they could present do to improve content presentation:
Unlock LoY with Luclin instead of PoP.

The following zones are unlocked to late in progression to get any serious use on a TLP server:
CT revamp
Chardok B
Sol C
Veksar
Plane of Hate revamp.
VP revamp.

These were all released to address a gap in EQ content on live. However on TLP's: increase exp rates, pick zones and AoC worked to remove these gaps. So now when these get unlocked they are mostly ghost towns that no even notices.

Well it's all about growth potential and capitalizing on this potential and they explicitly say this in the report to the investors. For DCUO, its about growth related to next-gen consoles. With LOTRO, its about the upcoming Amazon Lord of the Rings show and capitalizing on the success of the show (if it is successful). I'm not saying they won't spend a dime on EQ, but I don't believe they see great growth potential to funnel a lot of resources into it. They'll keep it profitable, and EQ will cruise along as it has been with yearly expansions, just don't get your hopes up. I hope I'm wrong however.

Double post

OMG triple post. What's up with the web host?????

Haha. When I saw the alerts I was like, "What did I say that made Invictus respond 3x??"

shut up

How would this give guilds more flexibility? Forcing a guild to raid on a specific schedule to take advantage of the lock outs is less flexibility not more.

This is a case of adding two and two and coming up with answer bowling shoes.

Both games generate revenue on their own and both have larger player bases than EQ does (licensing fees take a chunk out of that of course). Building those games does not mean they take that money from EQ and is smart business because DCUO is the largest game by far, and they are looking to take advantage of Amazon's LOTR series which has the potential for a huge return.

And of course, this ignores JChan's comment at the time of the sale:

"As a studio, you may have already noticed we have been doing some hiring recently in support of reinvestment projects. While we aren’t quite ready to discuss the details of those yet, they are in support of the live operations of EverQuest and EverQuest II." And the comment about investing in the back end to address tech debt.

..allowing players to raid different targets on different days is more flexibility, not less. With current lockouts, you're forced to the same schedule each week and you need an entire week of doing nothing to reset it.

Fixed-DAY lockouts would seriously be worse, whether you raided it or not that week you'd still be locked, the current system is more flexible than that. The way to make it even more flexble would be to reduce the lockout timer to fewer days.

I dont see how its worse. Say all lockouts clear 3am local time on Monday. A guild could raid Sunday night then do the same thing Monday if they wanted.

The way it's set up right now TLPs is if you raid something Sunday you're not going to be able to raid it again until next Sunday (maybe saturday?). The only way to get around it is skipping an entire week of said target

Not all lockouts are seven days. In fact, throughout progression the vast majority are not. Most are 4.5 days. If you raid it Sunday, you can raid it again Friday. Pretty much only the aoc's are week long longouts, all later content is shorter. And even a decent amount of aoc content is shorter than seven days. This would force things to all be seven day lockouts effectively and guilds could never raid the same thing twice in one calendar week. It's less flexibility, not more.

Function follows form. All this raid talk is because raiders were catered to over the last couple of decades resulting in a user base that is naturally, REALLY interested in raiding.

I think this trend will continue. The things I look for in the game that keep it living are things like a constant influx of new blood. It would be nice to serve two<or three or four> masters. Nothing against people being happy raiding. Very rewarding with getting rare and effective equipment, sense of comradery, shared experience, lots of goodness. I would compromise on some of my tightly held beliefs like pay to play gets rid of the riff raff IIF it led to more people entering the game. Something like the live servers with a built in ceiling on ability to level would be OK. Maybe have AoC only work for paying customers or something along those lines.

I am stuck where I am for the foreseeable future. No amount of improvements in the raiding scene would convince me to leave. I did leave other TLP servers like Agnaar, Mangler, et al when the user base got stratified. Stratified is probably the wrong word, more like stagnant. It would take such a rework of the TLP concept to convince me to move that I don't think it is practical from a DP time and money standpoint. I wouldn't mind one more server that included all my wish list, it is just that I don't think it is in the stars.

Just to let you know but your sig image causes my bitdefender to block a suspicious connection every time because it's not linked from a secure address.

hehe, it is from my personal web site. Chrome blocks it when I use it as a browser. I should switch to Firefox as was suggested and see about my web site getting flagged. My website is too crappy anyway. I started it just as I was burning out on things programable and never fleshed it out.

I'm well aware of the normal DZ timer. I've been around since the introduction of them. I was speaking exclusively about AoCs. Please, I don't need education on what the normal timers look like.

Every big boss I've seen has given the 6.5 days on Aradune. I haven't seen much worthwhile content with a lesser timer. Even simply requesting an instance and immediately leaving it gives a significant timer (2.5 days?).

You can also have dynamic unlock timers on a 4.5/5 day cycle if you wanted as well with all timers resetting themselves. You can make it more granular if you want a distinguish events/targets that fall onto a 5 day dynamic timer or a 2 day dynamic timer. Again, this would allow flexibility. We are talking about programming. Literally anything is possible. It's just is the work involved worth the effort? Probably not, but having dynamic lockout timers that reset themselves at certain points would give the greatest flexibility possible. How can anyone argue that all timers clearing every 4.5 days is less flexible than each event giving it's own 4.5 day timer? It's just not. The current way would never allow you to raid the same target two nights in a row. The former way would.

And to be fair, unless you're really competing for serverwide firsts, how often do guilds really raid the same target more than once a week? I cannot state it's uncommon practice in TLPs, but I've never once been on a live server guild that's raided on DZ unlocks. It's normally a set schedule once a week. I only know of a few guilds who even attempt to do it on live for "key" style progression such as RoI and MS. But we haven't seen that type of progression since TBL now.

My guild on Fippy raided 3 days on/ 2 days off for many years so that we could maximize the loot intake each expansion. Most guilds didn't/wouldn't do that, it's probably not common, but we were able to and we took advantage of it.