Selo Truebox

Discussion in 'Time Locked Progression Servers' started by Pappasalt, Jun 19, 2020.

  1. jeskola pheerie

    I agree - they really need to consider this. I think they are concerned about server instability/additional lag. I doubt the number of additional DZs would be enough to cause extra lag, though, and it would be a big win from a Customer Service perspective.
    Skuz likes this.
  2. Chaosflux Augur

    Yeh TBM HA scaling isnwhack AF, doing hunter right now, and the mobs put out more rolling dps on me (Paladin) then the TBM raid mobs do on raids.

    Especially when we first got TBM opened, and i was trying to get hunter done early (in COTF/TDS raid gear witb Slot9 TBM gear for max AC) i burnt far more glyphs on Dragon scales doing named then doing the Raids it was silly.

    Named spiking 95k rounds every 2 second while i am running glyph AND guardian? F OUTTA here with that nonsense, meanwhile Lady of Life raid boss only does 70k rounds (with some higher spikes) under just Guardian disc.
    Skuz likes this.
  3. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    And some of those nameds have 100% strikethrough so a bunch of your defensives are negated.
    Was rough tanking those as a zerk cuz the merc tank I rely on just got instagibbed.
  4. Machen New Member


    I hope they do a Selos 2.0. But I hope that they swap out the sped up lockouts for double loot. I think it would be far more successful with less pressure to raid constantly.
    ForumBoss likes this.
  5. Machen New Member


    Phinigel was the first. The very fact they have made 10x canned copies of it successfully shows that it was something fairly unique, when it was released.
    Zinth likes this.
  6. Gherig Addicted since Aug 1st, 1998

    That would mean you only do a raid 4-5 times a month. But lets say you have raiders who cant raid every raid, so with half lockouts you can expand your raider pool by having raids on different days not the same day every time. This was one of the best parts about half lockouts, if you raid every Saturday on a one week lockout but you work every Saturday, it was nice to be able to hit that raid up mid-week on your days off that you would otherwise have missed. Double loots 6 day lockouts won fix the issue, it just makes loot rot sooner and people who could use the loot miss out.

    If they leave it at 30 days expacs, then half lockout and double loot makes more sense since during some expansions only the core really got geared up and not much trickled down before it was "Obsolete" gear.
  7. HoodenShuklak Augur

    Well here's one thing we have actual evidence for..
    Very, very few people actually raid on a 30 day, half lockout server.

    I'm certain that some of the raiders that do actually keep up with it would prefer double loot and less raids as well. So, were talking about, likely 30 people at most in all of eq that think Selo setup is ideal?

    Another thing I know from past servers is that a lot of people, even raiders, feel compelled to keep up with double lockouts which makes them burnout faster. Eq burnout is a serious issue. (I'd say it really hit selo hard.)

    Selo is my lone tlp so it's sad to see it so abysmally dead, but at this point I think the only ones left are simply the ones who decided to stick it out to Live.
    ForumBoss, Skuz and Nargoul like this.
  8. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    Double loots was done for Underfoot, and that may be the only time we ever get to see that done retroactively owing to the amount of dev time involved in that process.
    A dev has to research every loot table of every raid mob, check & confirm those items are valid before they can then increase the drops for it. Image doing that for 24 entire expansions.
    That's why the halved lockout timer was the option that was settled on for Selo I bet.
  9. Gherig Addicted since Aug 1st, 1998

    That's not true, not true at all. Selo's had raiding in abundance well past PoP, well into TSS and SoD with daily raids and guilds, it wasn't until after SoD and Aradune/Rizlona came out that Selo's really saw a significant downturn in the amount of raiding and raid guilds.
  10. FranktheBank Augur

    Who are these talk amongst? 6 weeks doesn't address the issues with Selo, at all. It just makes it tiny bit faster than a phinny clone.
  11. Rage Lorekeeper

    A further boost to base exp isn't what is needed for a Selo 2.0, it was easy to keep up with exp as long as you were actively playing every month. The difficulty was for people who missed a couple of months or for new players who wanted to join. They should look to add some sort of catch-up exp mechanic where you get bonus exp the farther you are from max level. There's already a similar system for AAs, I don't know how easy it would be to adapt to regular exp though. Anything that encourages new players to join TLPs past the early eras is a good thing imo.

    If they can't do some sort of across the board increase on flags/loot they should as least look to boost the flags on some of the worst expansions (which they've already done for a couple) SoF and HoT both are rough for guilds that can't deep split, arguably SoD Korafax keys too. For later expansions EoK, RoS and TBL all need a boost. I think expansions where you had to clear each tier twice were fine but three or four times was way too much.
    Zinth likes this.
  12. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    SoF & HoT could use improvement on raid keying
    SoD was fine on Phinigel
    EoK RoS were fine on Phinigel
    TBL did have some planned changes in the pipeline that couldn't be executed before Selo & Phinigel got to it, the TLP after them should have an easier time.
  13. Tweakfour17 Augur


    If SoD was fine, what about SoF do you think needs changing? Both are level increase expacs (so 12 weeks on the typical 8/12 schedule), SoF requires 2 rounds of flagging, 1 to get into MMM and then another to get into Crystallos but each round drops 12 keys. SoD only requires 1 real round of flagging (can do raids to access Korafax in 1 week and flag everyone, or group progression outside raids) but Korafax only drops 6 keys per week so you need to do Korafax twice as long, in the end a single non-splitting, non raiding on lockouts guild is still likely getting about 6 weeks in the end game raids for both expansions.

    Personally I wouldnt mind if TLPs went the route of only requiring the raid requesters to be flagged to request raids. So once a raid leader has beaten Meldrath, he can request Crystallos. Or once theyve beaten Korafax, they can request tower. The guilds would still need to go through the entire expansion progression at least once, but wouldn't have to repeat some of the events 6-10 times to flag everyone.
  14. Rage Lorekeeper

    You can do tower with a fairly low number of flagged (16-18 or so) and then you can backflag an entire raid the first time you complete it so you don't actually need to split to get SoD flagged fairly fast. That's why I said it was arguable if SoD needs changing, I don't think it would hurt for the more casual guilds though.
  15. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    The dev posting about flagging seem to point to the team wanting to provide a similar experience to what the live servers had with each expansion, rather than removing so much of the flagging that it makes the expansion feel really different to how it did on live.

    I can see the design team wanting that on the grounds of making the sense of achievement from going through the flagging process valuable as well as keeping some of the tone from that flag process intact for more players.
    Altering the keying process for each expansion does change the feel that it had & translating that to a faster unlock schedule is tricky but I personally feel the dev team have done a mostly good job of that.
    TBL keying which would have really benefitted from a review & change simply slipped down the schedule as higher priorities needed to be addressed, namely finishing the expansion, and having to do that minus three experienced staff members. TBM HA scaling reversions were left incomplete as a result of that too.

    These things are some of the downsides for players leading the charge playing on a new server format, probably not all the needed changes are going to make it in on the first round, do I think the TLP concept could have been rolled out & iterated on better, yes absolutely there were definite milestones & issues that were not very difficult to plan for & work on implementing changes to resolve.

    I think the team simply didn't have the time in their schedules needed to fully analyze the impacts of speeded up unlock schedules on all of the other interconnected systems and work on how to properly deal with them, this meant that the devs had to lean on what was going to be needed coming back from the player communities there and that was the fall-back option they went with in the absence of a full play-flow analysis.
    I think TLP servers were a great idea, they have financially been a win for for Darkpaw, but I also think that the team underestimated the additional workload that they would generate a little and so fell a bit short of where they would have wanted to in facilitating them properly.
  16. sieger Augur

    Selo wasn't amazingly healthy after Omens. Omens is actually kind of an obvious quitting point for a lot of people who really only wanted to do early eras, because you get your Epic 2.0s, get to clear content that did actually release back in EQ's "golden age" (in terms of size of its player base/etc), but that a lot of casual TLPers never beat in era. That being said, we also had the launch of WoW Classic in Omens. It is very hard to fully know/explain the reason for TLP population swings, but my experience with my guild is WoW Classic was the biggest blow. We were three splitting Anguish with a stable roster of about 115-120 people logging in every raid night, and we probably dropped down to 90-95 regulars in the weeks after WoW Classic launched. Probably 7-10 of the people we lost to WoW Classic actually came back within 2 months, but the rest never returned. I also know the guild we absorbed late DoN before DoDH, said that WoW Classic gutted their roster where previously it had been quit stable. Selo never had a progression site like the other servers but I think we honestly had like 10 active raid guilds in Gates. Not as big as the super popular servers, but it felt pretty successful for a server launched in direct competition to a Phinny clone (which is the most popular TLP type), Gates was an extremely active time on the server. PUGs were available, economy was mega active, tons of guilds doing Gates raids and farming PoP raids still etc.

    After WoW Classic launched we basically fell to having I think 6-7ish raid guilds (apologies to any I forgot)--Faceless, Amtrak, Altered Minds, Reversion, CI, Rusty and Honor and Blood (Euro guild). AM merged into us I think late DoN, Amtrak merged into us last week of DoDH, Reversion I think disbanded in PoR and we got a couple of their members but there was never a formal merge. Honor and Blood were still active in PoR but I never really saw them much after that. From SoF forward it was just Faceless, Rusty, and CI for a long time, until like House of Thule era when Rusty merged with us and then CI folded a couple months later.

    At least for Faceless, Aradune had a far smaller effect on our roster than WoW Classic did. What's kind of interesting is we lost very few players to Aradune launch, I want to say like 2-3? But we did steadily lose members from VoA to CotF, and a lot of those raiders ended up on Mangler or Aradune. It's interesting how many went to Mangler (which was over a year old that point), and how we lost more to "gradual" jumps to Aradune than we ever did to Aradune launch. Most people who leave guilds/servers don't give feedback, but I did have a decent number tell me why they were leaving--most who left in that era:

    1. Didn't like the current expansion (which usually referred to an expansion from VoA to CotF)
    2. Didn't like the "game design" of that era of Everquest
    3. Thought their character now had "too many buttons" and they couldn't maintain it (this was literally stated by multiple people who left.)

    Some of those things are just core game design of later era EQ and probably not fixable.

    What's interesting is very few said they couldn't keep up with Selo. Most of the raiders I know who told me they couldn't keep up with the server quit MUCH earlier, usually by Gates of Discord.
    Skuz likes this.
  17. sieger Augur

    Also, a not-insignificant number of our players left because their groups that they did progression/xp with every month fell apart. In late era Selo even within our guild there is very little pugging. People have crews they run with. When those crews lost vital members, it wasn't uncommon for other members of those crews to drop also. This ties in to Truebox directly, if you and your friends don't constitute a viable progression group EQ is a very miserable game level 85+. I can tell you as someone that had to do VoA progression (up through 91 Alaran language skill) with no tank and two Magician pets, it was a true misery. Not having access to a real tank makes most of EQ very miserable, and guilds cannot function with everyone maining tanks. So it creates a real trashy situation that a lot of classes you need for raiding simply cannot anchor a progression group. Most tanks also don't like grouping with other people more than they have to (this is my 4th TLP and I have seen this phenomenon on all of them), tanks almost naturally develop box crews and quit grouping with their guildies.

    I would wager there are very few non-tank mains to have played EQ TLP post-DoDH or so who like Truebox.
    Tweakfour17 and Skuz like this.
  18. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    This is TLP life in late eras in pretty much a nut-shell, and a lot of what you say here strongly resonates with me.

    Tanks are the linchpin for all groups, you can scrape by with a suboptimal healer or merc even if you have a raid geared tank & that makes EVERYTHING so much more enjoyable, but without one life will be a pain in the butt.

    I 3 box with Truebox but without Truebox I could run a 5 box with a tank in there.
    I have at multiple points considered main-changing to a tank to help my guild that has had tank shortages & also to be able to box easier but I think that would just cause me to stop playing, I only really have a passion for one class even though I've played most to a high level & not being a main as that would mean not seeing the expansions as my favoured class the way I want to, and seeing these expansions I missed on TLP as a Berserker was the only reason I came to Phinigel to begin with.

    I would not consider playing on any server with Truebox ever again, unless it was scheduled to be switched off at 70/75 or at the latest 80 with SoD, the early game would be horrible without Truebox but the difficulties of the later expansions with it make that an inconvenience worth accepting if you plan to play the game all the way through to live.