Raiding Ruined on Mischief

In my opinion, the important points for the devs to consider are that: 1) Only having a few bosses with randomized loot on a server described as "Randomized Loot" does not meet the majority of the player's expectations and has significantly decreased the amount of fun the servers provide. 2) The lack of adequate communication surrounding what is "intended" has increased player frustration dramatically. 3) There is significant concern in the community regarding how future expansions will be handled given the relatively poor rollout of randomized loot in classic.

Niente briefly addressed Phinigel and Sky but the community deserves some communication regarding these points and how Darkpaw is going to address them moving forward.

I was speaking with reference to the complaints around changes since launch, which I thought was pretty obvious in the context of it being in this thread. Not sure how you arrived at thinking this thread was insanely positive towards those changes. /shrug

Correct.

I think we have to realistically expect that a few professional-style hardcore guilds will get some exploits in at the start of every expansion. These people understand the game from a player-level better than the devs do (we have to assume). This type of loot has never been done before. So we are the guinea pigs.

And the top guilds are the bigger guinea pigs that are well positioned to take our food (krono). Their all cracked out on meth water and are pumped with expirmental steroids. So us more humble guinea pigs will probably be too late to the exploit pinata.

But it has to be done. Exploits will be found for future servers this way.

But why are the devs complicit in allowing and even actively rewarding them for their behavior?

What do you expect them to do as it is likely that a lot of those items have already entered the open market and been traded for krono.

The developers did the greatest kindness possible to hardcore tlp burnouts by massively cutting time in classic and kunark down and yet still there's huge tantrums about how the loot isn't perfect. So good.

Just leave everything as-is. Who gives a damn if the golems drop loot that is meaningless in a couple months? The only appropriate fix was the out-of-era azorack drops.

They shouldn't fix bugs?

So a bug was being exploited and then got fixed.
I fail to a problem with this. This is what should happen.

Most of the sane people in this thread aren't complaining about the obviously overly generous mobs, the Trakazaraks, or the Spite Golem Gods being fixed. We're upset that the "fix" was to basically turn off random loot.

The issue is that it's a double standard. They didn't delete the kunark gear that obviously dropped as a bug (or if they did, it was after it was already long sold off), and they didn't take away the extra gear that was gained from exploiting the bug.

If you're going to punish the rest of the server for what one guild is doing to exploit drops, and not punish the people doing the exploiting, then what kind of trust is everyone else supposed to have in your decision making capacity?

Instead of just putting mitigation on the golems to make them not spawn in picks, they completely obliterated the fun excitement of random loot for the entire server, because one group of people exploited it to the max. People get sick of being punished for what others do, without ever seeing the offender pay any price at all.

Niente, why was the loot being dropped viewed as a bug in the first place? Why is it even on the radar of the development staff? I fail to see why the loot pinata is being viewed as something in need of a fix.

As it stands now, a small group of players were able to see random loot in raids for about a week. The randomness of loot was removed, and now we're just left with the same bland experience of yet another classic TLP. All you've accomplished in removing the loot drops has been disappointing a majority of an already dwindling user base.

My opinion:
Why can't these be just a fun party server where everyone gets everything they've always wanted?
I have never looted a Cloak of Flames. Wouldn't it be great if everyone could?

What does it matter if everyone on the server had every top-tier item available?

Any concern that too much loot could harm the longevity - is absurd (though it would impact krono hoarders). I do wish loot-rules were like this from the very beginning of the game.


Total random loot across all - let it roll.

Further, I could see that any/all random loot could put an end to kill-stealing and raid-over-runs, etc.
Toxic behavior would be left committed by those who are just down-right horrible people.

I agree 100%. The neckbeards, elites, and hardcore raiders have had their TLP servers for years now. Finally, DBG creates new server rules that sees the end of good loot rotting with the elimination of the "NO DROP" flag, rare mobs have increased spawn times and random loot is introduced which brings loot that many people have never seem because it came from obscure named mobs that nobody would bother camping.

So the news gets out about Mischief. There is excitement for TLP servers that has never been seen in the history of EQ. Casuals and others finally want to try EQ and many returning players who never raided are excited that perhaps they can finally own a piece of planar gear without having to raid hours on end.

Then this fiasco happens and the devs revert to their old ways of doing things and start penalizing the entire server for the misdeeds of a few and then start backpedaling on promises of random loot.

Penalizing all players for the actions of a few is wrong and despicable.

The players are not the enemy. Since the the early days, EQ devs have had a longstanding adversarial relationship with players. Mischief was supposed to be different, but as we can see the old ways of "nerf first and ask questions later" mindset in the name of expediency and maintaining "server health" are alive and well at DarkPaw. New studio name, same old modus operandi.

I would like to see studio head Jen Chan come out and make a statement to assure people that Darkpaw is not going to weasel out of the random loot promises made for Mischief and Darkpaw. We're all adults here who have probably invested thousands of dollars over our lifetimes into this thing called EverQuest. We are entitled to commensurate respect and transparency. We should not be afraid to voice our opinions either.

Every named mob should have random loot as promised. Period. End of story. Darkpaw made the rules. Stand by the rules. Stand by your word. No more excuses.

Please learn what a double standard is. They didnt change the loot dropping just for you and players like you while leaving it as it was for everyone who already killed the mobs. They changed it for everyone.

What you are asking for is to go and punish a bunch of players who did nothing other than play the game and progress through the content. There is absolutely no double standard at play here.

The devs determined the way the loot was dropping in some cases was a bug and it was fixed, FOR EVERYONE.

Every day these mobs are killed multiple times, each passing day makes the few kills before the change a smaller and smaller percent of the whole and will be completely meaningless in 2 more weeks.

Grow up. Retroactively punishing players who just played the game or worse, bought a piece of gear in the tunnel off another player is a horrible idea for content that is over 20 years old and is put out fresh literally every year. Even asking for it is extremely sad.

I'm well aware of what a double standard is. And knowingly leaving Kunark loot in the game for a group of players who got it due to a bug in the game, before fixing it for the rest of the server is a double standard. You are treating two groups of players differently.

Removing all the loot from the golems is difficult, because it's hard to track. Tracking Kunark loot in a Classic era is not difficult.

The only way to make the current "fix" to the golems fair, is if they retroactively went back and deleted every piece of loot that was farmed during that exploit, which is nearly impossible to do, and not a good solution.

Don't tell me to grow up because I disagree with allowing a group to spawn infinite picks for infinite boss loot. If you TRULY think they sat around thinking "wow this is intended" when they were camping out and infinitely spawning picks over and over for infinite boss loot, then you don't have a grip on reality. There's already been recorded videos of the guild leader saying "exploit this to the fullest, I don't care if they ban me", regarding the Spite Golem bug. They lose credibility for being innocent the second that happened. So yes, while I won't directly come out and blame them for doing it, because many others would have done the same; I can say that it's ridiculous to knowingly punish the rest of the server because a guild with no self control took advantage of an obvious oversight.

I've said it before, the obvious solution is to just put MOTM on the golems so that they don't spawn in picks. Period. They could even reduce the amount of loot they drop significantly in addition to that, and just leave random loot on. The solution is not to pretty much remove the loot entirely from them for everyone else.

If you're only going to have randomized loot for Faceless until they exploit it, then go back to normal server loot for the rest of the server, then what the is the point in even playing on the server? The server rules say randomized loot, not "randomized for one guild to farm to their heart's content, then normal for everyone else after they've had a few days to farm it".

TLDR: 5am tired, rambling, disagree with the way it was "fixed".

So I want to start by saying I havent read every single comment over the first 5 pages, so if this point was made, i apologize.

From friends I talk with, the issue wasn't that golems were dropping top tier loot, it was more that you could farm them easy by spawning new picks of the zone. That and they dropped just TOO MUCH of the said loot. I saw a screenshot from my friend that had 32 items off ONE golem kill.

It made doing any other classic content pointless. Why kill Naggy/Vox/CT/Inny if a golem gives you everything they drop and it takes half the people, and you can farm it endlessly. All they had to do is tone down the amount of loot and fix the picking situation IMO..

They did not have to one down the loot, they just had to fix the /pick exploit