lol, clearly most of the posters here play other MMOs too, my guess is you do to. the changes people are suggesting may help more to return and catchup and maybe even attract a few new players. time is the big cost with MMOs, moreover EQ returning/new players can't get guilds or catch up if they want to these days.
10/10 way to recruit players to EQ. Let's just go play other games instead of improving this game! Kill the forums, if you have a problem with EQ and another game doesn't have that problem, just go play that other game instead.
I do agree 100% that there needs to be content besides leveling and gearing. Its not enough to last a year. Not sure what that would be though. Some play alts, but thats not really attractive to me. Other games tack on pvp, and almost no one wants that. More fancy looks? Pah. The lack of content would only be made worse if you were to remove leveling and gearing.
MMOs need to be better embrace the RPG side. Otherwise, the game feels shallow and doesn’t feel like a world you want to spend time in. FF14 really opened my eyes to how narrow the gameplay of EQ actually is versus what it could’ve become.
Instanced Team-Based PvP (e.g. Warfronts/Scenarios/City Siege) and in-game sports (e.g. Huttball/Bloodbowl) can work extremely well I think. EQ has plenty of scope to do new playstyles however this would need some cross-server functionality probably but whether the dev team can do that kind of stuff or not is another thing. PvP in EQ is mostly terrible due to trying to have 2 styles of play use the same spells and abilities, balancing them is a nightmare - so don't. Repurpose the shroud system for PvP play - it really isn't used for what it was originally intended for, people powerlevel rather than shroud down anyway, retune all the shroud abilities and spells for PvP and you have an existsing system that is far more able to be tuned for balance. Once you have that you can look at the kind of content to build for it. This would probably be far easier than building a "PvP only" set of player spells and abilities for each class. Just because an entire-server whole-world style of PvP proved to lack popularity don't be fooled into thinking limited, controlled PvP event systems are worthless even in EQ, it all depends how you do them, Star Wars the Old Republic had a lot of players who Hutballed but never did Warfronts & visa versa and they were mostly all playing on PvE servers. Similarly in WAR there were players who loved castle & fortress and city sieges who hardly played regular open zone RvR.
I tanked Saryrn and TT adds and CT in those. With a summoned hammer! We hit the perfect storm of stupid that night. Of our 4 Paladins and 3 SK's, our SK/Pal husband/wife were out of town, our SK lead was currently fighting with our guild leader again and pouty, my dwarf was on his night shift schedule (he missed 2 raid nights every 4 weeks and 1 every 2 weeks with how his work schedule ended up), and my other paladin was coaching that night. We were down to me + our 3rd sk , who had to log after we did splittyzek (and who would leave not long after that night and end up in the guild I transferred to in Gates when my guild died) Sadly, evguild.org is long dead, but we had those screenshots up for a while. BRIGHT ORANGE PALADIN was a thing. I dont think anyone from the timepaladin channel still plays, but I was not the only one that had to do it that week. It was fun. The real hurdle was threat. Adds and CT damage are perfectly rotationable, their spikes arent that bad, I tanked most everything with a 2hander until shield block AA's anyway. But effectively naked paladin mana pools with no foci and no FT are, uh, horribad.
I wasn't proposing any changes to old content or TLP's. Though I would like to see Agents of Change on live servers. Really just a merchant (or a few) that will let you buy BiS gear once it's several expansions old, kinda like the Ethermere merchants except better gar and uses Tribute since that's way easier to earn.
Nope. People would bring in low level alts to loot items. I zoned in at level 38. They didn't take long to change it but it was open to everyone at the start.
