[ Suggestion ] - remove 30 max level for XP

There are multiple threads pointing out the level 85 heroic characters can not gain XP with level 120 characters now due the the max 30 level limit.

One simple solution would be to just remove that limit while keeping the 50% level limit in place:

At 60 the max level would be 90
At 70 the max level would be 105 vs 100 now
At 75 the max level would be 112 vs 105 now
At 80 the max level would be 120 vs 110 now.

This weekend I had the "pleasure" of helping a returning player get their heroic to the point of being able to group with their 118+ friends.

After about 2 hrs I was ready to say just do overseer for a week or two ...

This is a decent suggestion amongst a whole lot of prior player suggestions to help returning & new players, indeed I've seen this specific one pop up a few times even.

However, the devs & most players it would seem don't care much, given that many on the forums post there are simply too few players who are not 116-120 to bother with & the devs would appear to agree by way of omission.

So the answer for those hardy enough is play on TLP as long as they can stomach it and then when their TLP dies or gets merged they transfer to a live server & then begin to overseer their way to max level while playing "Ever-Beg" - constantly pestering anyone & everyone they can to carry them through XP missions/tasks until they've caught up.

The devs have had years to look at this issue & they've done nothing tangible, so I would say that this is an extremely low priority for them.

Basically suggesting a change that would be fairly easy to implement and ease a pain point for returning players.

Maybe now that they have released ToL and folks are hitting the 120 mark something easy like this might make it on the easy to do / done board.

I think even I concur that something like this would be helpful for casual/returning players with little harm to the game. And as others know I tend to oppose changes that make the a game a lot "easier"(see a lot of the threads where people demanded changes to ease the Epic's time sink.).

I'd almost argue that a change like this might be almost necessary to keep Live content and more importantly to keep our community accessible, especially to those that might want to transition to Live after getting board of TLP.

The reason is that getting rid of the "30 rule" would make it more practical for guilds go back to recruiting & catching up newbies/lowbies. In my opinion the "there are no groups" & "everyone bots" threads are actually a symptom of this leveling/progression wall that the 30 level rule creates. It's difficult for casual current content guilds to recruit/catchup newer/returning people up because it requires them to have alts available that are in the late 80's-100's and that's getting less common now... The result is guilds in general aren't as inviting to new players because the level of effort to catch new players up is much much higher because main's can't be used for the leveling.

From my perspective things have definitely changed since I came back about 5ish years ago when the level cap was 105. I know I usually tell people complaining about there being no groups to just find a guild, but I also recognize that finding people to help level you up from the late 50 through your 70's/80's has gotten harder as the cap has gotten higher.

To summarize, I feel like this 30 level rule is actually hurting the community because guilds can't be as open as they use to be because recruiting lowbies takes too much effort because most member's decently geared toons are too high level to directly assist. [I'm not saying it's impossible for guilds to help, I'm just saying its becoming less & less practical].

So please DBG, look at this thread & consider this OP's suggestion

As was pointed out above, this shortfall is not likely to be very high on the priority list.

Do you code and/or code for Everquest? Every single time I see someone say "easy" I just roll my eyes.

I think this would be a useful change to make max xp range be $heroic - $maxlevel. It would let a new heroic toon group with a max level toon (not that they'd be all that useful, but they could).

30 feels like an artificial limit since all through the levels it was level + level / 2. At 85 they should be able to group with 127/128 toons based on the non hard caped formula.

But if non-heroic and the same level they couldnt group with a max level and get xp?

I think they should just remove the artificial 30 level cap and go back to the formula it used to be and I assume still is at lower levels.
And It's possible I got some of my made up variables backwards, but I assume most understand what I was trying to say.

Yes I code. I do NOT code for everquest, but I do code.

The change is likely to be easy. Finding where to make the change ... not so much.

Great post & very well thought out, the point you made about TLP players moving to live was excellent.

I don't think this suggestion is anywhere near enough but it's certainly a reasonable step in the right direction that should not require too heavy an amount of dev/coder time to roll out.

However there are some very ideological design barriers the devs are known to be sticklers about and maybe this is one of them.

Wtb level 100 heroics

The fix I would like to see is a combination of several ideas:

1. Absolutely abolish the 30-level group XP limit. It serves no purpose. At level 115 in ToV characters are so outlandishly overpowered compared to level 85 content it borders on lunacy. Just drop the 30-level limit.
2. Introduce new Heroic Characters that scale. Allow customers to choose the level at which they want their Heroic Character so they can immediately jump into the game at the level that makes sense to them.
3. Chronomage and Mentoring. EverQuest needs this. What am I talking about? Chronomage allows a player to 'chrono' down to a level in increments of 5. So a level 120 can become a level 5, 10, 15, 20, etc while retaining all their spells, gear, abilities - it just scales down to that level. Mentoring is where you can 'mentor' a lower level groupmate. You become their level, retaining all your spells, gear, abilities - again, simply scaled to that level. When they ding, you ding.

I know this is a big ask. But EverQuest absolutely needs all the above.

I sometimes think that the best time-investment Darkpaw could ever make to EQ, would be to clean up and document the code...

remove the limit altogether, just make diminishing returns before for players lower then 75

Gotta disgaree with you on this point.
We have already seen with shrouds that players going down in levels is not going to work for the majority, a tiny few might but far too few to justify the investment, so I think the idea of scaling down any high level player is a total non-starter - when those high level players go down so does all of the XP that is relevant to their higher level - the devs purposely nerfed good exp while shrouded down because they simply do not want high level players getting high level xp from low level content, it's one of their firmly fixed ideologies that high level players should only be getting meaningful rewards from the latest expansion. This makes lowering your level to help a friend become completely worthless to do & the much better option is what players have done & that's good old-fashioned "swarm+DS+1ae" because that method reduced the pain of nothing in it for the high level player to the smallest amount of time required.

A scale up the lowbie system (Squire/Sidekick) would work, though I do understand how difficult to do that actually is - which is why so very few games ever had this, thing is that once actually created this system is easy to maintain and becomes a core system - Heroic Upgrade was done in Response to World of Warcraft's first ever character boost & then treated as a one & done deal while WoW continued to add new ones with each expansion (at least prior to the Stat Squish).

Indeed EverQuest already has something very similar to this "Side-Kick" idea with the Mercenaries - they level up or down with the player so the code team already has an understanding of such a system at least mechanically.

This can work and work well. Though I digress on the amount of work this could take. It would likely be a massive undertaking. That said, I would encourage you to go see how it's done in EQ2. It's WONDERFUL. The higher level toon still gets XP and AA in EQ2.

It's not very HEROIC to be 11 years older than current content, nor to pay money to the store and then spend the next few weeks powerleveling.

Make heroics at the current FTP level range (110 or 115, whenever you read this) + Epic 1+2 completed. Less farming of 15-20 year old content would be appreciated by all.

That would be truely heroic.

Do they not have a 'beta buff' that lets you take your character and boost it to the level / gear they want to test out the content? If so then they already have the tools to make a cookie cutter 'heroic' character for whatever level.

They did in EQ too to begin with, but then the EQ dev team nerfed it and actually said something along the lines of not wanting for players of high level characters to gain a similar amount of experience they would get from high level content while playing in low level content so if you shroud to 50 you get the exp a level 50 would - which to a level 100+ is basically nothing.

EQ devs are ideologically opposed to characters within 5 levels of max level getting level appropriate XP anywhere other than the most recent expansion, which is what makes shrouding down or any form of scaling down utterly worthless. It's a fundamental tenet of their design, it's why the old content exp nerf even exists at all.