Please, someone explain to me why I can't level quick anymore?

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Aussieguy, Jan 4, 2022.

  1. Leerah Augur


    Spoken like an Old Fart! Maybe we need a Rocking Chair Server!
    BadPallyGuildLeader likes this.
  2. Nennius Curmudgeon

    Hmm I am 61 and some of my students today did call me old. And I do fart once in awhile. So,

    [IMG]
  3. Gorg00 Augur



    Yea, it's so incredibly unhealthy to take a few days off work, and instead of working for 8 hours then playing a game for a few hours, you just play the game till bed time, then log out. sleep, wake up and do it again for another day or two. Nobody said that 30 hour grind had to be in a single session. My daily habits did not change at all other than instead of sitting at my computer working for 8-9 hours, I was sitting at my computer grinding.
  4. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    That's an unfair characterization I think.
    With having played on 2 TLP I can say for sure that while there certainly are a few crazies running around most players there - at least after the initial Krono farming surge anyway - are dedicated to seeing their mostly raiding guild's succeed and of them the majority are well-behaved.

    I think it is pure conjecture to say that the TLP players are using banned software more than live players (especially given the boxing prevalence on Live servers) that is unless you yourself are a purveyor of banned software so you have a direct handle on the numbers buying/downloading from you?
  5. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    I did the "grind levels & AA once the latest expansion drops" thing too, I still would not beat live players over the head as you did because you choosing to play that way does not make live players weak at all, it's just a dumb argument to make.
    Corwyhn Lionheart likes this.
  6. Maedhros High King

    The answer to the very first question in the post is that, you are wrong, you can level faster now than you ever could by grinding. We saw people go from 115 to 120 in 24 hours.
  7. yepmetoo Abazzagorath

    The first part of your statement isn't true. You used to could grind the 5 levels in 3-6 hours once the expansion dropped. So yeah, it used to be faster.

    But they didn't nerf level exp on mobs. People keep whining about that and its just flat out stupid.

    They did 2 things:

    1) increased the amount of experience needed to level on new expansions with level increases
    2) added % based rewards via overseer, collections and progression achievements that override the flat amount of exp you would get as an alternative based on the flat aa given

    Like, you get 2% of real exp from a collection reward, or 18 aa (yes you get both in tol for some reason, just saying, before you had to choose) at 120. 18 aa is like killing 10? or so level 114 mobs. You'd need to kill like 33 of the same mob for 2% real exp, somewhere around there.
    Corwyhn Lionheart likes this.
  8. Ozon Augur



    Khat (Nip) was a regular on the old SK boards, and if I remember right she was a redhead so that would almost 100% be who you are talking about.
  9. Flatchy Court Jester

    I honestly think it was Chaydee now that I think about it. She was the one with the infamous bubble bath shot.
  10. sieger Augur


    We had people that basically tried to level solely through Overseer--none finished within weeks of the time our people who did grinding did. Overseer is some very large multiple slower than grinding to reach max level.
  11. sieger Augur


    It is an unfair characterization and based on a live player not really knowing anything about TLP, and that same live player also choosing to criticize what people do as "unhealthy" (or rather suggest they are mentally ill, which is a personal attack) when he has plenty of obsessive behaviors himself. For example, some people might consider it unhealthy to spend the time maintaining a log parser and doing all kinds of min/max DPS stuff to beat content slightly faster than another 30 guilds that will also beat it trivially--or it could just be how some people choose to have fun and judging how other people spend time in a recreational game is dumb and childish.

    Everyone who has ever seriously played TLP and Live can tell you there is far more cheat software used on live than TLP--for the simple reason that the most popular cheat software is designed/marketed for live and trivially runs on live, and only non-trivially runs on TLP/Truebox servers. Early era TLP populations are a good 5-10x larger than a big live server and probably less than 5% are using such software, and that's 5% of accounts, not human players. On live I wouldn't be surprised if around 20% of accounts are using it on some servers, the % of human players is hard to say because more people run box crews on live and the box crews are often much larger (there's several 100+ box crews on live and almost none on TLPs.) Some of that is a function of being able to have Free To Play boxes on live also, on TLP every character logged in is paid.

    A typical person who does a "hardcore" TLP launch takes a few days off work and plays a lot of EQ, then it drops down to much lower hours per day. I know people who literally gamble all day long or who are so addicted to pornography they have to watch it on their phone all day at work. The reality is if your hobby / recreational activity isn't damaging your regular life, occasionally spending a lot of time on it is entirely healthy and fine. Like someone taking a trip for 4 days away from their family to do a long weekend dedicated to fishing, isn't "unhealthy", it's choosing to take a few days for yourself out of the year to do a hobby you find fun and enjoyable. Doing something like a TLP or to conjure up other games--a WoW expansion launch like that isn't unhealthy either, what would be unhealthy is if over time you kept playing the game so much it damaged things like your job, personal health, personal relationships etc. Outside of that people should mind their own business about other's recreational choices.
    Leerah likes this.
  12. Triconix Augur

    But what's their time invested into game when leveling only through Overseer? It takes a maximum of 10(?) minutes a day to get roughly 10% exp a day from Overseer. You need 401% total exp to get from 115.99 to 120. That's 40 days, 400 minutes, 6.6 hours in game.

    How many played game hours does it take to get 400%? 30-40 hours? Even if you double my numbers above, you're still investing 1/4 the time you would be in order to grind.

    If you go based purely on days elapsed, obviously you'll grind faster than than overseer, but if you look specifically at person in front of keyboard hours, overseer runs circles around grinding, especially if you planned ahead and banked half a level's worth of overseer rewards for the day of launch.
  13. Kazint Augur

    I've played on three different TLP servers in the past and know people that regularly raid on TLP. The attitude towards questionable software is completely different among the TLP player base. It's one reason why it's very hard to recruit players to live from TLP. You can't really trust that they'll stop using those apps. Plus if you read the forums where a lot of these programs are discussed it's pretty obvious where people are playing. They even seem to think that it's OK on TLP servers according to devs.

    Are you confusing me with Gorg00? I never said anything like that.

    You could consider maintaining a parser as unhealthy if you'd like. However, when you've been writing software for most of your life a parser is very easy. I wouldn't worry too much about my health over it.

    I've always been 100% against min/maxing so I'm not sure where you got that idea from about me. I regularly tell people that they don't need to waste time camping the best augs or getting BIS gear. Most buffs are useless as well as most achievements. Trophies aren't worth it for most people and I never got max evolving gear. I tend to do the bare minimum in EQ. Learning to play your class is way more important than trying to min/max.

    Of course there's money to be made on live so you're going to see bot groups everywhere. I was referring to people who are here to actually play the game and not people trying to create an easy income. Those people don't impact me anyway.

    At some point I suggest you work on your reading comprehension skills. Having to reply to dumb posts like this is almost as annoying as grinding for hours in EQ.
    Treage_Imminent and yepmetoo like this.
  14. sieger Augur


    Overseer also requires time invested building up a team of agents. Yes, it ultimately requires less active time, but far more actual time. Like if you're content to wait 40 days to level you're not very interested in playing EQ to begin with.
  15. Triconix Augur

    You can fully be interested in playing EQ without being interested in doing a grind. EQ is far from the days of not much else to do besides grinding mobs in a static camp. This isn't p99 or an early TLP launch. There are hundreds of things players can do besides grind.

    You can even take a peak at TLP forums and find dozens of players hating the grind in eras where that's pretty much the focal point of the game. You seriously think you're not going to find people on live who, after 20+ years, will choose alternate routes to level besides grinding?

    A combination of grinding and just completing the basic progression will net you 120 in less than half the time it would take to grind. What makes it an easier choice to choose this path over grinding is the fact that 1. Raids aren't released until a month after release so there's no dire need to level as soon as possible and 2. Launches are now smack in the middle of multiple holidays. Investing 30-40 hours in the game at a time when most people will want to be spending that time with family and friends usually isn't something many would prefer. It's much easier logging in, doing overseer, spending maybe 1 hour to complete a zone's progression, and log out. By the end of the week you'll be done with both progression and leveling.

    Now you spend that 1 hour a day burning through a mission run and/or a quick lesson burn, depending on the efficiency of your group.
    code-zero likes this.
  16. sieger Augur

    And which TLP servers were those? If you're talking Sleeper/Combine (2006?); Fippy/Vulak (2011); and Lockjaw/Ragefire (2015)--sure, I get where you are coming from; if you have played the 7 TLP cycles since then (Phinigel, Agnarr, Coirnav, Mangler/Selo, Miragul, Aradune/Rizlona, Mischief/Thornblade) you would have noticed that Truebox fundamentally changed that. The only TLP with very high levels of cheat software usage in that list is Rizlona, and that is because it is non-truebox. It is also Rizlona that very specifically makes the claim the cheat software is "approved", further evidence to my point. It's not really a big deal, and I know a lot of live players are older and have played EQ for longer, so to you the 2006 era may seem like yesterday but for many of us that was many TLPs ago.

    Well let me post a picture of your post and tell me, is it a picture of Gorg00's post or a picture of one of your posts:

    y7bIwze.png (1174×306) (imgur.com)

    Maybe you do not understand the meanings of words you use, but here in the real world where we speak English proficiently, the phrase "sane people don't", suggests you're talking about something that only insane people do--i.e. claiming someone has a mental illness because they play a form of EverQuest you're not interested in playing.

    I don't consider it unhealthy--in fact the vaunted reading comprehension you suggest you value appears to be lacking in your comment here. I specifically said that looking at how someone else chooses to spend their time and considering it to "lack sanity" is an unwise endeavor that I don't engage in. I'm a professional software developer and almost never program outside of work because I don't enjoy doing it, but I appreciate the efforts of people who make projects like log parsers and game add ons in games like WoW and etc; just not my cup of tea. But I don't go around calling people insane because they choose to enjoy things I don't enjoy.

    Interesting--obviously I only know you from your general public persona. But again, I wasn't saying min maxing was bad, I was saying judging the sanity of how others choose to play a game is bad.

    So your assertion then, is not that TLP has more people using cheat software, but has more people using it to "play the game" vs "create an income"? I frankly don't see that as lining up with my Truebox TLP experiences either.


    I think this post demonstrates you would probably do best to either not post stupid things like calling people who play on servers you don't like "mentally ill" (which is juvenile and reprehensible, real mental illness is a tragedy) or at the very least avoid saying I have reading comprehension problems in a post laden with multiple examples of your own lacking in that area.
  17. sieger Augur

    You mean like doing the missions / tasks to level up? If people don't want to grind, they don't have to grind.
  18. Triconix Augur

    Uhhh, yes? So why are you sitting here trying to argue that if people choose not to grind it means they aren't interested in EQ?
  19. sieger Augur

    I'm saying if people choose to not play EQ at all other than to login and do overseer for 10 minutes a day, for 40 days, they probably aren't that interest in EQ in the first place.

    It seems like we've lost the thread here--this thread is about a person crying that leveling is too slow. My position is grinding speed is reasonable and using a mixture of missions + overseer + task progression + a bit of grinding is even more reasonable and can have you quickly leveled.
  20. Triconix Augur

    And what number is reasonable? We've had a whole thread and you nor anyone else has given a reasonable range to grind 400% experience?

    20 hours? 30? 40?

    Before TOV I had a rule that in order to be a minimum worthwhile group I needed to hit roughly 1 yellow/hr or 5 hours/level under normal circumstances (no dumb FS sharing crap and dropping potions 24/7 uptime). That's 20ish hours to hit the max level and 25 to get max of max. That was just to be an average group. 1.5-2 yellows an hour was good to very good.

    Is pure grinding still in that range? Based on reports, it seems closer to double that. I would say that's not very reasonable.

    I said it in another thread. I know for a fact I got to 105 from 100 in 5 days time following the launch of TDS, during a period I was in a schedule that prevented me from playing EQ for a minimum of 18 hours a day. Taking that into account, it was physically impossible for me to have devoted to what seems to be the new normal of 40 hours to grind to max level in those 5 days. Even if I devoted all 6 hours of the rest of my day into EQ (I didn't), it would've taken me a max of 30 hours to grind those levels. That's still 75% the time it would take to grind in TOL.

    20 hours to grind to max seems a reasonable number to me. That makes it a legitimate alternative than doing just progression + Overseers. I would still stick to the later, but for the people that want to grind, 20 hours should be a good target. 40 is excessive. That's a full time job for a week or a part time job for 2 weeks. The average play time of an individual in normal circumstances more than likely isn't 4hrs/day, especially knowing the demographics of live EQ players. 2 hours/day means max level in about 1.5 weeks. With TOL, you're looking at 3 weeks during the middle of the holidays so you're probably looking at closer to 4-5 reasonably. That's a bit much, imo.
    Kazint likes this.