Please improve the returning player experience...

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Kalamir, Apr 24, 2022.

  1. Windance Augur

    In a way they have been. My AA/hr has been fairly consistent, going down a little, but AA required for each rank of all the AA lines has been increasing each expansion.
  2. Yinla Ye Ol' Dragon

    AA is a difficult one to adjust, players who are max AA at the end of an expansion need something to work on, so the costs are aimed at giving them something to do.

    About the only thing they could do with AA to help returning players would be to allow the auto grant to grant more AAs.
  3. Swiss Augur

    They could make more focus AAs work for all level spells and just do the percent increase instead of needing the highest few ranks to work on current 116-120 spells. It would still be worth maxing the AA lines for that extra focus on the spell line, but not as useless if you're just returning and 1k+ AAs behind on every spell line before you can use the focus on your current level spells.
    Tatanka, Petalonyx and Velisaris_MS like this.
  4. Flatchy Court Jester

    Rehashing this again? Have not discussed this for a couple months lol.
    Simple version
    Tasks and Overseer= Levels
    grinding on mobs= AA
    Yinla, Emilari and Wdor like this.
  5. Arkanny Augur

    Provided you're able to outparse me, sure why not?! And thats if you count 2 posts as "constant whining".
  6. uberkingkong Augur

    Returning player
    does: massive xp grinds, aka kill mobs all day

    Current players
    Go around zone doing collectibles (easy AAs)
    Ask for TA's to progression stuff (easy AAs)

    Did you get told, "you should do EoK progression it gives a lot of xp"
    Did you get told "have you heard of Overseer?"

    It's definitely a new vibe. Also, 115 is pretty much end game, back then people weren't even close to max level and they wasn't complaining, but back then there was other people to play with too. Thats why returners should be doing TLP. It still has the old EQ feeling.
    Where you can open the LFG window and expect at least a few people being listed.
    On Live no one does /lfg. It lost its Everquest vibe to be honest.


    For free to play returners,
    I think if they had a free to play server option, play till 100 then can choose to goto a live server or choose to stay on the server. Once you buy a krono you have to goto a live server, so its not promoting people to stay on that server for krono farming. It's aimed at returners and prep for live. Nostalgia of seeing other returners/low levels.
    1. server free to play is allowed on it, max level on server is 100
    2. krono trading is off
    3. you can choose to goto a live server whenever you feel ready
    4. 1 character max server
    Server designed to prep you for live, not a TLP server, also to meet other returners, play with the EQ vibe you remember.

    I also welcome new content for returners especially from 95 - 120, ex. a new zone where mobs are actually level range 95 - 120 and not the kind where they are scaled down in levels
  7. Velisaris_MS Augur

    I agree. Having each rank of a focus line work ONLY with one specific spell or ability is just downright idiotic and is only designed that way to be nothing more than a timesink...which has become the standard method of increasing the life of an expansion. Just make everything take longer to do for the same cycle of power increase.
    Yinla and Joules_Bianchi like this.
  8. Joules_Bianchi A certain gnome

    The system is so broken anymore, they utterly gutted mob kill xp. if you don't get a PL you're left twisting in the wind forever trying to catch up.

    It's obvious they want to force xp pot sales, but it's killing the game and people are leaving. Oldass games don't usually keep moving to higher difficulty. Nerf mob kill xp, nerf instance XP. Then wonder why sales are dropping, so nerf more to sell more pots. This is turning into a Wargaming development arc.

    Oh look! We can sell you a solution!(to the problem we made so we could sell these) Here, buy a level 100 character!
    Stymie and Dre. like this.
  9. Joules_Bianchi A certain gnome

    Buy heroic 85 or wait to buy heroic 100, buy OS completions. buy more agents cos the default ones can't complete missions, buy a perk for more xp, buy pots for xp, but DO NOT play the game for XP.


    Crap on long well known camps, like Giant fort in BW add higher level quest mobs to purposely break easy uproutes.

    It's all so tiresome.
  10. Joules_Bianchi A certain gnome

    Oh and then stand back and wonder why everyone and his brother automates just to keep relevant.

    The development of this game now puts more and more power in the hands of 3rd party runners and takes power away from any form of honest play.

    This is so totally Wargaming's playbook. Obstruct, create problem, sell "solution"
  11. Joules_Bianchi A certain gnome

    So don't be a new player, start at 85with OS. Gotcha.

    and 1-84 buy Krono and a PL from someone botting. That's how it works on the last 2 servers I looked at. Last TLP I wa son had a guild hall full of auto buffbots and some player had an AI druid warping all over Blightfirs buffing people 24/7

    NONE of which is playing a roleplaying game.
  12. Windance Augur

    A server full of free to play people with max level 100 ... means there are no max level players offering advice, running missions, help leveling with gear or plat.

    Sounds pretty miserable to me.
    Waring_McMarrin and Yinla like this.
  13. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    Regular Level XP after 110 is close to worthless, just do missions & quests for it

    At 111 you may as well go 100% into aa & leave it there.

    **The XP required per level should be lowered once the 5 level range is no longer within 5 levels of current max level

    Right now the XP per level required for 111-115 should get knocked down to pre ToV levels, once you are within 5 levels of max then the requirement is the new paradigm.

    (**not my idea, forgot whose it was)
    Dre. and Joules_Bianchi like this.
  14. Joules_Bianchi A certain gnome

    That supposes an awful lot and discounts that tenured players might uproute this way too.

    I also suggest, maybe max level players don't help everyone like maybe you believe they do. Some do, for some people, usually in thier guild or Discord. This leaves new/ returning players not knowing what is successful.
  15. Windance Augur

    That assumes tenured players would sit on this server with a F2P character, which sounds unlikely.

    We recruit returning players. They are the only source of "new" players on my live server. I am 100% certain that not having max level players to answer questions and help them out would make things worse for them.
    Waring_McMarrin likes this.
  16. Paladin Augur



    The last couple of expansions, the huge XP awards come from Achievements, and specifically, the Group missions. Otherwise, regular XP is generally bad. You can actually go to older expansions and get faster / better XP mass killing Dark Blues.
    Flatchy likes this.
  17. Gorgasm Journeyman

    It's not actually true that achievements give a massively better reward than straight grinding does other than the group missions. The achievements for partisans and mercs are a little faster for sure, but not massively faster if you have a high DPS group. The group missions are where the massive disparity in time vs reward comes into play.

    This is worse for a player who missed the initial rush, because few people will be doing the quests at that point, and most people doing any kind of XP are probably sitting around grinding out AA or farming augs or something of the like. So if you're a solo player whose already behind, your chances of being able to do the quests solo are basically non existent, and you're stuck getting XP however you can, typically by joining a group farming AA or augs.

    I'm one who thinks the achievement system for gaining XP is pretty strong, and incentivizes the things that the developers likely want incentivized. I think that they should probably keep it going forward.

    However, I think that there's a problem with people who missed the initial rush and/or don't have a static group of people who are leveling through that content with them. This gets worse the further away from the expansion launch *for the level you are trying to attain* you are.

    If you're level 100 trying to get to 105, you're basically stuck boxing or hoping some max level takes pity on you and gives you free XP. The new heroics are not going to meaningfully address this problem, they'll just make it easier to power level someone since you won't have that 5 level gap where you can't group with them.

    I suspect the answer is to take a page from the way raids are handled. I assume the increased currency rewards and increased ore from raids are time marches on is a recognition that the guilds full clearing raids immediately aren't going to have any gear related problems going into the next expansion, but guilds struggling to full clear *at all* likely are. So you boost their rewards at the end of the expansion to narrow the gap.

    You could imagine a similar system implemented for XP, a permanent, regular XP boost, on a sliding scale the longer it's been since the release of the level you're trying to obtain. If you're trying to go 100 -> 101? Well it's been 8 years since the release of TDS with it's 105 level cap, so here's your boosted XP.

    This would ideally start not just when the expansion is out of era, but while it's *in* era, but the amount should be relatively small at first, getting increasingly larger as time passes.
    Dre., Windance and Riou like this.
  18. Windance Augur

    I like it gorgasm. If I remember correctly they implemented something of an AA curve years ago. Something like making 2x the AA rate if you were under 3000 AA and then gradually scaling down to 1x at 5000 AA. ( This are made up because I don't remember the real numbers )

    Then they came out with auto grant which pretty much made the scaling useless for anyone on live.
  19. Bardy McFly Augur

    Threads like these periodically pop up.

    In a nutshell, the core issue is that you have the hardcore players that want it to be as difficult as it is, if not even more difficult or grindy, to level and gain AAs/upgrades, which is in direct conflict with ease of access to casuals and new players. There's no easy solution to that because the two ways of play are polarizing opposites. Half the reason EQ is in the subscriber situation it is now is because up until now the [semi] hardcore crowd mentality has won out which makes it hard for casual players and new players to even think of getting or staying caught up in any realistic timeframe.

    I'm not advocating for an easymode in the game. I'm just pointing out why we are where we are.
    Skuz likes this.
  20. MacDubh TABLES!!!

    Overseer, Mission TAs, and Merc/Partisan is enough to get from 110-120 with 100% AAxp turned on to start catching up. Obviously the devs don't want people grinding for regular XP anymore.

    The biggest issue for returning players is the level 70-110 experience. It seems like 1-70 you can still net around 2% per kill of regular xp, then it slows way down and you have an insanely painful grind from 70-110 unless you are a class that can solo gribbles 75-100. There is clearly a gearing issue in this level range as well but at the very least the devs could crank up the xp so you can still net ~2%/kill on a solo blue con mob from 70-110. What is the downside here? People could actually solo their way to 110 without having to box 2 or 3 accounts.

    Oh wait, I found the downside... $$
    Dre. likes this.