Developer mistakes that drove away casual players.

Let's say that all the effort is already included within the amount of time. Not many players are taking part in guild and raid organization and non-raid groups need to be organized also. So I am once again asking: What does remain as a reason for better rewards to the raiders ? Risk, effort, and time are already neutralized or even.

Because loot in this game plays into much of its value and fun as well as replayability. This is the design of the game we fell in love with. Asking it to accommodate your age and give you a free-ride, open its coffers and drop all the best there is to be found in the world of Norrath, just for gracing its' world with your presence, is not what any of us would have ever found 10, 15, 20+ years of entertainment in.

Go build and maintain an effective raiding guild, then come back and let us know if you still feel that "risk, effort, and time are already neutralized/even"

Raid, by design, you obtain the reward with a large group effort. Group, by design, you obtain the reward with a small group effort. Solo, by design, you obtain the reward with only your effort.

If anything, they should offer "more" reward if you figure out how to beat a raid with significantly less than 54; group, significantly less than 6. The implication being you are doing so with only characters from that era.

No, I disagree. Some expansions like TBM admittedly are broken now in terms of tuning relative to certain respecs etc, but for the most part I disagree. I would actually argue that the divide between raid & group gear has narrowed, and the point of raid gear & raids is to reward players that are more into the game & hard core. You really don't need raid gear to progress unless you really want to current expansions, how gear/rk 3 spell dependent you are could be a thread of its own given it differs by class.

There would be so many exploits and the game economy would be so broken if everyone in a raid got the same thing and worse there would be less incentive for some guild members to stay active once they're spec'd up. Certain classes in a guild would gear spec sooner and possibly become less active.

The reality of most MMO is that it's competitive near end game due to scarcity. Candidly, to me it read like you don't like endgame, particularly, which really isn't designed for casuals...

No, if anything allowing boxing & adding mercs saved the casual player base as it gave casuals time to flex their progression more. I box because it's hard to commit to a guild because I'm at a point in my life and career where I might have to go weeks without playing. A lot of the "younger" players (30 somethings) are in this position.

To me it reads like you want to do none casual content as a casual.

What timeline are we talking about here? The massive exodus of casual players starting around 2004? That to some degree was unavoidable--at that point EQ was 5ish years old, and new MMOs were coming out. Some gamers are always going to gravitate towards the newer thing. Beyond that--a big complaint in the GoD and Omens era was how a lot of non-raid content seemed tuned for raid geared players, and on top of that grouping was (and still is in 2022) mandatory for most non-raid content. Most other MMOs let you do a lot of non-raiding / non-dungeon content solo and meaningfully advance your character. EQ has chosen to not follow this approach, and it certainly cost them many casuals (who often are the ones who struggle the most to find groups.)

If we're talking the more "steady" decline most of us have seen since say, UF, with most servers on Live having lower populations and fewer raiding guilds, I think some of that is just unavoidable attrition of an older "legacy" game. It does at least "feel" like the population has been fairly stable the last few years though, but I don't have access to any numbers.

I do think the fairly extreme inaccessibility of the game to a "genuine new player" isn't very helpful, and AFAIK it appears the company doesn't find this to be a problem at all. Maybe they have market research suggesting if they made the game more accessible it wouldn't bring in enough players to matter /shrug.

Boxing and Mercs became common in large part to accommodate people who could not or did not want to group all the time. By and large boxers don't represent a big untapped population who would happily be doing regular groups if you got rid of boxing, the servers would just be lower population. Boxing was going on in 1999, the uncle who got me into EQ was boxing a CLR, WAR, NEC and WIZ in Kunark, he had 4 big CRT monitors, 4 keyboards, 4 mice. This was before you could even alt-tab the EQ client. He had a couple friends in his raidin guild who were doing the same thing. By Omens of War many people had done at least "some" kind of boxing, maybe no more than using a high level char to powerlevel a lower level, but the idea that boxing "appeared" at some point isn't accurate. Boxing is intrinsic to EQ and has existed since its earliest times. It has changed over time as the state of the game client and various other things have changed. As long as the boxers aren't using prohibited software they are mostly a net positive to TLPs and Live servers.

Also as a point of order the boxing TLPs have actually outperformed truebox TLPs for longevity. The last few Truebox TLPs to hit live: Phinigel, Selo and Miragul limped to live with extremely low player populations. Ragefire which is a boxing TLP is older than all of those servers and still has more players. Rizlona reliably has more players than Aradune now. Boxing promotes longevity on a server.

On Vaniki I notice different, raid players are just better overall and invest more into their main, as in they buy the potions, they do the group quests, and so on. Casual player doesn't even invest in Celestial Healing X potions or nullify potions or any potions.

Raid players play better too, its not just because of their gear. Enchanter and bard is a good way to see the disparity between a raid player aka a good player and a casual decent/bad player.

For one raid players take risks and charm pets in TLP. Further they are not attached to their pets and ok swapping them. Further they invest in potions to be able to do so easier, potions is not just for raiders, casuals can easily invest into potions as well. They just too much of a stickler with plat and tend to make more excuses.

Lastly, you get raid gear by investing in your main, not from making several alts, which takes away time spent/gear/progression from your main. Raiders stick with a main usually, they don't go out and make a bunch of alts unless they pretty much well caught up.
A casual is not even caught up and they'll go on to make another alt. Thats on them, no excuses why you aren't caught up if your not investing your time into your main.

Wrong again, when ToL raids went live, day 1 beaten by many guilds. If content was hard and they make it easier because easier to do, then ToL raids would not have been beaten by many guilds on day 1. I'm talking about ALL of them. Like T2 drops, ALL of those raids beaten day 1.

Its an MMORPG what do you expect, this is EQ, its old school MMORPG, just like Diablo2, just like WoW. Socialize, trade.

This happens in group game HoT and later. All because they make group content difficult. Raidlike.
If you notice one thing, RAID content gets beaten day 1 by many, however GROUP content, that takes a couple days for hardcore players.
If anything they need to tone down group content, tone up raid content.

Yes I can actually, when it's a fail event due to one person missing a trigger situation.

what GINA DOES, the GAME should do. Like I said, if it's NECESSARY to the event, then it should be baked into the GAME, not a 3rd party app.

I know WHY they require it, that's the PROBLEM. Events shouldn't be so failsauce because one person of 54 misses a trigger. (and audio triggers ARE baked into the game, but lacking visual cues onscreen)

Too much in the way of muh mechanichs creates fail loops and scapegoated players.

20 ish hours a week is a part time job and that's with a static group.

Exactly

It's been a while since I've been an active raider. If I couldn't box and use mercs I'd likely have quit by now. I don't think it's DPG's responsibility to try to make easy mode so I could solo or attempt to force me into grouping with people who I don't know which seems to be a regular demand from some.

Can't comment on the quality of raiders, but GINA and Parsers are needed due to the insanely bloated state of the game. Considering early raids were done with this:


Now I can't even tell how much damage a single spell did without a parser due to the fact there is a dozen procs off of a single cast. Similarly trying to manage things like ADPS when you have a full buff window, song window, aura window is pretty rough without that soothing GINA voice telling you what's happening.

Good or bad player you are definitely not playing to your full potential without some 3rd party assistance.

On topic of this thread though the game is way more casual friendly today than it ever was, if you want proof of that see how far you can get playing 1 night a week on P99 vs TLP/live.

I am a returning player. There's definitely a noticeable difference in the 1-75/80 game and the 80+ game. I had a blast molo-ing up to about 80 and felt I was able to do a lot of content. Starting at about 80, it started to get much more difficult. I started to depend more and more on the GL buffs just to be able to make any meaningful progress. Then in the 90's things started to get really hard. I had to have lots of GL buffs to survive most encounters. I started doing HA's to get merc gear hoping that would help, but by mid-90's the HAs were pretty tough to molo. I unofficially retired that character and have just been doing Overseer to level him up. I'm not sure why I'm leveling him up since I doubt I'll be able to play him at 100+ content, but I figure I can use him for some high level buffs of alts.

I'm not really interested in raiding or being part of a guild. I liked grouping in the old days when PUGs were easy and casual. You could roll up to a camp, join, and have fun for a while. I like playing solo and the pre-80 game is conducive to that. The wall that players hit at 80 is discouraging. I can see how lots of players wouldn't push through. It's more work than I want to put in. It's like how someone might enjoy chess, but if they have to play at a grandmaster level, they might not want to do all that work to play at that level. They might want to just play at a level where they can have fun hanging out with friends and not take it so seriously. The modern EQ game is much more at a grandmaster chess level where you needs lots of AA's, skills, practice, etc. in order to make progress. That's probably because they are catering to people decades of experience playing the game, but it means people who aren't as devoted won't have as much fun and aren't as likely to stick around.

He also forgot old.

I finally started using GINA last year.... my reactions to spotting things are a lot slower these days.

These days I prefer raids on TLP servers than high emoted raids on live where one person missing one emote kills the raid.

Umm we shouldn't be comparing raid gear to non prestige group gear. The comparison should be raid gear vs good group gear with good augs. The gap between A fully properly geared group tank and a group tank in silver status is pretty big.

I wouldn't call it a "developer mistake" but what gets boring and tedious is AA grinding. Progression servers are fun for the first few months. You level up and then do raids and gear and such. Then it becomes an endless exp grind for AAs.

It gives the hardcore folks something to do. It gives the casuals a reason to feel left behind.

The ideals I have seen in this thread for the most part make me happy you guys/gals do not develop video games. Sure Eq needs better expansions not cookie cutter ones. There are class balance issues, or mis represented class roles and the application of them.

No way would I ever agree that a causal player should have easy group access to raid quality gear just to please him/or her. You want raid gear that bad, go join a raid guild and learn to raid. Raid gear and group gear should have a gap, raiding requires you to actually know how to play your class.

Raiding requires situational awareness and ability to follow instructions and tactics.

No way would I ever make a change to a game to suit a few casual players that log in a few times a week or month, i dont care how old you are that is irrelevant.

End rant*

No it doesn’t lol. Raiding requires about 15-20 people that know this stuff. The rest can be, and usually are carried

In fact the people here complaining about their group gear, you folks can transfer to bristlebane and join the weekly rov casual raids on wednesdays, thursdays and fridays. Stop complaining about your group gear and attacking raiders and their gear we dont attack yours or the fact you box 10 toons at a time.

If your guild has 20 people that can carry the other half im the the wrong raiding guild.