The Paradoxical Tragedy of Endgame Content like Veeshan's Peak

Discussion in 'Time Locked Progression Servers' started by Brontus, Aug 2, 2022.

  1. Brontus EQ Player Activist

    Years ago I remember reading an article or devlog about endgame raiding content in Blizzard's World of Warcraft. I think it was penned by designer Jeff "Tigole" Kaplan. The dev pondering the the sobering reality of endgame content. In the article he lamented that according to their internal data, a tiny fraction of the WoW's playerbase would ever get to see endgame content like Molten Core, Blackwing Lair and Naxxaramas. This was years before looking for raid (LFR) mechanics was introduced that helped making raiding easier.

    He then went on to relate how much work Blizzard expended in time and resources to create all that endgame content. Kaplan saw the obvious problem in creating content that very few players would ever experience. This partly explains why Naxxarmas was repurposed in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

    Bottom line: it's foolish to expend time and resources creating content that hardly anyone will experience.

    I think EverQuest has the same problems with raiding zones like Veeshan's Peak. Back in the day, the announcement of VP was a very big deal with lots of fanfare. VP was going to be the raid zone to end all raid zones. The dangers were incalculable and the rewards spectacular! You were on your own. You could not petition GMs to get your corpse back. Whatever happened in VP, stayed in VP. SOE went key crazy in the Ruins of Kunark and put arduous key requirements for VP and other dungeons like Old Sebilus and Howling Winds.

    As expected, very few people ever got to see VP and as a result all that time and effort by the designers and artists was never appreciated by the vast majority of EQ players.

    Eventually on a TLP server I was able to see VP for the first time and I was blown away by it's majesty and grandeur. It reminded me of the coolness factor of the Temple of Veeshan that was to come in Velious.

    Fast forward to twenty years later and little has changed. Sure, some of the VP keys are a bit easier to get but we still have a tedious keying process to enter VP which causes endless frustration each time a new TLP server releases Kunark.

    As one EQ poster remarked in another thread, shouldn't the main challenge be the content in VP and not getting into VP?

    I tip my hat to the Blizzard developers for always being honest and open about their failures, missteps, and mistakes and then making the necessary changes to create a better experience for the players. We could use a bit more of that here in EverQuest. Thanks for listening.:)
    AurumKHK likes this.
  2. Timmyboi Dunning Kruger Award Winner

    At least you got your own special thread. No need to sully your wall of text in the other thread with ideas from the unwashed masses.
    Stymie, Polekn, Gheed and 1 other person like this.
  3. Dembian New Member

    Creating content very few people can see is horrible design agreed alot of things need to be changed on the tlp with all these 24 hour + spawns /camps considering how short classic/kunark are this is the first time ive seen people actually not care if they go to veeshans peek which is a sad thing for me to see as a raider as Veeshans peek is a very cool zone with interesting lore.
  4. Xhartor Augur

    VP did get repurposed later on (Omen of War).

    If you care about seeing the zone design, the zone is very accessible out of era when everything is trivial. The zones key requirement is removed during PoP or LDoN. If you have 3 or 4 EP/Time gears characters on Agnarr you can even see the pre-revamped encounters.

    Over the years they have made numerous changes to the key to make it more accessible to larger crowds and a less toxic experience for the player community.

    The real challenge with the VP key, is motivating your guild member to work on the key with how bad most of the loot in the zone is. The bulk of the loot is weapons that aren't as good as your epic. Only one of the six dragons consistently drops quality loot, and that Dragon is in the earlier part of the zones.

    Now it is the most enjoyable raid in Kunark. However that because the rest of Kunark's raid content is bad and unrewarding.
    Polekn likes this.
  5. HighSpawnRate New Member

    Nevermind.

    Gamers nowadays just want to eat the desserts, they never want to make them.

    Even on a TLP, where the "difficulty" of zones like VP is absolutely laughable due to the extreme amount of power-creep that players have been given over the years.
  6. Dembian New Member

    Curious what you mean by this as you said the power scale we have on TLP's is insane to what it was but its not difficult to sit at your screen for 10 hours and wait for a mob to spawn it's tedious the challenge should be in the fight's
  7. HighSpawnRate New Member

    Here we go again with the exaggerations. Sorry that you camped at the wrong spot for pained soul.
  8. Branntick Augur

    Nothing in EQ is hard until VERY late. The hardest mechanics this game has to offer for the first 2 years on every TLP are mobs that, at most, require tank swaps and AE jousts that are trivialized by GINA.

    EQ is not rocket science. There is no reason to lock VP behind the absurd keying it currently requires.

    This is coming from someone who has already participated in VP on Yelinak.

    Everyone on the server except 2-3 guilds will have to spend half the expansion keying their members. There is no justification for it. It isn't challenging, it isn't fun. EQ TLP would be a better game if the VP bottleneck was heavily reduced.

    I would go so far as to say that Trak should drop 20+ teeth per kill. The ground spawns in SoNH/Kaesora should be reduced to 5 minutes max. AJ, PS, RS, etc. should have double the spawn rate and drop 6 medallions per kill.

    Changes like this would put VP keying on par with Anguish signets. It's something that even casual players can hope to complete in a couple days or so after the grind to 60.
    Erekai and AurumKHK like this.
  9. Vlorg Augur

    because a significant portion of EQ playerbase take pride in getting kicked in the nuts and asking for more.

    We have a huge circlejerk of boomer who love telling eachother that WoW mythic raid is nothing but a easy to learn dance where you just follow addon, while EQ is for the true hardcore players who like HARD MODE.... like sitting for hours killing a mob 20 level lower than them. ( see post below)

    Oh, and the devs can't be bothered to do more than 2 QoL change per year.
    Erekai likes this.
  10. Cicelee Augur

    Lots of players experienced VP when it was current 20 plus years ago. Sorry you play on a server where expansions roll out every couple of months and VP is only "current content" for a few weeks.

    Or you could always enter it when you are level 65 or whatever. No one is forcing you to have to go there when you are 55 or 60. You can experience all the majesty and wonders of the zone and leave the loot on the corpses.

    Besides, I thought people play on TLP classic to "relive the good ol days". The devs made the key quest easier so you can get your key quicker. Be happy with that. Enjoy the "lore" and the "immersion" of the VP key quest. Or wait a few months and have fun killing dragons when the zone opens up.

    PS- much props for using the word paradoxical. Haven't seen that word used in a long time.
    code-zero likes this.
  11. Ranari Journeyman

    I figured this would happen. People would start to play TLP Classic and, I say this lovingly to the majesty of the original game, they would realize just how unfinished or incomplete it is. And now I believe we have a new market emerging that wants to experience this older content in a fresh way.

    But that's why I proposed the following minimal-effort solution to at least the key access part of the problem:
    1) Utilize the Epic 1.0's as the VP Key since that's the main focus of Kunark anyways
    2) Repurpose the current VP key quest to reward something on the level of the Spirit Wracked Cord

    Besides, for ANY of this to even work, VP 1.0 would have to be re-itemized so that 5/6 of the dragons aren't dropping inferior weaponry to the epic 1.0's players just spent all their time on getting.

    Profit.
  12. Ranari Journeyman

    Even dessert is better than inedible food.
  13. Midnitewolf Augur

    The issue with other threads is that once they get 5 pages deep, often your message doesn't get heard. By starting a new thread, you are ensuring it get heard. Nothing wrong with that in my mind.

    To the OP. Fully agree. The entire reason I am back on this TLP is to experience all the content I never had a chance to. Now I am finding that due to time constraints, I may still be missing out on ever seeing what VP is like due to these insane key requirements.
    Erekai likes this.
  14. Cicelee Augur

    No one says you *have* to see VP during the Kunark expansion. You can still choose to see it later.

    The only reason to have to see it during Kunark is loot. And considering only one dragon has viable upgrades that (on a TLP) will be replaced within a few months, then it is somewhat pointless to have to see it now. Visit it later, enjoy killing Phara Dar and Silverwing and Hoshkar and such...
  15. Midnitewolf Augur


    Let me rephrase that. I would like to see VP, IN ERA, when it is a challenge and the content available is relevant. If I wanted to just "see stuff" I could jump over to a live server, create a heroic character at level 85 or soon level 100 and jump all the way back to classic and sightsee as much as I want.

    Also you bring up a point in favor of streamlining the keying process. You point out specifically that the content in VP becomes irrelevant in a few months time. Since that is the case, it becomes obvious that a difficult and lengthy keying process is not a workable mechanic on a TLP with expansions compressed into short segments of only a few months at a time and MUST be reworked to accommodate the faster progression that happens on a TLP. Thanks for pointing that out.
  16. Rcbauer Augur

    VP isn't end game content. It's a horrible kunark raid zone that drops terrible loot for the most part.

    If people would stop doing the TLP recycle track they'd figure out that the game really begins at TSS
    Triconix likes this.
  17. Midnitewolf Augur


    The point is VP was endgame content. It was designed to be difficult to access because they were trying to keep people occupied in the game for the entire year or more it took for them to roll out Velious. The keying process worked fine then with 12 months for everyone to farm up the items need to get the key. 8 weeks however are a far cry from 12 months so the process needs to be accelerated at least 5x faster or more to be equilivant.
  18. Tucoh Augur

    • Use raid zones and content for group content (they do this in most of EQ)
    • Use hard modes to provide end-game content for hardcore players while making the normal mode basically puggable (Ex: WoW and many other MMOs). DPG does NOT do this, which is one of the bigger problems in EQ live's end-game. The playerbase is highly bifurcated in terms of lethality, but there is one difficulty setting that is too easy for the highly lethal players and too hard for the less lethal players.
    • Make last expansion's raid content relevant for an expansion or two by adding in items that persist being Best in Slot (EQ does a good job of this)
    • Re-use old zones in new expansions or hardcore heritage. (VP, for example, was my favorite zone in the Ring of Scale expansion)
  19. kengqvist1 New Member

    It's a tricky thing to balance, because there's definitely value in having difficult goals in the game. Content that takes a massive effort to access gives players something to look forward to and strive for, and makes it really special to do it. In this day and age, VP is almost the only thing on TLPs that isn't just automatically conquered by all players who care to raid. With DZs and the huge power creep that classes have seen over the years, everything else is just a matter of choosing to do it, not a question of whether or not you can, as long as you're not a casual or decidedly bad player. One of the most frequent complaints about modern MMORPGs is how nothing feels like a serious accomplishment because everybody ends up doing everything, so it isn't impressive.

    If anything, the original developers did the right thing when they designed VP: it isn't just a uniformly superior tier of gear that stands above all else. It's mostly just a bunch of okay weapons (and one or two great ones) and situationally useful clickies, three or four pieces of caster armor, and a single 41% haste item. Really the only two items in VP that are objectively superior to anything else available in the game are Phara Dar's robe and crown. Everything else is basically an alternative to one's epic (and usually not quite as good), and any given class really only has two or maybe three items from VP that are worth getting. You can skip it altogether without feeling like you've missed out on anything important. Melee classes in particular have almost no reason to care about this raid. Maybe monks for the haste shoes but that's just about it.

    WoW's blunder was much bigger: a raid tier that almost nobody got to do, but those who did do it received gear so vastly overpowered that everyone else was a second-rate player by comparison. PvP became a complete shitshow towards the end of vanilla as those with Naxx gear were nearly unbeatable for those without, and the weapons were so bizarrely overpowered that you could basically instakill people. It's like they repeated the supposed mistake of VP and made it much worse by allowing it to be something that really hurt to miss out on. By the end of vanilla, it was a garbage game for anyone outside that 1% elite.

    Personally, the only problem I have with VP is that Kunark doesn't have enough raid content without it. But then again, that's because we consider PoSky classic content when for all intents and purposes it was a Kunark raid.
  20. Triconix Augur

    There's absolutely nothing wrong with creating content that the entire population doesn't see immediately, or even in era. There were raiding guilds scattered around in all different eras on live back many years ago. And guess what? There's nothing wrong with that. Many people will eventually see the content, it's just a matter of when and how. There should always be an incentive to drive those who want bleeding edge. The content/rewards from these places should also have more than just singular era relevancy. The gear should be at least on par with the mid-level gear from the following expansion. VP, for 99.99% of items, does not do this. It's just a badly designed zone. Devs were still wet behind the ears when it came to end-game raid content design and it shows.

    The problem with TLPs is power creep really broke up the natural deviation of raid guilds that occurred on live. Everyone is so much more naturally powered, regardless of how talented you are at the class, that it neutered years and years of content design/development. Expansions that took months to beat are now being completed within days or hours. My standing auto-attack dps on my warrior now is nearly double what it was at this point of the game (TSS). I know this because I can open old logs on my storage HDD and see the staggering difference. Extrapolate that against an entire raid, which many classes saw even larger boosts, and it's no wonder why everything seems "easy" now. This results in the shifting of bottlenecks to more tedious tasks - faction, keys, flags, etc. The problem just gets compounded on itself every year and players continue to see power creep and more players are wanting to see end-game content immediately.

    Another problem with VP is not the concept of its access, it's the design - and its over time aging - how to get access. It was unique and interesting to figure out 20+ years ago, but now that knowledge has been passed down, the quest is nothing but tedium and an unnecessary time sink. The design of the quest aged like milk. It needs to be either completely redesigned or heavily modified from its original version.