While this post presents itself as hopeful, and I would love to believe it represents a healthier player population, to me it feels a little disingenuous to just say that there are players around. AB is nowhere near as populous as it once was and even in the time between CoV to NoS, there's been an observable drop of people leaving and not coming back. Many of the characters in zones are part of box squads, where often we have people 2-6 boxing and so if you see 6 chars in one zone it's often just 1-2 people at best. We're actively forced to molo and box more because of how scarce real players are. That was the hardest pill to swallow after coming back all these years later. It was hard catching up as there was no one around my level range, and were it not for my buddy spending so much time with me helping me get levels, finish quests and do missions, I might have given up in boredom and frustration with a non-existent LFG scene. I stuck through it and here I am now max and capped out on everything. It is definitely felt in the guild/raiding scene on our server as well. SoD and AoU do not have an endless supply of recruits as the HC guilds, nevermind the more MC/casual guilds like AD/LR. It's also why we end up with tighter knit communities doing alt raids together, where again, we're boxing multiple characters to field the full 54. The only time I've ever seen contemporary zones bustling with activity is on expansion release in hub zones. That quickly peters off. Even in the first couple of days in Firefall Pass, it'd not be uncommon to see 6 or fewer characters present. Once people are done with Mercenary and Partisan, Hunter and specific augs are the only reasons to go back, then once people finish up with those, many will just do missions and only missions because it's a better use of time due to minimal setup and how quickly they're done. For what it's worth, I do believe there should be more of an incentive to spend time in the actual zones and play the game. It was jarring how poor killing for regular exp has become in favour of Mercenary and Partisan to level up, and how effective Overseer is for the time invested.
AB is definetly a special server regarding its low populousness (so close to Zek) and should be merged with the next low populated live server above it which is Vox. Maybe Luclin, which comes next, would had to be added too . All other live servers are healthy. From EQ Resource:
Isn't AB the European server? If you're not in the same time zone as most of the players on the server, it will definitely seem vacant.
It is and it does get hosted from Ireland. US servers do often have a better connection to (central) europe than those from Ireland... Unlike other servers AB is pretty distinctive more vaccant during the night but this never was the problem as there are also some players from north america and australia and it is good to have them as friends there. I wonder where the medium count of 19.05% is coming from. Should be from the weekend only.
Yes, I think people that say they're casual play more than they admit. Average gamer spends ~7 hours a week on gaming, according to Forbes in 2019 while the average MMORPG player spends on average 22 hours from some research back in 2009. I wouldn't consider anything more than 10 hours a week casual at all, no judgement as a MMOs serve more purpose than just game entertainment. Overseer should definitely remain, there's a need for character progression from non-combat activities. However, playing the game can't feel as unrewarding as it currently does for people not able to get into a progression oriented groups. Both can exist, and they can compliment each other well.
It's certainly the most dead during night time for UK and EU time zones, but even during peak times the most you tend to see are members from the aforementioned guilds doing their raids, or camping nameds for aug items, if they're even doing that. A fair number of players are pretty much only raidloggers. For the past 3 months I was stateside and observed numbers during NA hours, while we do have a core contingent of overseas players in the Americas, it's still incredibly quiet. Most NA players I know are raiding with AB guilds due to work/life scheduling reasons. Those of us playing from the UK/EU, this server's all we have. Most who played on NA servers have since migrated to AB, where others remained with their guilds until player numbers could no longer sustain doing content together. When you start identifying the box squads as the main player behind them and recognising them out in the wild, the player population numbers feel even smaller. From then, fewer actual people around means fewer real grouping opportunities which encourages more molo/boxing and overseer. I've seen returnees deterred due to that vicious cycle.
I agree with you on the amount of time played, but the amount of time one plays does not denote the playstyle. When the terms "casual" and "hardcore" are used, casual is deemed to be the less "arduous" of game play usually in lower than max level or content other than combat-related activities. "Hardcore" or even "real" is deemed to be those who are raiding or doing content in the "end game" only. Ironically, if you look at amount of time played, those who are "casual" and playing more of the game content than the "hardcore" often also play more time per week because there is FAR more to do when you don't focus solely on combat-related content at the max level. In the days I was raiding in a ranked guild in EQ2 (years ago), I was playing significantly fewer hours than when I was tradeskilling, playing with house decorating, questing and grouping in lower levels, etc. My playstyle was casual when I wasn't raiding and, for me, it was significantly more fun. Raiding was intense and enjoyable in a completely different way, but also stressful (especially when trying to figure out a strat on an encounter that hadn't been 'broken' yet). "Casual" is often used as a pejorative by raiders and others who see themselves as "hardcore" or the "real" players with any addition to content other than their specific end-game objectives being deemed worthless no matter how many other players spend time (and money) in that content. Conversely, many "casual" playstyle players chaff at the seeming focus of development solely on the end-game "hardcore" playstyle. Development has to tread a line between those and they have my sympathy for trying to do so (at least when I'm not annoyed aspects of my own playstyle are neglected or utterly abandoned )
Overseer's is just a cash grab, and to make it work they had smash exp into the ground. I have a friend that is basically locked at 117. He got task added at a lower level then he should have and now all the progression stuff is done. The older progression offers almost no exp, grinding offers basically no exp. So he is left with repeating instances when the lockouts expire for 2-3% or.... He can drop money into the overseer get all the packs to do missions and just keep clicking the "finish now" button. Nothing better then killing stuff5 levels higher and getting .05% exp...
No one is forcing your friend to spend a dime on Overseer. With the exception of the seasonal quests and people just buying those agents because the damn quests always seem to be bugged, I'd bet they don't make as much from Overseer as people seem to think. There is zero reason to spend any money on Overseer. If you've maxed out the categories, you can make a minimum of 10% xp a day. If your friend would run it twice a day (12 hour tasks), they'll be 120 in a month, if not sooner. I'm not defending Overseer or the messed up hell level nonsense that Daybreak has adopted, I'm just saying that with the playing field they've given us, the doom and gloom surrounding OS is nonsense. It's not pay to win by any means...it just takes time, and is faster than trying to grind out 111-120 the old way.
Sadly, these are the people who think they need to make a level a day or the XP is slow. They won't do anything except current expansion no matter what else is available that could give them XP. They also demand that groups are available to them any time they want and exactly what they want. They blame everything else instead of looking for ways to help themselves.
Anyone that has spent money on overseer has the disposable income to do so. Bravo to them, you should thank them for supporting the game. No one needs to spend a penny on Overseer, ever. If Overseer locked you out of daily quests without spending cash, then it's just another predatory mobile game within EverQuest. Paying the monthly fee to play EverQuest allows you to do all 10 daily quests. Nice try, though. You can't please everyone, and you're just not into this feature and that's okay.
It’s 100% a game design issue. If you build a group based game, you need a lot of people to create interactions. They don’t do enough to recruit or retain more people. The game design past and present conflicts with itself. Modern design relies on groups to repeat content but no incentive to actually repeat and actively blocks repeating missions. There aren’t good tools in the game to build groups. If boxing wasn’t so easy and accepted, then this game would’ve crashed. It’s not a shock that people want to play the game when they can, and in the most relevant content. People create an expectation that you treat this game like a job, being proactive, building a network, and a reliable schedule.
Your demanding that others be there to group for the specific content YOU want on reliable schedules to be there for YOU, never to group with anyone for content they might want, whenever you happen to play when you can. Being proactive and building a network of friends, being reliable to join a weekly group or at least to communicate why you might be unavailable and doing things others might want or need that you don't is not a job, it's the reality of multi-player gaming and even of real life. If you want to be able to do "the most relevant content" any time you want without the need to associate with other people who might have other plans or needs/wants, a single player game would be a lot more suitable for you.
It doesn't lock you out per say, but it does tell you "sorry you can't do this mission because you don't have the people for it but you can tomorrow... Or you can buy this shiny pack from the market place and keep going." That's predatory. Your right though you can't please everybody. But you can tell who the people are that went through something that sucks that don't want it changed for the betterment of the game, because they want everyone else to do it the way they did it even if it's stupid.
Stop twisting words. Nobody is demanding, there’s an expectation that an environment exists to foster social interactions in a game without group finders. You can’t expect the game to sustain itself based solely off of cliques or a few friendly players. There’s a wide gap between EQ’s current quest design and a single player game. They need to make those progression tasks heavily incentivized to be repeatable.
Or perhaps there are people who just plain disagree about what would better the game. You do seem to want to impose your viewpoint on others. Understandable in some ways I suppose, but still you do need to understand that others may not feel the way you do.
When a person makes a comment either agreeing or disagreeing with the topic. That is plain agreeing or disagreeing. When a person then replies to that comment being rude and rude and condicending that would be imposing a viewpoint on people. There is a difference between having a discussion with people and those individuals that like conflict and start off that way. Who's the jerk the person that pushes or the person that pushes back?
No, that's nonsense. You do recruitment quests. You get the occasional (about 1 in 5) crit success. These give more agents. Now you have more agents, and can do more quests. Now you get duplicate agents, and use them to convert to higher level agents. Now you can do even more quests. I've got maxed Overseer on 6 accounts, never spent a penny on any of them. It just takes some time. If you want it today? Sure, then go spend some cash. But there's no need for that. It doesn't suck. If you think it's stupid, then don't do it. I see plenty of posters on these forums who don't use Overseer.
