There are plenty of reasons why this should not and will not be done. A lesser implementation for in-zone "campfire" may be a possible alternative, but not 3 characters allowing unlimited porting to their location from anywhere in EQ.
It isn't unlimited it has a 15 minute cool down. But who care if it did? What harm comes from being able to teleport in this game anyway? It takes 10 minutes to run from one side of NoS to the other, maybe less. If you have a bard in your group you dont have to worry about getting killed along the way.
Fellowships should be completely revamped to foster cooperation and grouping. Why not overhaul Fellowships? Grant them game-changing levels of experience and ease of grouping with instant transport to your group? Could even fold mentoring (a'la EQ2) and Chronomage into it. Make Fellowships transparent, functional, and worthwhile for all players.
Unlimited as in an unlimited number of characters could port to said location. It could be wildly abused for skipping content and others. You'd also be able to do something like run 3 characters, drop a campfire, invite and port over 9 more characters, drop a guild banner, prep 3 characters in another location, rinse/repeat.. That's just the obvious stuff that they don't want it abused for. Years back, I got stomped on by the forum warrior/EQ purist crews by introducing how Vanguard had 4 classes able to summon members to their group, so long as that class was out of combat and the target was in a specific location within a dungeon. That makes a bit more sense and limits the power, vs being able to port from anywhere in EQ to anywhere else in EQ.
Do you know anyone who refused a group because they would have to travel to the group? Maybe some folks are afraid to try getting to a group? Are there a lot of places in the game where that is a big problem? Just adding a double invis potion would seem to take care of most of that problem. Not many places you can't get to in the current endgame if you have that. I would rather see a more robust LFG tool. Perhaps a web based one where folks can indicate play times etc so they can work at setting up groups well in advance.Bring back EQ players and a robust LFG tool for folks to set up times to group and feedback to indicate if folks are no shows. You could then see players LFG their stats and whether they follow through on grouping. Only problem I see is whether this would encourage enough grouping to be worthwhile. Do TLP servers stay strong on grouping after the first year they are around? Or do they end up like Live servers where a lot of folks socialize but solo or box a lot?
This is almost trivially easy to abuse now. Run 3 characters that aren't the fellowship leader, drop members, invite new ones, they teleport across content etc. If they wanted to prevent people from skipping content with campfires they can implement character loot lockouts, or deport them from the zone like they do in the second stage of plane of war. There really isn't a good reason to prevent people from being able to get to groups quickly and painlessly.
Agree with OP Fellowships don't really help their intended purpose at their current size - ie enable everyone who groups together regularly and their alts (to share all that redundant xp) to be on one 'organisation'. (and no, a guild is not a substitute because fellowships are often cross-guilds and ideally should have space for those still growing)
It can only be done once. After that, there's something like an 18 hour delay on joining a new fellowship.
I've suggested this before, but instead of making fellowships bigger, give certain classes the ability to drop a campfire with less than 3 people. Rogues = 3 people (so can drop a fire on their own), Rangers, Druids and a case could be made for Wizards and Bards = 2 people (so can drop a fire with 1 other person). Add a bit of roleplaying back in.
They could just give wizards and druids more port spells add a port spell to the zone in of each zone in an expansion. Giving rogues teh abilityh to drop a fire on their own effectively gives every toon the rogue ability to sneak in places. Pretty sure that is a road they don't want to go down although are their any places in the last few expansions that need a rogue to get to?
Honestly mind boggling that they're apparently fine with people teleporting straight to a campfire, yet they restrict its usage to only these premade fellowships. Combine that with the effectiveness of the empowered campfire buff and it's basically counterproductive to group up with or invite random players into your group. Ideally you'd want to encourage people to form pugs to increase the social nature of the game, not actively reinforce exclusively playing with boxes and a small static group of friends.
That took an overhaul so huge it was more work than adding mercenaries. For computer programs no change is impossible; it's a matter of feasibility with limited development resources.
Would love to see fellowships decoupled from an expansion and released as part of the normal game. It would definitely help people find each other and group quicker. All good things.
IMO fellowships should be left alone Fellowships are pretty important to those who do open raids - and there are a lot of open raid teams across various servers that entirely rely on them. Even if you're doing a closed-guild raid, they can still be beneficial for a variety of reasons. Yes, a lot of people use them for alts. I do, too, and why I have a separate fellowship with a majority of them in it. I secretly wish they can fit infinites amount of people, but that entirely ruins the purpose of utilizing guild functions instead for such copious amounts of toons. I do believe that an entirely separate feature should be employed for random/pick-up groups to port to them upon joining. For something like that, the LFG tool is better off being revamped for that purpose. My feedback would to to have a pop-up window appear for a minute or less upon accepting a group invitation via the LFG tool asking you if you wish to port to the group leader.
Perhaps a generic Port-to-Group feature could be added, but just in zones that are free to play. If you're going to a zone in a recent expansion you have to get there using the usual means, but in older zones you can have the group leader pull you. The reality is that the zones in the earlier expansions are pretty much deserted. I get the sense that any "groups" fighting in the older zones are really just made up of a single person boxing multiple characters. On the rare chance that a pickup group is formed with characters under 110, just give them the ability to jump to the campsite. Sure, they may bypass content, but who cares? That content is years or decades old and there's not another player in all the zones they'd have to cross to get to the campsite on their own.
