EverQuest Producer’s Letter April 2023

I'll try to keep this post civil while having critical constructive criticisms and feedback.

Let's start with some positives: firstly, the Legacy characters on accounts COULD be cool if paired with additional incentives to actually be able to play those characters and "hot-swap" classes based on a pick-up groups need or raids need etc. Secondly, the evolving server benefits are a cool idea in theory to help those whole leave the server as a catch-up mechanic or to incentivize a friend to re-roll here later "past the rush" and still be able to catch up quickly.

I can see how both of these are attempts at keeping people playing the same server instead of hopping from one to the next. It also tries to give players a reason to level alts to help boost all other accounts they will play. These thoughts are great, but I feel like they fail to reach their potential.

Let's talk about the downsides to the two aforementioned identities of the server. First, we have Legacy characters we at first glance sound amazing. Bonus experience on my main for having leveled alts? AA XP should be easier, more time to play my alts and gear them except the bonus is not active when it could be most useful: level unlock expansions. Also, what are we doing with these alts? How are we going to gear them? AoCs? Nope - account based. Free trade? Nope. Not on this server. So now we just have toons we can't use effectively (box if on a different account) and the XP incentive for them is only partially effective and even that is gradual - when one reaches max you get 10% and then have to do each character again to get back up to your maximum bonus. While not tie the XP bonus into completing raid achievements in expansion or some other identity. If you can't give free trade loot, why not make no trade items heirloom and allow us to gear our toons that way? And surely you want people to sitll box because otherwise you're just losing sub money.

Secondly, you have this evolving set of benefits based on expansion release. They sounds cool, but they come too late and or at odds with their identity. 25% bonus loot sounds cool, but its only after we get to Kunark and it is still far less than what other servers have gotten in the past. AA EXP at Luclin and currency modifier at LDoN are great. Lowered spawn timers in Ykesha? Cool. Why not just have that be a base feature of this server? Faction modification once we hit Velious? Awesome. Let's get some tags on raid mobs for huge faction hits so I can turn in this quest. Oh wait. I cant cause of FTE.

And now here is the main issue people are having with this server: First to engage or FTE. On paper at total face value it sounds great. It just falls apart with a tiniest of scrutiny. People hate this aspect of P99 raiding and at least (if this announcement is to be believed) they have the decency of only applying it to raids while you are looking at doing it to all mobs. This may clear up your community managers DMs or customer supports ticket list with less tickets demanding justice for losing a DPS race, but it will only increase their workload when people realize how other will abuse and exploit this to make it near impossible for the average casual to get important named camps - even worse than it was before. This isnt even taking into account all the third party programs which will ruin the experience more.

You have for years held the policy that there are no camps and therefore no mobs are owned by one person or the other. Now you are reversing that to the a ridiculous degree and allowing the players little recourse to trolling and griefing.

On top of that you’re killing player interaction (what little of it we still have in EQ) even more. See a newb dying and want to help kill this mob for him, mez it, root it, snare it? Nope. He can /yell all he wants he is dead. Someone got social agro when pulling and grabbed a few too many? Not your problem anymore. Let em wipe and take their spot, er camp, er whatever you want to call it now. Before if someone was boxing and you rolled up you could ask for a spot and sometimes they'd sit one out to the side and just help with out of group DPS or what not. Not anymore. Leveling an alt and want to help with a higher toon out of group? Not anymore.

These are just basic initial thoughts not even getting into how this effects raiding, specific scripting on bosses, or what not. Like.. if you don't generate agro how does out of group healing work? Are you immune to what the mob is doing if you didn’t tag it first? So you can just stand in AEs? If yes, that’s broken. If no, that's broken cause you can get trained and have zero recourse.


But the biggest thing you need to look at on these forums and discords and wherever else you are gathering information from is the lack of people looking to create guilds on this server. As of writing this the server announcement came out 12 hours ago. There isnt a single new post in the guild recruitment section. There isn’t one post in there asking about making a guild on Oakwynd.

Edited: to be nice.

I think it'll be interesting to see how this all plays out, and that's exactly what I'm going to do.

Chewed up and spit out… let me slow clap the new TLP

Can you guys at least rename it to soup-sandwich ?

Free trade would be nice but without the random loot piñata that is Mischief. I’m not a fan of encounter locking. I was planning to resubscribe for the new TLP but not sure that I will at this point. The bonuses are interesting, I could take or leave them. I enjoyed the Mischief ruleset but felt like it inundated the market with way too much loot to the point where everything felt cheapened.

This proposed ruleset seems so out of touch with the playerbase. Who is asking for these changes? Who really wants FTE rules? The potential to grief is just way too high in a game where we all know griefing happens on an astronomical scale.

Many of us have been spoiled and accustomed to the Mischief/Thornblade loot ruleset. Anything you propose from here on out will always be compared to that. Why not make the Mischief/Thornblade loot rules standard across the board?

If you removed the FTE mechanic, had Mischief/Thornblade loot rules, and rolled out the proposed evolving rules with each expac unlock, I think you'd have such a dynamic and engaging server for players.

Only comment I can say is way to shaft the people playing the game outside of the US, the ping issue is gonna make them having any ability to tag a mob before others practically impossible.

Listen to this ^.. This is exactly what we want.

Even people playing on the East Coast of the United States will be at a disadvantage in Ping.

This whole rule set is disheartening. If there was free trade/random loot, and a perm xp bonus I could see it drawing enough attention that many would be willing to try it.

However when you also consider the issues it will create with PL alts now it's a DOA server. Won't be renewing my sub further either unless changed

Don't they primarily use test to test stuff for the Live servers? I seem to recall notices when they update test to Live before testing more things. Or did I misread that?

I do agree with you that its easy to imagine all the unforeseen stuff happening.

Who actually wants to play classic again with a 60/90 unlock schedule again?

It's going to literally take years before anyone has any real reason to play on this server.

I am not saying all these ideas are bad and kudos to you for trying. However if you stood this server up along with a straight Mischief clone. One would be a ghost town and the other would not.

Not really need Mischief clone, just add Free Trade! New EQ2 server is free trade, like last year one, them have 2 free trade servers in a row, EQ1 got standard loot server Yelinak last year without it so WHY you not make free trade server this year?

If you so want to make weird ruleset servers each year - do it, but also at same time open free-trade server and even with long unlock it will be way more popular i bet!

bruh... they said "first to engage". we know what "first to engage" means because thats how rampage target is determined. 2+2=4 not 35.8422

I second that. I would be stoked with just free trade.

The people here say if you don’t like the Ruleset don’t play you have to understand this FTE nonsense could be coming to your server in the future. You should also be against changing EQ into EQ2. This isn’t a server gimmick like mischief, selo, Vaniki where I would say if you don’t like it skip it. This a change in core mechanics of this game that could affect every server.

It is very late for me, I stayed up to be a part of the crazy discourse that was the Official Discord TLP channel and let me tell you I've witnessed something incredible today. I have been a guild leader or raid leader on the last 4 cycles of TLPs, it has become a major part of who I am and in that time I have seen a lot of friends turn enemies, a lot of good people say things to each other noone should ever say, and I've seen this game cause real life turmoil to the point of absurdity and yet tonight I saw many "big names" of the community 100% in agreement. It takes a truly wild announcement to unify so many jerks to the same side to where they are all in agreement and lamenting that the world is over like T.S. Elliot in that Hollow Guys poem. However, I do not think that this is over nor do i believe we are just going to have to take it in regard to this announcement. In the past the developers have shown that they listen to feedback, I gave an example tonight of the forum backlash to the original "4-week Classic" on the 'Yelinak' server and everyone seemed to remember how the devs changed their stance on that due to us uniting our voices. So I am here to hopefully give my humble opinion on why this announcement had the effect that it did in the hopes we can come to a better understanding together.

It would be easy to say that it was just a bad ruleset, that the devs don't listen to us etc; instead I will posit that the majority of players are actually upset at how this ruleset hurts both the developers and players. It makes little sense to incentivize players to pile all their characters on a single account when the raid lockouts from an Agents of Change prevent us from utilizing any characters past the first who kills anything in a DZ, thus reducing the point to leveling more characters up to raid level. The "FTE" or First to Engage rules will lead to a myriad of issues previous posters have described in detail so instead of me rehashing all of it let me instead point out that this change most likely kills powerleveling on the server as we know it, and with the aforementioned single account system in place the developers may have severely limited revenue on not just one but two significant sources of subscriptions. I gave an example tonight on the discord I would like to share here that I feel sums up this issue:

"To illustrate a point let’s say they had proposed loot boxes for a new tlp. everyone would be just as up in arms saying "How dare they?" and "Do the devs ever listen?" Etc etc. But eventually we the players tend to shake out okay on those issues and we accept them and work around them because we know deep down the devs are preserving the game, doing what they have to to keep the lights on in Norrath, which is what we all collectively want. But this ruleset is different as it feels in-cohesive and even at odds with its own systems. This will lessen subscriptions in multiple ways (less boxing, no pl farming, etc) why are they hurting their revenue sources AND hurting us at the same time?"

I mentioned previously that I have been an Officer many times and through those connections I have spoken to many other past Officers today, not a single one of them wants to come to this server with the ruleset as it is. In fact if you look at the TLP recruitment forums there have been no new posts for guilds since the announcement which I believe is very telling. We arent young anymore, it gets harder to field a competent staff every TLP and now morale has hit a standstill with those willing to volunteer their time and effort to raising guilds on your servers. The bottom line is that we can swallow hard changes if they are for a real reason, like to keep the game going or keep the devs employed; however this feels more like both the people making the game and the people playing it are going to lose if the ruleset isn't changed.

Someone said tonight "vote with your wallets, show them we mean business" but I think that is very foolhardy. Make no mistake DPG we do not want you to "feel the wrath" or "regret making this ruleset", we want to work through this with you to make sure the game stays profitable and fun for everyone involved. At the end of the day we are on your side and we too just want to get back to wasting our summers, ignoring our families, and watching you know who get banned for the 6th time in classic!

We love you guys, and it's because of that love and our insane love for this game that we are asking you to please rethink this ruleset.

Locked encounters will be interesting. No more AE pl's will be a positive change for the server, requiring people to actually group with others for xp. The griefing it will cause seems like a lot of potential frustration for both players and GMs.

Account locked bonuses make zero sense. If players can't raid with alts on the same account due to AoC lockouts, why bother leveling them? From a revenue perspective, doesn't it make sense to incentivize alts on multiple paying accounts instead? This is a very poorly considered mod.

The unlock schedule makes this server completely unappealing to me. A full year before Gates of Discord? LDoN STILL not bundled with pop? Eight weeks is simply too long for most expansions without a level cap increase- DoN, and PoR are notorious for causing player turnover, to say nothing of the early boring slogs. With increased xp/aa exp/drops/faction, twelve weeks is too long for any expansion. Players get bored when there's no progress to be made and look for other games to play(and spend money on.)

It's mind-blowing that Daybreak had a full year to brainstorm this server with non-stop input from the community and this is what was decided. If this experiment was submitted to a science fair, the total lack of thoughtful consideration and willful neglect of proven turnover mechanics would disqualify it from any ribbon.

Remove FTE, add free trade, juice up the evolving rules or reduce raid lockout times and you have another massive TLP hit on your hands.
Don't, and Oakwynd is going to make Vaniki look like the launch of Burning Crusade.
There is no way you have thoroughly tested encounter locking. We all know there are going to be game altering exploits and bugs around it. It's basically guaranteed to lead to two things:

1. An even bigger gap between exploiters/cheaters and honest players
2. Camps being permanently locked down creating bottlenecks that will make people just quit

People play these TLP's to enjoy fun old content and nostalgia, let them see more content and more items.

Edit to add:
Bro, combine some of these expansions, there is no reason for 5 months of PoP.

Everyone notice they're doing only 1 server? It's because they know how bad Vaniki failed, and they don't want to embarrass themselves again. Yelinak was as basic as it gets, and it still left Vaniki in the dust. When are they going to learn that no one wants to play on these trash ruleset servers, and TLPs are not the place to test "crappy ideas". In reality this seems more like a "test" fix to try and stop AOE pling, but they don't realize the can of worms with griefing this is going to open up. Its absolutely mind blowing that a bunch of developers collectively agreed on this ruleset, and stand behind it. Yet, are to scared to create another server with similar rulesets to TLPs that topped the player per day charts. They know this would be another Vaniki flop.