Oakwynd Feedback

Poll on the official EQ discord asks the simple question, do you like or dislike the new server rules?

5 thumbs up, 87 thumbs down. Small sample size. But again, it's a sample. The large majority of players have no interest in this. Those in favor, let's face it, are simple minded folks who aren't so good at extrapolating likely results based on available information. They're in the "cmon guys, give em a chance! Let's see what they can do!" mindset.

No one thinks this is a hit. Most people know it's doomed to failure. And again, my fervent opposition is not related to my hopes and dreams for the new TLP. If they wanna throw yet another round of TLPS in the gutter with a substandard ruleset, whatever. But that is NOT what DBG has intended. By their own words, they want to spread this ruleset to live servers and future TLPs. Sorry, that won't fly with me. If all I can do is post angry posts on the forums as a means of communicating my displeasure as a consumer, then that is what I will do.

Pretty much this, I don't really care what happens on oakwynd, people should be used to TLPs flopping every once in a while. My issue is I don't want it to spread to every other server.

And that is why others and myself are reminding people that we need to wait for more details before any judgement can be made.

Since 98% of the complaints are about the FTE mechanic and the way it facilitates KSing, it's pretty easy to deduce that it'll work exactly as the devs described in the announcement. There's not a lot of room for nuance. As they stated, it will make it so that when a mob is engaged, only the player who engaged it and their group/raid can touch it. It's a very basic concept without any real room for interpretation. What details are people supposed to wait for? Any further details might account for the tiny minority who care about how this might affect things like pulling in raids or whatever. Most are concerned with how this changes the entire dynamic of the game with regards to how the community handles camps and named mobs, and in that regard, it's self-evident that the FTE mechanic that the devs described in the announcement will work precisely the way everyone assumes. There just isn't room in such a simple mechanic for anything that would change the general reception. Short of simply scrapping the feature, it will pan out exactly the way we all think it will because it has already been spelled out what it'll do.

As of the latest expansion, nope, horde and alliance can tag each other's mobs.

WTF are you talking about? There is literally no encounter locking in FFXIV at all. You can have 100 people in a hunt train and every single person can get credit if their party does enough enmity (hate) to the target

The problem is that we don't know if what is being brought up in those complaints is accurate or not as we don't know any of the details about how encounter locking will work. All we have are people making guesses based on how they think it will work.

When I was last playing that is not how I remember it not to mention last time I played everyone got loot/credit for the kill unlike Everquest and just the person/group/raid that did the most damage.

If Everquest had a system like that with everyone who damaged the mob getting xp, loot, kill credit, and other benefits from killing the mob it would impact the need for this system in the first place.

I phrased that poorly, or Misunderstood how I leveled my blue mage to max, by tagging mobs and letting a 90 friend insta-kill them, it's entirely possible that they would have gotten rewards if there had been any to get.

What I do mean though, is that FFXIV is a significantly better and far more drama free way to counter whatever kill stealing the people advocating for encounter locking think is happening.

Mischief and free trade/random created the best EQ experience I have ever had (beyond the first year or two of playing, but that wasnt because the game was so great but it was all new to me.)

Sure, everything in the randomness wasnt balanced, Mujaki the Devourer anyone? This would be easy to fix for Mischief 2.0

And yes, having more gear = easier content, but that means a lot more players got to experience and beat raids in era, and not just the hardcore few, which is a good thing.

- Being able to get good stuff from rares that otherwise dropped less desirable items
- Not having good stuff rot due to no drop and not being able to use it. Oh, that rogue belt dropped but your guild only have one active rogue? Easy money to the guild bank to be used for the good of the guild!
- Easier epic quest, being able to buy that necro cloak from sky that never dropped for my guild (or I didnt win) was awesome! I still didn't get it "in era", but got it before Luclin at least!
- Good moneymaking to keep my spells purchased and gear updated (and later on not needing to pay real money to play the game due to the awesomeness that is kronos!)
- Actually getting decent gear before the next expansion rolls on, and not having to pester guildies to go back to doing older content to get that one rare item you still want.
- Single grouping older raid content for tribute/twink items/clickies and other sellables is great fun!
- Easy twinking of new players I ran into later in the game, or gearing up people that main change due to lack of key classes is great!
- High population and a thriving economy lead to the bazaar being a place with good opportunities for tradeskillers, buyers and sellers, twinkers, new players or anyone looking to get deals.

Can't find the poll you mentioned, so based on the tone of your other posts I have to assume it doesn't exist until you can point to it directly.
Meanwhile on the main EQ reddit there's a much larger sample size:
79 9.9% I love the idea and I can't wait!
161 20.1% I will give it a shot to see how it turns out.
210 26.2% I am on the fence, I might give it a shot if I get bored.
159 19.9% No way, I think they made a grave mistake!
192 24.0% If it is not a Mischief clone I will likely never try another TLP.

Keep in mind 24% of these voters will dislike any TLP that is not Mischief.
Also, on YouTube comments, the balance is neutral to FTE.

What details is it you imagine they've withheld that will somehow change the general view? This isn't some deep, complex feature with lots of room for things to work differently from what people have already extrapolated.

I feel like you're clinging blindly to this irrational notion that any further details can somehow make the KSing concern go away. Unless the devs literally turn this feature into something else entirely, that's not happening. They've already said what it'll do:

Once an NPC is engaged, it will be locked to that character, group, or raid. Characters not part of the lock cannot contribute damage. Spells from outside characters will not land on the NPC.

What possible details could they have withheld that would make everyone go "oooh, now I see! That's not what I had imagined at all"? Like... it's as if someone had said they're cooking gym socks for dinner tonight and their dining guests complain, and then the cook goes "well, wait for the details before you scoff! How can you possibly have anything against eating gym socks when you haven't heard which spices I intend to use?"

It's possible that the devs have something in mind for fringe concerns like abusing this to effortlessly pull trash mobs away from bosses in raids or whatever, but what most are concerned about is the fact that this feature will allow anyone to waltz into a camp and just steal mobs from the group there. It's hard to see what "further details" they could have that would somehow alleviate that issue, because the information they've already given us makes that a thing that's guaranteed to become a thing. It isn't possible for there to be any details that change this unless they straight-up turn the mechanic into something different from what they had in mind when they announced it.

In short, there is no rational basis for the assumption that "waiting for details" will somehow make Oakwynd seem like anything other than a dumpster fire waiting to happen. The devs haven't exactly been ambiguous about FTE. They've told us exactly how it works, and there isn't really any way for this mechanic to exist at all without doing precisely the thing that almost everyone is complaining about: making it really easy to KS, and making it so the one being KSed can do nothing about it. Because that's literally baked into the very purpose of the feature. It's by design. What details is it you pretend they could have that'll change this?

What details are missing? Pretty much all of them as they only gave a couple sentences to describe what the new FTE rules are. We don't have any confirmation on what exactly it means to engage an NPC. Is it any agro such as getting in agro range? Is it and detrimental spell that causes agro? Is it any damage? Is it a set amount or percentage amount of damage? With that alone it seems there are questions that still need to be answered. It seems that people are rushing to make judgements of that statement based on the worst possible outcome.

I'm assuming that what they have in mind, is enforcing rules like they did with people cheesing pickzone timers. Vague threats that basically tell everyone how to do the bad thing that you're not allowed to do.

Responding to TLP fodder. God help me.

Okay so if you throw out all the irrelevant, 'meh I dunno' responses and the ppl who are rock hard for free trade, you get a 2 to 1 ratio of people who are against it and people who are in favor.

67% don't want it. Pretty solid majority. And mind you, this is redditors. Progressive zombies.

also: https://discord.com/channels/618902729925984279/1082753049229004891/1093344095549804695

there you go buddy, go throw an upvote.

Engage = Aggro PERIOD. Anything that causes aggro RIGHT NOW IN-GAME, will, under FTE immediately lock to solo/group/raid.

There is no plausible other option. Anything else, would be completely out of the spirit of the initial statment, for anyone with reading comprehension.

As I said before, if it's based on damage then that completely nullifies the pro no train crowd and essentially moves the 51% dmg threshold to a smaller % while adding a bunch of other random nonsense along with it for... reasons? Those ideas make even less sense then their genric description.

Anyone who isn't sweating profusely from mental gymnastics, anyone who isn't desperate to leap to the developers' defense out of blind faith, anyone with any sense at all can deduce what "engaging a mob" means in this context: Aggroing it. It's the only thing that would make sense. If they were to put in all kinds of strange criteria like needing to do x% damage in order to lock it, the feature is even more idiotic than first assumed, and it would completely undermine what they intend for it to do.

Moreover, if the developers did have such a thing in mind, something that would magically disarm the concern that has now resulted in ninety pages of complaints, they wouldn't have just sat there silently withholding that information. So no, it's very much safe and sensible to extrapolate that it'll work precisely as we think: When you aggro a mob, anyone not in your group or raid is unable to touch it. You know, like they literally said. Given its use in the history of Everquest, and the fundamental way the game works, there's no rational basis for assuming that the word "engage" can mean anything else.

This is the bizarre part to me: why make it so other people can't damage the mob if someone else pulls it? Why would anyone care if someone else killed their mob for them if they still get the loot? If one of those asterisk spawned mobs is killed by someone else, the person who owns it can still loot it. Even when WoW did have first to engage (or on classic where it still does) you can't troll the whole server by tagging a quest mob and using an autoclicker to keep it perpetually polymorphed because other people will just kill it. The devs (should) know that people do scumbag stuff like charming placeholders and holding them hostage across the zone so why make a system that allows for even more scumbag behavior?

Pretty full of yourself. Which RMT activity will you be losing income from with FTE?

You forgot to subtract the people who will vote against every TLP that is not Mischief-which has nothing to do with FTE. Unless you think every tlp should be a Mischief clone then subtracting those would probably be a good step, eh? Then you gave the "I'm on the fence" votes, 26%, many of which probably aren't going to be playing any tlp regardless, to the against FTE "majority". Your analysis of the poll is complete nonsense. Reality is the opposite of your "alternative" interpretation.

The only real question is, what will the NPC going home entail? Will it path back at a walk or will it gate? And really that will make little or no difference except to someone who has a mob locked and thus has an opportunity to re-engage before it goes home or not.