EverQuest Producer’s Letter April 2023

The only "we" there and people going back to sitting on raid spawns is the one big mega zerg guild still going out of their way to kill OW targets on every TLP nowadays after DPS racing essentially made it impossible for anybody wanting to directly compete with them.

FTE with no train agro actually 100% solves the "issue" for EVERYBODY else. Who prior to this server might only ever go after the occasional OW target if they happened to see it up with no signs of the zerg army around. and typically while enough people happened to be logged on during one of their raid nights. Or of course in the event the target was lower priority enough that the threat of having the batphoned in Swarm Army or a train from the FD tracker dropped on your already engaged encounter wasn't the same damning consideration for the raid leader making the call.

So yeah, RIP making a few early shows of massive zerg force to discourage people going after targets, and then falling back on that always present threat to do all the heavy lifting as people enjoy a much less pressured batphone environment. "Competing" is now probably going that require that *one* single guild's members to actually have to wake a whole lot more to those around the clock batphones if they want to keep certain targets on lock. Euro guild going for a target you want at 4am? Time to wake up and go every single time it happens. A lot more guilds and instances of them going after open world targets they find up on their raid nights since they know there is now nothing you can now do to stop them once they establish engagement? Time to make the adjustment to be more ready to mobilize 24/7 on a moments notice. A whole lot more tracking, invested effort, and total required playtime commitment going in to all that for less total loot? Tough cookies.

Nobody outside that *one* guild is going to end up crying any tears over that. Since nothing really changes for anybody else there except the likelihood that they actually get to keep what they catch up. Don't like that new reality above don't join the guild doing it. Really that simple.

Sigh, you said beastlords and berserkers wouldn't be OP on TLP if allowed in classic, and you pointed to TLP monks. I pointed out that the TLP monks' bare fist ratio is not balanced at launch, and that they nerfed the hell out of monks both on TLP and Live servers to get them down to where they are on TLP; and that the reason they could not get them any further without because of how extreme they would have to go which would have huge impact on Live server Monks. My entire point was that your comparison was faulty. So nothing you ever stated made what I said wrong. However, everything that I said discredited your position.

More to the point, a beastlord pet is doing dps at Luclin levels, not classic levels, from 1-50. A berserker is doing dps at GoD levels, not classic levels, from 1-50. Maybe you want the Devs to nerf beastlords and berserkers on live so that they do classic level dps from 1-50.

As noted in my post above, FTE is probably the worst case scenario change for both the zerg guild playstyle, and as well for the most prominent big box farm crews who were among the very first to jump into to that thread screaming foul as soon as the announcement was made. That's a decent chunk of people, and a whole lot of of additional posting accounts at each one's potential disposal to echo that displeasure with, that were coming out of this as the biggest losers of the bunch. For arguably the first time since TLP have started. So for sure, with the other valid outside pros and cons concerns people have with FTE there was definitely going to be a vocal amount of grumbling regardless.

That said, reading through that thread start to finish in one sitting certainly gives as sense that a fair amount of those total posts are just the same 10 or so people going back and forth non-stop with anybody speaking up in favor of giving that server a try. Making any desire to paint that off as some "look, it's 10X+ more people complaining about a TLP ruleset then ever before!" a very misleading data point to try and highlight.

One person making a ton of posts is still just one person's voiced opinion.

What are you even talking about? Nothing that I said had anything to do with buffs. Further not everything is made equally. You can easily pull a single mob at times that ends up being more than a group can handle even with "good buffs" and knowledge of their class. There are just times when an extra heal from outside the group keeps the group alive, and it can be no one's fault that the heal was needed.

So I just read through it from start to finish and tried to have every user I could who had more than 20 posts in the two theads [Official Announcement and the merged Oakwynd Feedback]. I may have missed some for sure, but this is what I found:

Positive posting (Pro FTE)

1 - Warring_McMarrin - 118 posts + over 50 more in FTE Plvl or Encounter Locking threads.
2 - Aiona - 75 posts
3 - Zrender - 69 posts + over 20 more in FTE Plvl or Encounter Locking threads.
4 - Lejuan - 33 posts
5 - code-zero - 29 + over 20 more in FTE Plvl or Encounter Locking threads.
6 - Mageneress - 29 + over 10 more in FTE Plvl or Encounter Locking threads.
7 - Rajicki - 22 posts + over 10 more in FTE Plvl or Encounter Locking threads.
8 - Komodon - 20 posts (to give information on who I am replying to)

Negative (Anti-FTE)

1 - Nessirfiti - 65 posts
2 - Kunfo - 65 posts
3- Trident - 46 posts
4 - Larsen - 34 posts
5 - Myself (to give information about myself) - 14 posts

There were about the similar number of posters pro and negative that I could not look up as their profiles were private (about 3 each side) for example: Gunstar, Demilich, Coltongrundy, Twizzle, etc. All of these users were highly active in these threads.

Shout out to these individuals who have been the most "neutral" of all the replies I've read and stayed fairly close to the "let's wait to hear more because we lack details"

1- Corwyhn Lionheart - 20 posts
2 - Khafu - 18 posts
3 - Sakuraba - 15 posts
4 - Baulkin - 15 posts

If we take these high activity individuals and see how much they have contributed to the two threads listed above we see a 13% chance (395/2939) any one post is from of the 8 Pro-FTE crowd and a 7% chance (224/2939) that is comes from one of the high activity Anti-FTE crowd. This difference could be explained by the Pro-FTE crowd having a much larger number of posts to reply to to defend their side and also the Anti-FTE crowd not needing to respond because someone else already has on their behalf amongst other things.

Regardless, even if you remove these super high activity individuals there are still over 2300 (2939-619) other posts across these threads from individuals on both sides. Though it does look like from my reading it leans heavily against FTE. Even if we assume that forum posters are more heavily against FTE than the regular players the data across Reddit (about 50/50), Discord (even more negative than here), and this information we can assume that it isn't a super popular idea at all.

It would be silly to simply hand wave away the large amount of feedback recieved on this ruleset, even if it may be quite vocal and honestly quite filled with vitriol. It is now officially the most posted thread in the forums history and it has been only 10 days.

Both sides are awaiting word from DBG with hopes to clarify the mountains of questions we all have.

This computation does not account for those of use who did not post due to apathy, or we hit the IDGAS button, or others who just like watching the rest of the posters go down the rabbit hole.

So there is a third side, and we are not waiting for anything. We just play the game and try to stay in our own lane.

This is true. Watching a trainwreck from the sidelines when it doesnt effect you is always the best seats in the house.

And apathy or lack of response to feedback requests or surveys is always something to consider and since we cannot get perfect information on response rate we gotta work with what we have.

I don't think these numbers mean much in general (who is posting more on each side yada-yada) I just thought I'd be interesting to see how true the "same individuals" posting would hold up. I'm surprised you didnt dip your toes in here with your nearing 10k posts, Warring_Mcarrin the other whale poster could not resist.

I for one applaud and appreciate that investigative effort there.

Seems to be missing 2 fairly prominent names from my own quick 30+ negative poster tally though, and which for the record was reported and then latter deleted (which I'm assuming this will be as well).

There was actually a fair amount of deleting there last night so maybe a lot of those posts got wiped out though. Or maybe they were among thse that went private after I pointed that out lol

You sort of have me wrong, I am strongly opposed to FTE coming to any other servers and generally agnostic about it on Oakwynd. There's just a lot of bad takes and misinformation about what's a pretty straightforward ruleset

Fair enough. It isn't exactly a black and white issue and there is a lot of grey area - even if many people don't feel that way.

I'd disagree about it being straightforward but to each their own. There are too many questions of function for me personally. At the end of the day, I think regardless of what people want they will force it on Oakwynd and hopefully the feedback (you and others) have provided confine it there in perpetuity.

Not playing this new TLP unless its like mischief

The specific thing that concerns me is that in the course of Barding I have to drop a mezz on a particular mob, let's say Dirge of the Sleepwalker. So it parked, the memblur kicks in but no problem. Then mezz breaks and it starts trudging back home and I can't hit it again. That would suck a lot, I mean it'd really suck. Now if I can somehow remain on its list so it doesn't go off and force me to sing and dance for its attention again that's one thing but having roamers wander off and be untouchable sucks.

All the stupid garbage about "holding PH hostage blahblahblah" is ridiculous. Changes to mob behavior that makes crowd control on the occasions it's necessary is serious

I have not posted more than once or twice on this thread I believe, but I also do not like the lack of response to any of our concerns. As much concern as the playerbase has shown in this, it just saddens me to know how little they really care to keep us in the loop. Even speaking in this forum gets you roasted sometimes just for putting forth a valid opinion. The whole thing is just sad. Everyone is entitled to opinions and feedback should be welcome. I just wish they would give some type of assurances or updates.

The problem is they don't even really know how FTE works which is why they aren't giving us a new ruleset or faq yet. They see that there are 2 camps, pro FTE crowd which looks at it as new anti pl mechanic and anti FTE crowd who looks at it as the buggy/abuse/exploitable mess it really is but i'm going to assume they are trying to test it out more inhouse before releasing more information.

Both camps are right by the way, its great if we actually had a reliable way to combat powerleveling but on the other hand a lot of high end players can see how buggy and exploitable the system actually is which makes their viewpoint right too and the staff knows this which is why its taking a long time to update us on the current situation.

Look, even if I agreed to ignore your blathering about "Monks are OP yes but they shouldn't be used as the benchmark" line of argument, Berserkers & Beastlords aren't doing Rogue level DPS either.
I've played low level Rogues & Berserkers & Rogues beat them handily early on even with all the problems attributed to that class on TLP.

If you want to continue arguing Berserkers would be OP on TLP pre 65 then go back it up with some parses or quit bellyaching - because your argument is based on nothing but pure bias until you can do that.

So this “interesting “ discussion is mainly fed by a a couple of handful of dudes?

It is also concern over how much FTE it is going to break.

I highly doubt this hasn't had been tested throughly on their beta server. If it was discussed with the CRC, I think they are out of touch with much of the game that isn't high end.

I think you should review what you are considering pro FTE as all I have been saying is to wait for more information to come out before making a decision on it.

You forgot the third camp: Live players that do not want this garbage on their servers and COULD NOT CARE LESS about what happens on the gimmick servers.

Seriously...the TLP servers could burst into flames tomorrow and I wouldn't blink an eye. I just don't want FTE on Live because whatever imagined problems they think it will solve on TLP just don't exist on Live, so there's no reason to have it.

I will happily vote in favour of anti-PL methods once a genuine catch-up method is available - such as side-kicking.
Until then anti-PL measures are 100% against fresh blood on all servers & that's just Darkpaw shooting itself in the foot, just because a handful abuse them you shouldn't screw over everyone else who genuinely needs them due to the massive level-difference between when moloing becomes an uphill slog and current level cap.