PROS of Free Trade Loot and the 1 CON

Random Loot / Free Trade should never be the Standard Ruleset or Baseline for TLP servers, if they are they should be limited to group loot and stop there.

That should remain a special-ruleset because the devs will not allow Free Trade Items to land on Live servers, they have to be kept separate which means if you had Free trade on too many servers too frequently you would end up risking over-populating Firiona Vie which already has a very healthy population.

You should attempt to look at the broader picture here instead of focusing only upon your personal motivations & wants/desires to see what is better for the game as a whole, maybe then you'll understand the objections.

Just because most players who start on a Free-Trade TLP server will not make it to live & will recycle (even faster if they have the option to) does not mean that you can plan a release cycle that ignores those players who will make it to live & need to be shipped off to the FV server.

I prefer Mischief style loot 100%, but I don't think it makes people more charitable. In my experience, it made people more greedy. Before Mischief launched, I was playing on the latest TLP that had come out, and had so many raiding guilds trying to recruit me, simply because I was a Rogue and they needed a Rogue so that Rogue loot would stop rotting on the ground.

On Mischief I was also a Rogue, and people didn't want to invite Rogues to raiding guilds a lot of times because the class deals subpar damage, and they could simply loot the Rogue loot that would normally rot on a traditional server, and turn around and sell it for several kronos. That was one very distinct difference I noticed.

That's just one example. I can't remember the specific example, but a quest item dropped and someone in our group needed it. Suddenly two other people wanted to /roll on the item despite not being the appropriate class. Normally on a traditional server, that would have been ludicrous, but when that same item can suddenly be traded, people became very greedy over stuff like that.

There is a group of people who are hoping that the popularity of Mischief/Thornblade will be high enough when it reaches live that it won't merge into Firiona Vie and it will stay a random loot server and we gain a new live ruleset.

To think there's only 1 con to FT really takes herculean level of ego.

Also, randomized loot would be pointless on Live, at least from a raid perspective, considering there is only one tier of regular loot and every raid drops the TS ores. The problem it would create on live is Mischief would gain access to items 1-2 months prior to any server because t2 and t3 raids have their own drop tables.

I'm sure there are, but I am pretty confident they are very mistaken if they do.

Darkpaw wants to stay at its current server cap due to costs.
Unless by some twist of fate or game improvement (like a new graphics engine &/or character model overhaul) their live & TLP numbers are shot upwards enough to justify the costs of moving up to the next bracket with their server partner. Certainly the population of a single TLP will be nowhere near enough to justify increasing their overall server cap & the costs involved in doing so. So even if they hold onto more players than any prior TLP I am 100% sure they will all get shipped off to FV once it reaches Live.

You are right it does seem that they want to stay at their current server cap but that doesn't mean it will be possible to merge Mischief/Thornblade into FV if the population on them will cause issues for the combined severs. Don't forget there is always other low population live servers that can be merged into other servers to deal with any possible server cap.

As it stands now with two of the three servers maintaining a high population I think they would have trouble merging them all into one.

Mischief rules are a krono pinata for RMTers.

No more, no less.

We don't need another server like that thank you. We have FV and Mischief.

I don't like free trade at all. I'm fine with random loot, although I think mobs should still drop the same number of items as they originally did, not a whole bunch of extra. The Mischief loot pinatas were silly.

Free trade just goes against the spirit of the game in my book. It completely erases the prestige of having good gear, and it creates a new level of greed because everything is worth money. I don't get this notion that free trade makes people more generous, my experience was the stark opposite where letting newer members have free/cheap upgrades that nobody else needed was just not a thing at all because those items suddenly represented a considerable amount of cash.

All three of the guilds I was in had issues with people placing minimum DKP bids on everything in the hopes of winning an item here and there, and then sneakily selling the loot afterwards. Even if a guild has rules against this, it's pretty much impossible to police unless you literally keep a record of everyone's gear and inspect them daily to make sure they're using the loot they've been awarded. People were mainchanging left and right, cashing out all their gear and buying a new set of raid loot for their next class. It felt like a joke. The game became this watered-down parody of itself.

But most of all, it just made it way less special to get great gear knowing that a bunch of others had just bought the same thing. I'm sure the company made lots of money off of people joining the server and buying a bunch of kronos in order to purchase raid gear for their characters, but it completely undermined the satisfaction of obtaining it.

I'll never understand why everyone loves free trade. To me, it turns Everquest into something I don't want to play at all. It cheapens the entire progression element. The satisfaction of putting together a well-geared character is just not there when a bunch of other people get the exact same thing by swinging their credit cards. To me, it's the exact same reason nobody likes games with pay2win cash shop options. Those are universally reviled in the gaming community, but for some bizarre reason, everyone here just loves it and wants it to be the new way Everquest is played. Absolutely incomprehensible to me.

Maybe if the server didn't have buyable kronos so that people at least had to play the game in order to get their wealth... but Mischief (and any hypothetical future copy servers) is the textbook definition of unadulterated pay2win gaming. Literally buying BIS gear with real cash and then somehow not seeing how it utterly eliminates any integrity the game has. Somehow, this unabashed case of pure pay2win gaming was not subjected to the same scorn and aversion that such a thing normally is.

When Mischief launched, I rolled up a character to check it out. By the time I was level 42 or something, I had bought a full set of my class planar armor and two raid weapons just with money I had made while leveling. It was ridiculous. I didn't even bother leveling to 50 because it felt like there was no point raiding when I already had essentially BIS gear just handed to me in EC for a few hundred plat per piece. Then I came back during Velious to try it again because the server was weirdly popular, and raiding felt like some ezserver eqemu thing where nobody took it seriously and there was no challenge because mobs dropped so much loot, and people had bought a bunch of their BIS stuff in EC, that everyone was just going through the motions. Like those story mode difficulty settings some games have for players who just want to experience the storyline without having to overcome the challenges of the gameplay. How this became such a smash hit in EQ I will never know.

To me, the existence of kronos on TLPs is only tolerable because you can't buy most of the best stuff. I mean, you can purchase loot rights, but that's kind of limited, there aren't that many crews doing that so the supply isn't actually that great. But Mischief's combination of kronos, inflated number of drops and free trade made for a version of Everquest that isn't worth playing at all in my book. In fact, seeing everyone praise it and flock to the server made me realize that the TLP community consists largely of softcores who will take the path of least resistance anytime it's available, and that's baffling to me in a game whose main defining characteristic is the satisfaction of overcoming the toughness, scarcity and lack of handholding that Everquest represents.

If DPG launched a server that had a button in character creation that said 'start as max level with full BIS gear,' a bunch of you would choose that and then sit there going "yay, my character is badass! This is awesome!" Kind of pathetic, to be honest. Mischief was literally one step short of just straight-up selling raid loot in the in-game DBG store, and seeing how many people loved it wholeheartedly made me lose all respect for the TLP community.

Show me the guild that is denying a warm body and Ill show you a guild who is destined for a merger at best, or quick death at worst.

That also sounds like an absolute horrible hustle with selling rogue items considering they usually have no value to begin with or lose it at a much quicker rate.

Sounds like you created these wild theories in your head.

This is a really long post

very long and very skewed. when he says you can purchase loot rights but it is limited is such a false statement. every single item can be bought via loot rights on a No-Trade server hence why the big Krono Lords (he/she is probably one of them) are always against Free-Trade. They want to have monopolies on every camp that is useful and then sell Loot rights because they know they have far less competition compared to free-trade and stuff being sold in the bazaar.

He has no choice but to deny it's prevalent on non free trade, otherwise it ruins a majority of his rant.

Agree completely. The free-trade people think they're in the majority so the forums have become kind of a support group for them to throw tantrums when they don't get their way. Free trade is about as fun as an auto clicker mobile game. Minimal effort for max power entitlement ruleset. It's good for RMTers so there will always be a large marketing campaign promoting it for their income, even though that subset of free-traders doesn't play EQ for entertainment at all.

I'll be honest I, I could live with or without free trade. I really loved the random loot aspect. I never got jboots in classic before, because the cyclops are constantly camped by krono farmers. Watching the ring drop in a unrest group and winning the roll, was awesome.

And yes if you wanna lower the amount of loot a mob drops to whatever they normally would drop, but random. I'm all for it.

Agreed. Random was great and quite fun and would always be I think. Free-trade just makes everything pay-to-win or raid to sell. Best scenario is no free-trade, 1 classic loot item and 1 random loot item from the mischief tables. Best possible scenario in my opinion.

Randomized loot is just too immersion breaking for me. AOC instances and Picks to avoid camp monopolization while artificial are more immersive once you are in the instance because the small group of heros vs. the world experience is enhanced.

I never understood why people can "live without the free trade" who cares what people do with the item who really cares, Free trade takes away monopolies, less RMT PoS Krono farmers selling loot rights for absurd prices because they are the only ones camping it on 24/7 farm. I actually enjoy FV and Mischief I can leave come back at anytime throughout expansions and quickly catch up to raiding primarily due to "FREE TRADE". So many of you people are just Bitter about people having more options on getting items/gear rather than having to become a no-lifer and raid all the time for them.

The is a significant subset of the population who doesn't care what other people do with their time. It doesn't impact their enjoyment of the game in the slightest. I do not care if someone else bought their items. I don't care how they got their items. I can still raid for and obtain mine for free. I still feel a sense of accomplishment purchasing items with DKP. What others do does not impact how I feel about the gameplay. Is that really a difficult concept to understand?

As for the loot pinata. Mobs drop 2-4 times the loot they normally would. But we are only in these expansions 1/6-1/4 the amount of time they were originally live for. The numbers just mean we are going into the next expansion with roughly the same amount of loot the original players had.

This game has always been easy mode. There hasn't been any real challenge on any TLP I have played, with any ruleset. It's always just been show up, kill mobs, get loot. No one actually wipes to mobs unless they get super lazy. Plenty of folks are here for the social gameplay. Plenty of folks are here trying to ride this server to live learning their class as they go rather than having 20 million buttons dumped on them at once. People play for a variety of reasons, just because they aren't playing for the same reasons you do doesn't mean they are less than. More flexibility, more options for how to obtain loot, more forgiveness for taking breaks and coming back, it's all part of what makes the server fun for the folks on Mischief.

I honestly can't understand for the life of me why anyone would care how someone else got their gear. It completely boggles my mind that it would matter in the slightest. How you experience the game is what should matter to you. I love the fact that coming back after a break and catching up is so easy, I love the fact that loot is plentiful and you might actually have a chance of fleshing out your character each expansion, I love that if that one item I really really wanted never dropped for us I can still obtain it.

I love that if my guild mates are bored of their current mains they can swap and sell all their old gear, use that plat to buy more and still be a productive member of the raid. Because I understand that on a traditional server those folks would have just stopped playing and never returned, now they stick around after they get bored of the class they were playing. All the effort the guild took to gear that person isn't now wasted because they main swapped, because that gear transitioned to the new character. One way or another.

Just because someone enjoys the game differently than you does not mean they are no longer worthy of respect.

This is probably the most on point response, I've seen all week on these forums. Well said, Well said.

I've come to believe the people against Free Trade, are more than likely scared Krono prices will inflate too quickly leaving it much harder for them to stock up on those Krono.