Oakwynd Feedback

Raid mobs and being able to access them is a core mechanic of the game and it impacts players ability to fully experience the game. Not having access to raid mobs and having your game experience limited is a major change to the game. Up until all raid content became instanced it wasn't uncommon for players to be locked out of raid content due to it being monopolized by a small group of players and adding in AOC's was a major change.

Please note I am not suggesting that MotM is a core change.

Write a haiku about encounter locking.
ChatGPT
Players rush to lock, Exclusive access they seek, Others left in wait.

You seem to keep missing the point - and I am starting to think that it is on purpose.
Yes, AOCs was a major change regarding making certain content accesible to everyone, but it just wasn't a change to core mechanics - since it didn't change anything about how the actual content encounters worked. The AOC content is identical to the OW content in terms of how the encounter(s) work and what is required to defeat them (not counting racing against other groups of players for the content, but that is a social aspect and not a core mechanics one).

Pro Tip: Going around in infinitely repeating circular arguments is Waring's entire raison d'etre, make of that what you will.

waring is the only person I've had to put on ignore

for anyone that doesn't know: just click on a person's forum name on the left and save yourself a lot of facepalming

Raids are a core mechanic to the game and have been since they introduced raid mobs to the game. Changing it so that everyone has access instead of just the people who can get to the open world raids when they spawn is a major change to the core mechanics of the game.

It doesn't matter if the content is the same (it wasn't the case for all of the AOC instances as the AOC Naggy/Vox didn't banish players over level 52) because the important change is making them available to everyone regardless of being able to get the open world spawn.

Not to mention the fact that in the later non instanced raiding content you would have guilds blocking the rest of the server out of all raids by preventing them from getting keyed up to be able to access the later raids.

When referring to loot distribution, I assume you mean Mischief's randomized loot? Yes, it's not a mechanic change, but you simply cannot deny it's a massive change to one EQ's primary design paradigms or game loops. EQ basic gameloop: Progress through content of ascending tiers to acquire better gear corresponding to that tier. Being able to acquire the highest tier loot from the lowest tier of content flips 20+ years of EQ progression and loot design on its head.

There have been numerous core mechanic changes over the years. The latest well-known example is DoT revamp and functionality change. DoTs of the same line simply no longer stack with each other. That's a code change and therefore a mechanic change. It also fundamentally changed the gameplay of an entire class and good portions of other classes. Aided with the increased debuff slots on mobs, and you drastically changed the "meta" and "balance" of the end game where now most casters way more valuable than melee on live. Classes like druids and shams are some of the best dps classes in the game and neither are classically known as a dps class. Druid have been the more dps-centric priest class, but many still don't consider it a dps class and they are still definitely the primary healer in caster groups. Necros are so ridiculously OP that even the worst played necros on raids can still out dps basically any other class being played at an elite level.

Played on Test, wtf....I was hoping to play in 2 weeks...this is unplayable with the FTE crap. How you gonna roll something out so broken it's gonna gut your player base?
JFC please open a 2nd server with Mischief rules so we can at least have a home in EQ.

SO much this... and change this whole "you should play alts on a single account" business into something more impactful or much more lucrative.

The ability to form groups and raids are core mechanics, but someone racing you for content is not - that is just a competitive social aspect of the game (that DPG seeks to permananetly deny players everywhere with the FTE core mechanics change).

Instances of OW zones (whether they come from picks or AOCs) are merely an expansion to existing content and not core mechanics - since the content that they expand on already existed before those were added to the game.

AOCs and pickzones are invaluable QOL mechanics for sure, but just not core mechanics.
Only the ability to form groups/raids and how you interact with the content as well as what is required to defeat the content counts as core mechanics.

Ok, so here I see you agreeing (whether you intended to or not) that what AOCs do is in fact merely expand on existing content.

All the things that you seem to think are core mechanics just aren't - they belong in either the content or social aspect categories.

The ability to form groups to attempt raid content is meaningless if the targets are killed before you even have a chance at them due to time zones or other issues

I am not talking about pick zones rather instanced raid content that players spawn on demand rather then waiting for a mob to spawn and hoping that they get a shot at it.

As I have said multiple times before the ability to form groups to fight raid content is meaningless if the raid targets are not available. The core mechanic change is making raid targets available to everyone instead of just a select few.

No I am stating that it is changing a core mechanic of limiting the availability of raid targets by removing the limitation of them being longer respawn open world targets.

Raid targets used to be limited by longer open world respawns in addition to needing to be unlocked by completing other raid targets in cases. That entire mechanic got thrown away with the introduction of AOC's

Raiding is not something that affects everyone as much of the player base never raids. Combat is something that will affect everyone.

But that is just it, the code for doing instancing was already in game, already setup in a manner that allowed for zone instancing (which is also what a pick is). Whether or not you believe AoCs are a "core mechanic" (I do not think they are, though they did have a huge positive impact) is almost irrelevant since the major portions of the instancing code already existed (since PoP). In other words, they needed to do very little tweaking, more along the lines of adding a quest, to enable AoCs.

Whereas aggro, hate, etc is a major core component of the game itself, one tied to nearly every non crafting action in the game, mucking around with that code; code that is arguably some of the very original (oldest) and thus least likely understood code in all of EQ is exactly what we are concerned about. That coupled with the obvious lack of any real testing by the devs before pushing it to test make me extremely skeptical the game will be playable at all at Oakwynds launch (it is not on test right now).

Actually, it was a data change, not a mechanic or code change AT ALL, simply a database schema change that was performed (as evidenced in many threads) usually right before the next expansion was released on mischief. They actually relied on BobbyBicks spreadsheets sadly for much of the tiers early on and often had to adjust some things because they were uncertain what encounters should be in what tiers in many cases. Group loot was much easier in 99% of the cases it was the 5 level spread but raid loot was often adjusted afterwards, GMs had to disable some events due to uneducated guesses of what loot should be on what encounters by DBG and would adjust those tables afterwards.

Yes it was a database modification, but thats the technical change. Conceptually, it changed one of EQs fundamental gameloops. This isnt really arguable otherwise. I'm not sure the point of your reply other than being obvious of what technical features were changed. I literally said it wasnt a mechanic change...did you decide to not read that? The part of my post your quote quite literally has it as the second sentence.

What the mess on Test proved is that no part of aggro mechanics can be touched without it touching every other aggro mechanic.

It's way worse than I theorized and I actually doubt that there'd be any really usable exploits that comes from any 'fix' they attempt. It's not going to work in 2 weeks and probably won't in 20 years. It's not worth the effort to save the concept.

Bottom line, first loss is the best loss. Forget about FTE and try something different for trains

Here, I'll make it easy for you

The point was, it was NOT a massive change, database updates like that are typically not even done as a release, no question about the impacts (huge impact on loot dispersion), but the whole point here that folks with no developer experience don't seem to grasp is.. minimal to no change vs significant change to code. Tangential code updates vs code modifications to fundamental game functions. Understand that and then do your risk assessment on whether or not FTE will be ready in 2 weeks, considering its current state on the test server.

Or maybe I should put it another way, separate the impact to the end user from the level of effort to implement a feature.