30th expansion raids NEED to be harder

I would love to have 72 person raids again; but raids already do more DPS when only 48 people show up instead of 54 because of cross-communication lag.

Some of my fondest eq memories were beating something that was hard. To get that win with 45+ other people working hard and finally overcoming was awesome. That was when things were in Era and out. Even going back and doing that hard achievement. It was well worth the struggle for the excitement of finally winning.
So some of that in the game I would welcome (no, doesnt have to be every event). EQ even opened the door for in Era wins 6 months in with the new banner. I believe it makes the wins that much better than just swapping pixels for another year.

Making raids that are so difficult that only the top 5 guilds can beat them seems stupid from a business perspective when trying to retain players.

That being said, NOS raids were way too easy and should've been harder. But not so hard that only the top 5 guilds can beat them. TOL was probably the right difficulty when it comes to raids. maybe a bit harder than that even

I came from another thread another topic, it was timewasters for end game players.

Raids, challenging content.
Not necessarily 50+ people.

GW2 they have 100+ people challenging fights

100+ people, this was actually challenging on opening day, and now people look back, they enjoyed that challenge. No one beat it day 1. This is not a raid, this is a meta event. 100+ people. So if you define raids by people, I guess this is a raid then.
Then they got raids 10+ even more challenging.

They properly defined raids, challenge.
Just some games have more than other players which is ok.

But main point of raids,
Challenging content.

The definition persay you could say it changed in regards to games. Back then raid could have been many many people content, but times changed.

Anyways,
these raiders sucking up 100% of every expansion for them, raids beaten in 1 day so they go do timewaster on group content.

Put the timewasters on raids, get it outta group content.
Beating these raids ASAP the entire tier.

If they had everything available, best believe everything available would be done in 1 or 2 days.
Don't kid with me why they make raiders wait certain timeframe for raids to open.

Make raids harder period. More challenging period.
Theres like 4 bosses in T3, all 4 beaten same day, opening day?
Thats not challenging.

You don't need a beta for T3 raids really, its T3. It's timewaster content.
Casuals don't want those raiding grouplike content timewasters, put those on the T3 raids.
Make it challenging, not dps checks. I'm talking challenging. Like they know what to do, its moving around and doing stuff, not sitting at some boss all day. Not sitting at some spot mezzing adds all day.
Do actual challenging stuff.
Make raids HARDER. Thats their timewaster.

You see that video, everyone is moving, doing something, being challenged, seeing these AEs gotta move, this gotta move, gotta move.

Now look at EQ, NoS T3
Notice, "opening day"

hardly any movement, hardly any challenge
"centis soon"
"adds"
enchanter standing by the adds spawn, simple mez, boom easy.
everyone else just standing dpsing, easy, theres nothing going on.
Too predictable, too easy, too much of a joke.

move move, do something, challenge people. Such a joke these past T3 raids are.
Part of the issue too is that theres no animations, so EQ is held back because of being outdated.
No animations, no voice, no visuals of sun rising and what not, no AE damage rings to indicate your standing a spot that is gonna hurt hard, instant death.

EQ is so outdated that is a factor. But you can still do more, these raids not challenging and lately it seems like EQ is doing more time waster content.
oakwynd, just level to max, do it again, do it again. Personas, level it max, do it again do again. time wasters. ugh. Thats your thing for casuals???? Ugh we are not looking for time wasters, thats a end game raider type thing they look for. Make the raids hard, that'll keep em busy.

I have a question, OP. If EQ were to miraculously and drastically change everything to be what you want it to be, would you play it, or would you keep complaining about how bad EQ is? I am betting on the latter, but hey, I could be wrong.

So basically you want exclusive content for maybe 0.1% of EQ subscribers?
Those guilds that can cherrypick the perfect raid makup of classes required in order to beat the raid and the other 99.9% of players are SOL?

That's what you're asking for?

I feel raids should be what we have seen for the last few years and keep Vanquisher as the hard part of the raids with finishing Vanquisher the reward that separates raiding guilds

I'm just going to drop my 2 cents on the ground here and limp away. Harder raids worked in the past because the audience was younger and the raiding population was larger. This had an interesting effect, many guilds ended up falling 1-2 expansions behind. Some of us still raid 1-2 expansions behind due to being old and lack of serious raiders. Some of us don't like beating our heads against things for days on end.

This is the correct mindset, imo.

The raids themselves don't need to be staggeringly difficult (though I'd lean more towards ToL difficulty than NoS). The specialized challenges in each event can be, though.

How to achieve that? Not entirely sure. My first thought is akin to an older EQ2 raid. It had 4 "runes" in the arena. For each one you destroyed, the event got harder in some way. Something along those lines could likely be done. We even had one fairly similar with ToL's Maiden's Eye raid (though in reverse; not destroying things made it harder). Just add some entirely optional thing that once done (killed, clicked, hailed, whatever), it adds new mechanics to the event.

The whole "EQ players are old" crap needs to go away. Most of the players are in their 40s and early 50s. With a small number of them over 60. We still know how to play video games ffs.

Your comment about the raiding population being larger is the bigger concern. Another thing is society has become a lot more instant gratification oriented. You take an entire tier away from a large portion of those guilds and you'll find those guilds falling apart as people quit. Take away a large number of guilds and there won't be much point in making raids. Despite some peoples idea that raiding is an insignificant part of the population, it's not... take away the raiding guilds from the game - and believe me, the vast majority of raiders will not stick around this game if the raids vanish... and this game will be in trouble.

I suspect you are right in your conclusion. But, neither you or I actually know the absolute truth of that. I do think it could be fairly stated that EQ players are (getting) older. Getting older can bring lots of changes. In my case, it means that I don't have time to raid. In the case of a friend of mine, she retired and now has more time to raid. I still play, but my play time is mostly later in the evening when the wee darlings (noisy, messy kids) are asleep.

I would argue that it didn't work in the past, and that's one the reasons why EQ lost so many players to WoW.

From what I remember the game and raiding population took a hit during the GoD expansion due to the difficulty of the expansion.

From what I remember in 1400s ships sunk trying to explore new lands.
Different times buddy

From what I remember recently, challenging games get good receptions.
Elden Ring
https://www.reddit.com/r/Eldenring/comments/tamon1/how_hard_is_elden_ring_compared_to_other_games/#:~:text=It is very hard but,bosses to get better gear.
It is very hard but you can choose the difficulty (example: If you get stuck on a boss you can go explore and kill easier bosses to get better gear

If the guilds outside of the top 5 get stuck on T3 and final bosses they can always go back to T2 and T1 and get geared and try again when they are stronger.

The concept of generating harder raids is inevitably overwhelmed by the fact that unlimited access to them is allowed during beta. The two don't go hand in hand. EQ raiding is built on repetition and players reliably executing what they learn. Some of the harder raids being pointed out as must haves were either made so by the way they could (or couldn't) handle the lag load when moving to live, or the fact that they weren't really finished correctly when leaving beta.

There are ways to approach this while ensuring raids don't release with significant bugs. Guilds have the beta formula down to a science now. You need to disrupt that formula.

1) Allow limited access to raids. 1 raid per guild during beta. There should be enough in the top 20 to push out most raid bugs and ensure they can be win in a couple sessions. If other guilds see a bug during the first time they do it on live...then their ability to win will be in adaptation since its been proven to be winnable already.
2) Overhaul timing and texts on mechanics prior to release. Beta is to test mechanics and transiitonal phases of the raids. Don't give raiders the text and timing ahead of time to full completeness. GINA not operating with 100% reliability from Day 1 would throw some chaos into things for some guilds.

Alot of guilds do limited beta or none at all, and these changes wont change that. They figure it out themselves during live and/or use second hand information for other guilds to help them. They typically have more players that penalize the raid based on inconsistent performance, machine hardware, or lack of event knowledge due to limited exposure. Again, this wont change their experience.

It is still evidence of what happens when difficulty in Everquest increases and that was at a time with a higher population in the game.

It doesn't matter what other games do as that is a different player base that isn't playing Everquest and would be unlikely to play in the first place.

Remember the spike in challenge when GoD dropped and it was considered the guild killer? Great reception /s

2004?

19 years ago stuff?
Yep and in 2005 I remember there being more players and LFG window has players in there looking for groups too.
2003 I remember not every guild beating all the raid bosses too. Not every raid guild was on the latest expansions raids.

btw
Did the top 5 guilds beat GoD?

Unbeatable raids is not what this thread is about.

Expansion was over-tuned in diffulty mostly from a lack of testing (not just the fact it started out as a level 70 expansion but level cap wasn't raised with it).
Also due to the dx9 update being done at the same time the expansion was being made plus a bunch of developers got hauled off EQ to go help speed up EQ2 beating WoW to release.
Plus the dx9 update caused collision detection issues (collision engine got re-wrote)

Lots of stuff went on.

Including that in Tacvi some events were just broken, the prevailing theory at the time was that this was because not all of the events had been finished, but it was later revealed that no, all the events were there but one was a roadblock due to some nasty bugs that made it unbeatable & one before that was made almost unbeatable by bugs - once those bugs got fixed the final event was still hard as hell.

Retuned during OoW development IIRC, lots of dev overtime to do that while building OoW (which they scrapped & restarted after the Player conference they held about the state of the game).

Back on topic - one truly Hard raid per expansion is probably enough, case in point I thought TBL raids were well-pitched in difficulty.

This is discussing about harder raids, those people bringing up unbeatable raids. Their response is null.
unbeatable and harder are not the same.

btw
OoW was well received and no guild beat those raids before DoN was released.
DoN only 5 guilds or less beat it within 4 months.