Another EG7 product DDO has been doing the raid timer bypass thing for a decade or more, but they're more free to play pay to win. You can only try to loot each raid's chest 8 times a week, but you can pay cash to reroll your share of each chest 3x, so 32 chances instead of 8, and you have to pay for timer bypasses to run the raid back to back to back with your guild since you can't solo it and default lockout is iirc 3.5 days. Obviously they will never increase droprates on anything, and several times lately they've "stat crunched"/reduced damage/etc on old raid weapons and gear to force everyone to new best in slot gear. It's kinda horrifying the financial abuse MMO players will accept. I hope the EQ1 community is as successfully loud as the EQ2 community apparently was, I don't want to look for a new MMO, but no way I'm paying for sub/expansion plus in game store pay to win like timer bypass+chest reroll etc.
Tell me you haven't played other games that are really pay to win without saying so. Anyone who thinks paying for a boost to lvl 100 is the same as pay to win is out to lunch. Just look at all those heroic characters winning the raids faster than the raid guilds can! Oh nos! All the power you can give you lvl 125 character by boosting them to lvl 100...
It is free to wait and play the missions too. You cannot get the free levels without spending some minimal amount of time in the game. You can of course, opt to skip up to 100 levels and also a vast amount of AA with a single real money purchase. We can each call it whatever we want. They undeniably crossed into selling power, skipping time-sinks, pay-to-win, "insert your own phrase for it". It has always been for sale in various ways. When I think about it, it does not affect my own enjoyment of the game if someone acquires something without playing the actual game. If cutting out the middle persons allows Daybreak to have more resources to make more of the game...that does affect my enjoyment of the game...hugely.
The reason that lockouts exist is the same reason smartphone games make you wait x many hours to play again.. Its to keep you playing over a longer period of time. (and potentially sub or spend money) If you could run missions over and over again you would increase your chance of burnout and leaving the game.
Shift your point and deflect in any direction. We can call it anything you want, it is for sale, always has been. More recently, it is for sale from Daybreak. You specifically said power is not for sale in the store. Levels have always been the biggest power increase in EQ. You can do things with levels you just cannot do via other methods of obtaining power. With the addition of auto-grant AA, it just makes those purchased levels that much more powerful. The person saved a hell of lot of time by not playing the massively multi-player game all alone too. I have actually played a so called "play to win" game but did not think of it that way. The whales and the people playing for free and everyone in between were just playing a different meta. You are not playing the exact same game if you instantly acquire all the "things" that someone who waits in time gates for is playing. You simply cannot. In the same way, you cannot play the exact same game as someone who has vastly more time to spend on time sinks, the essence of EQ, than you. You are not so far apart though as a true "pay to win" scenario but I would argue you are highly unlikely to be playing together. In the same way, you are not playing the same meta in the so often highly debated raid vs group and TLP vs Live arenas. They are all bound by the same constraints on resources for the things they want improved though.
Thanks for supporting my argument. EQ is not Pay to Win. It's pay to cure impatience. The paying doesn't give you anything you can't do on your own. Pay to win literally means you have to pay in order to win. EQ does NOT fall in that category. Nobody does these things on a first char, because you want to actually play the game. On the 4th/7th/20th char? That's fine, let those people skip low level content they've already seen. And if it is somebody boosting a first char, and just skipping tons of content they've never seen? Well, more power to them (no pun intended, well, maybe kinda intended ). Thanks for spending money on a game I want to see survive!
I completely agree. How does one even win EQ? I never contended EQ is pay to win, simply pointed out they do sell power in the store. It was available for purchase long before that. Minimizing the meaning of that to whatever level fits your view of the game does not stop it from being true. Now, if we can skip levels and AA, why not lockouts? How is that so much worse? How does that let someone pay to win EQ? Is the win defined as obtaining everything an expansion has to offer for a single character? If the lockout I pay to skip is not to obtain any loot or experience, did I still pay to win?
I don't think it works quite like that. This assumes missions are the only reason to stay subscribed. Raiders are going be subbed all year long. Also, a lot of people pay for the 12 month subscription to get the discount, so they've already paid for the year regardless of any burnout effect. People want to run the missions to maximize their chances at looting an evolving neck item. With only 2 missions, why not let them do the thing they want to be doing?
If they don't put lockouts, then people farm them non-stop for their rewards (loot and experience both). They would prefer to visit a mission then play the other aspects of the game. If they allowed even the experience rewards, you'd get people farming the experience to max level/AA and then going through the content complaining about it being too easy or loot being irrelevant.
https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/does-anyone-think-ls-is-hard.295159/ It doesn't fix that issue.
It is a bit annoying. If I have time, it'd be cool to be able to run the group mission a couple times without having to load different toons. No Xp/Coins for you would be I think a nicer options than unable to participate at all. They've already sorta done this with loot lockouts.
I’d argue it makes it harder to group when my friends are locked out of the content I want to do so I don’t bother logging on because I have other mmos where I can login where you don’t get locked out of doing things. I get cellphone games do it but that’s mostly to sell more micro transactions. If I can only do so much of what I want to do then it actually limits my login session in a social game like EverQuest rather than encourage me to have longer sessions where I make connections and friends. If you want players to play the other aspects of your game make those better, don’t just ell players they can’t do the thing that they find rewarding with arbitrary timers. “This is how a game should be played”. Lockouts get us into dumb situations where if you drop your box for a player now you have a lockout but your box doesn’t so either your box loses out now because you can’t just redo it with your boxes or hey Johnny is going to be 40 minutes late today we have to wait for him to do this rather than just running it a second time. I can get behind 1 hour lockouts but for most players a multi hour lockout is no different than a 20 hour lockout. A 1 hour lockout prevents super fast spamming of we found a really easy way to do this that makes sense, go rotate this with something else.
I'd be happier with a restriction on how many times you can do a mission a day instead of having lockouts. Allow players to do missions 3 - 4 times each in 24 hours with no repeat timer, rather than waiting 6 hours for them to unlock.
Who cares? If people want to play the game that way, let them. Forced lockouts on very limited group content is bad design and just plain silly. Same for the raids...if guilds want to slog through them every single night, let them. If the devs don't like that, then they can actually be developers and come up with new ways to keep people engaged without imposing artificial restrictions on what little content they put out each expansion.
Oh sweet baby Jesus, this ^ Essentially treat it like a vitality resource, once you use it up, you have to wait for it to recharge a bit. It's how WoW does the "daily" XP bonus. Instead of LotD that we have ("don't bother me, I'm doing my Lesson. NO, don't camp here, I'm already doing my Lesson, don't want to waste it"), they have a resource that recharges. As long as there's some in the tank, whatever XP you get from kills gets doubled.
