Encounter Locking in 2024

DPS racing was 'built in to the game' because they never considered First To Engage AT ALL. Nobody ever considered giving you the exclusive right to interact with a creature in the world.

The creatures are designed by intention to defend themselves, the way they coded that was by assessing the biggest threat as the biggest DPS.

PERIOD.

PNP was again, LONG after the fact of design intentions.

They didn't lack the tech to do it the way they wanted. They wanted a mob who doesn't care about who attacks first, it cares about who is doing it the most harm.

PERIOD.

Played many MUDD's as well and there was a strategy in MUDD's to watch a group make an attempt and try and take the mob while they were recovering...

Online Text based MUDD's are very different from D&D.

Brad's vision was always centered around role playing and not PvP. Everquest was clearly designed with PvE roleplaying as the driver. The imbalance of PvP in EQ proved that.

I am quite certain the design intent was first in force. But the thought was if you did not have a force you simply would not be able to engage...Immediately it was First to Engage before it ever got out of pre-release.

I agree with much of what you say, just not your final conclusion. I think I've made myself clear on my opinion, as have you.

/bow and well met sir.

We can certainly agree to disagree.

But there is a reason they spent time to create a module to support First to Engage. And I simply do not think it was done for the purpose of upsetting the EQ griefer populations.....lol

Of course not. That would be absurd.

I was talking about the original design intentions, I hope I was clear about that. FTE was never intended initially.

They are adding it now, as you note. And THEY are not the same people who initially designed this game, and THEY have to react to corporate pressures from above and actual customer reactions.

Totally different ball of wax. And in that scenario they have decided to try FTE on one server in 25 years so far. Congrats! There is no world in which FTE was a design intention from the beginning and took them 25 years to make it happen. sorry.

No one said the game was designed to enforce FTE...When EQ came out they did not even consider the concept of locking the encounter...That came several years later...EQ2 from Launch LOCKED encounters. World of Warcraft LOCKED encounters. I am sure adding the necessary hooks to 25 year old code to implement encounter locking was no simple task.

My comment was the original intent was first to engage, Policy, in my early EQ days back that up. I do believe there is a difference in first in force and first to engage, and they were thinking first in force, When they realized the difference it became first to engage.

And the realization that the competition was going to be an issue very quickly forced a policy and that policy was centered around first to engage.

That is why their next version of EQ locked encounters from day one.

In this (bad) analogy, the closest thing comparable would be some of the grand royal type events at conventions and such....

And never heard of a single one of those where the GMs arbitrarily gave the spoils to a limited portion of those that contributed to the kill - they always treated them similar to a "zone event" encounter like Ah`Qiraj from WoW or Rifts from Rift, ad nauseum where contributions might be scaled to those that contribute more or less - but that all contributions get something.

Without quibbling over minutia (I might be inclined to on one or two points), that is close enough for me to agree with.

again. /bow

Did you do a seance? I doubt Brad is speaking to you on the topic to validate that.

And he did a NUMBER of interviews back in the day of not desiring to do anything overt BUT he also was under the belief that no one would regularly abuse the rules of such, as that's how the populations on earlier MUDs acted with maturity to each other.

He was still with the company and leading the project as a whole when PNP was put into place FFS.

Sure, less guardrails IS better if everyone can be mature adults that don't aim to ruin the experience of others - but we live in reality, a reality where only laws curb some people from doing things that harm others. And those ethics tend be be even more reduced online.

I played on Quelious in 1999, and then on Nameless when it opened.

In Highpass Hold, wizards would routinely "KS" .or try to, the sharlok pack dropping named.

The only time GMs stepped in was when the wizards were on a spot the orcs could not reach them.

For those who actually played in 1999 (and remember when necros would AFK at a spawn spot and let pets kill the mob, or when pets had same faction as the owner and not like now, or when necro pets with 2 FS dagger were deadly, etc...) this should ring a bell.

For TLPs (Remember Combine came up way way later!) just decide what is good now. Revisionisim is just bad (not to mention wrong, lies).

P.S: Take my post as you will. I have played EQ on and off from 99 (and, sadly, I do remember many things). I won't get into discussions on this - just wanted to point out history for those who didn't play in 1999.

Yes, PNP and general GM involvement didn't become a thing until Velious formally.

The people you're calling "Revisionists" keep acknowledging that it was 2000-2001ish for the start. Not that it matters, it was active more time than it wasn't when it comes to the lifespan of the title. (although we're only a few years from it falling into the minority portion)

GM involvement was very much a thing in Classic.

Then they added DZ's which completely destroys any point you have

https://web.archive.org/web/2004061...port/customer_service/cs_rules_of_conduct.jsp

2004 Rules of conduct from the way back machine.

1.1 Play Nice Policies - Activity within EverQuest
In addition to the general guidelines listed in section 1.0, players are also subject to these supplementary rules while playing EverQuest. While by no means an all-inclusive list of the do's and don'ts in EverQuest, it provides a suitable foundation by which the player can determine what activities are appropriate:

1. You may not steal kills.
Kill Stealing is defined as the killing of an NPC for any reason that is already fighting or pursuing another player or group that is prepared to engage that same NPC without that group's specific permission.
The intent of this rule is discourage and make note of habitual Kill Stealers, not to punish those who honestly try to work together or those who make an honest mistake. Its enforcement by the EverQuest Customer Service Staff will reflect this philosophy.


Whatever may have been the original intention is moot. They were breaking ground in a brand new genre and they had to adapt to player response/behavior. They made mistakes and had to adjust. They had the PnP in place for longer than it wasn't in place, when they had to cancel it due to an inability to maintain it they put DPS race back into place. Then they took the time to create a built in method for it to exist. They want it in place.

FTE is the new truebox. Love it or hate it.

Exactly, a factual thing.

1/5 of EQ's life before they felt the need to make a statement about GM's "Reflecting this Philosophy"
25 years before making a First To Engage mechanically enforced policy on one server.

These are facts we can all judge for ourselves.

Day 5 on Innoruuk we had a GM in East Comonlands dealing with players jumping a line created by the players.

The players came up with a way to deal with the number of players and lack of targets. Others were not going to go along it took a GM to make a ruling. It was weird the color of the text around them was a funny green color.

People forget how crowded everything was in the first couple of weeks and none of us knew much at all about the game there was no Allakhazam then or EQTraders...No in game maps I played for several years with a notebook of maps. Ended up with a notebook for each continent made it easier to find the map I wanted Antonica had 5 dividers....lol

There may have been an agreement between GM's about how to handle disputes, but as far as the player knows there was never any "rule" of FTE. If there was somewhere it was rarely if ever enforced. For the vast majority of the years I have played EQ there has been no enforcement of disputes over mobs, only if one resorted to training would any authority jump in.

I started on Innoruuk which was merged with Nameless in the first round of server mergers, then later it got merged with Erollisi Marr. I was in Ascentia on Nameless when I stopped raiding hard core around 2007.

Did you guys do a lot of DPS racing on lockjaw or just these GM enforced mob rotations? I'm not familiar

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...ations-coming-to-ragefire-and-lockjaw.225229/