I have indeed been here. Yes, there have always been lines and camps and whatnot, but what has changed is the people and how they go about things. In the olden days, people would try for whatever item they were after, and when they got it, they would either help their friends get one or go somewhere else. Now, it is the people who dominate spawns in order to get their 100th copy of whatever it is, in order to sell it in auction. While i have absolutely no problem with people doing this, it makes it quite difficult to do anything. If competition is good, and zone copies are bad, then there would be no agent of change in progression servers. Guilds would be forced to compete and get their trusty bat phones out and do it like we did in 1999. But that won't happen. And if it won't happen, then pick copies should absolutely be a thing for the normal dungeon content. The dev teams have always catered to the raiders. Always. Perhaps they should start treating their overall quiet majority a bit better.
Not long after posting this thread, i went and played for a while on vaniki. You know what was nice? the double loot. Not that i want more of the same things, i just want to see the utterly useless time sinks shrank down to a reasonable amount.
Honestly, if they would double or quadruple the amount of picks, i would be happy with that. At least happier than what we have now. As an example, in a dungeon like nurga or drogan, 6 people in the zone usually makes it impossible to try to get anything, yet it will be the only copy of the zone. If these dungeons had 3 or 4 copies, it might still be 6 people in each one, but more people would have the chance.
Love this. This is essentially how Lord of the Rings Online works. They call it open tapping. Everyone who engages a mob, regardless if they were the first or the last to touch it, gets xp and loot. The Lotro team added this much needed feature early on, when it was a massive issue of spawn domination and camping. The ugly elephant in the room is the player driven economy. It has outgrown its innocent beginning and become a server crippler for healthy game play. Last night i logged into several copies of the general chat. The vast majority of their use was to sell items and power leveling. Far behind were people looking for groups or to add folks to existing groups. Conversation was almost non existent. This was on oakwynd.
I think that's more a function of people not really using general chat. If you got rid of the "selling" spam, you wouldn't get more talking in General, you'd get less, as nothing would replace it. So many are on voice-chat now, or solo/box and just ignore General. I think the "sellers" are mostly just talking to themselves. And remember, it's a lot like stupid high prices in the Bazaar. Just cause someone's offering, doesn't mean anyone is buying
Vaniki has been working great, I really don't know why more players didn't play there. Starting in GoD had the bonus of having the player base nicely spread out and they have stayed pretty spread out ever since. Mischief was a good idea to mix up the group loot. It was fun to do zones like Tox Forest and kill Keran and get lots of different items. If they did it again I'd like to see it drop 1 item from the mob being killed + 1 random and remove all the junk from the table.
Because TLP servers are advertised very badly and there are limited informations about their setup. There should be an easy findable table where all TLP servers are being compared. Most players for sure have no clue that Vaniki does offer double loot drops or whatever the speciality there is.
6 people in the zone is a single GROUP in a dungeon designed for groups and that "makes it impossible to get anything"??? If you want a completely empty zone in the lower levels for only yourself, you should play on a Live server with a lower population (i.e. not FV or Bristlebane) to have a higher chance of no one playing in the level range of that dungeon. Even on FV, you can have a single-player game in most of the open world zones up to around CotF and maybe even higher. If you want a single-player experience on a TLP, look for a TLP that is expansion unlocked far higher than the zones you want to play in alone. If you want solo player Kunark zones, that would be more likely on a TLP unlocked to LDoN or higher than a TLP that has just unlocked Kunark.
I think you missed his point, which seemed obvious to me. He's saying the zone won't support more than one group, so if you get there, and there's a group there, you're out of luck, because there isn't enough content there to support more than that one group. No idea if the point is valid, but I'm 99% sure that's what he meant.
Because we barely have time to play on the one original server we play on (Live), and haven't even come close to finishing that content. That's why I've never given a passing thought to the TLPs.
There are posts when servers are being launched that make it fairly clear what the server will have in terms of rules and how it will be different from live. There is a convoluted page on alas that describes them too.
That is great for when a new server launches or people that can find it on alla's but it would be nice if there as an official way to compare all the TLP servers and know the differences and what expansions they have open.
I think most players on TLP use the progression site. https://www.eqprogression.com/tlp-server-rules-and-info/ But it would be better if they would update the official TLP help - but they're pretty close https://www.everquest.com/guides/eq-what-is-a-progression-server
Perhaps they do play. I've been here for a few years, and I confess, I have seen no evidence of this on the forums at least. Maybe I'm wrong. I wouldn't eat at a restaurant where the chefs don't eat their own food. That's a red flag I picked up by watching many episodes of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. I think it would be helpful for our esteemed developers to tell us directly that they do in fact play EQ in their leisure time. It would be fascinating to know how many hours they play a week, what classes, what groups, what type of servers all without revealing names. It would help humanize them and create more empathy between devs and players. It would also be nice to see the devs playing or raiding EQ on a Twitch livestream every now and then. They could do it raising money for charity too. Other MMO companies do this all the time, why not Darkpaw?
Nobody will read those news or knows where to find them after a few weeks. Returning and new players are often interested in TLP servers and they have no clue where to search and what the differences are. New players do not know about ZAM. It should be all linked on Everquest.com.
And neither of those notes what expansion the not locked forever servers are on. Unless you read the Announcements, there is no information on it. Pre-Oakwynd launch I was looking for information in a variety of sources and found none noting the expansion each server is currently on. The official information on "what is a progression server" is also not easy to find. Other than using the link from CatsPaws, I have zero clue how to find that page. TLPs are VERY badly documented and announced and advertised beyond an announcement or two in the News and Announcements folder where a lot of the posts are allowed to devolve into a deluge of bad and entirely inaccurate information. DB is really bad at promoting or documenting their own stuff in a way the information can be found for more than a couple weeks and even then it's spotty.
I am shocked that with playing this long you never saw any of the interviews live streamed or have never played on Beta where the devs raid with you. Just some examples: You can scroll thru many of the interviews done by Fadingillusion for The Everquest Show and many of the devs he interviews say what they play. This is just an example of one - not sure if J Chan mentions it in this one but in one of them she does https://www.reddit.com/r/everquest/comments/11s1tef/episode_17_of_the_everquest_show_interview_with/ Quoting Absor: He likes to play Bard and enchanter. I like a challenge. I censored at it, but I like to do things that are hard, and those classes proved the most challenging. When I need a break, I like playing a mage. https://www.everquest.com/news/imported-eq-enus-52355 Many other interviews are listed here https://everquest.fanra.info/wiki/Developers And stuff like this: I played EQ during the original Beta in 1999. My wife, known as Niami Denmother, and I played together and enjoyed all aspects of the game. https://www.everquest.com/news/get-to-know-your-dev-abell We do need to give them some credit
What you may be forgetting is how people will spin up Instances & drop them repeatedly to see if they can get one with some named or other up in it, it is a known behaviour that has been repeated often, this creates vastly more strain on the server & "Zones" as instances are more complex than regular instances due to the scripting many of them have baked in, I recall a Dev explaining how picks are harder to recover the RAM for than regular instances (designed as instances to begin with) because of this.
