Does the popularity of the TLP servers show that Everquest went down the wrong path?

The issue with TLP is its just another tangent that is taking resources from EQ Live. And I'm not saying TLP is bad, if it get folks to return to the game, they may stay on TLP or evolve back to their old servers.

I played on Vulak, and had a blast. There were issues with the server versus classic, and there were issues in classic. What I would like to see is if investments are made outside of EQ Current, don't use EQ Current resources to support it, or add additional resources to the team as a whole.

Currently, too much is being promised that can be delivered. So overworked employees are doing their best to achieve impossible goals. This results in an unfinished buggy expansion, poorly tested fixes, corner cutting ideas that require substantial resources to correct or revise, and players getting upset, leaving the game.

And yes, I get this is business, and companies need to run at a profit. I paid $380 for a new expansion that isn't finished. I purchased 2 of the top offerings not for the list of bonus items, but to make an investment in the game to keep it going. At this time, I am viewing it as a very poor investment.


Ruven

My favorite was always casters having to leave open their spell book to actually med.

But your 4 points are dead on. I might add a 4.5th along the Cashing In topic - Pay to Win. It's the easiest place someone can toss down money to get pretty much any/all "end game" stuff they desire, without the risk of shadier third party sites like it was back in the day. And the practice is so common to this generation's gamer that it's a big draw, too.

The success of TLP tells me that they should have created an EQ3 and and EQ4 and an EQ5 a long time ago rather than trying to extend an old platform.

TBM was the last straw, won't be going back to live ever. I was in the top 10 for bard/ranger for something like 10 years running and couldn't care less about it at this point, rather repeat the content I know I enjoy.

You'll take my merc over my cold dead body. Oh wait.

I played classic through the beginning of Luclin a lot. Then I started taking breaks. Over the years the breaks got longer and When I came back I stayed for shorter and shorter periods. For the last few years I have done nothing more than poke my head in, look around a bit and leave. Earlier this year I actually did play for a couple of months and enjoyed it for the most part but left again. Then on Dec. 18th I decided to try Phinigel and it was fun but I am bored already.

The problem as I see it (and I am not an expert so this is probably not worth much) is that the live servers have an enormously steep learning curve. It may not seem that way to people who have played the game for 16 years but for a new player I think it is a non-starter.

RIght now Live servers get some folks like me that pop back in to play for a while but I suspect an actual "new player" is as rare as the ever elusive Saharan Iceberg.

TLP servers fill up with players from live and returning players who are looking to relive their old eq days. That was me as well. The thing is, you really cannot go back. I was 16 years younger, had more time and less responsibility etc. TLP is not as time intensive as classic but it still requires too much of a commitment even levelling for me personally.

TLR EQ survives off of a few hardcore players and a "reserve" of old farts that reactivate for a while and go away. Like waves crashing on a beach.

I haven't been close to end-game live game content since LDoN yet I bought TBM (Haven't zoned into anything RoF or newer yet). Every few expacs I will ante up to support the game. I mostly dabble in a few of the TLP servers. TLP subs surely pay for the efforts (business wise) and possibly even support the live game, so let's leave that alone.

Live game needs to simplify bloat (# of stats, spells, AA, abilities, focus effects, mod2s, etc.) so that the learning curve to returning players is about the content exploration and event mechanics.

Live game needs to radically shift the "zone level pyramid" and continue lore so the majority of the zones in game are in the sweet spot of the population. Maybe this means all hardcore heritage and anniversary revamps and such are made live, with much more to follow. Simple example: Chardok becomes level 110 raid zone. NPC outside of chardok called the "Chardok Looter" holds the Epic 1.0 drops and is equivalent difficulty to the Kunark-era expectation so the important quests aren't broken, but the game can move on.

Live game needs to do much more with at least some core cities.Example: add some porting/translocate wizards to Freeport that make it handier for Norrathian travel than PoK books.

Most important thing the live game needs is an Expac like TSS (deep in lore, quests, goes from 1-cap, new race... Aviaks, goblins, Sarnaks, orcs or sand elves makes the most sense to me).

Instancing has been way overused. It sanitizes the immersiveness. LDoN at least had camps full of people entering the instances, so it felt more alive. My suggestion for live is create non-instance zones that have public-quest components (so when so much is done in the zone by whomever --including 2 competing raid guilds the quest completes) with raid instance finales off of them. Think of Old Sebilis having 2-3 raid and/or group instance pieces attached to it so you see the traffic, opportunity to interact in the main part of the zone, but you can go off and do parts yourself as well.


TLP just needs to have no new servers until the current ones are past Luclin. The more revamps and progressing that is done on live servers the more the redo playability appeal of future progression. Example: orcs take over Taelosia, zones are totally revamped with new names and purpose (but Dev team gets to reuse the base geometry). This would be fun on live, and make progressing people look forward to the now "lost content of GoD".

I'm not sure how a couple thousand people playing for a month followed by population crash where 90% of the players are already paying customers from the live servers indicate they are so popular to indicate anything except people that play regularly can easily max everything out and are bored.

Wrong path? Not at all. The TLP servers are full of botters, camp stealers, officially every mob is a dps race. More profitable for Daybreak yes. The live servers more or less follow play nice rules and are far less toxic overall. TLP servers also gain some popularity because they are less common. If all we had were TLP type servers and things had never varied from that EQ would likely have died long ago in my opinion. People come back for TLP servers but they have stuck around for the Live servers.

EverQuest went down the wrong path?
In many cases it did, but the right path (assuming that there is one and only one) is not at all clear.

Does TLP's popularity show that it did.
Certainly TLP isn't the right path - it's not even close.

IMO the best thing about TLP is that all classes can solo (unfortunately some better than others). If there's any single test of how powerful a class is with all of their assets on the table it's soloing.

And the worst thing is that some classes can solo a whole lot better than others because their total class power exceeds that received by highly group dependent classes. Naturally enough people flock to the OP classes unlike the start of EQ when everyone assumed there was mutual interdependence and parent class superiority in a narrow focus would be offset by group desirability.

I never played on Lockjaw or Ragefire but I can say that I've never once had a problem on Phinigel. I even had a member of the top guild (AoS) offer my group the Frenzy camp because he saw we were a group and he was just solo farming it. I've never had a camp stolen and just about every time someone was boxing it was an out of group character used to help the group.

You know what else is nice about TLP? The items are interesting, it's easy to get full groups of real life people, and the game is simple enough that you can afford to carry people who aren't the best players but are entertaining in chat.

I do wish we could have missions and more interesting raids but you can't have everything I guess.

Every time they've opened a tlp I've made a character, and promptly remembered why on normal live servers when I make a alt it's p'l or pushed as hard as I can to get thru those levels. Do others like them sure, and I have no doubt they've improved the bottom line for dbg, if not they'd not keep making them.

I believe they are trying their best with the resources they have to keep both live and tlp servers improving. In no way do I think eq ever went down the wrong path to the extent that its bothered me, if It did I'd have quit playing. I also believe that it's impossible for them to ever satisfy every play type available in Eq. And of course I have things I wish they'd change to fit what I want to get out of my play time.

It would be nice if it felt like all the money they've surely made from the TLP was getting reinvested back into EQ.

I'd love to hear something like "Hey guys, we've sold so many krono and bags on the TLP that we now have enough money to hire two more devs!"

As for dev time on Prog servers. They want to automate it as much as possible for future new servers to have less and less issues.

There is a combination of things that kills EQ for me, every time I hit about 70.

1. The endless series of faceless, boring, outdoor zones that starts with (I think) GoD. The whole, bloodfields, wall of slaughter, DSH, etc etc etc to infinity. The game completely loses the atmosphere it has in classic, kunark, and velious. Those worlds and dungeons are still to me, the best in gaming. Guk, Sol, City of Mist, Seb, The hole, Velks lab, caverns, kael, crushbone, mistmoore, unrest....so many great zones, with so much personality, and then the game devolves into something that looks like it took less than a day in a world editor to make.

2. The slowdown in exp/level gains. Combined with number 1, the game just starts to put me to sleep. Wall of slaughter is game killer of a zone for me.

I go back to TLPs, because replaying that content 100 times with actual people, will be better than sitting in wall of slaughter for 1 second.

No one sits in WoS unless they're being power-leveled by someone and in that case, they are there for like... an hour. Tops.

There are soooo many good expacs/zones that aren't wide-open "outdoor" messes like those zones. Often times I've found it's more a matter of people just being lazy and they don't want to go to dungeon ABC b/c the outdoor zones are just 'easy'.

People talk a lot of trash about the current state of "Live" and yes, in many ways it's a sh*t show but soooo much awesome stuff has also come about since the time when it seems most returning TLPrs quit ~10+ years ago b/c reason XYZ about horrible expansion whichever.

So, they remember the bitter downfalls of those early years and think that only content through PoP was worth a damn. That may have been the pinnacle of the EQ experience, but if you trudge a bit further and could get past GoD/OoW/PoR... there is so much awesome.

I came to the thread expecting arbitrary complaining about TLP servers, but it looks like you actually have an earnest post that actually is interested in talking about the "why" behind it. As someone who last played during DoN expansion (2005) and felt the peak of enjoyment was PoP, I don't think you could have formed a better list of mechanics/features that I've longed for since then. I've tried multiple MMOs since EQ, and nothing has even come remotely close to delivering on the 7 criteria you've mentioned.

I came back to play on Phinigel precisely for the 7 criteria you've mentioned. It's been amazing having a socially focused game again. I would also love to play a *new* game that delivers on those fronts as well, but time has proven that such games are not economically fruitful so they're not developed. The masses want WoW and other modern style MMORPG elements, so that's what we end up getting time after time.

I think the TLP servers would've largely fallen flat on their face if a modern MMORPG equivalent of EQ era 1999-2003 (up through PoP) mechanics and gameplay existed. As in, everybody does their 1-Month sign up to chat, and let's it expire. The TLP servers flourish (in the context of relative EQ population) because of the void of anything comparable in today's MMORPG scene to EQ 1999-2003.

If you like to hold onto impossible dreams, this may be coming via Brad McQuaid's Pantheon. But, well, I'm not hitching my hope wagon to that horse just yet.

What great dungeons are there to do at level 70? Every dungeon I've ever been in post Velious, looked like it took about 5 minutes to make. Random mobs just vomited everywhere, in a single texture covered series of hallways about sums it up. Maybe I'm missing something. I'd love to see a list of what people consider great dungeons from level 70-105.

Dreadspire Keep for starters.

And yeah I totally agree, Velks and Kael definitely are NOT white washed in 3 shades of the same ice pattern and TOV definitely does NOT have random mobs just everywhere in the hallways~ only see that type of stuff after Velious

Hm, since I'm a retired player (~2003) who came back for Ragefire, I guess I'll weigh in. I didn't come back for a classic experience; I came back because of the many ways the TLPs aren't classic. I want to experience all the content I missed on-level and, yes, eventually catch up to live servers.

I know there are many others who came back because they hate instancing, but speaking for myself I like instancing, and hope Ragefire gets it. I'm looking ahead, not back to the spawn-racing guild drama we had in 2001.

I'm grateful to the live players who I know are seeing less dev attention so that I can be having the fun I'm having.