Every mob summons at higher levels?

Heh what used to be hailed as genius design because of player ability is now being talked about as "abuse and exploit".

Bosses should summon. Random XP trash in a zone shouldn't. Its really not that complicated.
Is NPC involved in a raid encounter? If yes -> Summon If no -> Don't summon.
Is NPC a Named in zone? If Yes -> Summon if no -> Don't Summon.

The "it" would be the SoD video mentioned later in the sentence.

"in the SoD Video"

LOL.

OK, next step.

It's fine you mentioned a video. That was obvious. WHAT VIDEO?

Now I see. Yes. Reply to a month+ old post without quoting, got it.

Actually I'm referring to this statement below not a month old post it is literally 2 posts up and from Thursday
No videos linked so far in this post are SoD videos(iirc 3 were released) I am referring to videos that are on the internet but I will link it below

My point is that in one of the videos about the SoD expansion, it literally shows a solo player go grab a merc so they could kill a mob that kept killing them over and over. Not a group.

I remember the discussions from back then about mercenaries. IIRC they talked about both aspects being able to make a group if you needed a tank and or cleric and also if you wanted to solo as well.

I have to chime in on this and your comments about BMCQ.

this game is 24 years old. It hasn't been a 'group game' in over a decade. nearly everyone boxes. every newbie guide encourages boxing because the game is so insanely top heavy that there is nobody to play with at low level that isn't already boxing. the game has a bloody ai controlled player system to help facilitate this further, similiar to companions in swtor and eq2 and now eso and other games essentially making everyone a 'pet class' that can solo for the most part all the way to 120.

the group game may be at 120, but so few new and returning players make it that far due to the absolute slog that leveling has become in the current game. the game is overdue for level squishing and ability pruning.

your comments in another post about Brad and how punishing they thought EQ should have been two decades ago - i can gurantee you that if he was still alive today he would no longer think that way. I came from the same MUD he did and that was how we all thought it should be because we did not know any better. We were also substantially younger and were not as overworked as the modern western salaryman. All attempts to make new mmorpgs that were as punishing as they were 20+ years ago have done very poorly in the west. Wildstar as an example was a great mmorpg but attempting to go back to 40 man raiding with annoying attunements turned a lot of people away in the first two months. It's a business model with no future outside of Korean internet cafes.

That's an opinion stated as fact, it is also wrong.

And all of the things added to the game were to improve the ability to form groups, boxing doesn't change the base design of the game being a group game, it simply allows 1 player to operate as a group, if that were not true where is all the solo-content? There ain't none. EQ took WoW's Quest progression system and made it fit their group designed game, there is no quested solo path through EQ like WoW has. It matters not if 100% of players box, the game design has not been adapated for solo players, players have adapted. Even if Mercs made soloing more posssible, that still didn't change the game to a solo-friendly one, they are only really good to solo with up to around 65/70 anyway, that may have been considered a catch-up mechanic at the time, but they certainly did not balance mercs to allow soloing all the way to max level, not even to within 5 levels of max. Neither did they create a line of "Molo-Friendly" quests to take you from 80-max level onwards, and the heroic tutorials purpose was to get you used to a higher level character.

I agree that the slog to mex level is too long, I have long advocated for a "Side-Kicking" mechanic to help them play with the actual player-base instead of spending months alone working through 2 decades of content.
I do not agree with a level squish because there is a whole EQ meta-game of going back to old content solo at a much higher level to defeat it & maybe farm some interesting rewards.
I went back to the Lethar event in Ashegate's raid to farm the High Elf illusion shoulders for example, to VT to farm a clickiy IVU Ear. A stat squish would destroy that meta game which many players enjoy.

Unless you are going to claim that you can converse with the spirits of those who have passed on you cannot guarantee that at all. Perhaps he wouldn't but he can't tell us himself.

So you think that everyone thinks the same way you do, that is known as the false consensus effect.
Look it up, it may prove enlightening.

Why any individual MMO fails or succeeds is the result of a whole lot of factors, your attempt at simplification & reductionism is not going to bolster your argument indeed it undermines it.

Have a nice day.

No, no one thinks that you are the only one but I do know people like you are in the minority when it comes to harder content in EQ. The majority of folks are pushing 40+ and I can see it when I group with these folks. They react and move slow. There's no way these people with limited time and limited capabilities want harder content.

Besides only a handful of people I see being vocal, who is advocating for harder raids and content? I see the same posters asking for harder content and that's it. You don't see new faces coming to the forums asking for harder content. I don't see the casuals jumping into General on FV or Mischief asking for harder content when the topic arises.

I really don't buy the "players over 40 are slow to react" line, I know that's what you've seen, I've seen it too but I don't think it's any actual lack of ability. I've grouped/raided with 70 year old grandmothers who showed no lack of response speed.

The "slow" folks are simply distracted, they aren't playing EQ with it being the only thing they are paying attention to, they've got some streaming service running a movie or tv show on a second screen, they are jibber-jabbering away on an unrelated Discord channel or some are even trying to run a business while they are playing.

They are not actually slow in most cases, they are just lacking in focus because they are spreading their attention across too many things to make their EQ playing look good, they're taking it for granted that EQ doesn't really require super fast responses & to be fair they probably get away with it most of the time.
They could play harder content, but that doesn't fit their lifestyle, and that's okay, playing hardcore is not for everyone.

The vast majority of EQ players are not raiders, they are casuals and that's cool, but some raiders do enjoy challenging content, EQ can provide for a broad coaltion of players, group content for the casuals, group content that is challenging & raid content that is pitched across a range of players too, from familiy guilds up to more serious raiding guilds.

Most players are not active on the forums at all, the vast majority probably don't even visit the forums, much like the vast majority are not on Discord either, they're not calling for much of anything anyway they'll play so long as the game is running, and for many of them it's more the community they are a part of that keeps them engaged than the game.

So no matter what the people who will & do ask for harder content are in a minority before they open their mouths, doesn't mean they should be ignored.
It's all about the devs getting the balance of content difficulty right to appeal across the range of players, providing something for everyone.
An expansion filled with tough difficult to beat raids is not going to go over well because that would lock out most guilds from being able to see the content & get actual value for money from the expansion they paid for, but if it has at least 1 really hard raid & the rest are pitched lower in difficulty to that & "hopefully at least" the difficulty goes from easier in the early tiers to harder in the upper-tiers, then everyone gets something.

no more wrong than the opinions you have posted yourself

everquest is still a group game and has never addressed how so many classes are integral to make a successful group. daoc continued this to an even greater degree with how life-changing a full set of buffs from a spec'd out cleric were. WoW actually changed the paradigm by making questing the chief way to get to end game, making every class able to get to end game without the need to box and later removing any need to multibox outside of being a punk in pvp.

mercs are a horrible catch up mechanic because they barely get you halfway there. along the way these devs lost sight of what made this and the MUD it was based on great - the ever increasing amount of player power. Instead they started introducing content that destroyed anyone not raid geared and even then destroys many with current raid geared. this is fundamentally no f'ng different than the level scaling ESO and modern WoW do now with their open world.

WoW made massive level squishes without removing the old content after Cataclysm. You can still go back and do the old raids. Your point is moot.

Brad would have adjusted with the times and business models. He was not a buffoon, nor was he an old get-off-my-lawn codger you are portraying him as. [/quote]

2023 is my 30th year since logging into my first MUD. I would say that i have a hefty amount of experience. I have played and raided in every western mmorpg ever released in that time and several korean games as well. I can see trends. However only a narcissist such as yourself would assume i believe "everyone" holds these opinions. You do need to accept you are in the minority. Proof? look at how much people complained about the difficulty spike with cataclysm. look at how much people complained about mythic raids and higher mythic dungeon keys becoming inaccessible to most players. established wow players with huge followings lamenting about how the difficulty is just catering to the top 10% of players and leaving everyone else out. Now FFXIV is starting to get that same treatment.

a small number of players like yourself obviously want the game to cater to you and your fellow no-lifers, but as has been proven time and time again YOU are not the audience that keeps these games afloat - the casual andy who buys kronos and DB currency looking for shortcuts keeps them afloat. If this was not true, FV would not continue to be the highest populated retail server by a LARGE MARGIN. Mischief would not have continued to do as well as it now after PoP when every other TLP server dies at that point. Hell this game is barely floating 20% of the concurrent numbers it peaked at in 2000 and with the further segmenting of the community with emulators is just exacerbating this.

MMORPG (do not confuse these games with general MMO's, they are not the same) failures are well known by the people that shut them down. Wildstar's biggest failure was making raiding 40 man almost 10 years after the community at large had left behind raids that large. Their second and third failures tie in with 40 man raiding - 40 man classic wow raids were piss easy mechanically, the challenge was the human logistics. Wildstar raids were NOT easy. Thirdly they had attunement processes that were not easy to complete either.

Then you add the fact it was under the NcSoft banner and the game was doomed. Wildstar and City of Heroes were both profitable games but NcSoft's korean overlords are just massive jerks. Those games had higher playerbases at their ends than this game has now but it wasn't enough.

days are nicer when nit-pickers don't multi-quote.

Really sure about that are you?

Wrong-thinking going on here, consider "Archetypes":

For a successful group you need the following archetypes, Tank, Healer, DPS, Support*
*additionally you may also benefit from a class that can single-pull mobs out of a pack or a class that can crowd control.

Where does EQ fail to address how many classes are integral when all classes will fall into one of the 4 main archetypes needed for a group?

One class having good buffs makes forming a group harder or something?

Yeah & like I said EQ did not adopt a solo path through the game which is what the WoW questing system was largely designed for, so we appear to agree on this point.

We appear to agree on this point.

I flatly disagree here, the fact is player characters do get more powerful every year.

Group content is supposedly tuned for players who were fully group-geared from the last expansion, and many players seem to manage just fine under those conditions, maybe you should re-assess how you are playing & how well geared your group is. I have not been reading a lot of posting about how current group content is destroying raiders so I am curious who & where are these raiders who are getting detroyed are?

You can solo them in WoW post-squish?
If not, then you completely missed the point.

I haven't portrayed him as anything I am simply countering your argument that you think you know what he would say today if he were not dead which is entirely ridiculous.

I had no need to narcissistically assume anything because you said it yourself.

And by everyone it was implicit I meant everyone you were referring to when you used "we".

What minority is this? I haven't claimed any false consensus, or made a claim of belonging to a wider populace - that was you, please stop projecting.
All I have given is my own opinion, I am not speaking for anyone else but me, is that a minority? Well of course it is, it's a minority of one singular person.
Are you speaking for more people than just yourself, the mystical "we" who think the same way you do again?

So here you are attempting to prove that I, an EQ player, is in a minority of some sort by way of references to completely different games?

Okay then....

Of course I do, I want there to be content for dedicated passionate players who want to be challenged, but I also want there to be content for every type of player, including you. I do not want the game to exclusively cater to try-hard end game raiding fanatics but neither do I want the game to cater exclsuively to casuals either.

Pretty clear I want the game to be for everybody right there no?

But I am, because everyone is.

Everyone who plays EQ, pays for a sub, an expansion or stuff from the store is, and even the F2P folks play a role in at least making the game appear to be slightly more populated than it would be without them.

Do you think the contributions hardcore raiders buying expansions at full price, often higher priced special editions to furnish themselves with time-saving personal or guild ports is completely irrelevant & not helping to support the game?

You really cannot be saying that, it would be utterly ignorant, I think you maybe did not think this section through at all & just spewed knee-jerk bile all over your keyboard, but you are welcome to retract it.

I'm not an expert on MMORPG's, nor would I pretend to be able to give an accurate Autopsy on why those MMORPG failed which makes me curious why you think you are quailified to do so, have you worked in the industry at a high level or have you only ever been a player?

Well, suck it up buttercup because it's the best way I know to address specific points.

Keep having a nice day.
Yours sincerely, Narcissistic No-Life-Nit-Picker The Multi-Quoter.

Its extremally narrow minded to think that no summoning means everything can be kited. Like classic EQ was able to get around this. In classic mobs would root you or nuke you or even shoot you with bows. They had ways to interact with characters aside from melee damage. This could all be implemented with mobs not but its either laziness from the devs or they are so overworked that they can only focus on critical issues like making sure people can log in and play the game.

Just get a hotel room ...

a shadowknight needs no one else. a necro who invests in tradeskills to gear their pet needs none of those. try again.

yes..yes clearly because i only cited one class from that game it means there were not other classes in that game providing the same service. your inexperience in this genre is telling.

and npc's are made more difficult in the usual cheap, lazy way - more damage, more hp. there is a reason why so many TLP die out after POP.

not as many players as you think. the pbase is splintered between here and multiple emulators now because clearly quite a few do not like the direction of the live game at some point. the last time i saw numbers was from 2020 during the height of the pandemic when all mmorpgs were doing gangbusters and even then, eq's numbers were pretty bad. it is literally being supported by krono buying whales right now. that hardly means the game design is solid.

"current group content is destroying raiders?" again your inexperience in this genre continues to show. I did not insinuate any such thing. the returning player who missed an expansion or 3? absolutely

yes, yes you can. and those that you can't due to something being missed in the squish the devs address. again another example of your entirely myopic experience in this genre. I suggest you branch out a bit so you can see both the good and bad that exists in this genre as with such little experience it's going to be hard for anyone to take your opinions seriously.

when an mmorpg fails and closes up shop, the reasons are at that time well documented with data by the game media. the only exceptions have been wildstar and city of heroes - two games that had healthy populations and were in the black month to month and year to year. Wildstar could just be chalked up to NcSoft being NcSoft who have a reputation for making very strange decisions regarding their live games closing profitable properties while letting those that leak cash go on for years. City of Heroes came out of nowhere and the devs are still scratching their heads to this day. Thankfully CoH has a very good, well supported private server community that has been going for nearly 5 years.

again, something a rational adult who can type 'google.com' in their browser should not need to have explained to them.

What has that got to do with EQ not addressing how so many classes are integral to forming a group?

And the point you clearly missed was what has that got to do with forming a group?

You can form a functioning group in most MMO so long as you cover the basic Tank, Healer DPS archetypes, DAOC included. How does any one class's buffs make it any harder to form that archetype based group which will be able to function well enough to do quests & earn XP?

Play past PoP & NPC's are made more difficult in other ways too.

TLP do not in fact die out after PoP, they are decreasing in player population from the moment they launch all the way until they are shut down & merged iwth a live server.

What players mean when they say the servers "die" after PoP is that the TLP recyclers & most Kronolords have a new TLP to go to around then and the casual PUGGING scene dies off right around then as a direct result, raiding guilds carry on as if that population wasn't there to begin with.

I responded to you talking about group content difficulty tp which you then give a completely unrelated response waffling on about EQ player numbers which is not even what we were discussing there, can you not stay on point at all?

You did not insinuate it, you stated it overtly & plainly and you were specifically mentioning currrent era raiders, are you unable to reccollect what you yourself said even when the post where you said it is still on this thread for you to see?

Here, allow me to remind your indignation-addled brain.

You need to actually try and remember the words that come out of your keyboard here, you are making it far too easy to blow apart your counterpoints by using your own words against you.

Why do you feel the need to bring in so many examples from so many non EQ games to try & win an argument about EQ?
It's becoming clear you do so because you do not have a strong enough argument using only EQ frames of reference and worse you're making a conceited attempt to appear superior at every available turn because you consider yourself as having some advantage by being a player of many more MMO than you think I have played.

This is a discussion about EQ, not the entire MMORPG space, but you clearly don't feel you can win by staying on topic or on game, so you are attempting to belittle and demean by claiming some gamer high ground by way of claiming knowledge of more games and thinking that lends you more credence and also calling me myopic because I am trying to stay focused on a discussion about EQ, I've played a whole bunch of MMO too, but I'm not here referencing all of those because they aren't EQ and I think by using them I make my argument stronger like you are attempting to do. By the way, it's not working for you.

I have deviated to addressing some of your tangential points about other games a little but I am not going to to get drawn further into a protracted debate that completely loses sight of the original point by meandering all over the MMORPG-verse just to entertain your notions of superiority.


You said EQ has not been a Group Game for over a Decade & I got you to admit it was still a group game the very next post that you made, maybe I should have stopped there, I had already won at that point.

because it's not a group game. it's a box game. it hasn't been a group game for years. it's a box game. you are encouraged to box for your everyday gameplay. you can find a dozen or more threads on this topic in every single sub forum here. every 'what to do' or 'how do i start' thread in the newbie zone has 'box' as an answer.