Everything Should be Free Trade on a Free Trade Server

I will never play a server that isn't free trade again. I don't even care about random loot. My original live server when I get on to mess with friends for 20+ years is the only exception. I regret not starting on FB but when it was an option you could only have 1 character.

It's nice to sell a few things to buy that elusive item you can't seem to get. And it always irritated me to group with people that would drop 20kr a pop on loot rights to an item and be full BiS, and barely know what they were doing. Now everyone is at or near BiS so it doesn't matter if they blew thousands of $$ to suck because there is enough skilled players in great gear to make it inconsequential.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the Mischief and Teek servers are popular for both being free trade enabled and random loot. Both mechanics do not conflict with each other and are equally important.

Darkpaw developers are always changing things on TLP servers. As Captain Video has duly noted, they have reduced my bottlenecks over the years and I applaud them for doing that. As of the Teek TLP Lord Bergergule's Crown is far easier to obtain now and it tradeable. This is very good news!

For many of us, the 25th Anniversary of EverQuest is a big deal. We were expecting a new TLP server ruleset with a bit more originality than just copying the Mischief rules. In my opinion, offering Tormax was a mistake because it's more of the same. All Teek gave us was Kunark rolled into the release at launch.

As to why certain things are no trade on a free trade enabled server is puzzling in the absence of any cogent rationale from the devs. Every epic is for sale either via or loot rights on Teek. People are going to get their epics if they have the krono to spend. Making certain items arbitrarily non trade is merely a speed bump for well-heeled players.

Which leads me to this question that nobody has been able to answer: why not just make everything tradeable on a free trade server?

A few years ago, the devs found the time to make newbie food non tradeable. Free tradable newbie food was not going to break EQ. If they have the time to do this, they can certainly find the time to make every epic quest item tradeable. I'm going to do more research on this and find the exact number and name of every non-tradeable epic item.

They did indeed, and it wasn't intuitively obvious to you why? Because it was exploited. There were players who insisted on repeatedly rolling new toons and trading their "newbie food" to their main rather than simply buying food from a vendor, crafting food, using magic food, etc etc etc. This behavior was a burden on the character database, so it was stopped with a change that took 20 seconds to do There is no accounting for what some people will do to get some microscopic advantage in a computer game. I will leave it as a proverbial exercise for the reader why "Backpack" is tradeable, and "Backpack*" is not.

I think you will find that quite a few things exist in-game that were once tradeable, but got flagged as "no trade" somewhere along the line because somebody did something that caused a problem, and that was the simplest solution. Why isn't everything in the game tradeable? Becuse all those annoying things would just happen again, that's why.

But you are still missing the point, you called them free trade servers when Daybreak calls them randomized loot servers and they only mention free trade as the last part of the description.

Not to mention the free trade rules you are complaining about have been in place since 2001 which makes it close to 24 years. As the rules have been around and established for close to a quarter of a century you should already have known exactly what to expect on the server and the devs do not owe you any sort of explanation. At this point in the life cycle they are not arbitrarily making items no trade but filling well established rules.

I am not sure why you expected the random loot or free trade rules of the server to be any different then the existing ones when they didn't say that there would be any changes from the existing servers.

That free food was "exploited" for 20+ years and it didn't destroy the economy or break the game. Some things like free backpacks do make sense to be non-tradeable but that's it as far as I can see. There may be a few others. However, that doesn't explain the arbitrary nature of why some epic quest items are tradeable and others are not.

My point is that the devs do indeed have the time to tinker with flags in the database. What they choose to do is a matter of will. I suspect if they made more of an effort to actually play EQ on TLP servers they would be personally exposed to many of EQ's inexplicable shortcomings and find the resolve to fix them.

Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. EverQuest has a checkered history of nerfs that went too far. Expediency is not good game design.

I appreciate that you are trying to save the developers time by justifying the status quo, but I would prefer to hear it directly from them. A few minutes answering questions on the forums is not going to be the end of the world for Darkpaw. Don't worry, the EQ live community will still get their shiny new expansion every December.

I think what it really comes down to if you think that some epic items need to have the no drop tag removed create a list of items that should have the tag removed and explain why on each of them. But as those items have likely been no trade since the launch of FV you might find a hard time convincing them to make those changes.

You are quibbling. They are are combination of two rulesets: randomized loot and free trade enabled. Both mechanics are just as important.

This is the logical fallacy called appeal to tradition or appeal to improper past practice. The rules never made any sense back then as they were inconsistent and arbitrary. From my understanding, different devs were responsible for different epics and that is the fundamental problem. There was no cohesive design document or unifying principle on how those quest items would be acquired.

EQ devs change things all the time. EverQuest is an evolving product. The EQ of 2024 is completely different than he EQ of 1999 in more ways than just the addition of new expansions.

All I am asking is why are some epic quest items tradeable and some are not.

Can someone give me a plausible answer?

You don't speak for the devs. They can speak for themselves.

They just changed Lord Bergurgle's Crown and made it more available and tradeable. Lord Gimblox's Signet Ring is still non-tradeable and creating toxicity due to it being camped 24/7 and the loot rights being sold. Did the devs break their own rules by changing the rules for Lord Bergurgle?

Now that the devs have done this, they have set a precedent. This shows that they can change any of the "rules" that they wish. All I'm asking for is an explanation of the criteria of why the devs make certain epic quest items tradeable and some not.

I've never played on FV server. I didn't know the details of those rules. I'm not a MMO archeologist. I thought free trade meant free trade. That's a reasonable expectation that most players returning to play a special FREE TRADE 25th EverQuest Anniversary server would have.

That's a good idea and I have been planning to do that using Bobbybick's existing epic items list.