fixing the raid scene without instancing

This. Forever this.

It really does, most likely. I think a lot of us were under the assumption that it really wasn't too much work to add some expeditions in for it to work.

there was a dev quote a while back that said they didnt think itd be *that* much work. this was well ebfore the server launched when there was alot of discussion about it. it was more of an offhand comment.

but between the devs desire to keep old eq content "competitive" combined with the amount of work, it basically means it aint gonna happen,

Thanks for the responses, Absor.

All I can say is, I hope you have played on these servers. Players can't police themselves, like Aristo hoped in his post. When people use the word "toxic" to describe the atmosphere... it's accurate.

You have to realize they are working with 16 year old coding. The vast majority of their staff do not know how that coding works especially in scripted events as the people who wrote it are gone. This was painfully obvious on Fippy during GM / Dev interventions between TL & Citizen, they had no idea how a lot of the events and mobs worked in ToV/Kael and had trouble fixing or spawning things.

You all did say the same thing about the queue system...

I'm sure instancing is difficult, but the alternative is constant crap-flinging on Ragefire. Lockjaw actually rotates at least, but transfers may even kill that.

I think what Absor was saying is simply that they don't really have the development resources to instance (and here I am talking about expedition instancing, not just multiple copies of the zone) hate/fear/sky and down the road trak, sev, gore, talendor, venril and VP (probably missed something there) as they have more on their plate than just TLP. They have a new campaign due out before too long and live servers cry for their attention too. I think the popularity of this round of TLPs caught them by surprise and the population levels is what has magnified the already existing issues that go along with open zone raiding. I hope they do get the chance to add instancing, I think it would have been there from the beginning if the machines back then could have handled it and they knew all the CS issues it tends to solve, but it is what it is. I do hope they do zone instancing in hate/fear though. Too many people by far that want to kill non raid mobs there for drops to be supported as it is.

The concept is simple. The implementation may not be.

I know that if this was an server, I could put it all together in a matter of a few days (I've had my own for years, since before mobs even existed in it). But as a developer myself, I know that working with open-source code is, sadly, usually much easier than closed-source code. Closed source is usually written by an employee looking for the quickest solution, and even more so if it's contracted out. You're also correct about the code's age.

I was thinking that most (or all) of the expeditions could be done with scripts and DB without touching the compiled code. They have expeditions in recent expansions of the game.. though maybe those people got let go.

It's going to without a doubt. Be it in classic or in Kunark/Velius. They just cant help themselves.

Many people would be happy if you compromised and load-balanced Fear/Hate trash, at the least they'd be able to get some class gear without charm ganking (or at least, they'd be able to /pick away from the known charmgankers). You already have the technology to do that AND prevent main raid mobs (Innoruuk/CT) from spawning in the load balances. You didn't do that for Fear/HAte, despite that it would simply be two more zones to load balance...just two more zones, presumably not much work.

Equally importantly, judging from the comments I saw a few weeks ago at a different stage of the instancing debate, most of the hardcore raiders don't consider planar trash to be "raid mobs". So it's a baffling decision.

Either way, it's a big problem having a producer talking about "casuals" without defining what that means, and utterly failing to address the question of indirect PvP. Not that it matters, as things have to adapt as they evolve, but to at least put it in proper context, was EverQuest designed in 1999 with the idea of players socking, charmganking, training, DPS racing, outrecruiting, etc in order to get their raid mobs? Or did the original 1999 team not realize the lengths people would go to? Or was it somewhere in the middle; that is, it was designed for those things, but for a more spread out population (i.e. less players per server, less raiders as a percentage of those players, etc)?

You got owned by the Dev. Go back under your bridge, troll.

And you cant help yourself from being a forum warrior with an entitlement problem.

Do you know what solves raiding without instancing? More content to raid. Guilds might fight over AoW or NToV, but when you more than triple the amount of available raid targets there's (surprisingly, right?) more to go around.

It's not an entitlement problem. Its a problem with a system that screws the little guy and spoon feeds the worst segment of the EQ community.

As to the second half of your quote, I voted for Velius from the get go. Ive said it multiple times. That ship had sailed though so I tried to make the best of what was left. Forgive me if im a bit let down by these casual developers not being willing to put in the effort to retain a greater portion of their player base.

All of the bad behavior today is pretty standard in many games these days. No one expected this round of servers to be quite this popular, but maybe people wanted to support the new daybreak.

Very few returning players knew what they were getting in to and might not want to remember everquest this way. Some reacted poorly by complaining. Long time players reacted far too strongly to people who wanted to do nothing but complaining in some of the most dramatic ways possible. Some of them reacted poorly by overreacting to complaints by trying to steamroll them, which didnt work too well.

All the poor behavior was highly visible, while all the kind and generous acts pass unnoticed.

A less than perfect solution is still better than no solution though, please keep in mind. (To make an analogy - if someone is starving sure they might prefer a nice 20 oz ribeye & wine, but they're not going to say no to a box of saltines & tap water)

Also, I'm curious what happened between the development of Dragons, Dragons, Dragons and such and now that's made them so much more difficult to do however - there's old quotes that they were done quite rapidly. As well as OMM development stuff that quoted them as easy to make as well.

From a player standpoint it looks like they should be just as easy (if not moreso, since less quantity - no annoying augment flags to deal with) to create for Classic content before scripting got involved in PoP. [Which really only applies to PoP barring some oddballs like the Ring War, Acrylia, etc]

And might I suggest considering even if you can't instance stuff PROPERLY adding some sort of instanced raid that's new content (although it might be reused) as like a 1 zone thing just to throw a bone to people that would like to stick to a schedule? Could recycle loot even or whatever - even make it ridiculously tough - just don't let people that want to schedule their game around their life (instead of vice versa) get left without anything to do for 2-5 months because of the realities of old school content.

Probably only needed for Classic and Kunark and beyond that stuff should be spread out enough for people to naturally spread out like would happen in the old days.

It's an entitlement problem.
It's not screwing the 'little guy' when said 'little guy' sits a home on his sofa and then wonders why he didn't get millions or his title shot with Mayweather. Either join a guild, show up, and participate or stop all the whining about how you didn't get a chance.

Does anyone really compare raiding to winning a million dollars in real life?

I'm not sure what you mean by "long time" players vs "returning". I can only assume "returning" means people who perhaps haven't played since some point in 1999-2003 and "long time" are those who have been here for most of the last 16 years?

Bad analogy is bad - in many of these cases these are people that have trained just as hard and can't schedule it because of their RL. Mayweather doesn't expect 3am phone calls to get a fight in order to maintain his title/etc - he in fact schedules things months in advance.

"Chance" comes from spending an inordinate amount of time in game and sometimes doing shady behavior - to enjoy a 15-20 min encounter. We already "spent the time in the gym" for your Mayweather comparison - but you're trying to say we need to be ready for our call to start on the boxing circuit at any time at any minute with potentially only seconds to get to the ring across town to even compete.

Returning players meaning people who haven't been in the game for years, classic players

Long time players meaning those familiar with what the game had turned in to.

There was a massive amount of unnecessary aggression from long time players towards those who weren't as knowledgeable as them. This was likely coloured by the amount of people pouring on to the boards to demand insignificant stuff.

It was still shocking to see so many who are obviously knowledgeable about the game understand so preciously little about dealing with people in those games. Like, they haven't played in a heavily populated game in a long time.

I only started posting because I was appalled at the amount of people begging for lame stuff like pet name change potions. and the only people standing up for the old ways were needlessly abrasive and aggressive, and wondering why no one would listen to them.

just goofy.

Ah. I was trying to figure out if you were assigning "returning" and "long time" universally to either what's currently called "casual" or "hardcore". I think it's split up - many of the hardcores, for example, either did not play past PoP, or intentionally pretend GoD and beyond don't exist.