fixing the raid scene without instancing

I know it's a long shot, but - what if, instead of locking people out of the boss fights or being able to kill them, you lock them out of the loot? If they do any damage to the boss, it counts if the boss dies. Then they cannot loot for 3 days, 5 days, whatever you find fair to make sure there's enough raid boss to go around on a server with 4x the population that it should have.

If instancing isn't feasible, maybe a loot lockout could be.

PoP = enough content
TSS = enough content
LDoN = enough content

There, I said it. May be able to argue the content needed to be aimed more at XXX or YYY, but these expansions had enough (yes LDoN sorta cheated).

PS - I'm tempted to add DoDH. It was a damn good expansion. I think it was pretty unique that, of all of the above expansions, it had the exactly the right amount of content for it's target audiences for the time period it was fresh - and that content rocked.

DoDh and GoD had enough content, perhaps even Omens of War. I would take off LDoN though, because its the exact same content just recycled as "new". But then again, i hated LDon(And being forced to do them on every new character for a dodge aug >.<)

I loved LDoN, but only because you could get a group instantly 24/7.

I think DoDH was my favorite expansion because a lot of the hard modes of missions were challenging, but do-able if tried enough or tried to do it different then normal. I don't know how much that would fly today though with how much MMO players have changed though. Hardmode is just not viable like that anymore.

Reducing the respawn timers on raid mobs is not a solution. A major part of the raiding mindset is that content must be meaningful. Making these mobs more common directly reduces their value, just like anything else.

Besides that, a top raiding guild will always try to lock down all the content they can, precisely because this is what makes them a top raiding guild. Regardless of what anyone thinks about this, these people are competitive and they want to be the best, and the way to be the best in the current environment is to lock down content.

I would rather have the raid mobs respawn once per week than once every day. Even better if it's seven days and instanced.

The prime benefit of instancing for raid guilds is we could actually do some impressive stuff. Without worrying about winning a DPS race, CCing trains and the other assorted raid game nonsense. We could instead "be the best" by dropping these revamped dragons with the smallest or fastest force and EQ could return to the ideal of small numbers of truly talented players getting the job done and not massive 72 man raids designed to out dps other massive guilds.

But who am I kidding? I've got to get back to my new six box.

i was only interested in instancing/expeditions for one thing, and it wasn't for timing convencience. if the boss comes up at 3 am and i miss him, that's my fault.

like a lot of others i used to be in game design, i made things pretty, i avoided programming like the plague because the butterfly effect always drove me nuts... yeah i know there's a lot work involved in changing minor things.

sure you could increase loot drops and change spawn times again... but that wil not fix the issues on ragefire. it would only be a better bene for those who are driving people to quit.

the problem, and the reason i personally wanted instancing, is the certain players who are asshats. i'm a hardcore player, level 49, letting my 50 come and go... why? because unless i want to join TL, apok or one of the others i wont see raiding.

trying to gear up in hate and fear on ragefire is a nightmare of ksing/mob charming/memblur/mage bots/mage armies/training and other asshattery blocking the gearing, nevermind the regular areas(i've lost count of all the bots, solo mages/etc and and armies i've seen camping). make it so i and others can do stuff without dealing with all the . i'm not even going to do more than mention the mass suspensions for the cheating 3rd party software.

yeah... working as intended... it's all sunshine and lollipops and exactly the way the "raiders" want it. i'd rather be considered a filthy casual, than to be the asshats required to be a raider thanks.

can't do the programming changes? then hire GMs for the server that we're paying for and restore the PnP. just making KS against the rules again would be a huge step. i'm tired of being anywhere on the server and seeing a mage waltz in and take mobs i've spent hours camping for a drop i need, because as a shammie definitely cannot out dps him.

WOW..

Thank you Prathus for coming to the thread and letting us know what the real problems are. And please get some really cool stuff for live. I have been here because I am waiting on the next expansion before I spend my hard earned cash to catch up on expansions.

Again thank you for explaining things.

Correction it was Absor... again thank you for taking the time to answer.. Maybe it is something that can be worked on for the next TLP or after the next expansion on live comes out.

The big problem is that you split the population, unless you allow the "legends players" to play on the regular server, with a GM queue of their own, and other perks...

Not spending another dime until I see something to do (A REAL EXPANSION) or the ability to raid on TLP without joining the griefers.
Meanwhile, liquidating all my inventory on all servers and converting to Kronos.
Best of luck to the developers, unless they find a way to make us something to do, the whole game might die within a year. All due to TLP...

Bye!

I think there is a bit of a misvaluing of instanced raid content.

On combine, we didn't really know any better.

On fippy, we should have known but it was too resource intensive, and the server suffered

Now on rage, we knew better, but its still "too resource intensive" and the server is wrecked for it.

The only way "too resource intensive" matters even a little is if you think there won't be another set of TLPs.

Maybe instancing classic/Kunark would be too much for one round of TLP, but certainly not 2 or 3?

The dev team can take their time with it to further reduce costs. I have maintained since the start, I'm back and paying at the mere announcement of instancing. Even if its expac back starting 3 months after kunark. I'm patient. All you have to do is tell me its coming.

The best part is, even if its too late for this round of TLP, its not wild to assume there will be TLP 4 and maybe even TLP 5. If instancing is done now, it can just be switched on for later TLPs with minimal or no extra effort, and those servers can let us see what a non-toxic everquest is like

that wont work hahaha, now youve got bards perma kiting all the nameds

If mobs are spawning more frequently it forces them to spend more time if they wish to lock down all of the content which decreases their ability actually be able to lock down that content and increases the availability of the content to others. You would still have open world raiding so there would still be there would still be competition to get to the mob first. Yes it might make the loots "less valuable" but with a server as populated as these ones are I don't think that's an effect that will be that noticed since there will still be far more people hoping to get specific items off of those mobs than there are dropping.

Increasing the spawn timers to directly correlate to faster time in each expansion era is not a big deal, and id argue was a sensible change. We level faster, we move thru each era faster, the more limited raid content should reflect that as well. It addressed what was even more content rationing on TLP than the game was designed for with the original servers.

It also fills a players need to acquire endgame loot, while some players will lock down content and let things rot to avoid additional competition, the majority of players really have no interest is wasting their time doing that, which means more raid targets go uncontested by those on top so they can focus on the content they care about more.

The Hans Gruber solution to endgame raiding is likely making all the raid loot No Drop for everyone. No one would be thrilled by it, it would remove a lot of incentive to perma farm the content, and no raid wants to stand around holding a loot window open waiting to sell loot rights at 3am in the morning. disabling the ability to Multi quest raid and epic content would go a long way in preventing that abuse as well.

This will help, should give a week or 2 notice, and make the change, retroactive.
Also, add the items coming from the camps causing the most issues (Efreeti, AM, Frenzy, etc etc).
Make all that nicer gear no drop

I for one never felt it was simple, nor do I necessarily think it is even worthwhile time investment for every single raid target, as I like an element of open world raiding. If you were to ever decide to instance Classic raid content I would suggest starting small with the snowflakes where it makes the most sense and make the content scale in difficulty to make it viable additional content for live servers as well. Hate/Fear are already going to get their own upgrades over time, perhaps now is the time to look at a repolish using existing maps, mobs, loot as a roadmap and making those zones relevantly difficult again for existing and future TLP servers and scaling in difficulty based on level to reflect harder difficulties, again all features that could be given to Live servers as well.

Ultimately challenging raid content in Hate/Fear/Sky and possibly a harder Veeshan's Peak, Plane of Growth and Mischief absent the need to deal with negative player behavior should be sufficient organized large group activity, especially if lockout timers and loot drop rates can be tuned to realistically require a 54 man force to spend the entirety of its time in era to gain all the loot. Loot pinatas can be fun but they don't keep you running on the loot treadmill long, make the content challenging.

Triggered spawns of bottlenecks of open world raid targets seems reasonable so long as their is some "time intensive" element to doing so, not just hail an NPC to spawn a mob. Imagine if you needed 9 Blue Diamonds, 9 Jacinths, 9 Diamonds, 9 Black Sapphires to do so for example for just 1 step. What if a quest NPC you need to do a turn in to only spawns for a short window after the raid target has been killed.

With all due respect sir, is the current team in place pretty much the same size as the team/resources were for the last 2, woefully inadequate expansions? If so, how exactly will there be a course correction, short of massive cut corners (hi hails, zones where the merc/part/hero can be done in a couple hours flat and staggered releases), especially with TLP distracting things?

Underfoot (12/09) - 13 zones - 19 raids
House of Thule (10/10) - 13 zones - 18 raids
Veil of Alaris (11/11) - 12 zones - 14 raids
Rain of Fear (11/12) - 9 zones - 13 raids (This is missing the 5 later zones right? Pos, chelsith, and heartx3?)
Call of the Forsaken (10/13) - 7* zones - 11 raids - also staggered into *4* releases
The Darkened Sea (10/14) - 8 zones - 7 raids (2x being "one offs")

The above is glaring. Not to mention if you compare the quality of the zones in question, RoF and prior era zones had infinitely more content in each, content that wasn't dominated by hails or instance hopping, and took players time to accomplish.

A common definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. What is being done differently with future content to avoid the same results? Yes folks will always complain it's not enough, but the HoT/RoF to CotF/TDS drop off is way too glaring for anyone to ignore.

That would be "insanity" not "stupidity" fyi, stupidity would be slow to learn

However in this case, they are synonymous.