fixing the raid scene without instancing

not really since its the expectation of seeing different results that makes one insane, moot point anyhow, though misphrasing the common definition for insanity just made my think the poster heard it somewhere and was ignorant of the actual common definition to begin with which made it hard for me to not discount everything else he wrote in the post, but that's more on me and my own perceptions and biases

touché

Yeah I meant to say insanity, sorry. Posting from phone at work has its hazards, was pretty distracted. Regardless of my bad paraphrasing I think you got what I meant by it.

That being said the point remains: how are they going to reverse course on the CotF/TDS train wreck if it's the exact same team with the same (or less) resources, the TLP distraction and the same overall schedule?

im guessing there will be less focus on the TLPs moving forward, and more on the new content for live.

at some point people really just need to realize the TLPs are what they are now, and no more major changes will be done untill at least after the new campaign is launched. the devs have essentially said as much in this thread without much reading between the lines needed.

and again, i really appreciated the communication, even if i wasnt thrilled with the message.

I'd be wary assuming resources are less - EQN has been dialed back on focus (and money!) for the time being for one major difference since, also the sale was likely already going through then which always leads to a chaotic environment.

And regardless if their TLP and other work are any indicator - besides CS they seem to be doing more with less currently overall. They know people want another HoT or Underfoot level again - and with it being spread over two releases each year, that would be CotF sized.

You seem to acknowledge that CotF sized is what you expect - but when you're talking about it sating your appetite for content half as long, that's actually equivalent to how long it's going to be the current expansion with the new "Campaign" schedule twice a year.

You seem to be setting yourself to complain regardless - when reality is once you keep in mind the new schedule - the likely size they're working on is realistically what you consider perfect. If you get Underfoot twice a year that'll obviously be awesome - but realistically that's a ludicrously high hope.

It takes staff to make content. How many content devs exist now currently? 3? 4? When they had twice that we were getting much more robust expansions, and with the current crew we're not - it's really not an unreasonable extrapolation given we'll never know all their internal workings.

As to what's the "right" amount of content I can't really say, it's too subjective. But I will say that for the vast majority of the live playerbase, CotF/TDS are woefully undersized, especially with the previous precedents of RoF and prior.

Question for devs (if they're still reading this)

What kind of work would it take to change all raid targets to have the exact same spawn timers? I've discussed this at length in several other places, but not since the raid changes in July, which only make this an even better idea as I'll discuss.

Making all raid targets across all expansions spawn at the exact same time would open up raid content to lots more guilds without increasing loot. And since raid targets have been buffed substantially, the risk of one guild fracturing into a dozen smaller raids and continuing to lock down raid targets is minimized.

If guilds can see where other guilds are, and therefore know what's being claimed, they'll be less likely to engage in toxic behavior, such as training, griefing, and hacking.

Example. there are 4 large raid guilds. Spawns are coming in 1 hour. Guild A goes to vox, Guild B goes to Naggy, C to CT, D to Inny. Minimal griefing and training, increased likelihood that the raids are attempted as they were intended, with a real raid force.

Smaller guilds will take advantage of the bigger guilds being elsewhere and get lower priority targets such as phinny, brothers in rathe/sk, DEs in kith, so on.

Example 2: 4 raid guilds, A-C are the same. but guild D wants Naggy. Then they can go and DPS race for naggy. if they want, which would allow another 5th guild to take a shot at Inny.

Doing it across expansions forces raid guilds to prioritize targets and allows expac-back raiding. If I know that those 4 raid guilds are gonna be making bids at Kunark targets, I can slide my guild up to Fear and take out CT.

Example 3: 3 raid guilds. 3 at naggy vox and CT.... no one at inny... Race for inny! Lets get some real competition!

I imagine this could be done "simply"

Remove the variance on spawn timers, its not a good thing. Its just not. Socking is dumb and makes it impossible to plan ahead. Also, if the mobs are on "un-linked" variance, naggy might spawn before vox, and then the naggy guild gets a free attempt and then heads over to vox to contest.

Set all spawn timers to the same time, 23 hours? 19 hours? 27 hours? some weird number so guilds can't force them into a particular time zone (give some love to the euros).

I imagine the only difficult thing would be ensuring that the spawn timer is independent of target death. This would be necessary to keep guilds from staggering the kills in order to spread them out and then go back to monopolizing them.

Its basically a mechanically enforced rotation. No need for GMs or CS.

If you see what their team has done for content thusfar with pretty short timeframes and such recently, it's pretty clear while short on total people - they've got a team that makes alot out of a little. A team of MacGyver's when it comes to EQ1 development.

And you just repeated those expansions as undersized, while not acknowledging the faster schedule. I think it's realistic to expect something sized like those, but twice a year.

What faster schedule?

Underfoot (12/09)
House of Thule (10/10)
Veil of Alaris (11/11)
Rain of Fear (11/12) - t3 & t4 released staggered
Call of the Forsaken (10/13) - t1b, t2a & t2b released staggered
The Darkened Sea (10/14)

They're pretty consistently doing the same thing each year when looking at a timeline of past releases, the only real difference was RoF/CotF being staggered. But in the latter two, we still ended up with significantly less in the same time period once all the tiers were released.

Do you even play on live?

You've not seen Holly's post that they're moving to a twice a year schedule now?

There's going to be a Fall and a Spring Campaign each year now. The old schedule no longer applies.

And I fiddle around on Live a little, not a ton recently.

The *new* schedule for "campaigns" has very little to do with my assertion about CotF/TDS being inadequate expansions.

Also, Holly said they were making campaigns to be about half of a normal expansion, to be released twice a year. When multiple folks immediately asked if that meant half of a CotF/TDS size release or half of what we were accustomed to before with RoF and prior, they gave no additional information other than "details when we have them".

When they announce campaign details we'll know more, but if it's 3-4 zones per release, they're sticking to the CotF/tds model, which is going to further the downward trend.

Likely they're dialing in the numbers before stating officially what the size is - rather than promising the moon and falling short.

If I was a betting man I'd say the target that they're TRYING TO ACHIEVE is that Fall + Spring will be equivalent to Underfoot/RoF - but they're not going to make any official statement on size until they know what's going to get accomplished.

Also, remember we only speak with half of the team when it comes to developing new content - regardless of how much the Devs want or what they're targeting - if the art/assets team doesn't get enough zone geometry done for them they could have content for 100 zones and it doesn't do them any good until there's zones and mobs to populate with their development ideas.

Yes, its slightly worrying that they're not stating yet - but look at what PrathunEQ said in this very thread - paraphrasing because I'm lazy: "We know people were disappointed in size the last few expansions, and we are looking to buck that trend"...

That isn't the words of someone trying to keep expectations of larger than CotF/TDS quashed - that sounds like someone saying "We're trying to impress you guys this time and renew faith - details later"

I'm not worried about the lack of info, they always wait to announce that kind of thing.

That being said, the last time they said "we hear you" in response to player frustration about the shoddiness of CotF, they gave us TDS, so I'd say we have a right to be skeptical.

I wasn't around during the prep for TDS, so I can't fairly comment on that precedent - the team changes since then includes a change of leadership at top though, and they're not mid-transition either. So there are certainly mitigating factors that make that precedent less worrying than it normally would be.

I wouldn't be surprised if they start rehiring people they let go last spring with all those new subs that came with the tlp.Maybe they even have started that already.And often you get an announcement by late august-early september about what use to be call expansion but is now call campaign.So don't give up hope that they deliver more this fall then what u got use to recently.Of course that's just my guess.

Do raids even need fixing? A huge part of the problem is game imbalance at that point. And it doesn't start with raiding.

Make the game a bit more difficult, like it used to be, ensure that multi-boxing is the exception rather than the norm, like it used to be, and make mages on par with other classes, like they used to be... That would remove a lot of contention from all kind of content, from lvl 20 upward.

I understand it would completelly shift the server's equilibrium but hell, we played it back then, we would enjoy it every bit as much now.
Plus it is my understanding that a lot of this high level content is farmed, although through legal means, for purposes that goes beyond playing on time locked progression servers. I don't think that is something you want to encourage. Why not Make a special kind of Kronos used only to play on TLPs?

Your suggestions would only work if everyone played EverQuest at the same time. People from all over the world are on these servers with North American, European and Asian guilds all making their mark with different times for when they raid mobs. Making it so that all of the raid targets spawn at 8PM PST every single day might be great for North American players but make that content complete inaccessible to the European and Asian players. The current system at least allows those guilds a shot at the mobs if it happens to pop when they are raiding.

Maestro's suggestion isn't to have it be "24 hours" on all the spawns, although when he fleshed it out it was quite some time ago (a couple months ago).

The idea was that, after any raid mob died (excluding short-timer ones like Naggy), a timer for X hours starts (where X would be something like 19 hours, so there's movement throughout the day). After that timer expires, all raid mobs respawn, regardless of when or if they died.

Well right now I'm operating under the assumption that all targets will eventually get the same treatment as the classic dragons. Buffed to be more difficult and reduced timers.

Does this sound like a stupid idea though? We kind of all dismissed it because instancing was better, but if they're not going to instance, this would increase access to content and would certainly make xpac back raiding more realistic of an opportunity for guilds who want to raid and are willing to do everything that raiding requires except the DPS race and grief show of current TLP raiding.

The issue I see with it is that all the targets die in a very short window, then there's nothing to do for a large gap of time in the level-capped range. If the popping lands at 3AM, there's potentially no reason for level capped people to even log on that day.

That's also scripting work, which they seem to want to avoid right now. Not just scripting work, but cross-zone scripting work. We don't even know if the classic-ish zones are set up to support cross-zone scripting like newer ones.