Here's a crazy idea...

When all is said and done, the forum trolls will win this thread. They always do.

Either way, I have enjoyed the discussion.

Its clear that nothing will ever change with Everquest, so I am going to stop replying to this thread now.

Keep up the good fight against progress forum trolls!

Your efforts have done wonders for Everquest over the past 17 years!

All ~5,000 EQ gamers left out of the once half million population have you to thank for what Everquest is today.

LOL

You kept repeating yourself, adding absolutely 0 new information or arguments and building on your already bad idea, which he informed you was bad and WHY it was bad. You continue to do this. You have a number of posts in here, and not a single one of them is an addition to your OP. You just keep repeating yourself over and over and over.

So Absor made the smart call of realizing you are not someone that anyone can have a discussion with and stopped posting.

I still cannot get my head around this, what is it with TLP vs. "Live"? It is all EverQuest. Just because you hold some opinion of an expansion or era does not mean that is it for everyone.

Why aren't you asking them to divert resources from EverQuest 2, that must be another thing siphoning resources yeah? Do you have concrete information that Daybreak is losing money making expansions and/or those not playing on TLP are costing Daybreak money, not making them money and vice versa? Is it crazy to think that both play styles have and continue to pay for themselves as they are both not just continuing but expanding?

I know many people that play on regular and not-so-regular servers and enjoy the variety. I know some people despise TLP and some despise live. I know some people that just play to sell . So pay to play what you like.

The vast majority of the people that I have met on Agnarr are either players returning for the 1st time after having quit 10+ years ago or people that have been playing on P99 or other similar servers. The amount of people completely new to EQ all together trying it out for the first time that I've meet on Agnarr is pretty surprising too.

Yes, this TLP business model continues to attract new customers.

My total spent on 5 accounts since Agnarr opened is $29.99. To each his own, I guess.

One year before Wow release i left after making many propositions on the forums, verrant could not care less. They were convinced that their half a millions players were their property and that nobody would come and KS them with a dps race.

Many players shared my issues with the game, and i m quite sure that Blizzard teams read everquest forums daily trying to fix the blatant issues that the game had.

Issues were :

• Viability of some classes, what were druids for in Velious ? Why would a tank be only able to kill one LB ice giant each 6mn and then sit bandaging till next pop -- while my druid could quad blue or even yellow.
• Quality of the quests, almost no quest to get basic equipment, high end quests that needed 100 obscure drops. I mean it would have been so easy to have a quest to kill Mooto or the emperor in crushbone. Not only the kill 10 spiders quests were missing, but clear group quests were missing too (eg 35-40 quest could have been kill the orc shaman and the orc chief). The amount of trash drops with a quest flag on it is just overwhelming. Even the idea to hail all the npcs around was pathetic.

• Artificial lock : keys, quest,flag that required rare mobs. I remember Quillmane atrocity and people figthing for the ancient cyclop.
• Others are detrimental : This was a core issue, and still is. Blizzard answer was to use instances and encounter locking. 18 years after Everquest is still missing encounter locking (pathetic).
• Junk interface : Implied targeting and detrimental on the group window are a minimal requirement in the industry. Implied targeting would save me a lot of "A" keypress. Also the lack of way to perform z axis moves in third person view is detrimental. A target arrow would also improve the game a lot. [any decent mmo offers that]. Note that an interface is there so that your toon perform what you want him to do. If i target a friend and cast a nuke, clearly i want to nuke its opponent ;-)
• Raid interface No global view of the raid really ? --> joke. At least we should be able to select members of the raid to be monitored (50 is too much). [eq2,wow had functionnal raid interfaces]
• Cleric raid game play ? Well my logitech G105 can play a raid cleric -- i m exagerating -- and patch healing is so weird .. yeah cast stop action cast ...
• Locked group content . What a stupid idea, everquest 2 had none if it, you don't need to put lock if you put difficulty. Belive me if you bring ungeared people in top everquest instance you won't even kill the first named. Flags for group content when setting up a group is already non easy. Suicide. [wow,eq2 just removed flags, eq2 had some but only for raid]
• "Competition" : What Blizzard called competition is something like : Time geared 65 wizzie against level 38 necro ... yeah great they did the same for guilds, hard core raiding guild XX would prevent smaller casual guild to raid because the raid content was exclusive (at least agent of change may have fixed that). [wow,eq2 answer were encounter locking] Also Eq2/wow both had trivial loot rules, so a level 65 killing the AC would simply get nothing and no level 65 would farm hill giants either.
• Downtime : for sure we all loved the 10mn med break. This would have been so easy to fix, just make hp/mana regen grow and grow the longer you are out of combat (detail anyone in combat in your raid/group put you in combat). [wow,eq2 answer were out of combat beverage and food]
• Quest chains : failing the last step of a 10 step quest that took you monthes meant starting over, on top you could fail because someone messed up (eg Dwarf escort for the dain ring chain) [eq2/wow used step and failling a step meant simply restarting there.
• Corpse and XP loss. Corpses locked behind locked doors (befallen, TOFS), massive xp penalty. Oh well it would really have been simple to add a npc that would recover your corpse and x for a huge fee (say 1000 k at level 60 and 200 at 30?). It would still had been much cooler to find a cleric or a necro (for summon). They somewhat fixed that by allowing you to keep your stuff, but xp penalty is still here. [eq2 had xp debt (much less of a trauma) and they reduced it further and further, wow had only money penalty with equipment to repair]. Eq2 debt was a great idea since you could get ride of it by no playing.
• Cathing up . This is a disaster in Everquest, How do you catch up when most content is designed for a group (or at least 2-3 people). So people buy and sell PL or get PL by friends.[eq2 and wow both have solo time lines that get you to the last tier with enough equipment to play there]. Instead everquest added a crazy number of AAs that make catching up impossible.

Note that most of those issues could have been fixed back in 2003 a year before Wow came out.

Since it has been reluctantly and very partially done.

The result is that Everquest population is of order 1000 while it could be 100 or more time bigger.

The business model of the manager is 1000 people paying a lot (several account kronos etc ...), so they prefer to make 30x1000=30 0000 rather than 15x 300 000= 4.5 millions ..

Verrant management was fool, they thought they were the best because they were the first.

well you could model a "new" freeport that resembles the TRUE freeport and not that ugly abomination we have now... love all the other new zones... they are very nice... except Nektulos 2.0 that Hollywood scene was pathetic... Nektulos 3.0 is great though

I love how when devs actually post insight into the inner workings of how this game is made and what it takes to keep it running people just ignore it and continue on making demands that aren't feasible.

Dev: Well, we'd love to do that, it just isn't possible.
Randomrisikoposter: NAH MAKE THE GAME JUST DO IT NOW DO IT AND DO WHAT I SAY DO IT ITS EASY

Did everyone forget Vanguard - basically a clone EQ - it was very popular when it came out but again bad engine and code design killed it cause they couldn't even recode simple collision issues - ie walking below the ground etc.. also graphic engine was ahead of its time and people didn't have the machines at the time to run it again poor design

Yep, I was in the beta for Vanguard. I didn't stick around because I knew it was going to fail. I think many people still hold a grudge against Brad for how all that went down.

Not to feed into the forum trolls, but it sounds to me like the game just got a little too hard for you. I get it, you like gear that has +10 HP and +5 STR and is Best in Slot because additional stats and foci complicate things too much for you? You want to auto attack things that don't summon or have ANY mechanics til they die? You think all of the things that make this game fun Past PoP useless and unneeded because YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND THEM and complex game-play (as opposed to mindless repetition) slightly intimidates you. Its nothing to be embarrassed about, but please at least admit it.

Kiting was an accidental development, it was never intended as actual gameplay, and was something that was left in because it wasnt worth fixing. Yet you cite it as a feature that you specifically want. This leads me to side with people on here that say you have no idea what you are talking about. Most of your posts, as someone else in this thread noted, are nothing more than crackpot ideas botched together with "Sad and Lonely" brand Gamer-Glue and I assume you post them because you literally have nothing better to do.

My guess is that you have never actually played much EQ from a raid standpoint and you don't understand how INCREDIBLY boring raids are from Classic - PoP. Most of the time people who cling to Classic - PoP are not raiders. I would suggest that you may be in the minority since MOST players on TLP servers are raiding. Perhaps if your ideas were less about you and more about the average EQ TLP player...They might have more traction.

No need to answer or to defend this assessment. All the proof is in your post.

I wonder if they made a TLP of Vanguard if people would hope on to play it ?

Not enough to matter.

Also, the game never had any expansions - just the Isle of Dawn patch and added a new raid at some point?

They shut it down because their 1 server didn't have enough people on it to even make it worthwhile just to do updates to keep up with their login / authentication systems.

I loved the design of Vanguard, but even I could never stick with it more than a month or two (I didn't try until after they went F2P) due to all the bugs and crashing.

Risiko has been making these types of posts since Ragefire opened. He'll continue until the devs just make a game specifically for him. Hes the epitome of what I'd consider your typical phini player (or I guess agnarr now). Always complaining, never satisfied.

It's an 18 year old game and it shows. The code is extremely old, the devs even admit that some of it is extremely difficult to work with. Even getting what some of us would consider just a simple 'switch of a button' are basically impossible in some cases.

I'll give you an example. On Ragefire, we approached the devs via a PM chain to attempt to get timers lowered for Luclin. They explained exactly why they couldn't do it. Part of it was the time required, part of it was the code available, and finally, the biggest part, which I guess people forget: some changes effect EVERY server.

We eventually got VT respawns basically cut in half, which was better than nothing (we were basically told early on that nothing was probably going to be the case), and it took about a month. The entire time the devs kept constant contact letting us know all the things they were trying and what not.

As one of the devs mentioned earlier, things aren't as simple as just flipping a switch.

Risiko used to have realistic, legitimate comments to add. It is sad to see him devolve into the area of fantastical ideas with no root in reality or the business of it all.

Or he is describing Pantheon...

How do you make a progression server for something that never progressed?

Okay so, couple things to add here...

1. EQ was written in Borland C++. Coming from someone who's been programming for 20 years, I assure you that is a clusterfeck in and of itself. It's kinda why every other patch on TLPs comes with 500 bugs. Young coders these days just can't hang - ESPECIALLY without garbage collection.

2. The 'formula' of EQ is, and always has been, very simple: Force people to group. That's where the entire game draws its appeal from. You can't just 1-man crap to max level - classes need other classes. That was the winning formula, and a large part of why the game lost players to other MMOs later on. The social aspect of EQ was always its true staying power, and that diminished greatly in later expansions. The game simply made you form connections with people out of necessity. You'd think that would be easy enough to replicate, but...I've yet to see a current-era MMO risk it. Grouping in an online game shouldn't be an option - it should be enforced. Otherwise, just play a fkin single player game. Stop giving players the option to be antisocial. I've both been reluctant to leave and compelled to return to games due to the friends I have made.

3. Another addictive aspect was the risk vs. reward. Very few MMOs have any risk these days. EQ really exploited that whole dopamine dealio. You don't really have to make it that crazy, but honestly, exp loss always made sense to me. Especially with rezzes - which again, makes certain classes invaluable.

4. Make a new game, but lose the timesink. Don't change the risk/reward ratio, but stop forcing people to invest 10 hours a day into playing just to progress. If anything, I feel that a better way of doing this would be to turn the heat up - make experience gain higher, but exp loss also greater. Do away with the hours-long camps and instead, just change the dynamics. Replace the time component altogether. Instead of that named mob being on a 6 hour timer, make him a random pop in the zone. Or make a list of conditions that need to be met to pop him. The reality is that barely anyone has eight hours a day to play a video game anymore. Give them the same formula that made EQ such a success, but replace time investment with skill.

5. Daybreak simply does not have the talent or resources to remake this game. They can barely handle the TLP servers they're running. If anything, I would suggest they team up with Brad on Pantheon and merge - although my gut tells me that Pantheon will fail hard much like Vanguard will.

6. Anyone, at any point in time, can create the 'formula' that makes this game so amazing. They just need to market it well and trust the mechanics. People want to socialize in games, and they enjoy forming connections with others. So make an online game where your role actually matters, where the content is too hard to solo, and where the reward matches the risk.

I miss the online games of the 90s and 00s, where working together wasn't merely an option.

Your point of view is interesting but ....

1) With today Dev studio and tools you could redo it with 1/10 of the initial workforce.
2) Force to group, how people do when nobody is around to group with ? -- play at odd time, short play session (no time to group) -- are not in the "main" level range (on phinny 95% of the toons are 60+).
3) Difficulty ... there was never really any if you were grouped with a cleric, Everquest was tough but only for lonely cowboys or people in very small groups. Real difficulty would have been a game with no exp ressurection at all.

I have all kind of ideas, cult classic mmo fans would love that would pull in more rpg players and earn you guys some big bucks.

Perfect for an enterprising indie company such as yourself.

They all revolve around rpg style, eccentric and involved interaction and story telling.

Don't be afraid to lure some big, juicy, gog game/solo rpg fans on to your plate, that may have rarely touched mmo's.