Just going to say it, you are killing the game.

Nothing left to say in this thread. Every horse beaten. Every rock turned. Every person attacked.

Good day!

Last anniversary, I was running a new character through the 5th scavenger hunt, and it really struck me. EoK and RoS combined aren’t half the size of the original Ruins of Kunark. And that was a 6 month development cycle, wasn’t it?

Was it that many more developers then to finish expansions that size in 6 months, or were there two teams working for a year with offset release dates? The scope of the old releases is amazing compared to now.

It really is.

Clearly you have not played the latest expansion. The game is already dead... there are only a handful of live things but it is pretty much nothing but undead mobs.

Pixels aren't content. The sheer volume of zones that are just empty terrain with generic mobs that have level scaled hitpoints and hits, no abilities, is indeed ... bigger, in RoK.

Quests, tasks, missions, items, spells & discs all enormously higher in either of EoK or RoS. Plus all the super most basic content, the mobs just standing around and even the terrain itself has more going on in the newer expansions. Fighting a goblin in EoK isn't the same as fighting a bear in EoK of the same level, or a yeti, or a sarnak, or a chokidai, or a golem, or a spider, or a wurm, or an elemental, or a giant. All of em have something going on that makes them different. Just plain walking around OT isn't the same as walking around Frontier Mountains or Skyfire Mountains or Scorched Woods.

Consider if you "miss" spending literal minutes longer running across the old Eastern Wastes, just you in an open snowfield with maybe a couple mobs somewhere over the horizon. Was that content? Or was the actual content the few quest-relevant locales like ulthorks for otter quest stuff, or that one frozen dwarf to rescue for coldain ring (that lots of people had serious trouble finding because that one valley looked just like any three others that had generic animals that didn't do anything wandering through them)?

Ruins of Kunark expansion was scenic. And virtually devoid of content compared to modern expansions.

I did a lot of exploring back when I started and that was fun then. Now I would rather have something to do while I poke around.

The original RoK was pretty bad. AEing chardok was fun and OS/HS were good zones. But VP and the key quest were horrible and there were only a few dragons and VS to share among way too many guilds. Not to mention how most of the expansion was a big empty wasteland. A lot of people quit during that expansion out of boredom. SoV is what brought people back since there was a lot more to actually do and guilds could divide up based on faction.

I don't understand this thread at all. Even though ToV is one of those easy expansions the game as made huge improvements over the past few years and it's as good as ever.

Well the thread was started in May 2019, when a lot of casuals were complaining about how hard TBL was, especially Smoke Trials and progression. So there may have been merit back then for a thread like this.

But I do agree nowadays, there should be no complaints about the current expansion killing the game. Far more happiness now than back then.

More developers yes.

Also, the zones used WAY less resources for the servers and for player computers.

Those zones are mostly cut and paste bonanzas, with little differentiating most of one zone from the rest of that zone. That isn't costly to make, but doing it now can overload servers with processing overhead.

They could have made EW twice as large, what would that have changed? And we also know there is a cap on how many mobs can be up at once in a zone, we learned that in beta. Making zones even bigger spreads them out even more.

Run through the Karanas, look at all the EMPTY space. Do we really need that?

I don't know how y'all feel but as I said in

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/ideas-for-next-expansion.262646/

I'd much rather have the next expansion be ~20 zones with no quests / collections and just named mobs with associated hunter achievements than another expansion with 5 zones and a bunch of quests on them. Whether that's less work or more work or feasible given the EQ staff I can't say.

lol, they can make 5 new zones and put single new Named in all the old zones you need for hunter for the new expansion that were lore hidden until now for you.

So when I can expect at least one zone to have exp bumped to equate that of ROS Sathir's tomb such that mobs\per level ratio is reasonable?

Make it happen.

Forced questing via the terribad task system sucks.

EDIT: Not a single cent from me to DarkpawBREAKSEQ games until then. I'll check back every now and then to see if they care about restoring the viability of a leveling\gamestyle that was in place for TWO DECADES before the ubers were able to convince them to stick it to the casuals hard.

Almost all of your posts are very sad. You don't seem to like this game very much. Why play? Can I have your stuff when you leave or is it yet another empty threat?

I'm not sad at all. Some of your posts are informative and we have agreed probably more than disagreed. But on this issue it is simple and obvious that efficient leveling is something imposed and forced into questing\missioning via a terrible task system. For the first time in 20 years it is this way.....

Prove me wrong....show me how this isn't the case for the first time in 20 years with EQ.

If everything stayed the same throughout the game... it would be a pretty damn boring game.

We'd still be getting feared by just about every raid event. Running away, only to run back to do some more damage. Run away.. run back. Run away.. run back. Yay. Meh.

The quests and missions are just fine. The quests and missions are not a problem. Even if you can't do all of them "easily", you can still do most of them.

The way we earn exp has changed. You gotta roll with the punches.
There are people in my guild already over 50k AA. I dont know what max is for each class, but you can not tell me that if people can be 115 and max aa in under 2 months that we then have any kind of problem with exp.
You are looking at this from the "glass is half empty" point of view. Rather than "forcing us" to do quests and missions to earn exp, there is a carrot with the bonus of massive exp earned for doing the things you are supposed to do to advance your toon in the first place. If you choose to not do missions as some kind of protest thats on you. An extremely easy route to earn exp exists.
I for one am totally fine with there being a different exp route this year. A little change is good.

Possibly, OR, I am looking at this as "The glass is broken in half and will slice the wrists of people who were just fine with it" for the last 20 years.