Mischief/Thornblade rulesets were good start tweak new TLP using what worked

The free trade gear was amazing and it was really fun to be able to hand down gear to alts, it made me want to make and play alts and fill all 8 slots on my account.

What I lost after the 1st 30 days on each expansion was that feeling of accomplishment when you work hard to gear up your main character as the random gear drop rate increased the amount of gear dropping and available in the market so cheap and so fast, mains and 1st alt were geared up pretty much with BiS gear way too fast.

I think if Devs went back to the non random drop ruleset but kept the free trade on most of the gear like a FV server, kept the rest of the ruleset the same and then threw in something really cool like opening up all races to play all classes, it would be a really fun and amazing server concept try and you still would get an accelerated drop rate for gear, but very much reduced from the current Mischief and Thornblade rate.

I would also stop the ability to transfer back and forth between servers until at least after PoP as that messed up the economy on each server.

Btw the changes on keying across the expansions up to PoP were really great and improved the QoL of most of the player population because it took away the ability of people to block progression and then sell keying.

With all the recent TLPs launched, its pretty evident what is working and there really is not much more that can be tweaked to draw and keep people to stay and play EQ.

Without the random drops you'd just have farmers locking down all the "good" items. Perhaps the solution to your problem would be to just decrease the loot back to 1x instead of 2-3x but keep the randomness?

Pretty much this. Just remove the loot pinata and make it drop normal amounts of loot but still random. May need to fine tune the mobs that are on the same loot table but that would be a case by case basis.

I don't know if all classes all races available in classic would be a good thing or not, probably depends on how hard it is and what unforeseen issues could arise.

100% true, but have we reached the point we just don't want actual EverQuest now? Farmers have been a reality since '99, yet players have been enjoying the game despite that for decades. Random loot felt like a fan-fiction version of the game.

If farmers are such a pain we need to radically modify a core component of the game, let's just do a PvP server instead. Random loot is just an attempt to circumvent them, so why not take it a step further and just go right through them?

PvP would be a dead server and farmers would have no reason to start on it.

2 birds with 1 stone!

Sounds like a perfect server for those who hate boxers and farmers

They could keep free trade and random, just remove the 4x extra loot. Tighten up the buckets some and have each mob capped at the same amount of loot it would normally drop.

Last year's server, now featuring less loot! It's not a great sales point.

Well there was complaints about the amount of loot on live servers when they decided to try increasing the drops on raids throughout the year.

Would be fine it they removed Truebox.

If you look up Truebox in the dictionary it will define it as- Aids.

Didn't stop them with ToL or recent expansions. Last year's expac, but with vampires and the sister of goro.

Those are the kind of people who would complain if you gave them a Gold ingot for free - because it is too heavy.
Or complain that the sun is too bright after it rained for a week.

I personally think the amount of loot on live raids is stupid and pointless, especially considering you can pretty much gear yourself entirely without needing to loot a single thing from a chest in thanks to the ridiculous amounts of raid currency we now also get. It really diminishes the perceived value of acquiring raid loot. The days of being excited to finally get the item you wanted are long gone. The days of entitlement and expectation of complete gear overhaul within a few months is the new norm.

I prefer my raids to not feel like a broken vending machine. But that's just me.

First off, random had nothing to do with number of drops. Secondly, the drop rate was due to expansion time frames and potential for adverse effects from random to make it even harder to farm an item due to increased pool size. In other words, no - Mischief is just right (minus PoP being too long...). If you want things to take longer, then slow yourself down.

Maybe there is a bit too much loot, guild I was in was still putting it on new apps even towards the end of the expansion though so despite the large loot volume of ToV/CoV most of it was finding good homes, though plenty was going to alts too.

The move to a Chest loot Tier 1, crafted loot tier 2 model probably exacerbated the excess.

Tuning down the chest loot (tier 1) multipliers but keeping them or raising them a little for ores (tier 2) might be one solution.

Personally I hope they never repeat Mischief again, just like I hope to never see Aradune again. But if it is going to be used as a baseline, I would like to see a change.

People with bad opinions have always demanded devs to make their game easier. It's the #1 reason for MMO decline.

Part of what made EQ so addictive was planning for and working towards your character's next improvement. Levels, spells, gear, AA etc. People who want tons of welfare loot and defiant armor cheapen the game, and they probably don't even realize it.

In a guild that's been on live forever, the T1 loot is largely alt trash, with a few exceptions, since day one and continues to be. Most mains realize there is way more than enough time and loot to acquire full set of ores for T2 by summer time and if you really want to be patient, you can spend literally 0 dkp each year and be fully BIS for next expansion. Also, by the time summer arrives, you're going to have constant alt loot and it just destroys the value of raid loot.

For a majority of guilds, T1 loot should simply not exist. It should just be replaced immediately with T2 ores and the entire chest be ores + spell runes.

I agree with you, up to a point, the feeling of accomplishment is diminished if anything is gained too easily or too quickly, the difficulty is finding the fulcrum or balancing point where it is not too much effort, time or overall grind to where the frustration outweighs any eventual payoff.

Really when it boils down it its about managing the amount of dopamine hit you get from each "win".

If I almost sound like a scientist describing rats in a cage.........I probably am, though I'm no scientist.