New TLP Servers?

This thread: I want more difficulty in TLPs!

Also this thread: Oh no, I don't want to do content after POP because it's too much work. I much prefer doing the same select few zones to grind to 1-65, when the game is in it's most simplistic and imbalanced state of design, then redo it ad nauseum. But still, I want things harder!

Me: Wut.

I'm thinking you were on break when Aradune launched. The first 3 months where nonstop whining threads. Way worse than Phinny. Not even close. Worse than Ragefire/Lockjaw? I missed most of that as I came back about when Lockjaw launched.

Ah yes - I love those who sling petty insults because not everyone likes to "game" like they do.

Just accept it man - some people like the pre-PoP game for <reasons> that you don't approve of. That should be OK. Those same people would also like small tweaks to the 4-5 expacs of the game they actually enjoy in order to further their enjoyment.

Pearl clutch elsewhere, por favor.

There is absolutely nothing stopping you from setting up somewhere and just grinding.

Personally, I think the tasks/missions are the absolute best part of the 70+ game. I love having something to work on.

So I took a little stroll down memory lane, because while I was there at Aradune's launch (well, day two, cause no one was there day one) I can't accuse people of wearing rose colored glasses without checking my own. Most of the Aradune "whines" were about not being able to log in due to lengthy queues. I dunno that complaining that you have to wait 4 hours to log into a game and being upset about that really falls into the whine category, but sure, let's go with that.

Ragefire/Lockjaw had MONTHS of whining, true whining. Whining about timelines, 3 months is too fast, 6 is too slow. Whining about such and such guild killing a mob out of rotation or stealing their sky day. Whining about needing to open Lockjaw then whining because it was opened. Whining about transfers Complaining that their are too many people on RF then complaining that it is a barren wasteland. Complaining that mobs are too easy then complaining about MoTM. Magebox armies, voting, camp stealing, rollbacks, name stealing, pickzones, crashes, full servers and being unable to log in. They (Okay, we) complained about all of it. Though some of their complaints were just as valid as complaining about not being able to log in.

Pages 392-492 cover roughly the entirety of RF/LJ's classic era. 100 pages in a little over 3 months. If you go back 100 pages from today the posts are from Sep 2019, months before Aradune was even announced.


No one holds a candle to RF/LJ whining. No one even comes close.

He's not wrong though.

There is a clear cognitive dissonance between:

I want EQ to be Harder
I don't want to play the Harder content.

The way that EQ was made harder was through Raiding Mechanics, NPC abilities & Players skills added to the game gradually over the course of many expansions - the expansions you & your ilk reject.
Refusing to accept that is how EQ was made harder & then going on to begin demanding some other form of making the content harder is pretty ridiculous.
Pretty much 99% of "how to make EQ hard again" ideas are badly thought out suggestions that would only add tedium, boredom, annoyance and frustration.

How does a sensible person make EQ hard?

Make it more complex, that's exactly what the developers saw as the best way to continue to challenge the players.

It's that simple and that is the exact thing 99% of TLP recyclers absolutely do not want and that's why they are doing TLP after TLP and then complaining about being bored or the game being too easy.

All of the moaning & complaining is about a situation that is 100% self-inflicted.

What you are asking for is basically a seasonal TLP that cycles from Classic to PoP & each season it is made harder by some means other than all of the things the developers used on the later expansions to do just that. There are only so many ways to make EQ harder but hey if you want to accelerate the boredom hamster-wheel via group and raid targets having:
More AC each season
More HP each season
Faster Runspeed each season
Faster Respawns each season
Less XP each season
More damage each season
Classes have abilities and spells nerfed some each season until they match the original spell & melee tables.

I say, have at it, go bore yourselves to death all you want, but don't you dare go complaining that you were not getting exactly what you asked for.

I disagree with this because I love playing classic through pop content, but also think that it would be cool if there was some actual challenge to it. It's not that I dont like the harder content after that, but the nostalgia that I love this game for are in the first few expansions.

You cannot simply modify older content and somehow retain nostalgia. Once you change it, the old content is fundamentally changed into something that it wasn't previously. Nostaglia = gone.

Adding hp, mitigation, buffs, whatever to old content is just some bandaid to extend content. That's not making it harder. It's just making it more time consuming for the player which doesn't accomplish anything but detriment the casual players.

Players on TLP are playing the game with 20+ years of changes baked in over the 20+ expansions that have been launched and many changes that were in their day made for live servers long before TLP were made & since filtered backwards & altered the player-experience of the game (not XP) in prior expansions a huge amount. These accumulated power/advantage gains are what necessitated MoTM to prevent raid bosses being utterly trivialised.

So undoing/reverting/rewinding the most "power-creep"-inducing changes would make the game "harder" but it would also change the TLP experience substantially, one change was making it so Focus-effects for casters are not in the game until Luclin - and there was significant backlash against this even though it would be exactly what the game would need to make it harder among many other things like reverting spell & melee damage tables to their earlier-era values.

You have to be careful what it is you wish for here, understanding exactly what about the game design makes it boring & not fun and what makes it harder is not immediately obvious unless you have a really strong grasp of how each work.

My, my..you do have rose-tinted glasses on ! Aradune launch was even worse than what you remember. It was hours to log on....THEN getting disconnected not long afterwards and having to try to log back in for a few more hours. Meanwhile, people were getting around the log-in problem by staying in the game AFK. Meanwhile, the "queue" system to let people in would let some people in after a few minutes, while not letting others in after hours of waiting.

I really wish I could have the numbers of people who joined up to play on Aradune and never renewed their subscription after that first month because of the log in issues.

The flip side of this argument is that original EQ classic-->GoD was VERY hard at release. And that all the stuff that you mention that comes from later expansions, currently isn't actually very hard. Very few guilds are struggling to complete any of it. At one point, very few guilds could actually handle the content, access notwithstanding. Now, virtually every guild can. The change comes not due to knowledge or skill but due to changes in gameplay mechanics.

When you have 20 years of player power creep that have almost universally made the game easier across the board, and you balance that with harder hitting mobs and mechanics in new live expansions but not really in older content, that's a problem. Everquest on the TLP's is trivially easy, even with MOTM.

You only have to look at the TLP expansion completion rates to see the effects of all the changes. Look especially at expansions post pop where everyone had access and aoc's weren't needed.

One example, looking at OoW. First real mechanics that used to cause a raid real trouble if screwed up (AMV cures, OMM mask clicks...) On the older TLP's, most guilds did not beat OMM in era. Going back to Combine, only 1 guild beat it. On Fippy, out of 10 active raiding guilds, 4 beat it in era. Only five had even entered Anguish by the time DoN launched. Four more guilds beat OMM out of era, between 2 and 9 months later. The other two raid guilds eventually cleared everything else in Anguish but never beat OMM. On Vulak, afaik only 1 guild beat it in era (and "in era" lasted however long it took for at least one guild to beat it.) There was never a Vulak kills site so if I'm wrong here, someone correct me.

On Phinigel, 18/19 finished OMM in era. Damn near 100%. The 19th guild just missed it, finishing it just a few weeks after DoN launched.

Coirnav, 100% in era.

Mangler, 100% in era.

It wasn't that guilds on Combine, Fippy and Vulak were bad or didn't know what they were doing. The same strats were all over the internet in 2013 that are there today. It wasn't that they were undergeared -- a lot of the guilds that beat it on Phinigel, Coirnav and Mangler are very casual and don't have much current era gear.

Plain and simple, global changes to the game have made the content vastly easier than it used to be, across the board. Massive increased to player DPS (which were already well underway in 2013 when Fippy was in OoW, but have continued and increased since then) combined with massive boosts to player defense/mitigation, makes everything trivial.

Bottom line, it's legitimate to want a much harder version of Everquest classic-->pop without going past pop. In fact, going past pop these days doesn't even solve the problem. Look at Underfoot today, which used to be the second most difficult expansion of all times, only beaten by an untuned Gates of Discord. Prior to Phinigel, you could count on two hands the number of guilds that had beaten Underfoot in era. Now, it's beaten by almost every raid guild that happens to still be around at the time... And the ones that struggle, struggle because they aren't showing up with 54 active raiders, not because the content is hard.

TBL/Mearatas seems to be the first encounter that the current, Phinigel onwards, generation of TLP's have really struggled with. And even then, clearly #'s of players were part of the issue. OGC was calling on everyone they could scrounge up to beat it in era (and I definitely get that, we went through the same thing on Fippy, for a lot longer.)

It only takes new TLP's about five and a half years to get to Mearatas now. If the current trend continues, by the time Aradune and Rizlona make it to TBL, it will be a walk in the park... Maybe we can get to some challenging content in ~7 years or so. I'd like to think at some point the content will be hard.

Nicely thought out and detailed rebuttal post yet it was completely unnecessary as pretty much everything you said about power creep I covered more succinctly only a few posts later.

That statement implies the changes affected everything, which is your post's substance in a nutshell.

I think you are slipping into your old habit of arguing/disagreeing with me just for the sake of it again.

I am not really sure what your response has to do with my post. I said that the queues were bad and didn’t blame people for complaining. I wasn’t really commenting at all to how bad the launch was nor does the bad launch have anything to do with folks ideas that “Aradune is the whiniest TLP of all time.” Also, I never really had many problems logging in, but I was on convalescence at the time and could log on early in the mornings and play all day. If I got kicked off in the evenings I just took a break and usually a nap. The launch wasn’t bad for me, so no, I don’t remember it in a negative light. But again that has nothing to do with the conversation I was having.

LMAO. I was essentially agreeing with you and adding on another reason of why there were a lot of complaints on Aradune. Way to get offended, though, and let the bit fly over your head. Ahh, this forum. Always refreshing.

True. Back in the day our guild on Xegony was taking on targets from the previous expansion most of the time. Only the top guilds were doing current content. Granted, we were more of a family guild but still.

One can make a strong argument that experiencing similar mechanics over the years will make content seem easier than it is. There are only so many mechanics a dev can use before you see a trend and similarities. Once you realize this, the mechanics become "easier" because it's something you've previously experienced before. It becomes muscle memory.

The mechanics from original classic--> GOD were literally brand new. Players didn't have that experience to draw back on. It was something they were literally learning in real time.

Events now just share mechanics from other raids and they are layered differently to be perceived as something new. Running to auras, following emotes, kill add spawns, CCing mechanics, etc is something high end raiders have now done for many, many years. The learning curve is simply too low for us to fail for months on end like back in the day.

Example: Just off quick memory of one of my favorite events: Hatchet the torturer had mechanics which you needed to duck, run away, bring raid boss to specific areas? Sound familiar? TBL had the generals to move around. AOW had duck and back away mechanics. Things in raids now are juts borrowed from past events. It's just a different zone, different emote text, etc. The actual mechanic is unchanged. You honestly think mechanics from an event I still remember even though I haven't raided it since probably 2006 are going to cause me much issue now in 2021? No, of course not. Been there, done that. Give me my loots.

Practice makes perfect. Raiders have had a lot of practice.

While that's true, the power increases often make it so you don't even need to perform the mechanics any more. Example, the simon says event in MPG trials. You can just ignore everything and burn now and finish in a handful of minutes. No mechanics compliance needed. You couldn't do that back in the day, because dps wasn't high enough.

You could easily make TLPs harder by removing all the OP power creep. Even if you just lower the dps, suddenly a lot of things change. Right now in TLP land though you never worry about mezzing, for instance, because it's just so easy to burn things down. I'm not saying EQ would be hard, or that it can be objectively hard relative to other games... but early TLP is nearly mindless. There is room for some strategy...

I hope soon...

...but what does that have to do with modern raids, which was the topic at hand? All I'm saying is recycled mechanics means a lower learning curve for raiders who raided many years. That gives the impression that raids are easy now. A brand new person, without that experience, stepping into modern raids would probably find them hard. The average TLPmiller probably would have an anxiety attack doing Mearatas.