Once upon a time, in the days of yore, there was a Guide Program....

Nearly a lifetime ago I was a guide, which makes me feel ancient even admitting. Hanging with my gnomies in CS Home, porting about the game without mob agro, fun clickies, and helping the player base. It was really nice to feel like you were contributing back to a game we all love (well, for some it's like, and others a bit like dental surgery, but I digress).

I remember hearing tell that some of the newer TLPs had a /guidehelp feature and I found this neat FAQ: LINK, but this other LINK goes nowhere suggesting the program might not still be running

Daily, and sometimes hourly, we are seeing players complaining about cheaters/botters and other ne'er-do-wells that are removing happiness units en masse. I understand that this game is run by a business and only so much is allocated to police the game, but would not a volunteer army of Guides offer a way to lessen the load for you fine folk and afford you the opportunity to focus on the important things*?

* By "important things" I mean of course to give necros harm touch

While that sounds great in theory how do you ensure that those powers are not abused? I am sure that they are not going to take action against an account based on the word of a volunteer and will need to investigate it themselves. There are a lot of restrictions on what a guide can and can't do these days because their powers can be abused if the person so desires.

Would love to see the guide program rehauled, with guides given more power and independence. The flavor and increase in guides would he worth the abuse that'd come with it.

I asked this in a recent thread about guides and didn't really get an answer: what, in practical terms, can guides do and why are there so few of them?

Guides pretty much have two roles the perform these days (from my memories) first is running a quest and handing out rewards. Depending on which quest they chose they might not be able to advertise it (and depending on their rank they might not be able to advertise it). This is important to remember because there can be quests happening on a server that you don't know about.

The second thing is they can hold roleplay sessions and interact with players though I don't think many do this anymore.

In my opinion the problem comes from a requirement for a certain amount of activity (and reporting it) each week so it can end up feeling like a job due to that. I personally would rather see more flexibility around what is required to potentially attract more players.


As a side note you are not allowed to be a guide on any server where you have a character which includes level 1 alts that might be used for guild recruitment or to explore player based housing. This requirement can be hard for some players.

Personally, I do not expect Guides to dole out punishments and mete out justice, but to explore the backlog of /petitions to see if they have merit and then to raise it up to the proper Dev-type-personage to be handled in a timely manner (I would expect the Guides to have a priority queue when they put in their notes/report thingy and those are the ones the Devs look at first).

e.g.
Player reports that there are boxers living in Siren's Grotto and training people. Guide ports there and hangs for a few, they see what people are reporting and corroborates that this is an issue. They put in a report to a Dev that confirms the /petition's validity, which hopefully brings forth a Dev in a timely manner.

By this point you have the Devs hopefully having their workload cut down because they are responding to /petitions that are substantive.

Importantly, there are more than one set of eyes put on a situation, which hopefully is another way to address the potential for abuse.

Not sure if there are any other ex-guides out there, but the sheer number of /petitions that are silly or weird or just jokes is surprising. Those /petitions can be put to bed with ease, in the same vein as basic questions that people that have played this game for awhile are ready to field.

Seems like a win/win, they drop some of their more time-wastey workload, it costs no money, the player base gets to help shape their own game, and hopefully enough new sheriff's in town will clean up this join for everyone's benefit.

Is there any info on what the quests can consist of and what the rewards can be? I've literally never seen a guide event in the thousandish hours since coming back to the game when TBM was live nor have i heard of anyone talking about it ingame or in the forums.

I feel like if a guide sent me a whisper about a "guide quest" it'd involve some creepy roleplaying in a backalley somewhere and then a foot race through like, depths of darkhallow zones to get a few plat, a biscuit and some level 75 gear. Forget that.

I want to live in an EQ where a guide drop ships into the middle of great divide, sends out a gamewide notice and, spawns a bunch of level 120 undead giants and coldain, have them path toward each other and then if a group kills them they drop raid and group currency. Undead ring war. And this event is repeated on any new picks that spawn as the server rushes to join the fight.

Still a couple of problems with that train of thought.

• We really don't know what information is included in those petitions and there might be some information such as personal or exploit that they don't want people outside of the company accessing.
• Just because they are a guide doesn't mean that their information is anymore valuable then another players.
  • The guide could be friendly with the players and say there was nothing happening
  • The guide could dislike the players and claim there was something going on
  • The guide might not understand all class abilities and confuse something such as CoH or fellowship fire as cheating.
• Devs don't respond to petitions and in fact they are not allowed to deal in customer service issues. From time to time a coder or someone might help with something that a customer service person can't solve.

While we will likely never know the reasons why but they have been slowly reducing the powers of the guide program and removing things that they are allowed to do. I am sure that they have a good reason for removing guides from the petition process and have even gone as far as to remove the ability to change last names.

There is a section of the forums where guides can post events that they are running but I am not sure how often that is used anymore.

As for the quest information that is not supposed to be shared outside of the guide program but in regards to announcements there are two types. One that is announced and they send server wide announcement providing details for those who want to participate and generally those need a senior guide. They normally restrict who can make server wide announcements to prevent disruption on the server. The second type is quests with no announcement at all and players find out about it when they stumble upon and interact with the guide and those players may or may not spread the word.

Right, here's the one for my server: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/guide/index.php?threads/bristlebane-guide-events.5334551/page-11

And the first event i see: "Lace up your running shoes and toss your snorkel in your backpack! You're going to need them! "

DPG needs to rehaul the guide system.

I see Guide run quests at least once a week on FV. Unfortunately, the prizes they are allowed to award don't appeal to me and would just take up a precious bank slot however you can only work with what your boss allows.

Yes, they are quite frequent on Tunare lately. But like you, I no longer need 14 space backpacks - seems I never get in on the good rewards like the turkey drumstick weapon aug lol.

At least now when they do the announce it is on 90% server wide. I had spoken to the guides and explained to them that just doing an announcement in general was messing up the chance for new players or F2P to participate. At that time they explained to me how not all of them have the rights to do system announcements. So maybe my suggestion went somewhere.

My favorite memory of the guide program was how mad they got when they did some arena group vs group fight event, and did not invuln themselves. Zerker hit rampage. Took us a few more mins to clean up the rest of the PC's but the guides were hovering.

They ported us from zone to zone for about 2 hours before they finally gave us our reward for winning.
I think they were angry.

I've had many good interactions with guides. I appreciate their work to make the game a little more interactive. (and the memory above was not bad, it was fun, even if they drug us around a bit because they were mad)

Only way we wil get more guides is if the player base is exponentially increased, imo.
Players who want to be guides are rare
Players who want to be guides and are a good fit are even rarer still.

Used to be a time when EQ had 2-3 GM per server, now we're probably down to that 2-3 for all of the servers.

I am pretty sure it was not Guides, but GM's (actual EQ Employees, but not necessarily Dev's) that were the in-game Players who helped people and so on. In fact, they can still show up in-game to address Petitions (I saw and was helped by one within the past year).

Volunteer Guides, on the other hand, have always been non-EQ employees (not necessarily Dev's) with strict and specific things they can do and / or are expected to do. These days they primarily run Guide events and even have a Forum that is linked from the EQ Forums.

I do, however, think Guides should be allowed to do more than they are allowed to do, or at least expand their options. As it is, the rewards and Events they are allowed to run / activate are repetitive and have been for many years. They could use an expanded options for rewards (to attract more players to their events), more / different events should be developed / allowed and the Titles they hand out as a reward should be Permanent (not temporary).

Example... some of their rewards come with a reward Window where you can chose which item you want (i.e. the colored Bags). How about doing the same with the Shield Ornaments and so forth, so Players don't end up with multiples of the same item?

The food / drink they hand out is antiquated, stat wise. How about new / better and more attractive stat / food & drink?

The Illusion Potions they hand out have a limited number of uses. How about making them unlimited and therefore possible to Key Ring?

The scenarios they run can vary some (i.e. what Trivia Questions are used), but essentially they are always the same scenarios... so how about new guide Events 7 Scenarios that can even take place in an instanced zone that Players can be task Added to to participate (this removes live zones and live zone issues)?

The Guide Characters are not Max Level -- boost them to Max Level, give them all R3 Spells / Discs, Max AA's and also give them current expansion TS Raid Gear all ready!

How about the individual winners of guide Events, as well as the overall the Top 3 Players from the Festival of Might series, being allowed to request a certain item as a reward... such as an items that can only be acquired from Guides, Marcia Attamilgadd, past Expansion Bonus Items, past Beta Reward Items, past Fan Faire Items, past Promotional / Special Items and the like? THIS alone will attract Players to participate more, and even demand more Guide events! This can even be incorporated into a Reward Window to allow Players to chose one (and one only) from said items or category of items.

The highlight of my Everquest career was punching out a guide in The Arena.

A guides level shows how long they have been in the guide program, the higher the level the longer they have been in.

When they run a quest they have the ability to change their name, race and level, levels are dictated by Daybreak and are usually restricted to the level the quests are aimed at.

There are some really good points here

My take: There is room for different types of guides - eg guides who run fun events, guides who help players with minor problems, guides who police cheats. Someone with an interest and aptitude for the first, may well not be great at the last, and vice versa

EQ is a (very!) mature game. Its players include (that I know personally), professors, medics, business leaders; all kinds of professionals - many of whom have been playing for circa 20 years. I think we could trust folks like that to ascertain whether someone was cheating or other fairly serious problems.

We have argued for more GMs for forever and there's no sign it's happening. So how about more guides - guides with a revised range of responsibilities? I'd especially like to see them available thro the different timezones, those of us in Europe and other 'non-core' timezones often seem rather neglected

I have a bridge to sell you as well CHEAP!!!

most players are mature (honest , is another question) and their are a lot of Immature players .. just take a look at your servers /general channel .. and most of those immature players are prolly older people . they just like to bully others or start crap ..

so no, your idea of " I think we could trust folks like that to ascertain whether someone was cheating or other fairly serious problems" I would not trust just random joe who plays EQ to handle internal situations especially if they were to have access to petition tickets that held my private account info ..

I'm sorry to say , I would like to believe everyone is good and trustworthy in the REAL WORLD but realistically they aren't and I've got over 40+ years of life experiences to prove just that ..

you want guides in EQ to hand out quests and rewards fine , im all for that .. but thats it ..

The guide program is made up of volunteer players, the only way to get more guides is for more players to volunteer. Not every guide (player) has the same play time as you do.

If you wish to increase the number of guides in EQ follow the link below.
https://forums.daybreakgames.com/guide/index.php?forums/guide-program-faq-and-application.3/

At this years FoM they were all Level 85.