Title pretty much What is your opinion on a sorta, permanent classic server? I played the TLP on and off from the start, till mid GoD, and noticed quite a gap in player population from then. Classic up until Velious was very stable, and seemed to always be growing, luclin is when I noticed a small, not exactly much of a concern, drop in player population, after PoP it just started to shrivel up really. As most of us know, lots of people love the classic era, I personally feel a permanent, or well very long lasting Classic server will do good.
I've been asking for this for years but capped at Luclin. The three things that ruined the game for me all started at Planes of Power. * The bazaar killed the market system that the players already created which was a blast (East Commons tunnel on Quellious at the time). I spent half of my time in the tunnel and I took an enameled black mace and turned it into cloaks of flames, AoN, mana stones, and just about everything else you could think of for my characters. And bind on pickup gear is just dumb. *The PoK books made the world super small. *The constant tinkering by the devs with the player classes. Not for any sort of balance issues but because they didn't "like" the character for some reason or another. People made rangers to use bows for example and not to stand toe to toe for the most part and I played my druid because of the versatility for solo play (95 percent of my time in the game). I never had any desire to play a druid as a healer and and I shouldn't have to roll a new character. Planes of Power ruined the game for myself and my four RL friends that played at the same time. Basically, bring back the boats and the hands off approach that made Everquest a great game. One server capped at Luclin before all of the really poor game design choices were made and they'll have a whole slew of players jump on.
*** And I hope they don't do the same sort of stuff with the next EQ game. Having player houses doesn't mean it's a sandbox. A sandbox means that the players are left to create their own in-game systems for things like an auction house and they aren't forced to play a certain way. Even EVE online isn't a sandbox game.
Sadly, EQ Mac has SoL and PoP. One day Sony will see the light. They will release a classic server when they finally run the math and see t will do nothing but make them a lot of money. Then, maybe in 30 years when it's under new management we'll finally get classic-velious everquest remade exactly with modern graphics.
Only the 27th thread on this, but I'll bite again. I've been in and out of the game three times...and I love the old stuff, but also some of the newer races and classes. I would not like to be permanently locked on Luclin or POP, I would just like the time length really long so I could feel like questing and tradeskills were worth it. I'd also like the lower levels to go much slower (hell levels yes!) and be raiding Runneye to upgrade our gear =). Need to get rid of those Newbie quests in the starting cities that weren't really there until (LOY?). Nowadays everyone ignores the entire low end of the game and just grinds till there 50/60/65 depending on where we're at. People will still rush, but if the dwell time is a bit longer and you feel like a L20s or 30s set of gear/tradeskill/quest is worth it, it comes a bit closer to the old days and I think generally you get a different crowd. I think progression servers should be released two at a time though. 1. Just too many people for one server, lots will drop off soon, but the first month is madness. 2. We really do have two different styles...heavy raid/rush feel like they need to "beat the game" give em short time locks....and those who like exploring everywhere and doing other aspects of the game instead of the "efficient xp zone." Neither style is wrong, just different rulesets needed.
I love the idea behind the progression servers. I think they would be much better to run a real time locked progression server where the expansions are added at the same rate they were originally added. This would give players real time to enjoy the sense of accomplishment that EQ used to give.
The major problem with that is that people would quit at the expansion they didn't like. I.e. 90% of the server would leave between SoL and PoP, leaving the rest of the expansions barren for 10 years.
People would also quit when they ran out of things to do. I think people over-state the draw of a classic server. People would come back, and they'd enjoy it for a while, and they'd do all the things they loved; ring war, coldain shawl, PoP progression, but after a time, when this has all been done or when they just get bored with playing thru Luclin for the umpteenth time, they move on.
No server of any kind will please everyone. The question is whether special rule set servers will keep enough gold members happy and playing on them to make the server worth while for SOE and it's hard to know since they have never been done. I personally like the idea of a time locked server with a good 6 months per expansion, but I would also re-sub if they started an original - velious or original - pop server as well.
I disagree. If Sony did it right people would keep playing. I think I said it in another thread, but this is how you keep classic EQ alive. At least two servers, more based on population. 1. Server one is a permanent Classic-Velious server. 2. Server two (three, four, etc.) are Classic-Velious progression servers resetting bi-annually (each era lasting say 6 months with Velious era lasting a year). When server two (three, four, etc.) reset (on different cycles) all characters and work are transferred to server one, not deleted. People that don't get bored can keep what they want and come back when they want to server one. People that crave re-living expansions, racing for server firsts, etc. have the progression server(s).
This sounds silly. You really want a ton of servers resetting every 2 years? At the very most, there only ever needs to be one locked server. Most likely, it will be under populated. That said, it is a good place for new people to start. Instead of having newbie zones on each server, it would be a newbie-friendly server. Then let people transfer off when they inevitably get bored. I have no interest at all in a locked server. It sounds dull. The progression servers are fine as far as I am concerned as they are right now, except having slightly different rulesets for the casual versus raiders would get great. And every once in a while they start fresh ones so people can replay through the game.
This argument has been advanced in the past. The problem is that there just aren't very many genuinely new players in a thirteen year old game. When a new player does show up, why would you want to stick him/her on a server that bears little resemblance to the actual live servers, playing with people who refuse to play on the live servers? From SOE's perspective, it makes a lot more sense to let new players level up quickly, get a reasonable set of gear easily, and connect with the modern playerbase. And that is exactly what SOE has done. As for progression servers, my gut instinct tells me that the whole concept has reached the point of diminishing returns. How many times do people want to create a new character, level up, and kill Derakor the Vindicator? How many times do people want to race to be the first guild on the server to kill the Rathe Council? If SOE opened a new progression server tomorrow, there would be people flocking to it. But I expect the flocks to get smaller and to leave sooner. It's a stale concept.
I think there's still a draw, but there needs to be ample time between them, and the implementation has to be slightly different than the last ones (which takes some dev time of course.). There was enough time between Combine/Sleeper and Fippy/Vulak that people were interested again. That will be the case again, maybe in 2 more years or so.
Personally, for me, I haven't done it enough yet to be "satisfied" or bored of it to the point where I wouldn't want a fresh start and do it all over again. That's me personally. I'm sure there are differing play styles. But I'm the kind of person that could do classic/vanilla/whatever EQ > PoP once a year (preferably it would take longer than that) for an indefinite amount of years to come. But the key is a fresh environment. That time does come when a server gets stale. That's when I prefer it to be merged and refreshed.
" I played the heck out of EQ through Velious with months of actual game time racked up on three characters and I never ran out of things to do or see. I've never seen the Necropolis for example. I spent several hours, for example, trying to figure out how to get into the Rygorr fort with a level 45 druid solo and kill the Chief. It took a while which included over an hour of kiting up and down the coast to finally kill him. Fun stuff like that was in classic EQ. Besides, with the player driven economy in the East Commons tunnel there was always something to do. WTT/WTS Cloak of Flames, Wyrmslayer, Manastone, and AoN. Was I looking for something in particular? No just a good deal that favored me so that I could keep trading up. People that actually run out of things to do (because they don't access all of the game's potential) would probable have more fun in a Theme Park MMO since they always add new "rides" to go on. It was more fun to see how far I could get in dungeons solo or to see what I could do that everyone told me was impossible to do (i.e. solo level 50 melee druid against dark blues). EQ was an exploration sandbox game that felt like a living breathing world until they added in them park stuff like the Bazaar and the teleportation books. Besides, the devs can always add as much content as they like. It isn't about capping the content it's about changing the classic game system with junk like the bazaar. If they had all of the content that is currently in the game, removed BoP and defiant gear type stuff, got rid of the bazaar, got rid of the teleportation books, removed the idiotic "You shall not evade me" nonsense except from some high end bosses, and generally went back to the root game play that made EQ fun then that would be ok.. It isn't about wanting limited content. It's about making sure that the boats work and that the East Commons tunnel drives the economy (for example).
You hit the nail on the head. EverQuest doesn't receive many new players because it's an old game using an outdated engine. However, the new people that join the game have regular live servers. Those can be marked as the "preferred" servers for new players. Whether or not they wanted to play "modern" or "old" EQ would be a choice, clearly they would not be forced onto "classic" servers. So that point of yours is kind of mute. I would venture to guess the vast majority of "new" players though are those that want to relive EverQuest as it was (seeing if it had gone back at all); when they see it's nothing more than WoW now in an outdated graphical engine, they quickly move on (broad, but by that I mean things like - no naked corpse run, quick travel, solo easily via molo, in-game gps, etc.). These are the people a classic and classic-progression server would attract. People that want to play EverQuest without a bunch of WoW and WoW-esque features thrown onto a 10 year old interface. To hit on your second point. There would be a permanent server that never resets. It would simply be locked in Velious. So people that wouldn't want to start over, wouldn't have to (and at SOE's discretion they could xfer off said server to live). Also, no one on progression servers would lose anything, it would all be moved to said permanent server on reset. You severely underestimate how much enjoyment a lot of people get out of competing for server firsts. Diablo 2's ladder system has carried its population for over 10 years. Progression servers are EQ's version of resetting ladders, if Sony would just do it right. I would almost guarantee you, whether you and other modern EQ players like it, that two servers: permanent Velious and progression to Velious servers would be so packed full of people that SOE would have to open up many servers just to compensate. It would not affect live at all. Period. All it would do is give this supposedly non-existent population a chance to play EQ as the remember and loved it. The money it would generate would allow Sony to make live even more content even faster, so in the end it would help the whole community out. It would alienate no-one. If people would jump from live to these servers, that's just further proof about how great they are. Anyways, take care.
I love this idea. I registered on these forums just to say that. My friend and I played EQ classic and wanted to relive the glory days. We heard about the TLP a little too late, basically a month before diablo 3 came out. Despite that it was in PoP, we still had a ton of fun. The whole time we kept saying, "dang I really wish we knew about this when it came out". This time we have been monitoring the forums hoping for a new TLP server to come out so we wouldn't miss it. The idea to have a constant server that reset itself like the Diablo 2 ladder would be amazing. Is Fippy really dead? We're going to be starting back up again next week despite no new server coming, and were hoping to get some groups.
Sure, I won't dispute that there are some people who feel that way. But there are also a lot of people who came back to the progression servers because they never did the content the first time around. When I was on Combine, there were a lot of players in my guild who had never killed the AoW or cleared NToV. I was one of them, though I did a lot of raiding back in the day. I raided that content on Combine, and I raided it again in a progression guild on Test. I might do it again some day. But it won't ever be a novelty again. I've been to all the zones I missed the first time through. I've cleared Vex Thal. I've been elemental flagged. This is what I mean by the point of diminishing returns. As time goes by, the progression servers are going to lose part of their constituency because those folks will have done whatever it was that they always wanted to do. The history of the progression servers shows that things go south fast once GoD opens, because only a small fraction of the constituency is interested in raiding in GoD, OoW, or beyond. There aren't a lot of people who think, "Dang it, I never did get to kill any of those weird looking boss mobs in one of those instanced raids in that zone I can't remember the name of." Is there an ongoing audience for a server where you could start from scratch and kill Derakor the Vindicator once a year, or even once every two years? Maybe, but my gut instinct is that EQ might be good for one more successful progression server cycle, and that's about it. That's just my opinion, not something I'm holding out as gospel truth.
