please consider VT key revamp

To whom it may concern,
PLEASE consider making changes to the VT key process (shadows of luclin). The shards are MASSIVELY overcamped, which brings out the very worst in the player population. 3rd party programs, kill-stealing, etc are rampant. There are several potential solutions. Please consider increasing the drop rates (particularly Fungus Grove and Maiden's Eye), instancing the zones, or some (ANY) other improvement. We are on a massively compressed time scheduled on TLPs, and wasting time fighting amongst ourselves just to gain access to the raid content seems absurd to me.
Thank you for your consideration.

Nope. Also, there is no kill-stealing, just dps races.

1 zone and 1 end mob require keying, everything else does not.

If you are going to spend hours raiding as a guild then you can spend a few hours getting your members some keys or why even bother being with a guild in the first place.

what he said ^^
no need to change VT... there needs to be a challenge and it needs to take time... VT is such a candy land

Ya getting the VT key sucks. You know what sucks worse? After you get the VT key, you get to go raid VT for 3 months. Worst endzone in EQ history. If it didn't have a bunch of awesome clicks/toys you use forever it wouldn't even be worth going in there.

It's not a challenge. It's a matter of simply who wants to come in with the bigger force or act more selfishly.

Rizlona has been pretty chill other than a few occurrences, but I totally agree that this key is terrible. Hopefully the devs have learned not to listen to the "everything is fine" crowd at this point, though I doubt it. This and VP key are time sinks, are not fun and could use a do-over.

Honestly, I'm of the personal opinion that the full total key quest should be killing Trak / Emp and you get a Projection that you can hail for the key. I'm aware that I'm going to be blasted by saying that this is too easy, but would make more sense for the TLP servers in general.

With that said, if we're gonna keep the key quest intact out of stubbornness, there's a few that definitely stick out as especially bad:

- Fungus Grove is terrible. There's 8 mobs with a low drop rate. Moving the shard to be a low % drop on any "Shik'nar" would help immensely. Even better would be adding it to a low % drop rate for any mob in the zone.

- Dawnshroud Peaks - This one seems better than it was on Coirnav, not sure if they adjusted the drop rates, however it's still camped quite a bit meaning it should likely be adjusted (more?). My solution would be making the Lucid Shard a zone wide drop so you aren't stuck fighting people over a small cave of low 30 mobs. I finished this key on 13 in ~6 hours.

- Maiden's Eye - I spent 2 shifts of 8 hours to get 13 but 4 of those hours I was only able to get "middle" spawns. Changing this to a % zonewide would help, but if not, at least to any "Goranga's" would be acceptable too. I'm not a fan of just the named dropping it, unless the named spawn quite a bit more frequently. To add insult, it isn't 100% drop off named.

- Scarlet Desert - I'd say this one is probably the one I see most camped early on. Once I got a camp, I didn't consider it terrible. I think the main issue is that people hole up at the castle area and don't forage for the other mobs. Would probably suggest any mob on the plateau area of dropping it. Doing both the castle and other Sun type mobs, I did this one in around 5 hours with 13 characters. Exactly half of my drops were outside of the castle area.

The one that I look at and am like: This one is awesome: Akheva Ruins. It drops from Traps, and from mob spawns. I got this for ~20 characters in like 4 hours max.

With that said, for just 13 characters, I spent close to ~40 hours. I really think this is unacceptable amount of time considering you'd want to gear a whole guild for this, plus you have to add the Emp Key which is probably another 20-30 hours of time I spent.

So, in order to raid VT, I had to put in ~60 hours for 13 characters. Ugh.

well then lets make key pointless to make... in return we add 50% more trash in both VP and VT and make them hit 50% harder and have 100% more hitpoints... since people want "challenge" and not "timesinks", sounds like a fair trade.

Thank you for wasting both your own time writing this response as well as mine for reading it.

If you like VT key the way it is, I have great news! We'll likely see a "fix" many TLPs in the future anyway and your input isn't really required to keep it the same.

For the rest of us though, I do think it's good to point out broken keys/quests like this so that at some point a dev can look and see how many are taking vacations from work to finish a stupid key quest.

sorry but it isn't broken, you being lazy and not wanting to put in the effort, doesn't mean it is broken.
fine you want it changed... but if you want it changed I want the other changes in... your demand isn't worth more than whine, not even if you whine about it

While those saying the quest is not broken are technically correct what everyone should bear in mind when it comes to keys & flagging is that TLP are on accelerated unlock schedules, Luclin was current for 12 months not 12 weeks, so there is a very solid argument to be made for increasing the drop rate in line with that much shorter "current expansion" window, arguably a 4x increase in drop rates for key items from a 12 month expansion is about where it should be.

The other thing that needs to be borne in mind is that on a TLP server there are way more players active in these early expansions than were around on live servers in those eras and that has been confirmed by the devs on a few occasions, this means any open world farming is much more competitive on TLP than it ever was on live - combine that with the shorter window & a toxic environment is created even before you have players DPS racing on spawns. And all of that is before you even weigh up the fact that on TLP there is a far higher concentration of raiding players & raiding guilds than any live servers EVER had..

I am totally against changing key quest & flagging mechanics but with how RNG & EQ can be really cruel at times & the far higher rate of competition for key dropping npcs on TLP I think asking for the drop rates to be increased is a reasonable request.

Well when you are gearing over 2 groups by yourself, yeah its not gonna be great, but if you broke it down per toon you're sitting at about 3hours to key for VT which is more than reasonable for the end game zone in an expansion you spend 12 weeks in (3/2016 hours = 0.14% of the total expansion time).

Lol "worst endzone in EQ history", when NToV is much worse.

Correct me if im wrong, but you also did not have Picks back in the days. So comparing 12 Months with 12 Weeks is slighty off. Have your Guild help you spawn Picks -> Increases Chances to get Shards.

I hate all of the counter arguments that pop up in these threads.

"I did it the hard way back in 1999-200X so you should too!"
"You just want loot given to you?"
"If you want the reward put in the work!"

etc...

This isn't "the old days." There almost nothing "secret" about 20 year old content. When a TLP opens, everyone knows the best zone(s) to level in. They know where every named spawns. They know where every loot drop comes from. There are posts detailing, down to the second, how some rare spawns/PH's work. There's no exploration and seeing things for the first time, no finding something new and keeping it quiet until you get your friends/guild all topped off.

The gatekeeping of some of the "veterans" here on the forums is appalling. So much elitism and toxicity over content that has been nothing but a memory to them for more than a decade.

I remember the exact same explosion when they added in auto-grant AA's, and the elitist gatekeeping about how "I had to earn my 5000 AA's new people shouldn't get it for free." We saw it again when they made Veteran Reward AA's tied to expansions, rather than account time.

Keying/Flagging does NOTHING to slow down content for people with the means and desire. We have seen it with every expansion on normal servers. Guilds that participate in Beta get a peek at what's coming, they prep, the content goes live, they all rush to get there. Sure, Kunark and Luclin have much more of a choke hold, due to RNG and ground spawn timers etc... Once those were removed? PoP was only "limited" due to open world availability. Only BoT/Agnarr had any true keying. GoD flagging didn't slow down guilds from getting into Tacvi and smashing against broken content.

I can't think of a single GOOD reason to force keying/flagging an entire guild on a TLP. Require it for the raid requester for Agents of Change or instanced raid zones post Luclin? Oh, I'm all for that.

The same goes with just zone access. There's no really good reason. All that these progression locked zones do is divide people up. Sorry, you can't group with us because you still haven't beaten some mundane mission out of seven others you've completed.

It's not about being handed things for free. It never was. That's an excuse given by the "I did it so you should have to" crowd. The content should dictate if you belong there or not.

No one needed a key to get into PoFear. No one needed a key to visit Vox or Naggy. Outside of VP, no one needed any keys to get hammered by VS or Trak, Gore, Telk, Sev... No one needed keys in Velious except ST 1.0 dramarama.. Vulak, AoW, Tormax, and NToV beat out ST at almost every turn, aside from Avatar stuff and maybe warder drops.

The content should dictate whether or not you belong somewhere. A few level cap restrictions are just fine.


People wonder why EQ is a dying game (not dead, but dying, yes) and this whole experience is part of it. While live servers have removed many of these requirements, every new expansion follows the same 20-year old blueprint. Brad and the OG Devs would not be proud of what EQ is these days... Heck, just look at how people fondle themselves over the original two expansions vs Luclin and beyond.

Well, I'm starting to ramble. Just tired of the same "better than you" stuff getting replied every time someone makes a post about making keying/flagging less of a chore.

Sorry if it seems like I'm aiming it at Skuz, I'm not. I'm actually in agreement, of sorts, with at least lessening the impact of RNG and farming to gain access. Baby steps are better than listening to people hold on to their egos.

Honestly there is no reason for things to be gated behind key quests for entire guilds. There is no challenge to any of the keying in kunark or luclin etc. It does nothing but waste peoples time. I did both VP and VT and I can say without a doubt both processes were a waste of mine and my guild mates time. We cleared the content inside VP and VT basically as soon as we went in there and started doing the content. Its not that doing the keying isn't possible it is as long as you have time to spare. However for 20+ year old content it makes absolutely no sense to be gate keeping the content even on tlps. Do away with the keying process in these expansions and shorten the expansions by a month. Let people do what they came to the tlp to do the raid content to get loot drops they always wanted to see or do in era. I've never once heard a player say I just can't wait to do the VT or EMP keying process. I have heard them say I can't wait to experience the EMP encounter or farm clickies from VT etc.

wait what? how is it the worst in eq history? NTOV is LOVELY!

Actually it DOES slow down content (for those ppl and others)... else they would be in VT day one, getting endgame loot (for that expansion) annulling the point of the whole expansion outside of 1 zone.

Now they actually HAVE to work on the shards + getting keyed for the emperor + kill him enough time to flag enough people... so NOT instant gratification... which means they actually have to play the game... which is kinda the whole point of a game... to PLAY IT.

NToV isn't even the worst end game raid in history (that's Deathknell, followed by The Void in CotF, followed by Sanctum Somnium in Hot), but it's one that a TLPer complaining about VT would recognize. VP is also very bad.

NToV is a tedious and un-fun raid, it was different back when 3/4 of the bosses weren't perma-rooted and when overall player skill / knowledge / gear was super low (i.e. back in the year 2001), but on every TLP I've done NToV is a tedious snore fest. MoTM is especially poor in this era because it adds nothing to the difficulty of any NToV boss, just makes them take longer, the base HP of the bosses in this era was like 300-500k I believe, arbitrarily multiplying it and adding a damage mitigation buff to them never made a ton of sense. And unlike VT, most NToV bosses have extremely "hit or miss" loot tables, with many items being awful and wasted even on a guild's very first clear of the zone--pretty much every VT boss that dies significantly improves your raid. NToV also will take most guilds longer to clear out than VT when in farm status.

Really?

Luclin 35H 55Mins from launch to completion:
https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...ptive-teb-beat-luclin-in-xx-days-post.273176/

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/thats-eq-baby-to-the-moon.273271/

Velious 12 hrs 53 mins from launch to completion:

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...nishes-velious-in-12-hours-53-minutes.271513/

Kunark:

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/thats-eq-baby-zerg-vp-with-31-people.269794/


Please enlighten me as to how they "actually have to play the game" Or anyone, for that matter, by only going to zones with key parts, specifically to camp those key parts?

If you DON'T have to farm keys or flags to access content, all time outside of raiding can be dedicated to doing whatever you feel like, rather than ego-stroking by dominating limited spawns to keep others away from your phat lewtz.