Predictions World Firsts / WORLD RECORDS broken (Kunark Edition)

Those players aren't facing attrition at all, then. Go back and look at the thread counts on the TLP forums for the last five years. You'll find just the opposite of attrition, exponential increase in fact.

Maybe you wish they were dying to prove some point, but they aren't, actually.

I feel like teqb is very similar

Your strat killing PD at 51 if not it's still a major part of the race.

Phinny bottleneck was Bloodgill Marauder. They significantly reduce this mobs spawn timer in one of the many changes to make the VP key easier.

Phinny didn't have broken Trak. The change to "Trak" was buffing OOC regen of MoTM mobs. AoS killed Trak at 51 on the second attempt when Trak was at like 75% on engage. Nearly the entire raid was alive when and he would've died even if he started at 100%.

For key hunting sure, but there have been a bunch of changes to spawn rates and timers to make this easier, not really sure which is better. For leveling it was far far worse on Phinny because you had much smaller "camps" and much more competition for EXP mobs.

Crazy even like 3 years after Phinny your ego is still about this.

Nobody in the raid was above 51 on the first Trak kill. None of the Trak teeth we had came from the instanced version. Doing Trak at 51 wasn't even worth because by the time people were leveled UP we already had more Trak teeth then we could use. Bloodgill Marauder was 6-8 hours on Phinny with only 3 Picks and could be instantly charm gated away. It was ultimately the bottleneck on Phinny.

This.100%

But in defense of That's EQ Baby, which essentially is just the latest iteration of the same formula that will of course repeat itself next TLP while adding even more to the mass ...that is simply the easiest way to get the pixels in modern day EQ. So with the entry barrier to being in the "premiere guild" at an all time crater low...from the "I just want my pixels" standpoint it *is* the most rational path to go down. So that is what those people are going to do.

The surrounding reality there being that while instancing alone did it's part to water the once pre-existing perception of the "elite" guild down, split raiding and it's ability to completely negate any and all diminishing return values that can/should come out of zerg recruiting 1/3 of a server pretty much killed off the concept of competition as a whole. Which will also stay dead as long as that no diminishing return variable exists.

I don't even know how you'd fix all that at this point either. Well, for those that aren't just saying that want the possibility of seeing more competition. I guess maybe extend the instanced lockouts to being a guild tag thing (having server wide kill messages name that instead of the specific characters), and with an automatic full duration lockout on everything anytime a character drops a guild tag. Then let ego and human gamer nature run it's much more likely to get ugly course when you literally have to separate people up into different guilds to try and get around that.

That's an interesting idea, of course you would just end up with TEQB I, TEQB II, TEQB III for example and those "sub-guilds" doing character exchanges as needed to suit the raids of each but it would introduce some interesting wrinkles too.

Would give the guild 3x as much bank space as an up-side.

Well yeah, like I said that would be the obvious next step in the attempted extension progression. I'm also sure you would still even see your just happy to be associated Hicks types who would still be perfectly content to come here making those board claims of "I know it was That's EQ Baby that just got that server first kill, but I'm tagged in the guild That's EQ Baby Three with a bunch of their alts that are equal mains to me there. So /flex - that still technically counts me in by association!!!"

Having spent an on and off of almost 2 decades being surrounded by the types of people joining top server guilds, including myself at times....I just don't see it playing out so clean with a lot of others though. Too many extra dividing variable factors that in actual practice can and will present an additional layer of organizational problems. Too much additional potential for the always large amount of different personalities and opposing philosophies simmering in the backround on "what should be happening" to come into play when given more room and open opportunity to do so.

I mean at the point you are literally making separate sub guilds, it also starts leading down a road where it gets more logical for many to do their own thing. Or the appeal to join the A team elsewhere as a primary focus member you aren't feeling like you come off as in sub guild 2 or 3 goes up.

I don't think it can or should be fixed through game mechanic changes. If I were running a guild like TEQB with no real competition, I'd split my guild into two teams for launches and compete against ourselves.

Yea, probably a lot like that.

This is wrong. Trak was working fine and dropped less keys. AoS killed it in like an hour. Motm was added in classic on ragefire. Trak also respawned slower until about mid way through kunark

Also the competition was worse. all the fixes to the ground spawns werent in. AJ was charmable (i think he isnt now). People were looting and deleting/selling the pieces to troll

That just goes back to your initial core truth point that most of the people claiming they want to compete care a whole lot more about the never losing part then they do the actual competition aspect. For most the competition itself is just an associated means to the real end they are after.

As the saying goes - you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Especially in regards to a mostly dead game people are replaying over and over. The OGC/EQ Baby/ect ect model is here to stay, and will be the escalated model used in every TLP going forward. Where you end up with one mass recruit anybody/everybody zerg guild doing all the 'competing".

*Without* changing the way the game mechanics work...you can't have both anymore. Period. The prospects of having too many mouths to adequately feed in one guild and in a timely manner *needs* to be in any outside competition creating equation. Which will never realistically happen in the EQ grander scheme of things while leaving the ability to do split raiding as it is.

The instanced raid content was put in with the specific intent that any number of people could enjoy it. When phinny spawned with obscene numbers of raid guilds? They all got to raid. The fact that you can split raid and get tons of loot is by design - they made it super accessible as a response to a degenerate raid scene which led to heavy quitting early combine/sleeper, heavy hacking on fippy/vulak, and both on ragefire/lockjaw.

It's silly to think this "meta" raid game is here to stay forever. Phinny reshaped the raid landscape and the current zerg mentality is the natural result of it, but something could come along and change that. A server where every raid mob respawns at 6pm pst every single night, resulting in heavy open world racing and a desire to minimize how much loot gets spread. A selo type fast server where killing a mob once gives you all its drops, which leads to no possible desire to repeat for alts/splits. Special artifact item rewards for only the first x people to do something, which makes a zerg that leaves you out undesirable. Servers where every non-city zone is 100% picks with exclusively your guild. I don't think any of this is around the corner, but SOMETHING could be. Selo showed that they are at least open to the idea of a new concept.

I would love to see more servers that are outside the traditional phinny pattern they have repeated so many times now. I hope they are willing to take more risks, and I hope that they will (as they did for Selo) take ideas from the player base, rather than tossing out something of their own invention (e.g. Miragul). Hopefully they can learn from the mistakes and Miragul's results won't simply scare them off from trying other new things in the future.

Some very interesting ideas

All done

Did you beat w/e record you were shooting for?

Quality post. We've got some achievement guys in OGC who have pretty much run the board at this point with Hunters and Conquests and everything else in the late expansions. I've tried a lot of the Hunters myself but it takes a level of patience that I don't have, especially the classic ones that you mentioned. If anyone scoffs at these cheevos, they really are a fun way to get more out of the game than constant raiding or alts.

None of that is going to promote or much less create long term competition

Because here is the thing. What tends to always get glossed over in even the rare idea which might is that outside such paper theory, the more casual and looking for less hardcore approach player those ideas are aimed at appeasing typically are the least interested in "competing" of the bunch. Especially when it comes to any reality that sees their lesser amount of available playtime invested into a potentially wasted effort cause. Since ya know...anyway you try to slice it up it's still Everquest, and a game reality where numbers, superior playtime, and a willingness to take things to at least some extreme that more casual player has no interest in matching will always unavoidably be part of the winning formula in one shape or another.

So basically you don't actually end up with some heavy increase in the amounts of non meta type players willing to compete against the metas. You just end up maybe seeing a couple guilds (with enough people who initially like the "idea" of getting more loot...err competing) peak in at the idea once or twice, and then just permanently bail once they still lose in favor of investing that time in a more visible results group/farming payout. Which then in turn would just end up screwing the meta crowd over by leaving them with some failed gimmicky design that just doesn't offer the same potential blood pumping appeal a good ol fashioned batphone race can create if/when you get at least 2 somewhat equally footing guilds going against each other.

Not that there is anything wrong with any of that, mind you. I've morphed into quite the dirty casual myself who the likes his set kill X mob every week schedule. But you are the one kidding yourself if you think there is common ground concept to be found here that is going to appeal to both sides. Game just isn't designed to be that way

You're not going to get the non-competitive players to compete unless you make competition the only means of acquiring what they want. This is why so many who might have raced ceased doing so once they could be satisfied by instances. Taking instances away and forcing them back into competitive play isn't going to make them compete, it's going to make them quit (or go back to a phinny clone).

The idea is that if you have enough competition desirous folks to fill out multiple full raids, you have the potential with game rule changes to make them WANT to split into separate guilds rather than stay together. There is no reason for TEB or guilds like it to split apart in the phinny+ era. They lose nothing by consolidating under a single tag (at least until banner skips) or mass recruiting, and gain a great deal by having that flexibility and potential longevity if some of their folks quit. If you want competition, there just needs to be something in place such that the first say 72 people who see a 73rd app say "accepting this dude will hurt our pixels" and until then the blobbing will continue.

Nobody ever said anything about taking away instanced raiding. My suggestion was aimed solely at hindering a guild's ability to split raid for additional loot under the same umbrella. Which again is about the only possible way I can even fathom that might swing the surrounding player landscape back into something that creates the type of "competition" that can actually exist in Everquest. Although if you really wanted to up the anti on that and attack the current "zerg trumps all" mindset you could also lock the raid mobs and any loot they drop to the first group/raid to do 10% damage to it.

Of course the trade off to all that means less total raid loot coming in to the game world, and keying people for certain zones obviously becomes a more drawn out process. Not sure that is such a terrible grander scheme thing in it's overall relationship to TLP servers though.