Business Case Ragefire's primary problem is overpopulation. The consequence of overpopulation is bad/destructive player behavior, which impacts DBG's bottom line since it drives existing and potential customers away. DBG does not have the resources to hire a support staff to police the server. Thus, an alternate solution must be found. I propose that since your instancing technology seems to be working, once the current expansion's raid targets are down, apply that instancing technology to all non-raid zones. Stakeholder Analysis -Progression Racers still get to compete against eachother while the expansion is young. -Hardcore Raiders still get to compete for raid targets. -Hardcore Non-Raiders will have accessible high-level zones and dungeons with classic/by-design levels of competition, not grossly overpopulated boxes of frustration. -All Players will be exposed to less of the vitriol and antisocial behavior caused by overcrowding. -Game Masters will get fewer junk/frustration petitions as kill stealing, training, and other "legal but abusive" behaviors are dramatically reduced. Implementation Using existing design documents, determine a reasonable player cap for each zone. Obviously smaller zones like Befallen will have a lower cap than Greater Faydark. Use this value to drive instancing as it is currently driven in the starter zones. Considerations -Economically, more loot will be added to the game world. Because the expansion cycles are already grossly accelerated, I think this will actually provide a "feel" which is more era-accurate. -There is potential for abuse (skipping instances looking for a specific spawn). To combat this, /pickzone should drop a character at the succor point for the zone, unsummon all pets, and inflicts a debuff which Silences and Pacifies the character for a few minutes (so no casting or attacking). Additionally, /pickzone should not be usable in combat, and should only function if the current player cap has been breached in the zone (these measures may already be in place, I'm not sure). Conclusion Everquest's original design was for hundreds of players, not thousands. While "this is what the community voted for" is as good of a schadenfreude-laden excuse as any to wash your hands of it and walk away, it's also a financially short-sighted one. Daybreak has already been shown as willing to compromise on "this is what you asked for" by instancing newbie zones, but all this accomplished was delaying the problem, not solving it. I believe an implicitly pessimistic conclusion was made based on previous TLPs that most players will quit before they get out of the newbie zones anyway. So far this has been demonstrably untrue. Players don't quit when they hit the newbie zones, they quit when they hit the wall of overpopulation. Your experiment of pushing that wall back has only served to prove that people DO want to pay you to play this game -- as long as there is accessible content. You've got the technology and it appears to work. Instancing is not classic, but we're not here to play classic. We'd be on Project 1999 if we were. Instead We're here to play modern, accessible EQ with all its bells and whistles and QOL improvements, just limited to the zones we grew up with. Your instancing can't do raids? That's fine. Don't do raids. But it can clearly do regular zones -- so please, consider extending it to ALL bottlenecks, not just the earliest one.
Apply load balance instancing to HAte and Fear as well, just don't have Innoruuk/Cazic spawn in them. Yep.
finally a well thought out thread that isn't name-calling or insulting everyone else! I love some of those idea's especially making /pickzone so it's not exploitable.. though I think since the server has about double the amount of people in it it might be good to just have 2 base versions of each dungeon. Ive heard arguments that the loot will flood the world, but there's twice as many people so we do need the loot to be out there and in the market so those who don't do dungeons and make money will be able to equip them.. as we have done in the past. And not have such a hostile and competitive environment. Most of us who played in '99 now have families and jobs and can't sit waiting for camps for hours. Times have changed
It's been requested exactly the same since the system was announced - even if the alt versions are without rare spawns it would be better than the current nonsense.
If there's enough population to require instances of every zone, there's clearly enough population to just open another server. Much, much simpler solution.
The cost is quite marginal. Your proposed solution does nothing for login queues. A second server solves that issue, as well as all your others.
I'm sure Daybreak has considered a second server and also won't take any action until the perfect storm of the holiday weekend + launch is over and they can get more reliable metrics. They'd also have to offer free transfers and set up in preparation for that. Rushing into a two server solution last time resulted in two dead, un-mergable servers. No one wants that to happen again.
If there's not enough people to support a second server, there's no need for two instances of every zone. QED.
If I have to sit in queue for an hour (+ now cause I'm still not in), then we need another server. Not in 2 weeks, now.
I'll say it here as I have stated elsewhere, I think your all forgetting the money economy based on EQ that's outside of the game, i.e. PLAT Farmers. A lot of those boxers will be the future plat farmers on this new server. Each new server is virgin business opportunity for them. I would remove multi questing of epic drops, keep the epic pieces still NO DROP, make the epic drops come from several sources or special quests to reduce or eliminate bottlenecks. Yes have instances for the zones as they do for the lower zones and also do it for the raids as well, remember OLD EQ didn't have instanced raids for several expansions, but I can see the need for it here, if only to keep the elitist guilds from hogging raid events. Every server will have an avalanche of players getting into it at first, a lot of them will be the plat farmers getting ready to conduct business.
Those features would likely be positive on long run. They are implemented in other games like EQ2. It is effective in order to avoid problems which results from overcrowding. As a peak of frequentation is likely to happen for the next few expansions unlocks. Reviewing the system limit to increase the player cap would be positive too.
