The new time-locked progression server

I understood just fine, the problem was the logic was faulty and laughable.

One dominant guild will take everything and GM forced sharing just makes everyone involved bored and all involved lose members. That's how classic Everquest works and absolutely nothing will ever be done to change that, unless you are just dreaming out loud, in which case that's okay as long as you preface it with "this will never happen, but wouldn't it be nice if..."

Let's look at these strawmen you mention. If all they want to do is raid because that is the only thing worth doing, why aren't they joining the raid guild instead of quitting? Nobody is stopping them from joining whatever guild is in control. Where were our thousands of applicants? You act as though the top guild is some sort of secret society that requires a password and a complex handshake to join. EoE was not a pre-formed guild built to race to the end from day 1 - we were formed from players on Vulak, when the server was wide open for the taking due to the relative incompetence/indifference of the early guilds.

Now obviously, you are going to say 'they didn't have the play time or weren't good enough for a guild like EoE'. If people joined prog expecting to be part of the #1 guild, but didn't actually have the play time or game knowledge to make it possible to join such a guild - WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? You seem to be saying that progression was populated by thousands of deluded morons that thought they could raid top end content without playing a lot. Well, duh? It sounds to me like nothing of value was lost.

Point is, you contradict yourself by saying instancing sucks and classic EQ is the best yada yada.. but then you say that one guild dominating everything ruins it - but that IS Classic Everquest, so which one is it? Do what it takes to join that one guild or stop complaining. That's what I did. I couldn't sustain that level of play, sure, so I took a break and now I'm back. (and in the era I actually wanted to play in the first place so.. win-win)

Anyway, the odds of classic eq getting any sort of instancing/lockout/whatever is too remote to bother discussing - and yet it gets brought up, over and over. We've seen the same ideas recycled for over a decade. I should know, because 13 or so years ago I used to post about how raid mobs could have fast respawns but lock players out from killing them more than once. (we'd have split into 10 raids of alts and killed Nagafen all week long, so there's a rather obvious flaw there) Your 'new' idea of self-progression? Yep, heard it all before. There's probably 20 threads with the same idea.

I know the way classic EverQuest worked, and I was in EoE, you just are having trouble understanding that yes, a bunch of 'morons' thought they'd be able to raid too. Yes that WAS Classic EQ, when top guild domination was a thing you had to get over, but that doesn't negate anything I posted. Population dropped because the game wasn't fun. Even if every single person that joined thought into it that they'd never raid, they'd still join most likely, and leave at the same time when they had nothing left to do. What you said is true, and in no way contradicts anything I said. What you mean is the majority of people joining have faulty and laughable logic, which may very well be the case.

People who didn't actually have the time to play in a raid guild, yet for some reason joined the server thinking they were going to be top end raiders tend to turn into the bitter, angry types that come to forums crying about uber guilds and needing a new round of progression so the same thing can happen again and again.

Morons may have been a bit harsh. Delusional, certainly. Is out our fault that they had unrealistic expectations?

If I didn't have the time to make the cut in a top tier guild, I'd just focus on group content. Second tier raid guilds are second tier for a reason, and it's not The Man.

I agree with what Krizem said in his post. The part I quoted especially so. There needs to be a market for people with the same caps. I also think there needs to be support for FTP and Silver members of some sort. The game already caps by expansion, but could SOE set it up so that the cap is determined by membership level as well (sure they can, but I mean for a reasonable amount of development time). For example, Gold would have access to "current" content (whatever is unlocked), Silver is the expansion before that, and FTP is the expansion before whatever Silver has. But there would always be a vibrant community. I would even think it would be great to cap FTP to PoP or some such expansion, then there would always be a population in that level range, and Gold members could still play alts with FTP in those zones.

A large part of the fun for me was getting drops that were usable. I think the most common question on a regular server is "Is this any good?" more often than not the answer is trash/tribute/vendor it. It was fun to do old world trade-skills again and I have to admit it was a sad day for me when research was pretty much removed from the game.
Kreugen was, and is still right. If you are a casual player then you don't belong on progression. I chose not to believe that for over a year.
Kokkusho is right in that the game wasn't fun on Vulak. The dominant guild were not the problem though, they were allowed to do everything they did.
I cancelled my sub (as did many of the people I met) and moved on to another company but Vox pulled me back and I've had a good time on that server.

To start a new progression server would without doubt pull in alot of casual players and I'm sure it would be no different than Vulak and Fippy in that the /petitions would start flying again. Casual players would receive their hardcore education on what progression truly means.
One good thing would be that the competitive players would have a great time getting to do all the non instanced content again and I'm sure many competitives that quit due to instancing would come back for another round.
It would also mean that many competitives that are still on progression would reroll for the fun which would pull players from the current tlp servers. That would mean that guild recruitment will be pretty much impossible on the old tlp's and for many it would make the time invested on both servers a sad waste of time.
However, I see TL folded on Fippy. Hopefully that doesn't mean a bunch of cancelled subs because that would be bad for all servers and everybody who enjoys the game. If that's the case and SOE are losing subs due to the servers becoming "boring" then I'd say open a new TLP every time the current one hits PoP. Don't expect things to be different though, you might hate on EoE but it'll be same thing, different name on a new server.

That's generally true, but it is also one of the major reasons why EQ1 collapsed as soon as legitimate competing products started to hit the market. It was a really stupid game design that put far too much emphasis on designing content for about five percent of the playerbase. And that five percent was selected not by skill, but by a willingness to engage in time-intensive raiding that required a fair amount of discipline and resistance to tedium. Even a lot of high end raiders hated what they had to do. By the time of the collapse, the "casual" community (to use that term in its broadest sense) was resentful of the high end raiders, and vice versa. This was the fault of the game design, not the high end raiders or the "casuals."

But when we're talking about the progression servers, all of that is ancient history. These aren't "original rules servers." I remember from Combine that there were a lot of players who wanted to go back and see some of the content that they missed the first time through. In essence, about 50% (unscientific number) of the population wants to see content that was designed for 5%. But that doesn't mean that those folks want to be in the #1 uber guild for content that was designed during the Clinton Administration. There is a legitimate question here: 10+ years after the fact, why must the game be about racing?

You may be right that SOE will never expend the resources to make the raiding content more accessible. I'm skeptical about that myself, especially when it comes to instanced content. But what's the point of cranking out progression servers that are going to have the same issues as the prior progression servers? In 2013, the game doesn't have to operate the way that it did during the age of dial-up modems.

Yep. I'm not a fan of classic. I only did it so I could be in the place I'm in now. But there are plenty of people who will defend to death the absolute perfection of "classic" EQ and how the things they put in place later to fix this problem was the absolute ruination of not just EQ, but the entire genre. They infest every MMO forum with their mantra of "just make enough content and it won't be a problem!"

I think they are completely delusional.

If you don't race to win you'll reach the finish line only to find a 500 foot wall blocking it because in this race second place gets nothing. This problem was solved a decade ago for all but the first 5 (of 19) versions of Everquest.

You get two kinds of angry players as a result. The ones that entered the race with the intention of winning and failed to do so, who then turn into a bitter, jealous hate machine towards the winner. They are of course completely blind to their own hypocrisy, as had they been in the same position they hardly would have been inclined to share either.

And my favorite: a person who talks about how they like to take their time, explore, play at their own pace, enjoy the journey, all that nonsense. Then watch that very same person rant and rave about how all the high level content has already been taken when they get there. "Well, duh" I'll say. But then that same person will also talk about how classic eq is the only good eq because of competition and that instancing ruins the game. They complain about both the problem (competition for spawns) and the solution (instancing) while at the same time saying the problem is in fact the most essential part of their enjoyment. This is the contradiction I mentioned before. They try to invent these ridiculously complex solutions to a problem that has already been fixed because they refuse to accept that instances work perfectly fine.

These are the kind of people that should be fed through a wood chipper feet first.

Plenty of people enjoy the progression servers the way they are right now. You can maybe hope for minor fixes to come from the lessons learned here, but not much. Opening with Kunark or even Velious would help some things and require 0 effort, for example.

Sure, the -best- solution would be to go back and make instanced copies of zones with raid mobs. They'd have to go through and remove group rares, and people would probably pitch a fit if the instanced loot wasn't changed to No Drop, so its not quite so simple. You can even leave the normal open world versions there, and people can fight over who gets extra loot. But the dev team doesn't want to spend time working on 15 year old stuff. They want to make new stuff. And current EQ is like a giant dam springing leaks all over the place while they scramble to try to plug the biggest holes. Adding instances to old eq is unlikely to the extreme.

Since that won't happen, everyone needs to accept going in that for the first few expansions only a small number of people will get to do end game content. If they do enter the race and lose, they should accept defeat and raid less contested targets to bide their time for when instancing comes around and fixes the problem.

Of course, this is the least likely solution of all.

I don't know how many times I have to repeat this, but the population is not low on Fippy. We have a dozen active raid guilds at various levels, most of which are making continual progress. And though there are people that quit the server or EQ altogether, there are also new people coming to the server every week. It's not a population boom but the population is holding steady and is more than adequate.

Vulak is another story, but the point is, instancing hasn't killed our server.

One dominant guild didn't take everything in classic, at least not on Fippy. Or Kunark, for that matter. Or Velious. There was legitimate competition, and it wasn't always the same guild winning every time. By Luclin certainly TL was far ahead and locked Emp down pretty well for a long time. But it wasn't nearly as monolithic as you suggest.

Guilds that won anything though had to work hard for their wins. I think what he's really complaining about is the need to work for it, competing against others that are working just as hard if not harder.

That wouldn't be the best solution necessarily, since a lot of players play specifically for the competition.

It's also very time consuming for the devs to instance the raids (and as you note, that would take away from the "classic feeling" from those servers.)

Just thought I'd pop in and say that I love the TLP servers for one reason; because it makes the world I fell in love with in the 90's alive again. I absolutely love seeing crowded newbie zones, having to fight for Giants in Rathe, looking for groups in my favorite old stomping grounds. I rarely do raid stuff, I mostly just try to keep up with the leveling curve in the beginning and stay caught up, and do solo/small group stuff.

It's great seeing the classic world come to life again. It's a sight I'll never get tired of because it does such a good job of taking me back to that era.

Rokuzachi,

Your right on point man. I did the TLP for the old school play style. Its not only about content but the community. Its not like WoW, where you see all these ppl bad mouthing each other and just acting a fool. If you seen that back in the original days of EQ then those ppl would have to quit because noone would group with those fools. They didnt have name changes and what not back in the day. I'm patiently waiting for another TLP server to come out.

I know I get tired of playing with kids on WoW lol. It gets old fast when its time to hunker down and destory some content. The level of gaming are on totally different levels. In EQ, you DIDNT want to die. It was a pain in the azz lol. 3/4 of the WoW players couldnt function in TLP / early days of EQ.

I'm just wondering what utopian Everquest you played because it doesn't sound like any I ever saw.

This is the internet, it's all the same.

It was true back in the day kreugen, I know atleast on lanys tvyl we had a "poop list" (filteres wont let me name it correctly) forum anyone who did something bad ie; ninja loot, train, talk smack, or just be a general nussence was put on there and was blackballed by the rest of the server. The community was alot diffrent then, then it is now.

same on povar/xev...once someone got a bad name they were blackballed and known by the whole server community.

sony even published the list of folks who would name change so that they couldn't evade their reputation that way.

I played the first five years of EQ as a member of FoH. People on Veeshan could badmouth, ninja loot, train, and be a nuisance to each other all they wanted as long as they weren't doing it to their own guild members. If they were doing it to us they'd be more likely to receive praise. Very rarely was there ever anyone actually guilty of running around ksing, ninja looting and so on who was called out by the community and shunned. Mostly because of the ridiculous noise generated by all of the people crying wolf ("whaaa I was trained" - from guy sitting at zoneline) or making up stories about evil things they heard FoH people did to their cousin's friend's brother in law.

Veeshan was mostly too busy hating FoH for killing all the dragons. (and back then, we didn't steamroll people - if they were there at the dragon we sat there for HOURS waiting for them to make their attempt. Only once did we get in trouble, because when we ran in Nagafen was still in combat with a handful of people that were bind rushing and hadn't reset yet. So in a way you are correct, we were more polite back then. Of course, the difference is it was 99% certain that the other guild would die horribly and we'd kill the dragon on top of a sea of their corpses, whereas on progression two guys boxing a few mages could kill the thing.)

In Everquest, anyone not in your group is your enemy. Instancing has of course gone a long way to lessening the frequency of conflicts, but they are still there.

Of course, as a member of FoH/EoE, I'm used to the community always assuming I'm the bad guy and that everything is my fault, and people who do nasty things to members of my guild are completely vindicated. You'd think years of that would turn me into Jaime Lannister and I'd be a jerk because everyone says I'm a jerk, but that's not my way.

Nerds are such haters.

You understand, of course, that your experience may not have been typical.

In fact, I'm not sure what a "typical" experience would be. Everyone had their own personal experience in EQ, and it is common for people to extrapolate from their personal experiences to define what EQ was "like" in those days. This is true of everyone. But that's a different subject for a different day.

I agree with you as your comments apply to EQ1. I question whether that is an intelligent game design, but the consequences of that sort of game design were not appreciated in those days. Anyway, we're talking about old content on a progression server, and you are absolutely correct that this is the way that the game worked for that content. I can see the argument for retrofitting the old content, but (1) I would be surprised if SOE did it, (2) it would inevitably generate unintended consequences and various forms of exploitation, and (3) besides, there would be people screaming that it was really classic EQ anymore.

I understand why some people think that a static classic server (whatever the format is) would be fun, but if you effectively exclude the people who want to push through the raiding content, do you have a viable playerbase to sustain the server on a long-term basis? In order for a server to function, you need all of the different segments of the demographic.

Who are you trying to fool? Just listen to your words... the population is "holding steady"? Stop it... I agree Fippy is doing better than Vulak. But you're not going to convince me Fippy has a good population, I've been there. It doesn't.