Unbeatable Server? How to make end game last...

The problem with Everquest is that the ceiling for characters is higher than the content provided. With enough time, eventually people become more powerful than any of the content in the game and it becomes a cycle of going through the motions for pixels.

Even earlier in the expansions, you have situations where a single shaman or enchanter can solo camp high level camps that "should" take a group or two.

How to fix this for the upcoming Agnarr server? Simple....give players a challenge that they aren't meant to beat (but they are welcome to keep trying).

Make the level cap 50.....

Yup, one simple change, capping everyone 10 levels lower makes all of the higher end content NEVER become trivial.

You could also use this design philosophy to make the earlier game more engaging by slowing the EXP rate WAY down. This would make it so people would attempt higher level content than they are meant for and keep the "world" moving slower.

So when you learn about that level 24 warrior....in a couple months he isn't capped and bored and on an alt instead.

It seems a modern trend with live has been to get people to that "rinse and repeat" end game ASAP....which is the exact opposite of what an EQ server should be trying to achieve for longevity.

Give people something to struggle against and really difficult goals and they will have fun for years.

Or you could, you know, not do that and let people play EQ. Go make your own game dude.

I already am But I wana play everquest tooooo.

What an amazing idea. I wanna play a caster on this server so 100% of my abilities get resisted!

You clearly didn't play when GoD was originally released and that was only 5 levels....

Not really. By some high end raid targets, yea it would resist....but we already had that before lures were added anyway (for wizards). Otherwise most of the time you are fighting things relatively around the same level (so even / yellow / low red cons to a level 50, like in the planes). Which they can hit most of the time.

Would be resisted a lot more? More partial resists? Yes....that is the point....everything is a lot harder and requires to relearn the game and approach things in different ways. There are no more trivial raids and achieving some bigger targets might be impossible. Again, that is the point, to make BIG goals that are just out of reach for people to struggle towards.

Just put MotM1 on everything if you want it to be sufficiently difficult. Bugged MotM1 Cazic in Velious was pretty damn hard but doable.

Or you could go the "kill the server" route and apply it to literally every NPC in the game, that'd be interesting.

I would argue that the mindset of "characters having a higher ceiling than content" only really applies to hardest of hardcore raiders. The endgame, especially post-OoW, has some really interesting and crazy raids that most people have never even seen. I find this disappointing.

Yes, even OMM can be gimped (to a certain extent), but when I led raids on Fippy there were some truly difficult encounters that gave us a lot of trouble and took us almost until the end of the expansion timer to beat. Granted, we did not raid as often or as hardcore as Citizen/TL/EoE, but we always finished an expansion before the vote timer had finished.

Demi-Plane, while not insanely difficult, has some very interesting encounters that require more teamwork than you might be used to. SoF was the most difficult expansion that I can remember. Meldrath and Kerafym still give me nightmares because they were extremely difficult and required excellent coordination. Solteris was an exhausting raid due to number of events and variance in strategies.

I could go on, but the point is, a lot of people currently playing have not seen what the end-game looks like when they began developing it with more complex and difficult features in mind. Don't even get me started on Underfoot.

The only way to counter this is to actually play past PoP/GoD/OoW. I know people see this as the golden era of EQ, but there is a ton of game to see after all of that!

The reason people think it is the golden era of EQ is because the early / mid game was more interesting. More teamwork required to level up and get equipment.

But later on, it became more of a solo-fest (and then with boxing, it really became that).

So unless you were being a cog in a raid somewhere....then you were off solo camping some item to sell to get some other item you wanted.

The making the cap level 50 is more about that pre-raid gameplay than the actual raids. It makes it so people can't just solo camp a fungi with their main. Every zone with decent equipment becomes a lot lot harder.

I like the idea of the content being harder, although I'm not sure that many people share my opinion, however there may be enough to populate a server. I don't particularly like the idea of capping my level at 50, I would just prefer making raid mobs a lot more difficult.

The same argument is brought up everytime a new TLP is opened. Early EQ is too easy! It would be way better if it was harder! You would get more people if the game was challenging!!

Guess what, no they wouldn't. And nobody cares. People play the TLPs because it's fun. Making it more challenging would bring in 0 more people and create a ton of work for a limited staff and cost them money that they would never make back.

You want challenging content? Don't play classic - LDoN...

The game only got easier with future expansions and changes....classic EQ on a fresh server is the most difficult. Back when you don't even have a magic weapon to hurt a ghoul with.

Unfortunately with all the dps changes I suspect even post LDON is going to be a joke and quite trivial. Especially on Phinny where everyone is maxed out on gear from instanced raiding.

That is the problem....in non instanced servers, the strategy to limit equipment is by making the encounter very rare (since it dies instantly when it is up and drops few items).

Instead of making the encounter VERY challenging so people simply can't defeat it.

The one thing early EQ development should have taught developers was that you can't make the game too hard.....that players WILL find a way to defeat it, and they will have a ton of fun figuring it out along the way.

Why JUST cap it at 50? It may be interesting to put the level cap of an expansion 5 levels lower than initially intended. IE, 45 in classic, 55 in kunark/velious/luclin, and 60 during PoP.

The only benefit this would be is to challenge certain raid guilds to be able to complete content. This would be an interesting server if it were a "raid sprint" server where top end raiding guilds would have to sprint to the finish of the xpac, and then give a week or two after the content is cleared to do the next expansion.

Outside of challenging certain raiding guilds, there would be little point to adding challenging content to "classic" (original launch through PoP) everquest since most people don't WANT to be challenged, they just want to have a good time.

If you ever raided in Wildstar, it's a pretty awesome game where every single person in the raid had to be on their toes for every single mob, including trash, since some of the trash mobs were had harder mechanics than the actual raid bosses. So if you were raiding for 3-4 hours, 20 people had to be on their toes for the entire 4 hours. It was great in theory, where everyone in a raid was challenged ALL the time. The problem is most raiding MMOs allow people to take breaks in between fights, or you only have to do something hard every few fights. In the end almost every single top tier guild was having an incredibly high burn out rate since raiding was so challenging, it was no longer fun but incredibly stressful. Also they switched from 20 man tier 1 raids to 40 man tier 2 raids, so most guilds couldn't make the hop due to burnout. But yeah, the lesson learned is that most people don't want challenging. Most people want to feel like they accomplished something. Accomplishing something is fun. Challenging content makes people quit.

I guess what I'm saying is if you want a challenging raid environment/combat system, there are plenty of other games much more suited to that particular desire. Most of us are here to fart around and enjoy the nostalgia.

You realize that EQ lost a huge percentage of its population by making the game too hard in Gates, right? This was a thing that did actually happen...

I think a rework of the PoP Planar Progression fights for the purpose of a new server would be really interesting.

Something like:

Manaetic Behemoth instead of a constant stream of spider things, every 30 seconds from when the first one dies, another add spawns simultaneously, so instead of getting 4 per spawn it's 8 then 12 and by the time MB spawns you're getting 24-30 per wave so that you're struggling to keep up when MB finally activates.

Terris Thule AE Dispells at 100% and again at 50%. Spawns Gargoyles at 80/60/40/20%, spawns Bansheelings at 90/60/30/10%

Bertoxxulous Respawns first 4 Adan minis on Raid at 80%, second 4 at 60%, last 4 at 40%

Saryrn spawns ravens at normal HP percentages but another set of 3 every 20 seconds on top of the HP percentage ones.

LMM Respawns his 2 Guardian wrulons immediately if killed while he is alive, the Froglok at 60% and entire room (excluding Froglok) at 20%

Rallos Zek - Spawns Adds 10 seconds after being engaged, at 50% HP Locks until a certain number of spawned adds are killed and again at 20%.

Etc. Not too many enormous changes or new mechanics brought in, mostly just the same mobs spawning more frequently, and a few select mechanics brought in to prevent you from simply Zerg DPSing the mob out with our absurd DPS numbers for this era. A PoP expansion rework where the exact mechanics aren't known for the raid fights would be pretty awesome IMO.

The game isn't hard pre TSS anymore. It's sad so many people want to replay the game over and over when its still in its infancy. There is a disillusion from many people among this playerbase that the game dies after GoD. There is a slow period between DoN - PoR, but after that the game opens up so much more. There is so much more to do, better content, both group and raid. SoD+ is when the game really starts to get fun again. People are locking them selves away in the past, trying to relive some memory of the game that they are never going to get back. All of your crazy idea's arnt going to bring it back. Your closest bet is to go play on p99, and you can ask anyone who is playing there that it gets old fast.

Do your selves a favour, go roll a toon on vulak, experience a server that is locked in SoD right now, see how much of the game you are missing out on. Before your vocal minority leads DBG's down a path that makes the game not profitable for them anymore, and it gets shut down for all of us.

Depends on the audience. Every server doesn't need to appeal to everyone. Some people find challenging fun (so stuff like classic mechanics to get your corpse back is something some players hate....and other players LOVE).

As for accomplishing something, then slow the EXP rate wayyyyy down.

I don't get any sense of accomplishment from showing up to a 40 person raid and using DKP to get a piece of loot once in a while.

High end zerg raids aren't the entirety of Everquest.

Pretty much!