What are the needed changes in current day EQ?

I think a tradeskill forum would have more value than the guide events forum or the player studio forum.

Then don't force people to want to do all this trade skilling as "content". Those of us that put hundreds of hours don't want to hear it, we don't care. The completionists want a hostile take over of the zone, move on people! I'm going to be stubbornly defiant and unreasonable in this and hope the Devs don't come up with such a poor idea in the future for "busy work" when everyone has AA's and Augs camps done.

It was a beyond terrible idea in the first place to make buffs not tick down i PoK in the first place. It should never have been done.

I am still not sure why you care so much about buffs not ticking down in non combat zones. All non combat zones or at least GH, GL, POK, POT, Bazaar, and sunrise hills all work on mechanics where buffs don't count down. How is this a bad thing again? As far as the trade skill side of things there are other options one can take. You can craft from your house, yard and guild hall. Heck a lot of recipes you can craft from any zone if you have the right container to do the combines. These non combat zones are meant to be a gathering place for toons to do transactions, trade skills, buff up, socialize and allow for afk. With the wording of the EULA as it stands if you are afk in a zone and a mob encounters your toon(s) and dies this could be a violation leaving some people to campfire down and gate to POK as a measure of ensuring their toons wont get killed and also to prevent any risk of afk killing and the possible consequences that comes with it. These places are meant to be high traffic with lots of players as they are the center of the EQ universe essentially. When these zones stop having high populations that's when I would worry because that is almost certainly the end times of this game. Be thankful there is zone lag on your end when you enter because that means people are still playing this game.

As a conclusion it almost sounds like you are more bitter about how they approached the artisan prize than anything and to this I cant fully argue against that. One year they say we want you getting out of old content and into new content (this was after people kept doing gribble after gribble with new content release) and then they come up with this epic task that takes us back nearly two decades which makes me scratch my head some. They could have done this without sending us back to the stone ages wasting countless hours checking all the planar zones for named over and over again wasting countless hours, days, weeks and so forth when we could be enjoying the content. At the very least they could have shortened the spawn timers on those named to speed up the process. Nothing about this is difficult at 105 its just a huge bore fest spent checking track and watching tv.

It's not complicated at all. Remove 250 people from the zone that are doing nothing so people can load vendors or do things like click "combine" on a tradeskill container without lag. Buffs not clicking down just adds to lag, because people afk all day so they can be fully buffed when they can play. That was working just fine in the Lobby before the recent change when they made buffs last forever in PoK. It wasn't always this way.

Crafting anywhere else but PoK is utterly impossible for most anything. You need to buy all the mats there. Take Research for instance. At 53 combines per skill up are you going to buy the mats for one spell at a time and do the combine else where? Buying a bunch of every thickener, every quill (that has the same graffic, ugh!) and every ink is not viable, not in the slightest. There's too many possibilities for possible combines. EQ will sun set before your done. That's just not a reasonable expectation to ask every tradeskiller to to do the 5 or 6 thousand tradeskill combines to max the Prize elsewhere. All that so people can scam for buffs? Get out of PoK.

Here's another suggestion. Take all the Master Tradeskill vendors that have most anything and move them from PoK to Abysmal Sea. Place a Magus at small bank that send you directly to Abysmal. Place the vendors right next to all the spots existing vendors and tradeskill quests are. If you've been tradeskilling for any period of time you know where those npcs are.

There is a solution, some where. My original rant about buffs not going away and making people hang around all day is the easiest solution. Is it really that inconvenient to have to move 10 feet from where they all stand right now, click a door and move to Lobby instead? The answer is no. Make it happen. No. More. Buffs. In. PoK. Make PoK !

Without reading the last few pages, i can only hope you are joking.
Because if you were serious with this, it'd be the most utter crap i have ever read.

If you are having a problem with "lag", i can assure you we've had far more of them.
And i further assure you NOTHING of that comes from either mob density or "PC density".
(but perhaps from "Devs being dense" )

Ok, so there are different causes for different symptoms of "lag".
But the packets sending you the information about afk people do exactly zilch to add to any of them.
Neither is "Buffs not ticking down"...
That one is one call more or one call less the server has to make, depending on the way they coded it.
Any Sarnak casting "Sarnak reflection" on itself every few seconds needs more server-resources than AFK people.

Now...
If you had said "remove all the tradeskillers that are causing the vendors to constantly send their inventories to clients"
(something that causes actual traffic and something AFK people tend not to do)
It would be a slightly different matter.
But still not enough to matter, since the actual network traffic is quite efficient.
This IS a game from the digital stone-age after all!

When i see claims like that i always wonder how the guys in the "old days" - you know, in the stone-age of EQ - did do their tradeskills!
It must've been a pain to get to PoK before the release of... erm... PoP to do tradeskilling!
And even after Pop-release, could not buy all in PoK that you spoiled brats can today...
But even so: we had people with maxed tradeskills...
Amazing!

Here's yet another suggestion:
Fix housing and then:
Take all the Master Tradeskill vendors that have most anything and...
allow them to be placed in housing and Grand Guild halls.
(this has been suggested in this thread already, along with alternatives too)

No hon...
It's not a solution to anything except perhaps an even more empty PoK than what we had 10years ago.

It didn't work with America, why should it work with PoK?

I have plenty of experience doing trade skills as I currently have 9 toons maxed in the 7 base tradeskills and a toon maxed for all the specialized trade skills. When I have my "trade skill days" I will mass produce thousands of items and none of them are from POK at all. I rarely ever do combines in POK because I have an almost perfect setup in my housing area and if I need an item from a vendor I just keep a toon parked in POK as a mule to buy it and parcel it to my trade skill toon. Its possible to do this with some planning in advance and a couple of houses.

I understand your complaint but at the same time changes that have a negative impact on some players just to make others happy is rarely a good idea especially when mentioned above you already have the ability to adjust things on your end to help with lag. You could always take a screen shot of your visual options and then adjust them to the minimum while doing trade skills in POK. When done pull up your screen shot and reset your settings. With all the great suggestions on these boards this is not one I would like to see developer time wasted on simply because its not a win-win its a win-lose and those are the kinds of changes that push people away from the game not retain them.

Fix AB !

Bugs aside, make the guild portal dude port you to all zones in game so we don't waste time travelling/crashing...

Nimbuses can be turned off and it wont interfere with your raid auras, in fact a lot can be turned off and you can still see all the post effects etc in raids with no issues. i raid and i don't keep all that laggy crap turned on

i feel most of that is just fluff for the group game anyways

Make a group banner, preferable with a portal clicky like with campfires.

/who all group

When I returned to EQ several months ago, after a 10+ year break, I noted the lack of a tradeskill forum immediately, and it concerned me greatly. I felt that this lack of a space dedicated to tradeskill issues was a sign that tradeskills would be an orphaned part of the game. It isn't that bad, but my fears ended up being somewhat realized.

I rushed to max out my tradeskills, because I had been heavily into them when I left and had a nice stack of plat (so I thought) that I had made years before on Mistletoe Cutting Sickles, old cultural armor, and then DoN cultural. What I've found, though, is that there are niche markets for some items, but anything important to grouping, like armor and weapons, is generally a waste of effort. It really seems that tradeskills' purpose is to fill a couple of niches and to max out one top-end item. Otherwise, they are entirely sunk-cost.

I have no clue what "Peter Pan syndrome" would be, i only know things like the Stockholm Syndrome - you know.. real-world stuff. And i for sure cannot follow on your "example" or analogy or whatever that was supposed to be with a pedophile...
But with regard to your saying i were the problem:
I see it the other way around!

To ME, it's people like you who "defend" or even "want more" PvP in a game that is not built for it.
Want PvP? Play CS, Half-life, Battlefield, whatever.
It can be fun, for a time.
But they've tried with EQ and it's failed - that's a fact you can't deny.
To then go and want it enlarged to blue servers, in whatever form, is just denying the obvious.


And i don't lie when i say that PvP has "beaten" many a game i've played before it even had much of a chance to take off. This is because PvP brings out the worst in people, much like the internet in general. In Battlefield, i can simply log off and/or choose a different match if i do not want to put up with a particular crowd. in ANY MMO though i do not have that luxury.
For this reason alone, imo, does PvP have no place at all in an MMO.
And even in the FEW(!) examples where they've made it semi-work, they have included restrictions - for good reason.
Generally though, PvP is not for the mass market in the northern hemisphere.

You need a generally large population in your game in the first place (i would say at least 1:50 of not 1:100 or more) and then the population has to have a high fluctuation rate to maintain the "victim-rate". PvP is ALWAYS preying on the "unsuspecting", ganking, exploiting... you name the "bad thing", PvP's got it in abundance.

Me being the problem?
Rather not, pal!
But instead the people that are making PvP a more than unpleasant "passtime" for anything more than a few rounds of CS.


p.s.:
This thread has only gotten "out of hand" since some rather idiotic suggestion has been made about PvP that's brought up many up on the barricades.

Bollocks.
Want more PvP? I'm kind of preferential to the enjoyment aspect and adverse to the skill-building. I didn't start playing EverQuest so I could run around PoK handcuffed for hours on end.

Are we still talking about playing the same game?


Lesson learned - Good news, bad news - Ist was es ist
Playing EverQuest, even 3 days a week, for 5 hours per day, is pretty strenuous in the first place, when you get home so tired you can barely make yourself dinner, but I'm under the assumption that this isn't of relevance. Yet adapting to the PvP system, checking the zone numbers, seeking out those specific players, keeping Harmshield and weak, useless spells, as your spellgem necessities, and learning class-specific strengths and weaknesses, is just blunted so far skewed from what EverQuest will ever be, tends to be the main association that geared me back into the game

Do you seriously read what you post before you post it? First off where is this marketing you speak of? This game has not seen any serious advertisement in forever. Sending spam email to old customers to let them know this game is still around and sending out some tweets is not serious marketing. In terms of what you quoted me on how does this even relate to marketing or the ftp model in this game? That's like quoting someone who says they like cookies and then talking about cars.

Secondly just because a major corporation with great developers creates a game does not mean it is going to be successful. EQ PVE is a success considering the game is still here nearly two decades later. EQ PVP has mostly been a failure because there has not been any real thought or time put into PVP in this game. I doubt the devs had any real plans of this game being PVP and it was only put in as an afterthought to try and secure subs from people that like the PVP game. It does not take long to scroll through the forums and read all the grief from people still playing on Zek complaining about how unbalanced the PVP system is in this game. If you enjoy the PVP system in EQ good for you but I think the overwhelming population of this game would be against a game wide PVP model even if they actually overhauled it and got it right. Most of us are older now with families and RL responsibilities. The idea of having to go afk to tend to the little ones or get something to drink and coming back to a bunch of corpses because someone murdered me is just not appealing.

The very limited amount of players who want PVP in EQ is evident by the tiny Zek population. There are much better options out there for PVP and you can post whatever you want on these forums but it won't make even a tiny bit of difference in the direction of EQ in 2017. They don't even listen to their paying players when the majority wants something changed. They sure as hell aren't going to listen to a minority of PVPers who think EQ should have good PVP again.

Games don't have televised marketing, or whatever the f#$* kind of marketing you want to portrait. You go to Fry's or Best Buy, take a big whiff, and buy something interesting.

Are you even hearing my side?
This game is designed for a serious, long-term playerbase. Is that what I was interested in when I initially bought the game? Is that what I was interested in when I returned a decade later? The argument isn't about how PvP is a flop and also a reason I think many people do play on the PvP server. Because I'm partial to Pvp is the very same reason you don't want to come back from your RL duties and find yourself murdered -- I'd like to think I could care less if I come back and find myself in town

So was that a Yes or No on the Shd?

LOL. sick burn. 'nuff said!

If you think parses don't mean anything, you're an idiot. end of story. with that attitude you'll never play a character to the best of its ability regardless of it's class, and if that's what you want that's fine... but don't try to downplay someone else because they want to do the best they can.

False. False, and well maybe true. for the 3 healer classes in EQ 2 of the 3 do perfectly well soloing. if you can't, then you just don't know how to play the class. clerics, I don't know how to play the class in the slightest so I can't say that they can or can't solo these days, however druids and shamans should easily be able to solo in most EOK zones. If they can't, they need to learn how to play mo betta.

I think parsing is irrelevant
I parsed my necro at maybe 25k on raid burns and over 17 DoTs stacked. Bring me a beer.

You just copied and pasted my description of the overhead before asking that question. So I already know that you are mindlessly arguing like a Trump-supporting chatbot, but I'm replying anyways because you are funny to watch. Try not to be so wordy, so we don't get bored before you get to the punchline.