What made EQ great in 1999 can make it now - Campaigns

Contested open world content

Before EQ2 and WoW started instancing and holding gamers hands; Everquest existed.

A Massive world fraught with danger, where extra rare, and extra difficult monsters roamed the world. These encounters brought players together, and created an atmosphere of competition within the player base.
TLP's are popular because of contested open world content. Looking back on past TLP's it's evident once instancing starts, players lose interest. The moment GoD hits, it's the beginning of the end for a TLP's relevance.

We need to bring it back, and this first campaign release would be the perfect time to issue new world spawn raid content.

Many current end game players have been disappointed with the last few expansions. Logging in 1 day a week to raid an entire expansion worth of raids (arx1-5) just isn't keeping people on the hook.
We need to break out of our instances and bring the community out in the wild. We need raid content that isn't black and white, we need variables.

Even if you just start with one or two in this first campaign; Contested open world content will quench the thirst for glory that instancing has denied us.

Contested open world content; let's make Everquest !

Maybe.. another line of thought is that TLPs start to fail when the nostalgia factor starts to wear thin. It's pretty strong in the Classic through PoP times (PoP less so), but then those were the great times for EQ. Less people feel the draw to "their old game" and all the memories therein when the game progresses to and past OoW. For me, EQ ended at PoP; hence the TLP appeal. Think about the conflict that exists over scheduling raiding/spawns in the pre-LDoN/LoN/OoW expansions... people don't really LOVE the conflict over spawns.

I really love the sentiment of these posts and the drive to search for and emote what was great about EQ, but I feel a lot of it was just being the right game at the right time. And like all time, EQ's time ended at a certain point. Some are more than content to re-live the good times over and over with TLPs.

Same as collectibles. Some people love their '67 Vettes, spend countless hours and dollars restoring them and love driving them because of the feelings and memories they evoke. The reality is they are far inferior to any modern car but for said memories. Which is fine, because as long as there are enough people with strong memories interested in driving said collectibles, there will still be a community.

No offense, but have you actually taken a peek into the toxic TLP environment in the past few months?

Of course! I have played on all three rounds of TLP.
The toxicity is more related to the lack of targets vs. number of players.
But I don't doubt for a second that contested open world content is what brings the players in.
That's the appeal of old EQ

I'm not advocating the elimination of instances, or instance raid content.
I'm saying they should reintroduce some open world raid content. Something to keep people immersed, competitive targets.

Purhaps the targets would only drop the ultra-rare drops in the current tier of gear.
Keep it incentivized, but not drop overpowered or over-tiered drops

People that play on the live servers don't want anything to do with the TLP type setup. Go back to the TLP servers. It won't work on live, since they don't have TIME to make the necessary raids...

Do you really think it would be "fun" if there were 4 Arx raids and 3 contested raids that everyone had to fight over every week?

Are you asking if i think more raid content would be fun?
Yes, I do!

No one is forcing your guild to hit those targets, or compete for them.

Do what works, do what draws the players in, and that is observably what open world content does on the TLP servers.

You don't get it. There wouldn't be more content, there would be LESS.

Take what they have now for the campaign
Add some open world encounters

That equates to less content, how?

edit; you appear to be under the impression i'm looking to replace some instanced content with open world content... please read the thread again.
I'm saying add a few open world encounters - not replace raid content with open world raid content.

^This.

You're (OP) saying they add it as additional content. We get that. The point is that it won't be considered "additional" during development time. It will be part of the normal package, i.e. less overall for everyone if there are contested mobs as Smokezz says.

And if you're using the TLP model as an example of how much "fun" and a sense of achievement it is having contested content, well, that's not what I'm reading at all. I just see everyone still asking for instancing except the top guild

There was very good reason that instancing became a thing. Nothing they add that is contested will be "hard" or give a sense of achievement. It will once again come down to who is awake 24/7 and has a batphone system in place. The only accomplishment will be managing to get into work on time after a 3 AM wake up call to kill Super_dragon_001.

They have a skeleton crew with a finite amount of man hours. Any time they spend on content a handful of players get to use is time they could've been spending on content everyone gets to use.

I could not have said it better. Sliv is right and, I agree.

What do I think made EQ great in 1999? I thought it was really the first of its kind. They put in the work to make it standout and standout head and shoulders above anything else available. It all started from logging in. The music was exceptional. Graphics for the day were awesome. Gameplay, for the day, was unparalleled. It was not due to competition for targets.

Rykard

I'm using TLP as an example of how open world raid content draws players back in.
They want to relive the competitive nature of the best MMO ever released.
That is not something live servers have offered for quite some time.

The last paragraph is laughable, you're an adult.
If it's not worth your time, don't do it. Simple as that.
If a game is cutting into your work productivity, you have much larger issues to deal with.

Everyone does get to use open world raid content.
Are you implying some would be magically exempt from engaging these targets?

Heaven forbid you guys would have to log in to raid more than one day a week.
Compete for a mob rather than have it handed to me?!

It's alarming how complacent the average EQ player has become.

Let's get back to our roots!

Contested raid content doesn't draw people back. The thing that's bringing TLP people back is "supposedly Classic EQ". A fair number of people like it, and they're all crammed onto 2 servers which makes them look extremely busy... Cram 5 live servers into one and only give us 20 zones to work with and guess what, they'd be pretty damn busy too.

Well there are 2 ways they could do this:

1. The raid mob is a rare spawn with cool loot. Only one guild on the server gets to experience it until the next rare spawn, making the rest of the server "magically exempt".
2. The raid mob spawns often so lots of people can use the content. If they do this, then the drops will be close to group gear, and it won't be very exciting, and you might as well just instance it.

I loved open world raid targets. Competing with other guilds and the rivalry that developed made the game epic on a level that no game since has been able to duplicate. The only thing I would have changed would have been the spawn frequency. 1 week it's too long, 12 to 18 hours would have been better.

Contested raid content was the main aspect of classic EQ
It was the end game.

So I disagree.

Then farm instanced content till you're able to compete?
You can still raid 1 day a week as usual - but having something to do on the other 6 days would be a pleasure.

It's like reading a post from an FV or Zek poster saying everyone wants their ruleset. Yeah....no.....

I disagree with the entire premise of this thread. I've played continuously since Dec of 1999 and in no way was that the peak of EQ in my opinion. Contested open-world content is only "fun" for a limited group of people with limited real-world commitments and on earlier time-zones.

The dev team has (in my opinion) already wasted far too much of their limited development resources on the group of quitters who will come back for a short while to try to re-live their youth on the TLP servers. A fraction of those enjoy conflict and would want to see a PVP racing element in the game. There are plenty of PVP games in the world, that's never what EQ has been great for IMO. EQ is great for defeating complex events with 53 friends, not getting into conflicts with other players.

You must not have played EQLive in the past few years. Instead of getting 16 new zones with dozens of raid targets, quests, tradeskill objectives, epics, and revolutionary AAs (the things that really made EQ great from 1999-2004), we are getting 8 new zones that are half the size, one raid zone, 7 raid targets, group missions that were completed in 2 weeks by dedicated players, cookie cutter AAs, cookie cutter tradeskills, and certainly no epics. In fact, the word "epic," or lack thereof, describes what is most wrong with Everquest today. Nothing feels "epic" anymore. Group content is trivial, at best. TDS Raid content was a hindrance only because of the plethora of artificial roadblocks to prolong a 3 month expansion into a year.

I disagree with your premise that open world raids made EQ great from 1999-2004, and is what is drawing people the the TLPs. A vast majority of the TLP player base would prefer to have instanced raids. Take a look at how many threads there are begging for instanced raids. In my opinion, what originally made EQ great was the player base, the mass amount of content that you could get lost in for hours/days/months, and the feeling of accomplishment when you were finally able to take out Uber_Raid_Boss_001 or acquire Uber_Item_001. Nostalgia is drawing people back to the TLPs, not open world raids. TLP populations start to dwindle around GoD because that is when most people left the game in 2005. They no longer have that same nostalgia sucking them in.

Now, I don't think some open world raids are a bad idea. The positive aspect of open world content is that it brings the community together (for better or for worse). On Live, I couldn't name you 10 people on my server outside of my guild. On p99 or TLP, I have 10 people outside my guild show up on my friends list at any given time. However, the problem with your view is that you want this open world content to be in addition to whatever content is already on the campaign. That is just not going to happen. The development resources are far far too thin to even put out enough instanced, cookie cutter raid content to satiate the player base. If they create world raids, that means less instanced raids. Less instanced raids means less raiding for the overall player base. Why? Because only one guild is going to kill the mob each cycle, and all the other guilds are going to be sitting around playing /gems. With instanced content, everyone who has a desire to raid is able to. Raiding should be equal opportunity. That doesn't mean everyone has a right to all loot just for showing up. However, if someone would like to attempt a raid, they shouldn't be blocked from doing so by 35 year olds living in mom and dad's basement.

tl;dr Additional open world raid content would be great, but it's going to take away from our already ultra limited instanced raid content. Also, open world raid content wasn't solely what made EQ great from 1999-2004.