What's the current highest level on Phinny?

2 Days 18hrs 14mins . Maybe 2hours of that was spent running/notexping. 25% xp pot running 99.7% of the time.

What is your /played and % time running XP pot?

So almost 70 hours...So your looking at around 90-100 hours till 50?

My question to you then Ducreux is if you were a player who could only play 15 hours a week, didn't buy exp pots, had to get pickup groups both good and bad, and, most notably, had to compete with tons of other groups for mobs, do you think that person could easily take 200+ hours to hit 50? And if you do, do you think that is reasonable for people who only play 15-20 hours a week?

Honestly, I am rooting for yall to hit 50 as fast as you can. I firmly believe that DBG thought that by lowering EXP they were gonna set you and the other power gamers back by weeks, and you have proven them wrong. I also firmly believe that once you all hit 50 and start killing raids they will up the EXP rate for everyone else to catch up to yall.

So please, get 50 and get to raiding!

66 hours to get level 44 w/ 25% bonus potions.
So based solely on this example people might be able to expect 88 hours for level 44 ....

Doesn't seem so bad...

That is with a perfect group with 0 downtime and 0 competition for mobs from other people.

So take that 88 hours and at the very least double (My experience on RF > LJ the competition factor actually tripled the time it took me to EXP) it for competition and the prospect of bad pugs , your easily looking 200ish or more hours for level 50.

That's with no waiting to get a group together because of logging in 2-3 hours here and there, no uberfail players involved in PUG, probably running XP pots, nobody to contest any camps with.

This is just a gauge of the perfect scenario time. There's a lot more overhead for the average player.

Ill see your logic and raise you with .... Once more people are high leveled and geared you'll be able to be power leveled.... The rate will be determined once it gets to that point. All we are doing now is making assumptions. But I for one am enjoying it.

I heard you can buy shortcuts through that overhead with kronos and marketplace services ... Maybe it's just a rumor .....

Im never going to powerlevel anyone. I want to die on the inside.

It would/will easily take a casual player 200 hours to hit 50. Our exp path was essentially the most optimal thing you could possibly do for flat EXP with no farming of items/gear along the way. Since we were on the forefront we also had no competition whatsoever for camps and mob pulls and our group makeup has way more kill per hour potential than what you will get in a normal group.

Honestly our hope is that what you said comes true, once the raid targets are dead or a month goes by DBG loosens the exp restriction to allow the rest of the server to catch up and experience the content in era. Maybe we will get a week of double exp for the Holidays so people can get at least 1 character to a decently high level.

I can't speak for everyone in SA but I feel most of us want the rest of the server to also be able to experience this content prior to Kunark without having to devote 100s of hours of their life. Anyone who has played EQ for a decent amount of time knows how serious player attrition is and how much it can affect your ability to continue progressing into content. This server's ability to sustain a healthy endgame atmosphere is way different than any other due to the box restriction reducing the ability to shore up raid rosters and relies heavily on the ENTIRE playerbase being able to reach the endgame.

Buffed raids no joke, you NEED a large force to kill it. A skeleton crew of 20-30 is going to have a really rough time.

I'll raise you one more, How many times did people power level lower level people once they hit 50 on RF/LJ?

I can tell you exactly how many did in Faceless...0. Once people hit 50 they raided and worked on their characters. No one went back to powerlevel the lower levels in the guild, lol. I think you are living in a dream world if you think that Decreux is gonna hit 50 and then go power level all the people under 50 after slogging through 100 hours of boring leveling.

Thank you Decreux for being honest with your opinion - I think this perfectly sums up Phinigel.

I bet youll find those services available if you can produce some krono trades !!!

Another great, informative, real-world post on this thread. I hope DBG reads this one, too. Thank you!

So if you took that 88 as a lower bound, and the 200 as the upper bound, and spread it over 12 weeks, you'd be looking at around 7.5 - 16 hours a week, or around 1 to 2.5 hours a day.

1) 200 WAS the low average for most people. 88 hours is the best of the best no one will ever be able to do it that fast ever again on Phinny because that group had 0 competition, the perfect group, 0 downtime, and 100% pot uptime. It will literally be impossible for anyone to level to 50 as fast as Decreux has, and he is gonna be pushing 100 hours by 50. So, the 200 was actually the "Low ball" amount of time, the real time will probably be somewhere around 250-300 hours - which comes out to around 25 hours (3.5 hours a day) per week for 12 weeks of just leveling.

2) Do you find that, on a 84 day lockout server, having to exp for 200+ hours to get to max level and possibly missing out on every classic raid before you have to go to level 60 (which takes longer than going to 50) is an acceptable amount of time? Unless you exp for a minimum of 20-25 hours a week, there is a reasonable chance you will not see 1 raid content mob until after Velious launch. Is that acceptable to you?

3) These same "hardcore" levelers have said that they fear as people get Mid 30's they will quit and that in a month there may not be enough people to actually consistently kill raid targets. Do you agree with the top levelers on the server that the EXP rate should be increased because they fear that people are going to quit as they get higher because the time to exp is just too much for most people to accomplish?

I feel like you could post this another dozen times and people will just continue to have their eyes glaze over and pass right by it, assuming everyone could do what the top levelers are doing.

Correct.

Sorry, no. I do not honestly believe anyone cannot get a SINGLE LEVEL PER DAY (or equivalent thereof if they have to skip a few days).

I actually PLAYED a total of about 9 hrs today (started playing around 1 - ended at 11ish - with an hour of breaks I'd guesstimate - 30 for food proper, and 30 or so of real breaks).

I did FOUR FULL LEVELS in that time - 15.5 through 19.5. With quite a bit of inefficiency as we debated other camps - wasted an entire hour getting to and testing out if RunnyEye could be worth bothering with.

And regardless - I can't read Roshen's post any other way than to see that he made a concentrated effort to be more wordy than he had to be, than just saying "No" - and all that more complex phrasing does is make it so adjusting it in the future wouldn't be a lie.

I won't disagree that it's bad - and it's going to be rough for some people - but I find it hard to believe "normal people" couldn't find the time to do 7 levels across a week. Maybe in two days of knocking out a ton of time on the weekend or maybe a little bit every single day.

The average American watches nearly 5 hrs of television a day - replacing TV with Everquest should allow roughly TWICE my estimate.

I won't disagree it could be better - but there's something to be said for caging ones expectations. If you expect sunshine and rainbows constantly you'll be incredibly disappointed on a regular basis - if you expect the worst and brace for it, you'll find yourself almost constantly pleased as your expectations get busted all the time.

I've done nothing but say I hope X/Y/Z didn't get screwed up with this, but I expect some stuff to be - and as a result I've been mostly pleased - sure, I'd rather my leveling be done so I can help friends catch up in my off time (I actually am one to do this, although CLR/ENC/RNG isn't a great PL combo until they're in grouping range) and have more time to continue working on my PS4 and XBOne backlogs but at the end of the day, it's not THAT much different. Just adding extra weeks before my calendar of raids starts.

And do you think it is acceptable that people should give up all their other hobbies in order to enjoy end-game Everquest on the only instanced and "true box" server in the entire world?

You didn't answer my third question btw, Now that the hardcores are coming out and saying they do not think that your average player will ever hit 50 on Phinny and the server may not have the population to actually complete raids outside of maybe one guild, do you not now feel like this may be a problem?

I was addressing that in the edit - hit Post too early. I don't disagree that it might be, and I'd be HAPPY to see it adjusted. My expectation of timeframe is sometime immediately after New Years though - I expect I won't benefit from it with my current pace.

But I'm trying to make it clear that I believe that anyone who has a consistent drive should be able to make it even as-is.

At heart I am and will always be a HR professional - motivation is an enormous factor in how humans operate. Take two people one super skilled but unmotivated and the other barely trained and all but super motivated - and I'd put money on the motivated, barely trained person at posting better results.

Stay motivated and basically anything is possible. Even if your motivation is logging on and using Phinigel as a chat room that you don't pay attention to the XP during and you just get whatever you get as you chat with your friends. In fact the "chat room effect" is part of why we went well past our daily goal of 3 levels a day today - we were enjoying ourselves a bunch and decided to continue on because we were having fun regardless of the game "in the background" while we enjoyed hanging out with friends virtually. [additionally the friends of mine that have fallen into the "XP is too horrible for me to stand" problem when I reminded them of the chat room effect being part of EQ's magic and to just get the XP they can while enjoying hanging out with people they like in /gu and channels - suddenly they realized that I was right and that even if their XP was sucking for that moment they're in it for the long haul because it's fun to banter with friends while they get there] (Similar to how a job w/ friends is better than all but the most amazing job that you're working alone or with people you don't get along with)