Why Lockouts?

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by cayendar, Jan 3, 2018.

  1. cayendar New Member

    With the recent issues regarding lockouts, I'd like to pose some questions about task/quest lockouts and hear the community's thoughts: Why does EQ have lockouts? Are they a good/bad thing for the game? I know other MMOs don't have these mechanics. Are they a necessary evil? Have they been in the game so long that this is just the way it is? What would happen if they went away?
    UncleUms likes this.
  2. Riou EQResource

    It's to have a limit on the amount of gear coming into the game, it spreads out how fast you should be able to farm gear so you don't beat the game in a day, it also makes you generally feel better about your gear because it wasn't just handed to you on day 1 of logging in, it took time and effort over many days and such.


    The biggest MMO WoW, has a weekly reset per dungeon on the highest difficulty tier of stuff (so can be done once per 7 day period) - and before LFG Queues, it was an up to 24 hour lockout (reset at the same time per day, so can be done once per 24 hour period).
  3. Raccoo Augur

    Some of the older tasks/missions/etc should be considered for lower lockout timers, imo. Like the old man mckenzie missions. 6 hour timers on those I think, and only 3 of them to run.
  4. Leigo You come here often?

    OMM tasks should be 2hr lockout MAX!!
  5. Thrillho Augur

    It will keep people playing for longer.

    If you could just run and rerun tasks 'til you get what you want, people would have a group set up and grind that out for 6-8 hours 'til they get everything they need, then not run it again. If these groups are forced to disband, new groups later are forced to form up. These new groups could be the same as before, or they could include other players. Players who might not be able to do a 6-8 hour grind, but rather a 0.5-2 hour one instead. It mixes it up, and lets people play a bit later in the expansion's schedule and still find groups.

    There's also a financial side of it. Whether you like it or not, DBG is a business, we are customers, and they are looking to get as much money out of us as they can. Prolong the game, you prolong subscriptions. No point in putting all that work in only to have 1-2 months worth of income from it. Put in some blocks, and you extend the subscription periods. We binge shows on Netflix when they get released - I would imagine some folks would do a month-long binge of all of their shows then cancelling for a year if Netflix released everything at once. Instead, they release all of the Crown in December, all of Orange is the New Black another month, Ozark another month, Narcos another month. Now you subscribe for a longer period but get the same content.
  6. Risiko Augur

    It all comes down to content available to the customers.

    Early MMORPG design was all about having tons of content to be enjoyed by the player which is why it would take many years to release a MMORPG.

    Then early on, the industry realized that no matter how much content they put in the games, it was never enough to keep gamers going between expansions.

    So, there had to be some form of artificial slowing of the consumption of content in order to keep the customers from eating up a full expansion in less than a month and be sitting around for the next 11 months waiting on the next expansion.

    There have been a number of design implementations of this design. A lot of the old MMORPGs handled the problem by making the drops of needed gear super insanely rare. Others made it so that you had to collect tons of components to upgrade your gear. Some of the earlier EQ expansions used keying to slow down progression.

    All of those attempts at creating artificial slowing down of content consumption was met with disdain by the gaming public. In short, people didn't like it. We wanted the game designers to be more open and up front with their intentions.

    So, along came the lock out timers. Instead of trying to hide the artificially slowed down content consumption behind really low drop rates and the like, game designers just put it out there for the world to see in the way of lock out timers. Basically, they said, "hey we realize there is no way we can create enough content to keep you satisfied for a year, so we are going to just let you know up front that you can only consume the content in small portions once every so many days." And, it stuck.

    Would we as consumers prefer a big massive expansion full of content that we couldn't possibly consume in less than a month? Yes of course. But, that's just not possible with out having a massive development and design studio pumping out content non-stop, and quite frankly, our $15 a month won't begin to pay for that.
    Fanra likes this.
  7. Scorrpio Augur

    Timers were always there. Open world content has respawn timers. I.e. certain prime targets respawning only once every day/week/8 hours. Or named mobs having small spawn chance instead of a PH. Sure someone can get lucky and get 3-4 names in a row but statistically it evens out. Instanced content got individual lockouts. And it us not just EQ. A lot of things in LotRO have lockouts. Most repeatable quests. Small tasks have a per day limit. Crafting instances are daily. Heck even certain craft recipes have lockouts (one week on first age legendaries, large guild crests and gold level relics)
    One good thing about lockouts is if you got the time to play, they force you to vary your routine rather than letting you grind the same thing over and over. It might not be as efficient but it goes a long way towards preventing player burnout.
  8. Jhenna_BB Proudly Prestigious Pointed Purveyor of Pincusions

    "Content".
  9. Ofearl Slayer of all things Stupid

    Yeah why lockouts!!

    How about we make all raid loot drop in all the chests, off every raid for that expansion!

    Might as well make it tradeable aslo cause next expansion I want new stuff on day 1!!

    Also we need 54 items to drop per raid so we can vear up faster, k thanks
    Risiko likes this.
  10. Tatanka Joe Schmo

    I know that's the purpose, but they don't really accomplish that, with each expac adding at least 10-12 new missions. So, I have a lockout for mission A, but I can do mission B, C, D, etc. So, I can still fight for gear. But I can't do the mission I WANT to do. Just seems silly to me.
  11. Risiko Augur

    LOL you're bad haha