Does "Classic" mean a few dozen hold thrawl? Or why every mob should pop every 6 hrs

[EdTuBrutus]

P99 is a fantastic festival of nostalgia. It is wonderful to spawn in your home town (instead of a weird mix zone), to play the game and see it look like you remember). This is why I made a char on P99 and why I play the game and have really enjoyed the nostalgia of being back in Norrath.

To me, that is Classic. Not only that, but the look and feel of the game in general is all that is needed to be Classic. Being "Classic" is not a reason to keep broken and fundamentally alienating aspects of the game. Some of those, like the ridiculous pace of levelling you can over come. I think it should be changed but at the end of the day, there is nothing actively preventing you from overcoming this idiotic part of Classic EQ.

But there is an aspect of the game where you are actively and intentionally blocked by other players - a tiny number of the player base - from participating in the game. That is raid encounter mobs. And the kicker is that it is worse on P99 than it ever was on Live.

Now I'm not going to spend a lot of time speculating why that is. But the reality is that by Velious, Fear and Hate were not camped, Old World Dragons were not camped. Aspects of P99 are removed from the game from the bulk of players which, if they let the high content consumers move on, were never out of reach in Live.

And that's a real problem because it seems to me the game could be much more popular and much more active without it. At the moment a few dozen players (for greed in resale or for Kicks'n'Giggles) are locking a bulk of the audience out of end game encounters. Much of which is purely because "hey we can".

There has never been any reason, whatsoever, for raid end mobs to be rare and spawn on such a long time scale. The thinking (back in 99 to the early 2000s) was that players would simply quit en masse if they achieved end game encounters. We know this idea is wrong. There have been countless games which offer the full end game experience to players no matter what level their play time allows them to participate at and none of them have found this to be a problem. The entire justification to rare end game encounters has been found to be false.

So why persist on this? If every single end game mob repopped every 4 to 6 hours, what would be the effect on the game? It would still be Classic, it would look and feel like it did back in 99. The only impact it would actually have would be to remove the opportunity for a tiny number of players (and lets be real here, we are talking about less than 100 players) to block content for thousands.

If every raid mob respawned every 4 to 6 hours, then you could, if you had a job and commitments outside EQ, schedule raids, raid mobs and not be cock blocked specifically because a tiny subset of the player base gets their kicks out of stopping you from enjoying the content. The game would not be easier. There is nothing easier about killing a mob than setting up a camping schedule to track a respawn.

Classic EQ has a huge amount going for it. But that doesn't mean it should be static (clearly there are significant changes to the Live EQ of the Velious age). Fixing the end game would be the best way to get players to enjoy the game, stay in the game. And if it costs the server a few dozen players whose entire enjoyment comes from cock blocking content - well, that sounds like a Win to me.