Alter End-Game Mechanics

[falkun]

Originally Posted by nilbog [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

• Would guilds still poopsock?
• Would a single guild still get most of the targets?

From what I've seen, raiding guilds on p99 have far greater numbers than were historically on my eqlive server. I would hate to make a system that somehow made things worse :T

If raid mobs all popped at the same, known time, guilds would poopsock their highest priority targets.
A single guild (TMO currently) would still get most of the targets because they are large enough and/or have enough well-placed alts to mobilize multiple forces and/or quickly mobilize or camp over to other targets, as they have done on previous full respawns lately (Vox+Trak anyone?).

Raiding guilds are much larger on this server than Live because we are all in one place and the competition caters to guilds of the largest size.

These factors were mitigated on Live by rapid deployment of content (faster than one person could achieve multiple characters to absorb the content on), creating a longer grind (necessity of AAs meant players did not have time to devote to alts), and raid size restrictions (originally 72, now I think Live raids are 30man?). Classically, you cannot accomplish any of these (except maybe content deployment, which is determined by server staff capability) because AAs and raid interface are two non-classic additions to Everquest.

You, as a server developer, are stuck between a rock and a hard place and I do not envy you. As has already been mentioned in this thread, scarcity creates demand. Unless you dilute the item pool, you will not reduce the demand. At the same time, a lot of players stick around and don't "get max level and quit" because things are not diluted and the time investment is so great.

The only reason things have improved lately is because people stopped fighting. To quote Alarti, "IB is gone, VD is gone." There isn't another guild that wishes to, as Amelinda puts it, "TAKE mobs from TMO". The effort doesn't justify the rewards and the support the rest of the server would need from staff in enforcing the rules is not adequate (not that they don't do a good job when they are available, but they cannot humanly resolve everything). So the fighting is done, TMO owns the server, and the rest of us bitch at TMO for owning the server.

It'll go like this until either another guild steps up and "takes mobs from TMO", making Amelinda's life miserable but giving her exactly what she asked for or TMO gets bored killing the same thing without competition, realizing they'd rather have a PVP game than trying to PVP within some arbitrary bounds of PVE. After that next coup, we'll see if the new overlords turn out to be the same as the old (similar to IB -> TMO), or if they will be better or, Tunare forbid, worse. Eventually we'll reach some form of equilibrium, much as EQMac has now that its seven (is that right?) years old. I'm sure EQMac had some hard times in its adolescent time as well. EQMac, as a server, is wise in its old-age.

Back to the original topic, I think full server resets are nice. They give the smaller guilds a shot, at least, at one or two targets before TMO sweeps all they can kill away. They also add additional loot (the dilution I mentioned earlier) because they force spawn mobs faster than their intended range. EQMac has full resets every other week, I think something similar here would be nice, even if every 3 weeks.

I think the variance is a bit on the ridiculous side. The only people you're still getting to waste time with tracking is TMO. The rest of us wait for the "scrap of the week" from TMO, and then casually track that one target until it spawns. If we have the people on, we kill it, if not, its left for the next guild to casually kill at their leisure. Changing the variance to +/-12hrs on either side will still allow raid mobs to spawn at times more opportune for other time zones (as opposed to 11PM EST killing Gore and then the Asian time zones always being screwed out of his static respawn time), but TMO's trackers will get to breathe (unless they REALLY love tracking -that- much).

I'm conflicted about tokens. While I'd love to get my epic, and I'm sure other players would too, its definitively "not classic". However, I can see the argument for implementing the "spawned" mobs sooner. Spawned VS, Undead Bard (spawned Trak), spawned Faydedar, moving Hate/Fear epic pieces from the gods to the minibosses; these are all Velious classic changes that we will see on this server, help the raid scene, and can be implemented ahead of time. If you want to stick to classic, then change them when they were chronologically changed, "the change was implemented X months after epic release on Live, so implement it here X months after epics were released on P99, regardless of if Hate as a whole has been updated to 2.0 or if Velious has (not) been released yet."

As for the future, I'd suggest increasing the difficulty of Velious mobs. You already have charm on Kunark dragons (not classic as far as I can tell), but something more needs to be done. As you've mentioned, the guilds are larger, and as we all know, the strats are 10+ years old. I don't know how you'd do this, whether through more HPs (hello shitty Vex Thal), add additional raid boss mechanics (not classic), make them hit harder (hello shitty random number generator "IH8U" roll), or some other method. You might make more "linked" fights, IE: you pull Vindi, but you have to deal with the 3 guards that come with him (hello Emp Ssra) (that can't be monk-split or DoT+COS+COH pulled). I don't know all the solutions you can come up with, but make the content harder. Velious getting cleared in a night would make me a sad panda. I'm sure TMO might actually enjoy a PVE challenge for once too, instead of begging the server for a PVP challenge.