VP Keys Quests should not be in game

[azxten]

It would be interesting to see data on how many people on a given server had a VP key at Velious launch. I bet it was less than 50 on any live server. I bet some servers may have not had anyone get a key or not enough to conduct raids.

http://www.afterlifeguild.org/templa...ndex_jun_dec00

November 11, 2000 Posted by Arele
Veeshan's Peak Cleared - Phara Dar Dead!
Afterlife cleared Veeshan's Peak this weekend, starting Friday night with the slaying of Silverwing. Saturday we reassembled to kill the rest of the dragons - Hoshkar, Xygoz, Druushk, and Nexona on the way to the big prize (and only dragon not yet defeated) Phara Dar herself.

September 9, 2000 Posted by Arele
Xygoz & Druushk Slain!
Two more mighty beasts of Veeshan's Peak fell tonight at the hands of Afterlife. This was also the first time on any server the dragon Xygoz has been killed!

Monday August 7th 2000 Posted by Thanotos
Afterlife's First VP Raid
Well, we went in today. We didn't do bad for the people we had, but will be needing a few more keys before we can really show VP who's boss. Here's a screenshot for you...
Veeshan's Peak

Sunday Jul 23'rd 2000 Posted by Thanotos
Afterlife enters VP
Delnatha entered VP today, and took a few screenshots, we're not quite ready to go in and show VP what we are made of yet... but it wont be long. Watch out Veeshan [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Afterlife didn't clear VP until November 11th.

Kunark releases April
Afterlife gets first VP key July
Afterlife first raid August
Afterlife global firsts August-Sept
Afterlife clears VP November
Velious releases December

So from this we know...

1. It took one of the best EQ guilds ever which was achieving global first kills about 4 months to get anyone a VP key. Was this due to lack of knowledge or was the quest not working?

2. From first key to first raid took 1 month but notes they're still short on keys. They likely had almost no competition for keys and only the drop rate was the limiting factor.

3. From almost raid force keyed to cleared took about 4 months.

4. The best guild possibly ever to exist in EQ was only able to clear VP when Velious was less than a month away from launching.

Like I said, I bet a LOT of servers may have had zero VP keys at Velious launch. Probably 95% of servers had not cleared VP when Velious launched.

I think VP key quest or VP difficulty should be modified to try to mimic this kind of time scale. VP should only be for the most neck bearded losers and it should involve true challenge probably through more powerful mobs.

It's abnormal to play a "classic" EQ server where by Velious launch probably 3-5 guilds will be easily able to clear it both in terms of keys and ability.

https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/...3&p=3#comments

In this dungeon no gm help is available even in the case of Link Death or server crashes!

This is kind of interesting. Should VP be a FFA zone? I've proposed this before, on live GMs did not participate in "lawyer quest" like they do on P99. Apparently someone calls this zone out as special which I vaguely remember. I wonder if on live training and other activity in VP would never be addressed by a GM.

I still think the problem is bigger than keys or mob difficulty. P99 is simply too easy. ZEMs shouldn't exist, channeling shouldn't be so successful, and so on. The player level curve here skews way too fast to the top end. In live only the most dedicated players could raid a given expansions end game content before the next expansion dropped. This was good because it kept guilds and players spread out throughout the game. On P99 bonus exp alone results in too many max level characters than should exist for the time period designed.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the best EQ guilds were only clearing VP 1-2 months before Velious released. It's because the game was DESIGNED to provide a challenge that was only just achievable given the expected duration of the expansion.

On P99 we're adhering to classic time scale but not designing the game to fit that time scale. Faster exp than classic but using a classic time scale results in content that becomes trivial too fast and a bottleneck forms causing player frustration.

Want faster exp rates? Great. Then expansions also need to release faster to maintain proper design.

[Gustoo]

Azxten we talk about these problems a lot.

The biggest issue is that we are going into these new progression servers with 20 years of experience and 10 whole years of Blue 99 experience meaning we are grizzled psychopaths at decimating this content.

I agree completely that the fact that so many people are maximum level on Project 1999 is very abnormal and is very unhealthy for the server, but I don't know how its possible to stop it.

1. Everyone can look up the best places to level
2. There are a lot of people that know all kinds of elite mechanics for maximum powerlevel speeds
3. A lot of people on Project 1999 came here to WIN not just to quest. They don't want to flounder around like they did when they were 13 years old.
4. The population is all in there 30's or so which also means they are at peak age to DESTROY a game like this. There are no 11 year olds (barely) and no 60 year olds (barely) and there were a lot of these on Live. The imbalance comes from the way hormones work on adolescents. People that played in middle school can't really shake this game or at least its very difficult to find a game that is as fun / enticing / addicting however you want to describe it for this population.

Only psychos even knew how to get into VP or that it existed. Only psychos got to 60 before velious. ANYONE in planar gear on live was really hardcore, let alone anyone with an item we consider BIS today. That stuff was entirely legendary and by the time people figured out the content, a new expansion opened up and people were going to the next thing.

That experience can't be replicated here.

I think the next progression server will simply have a progressive maximum level cap and we all level up together without a crazy rush to the top. Eventually it will be top level heavy but at least we can all journey together for a while.

Thats just my guess since it saves a lot of the toxic we have here now.

[cd288]

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

Hey folks,

GMs acknowledge that certain behaviors are detrimental to the server that are gained by foresight for what's to come. These behaviors/items they seek to control are not negative nor do they have malicious intent, but ultimately are controlled to maintain the spirit of classic EQ experience.

I believe the most infamous/famous example of this to be GM intervention to nerf the Gnoll Scroll experience - but there are other intentional decisions to stick to this server's scope of work.

That being said - I do not think that VP Keys should remain in game for this reason. No one, in true classic experience at this stage of Kunark, had any idea what VP was or what it would do, what loot benefits would wait. And even if they did, I think it is fair to say that they were no methods to mass produce VP keys.

I would hope that the GMs consider the precedent they've maintained to make this the best emulated everquest experience and remove the VP Key quest line and/or its no drops - from the game.

This is my perspective alone and not representative of my elf pals.

This isn’t really analogous to the summon corpse list situation. The summon corpse situation was a bunch of people who realized they could skip a good portion of a raid by farming this spell and trying to exploit it by monopolizing its for themselves. Contrast that with simply knowing something drops of X Y or Z. It’s not the same at all.

If your standard is “well people didn’t know about this as much back in the day” then we might as well modify literally everything on the server because everything is known as this point except new ways to exploit things like summon corpse. Knowing how something drops isn’t similar.

[nphixion]

Originally Posted by cd288 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

This isn’t really analogous to the summon corpse list situation. The summon corpse situation was a bunch of people who realized they could skip a good portion of a raid by farming this spell and trying to exploit it by monopolizing its for themselves. Contrast that with simply knowing something drops of X Y or Z. It’s not the same at all.

If your standard is “well people didn’t know about this as much back in the day” then we might as well modify literally everything on the server because everything is known as this point except new ways to exploit things like summon corpse. Knowing how something drops isn’t similar.

It’s not analogous to the summon corpse situation which is why I didn’t bring it up. Thanks tho for your perspective.

[nphixion]

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

It would be interesting to see data on how many people on a given server had a VP key at Velious launch. I bet it was less than 50 on any live server. I bet some servers may have not had anyone get a key or not enough to conduct raids.

http://www.afterlifeguild.org/templa...ndex_jun_dec00









Afterlife didn't clear VP until November 11th.

Kunark releases April
Afterlife gets first VP key July
Afterlife first raid August
Afterlife global firsts August-Sept
Afterlife clears VP November
Velious releases December

So from this we know...

1. It took one of the best EQ guilds ever which was achieving global first kills about 4 months to get anyone a VP key. Was this due to lack of knowledge or was the quest not working?

2. From first key to first raid took 1 month but notes they're still short on keys. They likely had almost no competition for keys and only the drop rate was the limiting factor.

3. From almost raid force keyed to cleared took about 4 months.

4. The best guild possibly ever to exist in EQ was only able to clear VP when Velious was less than a month away from launching.

Like I said, I bet a LOT of servers may have had zero VP keys at Velious launch. Probably 95% of servers had not cleared VP when Velious launched.

I think VP key quest or VP difficulty should be modified to try to mimic this kind of time scale. VP should only be for the most neck bearded losers and it should involve true challenge probably through more powerful mobs.

It's abnormal to play a "classic" EQ server where by Velious launch probably 3-5 guilds will be easily able to clear it both in terms of keys and ability.

https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/...3&p=3#comments



This is kind of interesting. Should VP be a FFA zone? I've proposed this before, on live GMs did not participate in "lawyer quest" like they do on P99. Apparently someone calls this zone out as special which I vaguely remember. I wonder if on live training and other activity in VP would never be addressed by a GM.

I still think the problem is bigger than keys or mob difficulty. P99 is simply too easy. ZEMs shouldn't exist, channeling shouldn't be so successful, and so on. The player level curve here skews way too fast to the top end. In live only the most dedicated players could raid a given expansions end game content before the next expansion dropped. This was good because it kept guilds and players spread out throughout the game. On P99 bonus exp alone results in too many max level characters than should exist for the time period designed.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the best EQ guilds were only clearing VP 1-2 months before Velious released. It's because the game was DESIGNED to provide a challenge that was only just achievable given the expected duration of the expansion.

On P99 we're adhering to classic time scale but not designing the game to fit that time scale. Faster exp than classic but using a classic time scale results in content that becomes trivial too fast and a bottleneck forms causing player frustration.

Want faster exp rates? Great. Then expansions also need to release faster to maintain proper design.

Thank you for your research and perspective. This time scale for Afterlife couldn’t more clearly illustrate the point of my post.

[Zipity]

Trak died within 24hrs of Kunark green release... everything is accelerated on this server due to vast knowledge of raid encounters and key spawns etc. If anything the afterlife post shows we should already be in VP killing dragons.

[cd288]

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

It’s not analogous to the summon corpse situation which is why I didn’t bring it up. Thanks tho for your perspective.

Weird I don’t know why I read summon corpse instead of gnoll scroll. Weed is interesting

[Scalem]

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

Trak died within 24hrs of Kunark green release... everything is accelerated on this server due to vast knowledge of raid encounters and key spawns etc. If anything the afterlife post shows we should already be in VP killing dragons.

Easy to kill Trak fast when you can just throw 100 plus bodies at it over and over. VP will be cleared as soon as ST has enough people keyed. Notice how Trak isn’t one of the open raids they are “gifting” the server?

[Imposter]

petition to remove VP key items until the true date they should arrive on the server, which would be the release of VP, or at the very least, the arrival of gorenaire/talendar/severilous.

[nphixion]

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

Easy to kill Trak fast when you can just throw 100 plus bodies at it over and over. VP will be cleared as soon as ST has enough people keyed. Notice how Trak isn’t one of the open raids they are “gifting” the server?

Not the point of the post but duly noted, lol.

My point for those new to the thread, which has been corroborated by posts in that era, is that it took Afterlife 4 months to get to VP. It will take 1 day on green. It would take one day for one person to get 1-60 on scrolls if the scrolls weren't nerfed or delayed 30 days. It will now take...Uh.. 4 months+ (for some of us, lol). It seems apples-to-apples as a behavior/timeline that the GMs would typically control.