How realistic is casual raiding?

[DeathsSilkyMist]

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

This is entirely untrue and its very clear you have zero experience in a high end raid guild.

The opportunities to get DKP are aplenty. If you can't figure it out, then you don't deserve BIS loot.

You're taking points from DSM who has never been a raid playmaker, ever.

What are you talking about? I was agreeing with him about the part where you need to reward people with DKP.

If I understood his top point correctly, he just means not everybody can be consistently able to participlate as a playmaker due to lower playtime. In that case, you couldn't make it into the ranks of the top players who get first dibs in the system cd288 was proposing.

I already agreed with your points about DKP being superior, and that there are plenty of ways to get DKP, even outside of raiding.

I can only assume you missed cd288's post, which is what we were discussing. We weren't discussing a normal DKP guild where everybody gets rewarded with DKP and anybody can step up to be a playmaker.

[Kich867]

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

This is entirely untrue and its very clear you have zero experience in a high end raid guild.

The opportunities to get DKP are aplenty. If you can't figure it out, then you don't deserve BIS loot.

You're taking points from DSM who has never been a raid playmaker, ever.

...What are you even talking about? I was responding to someone saying that pullers should get more DKP than anyone else in order to be more fair. Those people typically get rewarded in other ways anyways they don't also need more DKP than people because they happened to be in the right place at the right time or picked the right class.

If I understood his top point correctly, he just means not everybody can be consistently able to participlate as a playmaker due to lower playtime.

To be clear, I wanted to specifically not say it in reference to play time. Some people will never get those opportunities because of the class they chose or that the guild already has established pullers or whatever, you could show up to every raid and be a great representative to your class and you'd be objectively in a worse off position for no reason. That's why rewarding a puller with more DKP or something is stupid. That's all.

[PlsNoBan]

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

Any class can be a playmaker, it's all in the prep.

DA earrings help, so casters have a benefit.

Sneak and FD help, so monks sometimes have a benefit, rarely.

Selo's for some reason we still allow, so obviously it rules out everything else when it matters.

The player make the difference, put Mjrn or Luddo on a naked 60 human warrior with a DA idol and some sow pots and wands, he'll outplay everyone in this thread.

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

Unless we're talking about tracking/FTE racing and other dumb things exclusive to P99 raiding. I guess that's a different story. I guess I assumed you were talking about raid performance and not all the utter nonsense that comes before you actually kill stuff.

Call me a boomer I guess. I miss the days when a skilled player meant someone that knew their class well and performed the role of its class at a high level. It's such a shame that the endgame has been reduced to who can farm more abusable clickies and practicing optimal race lines to tag mobs first and scripting and screensharing and account sharing trackers.etc.etc.etc

It's a fucking disgrace imo. P99 endgame raiders (and especially the heavy hitters in the FTE/Racing/Tracking game) have some serious stockholm syndrome

[DeathsSilkyMist]

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

Call me a boomer I guess. I miss the days when a skilled player meant someone that knew their class well and performed the role of its class at a high level. It's such a shame that the endgame has been reduced to who can farm more abusable clickies and practicing optimal race lines to tag mobs first and scripting and screensharing and account sharing trackers.etc.etc.etc

It's a fucking disgrace imo. P99 endgame raiders (and especially the heavy hitters in the FTE/Racing/Tracking game) have some serious stockholm syndrome

I think most people on P99 miss the 1999-2001 live days, where people didn't know much about the game. This allowed raiding to be more interesting, because your guild had to figure out the encounter while competing with other guilds who weren't sharing the information. Plus you needed to prepare for the next expansion. In that situation you don't really need all of the P99 rules/features that try and make raiding harder/fairer.

Unfortunately you cannot put the genie back in the bottle when it comes to game knowledge. I can't see any other way for Everquest raiding to end up in this scenario where you don't have instancing. Everybody knows how to beat the encounter, and at least two guilds always have the numbers available via batphone to kill the encounter. Racing and tracking is how you get the mob first, and FTE lets everybody know who tagged the mob.

Custom content would probably be the only way to change the current raiding system, but it almost certainly would fail. People just don't like custom content that much, which is why all of the EQEMU custom content servers have a fraction of the population of P99.

[PlsNoBan]

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

I think most people on P99 miss the 1999-2001 live days, where people didn't know much about the game. This allowed raiding to be more interesting, because your guild had to figure out the encounter while competing with other guilds who weren't sharing the information. Plus you needed to prepare for the next expansion. In that situation you don't really need all of the P99 rules/features that try and make raiding harder/fairer.

Unfortunately you cannot put the genie back in the bottle when it comes to game knowledge. I can't see any other way for Everquest raiding to end up in this scenario where you don't have instancing. Everybody knows how to beat the encounter, and at least two guilds always have the numbers available via batphone to kill the encounter. Racing and tracking is how you get the mob first, and FTE lets everybody know who tagged the mob.

Custom content would probably be the only way to change the current raiding system, but it almost certainly would fail. People just don't like custom content that much, which is why all of the EQEMU custom content servers have a fraction of the population of P99.

I think you're right for the most part. There's certainly no putting the genie back in the bottle with regard to game knowledge. I do believe there are a variety of changes that could easily be made to make the endgame less toxic and stupid and not just instances. They might be less classic? But honestly at this point how "classic" does p99 endgame raiding feel? It feels so different than classic that it might as well be a different game.

I've been a big proponent of either completely removing variance or making it significantly shorter windows. What good does having 16h windows do for anyone? It rewards unhealthy extreme neckbeard behavior and abusing account sharing/screen sharing/scripting. None of which is objectively a good thing or classic in any sense. Either 0 variance or windows of 1-2 hours would go a long way to reducing the extreme timesink barriers and reducing the need for scripts/account/screen sharing. I feel like most people that play this game can stomach tracking for an hour or two. People wouldn't be earning extra DKP to waste their lives staring at a screen for 16 hours straight for the 92389238524th spawn of the same dragon/giant/whatever we've all killed on this server time and time again. This only helps lessen the stupidity of the tracking portion of endgame and doesn't address FTE/Racing which I also think is terrible. Figuring out a better system than FTE/Racing is a slightly harder problem though. On paper I think enforced rotations is probably the most fair and least likely to result in toxic behavior but it has it's own share of issues. People would inevitably just splinter into like 30 different 30man guilds instead of having like 4-5 guilds of 100+ players. You could artificially limit how many guilds can be eligible for the rotation and just tell players if they want to be part of the rotation they need to join/merge into one of those guilds. That's not a perfect solution by any means. I do personally think it's better than encouraging guilds to spend HOURS and HOURS practicing race lines through raid zones and scripting to move off the line quicker and endless farming of otherwise unnecessary clickies and all the dumb shit that happens in this current system.

Another possible solution would be just making raid mobs spawn far more frequently. If every raid mob was on a 24h repop timer I suspect that a much larger variety of guilds would get much more valuable targets on a more regular basis than they do now. What's the negative? People get gear faster? Who cares? P99 is a non profit project right? Not like they have paying customers they need to retain to pay for operations right? What's wrong with making some changes to allow people to actually participate in the endgame? This isn't supposed to be such a competitive game. PvP servers are dead for a reason. Not to mention how many more players would they gain if the endgame was a bit more approachable for the masses? I basically entirely gave up on P99 endgame in it's current state. If some big changes were made to make it less toxic I would certainly consider getting back into it myself. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Every one of us as human beings only gets a certain amount of time to live our lives. I'm not one to shame people for choosing to spend their time however they like. I've spent a disgusting amount of my life playing video games of various kinds. Do you really want to spend DAYS of your life staring at a screen to "track" a 1999 pixel dragon and not even actually playing the game the entire time for a little extra DKP? Does anyone actually enjoy this?

[DeathsSilkyMist]

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

I've been a big proponent of either completely removing variance or making it significantly shorter windows.

I agree with removing variance. It isn't classic. It would make the game more predicable for the smaller guilds. I think this would help smaller guilds compete if done right. For this to work, the devs would need to always quake at peak play times. Otherwise random quakes could put the raid boss respawn time at 2am, which would remove small guilds from the equation again.

I disagree with shorter spawn times though. Scarcity of loot is one of the major factors keeping P99 going for so many years. Just look at how the TLP's bleed players with instancing. When you make loot too easy to get, your player turnover increases. P99 can't really afford that, since there isn't a lot of turnover to begin with. You need to keep the players you have.

Honestly I think P99 would be much better if they just removed a lot of the non-classic changes. No spawn variance, no clickie nerfs, no push interrupt nerf, and no rooted dragons. This would allow small guilds to compete again, and we would have like 5 or 6 guilds going after a target instead of 2.

[PlsNoBan]

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

player turnover increases. P99 can't really afford that

Why? Again this is non profit. Their stated goal is simply to recreate a "museum" server that as closely resembles classic as possible. This isn't supposed to be a money maker where they need to have as many players as possible or anything. It's not a business. People will still play P99. If the numbers dwindle a little bit it really doesn't make a big difference. A sizeable portion of the playerbase doesn't raid at all. You think they're all going to quit if raid gear gets easier to attain?

I do agree with your other points though

[DeathsSilkyMist]

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

Why? Again this is non profit. Their stated goal is simply to recreate a "museum" server that as closely resembles classic as possible. This isn't supposed to be a money maker where they need to have as many players as possible or anything. It's not a business. People will still play P99. If the numbers dwindle a little bit it really doesn't make a big difference. A sizeable portion of the playerbase doesn't raid at all. You think they're all going to quit if raid gear gets easier to attain?

I do agree with your other points though

P99 is a very niche server that has quite a few hurdles to jump over before you even get it working.

For players like us who love the game, we are willing to jump over said hurdles. But a lot of people stop at the point of trying to get the game working in the first place if they are not as familiar with the game.

Based on the data from the TLPs, I am farily certain people would leave P99 at a faster rate due to accomplishing their goals faster. As population dwindles, more people leave because the server feels empty.

You have to be extremely careful with multiplayer games. The player base is required to keep the game alive. Clearly the scarcity formula works for P99, or it would have died years ago. Anybody who wants faster loot is already playing TLP probably.

[Kich867]

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

Another possible solution would be just making raid mobs spawn far more frequently. If every raid mob was on a 24h repop timer I suspect that a much larger variety of guilds would get much more valuable targets on a more regular basis than they do now. What's the negative? People get gear faster? Who cares? P99 is a non profit project right? Not like they have paying customers they need to retain to pay for operations right? What's wrong with making some changes to allow people to actually participate in the endgame? This isn't supposed to be such a competitive game. PvP servers are dead for a reason. Not to mention how many more players would they gain if the endgame was a bit more approachable for the masses? I basically entirely gave up on P99 endgame in it's current state. If some big changes were made to make it less toxic I would certainly consider getting back into it myself. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

This is generally where my head goes for this. Just have them respawn more frequently with smaller windows, or no windows. I've also seen/heard some games go in different directions where the longer a mob is alive the better it loot it has so there's some incentive not to kill it immediately, I don't love that though it seems like it would breed a ton of drama and whatnot.

I think ideally a system would involve some level of mechanics to encourage a guild to not camp one mob forever, but I honestly think that would occur naturally if they spawned more often. If most raid mobs spawned every like, 8 hours, you're still going to regularly be trying to figure out what is up, what isn't up, who is doing what, what can you go grab, and for me at least that's kind of the enjoyable part.

And it would space spawns out to be somewhat reasonable for most timezones at some point.

[cd288]

Honestly I would support raid instancing on P99. Not for regular dungeons so certain things like Kael would still get contested but for things like the planes and ToV whatever just instance it. The whole Zerg and clickie meta nowadays is so unclassic anyway that why not just shove the big groups of man children into their own respective instances and call it a day.

I could imagine one benefit being maybe the staff is more engaged on other things because they’re not spending all their free time dealing with whiney raid petitions.