Alter End-Game Mechanics

[Alarti0001]

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

I am still interested in hearing proposals for better end game systems. In the past, I have tried to comment on the ones I thought were good and still in the spirit of classic, non-instanced raiding.

If there was a perfect system in which raid targets spawned simultaneously within a certain window:

• 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

Anyways, keep up the proposals. Hopefully something is suggested that supports more guilds getting targets without diminishing competition.

I have a suggestion.....Velious [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

More targets, more opportunities

[fischsemmel]

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

I remember when the variance was put in to deter poopsocking faggotry, and people just poopsocked harder.

NO ONE FUCKING POOPSOCKS ANYMORE (except on maestro, from time to time).

[Ravager]

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

It says it was created for you to have the OPPORTUNITY to experience classic EQ. It says it was created for you to relive the classic EXPERIENCE. It does not say that the server was created so you can experience things you missed out on back in the day. It does not say that it was created so you can experience everything as a casual.

You have an opportunity to experience every single piece of the p99. If you can't/won't seize on that opportunity, that's fine! But don't complain that you aren't being handed the game on a silver platter as if you were promised that with p99 any more than you were with classic.

I'm not asking to have things handed to me. Getting 30+ people together to kill a dragon that you have an even chance of wiping to, isn't the same thing as having something handed to you. I'm simply saying it's unfair that one guild gets to dictate the access to the end-game content.

[Ravager]

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

NO ONE FUCKING POOPSOCKS ANYMORE (except on maestro, from time to time).

Noone poopsocks anymore because the people who want to are TMO. The only players on this server that tried to 'compete' this way either burned themselves out or were griefed off the server.

Once BDA starts going after more targets, the poopsocking will start all over again.

[fischsemmel]

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

If there was a perfect system in which raid targets spawned simultaneously within a certain window:

• 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

Anyways, keep up the proposals. Hopefully something is suggested that supports more guilds getting targets without diminishing competition.

1. With any kind of window, either poopsocking or tracking is going to happen until the server gets to a point where no one cares enough about kills/loot to put in the time. And that doesn't seem likely to happen short of all the un-casual players quitting.

2. One guild would not have gotten most of the kills on the last two repops if either a) the other guilds had picked targets they could realistically kill before TMO showed up to compete and/or b) everyone knew what time the repop was going to occur. It also would have helped for the repop to be during a time when the most players tend to be logged into the server.


Imagine the system below:

1. Trak, maestro, and draco have a 1-hour window in which all three of the mobs will simultaneously spawn. This happens every 3-ish days.
2. Oldworld dragons, gods, outdoor dragons, VS, and VP have a 1-hour window in which all of the mobs will simultaneously spawn. This happens every 7-ish days.
3. The "-ish" accounts for a staff-selected time when the window will be near the 3/7-day mark.
4. The window's opening and closing times will be made known on the p99 site and ingame.

The 1-hour window is there just for a bit of... I don't know, I guess excitement. A chance for people to maybe make it in in time even if they aren't free at the instant the window opens. Whatever. It isn't really of consequence, I don't think, whether this exists or not. HOWEVER, any larger of a window will certainly work against the casual guilds being online in full force when stuff pops.

The 3-day window forces the more dedicated guilds to race/FTE/whatever for Trak to get those tasty BPs and teeth at the cost of missing out on the couple of nice things maestro and draco still have for these guilds. Yeah, TMO could split its forces and kill trak, draco, and maestro at the same time, but I think that thinning of forces really increases the chance of losing 1+ of the mobs to a guild that focuses. Smaller/more casual guilds get to head to/already be in hate or fear, though they certainly still need to be racing because enough people were certainly logged out on ledge to kill trak within minutes of the server coming up.

The 7-day window forces the more dedicated guilds to pick their priority targets. Maybe a guild can split 2 ways, but certainly not 3. VS, Inny, and CT are most likely the biggest targets, but so long as not all of the guilds try to race each other to those three targets, there are still 6 dragons out there sitting around just waiting to cough up their scales and cloaks and belts and shields and such.

Staff picking the windows can try to spread spawns out so that things aren't always popping at 8-11 pm est, etc. Everyone being on notice of when the window opens will give everyone an equal warning to try to be online at the right time, saving the more casual guilds from having to play 24/7 to compete and letting the more dedicated guilds play their alts or farm or whatever without worrying about being interrupted by a batphone.



Alternatively, the 1-hour window remains 1-hour but not everything spawns at the same time. Logging out at your highest priority target is suddenly a huge risk, because if he doesn't pop right away you could potentially lose an hour of other guilds killing everything else.

Random idea, not sure exactly how it would work because I lost my train of thought on it: raid mobs despawn if not engaged within a certain amount of time, and then perhaps their respawn is shortened cumulatively with multiple despawns? I don't know what the hell I was going for when that popped into my head.

[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.

[falkun]

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

1. Nobody poopsocks!!! The closest thing to a full raid force sitting on a spawn, ready for the engage the second the mobs pops, that exists in p99 is the occasional maestro poopsock. Other than that, guilds have individual characters that sit in zones watching for a raid mob to pop.

GET OUT OF THIS THREAD YOU GOD DAMNED NOOB. I've warned you before, you know nothing about the raid scene on this server and this post, this #1, just lays your ignorance out on the table for EVERYONE to witness and laugh at. The only reason people aren't poopsocking is because we've given up trying to combat TMO, as Ravager has already pointed out. Poopsocks will commence again when someone challenges TMO.

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

2. With any kind of window, either poopsocking or tracking is going to happen until the server gets to a point where no one cares enough about kills/loot to put in the time. And that doesn't seem likely to happen short of all the un-casual players quitting.

The only ones that care that much is TMO and yourself (congrats on putting in the tracking hours for no competition!). The only un-casual players are TMO, and possibly the more hardcore members of BDA/Divinity/Taken/Acyrid.

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

3. One guild would not have gotten most of the kills on the last two repops if either a) the other guilds had picked targets they could realistically kill before TMO showed up to compete and/or b) everyone knew what time the repop was going to occur. It also would have helped for the repop to be during a time when the most players tend to be logged into the server.

Again, you display your ignorance for everyone to mock. TMO can outmobilize anyone. If TMO shows up to Hate to kill Inny when BDA is already in Hate, TMO will fight for FTE instead of going to Fear to get CT, then they will beat Taken+Divinity (fictitious alliance) to CT because Takinity are clearing the zone instead of training it. TMO could just as easily spend an hour clearing VP and then the rest of the server would have most of the non-VP targets down by then, but they don't. TMO actively chooses to kill non-VP targets first knowing they will not have competition in VP. There is not a single target that any other guild "could realistically kill before TMO showed up to compete".

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

Truth.

TMO will do it, whether its fair or not, because its allowed by the server rules. "TMO gives 0 fucks", and will do what it wants until its banned by server rules (even then they'll push the envelope). If you think a server repop gives any other guild a shot at anything beyond their initial target, you're more ignorant to the guild you are in, the raid scene you participate in, and the server you play on than I realized.

Edit: I captured your post before you got to clean up some of your moronic dribble, Fisch.

[Jimes]

People are complaining about not getting mobs, but you really just want them handed to you on a platter. There have been a couple of times in the past month or two where the servers went down and every single raid target respawned. All you guys managed to drop were what, maestro and vox? What makes you think you deserve raid content if that's the best effort you can bring to the table. Enjoy your hate clears and KC xp groups, because that's going to be your EQ experience until you pull your shit together and take what you want. If there are people on the server that want it more than you, then whose fault is that exactly?

[achtung]

ITT falkun posts over and over again about how good TMO is at mobilizing. Quite the compliment.

[Splorf22]

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

I am still interested in hearing proposals for better end game systems. In the past, I have tried to comment on the ones I thought were good and still in the spirit of classic, non-instanced raiding.

If there was a perfect system in which raid targets spawned simultaneously within a certain window:

• 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

Anyways, keep up the proposals. Hopefully something is suggested that supports more guilds getting targets without diminishing competition.

Here's a list for you Nilbog [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

• What is your definition of competition in PVE EQ? I just don't think this whole concept makes sense really.
• I'm a scientist. You are asking questions that can be verified experimentally and easily. Setup two or three dates where you preannounce when you are going to reboot the server. Measure results. TMO claims they'll still get everything - lets find out.
• It's not hard to implement anti-poopsocking code. Just make it so that whenever a raid mob spawns, everyone in the zone is immediately evacuated to the zone in and the entire zone is repopped, plus anyone who logs in while said raid mob is up logs in at the zone safe point regardless of where they camped out. The guild that camps out right outside the zone will still have the advantage of course, but it won't be nearly as high as it is now. Part of the reason TMO is so unstoppable at this kind of thing is that many of them have 2 or more L60 toons, especially now with the IB character RMTs. With 2-3 targets in window at most with variance, they can simply park one toon at each raid mob.
• Alarti is right and Velious is the real answer. Although personally I'm almost inclined to quit just because I'm currently the unluckiest player on the server and am simply unable to win a roll on anything. I calculated that I had a ridiculous 1/1000 chance to go 0-20 something on fungi tunics in 2-4 man groups. I just have to laugh at guys like Treats and Quizy because I can kill the king easily duo, I just can't beat the RNG [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]