EQ TLP - Oakwynd (Evolving Ruleset Progression Server)

Arbitrary

Arbitrary

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Elderan said:
I think velious will be fine because it requires almost no keying. But luclin will be brutal and pop even worse flagging a bunch of alts.
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Doing Kael/ToV/PoG/Yelinak/Dain/ST instances twice a week instead of once a week is still just more. After that you've got extra Ssra/VT to look forward to. The better guilds are going to feel obligated to do them. Hell, why stop at just one extra set of instances per week. Why not two or three extra? I think Oakwynd is going to get the players it does have to go harder than is necessary with the alts and the splits now but next time around those same features are going to read like punishments. No, I don't want to ever level and maintain three Clerics again fuck you.
 
Tuco

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Arbitrary said:
My concern is that people are going to burn themselves right the fuck out leveling and maintaining several copies of the same character to do extra raids in Velious and Luclin so they can be extra more bis than they've ever bissed before and then just be done forever.
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Of the many problems with Oakwynd, one of them is that the heritage gear rules encourage people playing sweaty, but the FTE rules discourage it. What are you going to do, sweat it out and voltron-fuse a mega-BIS character in the first couple weeks of PoP just so you can.... not be able to meaningfully DPS race and then fight more trivial content?

The stacking bonuses also discourage try-harding because the more the evolving rules turn everything into a loot pinata, getting to a point where your gear trivializes everything will require less and less heritage sweating.
 
Tuco

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Zaide said:
We are past the eras where I normally quit on TLPs but based on the kill trackers it seems like Mischief is vastly more popular than other servers in similar eras. Consider that as recently as last month they told us that the server was still too populated to remove afk kick. Also it’s been shown to be much more active than Yelinak which launched a year after it.

As far as I am aware when we talk about population retention it goes Mischief, then Mangler and then a big gap before landing on Phinny/Aradune.

Mischief has 22 raiding guilds that I am aware of, plus probably a few more under the radar. Thornblade has another 6. At least 3 guilds atm are splitting all content, and 2 of them are pulling in like 100+ sign ups per raid night with minimal boxing.

I think the “perfect” server for an absolute jackpot population boom would be:

FV Loot
Double Drops (or Mischief loot)
Launch with Kunark open
8 weeks per expansion
Merge LDoN with PoP
Merge DoN with Omens
Merge PoR with DoDH
Classic zones (Commons, Ro, Nek, Lava, Freeport, Highpass)
Redo ZEMs the week before launch.
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Decrease all spawn times to 25% - 50% and I'm in. Add a rule where the first four weeks of an expansion release don't include the levels/aa's/spells, just the zones and I'll go hard on it.

Classic zones is a non-starter. The entire DPG staff can't produce the zones that the coked out artists in the '90s made in a weekend.
 
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Zaide

Zaide

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Tuco said:
Decrease all spawn times to 25% - 50% and I'm in. Add a rule where the first four weeks of an expansion release don't include the levels/aa's/spells, just the zones and I'll go hard on it.

Classic zones is a non-starter. The entire DPG staff can't produce the zones that the coked out artists in the '90s made in a weekend.
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The zones still exist. You can enter the old Freeport zones via a special clicky from the store and I think a quest for the SK epic retelling also lets you go there.
 
C

Canibal

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I only joined Mischief during pop and would love to be able to experience it from the beginning. All the rules Zaide mentioned a few pages back were spot on what I would enjoy, especially the classic zones. If they ever do mischief 2.0 I’m dropping everything and all in.
 
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Kithani

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Tuco said:
Add a rule where the first four weeks of an expansion release don't include the levels/aa's/spells, just the zones and I'll go hard on it.
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Hmm an expansion that was released without the levels/AAs/spells… so basically you want a vanilla Gates of Discord server?
 
Tuco

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Kithani said:
Hmm an expansion that was released without the levels/AAs/spells… so basically you want a vanilla Gates of Discord server?
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Bingo.

TLP is trivial, not worth being competitive in for me personally. Vaniki was a good idea but too aggressive. Something that provides a hard mode followed by the normal easy mode would be perfect and make prepping for an expansion release interesting.
 
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Ambiturner

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Arbitrary said:
They've made advancements in the past. Sleeper/Combine were neat, Phinny was the first introduction of raid instancing, people like Mischief, Vaniki was interesting, etc. Oakwynd is underwhelming now but it might come in to its own once a few expansions are unlocked. Probably not but maybe!
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It's possible they could get lucky and make a good server again by accident. But there were alot of people who seemed to think they were saving something big for the 25 year.
 
Arbitrary

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Ambiturner said:
It's possible they could get lucky and make a good server again by accident. But there were alot of people who seemed to think they were saving something big for the 25 year.
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The Aradune Memorial Server a few years ago had the gimmick of dedicated GM enforcement. I hope they have some good shit set aside for the 25th but I'm expecting disappointment.
 
Rajaah

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Tuco said:
Bingo.

TLP is trivial, not worth being competitive in for me personally. Vaniki was a good idea but too aggressive. Something that provides a hard mode followed by the normal easy mode would be perfect and make prepping for an expansion release interesting.
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I'm totally down for this idea. Having to do expansion races at the previous level cap adds a very cool Vaniki-like wrinkle to the competition without going full Vaniki.

For example, having to do Kunark content at 50 for a month, or OoW epics/raids at 65. I don't think any of that would really be a "hard mode" but it would make things interesting.

BTW, I don't think I've ever seen "next TLP speculation" start 11 months in advance before, so Oakwynd has set a record for that...
 
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Xevy

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I'm sure lots of people will answer lots of ways.

But in the end it doesn't really, really matter at all. Just get more hp/ac.
 
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Tuco

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Rajaah said:
For example, having to do Kunark content at 50 for a month, or OoW epics/raids at 65. I don't think any of that would really be a "hard mode" but it would make things interesting.
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Combine that with 25%/50% respawn times and a lot of comfy endgame camps could get pretty dicey.
 
SorrowsEnd

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About the Vaniki style discussion...

I just leveled up a full set of toons on vaniki and then some 55s to run the set of achievement raids this past week (CBQ, Lower Guk Ldon escort raid, Emp Ssra).

The current level cap is 80 with the HoT expansion unlocked. Normally you are leveling through HoT at 86-90. I've worked through a set of the various progression missions for t3-t4 access. I've gone back to underfoot and SoD zones and farmed up various gear etc. Played a bunch of the Hardcore Heritage blackburrow, unrest, cazic thule for the level 75-80 stuff and then had good time farming the phase 2 Crushbone HH for the level 90 gear. FYI named in Crushbone at the time were level 93-95 and we are doing this on 80s.

My biggest takeaway from a few weeks playing "hard" content on Vaniki is the lower level cap is a fucking joke. The only thing you are missing that makes it harder is the loss of level appropriate lull.

Normally I just bard lull and single pull the shit out of HoT. It just takes a little longer for safer pulls. That's it.

The level cap is dumb. Scratch that failed idea. Let the toons be level appropriate for the expansions that are out and just set achievement hard cap levels. Keeping toons at 55 to do some raids was fun. Trying to keep the level cap under the current expansion norm is just dumb.

Screenshot (402).png
 
Rajaah

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SorrowsEnd said:
About the Vaniki style discussion...

My biggest takeaway from a few weeks playing "hard" content on Vaniki is the lower level cap is a fucking joke. The only thing you are missing that makes it harder is the loss of level appropriate lull.
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Agreed, for the most part. Raid-wise we were able to roll a lot of content that we were ten levels short on. Kunark/Velious/Luclin at 50 isn't nearly as bad as one would think. The problems came with things like GoD at 55, DoDH at 60, TSS at 65. The latter had more to do with available cures and so on.

Group content by and large isn't hard with a ten level deficit. We had zero trouble farming group content in PoR (the highest 70 expansion) at 60 even with deficient numbers. The raids are where any difficulty crops up on that server, and even then it varies wildly.

The most fun I had raid-wise was PoP at 55. Was more challenging than the earlier expansions at 50, by a good margin, while not going into the "practically unwinnable" level of some of the later stuff. Without PoP gear yet, that first run of PoP fights at 55 could be absolutely blistering and a good rush. Emperor Ssra was also a lot of fun.

ssra how it started how it's going.jpg
 
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Tuco

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SorrowsEnd said:
The level cap is dumb. Scratch that failed idea. Let the toons be level appropriate for the expansions that are out and just set achievement hard cap levels. Keeping toons at 55 to do some raids was fun. Trying to keep the level cap under the current expansion norm is just dumb.
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What would you recommend for a TLP ruleset that made the game harder in an enjoyable way, harder in an even way for different expansions and could be disabled halfway through the expansion to give people a chance to catch up to the autists?
 
SorrowsEnd

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I think selo had the right idea with launching in a later expansion.

Killing emp with naked toons at 60 was good fun.

I don't think any specific tweaks they can make to the game itself to make it harder will really do anything. The game has been solved many times over.

I think they only way they can make an actual fun TLP in the future would be to flat out drop the no drop tag and after playing on vaniki get rid of all level requirements.

Start the server in TSS.
Free Trade FV or Mischief random, really dont care though mischief allows many more areas to open up for play
Just no truebox anything. Ban the people openly mq2ing. Play 6 like a normal person.
DOUBLE LOOT. Dont ever screw with the lockout timers or give people more chances to murder themselves raiding each week, just double the goddamn loot.

That's really all they need to do, TSS launch so you can play where you want. Free Trade, No Truebox. No gear level requirements. Double Loot. Thanks now get on it.

Then if you want specific hard mode achievements just set them up with hard capped level requirements or raid size etc. I think trying to build the server around the challenges just isn't the right idea.
 
DickTrickle

DickTrickle

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I don't feel like the mechanics of the game are worthy of being a lot harder. Like, the current game design every time you make something objectively harder you quite easily risk it being simply more tedious as well. Not to mention the repetitive nature of playing an MMO exacerbate any tedium, in my opinion.

Hard games like the Souls games work because they have well thought out, varied, and relatively complex mechanics as well as content designed to compliment the effort given.
 
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