Everquest - Selos Server - 20th Anniversary Casual Server

Elderan said:

The Deep AE run 24/7 makes 500k+ in vendor items.
Velks AE run 24/7 varies more based on how much you can pull and if you can pick or not .But in vendor items alone you make 700k+ a day.
Neither of these is counting the krono from the PL and the items sold for krono.

My point is AE PL groups make by far the most in the game and it isn't even close.

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No way deep aoe makes anywhere close to this.

mkopec said:

Used to be even worse on live servers like a year or two back, literal lag spikes for the entire server cluster as peeps were pulling entire zones, and were not talking classic zones here but massive expansion ones. This is why the pretty much did a blanket nerf to all AOE bullshit in this game at that time. Its when I quit (that time lol) because while not pulling entire zones I really enjoyed my ranger headsot shit in which they nerfed along witht all the other AOE shit.

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As far as TLPs go AE groups who run massive PLs 24/7 in popular zones (sebilis, velks) and pick hop for example cause far more disruption to players and game economy fluctuation than any other group of people.

I think all AE damages spells should have a max limit of 8 targets, one big problem solved.

mkopec said:

Used to be even worse on live servers like a year or two back, literal lag spikes for the entire server cluster as peeps were pulling entire zones, and were not talking classic zones here but massive expansion ones. This is why the pretty much did a blanket nerf to all AOE bullshit in this game at that time. Its when I quit (that time lol) because while not pulling entire zones I really enjoyed my ranger headsot shit in which they nerfed along witht all the other AOE shit.

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That's the part that annoys me is that game companies tend to nerf anything enjoyable in order to stop a handful of bad individuals from exploiting it.

It's been a repeating pattern for the past two decades.

Issue: Farmers monopolizing all loot camps keeping the other 95% of players from enjoying said content.

Industry Solution: Instance everything

Affect on the players: Cookie cutter run from point A to point B assembly line style instance dungeon crawls where there was no good rare spawns or rare drops because since it was instanced and therefore play-on-demand, they had to take the good loot out of the dungeons and instead give you some sort of ticket system for running the instanced dungeon. Then you took the tickets you got from running the dungeons back to a Chuckee Cheese prize booth in town to trade them in for the gear you SHOULD HAVE BEEN getting as rare drops in the dungeon in the first fucking place!

The MMORPG industry has gone from a living breathing world design to that of a safe-gloves-on game design all because time after time, game designers knee jerk reactions to try to deal with the 5% of the customer base that cheats and exploits the games.

Instead of fucking games up for the other 95% of their customers in order to try to curtail the actions of the 5%, they should be using customer support to deal with the 5%.

Elderan said:

As far as TLPs go AE groups who run massive PLs 24/7 in popular zones (sebilis, velks) and pick hop for example cause far more disruption to players and game economy fluctuation than any other group of people.

I think all AE damages spells should have a max limit of 8 targets, one big problem solved.

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No.

Everquest is a cool game because it has cool gimmicks, and imbalanced items, and quirky pathing, and crazy exploits... One of the absolute last things we really need are blanket nerfs for game balance sake.

Sure, your nerf will stop ae groups in their tracks. It also stops a multitude of game encounters built around trash swarms. It stops pog ae and forces abusing tuna summoning to get through quickly. It nerfs one coirnav strat. It cripples for example a level 60 cleric rounding up a couple dozen owls or wolves in hsm to solo ae down for tradeskill drops. It also, whether you like it or not, cripples a grouping method that seems to always involve multiple human beings working together and isn't (as far as I can tell) being done by the box armies.

Fuck nerfs.

yerm said:

No.

Everquest is a cool game because it has cool gimmicks, and imbalanced items, and quirky pathing, and crazy exploits... One of the absolute last things we really need are blanket nerfs for game balance sake.

Sure, your nerf will stop ae groups in their tracks. It also stops a multitude of game encounters built around trash swarms. It stops pog ae and forces abusing tuna summoning to get through quickly. It nerfs one coirnav strat. It cripples for example a level 60 cleric rounding up a couple dozen owls or wolves in hsm to solo ae down for tradeskill drops. It also, whether you like it or not, cripples a grouping method that seems to always involve multiple human beings working together and isn't (as far as I can tell) being done by the box armies.

Fuck nerfs.

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I don't disagree with you at all.

But when someone presents a problem and they don't like the fix to the problem then they just need to accept the problem and move on. Issue is most people don't and they just continue to complain knowing the "fix" is just another problem.

Probably the reason that stuff gets bitched about a lot is as a percentage of its (relatively small) player base, EQ has a lot more of the RMTer/botter types than a typical MMO. Anyone that has played any modern MMO has seen the same stuff in them, EQ especially on early TLP it happens fully in the open and definitely represents a bigger portion of the game economy/player base. Last time I played WoW was in Legion on Area 52 and you would very occasionally run into weird Chinese bot crews spamming kanji in chat and doing weird shit, but it's nothing like EQ TLP where you see stuff like that daily and in multiple picks of the most popular xp areas.

Another aspect to it is EQ has functionally no technical anti-cheat stance at all, they have True Box code and EQ Mule helped them box casual users out of using MQ2 on True Box servers, but like you can literally connect cheat engine to EQ process with impunity. Even really shitty games like Rust and Pubg auto-ban like instantly for that kind of stuff. What's interesting is while I understand there's probably technical/philosophical (i.e. like 2/3rds of their player base are live players who use MQ2) reasons for not trying to develop more modern anti-cheat, on TLPs it would actually take a very small amount of human customer service investment to shut down a lot of the biggest abusers. There's usually only 2-3 zones per era that really attract the most lucrative botters, and like I could literally do my real life job and be logged in as a GM on Mangler for example and easily ban the crews at those spots every day with little real worry I'd accidentally ban legitimate players since it only takes like one spawn cycle to tell who is botting or not. I think a big reason this is not done is Daybreak GMs have very little experience with the game, probably can't visually detect botting, and also spend a lot of their time doing nonsense tickets.

Elderan said:

I don't disagree with you at all.

But when someone presents a problem and they don't like the fix to the problem then they just need to accept the problem and move on. Issue is most people don't and they just continue to complain knowing the "fix" is just another problem.

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I disagree with it being a problem at all, though. Ae groups are fine. They require more setup and coordination and actual human attention to the game and as such are healthy social experiences.

The people screaming bloody murder about getting trained are just being dumb, as these are pulls and EVERY instance of trained-by-aers I have ever seen has involved groups faceplanting into mobs. Shit like not being invis, clearly not deciphering why it was clear to move to the location where the train hit, picking into the middle of a location (eg disco 1) and not on a zone edge, etc.

The answer to the ae group problem is not deal with it or the fix is worse. The real answer is ae groups are fine and not actually a problem, learn to coexist.

AE groups which have been around since 2001/2002 = fine. Automated farmers = bad. I think the bot crews are much more prevalent on Mangler right now than Selo (although I've seen a few Chinese down in Seb camping King), but there are at least a couple of big PLers that use automation (specifically MQ2), and one even told me he had to go on break because the last patch broke his compile in a way he couldn't easily fix. While I'm friends with some sketch people like that, there's no real denying they are bad for the game, or any game, really.

I like when big china tries to muscle in on a king camp.

Target their tank and spam him with "Tiananmen Square Massace April 15th 1989" half a dozen times and watch their internet access get revoked.

There's a guy with 18 boxes camping Hill Giants. At first, I thought it was terrible. But he doesn't loot his bodies, so there's lot of free plat since there's a merchant ten seconds away. And, he camped on only part of the hill but all the placeholders eventually path that way, so there were a lot of Hill giant spawns because all the placeholders were dead. I was able to kill dozens of giants while I was there. The increased spawn rate cancelled out his hoarding.

Meanwhile, I've been in zones where AEing was being done and those groups definitely didn't give a shit about any consequences or if you were there before them. If you try to stay there, you eventually catch aggro from a pull, so it's a lose lose situation for those not in the AE group.

I'm sure some are more considerate but that's been my limited experience on Mangler and Selo.

I don't play on Selos anymore, but if anybody wants to put together an AoE group for farming plat every so often, I'd be more than willing to log my 60 Wizard in and join.

I'd be more than happy to spend a couple nights a week or so farming plat on Selos in order to buy Krono for my real character on Mangler.

Hit me up if anybody is interested.

Selo is not the ideal market for farming krono. More hardcore players, far less hardcore spenders. There is a reason the rmters went for mangler - you would probably make more kr hustling hgs solo on a pet class than even aeing on selo.

Selos was amazing for selling crap. People were buying everything at exorbitant rates for the first 3 weeks or so. Now that krono has shot up to nearly 10k and most people have wisened up or bought the junk they need its a relatively depressing krono farming experience at the moment.

Plus with PoP today there's going to be less of it even if it'll not disappear altogether.

YHO said:

Selos was amazing for selling crap. People were buying everything at exorbitant rates for the first 3 weeks or so. Now that krono has shot up to nearly 10k and most people have wisened up or bought the junk they need its a relatively depressing krono farming experience at the moment.

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It was a thing when there was a lot less plat in circulation and characters were basically naked.

It's a sellers market. Stick to items people will want for twinks and you can keep charging a premium.