Everquest TLP - Aradune and Rizlona Servers (Now with real customer service)

yerm

yerm

Golden Baronet of the Realm
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SZ rewarded winning as usual, with no catchup or assistance to losers, and no balancing of team sizes, and nothing to stop people from just quitting or swapping to the winning team. I argued with a guildmate and would argue here that despite being an anything goes no gm fest and despite the brutal rules, SZ wasn't really a hardcore pvp server - it was a giant evil team zerg stomp.
 
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Mrniceguy

Trakanon Raider
617
334
yerm said:
it was a giant evil team zerg stomp.
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Evil had 2 real guilds total Hate and Fall. Evil was massively outnumber on the server for the first two years or so. Well over a year into PoP Evil got the only in era RZtW kill on the server. It allowed them to start massively outgearing everyone else. I couldn't tell you what happened post GoD cause i quit playing maybe it became "evil team zerg" idk.

Newts and Good both have access to the better classes for team PvP in the early eras. Bards are the God class in EQ PvP and Psalm of Veeshan makes even -500 MR lifetaps get resisted frequently. Damage shields and heals don't get resisted.
 
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Philonius

Philonius

Bronze Knight of the Realm
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Creslin said:
Most people who play TLPs have no desire to play a game like Pantheon that strives to be 'hardcore' like the original EQ, the TLP crowd likes instances, pickzones and steamrolling raids while semi afk. Pantheons audience is the 1500 people who still play P99.
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Count me in the former group. Instances are the way to go for raiding. The alternative is competing with the biggest poopsockers on the server for every spawn, or raiding every few weeks in a rotation. The TLPs have a decent balance I think, you have your weekly DZ, and on top of that there are OW spawns to contest.

I'd be more into competition if my skill and knowledge of the game was a deciding factor, but in EQ it's really mostly a competition between the respective guild's leadership. Whoever recruits enough to reliably be able to field more warm bodies than the other side, wins.
 
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herbert

Trakanon Raider
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Hit 50 today on my 7th day of aradune. I've been impressed with how easy it is to find groups even being way behind the curve.
 
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Animosity

Animosity

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Ya I quit cuz I couldn’t find any groups lol. Guess I should come back during this double xp
 
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Xeris

Trakanon Raider
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Competition, and guilds in general are almost entirely a factor of leadership. Big numbers without good leadership are wasted. Leadership is responsible for mobilizing, getting people to do the right stuff, and recruiting.
 
Sieger

Sieger

Trakanon Raider
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Rajaah said:
I had the same realization at around the same time. Here we had a massive amount of interest being generated by new servers. Tons of people returning to the game, despite a complete lack of marketing. Just word of mouth and people loyal to EQ bringing the game back to life once again. ...and then nobody could get on, and their solution seemed to be "well, enough people will give up over the next few weeks that the server capacity will stabilize".

They weren't prepared for success, and didn't even open the door for it to come in. That was the moment I realized EQ is never going to have any big resurgence, or be competitive, or rise as a franchise. There's no care. At least until people on this forum pool their Bitcoin profits and buy the game.
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I mean I think anyone who has ever done a TLP launch has experienced this. I don't really know that there's ever been a "decayed" MMO that has ever approached its original glory. WoW with all its financial power has never come close to its 12m subscriber peak in like 2012 or whenever it was, and it likely never will. I think the core business fundamentals simply prevent this. Now that EQ is part of a publicly traded company and we got real financial data on it, it's obvious what EQ is--it's a legacy game that throws out a good amount of profit (not just revenue), and doesn't require a huge investment to maintain. It's like owning stock in the local gas company, it's never going to go Tesla or Apple on you, but it's throwing off stable money every quarter from a decent sized "locked in" player base.

Anything to change that status quo would involve big fundamental changes, probably significant enough in nature it'd make more sense to just produce a new game or something in the first place.

I think the forumQuest Bill Gates bros overestimate how much monkeying around with little design shit in this ancient MMO is going to move the needle. The decision was clearly made wayyyy back when Star Wars Galaxies was being produced, that EQ wasn't "the future" of the company, that either its engine or its core game loop wasn't marketable or whatever to a bigger audience. So they've habitually harvested EQ cash to fund other (usually ultimately less successful) games. Maybe if they had reinvested more of that back into EQ going back 15+ years things might be at a different reality now, but that just isn't the case.
 
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Cukernaut

Cukernaut

Sharpie Markers Aren't Pens
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Sieger said:
I mean I think anyone who has ever done a TLP launch has experienced this. I don't really know that there's ever been a "decayed" MMO that has ever approached its original glory. WoW with all its financial power has never come close to its 12m subscriber peak in like 2012 or whenever it was, and it likely never will. I think the core business fundamentals simply prevent this. Now that EQ is part of a publicly traded company and we got real financial data on it, it's obvious what EQ is--it's a legacy game that throws out a good amount of profit (not just revenue), and doesn't require a huge investment to maintain. It's like owning stock in the local gas company, it's never going to go Tesla or Apple on you, but it's throwing off stable money every quarter from a decent sized "locked in" player base.

Anything to change that status quo would involve big fundamental changes, probably significant enough in nature it'd make more sense to just produce a new game or something in the first place.

I think the forumQuest Bill Gates bros overestimate how much monkeying around with little design shit in this ancient MMO is going to move the needle. The decision was clearly made wayyyy back when Star Wars Galaxies was being produced, that EQ wasn't "the future" of the company, that either its engine or its core game loop wasn't marketable or whatever to a bigger audience. So they've habitually harvested EQ cash to fund other (usually ultimately less successful) games. Maybe if they had reinvested more of that back into EQ going back 15+ years things might be at a different reality now, but that just isn't the case.
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It's never to late for tomorrow bro. Keep the hope alive.
 
Sieger

Sieger

Trakanon Raider
316
364
Atabishi said:
You don't have time to afk on p99 raids because the raid mobs die in under 1 minute. You don't even have to get resist gear or worry about dodging because the AE's are irrelevant. Due to how pathing/pulling works on there you can also single pull any non-rooted raid mob to anywhere you want without aggro'ing anything else. Don't know how you can consider p99 raiding "hardcore" lol. Raid mobs on p99 are the equivalent to a trash mob inside of a raid zone on a TLP.
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The big thing Pantheon is going for as far as I can tell is literally the 1999 EQ standard--in which raids are just not a significant part of the game, and where "leveling" is the primary game play loop. That's why they're going to produce a hyper-tedious game to level up in that most people give up on out of boredom within a week or two of installing it (also factor in due to their funding and development issues, Pantheon is guaranteed to launch as an unfinished mess at some random point when they realized they have to launch to keep VR going.)

I think Pantheon raids last I heard also cap out at 24 people or something because the engine they are using can't handle more players than that engaged at a time.
 
hory

hory

Bronze Baronet of the Realm
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Yeah because in eververquest raids all 54+ people are doing such meaningful and well thought out plays. They're so engaging.
 
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Rajaah

Rajaah

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Sieger said:
The big thing Pantheon is going for as far as I can tell is literally the 1999 EQ standard--in which raids are just not a significant part of the game, and where "leveling" is the primary game play loop. That's why they're going to produce a hyper-tedious game to level up in that most people give up on out of boredom within a week or two of installing it (also factor in due to their funding and development issues, Pantheon is guaranteed to launch as an unfinished mess at some random point when they realized they have to launch to keep VR going.)

I think Pantheon raids last I heard also cap out at 24 people or something because the engine they are using can't handle more players than that engaged at a time.
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If I'm remembering right, early EQ raids also topped out at around 20-24 people because lag/LDs would start setting in if more than that were fighting at a time. Not sure when that got fixed, probably before Kunark. I remember going on a couple of Nagafen raids in 1999 or so where there were only 20ish people there because more would lag the game out.

Fixing that was a humongous step for EQ the game, as was fixing whatever was capping mob HP at 32k. Once Velious came along and you could have 70 people fighting a dragon with 200k HP (rather than 20 people fighting dragons with 32k HP) it felt like a different game.

I remember theorizing back in early 2000 on how the game could be sustainable with a 32k HP cap. Maybe the bosses would just have higher and higher defense, or deadlier AOEs. Whatever the case, it didn't seem sustainable. Luckily it was fixed for Velious.
 
Kharzette

Kharzette

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I think it was during velious. I remember the 24 limit during classic. We went up to 30 for kunark, but I think it was more a result of people getting off dialup? It's all fuzzy.
 
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fjurn

Molten Core Raider
15
16
Heard on one of the ALovingRobot twitch streams that the original plan was to just scale defense and regeneration to deal with the 32k cap. By Kunark top mobs were regenerating as fast as the clock cycles could go, essentially a variable amount depending on what else was being processed, and Bill Fisher pushed engineering to finally refactor their code and increase the hp cap.
 
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Elderan

Elderan

Blackwing Lair Raider
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fjurn said:
Heard on one of the ALovingRobot twitch streams that the original plan was to just scale defense and regeneration to deal with the 32k cap. By Kunark top mobs were regenerating as fast as the clock cycles could go, essentially a variable amount depending on what else was being processed, and Bill Fisher pushed engineering to finally refactor their code and increase the hp cap.
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Original VP HP regen was brutal.
Rajaah said:
Fixing that was a humongous step for EQ the game, as was fixing whatever was capping mob HP at 32k. Once Velious came along and you could have 70 people fighting a dragon with 200k HP (rather than 20 people fighting dragons with 32k HP) it felt like a different game.
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Originally when doing nagafen anymore than 24 people could not dps him. I always thought it was a hate list issue of no more than 24 people could be on his hate list and anymore could not dmg him.

Also like the first 3ish nagafen attempts were fails but he was pick pocked no problem though. So we still got the loot.
 
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Rajaah

Rajaah

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fjurn said:
Heard on one of the ALovingRobot twitch streams that the original plan was to just scale defense and regeneration to deal with the 32k cap. By Kunark top mobs were regenerating as fast as the clock cycles could go, essentially a variable amount depending on what else was being processed, and Bill Fisher pushed engineering to finally refactor their code and increase the hp cap.
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That sounds interesting. They could do other tricks too like VS's lifetaps (he had less than 32k HP though, but maybe it was a trial run). Vulak having an AOE lifetap probably figures in to the initial Velious plans when the cap was 32k HP, i.e. give the top boss an AOE lifetap so it essentially regains full HP every 20 seconds or something like that.

Also I remember Kunark dragons having waaaay worse AOEs than Velious dragons, probably also because of the HP situation. When ST Warders had Velious HP + Kunark AOEs, it caused a real furor on the boards for a minute there.
 
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