Post#20 » Sun Nov 13, 2016 6:16 pm
In my honest opinion, removing, or limiting (depending on what the limitations are -- I noticed that it was suggested that the "base plugins/scripts" be used; not precisely sure what those are since I use MQEmu not the official MQ2 or the more popular Redguides version) Macroquest use will pretty much turn the THF experience into that of what Live had become when my family and I left Live, something geared toward non-casual players.
The thought causes me to reminisce of times where I was loitering about WoS for hours with an LFG tag overhead, waiting for that tankless group to come along -- when finally, hurrah! Here they come... At first all seemed well -- then I began getting random "Fuzzynutz is inspecting you" messages and then the questions came... "How much HP and AC do you have? How many AA's?" followed by comments, "ROFLZ! I have wizards with more HP/AC than that! We don't accept people with less than 10,000 AA's in this group. You're not uber enough. Sorry..." Then you wait around about another hour or so for a group being jeered at by the 12 year old ebayers who have more money than game experience, before realizing you could be better spending your time rearranging your clothes drawers...
I realize that this is a bit of an extreme setting but it happened to the old Kurze and Flint quite often, probably more hours than I was able to actually play. Usually I'd find myself heading back to Noble's Causeway or Bloodfields (or porting to Plane of Innovation/Fear/Disease) to solo a bit before being bored to tears and logging out.
My family's main attraction to THF is the ability to progress solo. We all have careers and our own home lives and cannot afford to be on EQ 24/7 to keep up with all the cool kids. In our downtime we enjoy the escape of EQ but are not capable of keeping up with all the newest trending raids, items, and zones due to our real life responsibilities.
At THF, with the ability to box, we can make smaller progress and accomplishments solo and then take down larger challenges when we are able to get two or three groups of our boxed toons online together. With my brother's new job, wife's new job, my new position, and my son's waning interest in EQ (he is a shiny graphics/explosions millennial gamer) -- we have less grouping time than ever before. Considering that we are all moving into T7 after several years of progress on THF -- the thought of this is actually scary to us. We worry, will we be forced to quit EQ again after finally getting to the near endgame spot in our character growth once more.
Those who have the most elite, endgame characters will benefit from this kind of thing because they will control the direction of what many others will choose to do -- because it will be by necessity to follow them for all others. However, to those growing in the game, they will be forced to follow others on what will feel like a rail-based play style unable to explore most content alone. I personally feel that this idea will destroy a large part of the fun factor for the casual gaming crowd by limiting them to doing what certain others are doing.
I never liked the idea of MQ and always regarded it as cheating. I always preferred the idea of grouping with others (and still do), but also hate waiting for days where that is more or less a possibility. Especially with my extremely limited play times. I like being able to make progress in raid zones while solo playing through boxing. The ability to make gains without others, especially figuring out new tricks and tactics against raid mobs (where you would otherwise be unable to experiment in such ways) is awesome. At THF with MQ you can better understand EQ than ever before, instead of just being forced to follow the most uber player and simply do precisely what they tell you to do while not really knowing why.
I box my group/groups through the use of custom hotbuttons (just learned how to use multiline social buttons) and Melee to handle my DPS section, cycling through their basic attack/skill functions. I have played (and still do play) all of the characters solo (usually for AAing) and develop better opinions of use and group implementation, which typically allows me one step further in progressing my toons. Whenever I make that advancement I share with the family and we step forward. If we lost MQ usage we would likely lose the ability to progress. We would likely be forced to shutdown our guild and meld into another. Since we are all pacifist social types we would likely not get much more done because we would not know how to ask anyone to go through the trouble of helping us, and would likely be intimidated by the other characters in the guild we wind up in. Also, and this happened on Live as well, we'd probably end up in different guilds and our family would socialize less with one another. My brother and son are more aggressive players and my mother and wife are extremely passive -- while I remain more-or-less moderate. I'm what glues us together. However, if we were unable to progress together, we would drift apart in the game -- and also in life... again.
It is difficult living several thousand miles apart...
If you do choose to do such a thing, maybe having a separate server for single account play would be good for those that crave such, but if it were implemented to the current server and population, I think many would simply leave. In our case, my brother would disband a few alts to an uber raiding guild, my son would quit and go back to ESO, my wife would turn to Facebook games and disappear into DragonAge again for months at a time, I would likely eventually leave because I would get bored in my permanent "LFG" status, and my mom, who is permanently disabled now, would solo around when she could but likely drift away through time.
Just my honest point of view -- take it or leave it...
Good to see you BTW!
