Server Round Table (Community)

[burzum]

Hi,

Firstly thanks a toooooon to THF team (to have ruined my social life because the server is too great lol).
My player profile is multiboxer (11 -12 toons).
With just one donor (SK weapon), I have been able to make it up to Phara Dar mostly by myself.
I cannot kill the PoF bosses because of the DTes.
I have not tried POT.

My suggestion would be to reduce the DT frequency.
I think terror (or dread's...) reuse time was around 50 seconds.
I only have one solid tank so far and cannot kill him fast enough to hope avoiding enough DTes.
Longer reuse time would allow me to kill at least CT"s minions by myself (not sure about CT that I never raided) .
Or maybe make the DT not leathal (IE -25 30K instead of -90K)?

Well this is what is preventing me to progress further by myself without donating for a shield.

Everything else sounded balanced to me.

Thx for THF

[Xorp]

I've never been so satisfied with an MMO as I have been with THF. A big thanks to the devs for their evolving vision and goals for the server as time has passed. I'm relatively new here, not even a year on the server yet, but I read back quite a few of the older posts throughout THF's history, and have seen how it's changed, improved, and responded to player's wishes / feedback.

So awesome job!. So one feedback from me for this particular adjustment to mob's damage, would be to also adjust their AC / resist values so that not only tanks / healers see an adjusted difficulty curve throughout the tiers.

And please, for the love of god, while you're looking at some balance issues, REVISIT the poor ranger class. Re-read some of the class threads that have been posted in Class forums. I recently parsed my ranger on T8 dummy with full buffs, using trueshot for 3 minutes and did a WHOPPING 5k DPS. And I have the donor bow + donor aug, and the AA's affecting archery damage & max stats. Granted, the dummys likely count as rooted mobs, but even if it was 10k DPS, that barely even matches an un'donored T8 mage/nec/bst pet SANS their owner, for DPS. This is unacceptable ! That, and their buffs they can cast on the raid are available on certain items which cheapens the class further. The only reason I'm keeping my ranger around is the hope that someday they get some love. Some GOOD love.

I also want to say how much I agree with Voki about the distillers. I donate quite a lot, across multiple toons, but not all of them, and being stuck unable to equip new shiny gear you've acquired because the aug'd out previous loot from 1-2 tiers ago is better because of the augmentation disparity is disheartening to say the least. There should be some way of easier acquisition of these for non donors other than 150 freakin AA! .. That's a lot of grinding for ONE aug switch.

Either make them plat purchase-able (around 25k each)

or

Cut the AA required to like 25 (which is still a decently high toll if you ask me)..

or

Reduce the price for 20 distillers to 5$-10$ ...

or

heck.. all 3 !

[Xorp]

I'd be willing to bet at a 5-10$ price for distillers, you'd bring in more revenue than you do with them being 30$ .. the lower 5-10$ range is not only much easier to swallow for some who don't necessarily like shelling out cash for games, but it's in that "impulse" buy zone. People who wouldn't want to bother with the AA grind, or cash farming, or even those who have cash but don't want to use it on distillers would be far more tempted to skip lunch for a day to get some distillers, but they won't skip their friday night dinner and movie (or whatever) at the 30$ range.

That, and there's really nothing else in <=10$ range to purchase for the server. I feel like there are probably people who are wanting to donate *something* to the server for the appreciation of having a place like THF to call home, who would be more drawn to lower cost items, close to the same they would pay monthly for a subscription based game and at least get *something* out of it.

I know this thread isn't really about augmenting what donor stuff is or should be available, but indeed the opposite of curbing the perceived need for donor gear to do well on THF, but I figured this idea was closely related enough -- maybe put a pin in it for later debate

[Lillithe]

I really like the idea of toning down the disparity between donors and non-donors. We've noticed that donors pump out at least 3x the DPS as T8 non-donors. Our donor necro pets for instance are now pushing 40k crits with buffs, which T8 pets are hitting 10k crits. So there's essentially two options I see here:

1- Dial down the content, then dial down the donor stuff so it can't be solo'd (or even single grouped for T7+)

2- Buff the non-donor items.

From my standpoint the biggest issue we deal with is lag. This is especially true in open zones such as HoH. We've canceled raids because our players cannot overcome desyncs and disconnects. On that note, we run with roughly 18-24 characters played by around 6-10 actual people any given night. I would say that roughly 75% of the raid is donor-equiped.

If we were to do a fully non-donor raid, I would expect we'd need at least twice those numbers. The simple fact is however that the server stability cannot support a raid encounter with that many moving parts. If we're experiencing disconnects and desyncs with 18-24 characters, moving that number to 40 would only make the issue much worse. Further, I know it's not client-based because all of us have high-speed (fiber or cable) internet with strong beefy workstations.

Server stuff is my line of work, as I'm sure we have many with the same experience. Have you all considered moving to Amazon EC2, or another cloud provider?

All of that to say:
+1 to buffing non-donors
+1 to server stability
-1 to nerfing content (because it will make donors too powerful)

[Vaion]

We pushed a possible fix for some of the lag encountered in HoH this morning. The zone "view" range was set extremely high (similar to what was happening in NK at beginning of Halloween). It was toned down so players should not be getting packet updates from across the zone anymore.

[Noren]

There is a lot of great feedback here. If I may, I'd like to ask for more

The server changes lately are aimed to accomplish this goal: to promote a healthy progression curve. In the later tiers, the difficulty of progression goes up sharply. We're working on that. In the meantime, in order to overcome the increasingly difficult content, the solution the community has turned to has primarily been (a) boxing more, and or (b) donating more.

The feedback so far has skewed towards donations. Good stuff there - I've read every word of it. Now we'd like to hear more about boxing.

[1] How many real people do you typically progression raid with?
[2] If you box, how many characters do you typically box and what is your latest progression tier?
[3] If you box, how many characters would you prefer to box?

Quests should be fun and have a rewarding feeling to them. Doing a quest 18 times is a chore for most people. Developers don't like to develop chores So here is my final question to compare to your answer to question [3]:

[4] If you box, how many times would you be willing to repeat the Epic/Flag/Aura/<insert tough quest here> quests and still have fun doing it?

As a friendly reminder:

Please keep in mind, as with all other posts the forum discussion rules do apply here. If someone mentions something that you do not agree with, flaming, harassing or being disrespectful in a malicious way will not be tolerated.

[Sian]

Well I will start like others with a big thanks for the very hard work that you guys have put into this server and on your constant comprehensive ear to the community's needs. That topic is again a proof of it. Although I think that what you are doing was necessary, I really think that it wasn't an easy decision to make.
Now, I will give my thoughts

1) Distillers : I fully agree with what has been said. Paying 150 AA for 1 / 30 dollars for 10 or pray special events to get few is a bit too much, especially when you think that augments are really a very important part of the game and that some very nice augments can only be acquired once thanks to a specific quest, or are just too rare.

2) T9 : First of all, I love both DSK3 and VT. I am having fun there, but I also think that in those two places lay the biggest progression problem. To me, they both bring the problem of tanking and dps.
Thanks to your update Vaion, boss will do less DPS, which is a very good thing because even with Chrom tanking (3/4 full donor), some boss like Vule were hard to tank. No need to say that even with Sianette, which has probably the best non-donor stuff (besides weapon that I have), it was really tough. Concerning VT, I don't feel like boss have a too big dps compared to DSK3 so your Boss DPS update is a good thing to narrow the gap between donor/non-donor.
Player's DPS on the other hand really need some adjustments in t9 in my opinion. There is no way, unless with a HUGE (and I mean HUGE) number of toon, that a raid can complete some scripts in time, both in DSK3 or in VT.
First example that comes to my mind are Maestro, Vule, Khasva that will make boss hit even harder and/or regen. I have done Khasva numerous of time with a 17 toons team full donor (donor pets, donor druid bp, 4 donor wiz with weapons, leggs and one with robe), Firenze, and I NEVER managed to take down Khasva's waves in time without druid bp on. On Vule it is close that he get the DPS boost without donor druid bp. It means that if I can't do it with a 17 full donor raid, there is no way that a 40-50 non-donor raid can do it, which is already a large raid.
Concerning VT, it's the same, or even worse. I haven't retried alone (understand with a 17 full donor raid) Korvaix's event (phase 1 first boss) after your timer patch on adds, but it was undoable because of the silence/stun/dispell, their huge hp and the timer. Even with druid donor and burning disc it was pointless. Now it might be better. But I know that I have been stuck for like 5 weeks now on Jantarx's event (first phase 2 boss that make IMPOSSIBLE to get access to other phase 2 boss) because of essences waves that are going too fast, again because of silence/stun/dispell. I have tried that event with my team + sosten, so it was a 36 players's raid with lots of donor and we failed it. Now I think we might be able to do it together, but it's absolutely 100000 % sure that normally donored guy or un-donored people cannot even dream of doing this. Rest of the scripts are well rounded and adapted and can, I think, be done with "normal" raiders, although scripts timer might be adjusted.

Solution for that DPS problem on adds ? Well, it dépends. Either :
- review timer of stuff (more time to kill, and thus more time between waves if there are numerous, so people can actually dps boss too!)
- less hp on adds.
- script less hard, but I don't like that solution at all.

3) Items :
That's not directly a progression curve, but it plays also on the interest of going back to some zones. I know that everquest is made of camping and coming back over and over to the specific place so you can get the item you want. But for example VT, I think that it's a very good thing that all mobs share the same loot table, with just phase 2 bosses that have 10% chance to drop class items, and phase 3 final boss the same 10% dropchance and 5% drop.
Thing is that when you start farming the zone, you quickly end up done with "normal" loots that are 2 x 100% drop on every mobs. So you farm phase 2 and phase 3, which only have 10% chance to drop something (and 5%). That's very low and lots of items rot all the time. I would like to see for example :
Phase 1 : 2 x 100% normal drops and the 50% armor drop. So no change.
Phase 2 : 1 x 100% normal drops and 50% armor drop and like 30-50% chance for class items.
Phase 3 : either the same as phase 2, with a little boost on the 5% chance, or make him drop 100% on class item and no "normal" loots.

It doesn't really directly impact on the "progression" curve, but it clearly plays on the fun (clearing CY + moving to bosses + doing trash and fights for rotting stuff because you are only there to get 10% drop on 4 mobs is hard) and those class items are awesome enough to allow "normal" toons to get closer to donored.

4) Generally speaking, I am not at all for boosting non-donored or nerfing donored. I think it has to be done on the difficulty of scripts (hp, which has been done already, and dps required). People have/will donate to thank for the hard work / progress faster. Why should that change ? What musn't be done is that those who don't want/can't, mustn't be "blocked", keeping in mind that the real number of real players is not too high so we need to take that into account.

5) To answer to Noren's questions :
1 : guildmate are kind afk nowadays so I progressed in VT with 2 people. And in DSK3 when we first cleared it, well we were like 4 real players.
2 : I box up to 17 before my computer explode.
3 : I would prefer to stick to 12 if it was possible to live like that and do what I want.
4 : Repeating quests ? Hard to answer... I did 4 cleric epics, 2 shaman more than 10 raid auras but it's boring when I pass the 4-5. Let's say that 6 is the maximum. That's why I haven't done raid auras for my new toons because I am bored to do that again.

Thanks for your time

P.S : Geez I didn't think that it would be that long to reread !!

[cbarrett]

After a lengthy discussion by the developers, we have decided to tone down some of the content for a more healthy progression where donation items no longer feel like a necessity.

I've made my fair share of donations, but the only one that I felt a little jaded about was the divine intervention shield so I could get past the lame death touches in Fear.

My comments are not going to be 100% on topic because I can't comment on a "more healthy progression" due to donator items. I think a "healthy progression" was completely blocked when T7 was introduced. At that point a decision was made to stop creating content for casual / solo boxers and to cater all future T7+ tier content to raiding only. And that's a damn shame.

I can't even put into words how much enjoyment I got out of creating my boxing team and progressing from one tier of content to the next over the months. What a disappointment it is to know that after defeating VP and Fear for the 100th time, that no new content would be forthcoming for me to consume. I quit playing a couple months ago because RedFang type encounters are just so disappointing. Oh how I would fly back in a heartbeat to consume T7 difficulty revamped zones like Howling Stones that are a real "healthy progression" from T6.

I hear from players that the "end game" is all about raiding with other people, and I say baloney. Do a database query and figure out how many guilds have been created over time that have stopped at T7, never to be heard from again. These are single player "guilds" of one person who boxes multiple toons. I bet you money the count of these is going to vastly outnumber those who join guilds that have more than 1 person. If the mindset had never shifted to "multiple people only content", there would be so many more players on the server chomping at the bit for the next tier of content.

[xadien]

[1] How many real people do you typically progression raid with?
On a good solid night between 5 -6

[2] If you box, how many characters do you typically box and what is your latest progression tier?
We are on DSK3 in progression, and I box between 6/7 depending

[3] If you box, how many characters would you prefer to box?
I would prefer to box no more than 4

Quests should be fun and have a rewarding feeling to them. Doing a quest 18 times is a chore for most people. Developers don't like to develop chores So here is my final question to compare to your answer to question [3]:

[4] If you box, how many times would you be willing to repeat the Epic/Flag/Aura/<insert tough quest here> quests and still have fun doing it?
Fun is probably not operative. Inventory management in itself for more than 6 is a nightmare. 4 -6 would be ok. It would be nice if I complete a task for all 6 at a time, similar to LDON's or the tasks in the Vale.

ON a site note- Playing on other emulated servers, you could buy tokens that would allow you to group instance, or Guild instance a zone. This would give us something to do with our plat

[Dreos]

I know I'm probably in the minority, but I generally box 24 and actually enjoy doing that many. When we were active (currently on somewhat of a hiatus!) we had 5-6 real people, each boxing anywhere from less than a group to 24. We're at VT, though we haven't done a lot in there as a guild. I have done the raid aura quest multiple times and have enjoyed that, so I don't really mind repeating the same quest. Having said that, I mostly enjoy the dps/survivability factors that comes with boxing that many toons. Some tiers, as Sian mentioned, such as DSK3 (in particular) seemed to make boxing that many toons a necessity for dps requirements, etc, especially as who was actively playing in our guild changed (and we had less people on). I wouldn't mind not being able to box as many, but I also wouldn't want to be able to do less by myself if need be (everyone's not always on!) as a consequence, so I am torn.

Player's DPS on the other hand really need some adjustments in t9 in my opinion. There is no way, unless with a HUGE (and I mean HUGE) number of toon, that a raid can complete some scripts in time, both in DSK3 or in VT.
First example that comes to my mind are Maestro, Vule, Khasva that will make boss hit even harder and/or regen. I have done Khasva numerous of time with a 17 toons team full donor (donor pets, donor druid bp, 4 donor wiz with weapons, leggs and one with robe), Firenze, and I NEVER managed to take down Khasva's waves in time without druid bp on. On Vule it is close that he get the DPS boost without donor druid bp. It means that if I can't do it with a 17 full donor raid, there is no way that a 40-50 non-donor raid can do it, which is already a large raid.
Concerning VT, it's the same, or even worse. I haven't retried alone (understand with a 17 full donor raid) Korvaix's event (phase 1 first boss) after your timer patch on adds, but it was undoable because of the silence/stun/dispell, their huge hp and the timer. Even with druid donor and burning disc it was pointless. Now it might be better. But I know that I have been stuck for like 5 weeks now on Jantarx's event (first phase 2 boss that make IMPOSSIBLE to get access to other phase 2 boss) because of essences waves that are going too fast, again because of silence/stun/dispell. I have tried that event with my team + sosten, so it was a 36 players's raid with lots of donor and we failed it. Now I think we might be able to do it together, but it's absolutely 100000 % sure that normally donored guy or un-donored people cannot even dream of doing this. Rest of the scripts are well rounded and adapted and can, I think, be done with "normal" raiders, although scripts timer might be adjusted.

Definitely agree with this. I would also add that, at least in my opinion, having every boss in VT silence really seems to limit those who have hybrid tanks.

I also agree 100% on the distillers. Please consider making them tradeskillable, tradeable, buyable from a merchant (25k per was mentioned earlier and seemed like a nice price to me), or some combination of the above. They really are almost a necessity, especially end game, and it is disheartening to receive a piece of loot that can't be equipped without a lot of aa grinding or a donation.

Another suggestion I might have, and I don't know how feasible this would be, is to increase raid exp. Perhaps not as much as a group would get, but it would allow for an added benefit for even people boxing single groups to join up together and still farm AA's. I could see it also helping people who box less than a group.

Also, a question - how feasible is implementing the cross-guild instancing system used in VT in earlier tiers? Sian and I have several times raided in VT together and that has been a lot of fun. I think it would be great (but I imagine very time-intensive development-wise) to be able to do that in earlier tiers, especially for those times when guildies can't be on.

I do have to say though that personally, raids starting in dsk 1 and 2 and going up until dsk3 (I haven't done a whole lot of VT, but the encounters have been fun there too!) have been some of the most challenging, but also rewarding and fun, encounters. I know I really enjoyed going through dsk3 with Don, Khal, Nil, Gorren, Grim and MK and working together (and getting help from others - Sian, Noren, Galdace, Beat and Warlgor, etc!) to figure out the fights. I find them so much more rewarding than tank/spank encounters you see on some other servers and I really appreciate all the hard work that goes into creating them.