Group content pathway community discussion

[Muergan]

I agree with the above plane of tranquility would make an awesome quest hub for group xp all the way to tier 10 (plane of time please !). I first started playing a single toon but even way back then when you could do that it was often required to play a few boxes by hand because mq2 was not allowed. So i eventually worked up to a full group boxing by hand and our guild of 4-5 worked out way up to dsk when it was released. Eventually it became to complicated to do without a program so we all slowly faded away. When MQ2 became legal it brought us back and we have been playing off an on now for many years trying to work out way without the help of donors besides maybe a weapon/necklace on our "main". So many good ideas have been present here and I would love to see a lot of them implemented to get our population back up to levels of old. However, after spending many years of my life playing here and putting in countless amount of hours it would be really hard to let go of the toons i have worked so hard to level,flag, and gear. Hopefully there will still be a place for those of us that have adapted over the years and have a raid of our own. Some of the things I'd also like to maybe suggest:

Augments:

The augments on this server are great, and are probably the most important things to farm and invest time in. Especially with the new tier system which incorporates the augment scores into your gear score this has become a really hard paywall for those of us who can't spend tons of money to buy distillers. While some of the augments are easy enough to obtain again such as aviaks, kodiaks, and hoh there are many that would require a large amount of time and repetitive killing to get (not to mention holiday augs). Quite honestly this has prevented me from auging most of my characters because i do not want to waste good augs on gear that wasn't "final". I would love to be able to earn augs and keep them and enjoy trying to progress through all the new zones rather then being forced to re-farm augs every time i upgrade a piece. Now lillu has made it abundantly clear the one item that can summon these distillers will never drop in price, and thats fine. However, an alternative can be found to make it fair to the rest of the people who can pay for them. For example maybe make an item along the lines of a epic 3.0 quest that summons once a day, or add them as a very rare world drop line the holiday items, or as a less rare to named mobs. Something like this would let people work towards progression without the constant need to refarm stuff, and in the process make the server more fun.

Achievements:

These have always been a very fun part of this server for me I love trying to obtain them and Im happy you are going to expand on them. I also see this as an opportunity to make use of old zones and such. If you make rewards such as more buff slot AAs or possibly bigger bags associated with achievement point milestones more people will take the time to go back and complete all the content they might have skipped or missed.

AAs:

Like people have said above there are many AAs that do not either work or are useless here. A revamp/fix to some of these would be greatly appreciated. Also something that would be cool (if possible) would be zone AAs which would give a little boost in someway to the zone you are currently working on. A good example would be to help mitigate VT debuff a little if you aren't able to do all of dsk3 yet, or maybe even AAs to help deal with the effects from HoH mobs. This would greatly expand the AA system without making people overpowered because they would only deal with a specific zone.

Wiki:

This applies especially to holiday events a list of quests should be provided so people can try and complete everything in the limited time then have. However a more complete wiki would also be greatly appreciated even if its just clues. I realize this was mostly player created entries, but maybe add a team member in charge of creating/updating entries. Players can still write them but submit to that person.

[possom]

Great plan on grouping.. However it is still missing something to allow us to all better play togteher.

Often a higher tier player character will be willing to help out others.. and sometimes that's awesome.. but sometimes it de-values the experience for the lower tier people being helped.

I think it was Muergan (sorry if was someone else!) who took my ranger through my VERY first trip to ST and kill of Sleeper one day. I never killed Sleeper in live.. it was the first time id ever SEEN the dragon other than in live the day iot escaped and killed everyone... and he made such quick work of the dragon guardians and sleeper, I was just numb and following along.

If a T8 player and a T1 player want to group, either T8 with content completely trivial to them, and T1 does not get to really "experience" it and instead blows through it, and its then boring to both.

Some games address this by scaling content, or player characters up or down to an equal level.

I dont know how that could be executed in EQ.. the only way I've come up with to address this would be everyone to keep some characters at lower tiers and not progress them, so they can play together "on tier".. but thats impractical for most.
The other would be some form of character pool or sharing.. Want to play together, here use one of my characters, or let me use one of yours... you lose the feeling of playing "your" toon, but that may not be as important as 6 or 12 actual people working each a toon together to fell that dragon like the "old days".

Tokens may help here to I guess, if people find willing regular play partners they can token them up to tier.

Anyway the root of the problem is people play at different paces and it seems most of the server is at the top of the tier structure. I'll probably never be T8, T9, so ill probably never really "enjoy" playing with those who are... because they cant play down to my level.

Edit:

Or i guess... could one just keep a couple bags of Tier armor and weapons and Tier down/up based on gear? I suppose that would allow a T8 tank to tank at T1 without trivializing it (other than AAs), and casters could use Tier appropriate spells.

[Niixnec]

It would be great to have Group content but are there enough real players to actually support this model? Do you know how many unique users are actually playing on a regular basis, then how many of them actually want to play a single / duo character? From the recent poll 28 people responded. Seems like a low number of potential group mates to choose from. Throw in time constraints, etc. and while it may be possible to find a group on Friday/Saturday what are the odds on a Tuesday afternoon?

If the idea is just to provide an alternate path so that you could Raid or Group to get the same gear that would be pretty cool.

As for playing together there are always going to be overpowered characters that can trivialize most encounters if you make the encounters so characters without donors still can kill them. Look at the difference at AC/HP from a fully donored Tank vs. a T8/T9 tank, not to mention the clickies. Compare the DPS of a donored Rogue or Zerker compared to those with even a few donor items (Weapon, Weapon Augs, and BP).

As for "Playing the old school way", aren't there other servers already set up for that and we choose THF because it was not set up that way? I agree there should be solo, group, and raid content so anyone can play the way they want. Not content will force people to group in order to continue to progress.

regards,
niix

[Ydiss]

Lots of great points made but I just want to clarify a couple things:

1. We're not doing this specifically for single box players or those who run mq2. We're doing it to provide more options for players to enjoy content. All players. On a side note, we do this because we feel it'll benefit existing players, also bring in new, or returning players and, possibly most importantly, because we feel it'll make the server better than it is now. We think there's enough demand for it but there's a lot more to it than that.

2. Sadly, as much of a genius as peterigz is, I think that authoring a truly balanced mentoring system in eqemu might be a project of too large a scale to be taken on in all practicality. So our aim isn't to allow tier 9 players, or donating players, to join tier 1 players to do content together without trivialising the challenge (although there's nothing stopping it) more to give more content for players to do together without needing to form a raiding guild necessarily. I will add that we are structuring the new content and existing content so that the idea of handing in a token to skip 8 tiers of content is no longer supported. We want new players to enjoy everything and existing players to optionally expedite alts through the tiers. This is one motivation for what we plan.

3. Augments and distillers. Points taken on this, we'll at least discuss this internally. That said, the new loot system allows the opportunity for us to provide expedited paths to obtaining gear, we'll be addressing all augments to ensure these aren't such a heavy bottleneck and the new content should provide more opportunity to access them. This will all make more sense as we reveal more.

4. Solo content. I've got empathy with the comments around playing reaching so far in the content but hitting a brick wall due to player numbers. It's one of the biggest drivers of what we're doing. We want players to form guilds and progress through the raid content but we don't want players quitting if they cannot do this. But this is a multi player/social game and we need to guard against the issue where players may end up with the question "if I can do it alone, why do it with more?"

We think what we have planned will enable us to create content for groups from 2 to 6. That technically means a player can solo with a bot. But the player that solos will not get every item and it'll take longer to get
Loot compared to a full group (and a group longer again compared to a raid - where only raid content will provide certain rare items).

It might be that the items you gain from grouping will be slightly less powerful than the equivalent raid tier (a good example of this might be to compare tov quest armour to still moon dropped armour).

We will look to at least trial a minimum group size of 2 and will see what everyone thinks of it. We may restrict some content to larger groups though.

Either way, there will be some solo content coming anyway (at the very least via the 3.0s, which are on our list and the solo aspect of those quests will see a significant overhaul).

5. Connecting zones, exploring and other content. We're definitely planning to at least attempt to link up world zones where appropriate and we want to give you some very unique content relating to that. I've always personally wanted to play out a battle between two major cities (read, opposing factions) that rages back and forth through the interconnecting zones, for example. Being able to engage in said battles and influence the outcome for riches and fame is definitely something I'm very keen to see become a reality.