Group content pathway community discussion

[Ydiss]

Making this its own thread. My comment below quoted from elsewhere.

One of the areas I may look at once the current content and ROF2 are both released and working fine is the server's existing pathway for smaller guilds/group content. Indeed, the content we're designing right now is primarily aimed at groups and small guilds (though some encounters will need a larger raid to complete).

I think it's important that there be a fun and challenging pathway for players who don't want to or cannot raid up and that includes players who don't want to box but can't form a 24+ player guild. There's quite a lot of great content already for those players (you can single group all the way up to ToV, there's ldons and group instances like ascent and more recently discord tower) but I'd ideally like there to be a contigiuous pathway through the tiers that bridges any gaps between those different existing areas.

The main issue, for me, is that anything that's designed for a group to do tends to be balanced by making you do that content about 1000x more to get similar sets of gear to raid content. I get the requirement for that but I'm going to spend some time thinking about how that might change, yet still keep things fair.

One place I'm going to start with is the epic 3.0s. Vaion's work so far on these is superb and most of the sequences and challenges I went through to complete these quests were so much fun. One part of my very long "to do" list is to continue these quests where Vaion left of. But before I do that, I'm going to have a think about how to make the solo branch of these quests a little more fun and less grindy/Everquest Live campy.

No promises or guarantees right now and this might be months away before I even start. Just wanted you to know it's something I'm thinking about.

As always, any ideas are welcome so please do discuss this.

Please discuss if you have any ideas.

I'll get the ball rolling with my thoughts about the 3.0 quests, in particular the solo path and long camps within each. The story and puzzles for the 3.0 quests are excellent and I want to continue that quality with the remaining 3.0s yet to come. I've completed (as in I've played as a player, not created) three of the four quests out already (solo pathway each time) and my overwhelming impression of the camps was it reminded me of playing Everquest back in 2000; it's the first time I'd felt that on THF since playing here for 10 years. However, these are epic quests, they're supposed to take time and yet we can solo them. How do we make that fit together without very long, essentially dull camps, just like Everquest live had?

Vaion stated that the camps each had an average of 13 hours to complete. In theory, that seems OK. It's just that you need to sit there for an average of 13 hours watching the same npcs pop over and over again. They're also contended spawns and we need to retain that.

I thought, how did we do it with the earlier epics? We had longer spawn times. The unicorns for the 1.5 on a four hour timer, for example. You don't need to wait for four hours, killing the unicorns over and over again for a rare drop, you just pop into the zone, see if they're up and if they're not you come back later.

I feel this approach is less arduous but can still apply a delay to the progress. So I'm playing with the idea of doing something similar with the 3.0s.

If it's 13 hours on average then we can retain that. Currently, it's four drops required and it's about 5% chance every 20 minutes. Instead, it could be 25% chance with a spawn timer of three hours. Or 50% chance every six hours. It'll still take time to complete the whole quest, but instead of sitting out 5 or 6 13 hour camps, you just need to go on several hunts for the same targets once, twice or maybe three times a day. Then carry on doing other fun things in between.

I can add some more complexity to it, perhaps with a lot of flex with spawn timer variance to make it less predictable. In theory, I can replace some of these long solo camps with a mini solo challenge (kill a sequence of targets with a timer for example). Ultimately, that latter idea is the perfect scenario for me. Albeit the one that'll take the most effort and time to create.

What do you think? Any ideas of your own?

When I get time, I'll post some thoughts on how I'd like to see a group only pathway (from level 1 to tier 9) work. But please do add your own suggestions here.

[crx]

I'd like to first say that I like this server how it is right now, and that I spend a good amount of time on it, and I'm aware that the devs work very hard on the game. I am very excited for the new content. That being said, without going into great detail, I'd like to express areas I'd like to see improvement in.

Platinum
- variety in gain - right now there are too few ways to farm platinum regularly, maybe daily / repeatable turn in or kill quests that would give a significant amount of platinum
- more meaningful uses for platinum - as it stands right now, the only meaningful uses for platinum are raid tokens and for HoH points. Would like to see uses for gear and augs maybe, perhaps the holiday augs or lillu's distillers, etc.

Zone usage
- there are tons of zones that are relatively unused that could be used for questing areas for leveling or gear improvements

Power
- single character power should be more emphasized in progression and we could use a pathway to improve a single character more simply - i.e. a solo epic pathway all the way up, and/or other class items that are challenging for a solo player, but doable. Also the power of augments should be HEAVILY emphasized somewhere to teach players who don't know how much they improve a characters power.

AAs
- there are a ton of AAs that are practically useless in the general tab that could be turned into earlier and permanent power increases - hard to gauge what would be too powerful and what's not powerful enough of an addition here.

LDoNs
- vast potential here for drops, quests, events, variety, etc. Would like to see cross-over from LDoN gear to other progression gear through augment slots and heroic stats perhaps. More LDoN zone usage with greater rewards and maybe even an LDoN questline along similar lines of the aura quests that would significantly and permanently affect a single characters power.

Augments
- I think augments are where a players decisions directly affect how powerful their character is in certain circumstances, and as I said before, I'd love to see more emphasis on them. A lot of the augments from the leveling zones or the group zones are relatively useless. AC/HP being the great divider that it is for progression checks, it would be great to see more options early on and through the entirety of progression that are usable in different slots. IMO, the most wasted augments we have are the LDoN augments. The amount of player choice and power available from those items if the augs were say changed into 8 slot augs or 16 or 17/18 slot augs would be insane. Maybe too insane, idk, I'm just a player, and I assume that the knowledge of how powerful they'd be if unleashed is the reason why the devs haven't changed them from 2 or 10 slots to be usable in more of the progression gear. I suppose it would be boring if everything was just usable in every slot, but I definitely think there's some room there for experimentation at the least.

I can't think of anything else at the moment, so this isn't a full list. I may edit my post later to add more. Also, I don't necessarily think I'm right about everything I've posted here, and I want it clear that this is just my opinion, and that in no way am I shitting on the devs. This post is purely to express my desire to improve a thing I love and possibly get more people to enjoy the thing that I enjoy.

[Ydiss]

Thanks for the suggestions, crx!

All feedback will be listened to so don't worry, we don't take it badly at all.

Solo progression is definitely a much more challenging task to properly achieve and do right. I don't think Everquest has ever been well designed for proper solo play (not without picking a certain class). However, I do have some ideas that I'm going to brainstorm with the dev team and may implement in the solo 3.0 quests in place of grinding camps.

Maybe something way, way in the future we can look at is enhancing bot code so some classes can perform better. At least then solo play might actually be reasonably achievable in a balance sense. Whereas, right now, how do you create solo content that's fun, challenging and rewarding equally for a mage and a cleric? Without writing bespoke pathways for all 16 classes individually, which I think isn't feasible.

But give the cleric a tank bot that really does its task and maybe give the cleric an undead pathway/story with new custom anti undead spells?

Perhaps a pipedream. Also, perhaps out of scope for a game that's primarily about grouping up with others. But we're not above crazy ideas here

[ocsi]

Thanks for starting the thread, Ydiss I'd love to share some of my ideas. I will touch on a few topics I have been thinking of for a few years, not touching on augments or AA's since I think those will require a bit more discussion.

Barriers
I have to agree that there are a ton of zones available in Everquest that can be utilized for THF. I have thought about the difference between solo gameplay and boxing gameplay for a long time now, and the greatest barrier between the two is simply the content. There is no solo or group content (group not being raid) available that will allow players to gear even remotely close to Vex Thal tier.

The problem with this is that it is very discouraging for players who come to play with no intention of boxing. This is further discouraged by the fact that, because most people box on THF, you will likely not find others to group with. I know for a fact that playing 1 character with someone boxing makes you feel insignificant unless given important tasks. A method I like to use while inviting solo players to my raid runs (i.e. I make them do the mechanics, like clicking the gems during the Khasva encounter). This makes it more fun for them to be part of the raid.

Solo Zones
I think it would be fantastic to see a series of zones that provides soloable / groupable content that lets you gear up to the highest tier but not necessarily with items as powerful. For instance, the unused Planes are a great series of zones that could behave as a tier system where completing one plane will key/flag you for another. You can even put a key quest line in the first plane in this series that will progressively flag you for further tiered planes. The armor available could be a result of turn ins or drops from named mobs. This armor can have base stats (hp, mana, ac) that match that of each tier (i.e. a tier 9 equivalent plane will have items available with the standard 3 augment sockets and roughly 900 hp/mana/end and some calculated AC). To prevent such solo content from outweighing the importance of raids, you can have the item worn effects be more exclusive to raiding however provide some more simple item worn effects on this solo content armor.

Incentive
To make the group content important for those who do raid and do not need the armor, you can put spell quests / spell drops into these zones. New spells can always be useful - especially for something like Magician which is primarily focused on fire spells currently, when it is totally possible to provide some ice or thunder oriented spells to give them more flavor. Similar can be done for Necromancer where diseases aare sort of left out, and fire seems to be the primary DoT for them. This may also be a great way to, as you said, introduce some spells for classes like Cleric which can't solo as well as a true damage class (maybe provide some damage dealing spells to them). These spells can then change with each tier, provide new spells every other tier, or even make it similar to the Rk. I-III system from HoH.

Instanced Content in Solo Content?
Now, I would also like to see the LDON system carry over into such zones somehow or even just an instanced dungeon option for groups. The problem I would like to avoid is large boxed groups running over the group content zones. Maybe providing a guild instance of the zone through an NPC might make it appealing for boxing guilds to access these areas without interfering with solo players grouping up. Not quite sure what the true answer to this would be though as it is difficult to predict what players will actually do given the content. I just know it can be difficult for 1 character to compete against 6+ in a zone if they are choosing to solo.

[crx]

Reading Ocsi's post sparked a thought - what if there were second, group versions of the raid tiers? For instance, a grouped version of VT would share a lockout with VT, have reduced hp and nerfed mechanics so that a group can go through them feasibly, but the catch would be that maybe they only get one piece of loot per boss, and don't get a raid token or the option to buy a raid token.

[crx]

Also, probably a good idea if that was a thing to limit the rare drops to raid only as well, because there still needs to be incentive to go raid. Wouldn't want people just being complacent with doing only the group content. The idea is to make a single character more powerful so that their groups are more powerful so that their raids are more powerful, not to just eliminate the need for grouping/raiding entirely.

[John Stark]

Well its been a long while since my family and I played here, but I'll throw a few things out there.

Content is King. This of course presumes that we're talking about good content that is fun, interesting, challenging, and so on.

There are a ton of old zones that really don't have a lot of use on this server other than for, perhaps, xping for the sake of nostalgia. The custom content here is fun and lets you get right into it and move along at a good clip to get levels, AAs, and gear, but then its a bit of a road block once you get past leveling and AAs... unless you box one or more full groups and use MQ2 (a point raised already obviously, or this thread wouldn't exist). That really isn't my cup of tea, but since my wife likes to game when she has the time, and our kids too, we have a full group and could do at least some of the raid content here without boxing.

I would suggest expanding the content and making use of more of the old zones to create both a solo and a group pathway towards not just advancement in terms of levels, AAs, and gear, but for fun and interesting content in the form of quests.

Great old zones like Solusek's Eye, Cazic Thule, Permafrost Keep, Runnyeye, Splitpaw, Mistmoore, Kedge Keep, The Hole, Kaesora, Howling Stones, Droga/Nurga (this one screams for a interzone quest line), Velks, ToFS, Crytal Caverns, and so on, are all dying on the vine. Revamps of these for level 70+AAs characters (solo and group) might be as "simple" as re-itemizing the loot drops, buffing the mobs, mini-bosses, and bosses. No custom quests needed really, just different places to solo and group with decent rewards. Not any BIS items, but perhaps with some patience the ability to gain some near-raid or lower tier raid type gear. Perhaps only a small chance of something good from a mini-boss, and a little bit better chance from the main boss or bosses, but make people work for it whether group or solo by making the monsters tough to clear to get there. Remember how freaking hard and challenging Lower Guk or Sebilis or the revamped Cazic Thule was back in the day?

Shadow Haven is a great example of what you guys did here on THF of what I'm talking about. Good fun, and is groupable and later soloable with AAs and gear. The quests are the icing on that cake.

The head hunter Quests are fun, and I love the World Boss quest too. More please. Along these same lines, have a hunting quest where you have to hunt a nasty beastie in every single outdoor zone in the game, collecting pelts, furs, antlers, bones, scales, etc. Some of these could be soloable (at 70 with AAs) and other needing a group.

Ocean of Tears, Erud's Crossing, Timorous Deep, Iceclad Ocean, along with the watery areas where you could catch boats back in the day (Freeport, the dwarf docks in Butcher Block, Fiorina Vie and Overthere, etc.) are begging for a quest the requires not only slaying nasty sea monsters (need a Kraken!), but a fishing quest. Not a lot of new monsters needed (except in the water), as the islands in the ocean zones offer discreet adventure opportunities, and the water itself has all kind of potential. A beefed up Phinny could be swimming in one of these ocean zones for his vacation, and there are sirens and sharks and all kinds of stuff to put in the water. Even a lot of mobs that seem like "land only" would be good in the water, like trolls (scrags in old school D&D), ogres (merrow), and so on. Make fishing.... Dangerous!

Another thing I miss is traveling and exploration. Its great to use the fairies to get somewhere and get some xp, AAs, loot, etc. when play time is limited, and it does relieve the tedium of travel when you just want to make use of an hour or so of play time. However, my main on Live back in the day was a wizard, and later a bard, and I would just run around the game and check the zones out. Make people explore the every non-raid zone for ground spawns and wandering NPCs (some guarded by nasty monsters), and make the spawns ground random (a few hours, a day, a couple of days). You have to find a mushroom here, or a flower there, or hail a fairy or a hermit or whatever. Give the whole thing a story, and make it a quest that has to be completed by talking to GM wizard of each of the caster guilds in the game. Make people do some running around again.

Make the old world cities relevant again. This would be tied up in factions, since that was the whole point of the original "old world," right through to Kunark and Velious. Man I love the faction system in those old zones. Good vs. Evil, with neutrals playing both sides, or neither. Makes it so that ogres and dark elves, and trolls, along with evil humans and gnomes, would get a reward by working their old world factions to max, as wood the goody goodies like the high and wood elves, dwarves, halflings, and those gnomes and dwarves who worship good gods, would get a reward for having good faction with their home towns. Lots of questing potential here, and lots of potential to make original EQ and the earliest expansions relevant again on THF.

Which ties into something that might not be popular, but would be potentially be a ton of fun if the griefing and nonsense could be kept to a minimum. Make the old world and its cities PvP zones, all based on factions depending on which god you have chosen. Give every race/class an option to go "agnostic" and thus non-pvp. Make the old world cities quasi-safe zones, where the guards are NASTY and can really only be slain by at least a raid force. PvP could have its own rewards, and not only could agnostic players not participate, but using the fairies and so on lets people play the custom content that already exists with bothering with PvP. Keep the already existing custom zones and such of THF non-PvP, but as zones are revamped, have a mix of PVP and PVE.

Overall, as wild and work intensive as some of my ideas might be, especially quests, simply revamping old zones to give more places to actually do something different than what is already here, IMO, should be priority. EQ was great, especially when Luclin, PoP, LoY etc. were released before the level cap every went above 65.

And that right there is where EQ went wrong... raising the level cap too high. New AAs? Sure! More zones to solo and group and raid in with interesting stories and quests and new/different gear. More please. More questing and less level tread mill crap that makes almost all of the rest of the game obsolete. Right now THF has a few zones to go from 1-70, and then a bunch of raid zones that need 1 to 3-5 groups to raid. That feels about right to me. However, the server needs a lot more to do when characters hit max level, and that means more zones to play in, learn, complete quests in, etc.

All MMOs eventually get "top heavy," and typically bored players who have played all of the high end content make alts and do the quests and grind in zones they didn't do the first time around. Rather than replaying that scenario, with a ton of useless zones that are no longer relevant because they are essentially newbie zones, revamp those old zones so people play them again. Make em all level 70 content, where we can solo in some, group in others, and raid in others. When characters are low level, especially on a serve like THF, limit the options since they won't stay in those levels for long given the bonus xp here. Once they get to 70, that is where the game starts for real, and expand the options for play in light of the greater power and options characters on this serve have once they hit 70 and start bulking up on AAs. This server really doesn't need newbie zones. It needs a lot more high level zones to play in.

Content is King.

And I can dream.

[Ydiss]

Can't read all of your post right now but I will. Just skimming it and a lot of what you say is similar to the things I've always wanted. Very quickly, sequences of zones on foot for group content (ie East and West commons, the karanas (obviously not south) and the deserts of ro and the Kunark zones) and so on.

Making use of classic zones is definitely there. Content that's repeatable but not necessarily there just to progress/level up/gear up and is there just for fun. This last one is a big thing that we'll be brainstorming ideas for at some point and have already spoken about.

I'd love to do a triumvirate type faction story, like Velious. We're limited with being able to do that exactly how it was obviously (kael and thurgadin are in use already). But elsewhere? I'm up for that.

The ultimate challenge, besides limited time and effort, is making all this fun but meaningful. I don't think just buffing old world content up is enough.

Anyway, thanks all for your suggestions. Keep them coming.

[John Stark]

The ultimate challenge, besides limited time and effort, is making all this fun but meaningful. I don't think just buffing old world content up is enough.

If you had the time to do more than just buff up old world content, that would be great. Crushbone, Sebilis, and so on are fun custom zones, and a treatment of other zones in that manner, especially for high level play that was fun and challenging would be great (understanding your time limitations).

However, my comment about creating more stuff to do at higher levels, and using content that hasn't been made into a custom zone, failed to note exactly what I meant by that. I personally like to dungeon crawl. Not camp in one spot for hours or days on end for that one rare drop (although on Live back in the day I did that too). I mean crawl the dungeon, fight through it and keep on the move, pausing only when the need to rebuff or regain mana necessitates stopping for a camp to do so.

Sebilis is one of those zones. I have had a ton of FUN just crawling that zone, because the crawl itself is enjoyable to me. Even if it wasn't a custom THF, with added quests and achievements, the zone itself, to me, is such a classic because it is fun to play in it. Solusek's Eye is another one, along with the revamped Accursed Temple of Cazic Thule. They are fun to crawl!

Others might like kiting mobs in outdoor zones, and I've done that a ton on Live back in the day as my first main was a wizard. Swarm kiting with a bard was a hoot (to me at least) too. It was fun, and even when Sony/Verant would nerf kiting in different ways, quad kiting, AE kiting, and swarm kiting were still fun!

Also, I remember doing AE groups back on Live with my wizard. For those who never did that, take a couple of enchanters, a couple of wizards, a healer and a puller, and AoE mez (chanters job) and AoE nuke (wizards job) and suck in great gobs of xp (especially AA xp) by AoE nuking a hundred mobs of whatever at a whack, with the healer and maybe keeping the puller and the rest of the group alive. Tons of fun! Sometimes it was high risk and there would be a wipe or three, but still a blast. SONY/Verant specifically nerfed certain zones to stop, or at least hinder, AoE groups, but players just found new zones to do it in, new tricks to pull it off, and it stayed fun!

Take the THF custom zone in Shadow Haven. You guys turned that into snake-central for level 70 groups (or solo for characters with some gear and especially AAs), and did a great job with it. While I like the quests and stuff there, the plain fact of the matter is that, just like Old Sebilis or SolA or Lower Guk, I enjoy crawling the zone and killing the mobs there. Its fun, and the quests, to me, are icing on that cake. Take out the quests and leave just the tough snake mobs and their loot, and I'd still crawl it. To me, you guys did something with that zone that made me think of all the other old zones that I enjoy for the crawl as much or more than any of the loot or quests.

Now pretend that your version wasn't a custom zone, just a revamped zone like they did with the Temple of CT back in the day. I enjoyed the original CT when it was level appropriate in original EQ (30+ something zone IIRC), but the revamp was great because it kept the fun crawl but updated it to meet some of the demand for "top heavy" high level play. You could xp lizardmen in the courtyards and maze, or go down to the slime pits, or do the cycle up on the temple. Great stuff, and worth playing for the challenge and some of the loot even after PoP came out.

Long and short, there are zones that are simply fun to play in because they were well designed, had good monster placement, and so on. Challenging, but not pull your hair out challenging, keeping it fun.

I do understand that development time is limited, and admit that I may not have enough knowledge of the time commitment necessary to "simply" buff a zone up for higher level play. Maybe your time is better spent making more custom zones like Shadow Haven.

However, if it ain't broke, don't fix it as the old motto goes. Turn SolA into a 70+group zone so that its fun to crawl on THF, with just some buffed up mobs and gear, and I personally would have a blast with that!

As a side note, one of the things I really wish EQ had back when was bigger dungeons. Much bigger dungeons. But that's for another post maybe.

Regards

[xadien]

I'll be Brief. I'm happy to do any and all content, the most fun I've ever had on the server is when people were actively doing things as a group. Boxing is fun, and exciting, but it is a MMO, and it would be great to see more grouping together. I log in when I can play (admittedly) less than ideal currently, but I ask, does anyone need help or want to group up? Almost always I'm met with silence. I'd love the chance to incorporate more LDON, LoY or some of the other instanced zones out there. Uqua, Ikkinz, TacV are built, just need to be scaled. Some people would be happy to do zones purely for nostalgia and challenge. Take CoA and ramp it up to be difficult for a 6 man team and make it an Aug run, like it used to be back on live. You avoided the Bosses, but did the Mini's for augments.

I'd love to only play one or two characters, as all of my boxes were born out of necessity for raid completion as numbers dwindled. In short, I love the server, and the population, and I'll do anything I can do to keep it going, help players or kill stuff!

Voki