EQ TLP - Oakwynd (Evolving Ruleset Progression Server)

DickTrickle said:

Meeko's had some interesting references before:



EQ developers revel in their little fiefdom.

Click to expand...

That's an interesting Zaide post. I had never seen that. Based on my experience on Yelinak, I ( and several others ) wondered if some of that was going on there. The suspensions seemed pretty lopsided at times, but who knows.

I do wonder who at DPG is so hell bent on dying on this encounter locking hill and why. At this point, it seems like it must go at least as high as JChan and perhaps higher? I agree with most of the speculation that it's CS ticket driven, with perhaps a bit of casual player retention concerns thrown in.

It does seem like they ( at least the ones making the high level decisions ) really don't understand how their own game actually plays though, for the vast majority of players. Hell, some of Meeko's recent Discord comments seem to lack a fairly basic understanding of how many things work.

I wonder how important TLP's are to them revenue wise? Sometimes it appears like they really don't care about them that much. I would think they are a significant portion of their revenue?

Jasper said:

That's an interesting Zaide post. I had never seen that. Based on my experience on Yelinak, I ( and several others ) wondered if some of that was going on there. The suspensions seemed pretty lopsided at times, but who knows.

I do wonder who at DPG is so hell bent on dying on this encounter locking hill and why. At this point, it seems like it must go at least as high as JChan and perhaps higher? I agree with most of the speculation that it's CS ticket driven, with perhaps a bit of casual player retention concerns thrown in.

It does seem like they ( at least the ones making the high level decisions ) really don't understand how their own game actually plays though, for the vast majority of players. Hell, some of Meeko's recent Discord comments seem to lack a fairly basic understanding of how many things work.

I wonder how important TLP's are to them revenue wise? Sometimes it appears like they really don't care about them that much. I would think they are a significant portion of their revenue?

Click to expand...

I think they've said before that TLPs are about half their revenue. They certainly don't give them half of their dev time, though.

TLP's seem like such an easy win for them, that they refuse to take though. I don't get it.

I guess I kind of get that they are in a spot where there are so many TLP's now, that every new successful TLP, just pulls from the exisiting TLP servers player base. Guessing that has to be considered on some level too.

Zaide said:

I mean most video game devs/designers didn’t get into the field so they could work on some other devs 20 year old spaghetti code content. They understandably want to make new content; their content.

Click to expand...

Yeah but their current year content isn't fun... it's there for them to get a paycheck and deliver content each year. Releasing new expansions makes the game look less dead, even if only 5% of their active subscriber base is playing that content. That much is obvious to me, as someone who has made financial decisions in industry before. It keeps the IP alive, it gives you deliverables you can blast out to news sites that will simp over the idea of getting a taste of that content tit.

But if the content doesn't do the playerbase justice, who the hell are you making games for?

It seems like there's no love being put into these rulesets like Oakwynd - just, "How do I make this easier for our underlings in CS?" or "How do we make money while still being cautious about our yearly paycheck?" and they don't meet those goals exceedingly well because they are normally too cautious.

Outside of the developers & Daybreak making money, TLP (and TLE on EQ2) is there to satisfy the hordes of players that trust Daybreak for some reason but can't seem to trust Emu, and stick to them like fly on glue paper in hopes they'll 'some day' deliver a product that they enjoy. Granted, Mischief is the only instance where they experimented in a way that benefitted the players, and I imagine it made a ton of money - there's still people playing into TSS, more than any other server.

Daybreak is only one step above Pantheon - and that's only because they can deliver a product.

Secrets said:

Yeah but their current year content isn't fun... it's there for them to get a paycheck and deliver content each year. Releasing new expansions makes the game look less dead, even if only 5% of their active subscriber base is playing that content. That much is obvious to me, as someone who has made financial decisions in industry before. It keeps the IP alive, it gives you deliverables you can blast out to news sites that will simp over the idea of getting a taste of that content tit.

But if the content doesn't do the playerbase justice, who the hell are you making games for?

It seems like there's no love being put into these rulesets like Oakwynd - just, "How do I make this easier for our underlings in CS?" or "How do we make money while still being cautious about our yearly paycheck?" and they don't meet those goals exceedingly well because they are normally too cautious.

Outside of the developers & Daybreak making money, TLP (and TLE on EQ2) is there to satisfy the hordes of players that trust Daybreak for some reason but can't seem to trust Emu, and stick to them like fly on glue paper in hopes they'll 'some day' deliver a product that they enjoy. Granted, Mischief is the only instance where they experimented in a way that benefitted the players, and I imagine it made a ton of money - there's still people playing into TSS, more than any other server.

Daybreak is only one step above Pantheon - and that's only because they can deliver a product.

Click to expand...

Way more than 5% of their active subscriber base is playing modern content.

And they delivered a product that many people have enjoyed, even if they have issues and are not always happy. You act like subscribers are homeless crack addicts. Don't get me wrong, it's not a great dev shop, but acting like it's only a step above Pantheon is silly.

The subscribers you speak of are mostly uncapable of downloading another game or even leaving their homes. What the subscribers don't realize is EQ Iive is in fact ground hog day.

I don't care if live eq eats more dev time than tlps. That's understandable from every perspective, including the "tlps can get to it eventually" one - stuff like TSS and SOF which were designed after the first tlps are now old content that I really like and tlps are the ones using.

What bothers me is when some nerd forces their will into something that doesn't work. The original meeting stones in wow were perhaps the worst for this, when they didn't work they started breaking or removing features like the lfg tool until people had no choice but to use meeting stones or suffer. THEN, literal years later, they made meeting stones functional, and something like a decade later put that lfg tool's feature list back into them. I hate that shit. I hated it working software for benefit administration - as soon as a programmer or developer crosses that line into thinking something they made is a personal reflection of them and criticism of it is criticism of them, it fucking SUCKS. Maybe Im totally off but I am smelling that here and I really dont like it!

Rajaah said:

Pretty sure that didn't literally mean that they're Gen Zers or those things are happening.

Click to expand...

Should have been a dead give away when I said the leaders were reading the forums.

Pick zones were smart, agents of change were smart. They didn't fundamentally change the game, and barring a few issues, they were easy to implement. FTE does fundamentally change the game, and clearly whoever came up with the idea, and those that agreed to go along with it did not think it through. There are a number of factors that go into the hate list of an npc, and there are a number of ways to drop off that hate list. Not to mention the additional component of /yell, or having someone leave/join a group/raid.

They will have to completely rework how aggro works in the game if they want FTE to even have a remote chance of being successful. The fact that they put this on test and thought that would work is a joke. It puts on display the lack of knowledge they have regarding their own game. And they have a week and a half to make it work. Good luck with that.

TLPs are so easy, it's literally free money for this company, whatever they call themselves now. Why are you even throwing resources at them. Everyone who plays on a TLP at this point is hooked. You got them, they want to play your game, they like your game. Don't change the fundamental game itself. Bring back EQNext if you want to take on that kind of project. You have so many easy things to work with for a TLP.

• Bsts & Zerkers available at lauch, or more race/class combos
• Free trade
• Boxing rules (relaxed truebox etc)
• Varying unlock timers, or even another true progression server where it unlocks when you complete each expansion
• A resetting TLP

The list is so long, those are only a few of the options that would be a free win every year for them. Instead they go for an option that I honestly don't believe is possible in EQ. At least not without a ton of development and testing time that they don't have nor do they want to pay for. The whole thing is absurd.

yerm said:

I don't care if live eq eats more dev time than tlps. That's understandable from every perspective, including the "tlps can get to it eventually" one - stuff like TSS and SOF which were designed after the first tlps are now old content that I really like and tlps are the ones using.

What bothers me is when some nerd forces their will into something that doesn't work. The original meeting stones in wow were perhaps the worst for this, when they didn't work they started breaking or removing features like the lfg tool until people had no choice but to use meeting stones or suffer. THEN, literal years later, they made meeting stones functional, and something like a decade later put that lfg tool's feature list back into them. I hate that shit. I hated it working software for benefit administration - as soon as a programmer or developer crosses that line into thinking something they made is a personal reflection of them and criticism of it is criticism of them, it fucking SUCKS. Maybe Im totally off but I am smelling that here and I really dont like it!

Click to expand...

From following their responses in discord and on the forums I think it's abundantly clear many of the EQ devs are defensive about what they work on and plenty of them have quite an ego as well. Don't get me wrong, many EQ players are total dipshit mouth breathers who wouldn't know how to converse in a civilized manner if their life depended on it, but more than a few devs would overreact to pretty benign comments. Or, they would read and respond to one retard and take it all personally and not want to make any changes, ignoring all the people who actually were addressing it in a civilized manner.

One tiny example that I can't help forget is when they did some changes to the way chat filtering was done and it fucked up things in a really stupid way such that you couldn't separate things you normally could before. There were many complaints and one of the senior devs kind of agreed with some of the them but they said they weren't just going to wipe away someone's three weeks of work or something to that effect. That blew my mind. Literally keeping in shitty work not to make someone feel bad. There was some vague comment of eventually improving things but when I quit the game it was still the same way.

I feel like a lot of this rests on Meeko's shoulders, not as the champion of FTE but as the poor schmuck with orders to make it happen. He's getting a bit frustrated and snappy in discord but can't blame him too much because he's the lightning rod for a lot of the shit that TLPers are flinging at the moment.

If it was me I'd probably be like..

At best we're looking at what? It launches just sorta broken?

Zaide said:

The Oakwynd server has a dope ruleset minus Encounter Locking.

Click to expand...

I think the idea is good enough, but the bonuses are too negligible until deep into the servers life.

The 10% for each maxxed char seems pretty awful, too

Ambiturner said:

I think the idea is good enough, but the bonuses are too negligible until deep into the servers life.

The 10% for each maxxed char seems pretty awful, too

Click to expand...

I don't understand why Kunark has +25% more loot and that stays at +25% until eleven unlocks later when in The Serpent's Spire it goes all the way to 200%. You get +25% faster AA in Luclin and then fourteen unlocks later it goes to +50%. I get that the idea is the hook gets more and better bait over time but that 65-70 area does not impress.

I think people are focused on the "weak" bonuses and sleeping on a couple of other factors like char only lockouts, heirloom loot and truebox being relaxed and eventually removed.

And people absolutely will level alts just to run raids a second time, Mischief proved that, people there duplicate their entire box groups and just pass the loot across before running a raid a second time. Heirloom will allow people to do that as well, just not going to be making as much bank from selling all that free trade loot.

Arbitrary said:

I don't understand why Kunark has +25% more loot and that stays at +25% until eleven unlocks later when in The Serpent's Spire it goes all the way to 200%. You get +25% faster AA in Luclin and then fourteen unlocks later it goes to +50%. I get that the idea is the hook gets more and better bait over time but that 65-70 area does not impress.

Click to expand...

This one actually seems good to me. TSS is a huge changing point in the game where you start the heavy quest based gameplay over drop based farming, which DODH and POR are kings of. There is still shit to grind if you want, but its only a few handfuls of augs versus like dodh has a dozen clicks and a dozen augs worth getting to drop, and por has a bunch of weird shit people may want. It's definitely the time to just skyrocket it.

yerm said:

This one actually seems good to me. TSS is a huge changing point in the game where you start the heavy quest based gameplay over drop based farming, which DODH and POR are kings of. There is still shit to grind if you want, but its only a few handfuls of augs versus like dodh has a dozen clicks and a dozen augs worth getting to drop, and por has a bunch of weird shit people may want. It's definitely the time to just skyrocket it.

Click to expand...

You can goose something in the middle up to +50% and still have room for that other +50% down the road.