Everquest AMA Answered!
- Thread starter Wintermute
- Start date
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
Early versions of SEQ obviously weren't so user-friendly. The first time I realized the PvP side of the game was totally screwed due to widespread adoption of hacks was on Discord server. Basically everyone who won that server was in a very cheesy guild that openly hacked (SEQ), and SOE couldn't do a thing about it.
If a minority of people use third party programs to break PvP, players can decline to use it and still enjoy the game. If 51+ percent are using it, the best you can possibly do is load it and use it passively just to identify obvious hackers and avoid PvP with them. That's how the remaining honorable players on Zek did it for several years.
I'm really all for anything in EQ that facilitates the ostracizing of anti-social players. I would love a feature where you can add individual players to your full-time PvP flag list. I.E. if you're on my list and I'm on yours, we're PvP-flagged against each other. But you can also remove people from your list (with a reasonable time-delay to avoid exploitation). That way the people who can't engage in PvP and also behave themselves just wind up with no one to fight.
Punko
Macho Ma'am
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Don't give it too much weight, its coming from the guy that stated "we invested zero time on PvP" and is using current PvP numbers as an argument to state that it is worthless.
EQ devs roll like that.
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Sieger
Trakanon Raider
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I'd put weight behind what a reasonable guy like Elidroth says vs an EQ PVP autist any day of the week. You're literally on crack cocaine if you think EQ PVP once received tons of resources, but it was clear by like, GoD and later era almost that entire player base had moved on, it'd be terrible business to invest dev hours into something no one would ever care about or spend money on.
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Punko
Macho Ma'am
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Where did I claim I think EQ pvp once received resources?
If you are blinded by anger due to gender issues or something, we can help you in another thread.
I've been posting consistently that a game mode which was neglected and lost players, isn't a fair base to judge its potential popularity.
E Elidroth might as well post he hasn't had his BMW serviced for 300.000 miles, it broke down, making BMW a shit brand.
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Nirgon
Log Wizard
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xp loss on death was classic (sullon). working as intended
There wasn't a single FFA PVP server, ever, with xp loss. Just like there wasn't a Sullon incarnation with item loot. FV had many no drop items as droppable, should that go on blue/green because it's "classic" too? Bishop takes knight and checkmate.
It's being discussed here because you and Fifey brought it up and ive issued valid corrections.
Who were you on red anyways bud? Get over it.
Sieger
Trakanon Raider
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It lost players because the underlying game wasn't suitable for PVP, it had niche appeal, and that appeal was time-limited. There was nothing reasonable that SoE could have done to preserve or even promote PvP in EQ. They could have made other games instead, and in fact they did, and some of them did well and some didn't. All these Arm Chair Quarterbacks that think if SoE had just done this or that EverQuest would have followed WoW's trajectory are ignoring a lot of reality.
This just isn't accurate. PvP was never a priority, but for quite a while there was the occasional PvP update/overhaul. Until 2006, at minimum. If I wasn't so lazy, I would look up the patch notes to nail down the year.
And the entire player base definitely had not moved on by GoD. Zek had several large raid guilds (and tons of smaller, active family guilds) for a good long time. The Euro guild on Zek was consistently the top guild post-merge, and they were the first of the raid guilds to fold due to lack of numbers (due to limited recruits in their playtime), but that didn't happen until just before the release of TSS (they went to Antonius). There were still five other raid guilds at that point, and the process of those guilds merging and dying took years to finish.
Of course, it has been quite a while since active updates were given to PvP, so the kind of updates that would have helped (DoT timers on PvP Harm Touch, et cetera) are well out of the bag now and it is only reasonable to accept that developers shouldn't be asked to catch up on them, nor should they be launching new PvP servers or otherwise dedicating significant resources to a ruleset which was imperfect to begin with and is now thoroughly moribund.
Ultimately, however, the constant antagonism of blue players toward red players, including making stuff up like the notion that PvP was dead in EQ by GoD, is just silly. Most red players are scum, no doubt, but how are you any better if you pretend to know better than them about stuff you didn't participate in? Or constantly piss on their right to even participate in the game? Or call them names ('autist') that would get you punched or at least ostracized in adult company in real life?
It's not rocket science. Shut down the server if you don't want it. If you want to keep it and keep the handful of players on it, table the handful of low-resource solutions you might give those players, choose the least terrible one, and move on.
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krysanth
Golden Knight of the Realm
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On Tallon the community was great when the server launched. It added to the danger of the game, yet teamwork allowed some safety and a cause to rally behind. This attitude did not last long, and the griefers and cross teamers (shamefully I was in Pande--a great guild) killed the idea of the server. Since then, PvP servers have become shit fests where people maximize the grief, just like non PvP servers but to a higher degree.
When they look up and no one is around to play with them they wonder why. Which has been the history of these servers and even P99 Red (lol)
The days of PvP community being worthwhile or possible are long gone, along with any sort of balance that would make PvP even worth it.
Sad, but true.
When they look up and no one is around to play with them they wonder why. Which has been the history of these servers and even P99 Red (lol)
The days of PvP community being worthwhile or possible are long gone, along with any sort of balance that would make PvP even worth it.
Sad, but true.
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Sieger
Trakanon Raider
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Nothing you've said here contradicts anything I've said. In your own words the PvP servers were maybe 1/25th or smaller a % of EQs total population. They hadn't even merged all the blue servers down to their present state by 2006, with there being many more blue servers at the time, most of which had multiple raid guilds vs one viable PvP server with a handful of raid guilds, probably a server with 300 players, and you're acting like that's not a sign of it basically being dead. SoE/Daybreak aren't running P99 Red or some Emu, they're running a for profit game company, anything that has a few hundred players maximum out of a player base that in 2006 was probably 20,000+ or more, is pretty much irrelevant.
Point stands--PvP in EQ was an afterthought when implemented, it gave some people fun times and that's great. It was never a primary driver of a significant portion of EQ's revenue. Contrast this with say, WoW which was designed to be more PvP focused right out of the gate (although that's decayed to the point now WoW PvP clearly is much reduced in importance, but in 2004-2009 or so PvP was a major driver of player subscriptions for Blizzard.) There was no way to go from the game that Brad & Crew launched in 1999 to a game where PvP was driving a lot of revenue, simple reality.
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YttriumF
The Karenist Karen
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Great dialog and a great group of folks, I really enjoyed the candid responses! I think the team should work with The BattleMage for more 20th Anniversary swag ... and also release the home brew recipe for Brell's Blessed Stout.
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There was only like 2 or 3 that I didn't include and as you can see only 6 that I added that they would not answer.
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Lambourne
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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I was indeed asking for a way to hide my own character's name but not other names, which is not currently possible. Probably a design relic from when everyone played in first person. Third person seems way more popular these days and having your own name on the screen all the time is just annoying.
Thank-you's to a_skeleton_03 for making this AMA happen and to the devs for giving real answers and not corporate PR speak.
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ZyyzYzzy
RIP USA
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I don't remember but I think it was a single one from a_skeleton_02 or maybe I just cut a portion out of it.
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