Everquest TLP - Aradune and Rizlona Servers (Now with real customer service)

Cinge said:

1 month was perfect for the 1/2 LO timer. By the time the month was up you were getting bored of current content but it wasnt an issue as new one was right around the corner.

1 month could still work with double loot.

I think 2 months would just have you bored after a month and then wait another month for new stuff.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I think 6 weeks would've been the sweet spot.

Regardless, I agree with Fight that one of the largest success factors with Selo's was the Luclin start. Having AA right away allows you to constantly feel a level of progression. "Classic" starts just hamper the fuck out of that, especially on a server like Mischief where loot rains. I think the server is going to feel amazing once SoL drops, but knowing it's still almost 3 months away is rough.

Selo launch was awesome. Killing Aten with a bunch of naked casters was maybe the funnest individual thing I've done on TLP. The idea of increasing loot instead of reducing lockouts i feel is a good middle ground to getting people to keep pace with the fast expansions and keep burnout reduced. Sure you can say just don't do all your instances, but people are going to be people and you'll have dudes that will raid 24/7 and burn out.

Zaide said:

Just do 6 weeks for any expansion where the level cap increases and 4 weeks for all others. Double loot instead of half lockouts. Basically just Mischief but with half the expansion durations.

Click to expand...

Yeah this could work. I do know me personally towards the 4th week you are starting to get bored. Granted the 1/2 LO contributed to that, since you saw more of the raids in a compacted time frame. Double loot, would basically make raiding once a week tolerable and could let you extend it a couple weeks before boredom sets in. I will say the the 1/2 LO while making people quit, I also think it kept more around as it didn't give a break where you are doing nothing and started to drift away or play other things.

Half lockout was offsetting 1/3 the usual tlp expansion length. You raid twice as much to still end up with less gear than a phinny clone. You couldn't just not raid all the time. That was not a real option; you would fall behind. So, double loot would obviously mean you do half as much raiding to get the same gear, which is good for burnout. 6 or more week unlocks isn't really the answer so much, less of that endless relentless unlock schedule is. In fact if they did half lockout with longer expansions it would only make it worse for burnout.

Mischief shows they are capable of doubling loot. Rizlona shows that non truebox can mean a friendly community. Just have selo with double loot tables and no garbage ass truebox and its the perfect tlp ruleset.

Zaide said:

Last half of Kunark is always insane for attrition. Velious will probably suck too because you beat it in one day and it is the most boring raiding in EQ.

Click to expand...

This servers attrition is going to be bad for non rmt raiders because they can get their gear so much quicker than normal. The other Faceless (the rmt one) will have other incentives to hang around for a bit but I suspect as massive amounts of loot gets injected into the world even their motivation will dwindle rapidly.

Its still a good server, just the bonus loot was too much.

Elderan said:

Its still a good server, just the bonus loot was too much.

Click to expand...

The "bonus" drops probably should've been capped at 1 extra loot table. That said, I really think people underestimate what a game changer AA and the Bazaar is for people's motivations.

What reason do I have to continue to exp once I'm 60? None.
What motivation do I have to farm loot when I have to haul it back and deal with the cancer that is the ECTunnel and an /auc macro that fires off every 3 minutes while I watch TV? None.

Those 2 things alone are massive contributors to attrition, both get fixed in Luclin.

Kirun said:

The "bonus" drops probably should've been capped at 1 extra loot table. That said, I really think people underestimate what a game changer AA and the Bazaar is for people's motivations.

What reason do I have to continue to exp once I'm 60? None.
What motivation do I have to farm loot when I have to haul it back and deal with the cancer that is the ECTunnel and an /auc macro that fires off every 3 minutes while I watch TV? None.

Those 2 things alone are massive contributors to attrition, both get fixed in Luclin.

Click to expand...

The best part of Selo was that it started in Luclin.

I've said a billion times, mischief is not going to be ideal for your super active top tier raider - particularly the autistic warrior stereotype. It's gonna be great if you like lots of boxes andor alts, if you only play a few days a week, that sorta semi casual lot. Luclin will fix a ton of things I hear people wailing about but eventually it's gonna come down to a server that's good for a relaxed dude and shitty for a bis chaser.

I think we're having this loot conversation in the wrong era. 90% of raid loot is trash tier compared to what you can obtain outside of raids. Mana Robe is one of the few items I rarely see that still empties out bank accounts/dkp to this day. Sky loot is another conversation entirely, but the point still stands there too. We're not exactly seeing a Belt of Four Winds on every Warrior either. But Im not even sure that quest pieces have a double drop rate that coincide with the servers ruleset. You see these things on people, but they arent a dime a dozen. So to me, its not that the double loot is causing burn out - its that, in my mind at least, there arent a lot of items that you need a raid to obtain. Classic, Kunark, just not the era's I really wanted to do again - and I think a lot of people are of the same opinion.

Now say, we kill a random WW Dragon and get Vulak loot - I might start to agree with the assessment when it comes to player retention. But I just dont think thats going to be the case. Especially if it does drop it and it'll be a target worth bat phoning.

VP just has too many weapons in an expansion where everyone is doing their epic. There are only a handful of raid items that are highly sought after. Lots of missing slots in terms of kunark raid gear.

Velious will bring a lot more desired items. Should be pretty interesting for every type of person involved. Buyer, seller, raider. The pool of items will be huge, but at least there will be raid items in every slot, for every class.

Whoever is in charge of batphone is going to have a rough life though. It's possible that vulak/aow/tunare loot will drop off 20+ other bosses if they don't change whatever formula they used for Kunark raid bosses. How long do you go with batphoning every single target that can drop vulak loot. When do you just let other guilds sneak into ToV to kill some scrub dragon. It might drop garbage... but it might drop 8 vulak items!

I feel like the batphones will only die off when there isn't money to be made, even if you're doing Vindi every six hours. If there's Vulak loot dropping from all of the level appropriate "army" bosses, I don't see it never not being the potential for good money.

On the plus side, it seems likely that it will be just a bit harder to corner the OW mob market. From what I've seen as an observer, it seems like the OW race has tilted back heavily towards Greed is Good. I don't really keep too close an eye on it, though.

Los_Necros said:

VP just has too many weapons in an expansion where everyone is doing their epic. There are only a handful of raid items that are highly sought after. Lots of missing slots in terms of kunark raid gear.

Velious will bring a lot more desired items. Should be pretty interesting for every type of person involved. Buyer, seller, raider. The pool of items will be huge, but at least there will be raid items in every slot, for every class.

Whoever is in charge of batphone is going to have a rough life though. It's possible that vulak/aow/tunare loot will drop off 20+ other bosses if they don't change whatever formula they used for Kunark raid bosses. How long do you go with batphoning every single target that can drop vulak loot. When do you just let other guilds sneak into ToV to kill some scrub dragon. It might drop garbage... but it might drop 8 vulak items!

Click to expand...

VP weapons were more of a thing orignally since Epics were added after Kunark had been around for awhile and actually took time to complete even after they were added.

Zaide said:

Last half of Kunark is always insane for attrition. Velious will probably suck too because you beat it in one day and it is the most boring raiding in EQ.

Click to expand...

Oh come on... who doesn't just fucking love Sit, Stand, Sit, Stand, Sit, Stand, Sit, Stand for 40 minutes. Yeah baby! That's great raid content right there!

And, let's not forget its sibling in annoying game play, IN... OUT... IN... OUT... IN... OUT... IN.... OUT... IN... OUT... IN.... OUT...

yerm said:

Half lockout was offsetting 1/3 the usual tlp expansion length. You raid twice as much to still end up with less gear than a phinny clone. You couldn't just not raid all the time. That was not a real option; you would fall behind. So, double loot would obviously mean you do half as much raiding to get the same gear, which is good for burnout. 6 or more week unlocks isn't really the answer so much, less of that endless relentless unlock schedule is. In fact if they did half lockout with longer expansions it would only make it worse for burnout.

Mischief shows they are capable of doubling loot. Rizlona shows that non truebox can mean a friendly community. Just have selo with double loot tables and no garbage ass truebox and its the perfect tlp ruleset.

Click to expand...

I mostly agree with this, but I feel the real reason Rizlona is so chill and friendly is because Aradune got all the bad seeds. This seems to be the way with Mischief/Thornblade, too. I'm not sure there is an answer to this as some of these people are going to be toxic regardless of the server rules. They just cannot not be scumlords. Maybe, as Sieger says that they should "stop being cucks."

I think that Mischief is definitely the best TLP candidate for casual gamers as well as any hardcores that want to make krono, and I believe it will stay that way for a very long time. This is essentially the real FV 2.0 that people have been asking for a long time now.

That being said, there is a large populous of gamers that don't fall in either the casual or hardcore categories that this server might have trouble retaining. That's the medium core guilds that generally make up a large part of TLP servers.

These are the people that generally like the idea of hardcore raiding, but also have a life outside of gaming. They want to be part of something meaningful and earn their achievements themselves. This time of EQ gamer is turned off by the fact that rare mobs are loot piñatas and drop stuff they normally wouldn't drop. They don't like the fact that the uber item they finally got to drop is worth next to nothing because there's a ton of them on the server due to randomized loot.

The problem is that these are also the people that end up feeding both the casual guilds and hardcore raid guilds later on in a server's lifecycle when attrition really kicks in. This is the pool of available players on the server that guilds feed from when they need more numbers. This is where I think this server will have trouble later on down the road.

As an avid alt-a-holic, to me it has seemed like the low levels dried up pretty fast on this server. I alt like a mad man on ever TLP server, and I truly have felt like the available low to mid level experience groups dried up way faster on this server than on previous TLPs. I'm having to rely on bringing my own tank/heal/cc for low to mid level experience groups a lot more than I usually would be doing.

That all being said, I wonder if this is really a problem with the ruleset or something deeper like perhaps EQ gamers are getting tired of starting over. I don't know. I hope the server lasts all the way to Live because it will be an amazing server long term if it does.