New Progression Server confirmed

Rangoth

Blackwing Lair Raider
1,899
1,993
It should only be raid targets that are instanced. Who fucking cares if every joe can kill naggy. I think they should be able to. Christ man. The game is 15 years old and we are talking anout content from that day. Let groups of 5-10 friends live the same memories you got to have and they never did. I never understood why this is a problem. You and your leet bros will still level faster, beat them to the mob, kill it faster and get your name on the webpage. Relax

On top of that little timmy will failcake from shit skill in pop while you keep being leet. This is a progression server on An old game. Let someone else enjoy it. We all know the same 50 people restart the same guilds and reown the general public.
 

Vaclav

Bronze Baronet of the Realm
12,650
877
Maybe I'm just thinking of specific examples but I recall AoW dying a handful of times before SoL, Trak took like two or three months by the LoS archive I believe. Whereas these were dying day one on TLP. I think EoE and co did VP with 13 people btw. Not sure the charm glitches were a big deal in VP.
AoW has been tuned really far down - SKs were soloing him at 85 IIRC (or was it 90?) - and it's not possible to do VP with 13 in 3 days - keys would take at least a week for 13 and that's assuming every Trak was very giving (3-5 teeth was the spread IIRC - and I know personally it seemed very skewed towards 3) and every single person precamped their solo camps.

AoW is about the only one that would be remotely screwy for how many drops enter the world - and nothing is to say they'll not leave some "bonus stuff" like Kael completely contested anyhow. (I'd imagine not, since it's a good thing to instance for the normal Live servers since it's a constantly farmed target that's never up - but sensibly if they were to skip some stuff, non-progression stuff like the AoW makes sense)
 

Zaide

TLP Idealist
3,977
4,922
AoW has been tuned really far down - SKs were soloing him at 85 IIRC (or was it 90?) - and it's not possible to do VP with 13 in 3 days - keys would take at least a week for 13 and that's assuming every Trak was very giving (3-5 teeth was the spread IIRC - and I know personally it seemed 9very skewed towards 3) and every single person precamped their solo camps.

AoW is about the only one that would be remotely screwy for how many drops enter the world - and nothing is to say they'll not leave some "bonus stuff" like Kael completely contested anyhow. (I'd imagine not, since it's a good thing to instance for the normal Live servers since it's a constantly farmed target that's never up - but sensibly if they were to skip some stuff, non-progression stuff like the AoW makes sense)
You're right on the VP time. Just checked, it took 9 days for the server first PD kill.

For comparison, Kunark launched in April 2000 and LoS got their first VP dragon kill on 28 October.
 

Big Phoenix

Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
<Gold Donor>
47,396
101,963
Maybe I'm just thinking of specific examples but I recall AoW dying a handful of times before SoL, Trak took like two or three months by the LoS archive I believe. Whereas these were dying day one on TLP. I think EoE and co did VP with 13 people btw. Not sure the charm glitches were a big deal in VP.
Haha yeah, they killed Phar with less than 15. Good drama surrounding that kill too.
 

Crone

Bronze Baronet of the Realm
9,714
3,211
Haha yeah, they killed Phar with less than 15. Good drama surrounding that kill too.
The drama was guild internal. The 13 that had gotten keyed at that point were clearing VP, and got to PD, and made the call to try and kill PD. I believe them that they didn't really expect to win that fight, but they barely did, and got the server first. People were butt hurt they didn't get included in the fight, citing that it wouldn't have mattered to wait 1 day, and do it the next night with a lot more people keyed at that point. Technically, that's true, but oh well. At the time I knew we were trying to catch Fippy in progression, and I don't remember if waiting a day would extend our unlock by a week or not.

Either way, we all still got in there, and I got to see VP for the first time. Was awesome!
 

Kreugen

Vyemm Raider
6,599
793
EoE didn't even exist at the beginning, the server was wide open until then. There were a few large-to-huge pre-formed guilds that just didn't seem interested in raiding early on that certainly had the opportunity.

So done quickly (as I tab back and forth) here would be my way of doing it, in rough order of return for investment/likelyhood of happening:

-Open with Kunark (better zones - there simply isn't enough room for the surge of players because vanilla's mob population is extremely poorly distributed, this has been proven four times over now)
-Reduce 26 minute zone spawn timers to ~15 or less, in effect making zones "denser" and counteracting the general increase in class power / player density
-Allow TSS OOC regen because holy shit 20+ minute med times are dead, dead, dead and should stay that way. (plus its a class balance issue - think of the game as being tuned for TSS and work from there)
-Double the HP of pre-Velious raid bosses plus if possible some further tuning to make them relevant and interesting again (easier than de-tuning nearly two decades of class balance changes just to do undo it all later.)
-Find a better way to throttle XP than the awful xp cap you tried last time
-Instanced copies of all raid zones with no drop loot. Remove open-world versions because the CS staff to handle them no longer exists
-Whether or not to leave general zone pop in instanced versions untouched as a leveling alternative (over-population solution) is up for debate (no respawn?) but I'd lean towards no


Other randomness:

-Three month time lock worked fine, but voting turned out to be redundant and destructive (the one time a vote failed, the population was decimated. Without voting, there's no disappointment - everyone knows what the pace will be and what to plan for)
-You'll want to take the hell out of the hellish key camps for VP, VT and epics etc because you are going to have an unprecedented number of people trying to do them at once if you do the above. (multiple drops?)
-You may as well activate mercs with Luclin because that's when the majority of "groups" out in the world are boxers or frustrated people trying to find the one open spot in a boxed group. AA essentially destroys social grouping. We've seen it over and over. People try to blame instancing for something that actually occurs much earlier with the introduction of the endless XP grind.

And if this destroys your precious nostalgia, consider this: How much nostalgia do you get from two guys killing the first Nagafen on the server? How about one shaman solo breaking fear? Trakanon dying in 7 seconds?

It's a lot easier (in $$$) to take TSS as a starting point and rework from there, than trying to undo it all and add it back one expansion at a time.

Hrm, clearly, I like to babble on this subject. Apologies. None of the people who are only interested in the first 5% of EQ will agree with any of this, but it's fun watching them repeat the same shit that will never happen over and over.
 

Fight

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
4,727
5,608
rrr_img_91753.jpg
 

Kreugen

Vyemm Raider
6,599
793
I bet the official forums are having a VERY different discussion, hah.

A hardcore group of OMG PRISTINE CLASSIC REBUILD ENTIRE GAME 3 YEAR LOCKOUT PLZ diehards that post over and over and over and over...

No one can grasp the amount of work that would take, let alone the paradigm difference between "classic" and "progression"
 

Vaclav

Bronze Baronet of the Realm
12,650
877
I bet the official forums are having a VERY different discussion, hah.

A hardcore group of OMG PRISTINE CLASSIC REBUILD ENTIRE GAME 3 YEAR LOCKOUT PLZ diehards that post over and over and over and over...
There's a few, not any great majority though - more of the "nothing instanced" versus "some form of instancing" is the biggest discussion with the diehards. Awesome to see you on the rational side, glad to see it. [Always liked you, always disappointed me we had that stupid kerfuffle over Plane of Sky you and I got verbal to each other during]

Honestly, probably going to copy some of your ideas - I really like your idea overall a few small tweaks but I agree with 90% of it, some even in preference to my own ideas before reading it.
 

Kreugen

Vyemm Raider
6,599
793
What on earth would I have been arguing over in POS? The only time I recall being pissed is when Faceless showed up in Plane of Hate five hours after we had our raid there and successfully petitioned to have us removed (only to be overturned by another GM) That was the point where I didn't give a fuck about fairness anymore or any talk of sharing.

My thoughts could be summed up as "make old content fit into current eq instead of the other way around" because you could then unify the changes across all servers, with only minor differences for special ruleset servers like the unlock mechanics / xp rates. This way it only has to be done once instead of going through this shit every few years. Update, rather than revert.
 

Crone

Bronze Baronet of the Realm
9,714
3,211
As long as the instances have a minimum party, I think that would be cool. Make it high enough that 1-2 people couldn't just box the whole thing, and that would be sweet.

How many players does it take to unlock Anguish instances?
 

Kreugen

Vyemm Raider
6,599
793
12? Didn't stop two people from boxing it for augs, heh. Hell, there was that one guy who had his own raid guild.

The downside is yes, if the bosses are that easy people would split into the smallest possible raids to maximize loot. That's why you make it NO DROP.
 

Crone

Bronze Baronet of the Realm
9,714
3,211
What if it was no drop while that expansion was current, then went droppable after the expansion was "old"?
 

Vaclav

Bronze Baronet of the Realm
12,650
877
Uh, we were DHS - and you got there late, some of EoE was being shitbirds and had a summon team on like Island 6 or something after we'd spent all day clearing the lower islands and were almost to the top - y'all cruised in and summoned up to 6 or something leapfrogging us. Irritated me - and you came in late and backed up your friends a bit. (It was winding down at that point that)
 

Vaclav

Bronze Baronet of the Realm
12,650
877
You say that is if there were instances where they weren't.

Curious as to what affect this will have on P99's population when launched.
Well, DHS was intentionally staying behind and out of the way - so we rarely butted heads. So the only times they were really particularly bad to us is when we tried to call discussions for rotations and such and I as leader was the only one who was really involved in that stuff - most of the time. (And most of that was "Nope, Damdor doesn't want to agree to share anything with you" so it was short and sweet and easy to blame on just Damdor - I honestly enjoyed talking to and hanging out with most of EoE myself - but we were high-end casual rather than trying to bump heads by being another hardcore)

I've heard plenty of stories, but I'd really like to think from being on the sidelines from it most of the time that it was a few isolated people that were jerks - not that the majority were - because honestly with the ones I got to know, they'd have to basically be Jekyl and Hyde with how awesome they were in XP situations/chatting.
 

Apostolos

Golden Knight of the Realm
439
229
The required number of non merc zones still annoys me. If an expansion is over 3 expansions old it should be opened up imo. I remember trying to work on either an epic 1 or 1.5 or maybe it was the flag for the extra buff slots (can't remember anymore) but I could two box it probably fine, but some of the zones had a 6 person requirement or something and that drove me nutz. This was either tippt or something that used that zone for a quest... whatever it was.
 

Kreugen

Vyemm Raider
6,599
793
Ah. Yeah, you weren't going to win that one, not with the way respawns worked and the amount of farming we'd already done to key our way up there. Did anyone else even ever make it past bees in vanilla? I don't remember.

POS is nothing but a waste of time and always has been anyway. I was probably just bored being there and looking for something to chat about.