I think what Kreugen is saying maybe is.
He already tells us exactly what he is saying:
Other players are your ENEMY. They take your loot, they take your XP, they waste your time. You put up with this in the hope that they will return the favor - and over time you run into enough shitheads that you realize you are wasting your time more often than not.
For the most part, there is more penalty from grouping than there is benefit. To really encourage grouping, there should be notable advantages in doing so for all people involved, and in every aspect of grouping, all of the time. There has been a decent effort toward this in recent years, but I am sure it could safely be taken to more extremes. Some systems would not be easy to adjust to be more group oriented, but others would be fairly simple IMO. Essentially, grouping should increase progression of everyone in the group at a steady rate.
Without going into too much depth on the subject, I think the points of other players taking your loot and experience are fairly easy to resolve. One solution would be scaling better to group size. There are already experience bonuses to grouping, but the last time I checked, they weren't that much better than soloing. Especially when you calculate the downtime that is inherent to grouping (such as finding a group to begin with when you could have been off soloing instantly). The group experience bonuses would be easy to increase.
Then, you are still sharing loot between the group, which means you could be earning less platinum and getting less rare drops. Many multi-player games solve this by making loot specific to each player. A more simple answer might be to simply scale loot drops based on the size of the group. I certainly don't think that drop rates need to be increased to be increased by 100% for each player that joins a group, but it would make sense to have them increase at a rate similar to XP bonuses. Maybe something like an 50% increase in drop rates for each player in the group that is added. So, a solo player would have a 100% normal drop rate, then adding 1 more player would add 50% more for a total of 150% drop rate. A third player would add 50% of the previous 50%, so it would be 25%, so the total would now go up to 175% drop rate and so on. This is just an example that would need to be tweaked to balance the drop rates vs the penalty of grouping to get the drops. The actual bonuses used should be enough to make grouping the clear choice even for people looking for loot.
Once you have enough bonuses for grouping to clearly make up for how much time is wasted by grouping, it should promote grouping overall.
Note that this does not take many of the current systems on Live into account, but it at least addresses some of what I consider to be major flaws in the original design of EQ grouping. There are other problems like having 700+ zones that divide players up, Or, having way too many quests and tasks for very many people to be at the same point on. You basically need to funnel people through the same path in order to promote any kind of grouping. I think Live tries to do this, but in doing so, they end up making all older content completely obsolete.
Elidroth mentioned how much work it would take to completely remake EQ within a new engine. One thing he didn't touch upon was that it could be done much cheaper/easier using the existing engine. Instead of having the dev team work on the next expansion with completely new content, they could redirect that team for a year or 2 to instead work on a revamp of a more classic EQ progression, which could be implemented directly into the current game. You could have a system where players start over in content very similar to classic EQ and progress there. Progress in this content may be able to relate directly toward your normal character (just for motivation of actually experiencing this content). Maybe each level earned equals 10AAs (or more for 50+). Maybe each piece of classic loot has an equivalent current EQ piece of loot with decent stats. Fabled loot is similar to this idea, but the loot would have to beefed up considerably to make them useful in current day for normal characters. So, you get an SSOY in the classic progression and your main character might get an option to get a superior version with respectable stats.
Sure, some people would be able to fly through this content and get some decent stuff fairly easily, but those same people would have just been flying through the current Live content anyway and progressing at a similar rate. It isn't just the lack of inventory space, or map or many other current features that make Classic EQ style fun and challenging, it is the difficultly, downtime, penalties, etc. Even the limited amount of available content is a good thing, because 700+ zones are just too overwhelming no matter who you are, and they only divide players up.
One of my favorite things about EQ was dreaming about what zones I wanted to go to, what mobs I wanted to encounter, and most importantly; what loot I wanted to get. Just this weekend, I found an old binder I had made (probably from 2001ish), which included hundreds of pages of maps, tradeskill combines, loot, etc, which I used to plan out my play time. On EQ these days, there is so much loot and content that it waters it all down. I don't feel the need to research anything anymore, which is good and bad IMO. By limiting content, you make the world feel more like a story where there are well-known and famous swords, armor pieces, places, and mobs. It reminds me a bit of watching The Hobbit, when they go over what the name of the different elven-made swords are. The swords were cool enough to have their own names. Now, on EQ, even though items still have names, it doesn't feel like they really deserve them. In old EQ, they did.
I better end it here before I keep rambling on...
