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I think views on PoP remain mixed. It killed the casual guilds back in the day, and still stands as a clear "different game" point vs. the classic trilogy and what Luclin started moving it towards. LoY and LDoN were both attempts at fixing the group/casual game content lacking in PoP... if you lump all 3 together as one expac (didn't they do that on last progression servers?) the overall design makes a bit more sense. For me, the "high planar" concept with no meaningful faction interaction with the previous content was a major downer to PoP (especially after visiting moon kittens).

Granted I like the planar class armor sets, but that stuff was casual accessible in the later era it appealed to me as upgrades (I think my first chanter main went from Neriak newb robe to the planar robe). The flagging was goofy and poorly thought out. Group content flags for higher group and/or low raid zones is fine. Higher raid flags from the lower raids is fine. PoP was not a style other games looked at and said "we gotta do that". The 85% rule was helpful for established guilds to deal with incomers, didn't really help up and coming guilds all that much. We lost a lot of people with PoP, mostly due to the flagging in my view.

Some of the PoP zones are fun, but most remained too difficult to use in small group setting (or solo) years after the content was current and level cap was over 65.

But, a high end guild that pushed PoP in era would likely have created a guild full of players with great memories of that era/content. The circles I was playing in at the time were mostly Velius nostalgic (even Luclin wasn't right) or right into LDoN.

PoP would be a good expac to completely revamp/redo for level 100-120, using what they have learned in recent years about zone access and difficulty settings. I think they could do a killer job of it without the complicated spider-web of backflagging, and design it that 2 expacs later people still want to do the top-end raids from it. Now that they recognize throwing bones to each play-style a bit better (New Plane of Justice Trials could be solo-group and level scalable for example) it could be fun.

The snarky response is to point out that most people who are still playing thought PoP was a great expansion. PoP was the point at which EQ popularity began declining rather than growing. And a lot of that was that it killed the middle level game and created a gulf between raid guilds and solo/group only play.



Sure. You had to raid to raid. In PoP, you had to raid to group. Group content (and drops) was so much vastly better in PoP, but required ridiculously large raid events to gain access to it. Couple that with a 5 level increase and you basically cut everyone who wasn't a raid player (or played one of a handful of classes which could easy get invited to pick up raids) from accessing the new content. That was a *huge* problem.



Yes. Pre-PoP you could because outside of raid zones (or parts of zones), the whole rest of the world was directly accessible to the solo/group player. You didn't "need" to raid to enjoy the game from start to highest level. Today, with the much better designed tiered expansion system, you also don't need to raid to experience the game all the way to the top level. But there was a period of about 2-3 years, starting with PoP, where if you didn't raid, it was nearly impossible to enjoy or possibly even experience large portions of the current game content. You simply couldn't get there. Period.

And honestly, they compounded this error with the GoD expansion, which more or less required high end PoP gear to do more than nibble around the edges. It was "hard" even by raid guild standards, and for everyone else? Unusable. They didn't begin to fix this problem until OOW, but by then the damage had largely been done. And frankly, they still didn't really get the game back to the casual player friendly status until maybe SoF/SoD time frame (some might say TSS, but that really just provided an alternate route to level, and not so much alternative mechanics for balancing the top end of the game).

It was a terrible terrible mistake IMO. Nearly destroyed EQ.



I'm sorry, but I simply have to completely disagree with you. The only reason EQ has survived (and has kinda begun to experience a surge of new/returning players) was that they finally moved away from a "raid or go home" mentality. And to be perfectly honest, this didn't really start to happen until the HoT expansion, when they finally created true raid-disconnected gear options for solo/group/raid play and provided incentives for all three types of players to play.

There's a whole swath of players who enjoy just logging into EQ, doing some dailies, maybe working on a few expansion tasks for an hour or so, then logging out. They don't raid. They rarely group unless someone happens to come along working on the same thing they are. And they are perfectly fine with this level of play. I also think that Sony has figured out that their bang for the buck largely rests with these players. These are the kinds of players who may not put as much money into their pockets per player, but also aren't constantly making demands for more/tougher/higher content. I think we hear a lot more from/about the folks engaged in end-game raiding, but it's a mistake to think that's where the heart of the game lies.

Edited, Apr 16th 2014 3:56pm by gbaji

This is one reason I think that having alternative ways to get Raid gear should exist. The game has alot of casuals.. and these casuals sometimes play longer and more than people who Raid. If they had an ability to get Raid gear through doing multiple quest lines etc that took large amounts of time, this would help the game more than I think it would hurt it. Yes Raiders would get mad but I think having better geared people to join in on raids and having people not have to fight over raid loot would benefit everyone. I love how SWTOR has this.... I can go out and group and get raid gear.. its very very slow. But I am able to get the gear even when I cant log in and raid with my guild. When I do get time to join my guild in raids.. I can join in and be geared and ready to go and not feel like I am being drug around because I cant play 20hours a day.
When I raided back in EQ... my biggest gripe was that I could not go to every single Raid.. and the way most guilds would do looting had me watching people who could raid every single time loot Tank gear for non tank classes or alts because they had the "points" and I did not. And of course some would argue about me joining the Raids because my gear was not that great... of course when I would point out that my gear would be better but I keep loosing upgrades to non tanks.. I would be ignored. So I became very anti raid... I had considered it was just the guild I was in but after trying out 4 other guilds I took that as a sign that Raiding was not for me. Ide love to Raid but I dont see anything different with the way loot is handled so I stay away from Raids.

First off, I disagree that raid gear should be obtainable via anything other than raiding. It's not really necessary. Tier 1/2 gear is fine for doing any group/solo current content, and it's "good enough" to start out raiding. The gap between current tier1/2 and current tier3 isn't like it was back in the day when if you didn't raid you likely had gear designed for someone 10+ levels lower (and likely not raided either, just drops off nameds). That created a massive gulf that was nearly impossible to bridge without some serious help. In today's game, I just don't see the need for this.



The flip side of the tiered content model is that progression tasks make this form of raiding incredibly difficult to do. Yes, you can do pickup raids. But if you're doing this for anything remotely near "current", you'll likely end out doing the first couple progression tasks over and over with your pick up groups. With a pickup raid you can only do content that every random person who replies to your request for a pickup raid can do. That's rarely going to be very deep into progression.

It's called EverQUEST. I do think they should introduce involved complex but doable solo/grouped quests whose reward is something really really GOOD, i.e. raid quality or even better. If they worry about raiders getting pissy about it make the quest take a good-awful amount of time and effort but still doable alone or just with friends (as opposed to requiring full-blown raids) and making the reward be suitable for the effort and time invested. Like the old shawl quests but without the raid component that used to be needed back when the shawls were truly end-game quality (or better.)

I never understand why they do NOT do this beyond a hard-coded unshakeable deference to raiders.

They've done this in the past. As you mentioned, the Coldain prayer shawl and Coldain rings were raid quality loot during their time (the shawl moreso than the 9th ring. The 10th ring required what amounts to a raid). Aid Grimel's earring was raid quality (to the point where uberguild members of that era were actively doing tradeskills to get it). The problem with doing this now is the fact that the players are often "smarter" than the developers. Many players have been playing this game longer than a large part of the dev team has been working on it. So we know the ins and outs of the game far better than the people creating content for it. If they come out with a quest they estimate will take 3 months of daily work to finish, the players will find a way to complete it in half the time. The only way the devs can delay that is by creating contentious bottlenecks like contested rare spawns or (as in this case) commonly known drops that are farmable. It's the 'crabs in a bucket' strategy.

I think there is a deference to raiders, which is why they've consciously made raiding more accessible over the years (to increase the pool of people who can identify themselves as 'raiders'). Do you honestly think as many people would be raiding if all of these encounters (and access to them) was set up like it was in the old days? Do we even have 'FFA' servers anymore? You talk about racing to Aten, which I've seen happen. What I've also seen happen is people blocking access to the minibosses so if you leapfrogged, you'd have to fight Aten with her AE deathtouch ability (which she wouldn't have if you'd killed the minis). I've also seen 12 hour long raids in VT because if you left anything standing, a competing guild would come in and kill it right after you leave. I'd say at least half the people who are currently "raiders" wouldn't have been able to handle it under the conditions that existed back then. Racing for spawns? Killing a mob the moment the previous guild wiped (on top of their corpses)? Racing home from work to log in because a sought after mob is up? That was the whole reason for instancing everything. So now, people can raid on a fixed schedule for a fixed amount of time.

My memories of Vex Thal, and I spent a LOT of time there in raids, is that the major frustration was with the amount of trash-clearing involved. The competition with other guilds to get to the nameds first was exciting. The trash clearing was just plain stultifying, due to the high HPs, the worthless drops, the tiny XP (even by raid XP standards) and the fact that they were hard-coded not to be splittable or all mezzable. Plus the whole thing with the warders struck us all as an arbitrary "deus ex machina" just to ensure that no "clever raiders" bypassed the time-consuming clear to pharm the nameds when they spawned. We understood WHY the warders were needed, it's just we wished the devs could have come up with a less blatantly jury-rigged way to accomplish the same goal.

There won't ever be a Vex Thal type zone in the game again, that's for sure. Don't forget the whole process of getting keyed just to enter Vex Thal---there was a raid required just to get flagged to raid: the SSRA Emperor fight! Talk about your logjams. The emperor spawned infrequently and then the race was on for the first guild to get to his room. And guilds had to do it over and over in order to flag their entire raid force. I remember all too vividly our entire raid force porting UP to the emperor's "room" only to discover another guild was ahead of us in the entryway prepping to engage the emperor and his dangerous courtiers. Just imagine two guild raid forces of 40-50 players EACH crammed into a tiny entrance room, where even a slight mistake could trigger the encounter prematurely. One of our guild's lead shadowknights got so aggravated by the fact that we had done all this work to get thru SSRA to the room only to find another guild about to engage the emperor that he aggro'd one of the courtier mobs before the other guild was ready thereby leading to a wipeout of everyone who didn't evac. We had to boot that player from the guild once the details were uncovered---with the help of a GM!

Like I said, we won't ever see a Vex Thal again...



Edited, May 4th 2014 8:00am by Sippin

Edited, May 4th 2014 8:01am by Sippin