Everquest

Classic server to Velious

There are several things that would bring not just me back but others as well.

1. MORE SOLO content. Players want this. Just check out WOW and EQ2. Players want more casual friendly. Solo is important for casual players.

2. Faster leveling especially at pre level 70. Casual players need faster leveling. I didn't say fast,just faster. Also, if this can be put in pre level 70, we can start to catch up with the existing player base.

3. Less time sinks: EQ, from what I have read, has implemented this a bit ,but it needs to get better. Eliminate need to run through zones and corpse recovery. DEFINITELY eliminate the experience loss on death. I can't emphasize this enough. Maybe they should adopt what is found in WOW or EQ2,which is damage to armor that requires repairs or some small amount of experience debt,which can be eliminated over time.

Honestly?  Probably nothing outside of a "NGE" type change to the game.  I enjoyed the game back in the day, but after playing the other MMOs on the market with their ideas and different style, I probably could never return to EQ.

Originally posted by taxguy

There are several things that would bring not just me back but others as well.

 

1. MORE SOLO content. Players want this. Just check out WOW and EQ2. Players want more casual friendly. Solo is important for casual players.

2. Faster leveling especially at pre level 70. Casual players need faster leveling. I didn't say fast,just faster. Also, if this can be put in pre level 70, we can start to catch up with the existing player base.

3. Less time sinks: EQ, from what I have read, has implemented this a bit ,but it needs to get better. Eliminate need to run through zones and corpse recovery. DEFINITELY eliminate the experience loss on death. I can't emphasize this enough. Maybe they should adopt what is found in WOW or EQ2,which is damage to armor that requires repairs or some small amount of experience debt,which can be eliminated over time.

I agree about the downtime.  I just recently re-subscribed for some reason and was very disappointed.  I have a 33 Monk and 20 Druid.  I played the Druid for about 30 minutes, but could not stand the constant meditating, it was so annoying that I moved on to my Monk.  Then I realized that I couldn't stand how long it takes to kill something, even with my monk it took forever, then everything would run away at low health, with no snare or root and an inability to kill them quickly enough, they would always run into friends.  Feign death would keep me from dying but I would also lose my chances for a kill, I did this for about 20 minutes and then I logged off and re-cancelled my sub.  I can never again go back to such boring and irritating game mechanics after playing far superior games like EQ2 and WoW.

Originally posted by truenorthbg

I have decided, after spending years of thinking about this issue that is important to tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people, that many will return to a classic server to Velious. 

 

Perhaps the server should begin at Classic then open Kunark in six months and Velious in a year, but a sever that ends at Velious I think is what many, many people really want for varied reasons.  I think SOE should simply deliver it. 

Yep right on and as long as they could keep some expansions  coming that didnt completely change the game like luclin did I would go back.  I dont need the flashy graphics just give me back that great original stuff where the world felt like a world and made you actually nervous to travel deep into dungeons.  Luclin and the expansions that followed ruined it for me. 

It is absolutley in EQ's interest to create a working progression server.  It is by far the cheapest way to gain more long term memberships with very little work involved, the content is already there!  In my opinion it is a GOLD MINE waiting to be tapped.  Sleeper and Combine were not failures they were learning experiences.  They only need to implement it in a more ingenious way.  As a player of 10+ MMO's for many years, EQ is without question still the best designed game in respects to mechanics and human nature.

The polls options are mostly irrelevant as people WILL come back and continue to play, you would know this if you participated in the first month of Combine or Sleeper.

As a part of a progression killing guild that plowed content and ruined it for most of the people, I feel I have some insight into how the developers can solve a key problem. 

The key question that Dev's needs to answer is "What is it about opening content that ruins the environment?"  It is a simple answer but a difficult problem to solve.  The answer is: people want to accomplish something that feels heroic.  So, how can you sustain this feeling for everyone indefinitatly to maintain a player base.

An example of what I mean for clarification purposes:

To kill naggy/vox or clear hate/fear with limited gear and people with a lvl cap of 50 feels like accompishing something heroic.  But when Kunark opens and now you have gear and levels available to you that makes these zones/encounters trivial they lose the heroic accomplishment feeling, even for those still in the previous era gear and level.  This is because that content is still available for those that progressed ahead of the pack.  This heroic feeling can be later reaccomplished by those that have progressed by soloing naggy/vox or clearing hate/fear with a single group or less, but the consequence to the masses is it erodes the environment for those still in that era.  This same event then continues through the next expansion polluting all previous expansions and so forth.

The solution!

1.) When you enter an expansion your level is brought down to that expansions max level for that era.  Example: level 70 warrior in PoP would be a level 60 warrior in Kunark.

2.) Health, Mana, AC and all other stats of a character would be lowered to a max range for that expansion.  Example:  Level 70 warrior with 10khps in PoP would have 5khps in Kunark.

If this was balanced correctly for each expansion this would not only solve the previous issues but solve many of the other issues in the game aswell.

That level 60 cleric that needs his epic part in Solusek A now has to group to get this item, thus enriching the population of lower level zones by adding a positive influence to the zone instead of a negative one that can easily kill most of the zone himself if he was still 60.  No longer could people powerlevel to the extent they can now.  6 people could no longer clear hate/fear in a trivial manner destroying the opportunity of all those that could have benefited from it.

Please punch holes in this idea, I honestly believe it will be the absolute fix to the EQ crisis and bring the masses back to EQ in droves. 

Originally posted by taxguy

There are several things that would bring not just me back but others as well.

 

1. MORE SOLO content. Players want this. Just check out WOW and EQ2. Players want more casual friendly. Solo is important for casual players.

2. Faster leveling especially at pre level 70. Casual players need faster leveling. I didn't say fast,just faster. Also, if this can be put in pre level 70, we can start to catch up with the existing player base.

3. Less time sinks: EQ, from what I have read, has implemented this a bit ,but it needs to get better. Eliminate need to run through zones and corpse recovery. DEFINITELY eliminate the experience loss on death. I can't emphasize this enough. Maybe they should adopt what is found in WOW or EQ2,which is damage to armor that requires repairs or some small amount of experience debt,which can be eliminated over time.

Are you serious? Why not just go play Wow then? I think they should bring it back to it's original state when the game opened. I don't want to play a progression server with all the garbage that is new still floating around in the game. In the progressive server we still had to see those stupid POK books. I think one of the  best ideas I have read came from the guy above me in another post, if you play on a classic server you can transfer over to another server at the end if you don't want to stay on the classic server. That way everyone is happy. People like me can stay where we feel the game was best. The should revert the graphics back as well and the UI and game mechanics though. The XP level should be back to the original as well, I think the screwed with it some.

Originally posted by taxguy

There are several things that would bring not just me back but others as well.

 1. MORE SOLO content. Players want this. Just check out WOW and EQ2. Players want more casual friendly. Solo is important for casual players.

2. Faster leveling especially at pre level 70. Casual players need faster leveling. I didn't say fast,just faster. Also, if this can be put in pre level 70, we can start to catch up with the existing player base.

3. Less time sinks: EQ, from what I have read, has implemented this a bit ,but it needs to get better. Eliminate need to run through zones and corpse recovery. DEFINITELY eliminate the experience loss on death. I can't emphasize this enough. Maybe they should adopt what is found in WOW or EQ2,which is damage to armor that requires repairs or some small amount of experience debt,which can be eliminated over time.

These three things would be about the only things that could drag me back to EQ.

I played EQ from launch to Ykesha, and unlike a lot of folks, I thought things got better when PoP came out, not worse. I cheered when the Plane of Knowledge went in. Once that happened, my Druid was no longer pestered 24/7 for ports while I was trying to level because everyone else could get around at will. And Norrath was fully opened up to the players, since you could easily make any race/class combo you wanted and you could meet up with your friends to play together from the start. It was fantastic.

EQ was fun for a long time, but after a while, the XP loss on death (including de-leveling), the endless grind of hell levels, and the long, annoying downtime between battles turned EverQuest from a game into a job for me. I'd spend almost as much time in Norrath as I did at work sometimes, and I'd get a lot less accomplished. That wasn't fun. Eventually, it got so tedious that I dreaded logging in, so I quit.

Make solo/duo play more viable (i.e., like EQ2), get rid of the annoying time sinks like XP loss on death and corpse runs, and up the XP curve so that the game doesn't turn into a second job again, and I'd give EQ a second look. Other than that, I'll stick to EQ2 and CoH/V.