If they let You make the "ruleset" what would you do?Follow

The lack of good plate wasn't so bad because we always had full, well balanced teams - which meant we had the power to dungeon crawl even if our gear was subpar. We usually had enough people online for two groups of 4 or 5 people, so that made things even more fun. The main problem was not wasting time getting everyone to our camps.

I really don't remember where all the armor bits and pieces came from. I cheated on a few slots, the Kaladim newbie armor Paladin ram horn helm is simply awesome looking and couldn't pass it up. Most people in the guild never cheated on that sort of stuff - and suffered through the process with grim resolve. heh

We farmed the heck out of Acrylia Caverns, we lived at the vampire castle in Tenebrous, and did a few mini-boss cave raids in UP.

edit: I forgot to mention we had the benefit of level 1 and 2 AOE fellowship campfires which in our case meant a scaling mana pool buff.

Edited, Sep 19th 2015 12:49pm by Trappin

"No instance server" is a really interesting concept. I think some people would really enjoy that... possibly better as a pvp server too?

Totally not my thing... but I could see a group of people really liking it. As long as there was competitive guilds. Could work as a race to unlock progression server. Maybe work best if you added a "underlevelled" component to it... so you have to beat the raids 10 levels below the historic cap for that raid or something.

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Moving forward in the live game, I wish the devs would make a non-instanced "group" level version of every zone. Some of these would go live the same time as the raid versions (I'd do different difficulty in the raid versions too). Think alternate flagging and giving future raiders a peek at the content.

Most I would not put out (the noninstanced) while the raids are current endgame, but rather release later when the the storyline/drops/keys and such are still needed for progression but the top of the game has moved on. Historical precedence is simple: Old Sebilis became a group then solo then farm zone simply by level increases. This took years worth of expacs. Much of the GoD and later stuff would need script changes or the ability to login them as a group to work.

Then there is things like LDoN that would just be so good if they strung all the maps of a theme together into old-school crawl dungeons

Nah, I'm not a fan of EQ PvP. I believe in order for PvP to work well, the game has to be designed around it from the very beginning. So games like EVE, DAoC, and to a lesser extent, AO do it very well while most other games just tack in on as an alternative to PvE.



I can totally understand that. It's the primary reason MMOs have gotten less and less time intensive over the years. I'm in that weird topsy-turvy situation where I actually have a better job with a more flexible schedule than I had back then. Thanks to the internet, I don't even have a commute anymore and working from home allows me to pick up various side jobs that I do alongside my main job. So, at the height of my EQ madness, I'd play from 6pm to 6am and then go to work, now the 'go to work' part doesn't factor in and I can play (in a diminished capacity) as much as I want. And I spent most of my EQ "career" in midtier guilds, and that's my preference. I did spend several months in the top guild on the server but I left because it was basically like what would come later (instanced raids). There was no competition (the #2 guild was a full expansion behind) and that's boring to me. So no bragging about loot in /shout or /ooc for me (unless you wanted to be PWNED by someone from the top guild smashing your "accomplishment" with something REALLY uber).

I stopped at SOF level because that was when the game seemed intent on killing the midtier guilds. Group gear was SO much better than the raid gear (or even just functionally equivalent) that came before it that there was no real reason to raid unless you were raiding current content. One expansion doing that wouldn't hurt very much (it would give midtier guilds a leg up on those few encounters still worth doing, like Two Gods). But after SoF, every single expansion just raised the bar and made everything more than one expansion before it largely obsolete. But that's where instancing came in to balance the scales. With 'lockout upon success', you could bang your head against an encounter until you finally beat it, safe in your little bubble without outside interference. Plus, there were A LOT of great features released between PoP and SoF (OOC regen, for one).

I truly miss the days when there were multiple guilds consuming content at all expansion levels. The Kunark level guilds gearing up for VP and Velious and the Velious guilds breaking into Luclin and so on. In that time, there truly was something for everyone since most playstyles and commitment/aspiration levels were covered by one guild or another.

Edited, Sep 20th 2015 1:27pm by Remianen

Being someone who started out on Mayong, the server opened on June 30, 2009. It was merged into Tunare a year later.

Soloing old raid mobs, obviously

Understandable and why guild recruiting officers can be key. Having been in leadership of a guild with a similar situation, I valued our PST people for their ability to extend our raid window. When the East Coasters tucker out, the West Side folks are just getting warmed up. For those of us who were timezone agnostic, that gave us the best of both worlds. I recall a few times where the East Coast members complained because we got lucky and managed to find Burrower and most of the big named in Ssra (High Priest, Creator, Cursed cycle) up after the East Coasters logged off for the night. With the way spawn timers worked, that wasn't all that uncommon. I believed then (and still believe now) that time zone issues only exist for the unimaginative. Heck, we even had 16 people from Australia inguild. The combination of timezone and work hours (not everyone is a 9to5er) allowed us to be extremely flexible and it let us hit more targets. Like:

Raids start at 7pm (EST). Around 9-10pm, the West Coast folks pile on. Within an hour after that, the East Coast folks are logging out. With enough targets available, we could be raiding until 3am (again, EST) because of our timezone balance (while our competing guilds are either quitting or just getting started at 10pm). We also had a window of about two hours where we'd have our full raid force available, so we could try new encounters.

It had nothing to do with epeen waving either. For me, it was all about hustling (or, in more common parlance, making the most of any given situation). We were never going to be cutting edge but we could be the best possible group at our tier of progression. The people who played more got more (as it should be) but everyone could advance without sacrificing other areas of their lives. Even when we were breaking into Vex Thal and wiping in early PoP, we were still doing Kael and ToV and Sleepers because folks still needed stuff from there.

Trust me, I understand what you're saying. For several years, I played on Torvonnilous where a Euro guild competed with and then flat out passed us in progression before eventually imploding (many of their top people either ebayed or moved to Antonious Bayle). I know many people in other guilds who complained about timezones being unfair to them (some of them I poached for our guild, of course). I also understand how instanced raids just come with a level of convenience that works for the vast majority of people playing nowadays. I get it, that ship has sailed. I also don't think I'd ever be as relentlessly hardcore now as I was back then (20+ active accounts? Hell no!). But when I thought about why I don't raid in EQ anymore (despite the fact that I very easily could), I came down with the "it's not fun" conclusion. And the 'why' got me to this whole idea.

That's actually what Stormhammer turned out to be. Before the server's launch, you had five or six uberguilds preformed and ready to roll (Township Rebellion, Leviathan, etc). The server was top heavy to the extreme. It wasn't until months later that it became the character laundering server of choice. But throughout its life, it was about as top heavy as you could get. Even the guilds behind TR could've been the top guild on most regular servers.

It's a cool idea. I seem to remember some concept floated for EQNext where you could port over your EQ main somehow to EQNext and at least keep the connection thru that. I can't recall the details, though.

In EQ itself, I doubt anyone would want to sacrifice a carefully nurtured max toon just to be transform into a dual-class which would have to start over, with an XP penalty yet. Most people bored with their main just start playing alts until a new xpac allows them to work again on their main. Right?