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Phinigel Server Thoughts on Progression circa mid-VeliousFollow

#1 Jun 25 2016 at 5:37 AM Rating: Excellent
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My playtime in EQ has been mostly limited for the duration of the Phinny server era, so my playing there is an odd choice as my progress has been quite slow. My thoughts on Phinny (which are just mine, your experience is probably different):

Good things:
-there is grouping, especially if you are willing to form up a group for the popular zones (i.e., south ro crocs, unrest, CoM, Velk's, Sebilis, etc.)
-there are lots of raiding guilds if that is your thing
-no voting so you know what you have*
-some nerfed items in the modern game are at least temporarily available
-the "true box" code actually seems to work
-the instancing and load balancing is mostly helpful
-lots of helpful people in chat channels, server community is pretty good
-group XP bonus is significant
-porting classes do well if they want to play taxi
-certain tradeskillers do well if they want to do so (so there is value in the skill)
-they finally fixed access to cultural armor that should be in Velious, some of the coolest looking armor in game for some race/class combos (i.e., Dark Elf casters with the Najena chain look)

Odd things:
-impact of Krono and the out of era potions they have allowed is significant if one wanted a "purer" progression
-Heroe's Forge is allowed
-leveling is slow if you are only playing a few hours or few days here and there.
-class balance has really shifted as the hardcore types have leveled and geared alts. Example: rangers and rogues were super rare before Kunark (and yes gear really helps rogues in Kunark).

Not so good:
-solo XP is lousy. A necromancer is better off killing light blue mobs fast in a group than soloing reds.
-spell research is spotty for finding people doing it (the guy that cornered the market early doesn't seem to play anymore.)
-death penalty is especially harsh if you are playing casual as by the time you are in your 40s a single death can wipe 1-2 hours of solo progress.
-auction prices in commons are mostly super high. There is a lack of low level gear outside of the "big ticket" items... Luclin baz will help with this I think
-the quest xp nerf was pretty severe
-some NPC are permafarmed because they only spawn in open world. Example is there is always people afk in the Neriak Cleric guild...
-forming groups is tricky if you aren't a healer or a tank, there especially seems to be a lack of tanks in the PuG game.
-they are talking about combining GoD and OoW as one expac, which is really odd as they are not the same level cap... this makes far more sense for expacs later on that tend to kill progression server population and the two tiny expacs fo LoY and LDoN... so we'll have to see what they end up doing.

*they did change the timeline which pushed PoP back.
#2 Jun 25 2016 at 6:22 AM Rating: Excellent
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snailish wrote:
-group XP bonus is significant


So, it's a different bonus than on the main servers, or you notice it more because you group more?

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#3 Jun 25 2016 at 11:01 AM Rating: Excellent
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tatankaseventh wrote:
snailish wrote:
-group XP bonus is significant


So, it's a different bonus than on the main servers, or you notice it more because you group more?

Tat



regular main server is probably more, but could be equal.

For relative perspective though... group XP is just so much better than solo (or even duo) that it feels like a huge difference on Phinny. It could very well be 25% of what live server people enjoy, but on live servers the true solo classes can XP very well.
#4 Jun 26 2016 at 3:19 PM Rating: Excellent
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OK, so it sounds like it's the same amount of bonus XP.

Agree on your conclusion. As a Druid, I soloed a lot in the old days (through ~2002). There are SO many tools available now for solo classes, that didn't exist back then, that grouping was way faster XP than soloing. In the modern game, that's less true, due to all the awesome tools certain classes have for soloing. The other caveat, though, is that for some of the soloing classes, those advantages are highly situational, so the places where you can rack up that awesome solo XP can be very limited.

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Michone, 115 Troll Shadowknight
Anaceup Mysleeves, 115 Erudite Mage, 2 x 300 Master Artisan
Snookims Whinslow, 112 Erudite Enchanter, 2 x 300 Master Artisan
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#5 Jun 27 2016 at 10:45 AM Rating: Excellent
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I tried to play on Ragefire and the multiboxers and overall rude behavior of camp stealers pushed me away. I liked the idea of Phinigal but the slower exp pushed me away on that one.

I think the problem with both servers boils down to Krono. Krono has put cash value on any item that drops in game. This encourages people to farm, Killsteal, camp steal, and otherwise act like greedy jerks. I know it won't ever happen but I think if they had a truebox progression server without Krono it would be alot better community. Considering you have to pay to play on these servers anyways I don't see why we should still have basically pay2win items. Besides it doesn't seem fair that a person can have a head start on a new server because he/she has several max levels on a live server and has been farming Krono for years. When people roll fresh on a new PAID server they should all start off the same IMO.

Just my 2 cents anyways.
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#6 Jun 27 2016 at 11:21 AM Rating: Excellent
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fronglo wrote:
I tried to play on Ragefire and the multiboxers and overall rude behavior of camp stealers pushed me away. I liked the idea of Phinigal but the slower exp pushed me away on that one.

I think the problem with both servers boils down to Krono. Krono has put cash value on any item that drops in game. This encourages people to farm, Killsteal, camp steal, and otherwise act like greedy jerks. I know it won't ever happen but I think if they had a truebox progression server without Krono it would be alot better community. Considering you have to pay to play on these servers anyways I don't see why we should still have basically pay2win items. Besides it doesn't seem fair that a person can have a head start on a new server because he/she has several max levels on a live server and has been farming Krono for years. When people roll fresh on a new PAID server they should all start off the same IMO.

Just my 2 cents anyways.


I dislike the principle that in game items can be bought for real $. With the Station Cash system the most disruption real $ had was allowing people to progress faster via experience potions. Krono is an entirely different thing that I also feel has had a negative impact on the game's integrity, and the behavior of people playing it. I wouldn't pay to play on a progression server that allowed kronos to be exchanged - but that's just me, clearly.

What I find even more curious, and excuse the cross game content here, but it doesn't seem like Warcraft's token system (which is almost identical to Kronos) had any negative impact on WoW at all. Does anyone play both that has any thoughts on the difference here? I have always assumed that the intention of taking RMT in-house was to deter 3rd party gold/plat seller scams. But how do you give people a way to exchange $ for plat but prevent every FBSS or CoF from being a lottery ticket win?
#7 Jun 27 2016 at 11:43 AM Rating: Excellent
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I couldn't have said it better Fronglo. I would love a Phinny style server with no tradeable krono, but it seems very unlikely to ever happen.
#8 Jun 27 2016 at 2:59 PM Rating: Excellent
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Rayder wrote:
I couldn't have said it better Fronglo. I would love a Phinny style server with no tradeable krono, but it seems very unlikely to ever happen.



Many things that were "never going to happen" have happened in the last 5 years+. Keep participating on boards (including Official board) and state your preferences.


They will give me goblins as a playable race. I hold onto that hope. Smiley: sly
#9 Jun 27 2016 at 8:29 PM Rating: Excellent
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Don't have much to say about the other stuff, but this:

snailish wrote:
-they are talking about combining GoD and OoW as one expac, which is really odd as they are not the same level cap... this makes far more sense for expacs later on that tend to kill progression server population and the two tiny expacs fo LoY and LDoN... so we'll have to see what they end up doing.


Honestly makes a lot of sense. My understanding is that GoD was initially planned to include a level cap increase, but that part of the expansion work fell behind schedule, so they dropped it. This required them to have to scramble to adjust the mobs and loot and whatnot, which made a muddled mess of the whole thing in terms of difficulty versus reward. And is frankly why it was considered the wost expansion for a long time (may still hold that distinction in fact). It didn't really become a playable expansion for most players until after OoW came out, and even then, OoW had better rewards.

Of course, the flip side to that is that if you release GoD and OoW at the same time, you've still got the problem of GoD content more or less being skippable. Eh. But I'm sure there will be folks who'll plow through it anyway.
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#10 Jun 27 2016 at 9:04 PM Rating: Excellent
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Gbaji beat me to it but, yeah, the developers admitted that a planned level increase with GoD wasn't ready and, as a result, the difficulty of the expansion was completely out of whack and served as a brick wall for a lot of players (and led to a lot of people leaving the game). Releasing both GoD/OoW allows people to level up in GoD as originally intended.
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#11 Jun 28 2016 at 4:47 AM Rating: Excellent
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Jophiel wrote:
Gbaji beat me to it but, yeah, the developers admitted that a planned level increase with GoD wasn't ready and, as a result, the difficulty of the expansion was completely out of whack and served as a brick wall for a lot of players (and led to a lot of people leaving the game). Releasing both GoD/OoW allows people to level up in GoD as originally intended.


The counter-argument that a fair number on official boards are giving is something like this:

-GoD was retuned after the playerbase perception damage was done. Due to timing a lot of people quit EQ before giving GoD a chance. GoD as it now stands has actually been a lot of fun on past progression servers for the top raiders to do.
-Combining the two expacs in the proposed timeline doesn't leave enough time for even the most hardcore (use all their lockouts) guild to really do all the raid content before the expac(s) [not clear if further bundling occurs] so it is relegating most of GoD content to "skip it" status.
-the expacs beyond OoW are where bundling actually needs to occur as 3-5 expacs are spent at certain level caps and it has traditionally been where progression servers truly lose population


My personal take is a little different in that I originally hated GoD, and OoW was the last straw for the first time I quit. I've since gone back and done a fair bit of the OoW non-raid game and it is pretty good aside from the insane mob abilities (GoD has that too) on all sorts of trash mobs.

I'm also leery of the fact that it is heavy-duty raiders who are mostly complaining about this on the official boards. If the average to casual players get Natimbi as the only useful zone for 84 days that won't be good for the server. On the surface the idea of blending expacs that are not the same level cap does seem odd to me.

As far as progression server player loss... all the voting ones moved too fast and lost big chunks everytime an expac turned over. Phinny is at least predictable... though I think if the longer unlocks of Ragefire/Lockjaw had the instance set up and didn't have the box armies or voting that always looms as a community argument it would be the higher population.

So based on what I think I know, I would still lean towards not combining GoD/OoW. A more detailed rationale from the devs would probably convince me though.
#12 Jun 28 2016 at 6:42 AM Rating: Good
I also play on Phinigel and help run a fairly large raiding guild.

I have really enjoyed this server so far as it has brought me back from retirement on the live servers.

It sucks they nerfed solo experience but I understand why, especially for a server like this. It really has pushed people into grouping and that's a good thing.

I think the server will continue to be healthy for a while as long as they keep addressing issues we face on that server. So far they have done a decent job at fixing bugs, especially within the last few months since the closing of EQ Next.

As far as the bundle of GoD and OoW together, I hope they don't. GoD is a fantastic expansion alone and I would hate to see people bypass it to work on OoW.
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#13 Jun 28 2016 at 6:13 PM Rating: Excellent
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snailish wrote:

The counter-argument that a fair number on official boards are giving is something like this:

-GoD was retuned after the playerbase perception damage was done. Due to timing a lot of people quit EQ before giving GoD a chance. GoD as it now stands has actually been a lot of fun on past progression servers for the top raiders to do.
-Combining the two expacs in the proposed timeline doesn't leave enough time for even the most hardcore (use all their lockouts) guild to really do all the raid content before the expac(s) [not clear if further bundling occurs] so it is relegating most of GoD content to "skip it" status.
-the expacs beyond OoW are where bundling actually needs to occur as 3-5 expacs are spent at certain level caps and it has traditionally been where progression servers truly lose population


Fair points. But the problem with GoD, even after retuning, is that it's basically only fun *for* the top raiders. It only becomes worth entering as a group/casual player *after* the level max bumps up to 70. I suppose it depends on who you're trying to please most. And, as you mention, if the issue is about maintaining population, which is going to cost you more? Giving the hardcore raiders time to do all the raid content in GoD with a level 65 cap also means giving everyone else no new content for the same period of time.

I'm not sure what the rules on Phinigel are with regard to progression. Do unlocks occur on a timer? When someone defeats certain top content? By vote? If it's a set timer, they can simply increase the time a bit to allow for raiding in both GoD and OoW, with the bonus that the more casual players can now actually enjoy the more group friendly OoW zones at the same time (and can play around in GoD if they want, but other than epic1.5 bits, I don't recall much at all of interest in any of those zones that wasn't raid based.

Quote:
My personal take is a little different in that I originally hated GoD, and OoW was the last straw for the first time I quit. I've since gone back and done a fair bit of the OoW non-raid game and it is pretty good aside from the insane mob abilities (GoD has that too) on all sorts of trash mobs.


Yeah. GoD sucked when it came out. Bad. It didn't help that PoP basically put a very hard dividing line on a lot of people's gear. And that dividing line was often purely numbers based. I absolutely hated that they created advancement blocking flagging events that required very very large raids, just to get into content which could be grouped. It was backwards from previous content progression methodologies and basically wiped out a large number of smaller casual raiding guilds since it was often easier faster for their more hardcore members to join some other guild's raids to get flagged and then group with those other folks for gear in the planes that they could access, but not the bulk of their own guild. Ykesha didn't really have anything that boosted gear. LDoN did, but this time went the other direction. The folks who could spend massive amounts of time grinding adventures could buy gear that was maybe an upgrade to what they had (if they weren't able to get elemental or better stuff in PoP). But for those who could only play a few hours at a time a few times a week? Too slow.

Which meant that when GoD came out, there were a number of people (like myself) still sporting basically Velious era gear (with maybe the occasional upgraded weapon or bit here or there) and more or less utterly incapable of handling GoD content. It wasn't until OoW came out that we could actually advance. The factioning was obnoxious, but you could acquire up to tier2 OoW gear without too much difficulty just by joining groups and killing stuff. Which was, at the time, a pretty nice upgrade (hah. But laughable compared to defiant of the same level range now, which I find funny).

So my perception was that OoW was the saving grace during that time period for many players. I also think it did help stop the bleeding that EQ had been experiencing. So yeah, bundling it with GoD is not a terrible idea. The fear is that if the more casual players get bored or frustrated, they're going to just leave (cause in this case, it's just one server, not the whole game as before). And if they do, most of them aren't going to come back once OoW comes out, where as they likely would not leave in the first place if it was out from the get go.

I just saw that entire era as a huge block for the more casually inclined players, so anything that pushes through it might not be a bad idea. Again though, I've never played on a progression server, so take my opinion with the massive block of salt that it requires.

Quote:
I'm also leery of the fact that it is heavy-duty raiders who are mostly complaining about this on the official boards. If the average to casual players get Natimbi as the only useful zone for 84 days that won't be good for the server. On the surface the idea of blending expacs that are not the same level cap does seem odd to me.


Yup. Well, to the whole "they just get Natimbi" bit anyway. Again, I suppose you could just have them continue playing around in the "older" content, but to be honest, there just wasn't that much that was good for casual players in the previous set anyway. How many folks are going to spend a significant amount of time doing the same LDoN missions (for example) when they know that once OoW comes out, they can get better gear anyway? So aside from tooling around the lower tier PoP zones (which have more or less zero rewards except exp), I'm not sure what there is to do for them. Luclin?

Then again, didn't GoD also include a big tradeskill revamp? I thought that's when the whole Abysmal Sea thing came out as well. Or am I mixing things up? I suppose that could give some players something to do, maybe. Not sure how the tradeskill stuff advances on these servers though.
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#14 Jun 28 2016 at 9:35 PM Rating: Excellent
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There are some differences to the Wow token than Krono. For starter once you purchase a Wow token its no trade. You can't buy low and resell like you can with Krono. Also you can only have 10 of them at any time and you can only purchase a certain amount, I want to say 36, in a two year time. Like right now on wow I have 10 tokens sitting on my bank toon when/if I should decide to start playing the game again but I have no prepaid time. A lot of people link more than one account to their battle.net account for whatever reason (family, multiboxing, etc) so if your a I guess people run into the 36 limit could be an issue. OF course the simple solution to that problem would make a separate battle.net account for each wow account.

I don't think the percentage of boxers is as high in WOW as it in in EQ though.

I agree with the comments on Planes of Power. Probably some of the most interesting zones ever in terms of design, theme, lore, etc. Even the eccentric soundtrack is some of the best music in EQ. That being said it wasn't uncommon for people to buy this expansion and never get to see over half of the zones due to the flagging. I was in the casual guild and we struggled many times during that era to try and get people flagged etc. Farthest we ever got during that time was pojustice trial, couple of Halls of Honor Trials, and 2 success (out of a ton of failed) MB raids. OF course the successful raids BOTH TIMES bugged at the end and the gnome did not give the flag update to several raid members. I think if he got hailed too many times he quit giving them out. It was usually the ones who died who didn't get their flag and both times that was me. Even with screenshots, emails, petitions I was basically given the whole "Im sorry we can't help you" speech from GM's/Customer Service.


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#15 Jun 29 2016 at 6:08 PM Rating: Excellent
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Yeah. I think we did slightly better than that, but not much. Did the PoI stuff, PoJ trials, HoHB, and PoNB stuff (oh and Storms->BoT, and did some tower raids), and some stuff in Tactics I think. Any members that got farther than that (elemental planes, SolRo tower, etc) got there, not via our own guilds raiding, but by piggybacking on other guilds raids. A whole lot of guilds got more or less destroyed by this process. In any "casual" raiding guild, there were usually a smallish core of folks who pushed the raid efforts, researched stuff, and basically kept things going on that front, and a larger group who puttered around, grouping mostly, doing trade skills maybe, but would assemble on raid day as long as someone else was doing the organizing and planning. So the problem was that these types of guilds could rarely field more than 20-30 players on a single raid event. Prior to PoP that was actually sufficient numbers for most raid events. Maybe not the top targets, but still a large portion of raid stuff was doable. With PoP flagging these guilds simply could not do the flagging events themselves. Some were barely doable, but many required more like 50-60 people to do with the gear of the day. Double problem was that since these flags were required to merely enter the zones which could possibly contain drops that you could use to improve your gear (and the named mobs that dropped that stuff were often quite doable with far fewer numbers than required for flagging to get to them), you were more or less stuck as a guild.

So the more raid focused members, because they were the ones used to planning and researching such things, were often also more in touch with the members of other guilds (for coordinating schedules, if nothing else). So they'd know when a big raid guild was planning a raid, knew some of the players in that guild, and would ask to participate. The rest of their own guild got left behind. They'd then find themselves flagged high enough to now participate in smaller raids for loot that they wanted (plus groupable content that got them components for the armor upgrades), but again, not with their own guild. So most of the guild was stuck at one level, unable to advance, while a small number did but with the members of other guilds. It didn't take long after that for those more raid focused players to just leave and join some other guild that was actually advancing. Which left the rest *really* stuck, which lead to more folks leaving, which lead to the remaining members finding themselves no longer able to field sufficient numbers to even take on targets in older content which used to be their bread and butter.

In the case of my guild back then, we tried really really hard to keep the guild together, and did manage to make some progress, but there was still some attrition, and it was hard to recruit new people to a guild that wasn't advancing. LDoN provided at least a bit of an alternative route, but it was almost as bad since you could only do single groups. You were no longer doing things as a guild, but in small groups within the guild (which just formed grouping cliques within the guild). Honestly, I think if OoW had come out sooner (like if they'd swapped it and GoD, and included the level bump that did come with OoW at that time), we might have survived intact and been able to rebuild. OoW actually did include content that you could advance through with smaller numbers, gaining gear upgrades along the way. But GoD was more or less the final straw. It was so incredibly unusable and unplayable, and expecting players to wait that many years to do anything really "new" was just not workable. I recall that when OoW did finally come out, we were basically down to single groups doing stuff together, and occasionally managing to muster up a small raid force. Still was sufficient to do some gear upgrades (and I recall we even did a few epic 1.5s back then, so maybe not quite as bad as I remember). But the writing was long since on the wall by then.


Yes. I'm still very very bitter about the flagging design of PoP. IMO, it was the worst design decision that the EQ devs have ever made. The lore was great. The zones were great. But the flagging system just killed it.
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