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PoP still bad for the game?Follow

#1 Feb 12 2017 at 6:40 AM Rating: Excellent
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I'm seeing this play out on a progression server (Phinny) which I thought the instancing would help with, but really it may not at all:

PoP is pretty much all good for the hardcore focused raiding guild. On progression, with the increases in player power, known strats and general raid force experience this content is like brushing teeth for many. Phinny's rules mean more of these guilds are succeeding on a single server than ever before. There is no real issues for this niche playstyle (Fippy server may be the only server where more paid accounts are hardcore raiders than not... as the hardcore raid guild is pretty much all that is left there) outside of some of the keying decisions the devs have made.

However, PoP may now be even worse of a community killer than it was originally. Originally most servers had a top guild or two blocking everyone else. So everyone else had to either join them (if you could), or stick together and do other things. Some raid-focused people got discouraged by this for sure. Lots of guilds weathered this (though it was a straw in the pile that GoD and WoW eventually broke).

On Phinny, it seems that any guild with a mixed playerbase (there's quite a few with several hundred "casuals" and a raid core of 60+ members) is feeling this the worst. Here's what seems to be happening:

-phinny has a leveling culture of only using a few zones. Not ideal, but at least you could mix together and get groups when they were open to all zones like Velks.
-many will tell you the xp rate is fine, but they use the juice (xp pots), keep their group level ranges extremely tight, and only use those few zones. These people also tend to play a lot. Some of these people are already saying that PoP progression is going too fast and next expac needs to be sooner. This is a loud group on the official boards, but one that misses the point of progression servers for anyone not in-era hardcore raiding (a very large population on Phinny, that PoP may begin to deflate).
-the few zones preferred in PoP are mostly partly behind keying (or are stupidly busy with people keying up including those that like to KS and train), so now the mixed guild has the raider core leveling in PoP and a large chunk of the guild left out. This hasn't hit critical mass yet as long as a person is over 60, but that will happen soon (when all the 65 raiders are only in elemental planes).
-worst hit is the person slightly off in level that could in theory group with a level 60 (and now 65). This was very common among friends back in the day, aside from "I am PLing you" (usually for pay) on Phinny it is rare... with some irony being that 50s leveling zones like GE are being taken over by level 62s. Exception at times to this is the cleric...
-obviously part of this is the hardcore raiders are pushing their mains right now

So in the aforementioned "mixed guild" we now see the raiders spending all their leveling time together as well. This doesn't harm the raid core directly, but down the line it hurts the overall guild (if mixed or family is truly the vision) and server community. Pretty much none of this applies to a focused-vision raid guild. But if you are a leader/officer in any sort of mixed guild it bears some thought.
#2 Feb 12 2017 at 3:11 PM Rating: Excellent
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I started to see the same raid behavior on Fippy not six weeks after Kunark launched - I joined what I thought was a mixed guild. When the time came to begin progress through Sky a whole bunch of people I'd never seen logged in on max level toons. Guild chat would become terse like we were a infantry division of USMC preparing to land on Guadalcanal. After the raid the same folks would logout until the next raid. I kinda felt like a tool enabling a core group of server hopping raid-groupies to play a totally different game from the game I was playing. I bailed Fippy after that.
#3 Feb 12 2017 at 11:03 PM Rating: Excellent
The people who want expansions to come out faster are a small minority and I doubt they change anything for Phinigel as far as the schedule goes outside of adjusting for non level increase expansions. I think the schedule is fine where it is personally.

The grouping culture, I think many of these people who are grouping that are in top 10 raiding guilds are probably from the live servers who were used maximizing their experience gain to get max level as soon as possible. It's also pushed by leadership to get levels and AA's to perform better on raids in some of the more competitive guilds, at least it is in my guild. That is where you're probably seeing people being picky about letting certain classes and levels in. In the first few weeks of an expansion, it's always like this. It happened in Kunark and Luclin so far from what I could tell.

I came from a mixed guild on Xegony like your talking about Snailish. I was an officer in that guild for years before I retired there to play on phinigel. In that live guild we ran into these issues all the time with a core of high playtime raiders and some very casual players and a very small to nonexistent recruiting pool.

When you label yourself as a casual family raiding guild (mixed guild), you normally are going to end up with a wide variety of different player schedules. The once a week raider, the once a week grouper, the once every 2 week raider, etc... It was a huge problem for us as a mixed guild. Especially when you need so many of each class on events and you never knew who was going to log on for raids so we had to pick raids we could do with the numbers we had and the classes we had on for that night. It slowed our progression down to a complete stop and made me quit the game it was so bad. So in my phinigel guild we pushed for raid attendance requirements and recruited only people with a high playtime. This almost eliminated that issue altogether. We still have some people that don't play as much and get left behind but they usually either deal with it or move onto a more casual guild.

It's up to the leadership of the guild to set the culture of players they want in their guild. Competitive raiding guilds know about this issue and push for raid attendance requirements and high playtime on recruits and the entire guild as well.

Edited, Feb 13th 2017 1:09am by Gidono
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#4 Feb 13 2017 at 5:24 AM Rating: Excellent
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I don't see Phinny changing the timeframes either. Nor do I think they should. Phinny is working quite well. Next TLP is summer 2017 can still learn lessons from it.

Said much shorter, my points probably summarize as:

PoP is working well for the harder core raid guilds. The family/mixed guilds appear to be (again, as was historically done) dropping the ball in respects to keeping their community together. I expect a significant casual population drop-off as a result, although this should be unnecessary.
#5 Feb 13 2017 at 2:31 PM Rating: Good
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Wow I find it astonishing that players who presumably have raided on the regular servers in content massively beyond PoP would take advancement on a progression server still at PoP level so SERIOUSLY! I always thought the POINT of progression servers was to go back and enjoy the early days of EQ gameplay. Ultimately who gives a you-know-what if your guild is the first or only guild on a "retro" server to kill Quarm---in content so old that many players on current servers don't even have any memories of the entire expansion in which Quarm "reigned" as the boss mob. Not to denigrate retro servers (I enjoy playing on them myself) but it's like a group of experienced chess players going back to playing a game like tic tac toe and cheating and scheming in order to win! I'm not saying PoP era was as easy as tic tac toe, but given that players on retro servers have all kinds of advantages today that the original PoP players did NOT, it seems rather lame to be ****-blocking other players to finish first on a retro server capped out at PoP level. Just my take. But I guess when it comes to competitiveness some people never know when to call it quits. We all have had "friends" who had to beat us at every stupid competitive "event." I dropped my so-called "best friend" in junior high because he wanted to beat me at a math test so badly that he made up a story about me cheating on the test so ,my 97 score who fall below his second place 96 score. Luckily for me the math teacher believed me. I guess human beings are inherently competitive, even in games and even if it costs someone a friend! Smiley: yikes

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