The Legacy Problem
 

What is the Legacy Problem?
I was going to start out this post with some quotes from the wild. But it seems hardly necessary. Anyone reading these forums or Discord has seen that almost half the server states "wanna get legacy item" as a central motivation for their Green excitement. It's obvious. The historicity and practicalities have been discussed to death. Anyone who's done the math knows that those people will be first disappointed, then angry, then demotivated or toxic. This is the Legacy Problem in a nutshell.

Mechanics have been implemented. GM-Cops reportedly stand ready to patrol the legacy camps 24/7, rhythmically spinning their pixelated batons while they whistle a jolly cop tune. This response is reasonable and well considered enough.


Tedious Disclaimers You Won't Read Anyway
Let me preface a few things here. As a vanilla EQ player, I was big time down on Green due to what I saw as an unwillingness to address the one vanilla imbalance that could spoil the whole barrel: insufficient content. Spawn time reduction and List helped show me that unwillingness doesn't exist. No doubt long discussions have been had; positions have been taken; decisions have been made; time has been invested, and a fragile truce seems to exist around List. All the same, I want to make the case to you all, and especially to any staff reading this, that this state cannot last, and we should, in this 11th hour, take a radically different approach.

I am conscious the Green release date looms large, and that this is too long and you didn't read it. And as I know some of my esteemed poster comrades are very concerned with purity of intent (skip this if that's not you), allow me to sound like an insanely huge tool: I am wealthy beyond measure on Blue, and I will do well on Green too. If it's useful or even just mildly entertaining to me, I own it. If it can be killed, I've killed it, probably solo or with a minimally viable crew. If it can be done, I have done it. I like to think the people of P99 know Gatmanno as a force for the joie de vivre of adventuring. I am not mad, bad or sad in any sense of those words. And while I would like to engage with all my poster comrades about the legacy item problem here, if this doesn't insulate me from having my intentions impugned, nothing will. I am not out for anything except freeing people to enjoy the classic experience.


Maybe Shut Up And Get To The Point, Gat?
Every day hopeful greenhorns (that's what we're calling people who joined p99 for Green launch, that's forum canon now) pop in to tell everyone how excited they are to do this and that, and finally get their shot at a Manastone. And of course they do. As a Manastone owner on Blue, I can tell you yes, Manastones are every bit as fun as they look. Regardless of efficiency, it is a very fun mechanic with a very fun visual effect. You'd be crazy not to want one, of course, like a great musician who died too young, they became an iconic item!

I seriously applaud List. It is clever and well thought out, and it will likely be as effective as can be expected in managing camp drama given this situation. But the operative term is "as can be expected" here. And the underlying issue is underestimating how central Guises, Lockets, Rings of the Dead, etc., all these iconic classic items are in the minds of 'people who reminisce about Classic EverQuest and are drawn to be genuinely passionate about the P99 vision'. People can laugh derisively at them, or appeal to reason or purity of classicness, if it makes you feel better. It won't help. In many ways, the perceived possibility of obtaining legacy items is a core part of what defines classicness to many.

Because it isn't just those items-as-items. It's nearly twenty years of people low key, maybe not even with conscious awareness, thinking about that Manastone they never got in Classic, now and then, when they saw an EverQuest thing. You don't need advanced degrees in psychology to work out that if you emotionally dangle a person's childhood dreams, even stupid and trivial ones, just out of reach in front of them, they are going to pursue it with single minded toxicity. And they will culturally transmit that attitude to everyone who didn't play Classic.

List will thus have both foreseeable and unforeseeable consequences for gameplay at large that doesn't really address this problem, not least of which in people picking classes based on aptness for the new mechanic. And when I think about this, I think all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't keep Humpty from pursuing his deeply entrenched psychological desire for one or more legacy items. I think it's a very humbling, very human thing. As Green 1 becomes Green 2 and 3 and relevant strategies improve, this will only become more pronounced.


Too Long, Didn't Read
And that's it. When we get to the Green 2, Green 3, etc. part, what's when I think, hold right the heck on here. These items are only a problem precisely because they're so fun and iconic and representative of "classicness" that there is no classic without them. Why are we doing all this unclassic work to keep people from having them?

I feel like the community have slowly and very begrudgingly acknowledged the very real psychological importance of legacy items in defining 'classicness' for most people to begin with, and the importance of their equitable availability to a Classic EverQuest project. Then, slowly and begrudgingly talked ourselves into deploying a combination of a custom game mechanic plus heavy manual enforcement to deal with the toxicity we all know will ensue from their scarcity even when they do drop.

We do all this so that we can specifically keep the amount of certain legacy items era accurate? So, here's the punchline:

Announcing a dramatic increase in legacy item influx rates independent of cash or other items the mob has, and adding other minor tweaks like Lore tags, would be simpler, more effective and at least less aesthetically unclassic, with less side effects.

If you're still with me, thanks for reading. Sloths rule, Hail Satan, Hail Santa, Hail Bristlebane.

I think the best approach would have been to leave the legacy items out entirely. People cry not classic, but every new server launched post-legacy item nerf was launched with those items removed. So it is classic to launch a new server without them. People would gripe but it would save a lot of headaches for both staff and players. We'll see how the List plays out, though. They put a lot of thought and effort into it, so hopefully it works reasonably well. The eternal neckbeard, however, ruiner of lands and hoarder of pixels that he is, may have other ideas.

A sensible, common-sense solution that can never work because

in other words, a classic server without these items is, in a deeply entrenched definitional sense, not classic, because "classicness" is in large part defined by the perceived availability of these items.

I did read your entire post and you touched on what would have been my solution to manastone slightly.

I would have made it Magic Lore No Drop and soul bound (unless there is a way to make it lore across corpses). I would’ve also put a level restriction to looting it. That way you could only get 1 manastone per character above the minimum level. You would need to level an army of characters to get lots of them.

As soon as they no longer drop, remove all of the custom features and restore to its original state.

It's classic because sullon zek, firiona vie and like 10 other servers never had them

There is no strict definition of classic here. It's whatever staff feels works best for their vision and there is no hard and fast "must do x because of y" in this project.

For example if they decided the final solution to the classic problem was to remove all manastones and guises they might just do that. I don't think they will. They already decided what they want to do, which is include these items.

I spent a lot of time on the red server. It's the toxic equivalent of a nuclear waste storage casket on a Superfund site. Manastones were there without a list. Server cross trading was legal for a couple of years meaning red and blue economies effected one another. It didn't ruin the world.

Pvp reduced the toxicity of these kind of camps, sure.

But like most people deeply worried about this I think you're more worried about your blue bank account and how you don't want to have to tactically participate in green just to boost your blue riches.

New servers are always a financial opportunity even if it's in game coin only. They always will be. Green will be too.

I read your TLDR and still didn't get what your point was but responded anyways good.luck with your thread.

Every person standing in line for a to-be-removed item that I don't care about is one more person who isn't choking up the stuff I do care about, so I'm fine with the present setup. It'll be interesting to see just how long the lists get.

I'm with Vexenu, if it were up to me I wouldn't have put those items in at all. I don't see the value in trying to replicate the game's entire patch history. Seems like a lot of extra work for little benefit. But then I'd never build something like P99 at all....don't love the game enough to put in that much time. Got to be something of a true believer to do that.

Danth

No need to encourage them.

T-T-TRIPLE NEGGED

I hate when people put the words mad glad sad dad or bad together in a string, since with my regional dialect they all have seperate a sounds and dont rhyme with each other and everywhere else in the world they rhyme so it sounds silly when I read it.

Its like when people used to say "its on like donkey Kong" and for me on and kong dont come close to rhyming like everywhere else since we have split short o's as well.

Also people read more than you think :p

Thank you pal. Lore No Drop Soul Bound with revert after removal is an interesting idea for making life difficult for farmlords. As I am already familiar with numerous deranged individuals and crews planning to powerlevel lootmules for legacy items, I think nothing can probably stand alone without increasing the influx rate, though.

My friend, as someone who already has everything, I promise you my only concern and point is liberating people such as yourself from the need to view Green as "a financial opportunity."