Quote:
Originally Posted by falkun
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The problem with Luclin was all of the leveling content that made the old world irrelevant. Paludal caverns single handedly emptied out Crushbone, LOIO, UGuk, Unrest, etc., and that was just the beginning.
The best part about Luclin was Ssra temple, that whole dungeon was a great EXP and raid location, but VT had a harder key grind than VP, and then the trash was a pain and the bosses were easy (Thott's Luclin Uber Content post).
The good thing about Velious and PoP is that they did not rewrite the low-level game. Velious didn't have content for players sub-L35, and PoP did not contain content for players sub-L46. If they could make Luclin not have content for players under L40-50, then it might have worked out better. Also, while the new rings in Luclin were good, VT needs to work on the balance of trash-vs-bosses. |
But that will always happen in any game that expands unless you expand the population dramatically. People will go to where the shiniest new toys and the biggest carrots can be found. If you don't increase population to fill the empty zones caused by the older population moving to the new zones, then you'll have empty zones.
The only other choice you have is to revamp the old zones and make them on par loot/exp wise with the newer content. Well, that does partially defeat the point, work, and expense of creating the new content, but it could and was later done to some of the classic EQ zones and dungeons. Eventually people get through the old content.
At some point a large enough portion of the population has "beat" the old content and becomes bored and restless. If you are a company which is making money off of subscriptions, then the last thing you want is for that bored and restless population to go elsewhere and give their $$$ to another company. So you have to design new content for them. That content needs to offer enough of a reward to spend plowing through it, so the carrots need to be made larger than the ones from previous content.
So the population goes to where the bigger carrots are. The loot from the older content becomes worth less and so the new population becomes better equipped to deal with the content, and as more new content loot becomes available, it starts to trickle down to the new players. It just keeps growing and growing. Each new expansion increases the effect.
Kunark did this to an extent, and Velious will do it more. There just isn't any getting away from this. Eventually the population on this server will get bored with the content that they have already "beat", and unless Rogean adds more content, they will leave for other games or servers. So unless Rogean can continue to add new players to make up for the loss of population, it will come down to expand or die. It's the exact some dilema that Verant and then SOE faced, just on a smaller scale and without actual $$$ and jobs at stake.
Rogean does have one advantage that SOE didn't have, and that's hindsight. He can restructure and redesign the world however he sees fit. He can connect zones anyway he sees fit, can leave out zones, and he can mess with the transportation systems. He can selectively add in features, skills, spells, etc without having to enable an entire expansion. For instance, I'm pretty certain that Rogean could add in the Mount system (horses, etc) without having to enable the entire expansion that they came in. So he could in fact create a whole new EQ with it's own progression, look, and feel so as to not break things about the game that he likes.
But let's talk about one important thing in EQ that was always at issue for people with limited play time... Travel time. Yes, I understand that the feeling of being in this HUGE and interactive world was part of the appeal, but for people who only have an hour or three to play at a time, spending 30 minutes or more tied up into travel time just to be able to play, especially with the ban on boxing so people can't create their own porting system, is that you start to lose the casual players who get frustrated that they are wasting all of their play time just trying to get places. So the Spires and Mounts were created, followed by PoK and the Stones. Rogean has the power and opportunity to fix travel, but in ways that don't break the feel of how big the world is. Well, at least attempt to anyways.
So while it might not be "classic", P1999 could become the game we always wanted EQ to stay/become, because as the old saying goes... Hindsight is always the best sight.