Quote:
Originally Posted by Pomaikai
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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.
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One of the points of classic is the boat rides,the druid ports etc and you are missing that it seems.
Getting the boats to be a little more solid would be good, but if not so be it.
They went to a ton of effort and still are to make it very similar to classic even if it is harder and takes longer.All of the expansions too EQ didn't save it from the players getting bored and leaving.
I wish there was an answer to the top heaviness but there isn't and as EQ showed adding expansions isn't the answer either.
There still is the sleeper with full regen to beat for instance though and it would probably take the entire server to do it if it could be done at all.
On Project1999 that isn't entirely out of the question,the whole server.
It will be interesting to see if the AOW can be beaten without zerging .
Of people who play on EMU servers project1999 seems to be doing
comparatively well.
For people who want horses and books to get around there are tons of servers with them.
I tried several of them and got very bored quickly,they are just too easy.
Here I really really don't want my character to die, on the other servers big deal, the experience can be made up easily .
Might as well be playing the sims.
Project1999 is already the game a lot of us want eq to be thanks,just not the game you want it to be