Quote:
Originally Posted by Tecmos Deception
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
Or we could assume it is the simple, obvious answer, rather than the complicated and unprovable one.
The server has a tiny population compared to live but does not have a proportionally lower amount of hours spent camping the big cash camps. Couple that with an extra long time in Kunark and big surprise, we have a high concentration of high-end items on the server.
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by CrystalBlue
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
|
It is a multitude of factors including, but not limited to, the factors quoted above. Where people have been able to demonstrate an incorrect (high or low) drop rate or spawn rate, the devs have taken the evidence and acted appropriately.
At the same time, Kunark came out 1 year after EQ, epic quests came 5 months after Kunark, Velious came out 8 months after Kunark and 3 months after epics. EQ was still experiencing a massive influx of new players with the veteran players moving forward each expansion not having time to go back and farm old world content when new content was being released at a relatively brisk pace.
As I stated earlier in this thread, no one had wikis or walkthroughs handed to them on day 0 of each expansion or quest. Uber guilds held boss strategies close and quests were crowd sourced for weeks/months from scratch across many forums, some with good information others with poor information. The original EQ client disabling alt+tab further hampered the ability of players to accurately share information that didn't have access to a second box, writing/printing everything, or violating the EULA with WinEQ, but at the same time the disabling of alt+tab further re-enforced the "You're in our world now" aspect of the game.
To contrast the original experience and time line, players here on P99 know exactly where to level, what quests to complete, what mobs to camp and had additional time to complete each of these based on the ability of the devs to update/fix timeline issues as they cropped up. The player base here had 5 additional months of vanilla to farm/level/alts before Kunark released. The players had an additional 5 months between the release of Kunark and the implementation of epic quests, which everyone knew what exactly would be needed ahead of time and gathered the pre-epic pieces that were available in addition to gaining more levels. It has now been 18 months since Kunark dropped, and we do not have Velious, as of today that is an additional 10 months of Trakanon, VS, world dragons and an additional 6 months of epic quest completions. Without a release date of Velious, these disparities are going to become increasingly larger.
We will never truly get to experience EQ as we experienced it in 1999-2001 again (like re-watching the Sixth Sense), but we can attempt to help the devs to recreate a close approximation of the original trilogy. We can not erase the knowledge people have about the game, which was one of the amazing things about 1999-2001 everyone was fresh and experiencing a new world that was ripe for exploration. People didn't even have accurate maps for quite a while after vanilla release, as people had to draw them from scratch like 15th century explorers.
An across the board reduction in drop rates of rare items is not the fix, if there could even be one at this point in time, the solution is the release of new content for players to move on to.
Hopefully, the players and devs can continue to refine the server and timeline progression for an eventual new server that can be automated to release timeline appropriate content and patches. For now, I'm just playing to enjoy EQ and provide bug reports as I come across relevant material to help provide for a better experience in P99v2.0, if there ever is one. I would hope other people follow suit.