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Originally Posted by Goobles [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

If I can recall correctly, paladin, ranger and sk penalties didn't apply to group exp rate - only individual xp rate.

They applied to groups in classic up til a Velious patch when everyone ran the math and figured out the absolutely ridiculous mechanic existed and called for Verant's heads on pikes. Then Verant said "you're right, this is stupid and it's causing hybrids to get passed over in groups since the group doesn't want its xp gimped." And so it changed.

I personally hate the mechanic and am spreading word about it on the server in hopes the same thing will happen here. It's silly, and just because it took until Velious for the change to happen doesn't mean the delay has to happen here. The change occured because people called Verant on its bullshit mechanic and they said "yeah you're right." Chronological order doesn't have to be sacrosanct -- keeping a mechanic in place that actively hurt the game by Verant's testimony seems to be putting the carriage before the horse.

I know the p99 staff doesn't do this for us (I'm not really sure why they do it, but I'm happy they do) and we don't pay them any kind of money outside of donations, so really they owe us absolutely nothing. But we as a playerbase want this to work. We're here because we don't want to see the mistakes of the past get repeated. And this setup was a mistake, as the creator of the game itself admitted.

People keep bringing up technical issues as a comparison for a reason -- the team seems to swing back and forth between a hard stand on chronological order of events and the elegant recreation of the Classic experience.

We as players care more about the latter than the former. We want a world without the PoK, where factions really matter, grouping is crucial, factions matter, and travel is a dangerous adventure. We want legit progression so we have time to enjoy each era of the trilogy as it evolved. We care about the "spirit." The fact that we can play in 1900x1200 and use number keys to cast spells and don't require a video card that uses the Glide API and can meditate without opening the book, which is really irrelevant since we're playing in 1900x1200 anyway, really doesn't bother the vast, vast majority of the playerbase. Some of these original ideas were just products of the time, some were just outright bloody stupid (a UI that takes up over half the screen = totally moronic, even for 1999).

The p99 dev team is split between the two goals, mostly because it's comprised of individuals doing their own thing and not quite working and communicating as one unit. This shitstorm started because one guy as an Ogre was outleveling his wife, a Dark Elf. The tables clearly needed to be fixed because they were wrong (off by one as it turned out) but while he was digging around, he found that Hybrids weren't gimping group XP. So he "fixed" it by chronological standards.

This "fix" does nothing to recreate the good aspects of the EQ Classic spirit. For instance, was anyone really angry that Rangers aren't (well, weren't) being shunned like they were in 1999-2001?

That's the whole point here, and why the technical stuff keeps getting brought up by players as a counter-point to this change. It doesn't *feel* right. It *feels* like a godawful decision, chronologically correct or not. Everyone knows that it's going to damage and divide the community in a way that something like a technical regression to forced 800x600 or 640x480 resolution and a UI that takes up 3/5ths of the screen would.

No one (except the real noobs) is asking for race or class XP tables to get removed. Rather, I think alot of people are up in arms about this issue because, as history showed, it's going to be actively detrimental to the community. Verant programmed this shared penalty and forgot about it. There was no malice or anything involved, they basically just copied over their AD&D campaign and custom GM rules and forgot about it.

In short, we know the effect that the original discovery of this mechanic had, and it simply was not a good one. The community was furious and four classes were suddenly relegated to the dustbin. The Ranger actually never really recovered.

I don't know. It just feels like you've recreated the Titanic for us to walk around and admire its original splendor, decadence, and design. Then you realized you forgot to put an iceberg in its way because, well, that's what happened to the original Titanic, right? It was an unmitigated disaster that no one in their right mind thought was a good thing, but hey, it happened, so it has to happen again.

You don't have to recreate mistakes out of blind adherence chronology. You're not going back and implementing bugs and exploits. You're not going to overlook ShowEQ and MacroQuest users because the technology wasn't there to detect their use in classic. You're making meta-game decisions all the time that aren't consistent with the real, buggy, exploitable classic version in order to improve quality of play for everyone, since, face it, cheating and exploiting and bugginess sucked and hurt the community. But, like it or not, those things were classic.

You can't go home again. Honestly, no one really wants to go home again. We want the home cooking, the familiarity, the friends, the fresh experiences and wonder. You're giving us those things. We love you for that. But then, out of the blue, you're slapping acne on our face and making our voices crack because "that's the way it was."

There's more to this than a innocent "fix" to make things more "classic." You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.