no global ooc in offpeak killed the game

[YendorLootmonkey]

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

In summation: no global is good for playing the game, good for anyone who hated farmers monopolizing camps and playing the market. At least from my experience.

FIFY [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] hehe

[stormlord]

I'm a classic fan, no doubt about it, but I had my reservations about removing /ooc this soon. If it were me, I would have done it when peak was 1000+. Nonetheless, I'm a classic fan. Now that global chat is removed, I play the game that way. There's the /who command, which I try to refrain from using, and then there's irc and the forums for auctioning, both of which I've also refrained from using. Why? Because they don't feel classic to me, even though they were available in 1999. It's not the way I want to play the game. Still, it would help me to find what I'm looking for if I did. Lord help me! You can't treat an old dog new tricks. Don't pity me.

So I have sat in EC for a long time. I never went to EC in 1999. In fact, the only trading zone I knew in my career on live was the bazaar. So being in EC these past couple days was a completely new experience for me. My thoughts are mute. I don't know whether I hate it or like it. I suppose it has opened the door for people to try new things to keep others entertained. It's boring sitting in a zone trying to find what you want because you refuse to use irc or the forums. One options for me is to adventure in other zones and try my luck at finding the items I want. The other is to stay here and either: a) attempt to find ways to entertain myself in-game b) browse the web. So far, I've mostly browsed the web with "/log on" for searches. However, the opportunity to create new amusements in EC so that people don't get excessively bored is there for enterprising souls.

I almost wish EQ had a card game or something that we could play in EC while waiting, but that's not the only thing that could be fun. Honestly, there's no rulebook on how to create an mmorpg. Nothing says we have to kill things when we're logged in or play card games when we're not killing things. D&D is combat-oriented, but mmorpgs could be anything we want them to be. They just have to be interesting. Personally, I don't think EQ was developed for non-combat related fun. So people have to get clever to make it fun. I wish sometimes that the new mmorpgs would revisit some of the things EQ did, but add a framework that's more friendly to creative people so that they can create new forms of entertainment to occupy us when we're not in combat. Imagine a new mmorpg that had corpse runs, but did it in such a way that it's fun. Corpse runs don't have to be automatically a bad idea. It's all in how you implement the idea. Same for everything else. Nothing necessarily has to be boring. There just needs to be a developer ready to make it fun. Which costs money.

Things I can think of off the top of my head to fend off boredom in EC:
1) Tell a story
2) Gamble
3) Make a game for people to play
4) /duel someone or manage a series of matches and reward the champion
5) Tell a story, but this time use actors (players) and a scene that exists in the zone
6) Find a creative way to reward new players

I'm sure there're many others. It's a pity that we have to invent ideas though. It'd be so much easier if they gave us a way to create new card games, or new games for that matter. There're many players who have the skill to accomplish something like that. An arena in EC would be a nice attraction for duels and fights, but it's hard to manage something like that. You get what I'm saying? There's no limit to what could be done to occupy people while they wait for a trade.

[Agecroft]

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

I'm a classic fan, no doubt about it, but I had my reservations about removing /ooc this soon. If it were me, I would have done it when peak was 1000+. Nonetheless, I'm a classic fan. Now that global chat is removed, I play the game that way. There's the /who command, which I try to refrain from using, and then there's irc and the forums for auctioning, both of which I've also refrained from using. Why? Because they don't feel classic to me, even though they were available in 1999. It's not the way I want to play the game. Still, it would help me to find what I'm looking for if I did. Lord help me! You can't treat an old dog new tricks. Don't pity me.

Just curious. Why no /who?

[Maggok]

hmmmm was actual sitting 3 hours sitting /LFG today. and yes, i did /who all lfg and /who all *Zonename*..... and tried up to build a group

during the peak-times, this would work, but when only a few people in the range of lvl 20 - 30 are LFG - u ve no chance to build up a group. as a casual / player with familiy / player with long working-times the actual situation is realy disappointing. oh yes, "its classic" - how could i forget that - so it must be gold, or?

btw. we r doing lots of polls - may be, we should do a poll, how many time each of us can play per day during a normal week - than we would see, if 1 or 2 hours time to find/build up a group, like today its often the case, is the thing we should working for...

Greetings, maggok

[stormlord]

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

hmmmm was actual sitting 3 hours sitting /LFG today. and yes, i did /who all lfg and /who all *Zonename*..... and tried up to build a group

during the peak-times, this would work, but when only a few people in the range of lvl 20 - 30 are LFG - u ve no chance to build up a group. as a casual / player with familiy / player with long working-times the actual situation is realy disappointing. oh yes, "its classic" - how could i forget that - so it must be gold, or?

btw. we r doing lots of polls - may be, we should do a poll, how many time each of us can play per day during a normal week - than we would see, if 1 or 2 hours time to find/build up a group, like today its often the case, is the thing we should working for...

Greetings, maggok

But this begs a question. Even if you could find someone with global chat, that might mean they're too far away to reach you. I mean, you can '/who <zone>', right? That even lists anonymous players. The other /who method won't list anon players. All global chat would do is better open you up to anonymous players and players who're too far away already to make it practical. Anon players, many of them, don't want anonymous /tells. For example, a lot of druids will go /anon to avoid getting lots of tells for ports. Even if a player doesn't use '/lfg on' because they don't know about it, you can still use '/who <zone name>' to find them.

It's a little less convenient to do it this way, but keep in mind some players don't even use these tools. Like me for example. I actually go to the zone. I don't like to use /who or irc or the forums. When you're lower level, it's not that hard to find groups. I can understand that it's harder at higher levels. It's also easier to solo at lower levels and get a corpse. So I'm not fooling myself into thinking that you can do it the way I do it.

I wasn't cheerleading for removing global ooc, but you need to use your options. And you need to decide whether you want to live angry at this game or whether leaving is better for your sanity. Alternatively, play a class that can exist better on its own. A warrior is a horrible class to play at off-peak hours, but it's not so bad once you've got a guild and have a main character at level 50. At that point, you can just twink a warrior alt.

If I were you, I'd try PEQ. But leveling up, even with the extra bells and whistles of PEQ, is still not the easiest thing. On the plus side, you can box at PEQ. You have options. Stop complaining and use them.

And i have no doubt in my mind they'll enable global chat if population falls. I'm sorry if me telling you to use your options is getting you mad. I've been there. I've complained. But if you can't cope with the set of classic features on this server, the best statement you can make is not to play.

[Xenephex]

I don't mean this as snide, but welcome to their world. It's hard, it's inconvenient and it's tedious in a multitude of ways - just like it was when we all started. And back then, the devs did not care about our opinion; they really did not want to know what we wanted.

We bitched, we moaned, we groaned - and we kept playing. And we rushed back here when we found out about this server.

I can think of a bunch of things every day that I wish were different; would it really kill the game to leave the translocators up all the time? How about... well, you get the idea.

As soon as they start running this according to polls, we're headed downhill. Because what most of us are going to want is to make it easier - just little things that won't really affect things all that much. Just because that is really inconvenient.

And eventually, we'll get what we want, and then discover that we're just not enjoying it that much anymore, and we probably won't even understand why.

[stormlord]

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

I don't mean this as snide, but welcome to their world. It's hard, it's inconvenient and it's tedious in a multitude of ways - just like it was when we all started. And back then, the devs did not care about our opinion; they really did not want to know what we wanted.

We bitched, we moaned, we groaned - and we kept playing. And we rushed back here when we found out about this server.

I can think of a bunch of things every day that I wish were different; would it really kill the game to leave the translocators up all the time? How about... well, you get the idea.

As soon as they start running this according to polls, we're headed downhill. Because what most of us are going to want is to make it easier - just little things that won't really affect things all that much. Just because that is really inconvenient.

And eventually, we'll get what we want, and then discover that we're just not enjoying it that much anymore, and we probably won't even understand why.

I think we had it easier with our higher population and p2p service. I don't know about what others thinks, but I remember a lot more people in the zones in 1999.

But stop making this an 'easy vs hard' argument. That's the root cause of all this confusion. This is less about easy vs hard, and more about classic vs live. They're different games. That's what matters. When EQ lost population over the years, the developers were forced to make some things easier, but overall, the difficulty or tediousness of the game remained the same. That's what so many people don't understand. The reason people want classic, the reason project 1999 exists, is because it's a different game compared to live. So all of the changes over the years to compensate for falling rates of new players and because of attrition made EQ, gradually, over time, into a completely different game. It was not a change of opinion. It was necessary!

Let me restate: classic is a different game compared to live.

I'll give an example. Global chat. We all know the connection between population and global chat (or i hope so). If there're enough people, we don't need global chat. If there're too few people, we need global chat to compensate. Understand? Same thing applies to everything else in the game. When population falls, the game necessarily must be easier, but that doesn't mean it's easier for players!!! Understand? I hope so! It's all relative. Hard at 200 population is not equal to hard at 1000 population. Stop thinking in absolute terms.

[eqdruid76]

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

hmmmm was actual sitting 3 hours sitting /LFG today. and yes, i did /who all lfg and /who all *Zonename*..... and tried up to build a group

during the peak-times, this would work, but when only a few people in the range of lvl 20 - 30 are LFG - u ve no chance to build up a group. as a casual / player with familiy / player with long working-times the actual situation is realy disappointing. oh yes, "its classic" - how could i forget that - so it must be gold, or?

btw. we r doing lots of polls - may be, we should do a poll, how many time each of us can play per day during a normal week - than we would see, if 1 or 2 hours time to find/build up a group, like today its often the case, is the thing we should working for...

Greetings, maggok

So you pick a zone, sit at the zone-in and spam /shout LFG until a spot opens up. That's how it was done 11 years ago. That's how it's done today.

Geez, serverwide chat spoiled so many people.

[nicemace]

Originally Posted by eqdruid76 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

So you pick a zone, sit at the zone-in and spam /shout LFG until a spot opens up. That's how it was done 11 years ago. That's how it's done today.

Geez, serverwide chat spoiled so many people.

done that, dosent work... you guys who play peak times have it nice and you actually have NO idea how bad it gets during off peak times.

sure when a zone is rammed full during peak you can sit there and spam LFG and something will pop up cause the turnover in a group is generally pretty good, people going having dinner, going to sleep and what not.

in offpeak times youre lucky if you have only one group going in the zone, they are all locked in and just doing their thing.

as i have said, i have spent 10+ hours multiple days where i have been ACTIVELY looking group (doing the / all shit blah blah blah) spamming in zones n shit.

its not viable during offpeak, period.

and this is a perfect example of people being selfish twits. it works all good for them cause they only play when 600 - 700 online. they arent the ones who have to play with 150 - 200.. so they couldnt care less. as long as its good for them they'll just shut everyone else down.

[eqdruid76]

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

done that, dosent work... you guys who play peak times have it nice and you actually have NO idea how bad it gets during off peak times.

sure when a zone is rammed full during peak you can sit there and spam LFG and something will pop up cause the turnover in a group is generally pretty good, people going having dinner, going to sleep and what not.

in offpeak times youre lucky if you have only one group going in the zone, they are all locked in and just doing their thing.

as i have said, i have spent 10+ hours multiple days where i have been ACTIVELY looking group (doing the / all shit blah blah blah) spamming in zones n shit.

its not viable during offpeak, period.

and this is a perfect example of people being selfish twits. it works all good for them cause they only play when 600 - 700 online. they arent the ones who have to play with 150 - 200.. so they couldnt care less. as long as its good for them they'll just shut everyone else down.

You're doing it wrong.

Classic Everquest is a game of patience. It's SUPPOSED to be a challenge to find a competent group, advance, and get loot. It's time to take off the diapers, remove the training wheels, stop complaining and learn how to play the game. Join a freaking guild. And if you're already in one, and there's never anyone on, join a bigger guild. Guildies who are never on can't say too much about you doing so.

You're whining about the loss of the ease of grouping as it existed on live in 2006. This isn't Project 2006, it's Project 1999, where finding a group, finding upgrades, and selling your wares is supposed to emulate live in 1999 as much as the mechanics, graphics and content. And Classic Everquest was not a game for whiney people who needed someone else to hold their hand and play the game for them.

Serverwide chat is not going to be reinstated just because you refuse to adapt, do the footwork, make the contacts, establish the rapport, and participate in the same game the majority of us experienced, remember, and are glad to see again.

There is absolutely no reason you can't find a group at any hour of the day, other than you're just not trying hard enough. I understand your hesitation..."what if I go all the way to Guk, spend 2 hours /lfg, finally get in a group that wipes and disbands after 3 pulls, and spend 2 more hours doing a CR?"...Reality check: this occurs thousands of times a day to ALL players, regardless of time zone. That's the challenge of this game. Anyone can log on, push 3 buttons for 6 hours and gain a level. Finding 5 other players who don't suck is the challenge. And it's an even bigger challenge during peak hours. When in a group, you're only as good as the other people in the party.

If you want an easy game, I encourage you to man up, pay the 15 bucks a month, and log into Live. You don't need to find a group there anymore, and you'll be afk selling thousands of plat worth of gear in less than 2 weeks. There is absolutely no challenge left in the live game. That's why server populations are so low. That's why servers are merging. Right now, on the Luclin/Veeshan server, there are less than 1000 characters online. At least 500 of those characters are /afk in the Bazaar. The majority of the at the keyboard players are multi-boxing.

There are more active players on Project1999 at this very moment than there are on any one live server. That should tell you something. We're not here for the ease of play, or the instant gratification of uber gear by level 10 or automatically being level 51. We're here to play Everquest, as it was designed at its inception, where players had to actively research and socialize to advance.

Welcome to Everquest. You're in our world now.