EXP IS SO SLOW!

[Goobles]

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

[Combo]

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.

[mitic]

since exp penalties are STILL in game i want spell books in front of my face now too so those casters especialy necros and mages have some incentive to play their classes since hybrids are OP rite now with their neg exp...

sk, pal, and especialy rng are way to overpowered since they can solo moss-snakes at lvl 50...do it devs!

equal rights for all, rite?

[astarothel]

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

since exp penalties are STILL in game i want spell books in front of my face now too so those casters especialy necros and mages have some incentive to play their classes since hybrids are OP rite now with their neg exp...

Spellbooks are client.UI based there superstar. Care to try again?

[Combo]

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

Spellbooks are client.UI based there superstar. Care to try again?

troll'd

[Qaedain]

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

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.

SNIP...

Fantastic post. Seriously. Probably one of the best I've ever read on a forum.

[Bumamgar]

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

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.

No changes were made without full discussion with the rest of the dev team including Nilbog. The p99 dev team work and communicate as one unit quite well, thank you.

[Oogmog]

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

No changes were made without full discussion with the rest of the dev team including Nilbog. The p99 dev team work and communicate as one unit quite well, thank you.

Could you explain why hell levels are penalizing the entire group? Sorry to nag, but I've brought this up 4 times now myself along with others. Racial penalties did penalize the group, however, hell levels did not.

[Combo]

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

No changes were made without full discussion with the rest of the dev team including Nilbog. The p99 dev team work and communicate as one unit quite well, thank you.

If this is truly the case, you should have been more clear about this in your testimony about the change. It really read like you said "My wife and I discovered I was outleveling her, so I told the dev team and they gave me carte blanche to do what I wanted to XP. I found the code mistake, fixed it, but found something else that I knew was classic and changed it too."

Further is the problem with the feeling that "I went in to fix something with the blessing of the staff, but I found something else I wasn't actually looking for, changed it, and then got the blessing of the dev team after the fact."

Maybe that's how it went down, maybe it's not. Maybe you had a conference call and discussed repercussions of this change, maybe you just did it and everyone else said "yeah that was in classic."

All I want to say is that the reason you specifically are getting so much flak from the community is due to the whole under-the-table, undocumented feel this change (I can't in good faith call it a fix anymore) has. We were all around when Verant pulled these tricks, we all got mad and complained because we all felt cheated. Sometimes it was an innocent mistake (Martin in customer service had strep and didn't write the patch notes), but the vast majority of the time it was either totally under the radar or expressed so vaguely in order to delay the firestorm that the developers knew the change would cause.

They weren't stupid. You're not stupid. It's Friday afternoon, you can either write patch notes that are going to result in you getting bombarded with hate mail or you can just do it and deal with it after your weekend. After crossing your fingers that no one notices, of course -- which is a complete joke as any software developer can tell you. Your users will *always* know your software better than you do.

Please don't take this as an insult as I'd rather not get banned, but it also doesn't help the situation that you've gotten so defensive, arguably smug, about what has become "your" change. I don't blame you for it -- stubbornly sticking to your guns is a common and effective thing to do. But it also leaves you stubborn and unwilling to reconsider the wisdom of your decision.

No matter how many times you say it, this isn't a binary choice. This isn't "This was classic, get frustrated and lash out and you're banned, end of story." You're implementing what the producers would come to admit as a design flaw.

There are plenty more of those you could implement. If you'd like, I'd be happy to dig through patch notes and break things that the patch ahead of where we are in the timeline fixed. I'm good with C++ and Java and dabble in several other languages. I would be happy to implement bugs and exploits, because bugs and exploits are classic and can be fun. They added the broken zaniness that caused many of us to have a sick love/hate relationship with the game, that, 10 years later, those famous rose goggles have changed into just love, kind of like the old girlfriend we've all had that was on that lovely border of gorgeous and plain, flawed and perfect, and was prone to outbursts of batshit insanity. We miss her more than the one or two barbies we got lucky (or so we thought at the time) with, the intellectuals, the emotionally dependents, or even are (hopefully) well-balanced, loving wives.

I don't know. Do what you want. Just try not to delude yourself or the rest of the staff into thinking this change is anything but actively harmful to this server and its community. Even the great stubborn Verant knew that was true when it was discovered -- that is, when Verant was reminded they'd implemented it.

[rioisk]

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

If this is truly the case, you should have been more clear about this in your testimony about the change. It really read like you said "My wife and I discovered I was outleveling her, so I told the dev team and they gave me carte blanche to do what I wanted to XP. I found the code mistake, fixed it, but found something else that I knew was classic and changed it too."

Further is the problem with the feeling that "I went in to fix something with the blessing of the staff, but I found something else I wasn't actually looking for, changed it, and then got the blessing of the dev team after the fact."

Maybe that's how it went down, maybe it's not. Maybe you had a conference call and discussed repercussions of this change, maybe you just did it and everyone else said "yeah that was in classic."

All I want to say is that the reason you specifically are getting so much flak from the community is due to the whole under-the-table, undocumented feel this change (I can't in good faith call it a fix anymore) has. We were all around when Verant pulled these tricks, we all got mad and complained because we all felt cheated. Sometimes it was an innocent mistake (Martin in customer service had strep and didn't write the patch notes), but the vast majority of the time it was either totally under the radar or expressed so vaguely in order to delay the firestorm that the developers knew the change would cause.

They weren't stupid. You're not stupid. It's Friday afternoon, you can either write patch notes that are going to result in you getting bombarded with hate mail or you can just do it and deal with it after your weekend. After crossing your fingers that no one notices, of course -- which is a complete joke as any software developer can tell you. Your users will *always* know your software better than you do.

Please don't take this as an insult as I'd rather not get banned, but it also doesn't help the situation that you've gotten so defensive, arguably smug, about what has become "your" change. I don't blame you for it -- stubbornly sticking to your guns is a common and effective thing to do. But it also leaves you stubborn and unwilling to reconsider the wisdom of your decision.

No matter how many times you say it, this isn't a binary choice. This isn't "This was classic, get frustrated and lash out and you're banned, end of story." You're implementing what the producers would come to admit as a design flaw.

There are plenty more of those you could implement. If you'd like, I'd be happy to dig through patch notes and break things that the patch ahead of where we are in the timeline fixed. I'm good with C++ and Java and dabble in several other languages. I would be happy to implement bugs and exploits, because bugs and exploits are classic and can be fun. They added the broken zaniness that caused many of us to have a sick love/hate relationship with the game, that, 10 years later, those famous rose goggles have changed into just love, kind of like the old girlfriend we've all had that was on that lovely border of gorgeous and plain, flawed and perfect, and was prone to outbursts of batshit insanity. We miss her more than the one or two barbies we got lucky (or so we thought at the time) with, the intellectuals, the emotionally dependents, or even are (hopefully) well-balanced, loving wives.

I don't know. Do what you want. Just try not to delude yourself or the rest of the staff into thinking this change is anything but actively harmful to this server and its community. Even the great stubborn Verant knew that was true when it was discovered -- that is, when Verant was reminded they'd implemented it.

Just want to add to this that mimicking classic mechanics and classic mindset are two different equations to creating the classic experience. The EQ community as a whole was pretty ignorant about all this XP penalties/group sharing etc etc (as they were with a lot of issues) back in 1999 but here we are same game same mechanics but now we suddenly have a problem with it.

We know devs here work very hard to provide for this server at no pay and we know what the "vision" of the server is. However, I think a majority of players don't like how "fixes" to make the game more classic are done months after the launch of the server. Trying to make a game more classic everyday only to see some of these changes reversed in an expansion (kunark/velious) not long after they're changed (or issues being totally ignored because they're patched out in kunark/velious) is highly aggravating.