Please stop the quakes

[Nostalgiabait]

I just started playing again a few months ago after 20 years, and had the same "wth another quake" feeling, but I think I understand it better now.

Logging onto a server where people have been playing Velious content for many years has been really disorienting; all this content was new last I played it, not more than 2 years old when I quit the original.

Even though it's for all intents and purposes the exact same game, a server that people have been playing on for a decade or more is decidedly different from the new-and-fresh experience. For example, plat inflation vs. what I was used to is extreme, so much so that new players are priced right out of the market even for mid-level gear, and I still don't have a good handle on how things are valued on P99, whereas back in the day I could spit out an approximate market price for any item you could name.

Which brings us back to the quakes.

At first I hated them, but coming to an understanding of just how mature the server is and all that it implies, I get it now and support the frequent quakes. There's just nothing left other than raid mobs for players who have been playing for years - it was already that way for me when I quit EQ back in 2022. And who is going to be playing EQ still in 2024? Not the casuals, pretty much only raiders are going to be logging on.

The numbers show it. First quake raid I participated in, a /who of NToV showed over 220 players in the zone - somewhere between a third and a quarter of all logged-on players were raiding mobs in the one zone, under an hour after the quake. Probably just as many if not more were raiding in other zones. Back in the day you'd never see 100 players in NToV at once with three times the server population, to give some perspective.

The downside to the quakes is item rarity - it's not special to get that uber drop when the most difficult part of getting them - being first in force with a competent raid - is gone. But with the server as mature as it is, you don't get the glow of seeing others admire your shiny pixels when those others already have the same stuff on their 3rd and 4th alts anyway - the ship has sailed.

Thanks for putting up with a bit of a rambling message; I hope this perspective helps inform others reading this thread.

[Videri]

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

At first I hated them, but coming to an understanding of just how mature the server is and all that it implies, I get it now and support the frequent quakes. There's just nothing left other than raid mobs for players who have been playing for years

Ah ah ah, you have imagined that the purpose of the Earthquake mechanic is to appease the raiding population. This is not the case. Quakes are actually called "sim repops," or "simulated repops," and are meant to replicate the weekly server resets which occurred on live EQ back in the day for patches. These resets respawned everything and resulted in raid mobs spawning more often (7-day mobs would be seen more often than every 7 days, for instance). This is replicated here for a more classic environment.

But seeing as each sim repop does respawn all the raid mobs, of course all the raid guilds mobilize and snap up what they can.

Furthermore, last Wednesday's quake was an accident. The GM literally pushed the button by mistake.