P99 is a Meritocracy, not a Democracy

[magephyre1]

This topic has more of the classic EQ toxic bullshit "if you have anything going on in your life other than this game then FUCK YOU!" than you can shake a stick at. God damn, if you played the game when it was young you're at least in your 40s.

[Ripqozko]

DSM and ucf are basically the same, they both will achtually you to death

[Nexii]

GMs enforced rotations on some servers but I don't think they created them ever. Big difference. The GMs would have done something more akin to P99's idea of a player agreement which is then enforced. Draft week is just another flavor of this.

Most servers did first in force (rolltation) from what I can find as it's the closest in-line with the Play Nice Policy vision.

I doubt any classic servers did DPS or FTE. Possible but unlikely.

Norrath would have been designed very differently if sharding was possible at the time. You wouldn't have raid bosses within leveling zones, which was a lot of the charm of EQ. Possible that they could have made it work though.

[Jimjam]

Every day we stray further from Brad.

[Praxcthius]

Question. How many of you actually played from the start of eq live ? Now how many of you played at least 5 servers? If not you have no clue what went on each server. There were not multiple guilds taking on vox or naggy at the onset of their introduction. There were not multiple guilds engaging fear hate and sky at their inception. There were not multiple guilds doing Kunark dragons Chardonnay king queen vs vp at its release. Insert each new expansion with same results until pop. Most of you talk out of your ass like you are the know all of eq. You are not. At best you were that weekend dnd player who experienced pick up dnd like groups when you played live. Maybe a year 2 or more you started to raid and then you thought you knew it all. You didn’t.

Klazdaxthun

[mycoolrausch]

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

Question. How many of you actually played from the start of eq live ? Now how many of you played at least 5 servers? If not you have no clue what went on each server. There were not multiple guilds taking on vox or naggy at the onset of their introduction. There were not multiple guilds engaging fear hate and sky at their inception. There were not multiple guilds doing Kunark dragons Chardonnay king queen vs vp at its release. Insert each new expansion with same results until pop. Most of you talk out of your ass like you are the know all of eq. You are not. At best you were that weekend dnd player who experienced pick up dnd like groups when you played live. Maybe a year 2 or more you started to raid and then you thought you knew it all. You didn’t.

Klazdaxthun

Yes...there weren't multiple guilds standing on top of each other at every raid...that's why p99 has a conundrum that didn't exist in classic, that it's dealing with using content metering in the forms of single FTEs, quakes, lockouts, and drafts. Which is wise. What wasn't wise was deleting ~15% of velious raid content (sleepers) but maybe a custom content zone could replace it someday. Even just that would lighten the guild bottlenecking on quakes substantially.

[Praxcthius]

Chardok* not Chardonnay ��

[SantagarBrax]

Now we're having a healthy discussion. I like it [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Pro Tip: Notice all of those conducting personal attacks...those are the true "toxic" players on this server.

https://imgur.com/WRTyKUn

https://imgur.com/ZDrSn5Q

Compare the subscription numbers to the Expansion timeline releases. After Luclin and PoP launch, subscriptions were trending upward with a first ever decrease in July '03. Just like the real world economy, policies and implementations take some time before the effects are visible and felt.

What happened to cause subscriptions to begin decreasing in July '03 then permanently continue the trend by the fall of '04?

Management mandating an expansion drop in 4 months with Legacy of Ykesha, which was a terrible expansion that brought a few quality of life improvements/spells that we were all going to get later on down the road anyways. It was a pure money grab and we all knew it at the time. Then, LDoN brought the first Instancing to the masses. No longer were gamers required to have any downtime to socialize and get to know one another via interaction (Brad's Vision), and it became a soulless experience going through those missions. LFG Tool was implemented as well. What made it worse was LDoN had some of the best augments so everyone was forced to do it. We were all forced into a non-interactive state and it was a terrible experience. Gates of Discord bombed severely due to it being rushed to Live with broken content, overpowered mobs, and the initial level cap presuming to increase to 70 and instead kept to the level 65 cap. In addition, gamers were burnt out (just as the devs were) on sharding to experience gameplay: VP, ST, Vex Thal, PoP. We needed a break too and realized SOE didn't give a damn about the player base, they just wanted "more more more".

Subscriptions rebounded around June '04. I believe it was in anticipation of Omens of War and to see if the path forward would change for the better, but in the end it was just more of the same. In Feb. '05, Dragons of Norrath launched and it was met with mixed reactions across the board. Lower level and casual guilds couldn't truly participate in the content and top tiered raiding guilds felt it was a continuation of heading down the wrong path, yet again. Cool concept, improper implementation both regarding content and timeline release.

Subscription numbers plummeted from OoW launch date in Sept. '04 - Sept. '05 by over HALF. SOE chose their path, the same path Atarii and many companies that followed chose, quantity over quality. They never recovered from this blunder.

In conclusion.. I've always believed that both the player base and dev's needed a break from continuous new expansions drops. Take a year or two off from beginning to make any expansions and go back to polish the broken/overlooked aspects of classic and all other expansions up through PoP. Keep in mind that the most "hardcore" players only had 1-3 alts and none were really max level nor fit for raiding. My father was a hardcore casual player, with every single class in the game, yet none above lvl 50 by PoP era. There was time to take a breath/break and it either else wasn't recognized or plainly ignored.

[Arvan]

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

What happened to cause subscriptions to begin decreasing in July '03 then permanently continue the trend by the fall of '04?

World of Warcraft released.

Hope this helps.

[Reiwa]

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

World of Warcraft released.

Hope this helps.

beta but yeah. it was a buzz in the eq community at the time.