EZ Server

pretty game-changing.

I've been playing EQ1 this past month, having a blast boxing on Test server (free Gold).  Today they announced that in February update every AA will be free up until House of Thule AAs.. so thats thousands and thousands of AAs.

They also announced getting rid of powerleveling abilities (decap/headshot/swarming/etc) today.

https://forums.station.sony.com/eq/index.php?threads/changes-with-the-february-update-alternate-ability-grants-for-gold-members-and-ability-changes.207363/

LMFAO the Sony gents are explaining how mass pulling negatively affects THEIR servers. I would like to see the few "naysayers" from a few months back try to prove their point with Sony's data backing up Hunter's statements. :-)

-Hate

+1

Yeah apparently on Live, mages can somehow pull an entire zone of light blues and survive.  They should just make characters cast a hidden Fading Memories if agro pool is too large, but thatll prob lead to exploitation on Live.

Removing the power leveling ability in EQ just proves they want the game to fail.

I don't know that anyone who commented about the implementation of the jail said that mass pulls doesn't stress the server at all, I think the general sentiment was that current design encourages that type of game play more than anything.  There have been a couple of tweaks to improve the rate at which essences drop and that's a big boon, but with so many progression based items that require you to backfarm aa's or components, people are going to kill as efficiently as possible.  Unfortunately, that means pulling whatever mobs you can handle up to the limit and killing them at the same time.  You rely on ripostes as part of damage done to mobs, having the warrior riposte click helps with that, and a lot of people roll zerks to AE stuff down quicker.  The recent regen changes have mitigated the effectiveness of AE killing a bit, but once you're overgeared for the zone you are farming it's still beneficial to have that AE dmg.

Now with AA farm rate being so valuable to RoA grinds, mask of experience grinds and DI earring (which nobody is really bothering with, but for the sake of argument it is an AA based item), and there being really no alternative to straight up killing mobs, people are going to keep doing what they can in the current rule set to maximize their kill rate.  I had proposed some sort of kill task, based on tier of the group requesting, that rewards you with a sum of considerable AA upon completion to Hunter and he seemed receptive.  Basically you'd load up your group and go to a zone that was appropriate for your gear and level and get the task and work on completing it while working on whatever else you could in zone; ie farming epic parts, working on charm drops or w/e.  It would have to be coded so that you couldn't be in T7 gear and mass slaughtering the T5 task just to get the exp from task completion, probably would have to have some sort of lockout timer too so that people didn't abuse how often/how much gain you could get in a short time.  I think something like this that lets you get a lump sum of aa's while working on other tasks you would otherwise be doing would go a long way to making the repetetive and non-challenging tedium of AA farming less daunting and give people a reason to work on aa's as well as progression at the same time.

Sorry for the huge tangent, but server is down and was just posting this while I wait for it to come back up.

tl;dr - Less mindless grinds = more fun = less need to mass pull = less stress on server

One idea I cant seem to shake is the idea that we could hand in essence of a higher tier for a essence of a lower tier... this would allow me to farm in the abyss....for the flags i need..and still work on my UW2 or whatever I am after...

It would not have to be a equal number of essence maybe 80%? 60% somthing..anything would be better than spending days mass pulling postorms or HOH ....causing server lag....


just a thought....

I don't get how the tasks would work Dim.  How would that help when you need to backfarm things.

The idea was to farm AA in your current content rather then content you are overgeared for.

Yes, but that doesn't help when there are other things to farm like essences etc. other than AA.

Would only be really useful if there was a way to scale the tiers based on gear, rewarding you with improved droprates.

Would take a tremendous amount of balancing though and should probably be optional if you want the challenge and the improved droprates.

Why I think it should be optional is because even though i am t7 flagged, I can't kill there worth a damn when I tried.  There is a marked jump up there, and if suddenly all my t6 instances were t7 difficulty the game would be unplayable given the advice I have been given is to keep farming uc2's, but people backfarming it for their 20th alt might want to make it more interesting, raise exp rates, and maybe you get double armor drops etc

Lots of possibilities but alot of work and balancing.

It doesn't do anything to address essences.  Hunter has increased the drop rate in many zones of essences from trash mobs, but if those changes still aren't enough I suppose people could feedback as much.  My tangent was more centered on having to backfarm aa's in non-relevant content and trying to take the tedium out of it by rewarding people for centering their efforts on content that is challenging and current to their gear levels.

To clarify how the tasks would work, and this is just my suggestion, you would be able to hail an NPC at the zone in of custom tiered zones.  It could be the existing zone in vendor that sells Vellum or it could be a totally new NPC like the roaming gnome.  Upon hailing him, he checks your level flag(s) and if you are too high level for the current zone he says as much; if you meet the requirements and there is no lockout timer still running (to prevent people from using the task to farm AA too often), he assigns your group a task with a kill component specific to that zone.  This way you could specifically say X number of Y variety of mobs need to be killed, making people move around zones and kill different mob types.  Upon completing the required kills, your group would be awarded some pre-determined sum of AA that would scale by level.  Higher level zones would award more AA than lower level zones to reward progression accordingly.

As far as essences go, I think implementing some way to trade in higher essences for lower essences at a loss would be a good way to go.  I would set the trade ratio high enough to make people think twice about sacrificing essences over back farming the ones they need, but still keep it reasonable enough that you aren't forced to farm trivial stuff so much it makes you dread logging on to advance your character(s).

Dimu, those are awesome ideas.  I would love to aa farm in my current tier than going back.  I also love the ess exchange idea, just not sure imo what would be a good exchange rate.  I think if it gets to high most people wont use the exchange and just go back to that tier.

I love the idea of exchanged essence rates even if they were ridiculously bad. I am in t6-t7 content and hate going back to HOH for tokens to do t3/t4 essences ; and while yes everyone has to do it I just think a different option would be pretty neat that way I can mass farm t5 or something for character flaggings and have an exchange rate to trade t5/t6 essences for t3/t4 essences

Yeah seriously, if the drop rate on tokens wasnt so bad and the essence rate wasnt so bad HoH farming wouldnt suck dick.
Last double loot I spent way to much time farming the stupid zone and barely made my goal.

I agree, token drop rate is horrible.

Since when? In 1 double loot weekend I farmed thousands of tokens and killed the bosses and was done with that place in 2 days in t5 gear. With Repop instances its even easier now than it ever has been.   Yes it takes effort but its not horrible.  Spend  a day or two farming Tokens before double loot gets activated and its even easier.

As for exchanging ess, thats what auction is for.  I dont know a single person who didnt exchange ess for other ess.. Why do we need an NPC to do this?

Ive been gone awhile so anything I say above may be blurry.

I've been clearing HoH plenty lately for tokens and v2's and the token rate H1N1 specifically have plummeted.  3 clears and 1 or 2 H1N1's? ? That's not a good ratio.

Were you on for the last two double loot? Because I was and farming hoh was boring and slow. Even pulling a wing at a time and clicking UW when it had click.
I was clearing the zone and repoping pretty quickly and talking with people so I wasn't pulling great numbers but I was doing well enough. Spent on average 5 hours a day in the zone for 12 days.

Just a few numbers for you guys on the HoH tokens, as i am back farming these for more strike augs.  10 clears of hoh 239 T3 tokens, and yes that's counting MCP.  So about 24 tokens per clear here.  on average with the 50 mob limit it takes most people about 30 min per clear.  So 10 clears is taking 5 hours worth of time, and that's going at it constantly.  However, if your going after Gmajors, your looking at only 12 T4 tokens per clear, on average.  So it would take about 90 clears to obtain about 1000 t4 tokens, still counting MCP, so more like 100 clears to get a full 1k T4 tokens for turn in.  100 clears is 50 hours of farming just to get enough tokens to roll stomp the t4 mobs for a good full days worth of Gmajor grinding. This is of course assuming your going for enough to get your UW.  On the flip side the gmajor essence drop rate is a whole other story, personally i think it's fine where it is currently set. But the token drop in HoH is a huge thorn in my side anytime i'm having to back farm them.  I would like to see a small bump in the token drop rate, the essence drop rates in T3/T4 are both fine in my opinion.

Worthington

Small after thought if the token drop was upped a bit, then we might see newer people selling these more often.  As it stand right now i hardly ever see anyone selling these, but i do see several t7/ t8/ t9 people buying these, not sure if their getting any but i would doubt it with severe need to horde these by almost every player on the server, and if your not hording these you should be! Or, you just haven't made it this far yet.

Exactly, players can trade their essences with each other in /auc.

If I made NPC to downgrade your essence, then I might as well make them all no-drop too.

I'm not sure why you'd need to make the essences no drop with a trade down system.  And as far as trading essences, that's all well and good in an economy set up to support it, but considering how little time people spend in >T5 tiers it really isn't practical.  The only reason people even want to have a trade down option is to remove the tedium in backfarming trivial mobs/content and allow them to remain in content that supports progression.

Also considering the fact that everyone is hoarding their essences anyway and if they aren't it's ridiculously priced and not up for trade for X essence most of the time unless it's double loot. I think taking the no drop route would be ridiculous in it's own way.

I just thought it would be a smooth way to remove the bottle neck of having people endlessly grind out content that is absolute no challenge to them...its just a time sink...and let us actually focus on fighting stuff that is challenging and fun...You still need to farm the hell out of essence to make the UW ...


I do not think that it will really effect the market on essence as people would still be /auction for them as well....

Also ignoring the essence trade down possibility for the time being if that wasn't very possible or if it resulted in making essences no trade that it wouldn't hurt to look at HOH tokens. As it stands - given the above stats from worthington , it generally speaking I don't know of tokens to essence results , but saying 1000 t3 tokens would result in 100 t3 essences (excluding needing the essences for strike augs etc) that would mean 1000 t3 tokens for t3 essences , and 2000 t3 tokens to get the t4 essences done assuming that 1000 t3 tokens and 1000 t4 tokens got 100 of each essence. That would mean 3000 t3 tokens would be required to farm in order to get just the essences done for UW -- At my rate, I clear HOH in about 35-40 minutes, making MAYBE 20 tokens, 5-10 of which are mcp usually. At that rate, which is pretty average at 40 minutes making 10 usable tokens would be 66 hours per 1000 tokens, that means 198 hours for 3000 t3  tokens.

Although, that is just my rate of tokens per clear and time frame yes ; but it's a pretty avg clear time for most unless max UW already. Also could be bad RNG for tokens but given that, I think HOH tokens should definitely be looked at or have an increased in general across the board for HOH

Just do HoH during double loot or when you are bored.  Its not meant to be easy but it really isnt that time consuming. God forbid you only get 2 UWs completed during a double loot weekend.  I was in full t6 when I decided to work on my UW5 and above, it isnt needed before that, and by the time your war is t6 you can handle more and more HoH mobs. I actually farmed my 3k tokens with a full group tagging along which makes it that much longer. Gmajors are a hurdle we all went through, it wasnt that bad at all so I do not understand why people want HoH looked at all of a sudden.  You can also trade for HoH tokens or buy them with plat when you get bored of farming.  Not to mention HoH was and prob still is amazing exp, you can do some serious work on your RoA. And while farming, you can loot v2s for alts.  Thats what I did.  Dont forget HoH is 2 seperate UWs you are working on, those 3k tokens nets you 2 UW, it should seem longer.

I did average of 5 hours a day for something like 14 days. Couple days I did longer and then didnt log in the next. This was outside of double loot.
Drop rate use to be a lot better.

Why exactly did the token rate get smacked in the mouth? If anything - MCP tokens take up a huge chunk of tokens dropped per clear which is rather annoying

It took me way north of 3k tokens for 100 minors and 100 majors

During DL, I averaged bout 1:16 for minors and majors 1:22ish

Should be better now with tweaks, i haven't farmed them for augs since changes.