• Assuming current Kael difficulty as a baseline, would you like to see new content:
Harder/Much harder. I'm not against an "easy component" but I think there should be some content in game that inspires players to consider their actions, to understand the abilities and pay attention to strategies. I think the structure and mechanics on the server are really nice and it's a shame to not flex it a little. I think some easier content should be as difficult as original kael and some should be considerably harder. Ideally this content would exist but not be required for progression, it could be totally orthogonal. Hard modes of bosses for small rewards would require relatively little investment and since they aren't required, precise tuning isn't as important. If an encounter is too hard, we can grow into it.
• We have also been working on the idea/scripting to implement a 'hard mode*' in new content, so if you think the general zone should be slightly easier with hard mode, then that's good as well.
Gnonim hit the nail on the head with this. Hard mode that drops more of the same or offers faster progression towards the same goals only will be basically impossible to balance and will leave you in one of two extremes: (1) its not rewarding enough, farming easy content three times as fast with no risk is faster than farming difficult content for 1.5x the reward. Even if you, by some miracle, balanced these things you'll still pick the easy option because it's consistent. (2) The hard mode content is 3x harder (or whatever, for kael it probably needs to be in the 3x range to be interesting), and it legit pulls you through progression 3x faster, but now you have a ton of bitching that it's impossible to complete in easy because it takes too long or the hard mode content is too short. Furthermore "you now have less to do" is kind of a lame reward for putting the effort into learning new mechanics and doing more dangerous content. I think the issue is to make content that will be meaningfully challenging, it'll will need to be many times harder than current kael yet you can't scale common drops by that factor without making easy mode feel worthless. However, you CAN make things 4x harder and offer distinct rewards that are some tiny fraction better than what's available through easy modes.
I talk about this above, but I really love the solution where encounters can be done on hard mode for small additional bonuses to stats or whatever... just enough to be a reason to do it. it's a challenge that exists and it doesn't even matter if it's "too hard", heck it may even be literally impossible at our current gear levels. All that really matters is that it gives the player a reason to care about playing well, learning the mechanics, making good choices and about gearing up. However, I think this is a nightmare without talking about raid size because it may just inspire larger and larger raids so......
Fixed raid size is a really good concept and I think it should happen. It will GREATLY ease balancing and tuning of content. I think it is overdue and removes one of the aspects of the server people tend to get hung up on and worry about too much. I really think that standardizing raid size will allow a much smoother, more precise content development process that will benefit the server a lot. I think this bit of normalization is essential to making interesting and challenging content. Otherwise you will always have to plan for people simply adding more as a way to meet challenges. I'm not worried at all about the characters I leave behind, they'll provide a useful bench for me to give my raid compositional flexibility and I'll probably just end up starting second teams with them; furthermore, I don't really feel any emotional attachment to any of them. Having to think about and justify the inclusion of specific classes is more fun than just "well add 6 more because why not".
• Do you find the background lore, NPC emotes, quest background stories etc. engaging or entertaining, or don't really care much either way?
I can't care about this at all. I'm not against it but just please don't make me read it. If it's enjoyable to develop then by all means keep it going!
• Is there any mechanic that we've used previously that you would, or would not like to see repeated?
My biggest suggestion is that it would be good if different mobs had different abilities and forced different considerations and approaches. In Kael every mob is the same roughly speaking. In VP there's basically 3 mob types (dogs, dragons, necros). The necros and dragons are already quite similar but I think that diversity in the mob population is really good for forcing the player to keep their brain going. As an example, in VP when doing huge pulls, I always had to think about when I was going to kill the dragons, the way; this only matters because they have unique abilities compared to the dogs that change the dynamics. It's just a way to keep the content more engaging and make pulls different from one another. I think the more unique "base type" mobs you have the better. I know this is time consuming, but even just 3 or 4 different types makes for very diverse pull combinations.
• Feelings on bane weapons?
Neutral more or less, sounds kind of like just an annoyance but maybe if implemented right it would be fine.
• Aside from the content, what would you like to see 'fixed' as part of this Tier? Example I've heard: Item effects are not very useful/being re-used. But it's open ended, whatever you'd like to see done better in some way, or fixed.
Item effects are always an issue but I don't think that's immediately fixable. There's so few available improvement avenues for old-school EQ, original upgrades. You can have one of each effect and there's only a few possible effects, the original framework just wasn't meant to enable the kind of slow, graded power increases that we expect in modern games. This also ends you up on the "addiction model" where since you need that effect you can only replace it with something else with that effect and so it ends up with very ridgid itemization (arms always have effect x, boots have y, etc). My too-much-work idea for fixing this would be to just steal one of the meaningless stats in the game... corruption resistance or something and set power (whatever that might mean, let's say the level of your UC effect) scale off of it. That way upgrading is straight forward and you aren't "hooked" on individual pieces because they don't contain unique effects. This is essentially the way WoW solved this problem in vanilla through "spell power".
• Since this post will probably get people's attention, is there anything currently broken or janky that you feel needs to be addressed? (completely separate from the Tier).
Obviously donations are needed because so much QoL is locked behind them. I am generically in favor of the way they work at the moment because I think compensation for the nice content and experience on EZ is well justified. I know there's some issues with the ability to accept them right now but what if the donations went to compensate those who currently keep the server alive, bug free and experiencing current content. I would be very in favor of compensating our GMs with that money. I think it makes a lot of sense and is really the way the money should be distributed. I would also be in favor of just setting it up as a money that gets channeled to charities, some combo of children with cancer, vets, animals, I don't know. It doesn't matter much what you chose, there's a lot of obvious choices.
