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What does playing on those TLP servers feel like? I might want to pick this up again, and wondering whether I should do so on the new TLP or on P99 green, which is still in classic atm. How much modern stuff is in? Revamped zones still modern? I'd like an experience that feels like classic, but the P99 guys are extremely autistic in removing every single little QOL change, which is going too far in the other direction for my taste. What are the communities like on TLP / P99? From reading this thread it's infinite bot armies on TLP.
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May 1, 2020 12:49
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Philonius posted:What does playing on those TLP servers feel like? If it's your first time on a TLP, and you like EQ a lot, you'll probably have a drat good time. You'll find groups in lowbie classic zones and there will be tons of guilds and players doing stuff in every corner of the world. There are tons of QoL changes. There's also some pay 2 win poo poo, like huge bags and store bought buff potions (these scale in power so aren't absurdly strong, but they exist). The game is faster and easier overall, but most zones and items are unchanged and still loaded with nostalgia. There is a big chunk of revamped zones that kind of suck (Freeport, commonlands, desert of ro/oasis, lavastorm) but you move past them fairly fast or can avoid them completely if you want. The bots and abuse of the server rules is something you mostly notice after you've played for a while and hit level cap. It's generally a toxic cesspit when it comes to any high value camp. People will push you out of a camp if they can out damage you, and it is within the rules for them to do it. Training actually gets people suspended but still happens plenty. The groups that play the server to make money have really refined their game at this point and will generally lockdown whatever they want from average players. You can still find a guild, enjoy instanced raids and compete for open world camps just fine with your friends. Just have to go in with the right expectations. We will see if the box limitations change this at all, I am super curious how it goes.
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May 1, 2020 13:09
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Philonius posted:What does playing on those TLP servers feel like? Depends on how much RL time you have to put into leveling. Exp on P99 is very slow (original pace)
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May 1, 2020 15:05
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diapermeat posted:Depends on how much RL time you have to put into leveling. Exp on P99 is very slow (original pace) True, but they're also following the original release schedule, so you have plenty of time to get to level cap. They're stopping at Velious though, and I wouldn't mind progressing into Luclin and PoP. I don't care much for expansions after that though, so neither server is perfect.
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May 1, 2020 15:19
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Rallos posted:It depends. On Rizlona you can multi box on one pc if you want. And things like MQ2 are allowed as long as you’re not afk or warping. There’s gonna be a lot more boxers but it should be a pretty chill server. All the Kronos farmers and shitlords are gonna be playing on Aradune because that’s where the money is. If you want a much less toxic experience then Rizlona is the way to go IMO. Most boxers are happy to drop a box for a real person. And I think most people aren’t gonna be boxing 6 anyway since you’d need 6 subs unlike live. 2 box limit is sort of arbitrarily weird. I kind of wish they had gone with 3, because the number of warrior/cleric, sk/shaman, monk/shaman, ench/dru, wiz/dru, mag/dru, nec/dru combos are going to be crazy. At least with 3 box limit you can fill a group between two real people and there will be a little class diversity.
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May 1, 2020 16:00
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koreban posted:2 box limit is sort of arbitrarily weird. I kind of wish they had gone with 3, because the number of warrior/cleric, sk/shaman, monk/shaman, ench/dru, wiz/dru, mag/dru, nec/dru combos are going to be crazy. A lot of people in my guild are going single box to launch with the 2nd toon running after we get our raid group ready. We're mostly happy that Krono lords are going to get really messed up on this server as its stupidly easy to tell if someone is boxing 6 toons and camping all the high value camps.
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May 1, 2020 16:50
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Rallos posted:I think most people aren’t gonna be boxing 6 anyway since you’d need 6 subs unlike live. If someone has the tools to 6box they aren’t paying for the subs with money anyway, they are self funding it with krono and will be there to run the first couple months of classic krono economy when the fleecing is good. It’s literally how the first month of every TLP starts. Box crews racing to lguk camps then solb efreeti and endlessly hawking fbss / ada rings / gebs to week 1-2 raiders. E: by racing I of course mean warping. Who’s gonna report you when all the honest players are still in crushbone! EE: not to say box crews inherently cheat or warp. Just the fleecing type or people that sell AJ medallions for all of kunark on mangler, etc. or that dude who parks his six box necro crew in efreeti for a 24/7 camp. onesixtwo fucked around with this message at 19:34 on May 1, 2020 |
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May 1, 2020 19:29
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onesixtwo posted:If someone has the tools to 6box they aren’t paying for the subs with money anyway, they are self funding it with krono and will be there to run the first couple months of classic krono economy when the fleecing is good. It’s literally how the first month of every TLP starts. Box crews racing to lguk camps then solb efreeti and endlessly hawking fbss / ada rings / gebs to week 1-2 raiders. Box crews have been warping so long on other servers that we cant really even play POP. Some of the minis needed for progression are blocked so badly that you can sit on the spawn, only for 6 necros or something to pop up a soon as it spawns and abuse the fact that dots get full damage for kill purposes. Same problem on efreeti, 5 necros and a bard camping it, no way to get rid of them with trains or anything, you also cant dps race them. Groups like this are the primary target for the true box rules. Dedicated GMs make it even more likely that normal groups can actully do the content as well. Mostly we really want to block stuff like that Paul guild with 18 toons sitting on the ice giants for almost a month before he "quit"
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May 1, 2020 19:56
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All the stories about botting make me real wary of ever joining a TLP tbh Like p99 is modded by volunteers, how is it doing better on that front?
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May 1, 2020 21:36
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please knock Mom! posted:All the stories about botting make me real wary of ever joining a TLP tbh Don't have to pay volunteers, do have to pay GMs
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May 1, 2020 21:42
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please knock Mom! posted:All the stories about botting make me real wary of ever joining a TLP tbh The secret is botting exists on both. TLP is just more expendable and easy to scale to many more accounts with minimal investment of time compared to the p99 grind. The people that box or bot on p99 have been doing it for years and are buddies with the admin team. P99 has a very shady history of RMT being rampant and public up until 2014 or so? That culture doesn’t disappear overnight because of a forum post saying it is no longer allowed. I would absolutely still encourage someone to try out a TLP. It’s a way better experience to playing EQ fresh than playing the p99 ruleset. I really can’t speak to p99 green, at all, but the p99 vibe was just odd from the years I was active. I spent 2012-2015 on both blue and red, and I can say everything I did on agnarr and mangler more recently was much more enjoyable and less drama filled. /pickzone and instanced raiding is the only way to play EQ without losing your patience or wasting hours of your day. Having the QOL added features of origin, better loot window, lack of corpse runs are just modern day conveniences that really exist to eliminate time sinks. onesixtwo fucked around with this message at 22:01 on May 1, 2020 |
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May 1, 2020 21:53
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I had a blast on Mangler last year. I set out to see all the stuff I missed as a kid, like Nagafen, Lady Vox, the planes... Took a Monk from 1-50 and learned how to pull all the dungeons and raids. Everyone I played with got sick of the game by the time Kunark came out so I stopped playing. I recommend TLP over p99 unless you’re just super hardcore. The TLP’s feel like a good balance between oldschool content and QOL changes. It’s still incredibly grindy, but there are no corpse runs, you can pick different instances of zones, there are XP potions to speed stuff up a bit, etc. I have to stop myself from talking too much about this or I’m gonna end up playing EQ again.
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May 1, 2020 22:09
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I also recommend TLP over p99.. there's a reason EQ has been considered a dead game since WOW came out, and 100% of those reasons are still present on p99, while some improvements have been made via TLP. Not that TLP don't have their own problems, but they're very different ones. There's even occasional improvements!
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May 1, 2020 23:26
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The TLPs let you actually experience content with like 75% less pissant drama and dick waving for one. If you aren't going to turbonerd phone tree or just don't give a poo poo about raiding I guess p99 would be fine but man the stories from friends who played on the red and normal servers I am just wildly uninterested in that these days. Gimme those instances, please, I do not want to have to scramble for raid monsters anymore or deal with discord pings to log in to monopolize monsters.
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May 1, 2020 23:28
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P99 doesn't have picks right? So there is one lower guk and one sebilis etc? So even doing xp is a total poo poo show?
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May 2, 2020 01:40
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Doctor Party posted:P99 doesn't have picks right? So there is one lower guk and one sebilis etc? So even doing xp is a total poo poo show? Working as intended! Now imagine trying to do plane of fear / hate or dragons but instead spend two hours doing corpse recovery because another guild keeps training you before their raid force assembles or, because they are bored.
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May 2, 2020 01:46
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Yea that’s a level of masochism I can’t even fathom.
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May 2, 2020 02:44
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koreban posted:2 box limit is sort of arbitrarily weird. I kind of wish they had gone with 3, because the number of warrior/cleric, sk/shaman, monk/shaman, ench/dru, wiz/dru, mag/dru, nec/dru combos are going to be crazy. There's going to be 5x more enc/clr than any other combo. It's absurdly strong for every era up to PoP with 0 gear required.
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May 2, 2020 03:45
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Doctor Party posted:P99 doesn't have picks right? So there is one lower guk and one sebilis etc? So even doing xp is a total poo poo show? I actually prefer this because instancing ruins MMOs for me but yeah it's all the same world
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May 2, 2020 05:10
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please knock Mom! posted:I actually prefer this because instancing ruins MMOs for me but yeah it's all the same world Instance vs non instance has a failure point. Classic EQ you could walk from one end of lower guk to the other end at level 1 and not even get hurt. Spawns were simply to slow for the player counts, hence picks are needed once population hits a point. If you could build a game where the dungeon was big enough to support the population then I totally agree with the rule that instancing is not needed. This game design would need to be built more like EvE or some other system, it would also need to prevent monopolization in other ways. PVP games work well here since territory and resource control matter. For a PVE game you would have to steal ideas from a lot of those "other world" anime's. Like for example huge randomized dungeons come into play till they are solved then move elsewhere to prevent camping. But ya, we are getting to a point where a game like this could be done on modern systems.
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May 2, 2020 06:05
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I do not understand the Truebox restriction on Aradune. If they implement a 2-box restriction per PLAYER, and will supervise it through GM presence. Then why make us all juggle with shabby laptops on the side and two mice & keyboards on the tabe and not just allow the two accounts to be logged from the same pc. Big QoL thing you know. And yes, leave Rizlona to the people who wish to go all out on the boxing thing. PS: 3months for Classic and Kunark (again!) is WAY too long. Make it 2 months or a direct Kunark launch which opens up pretty cool low level dungeons nobody ever used outside of PLing.
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May 2, 2020 10:06
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Truebox is their shorthand solution for Macroquest 2. These servers supposedly prevent it from being used, so they can act as if automation tools do not exist. I think they're leaving truebox in place for this reason, and also because changing it to 'two-box' would require programming work to be done. There is some code in MQ2 the dev put in to make it not work on Truebox servers specifically. I guess there's a competitor product that has been in full use since I started playing 3 TLPs ago with what seems like identical functionality. Once you recognize how the program moves melee dps behind a mob it's so hilariously easy to spot. On a side note the MQ2 dev posts sometimes on the official forums and loving explodes if you suggest cheaters are using his program on truebox. It's really really funny
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May 2, 2020 10:33
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please knock Mom! posted:I actually prefer this because instancing ruins MMOs for me but yeah it's all the same world I normally agree, but man...there just aren’t enough places to level in classic. It was not uncommon to see 20-30 instances of lower guk during the peak of a TLP during the classic era. I think the only way they could avoid instancing would be to release classic, Kunark and Velious at launch. That would spread the population out and remove some of the leveling bottlenecks. But even then you’d still have to deal with non-instanced raiding. There’s no way I’m doing that in 2020.
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May 2, 2020 14:19
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Ehud posted:I think the only way they could avoid instancing would be to release classic, Kunark and Velious at launch. That would spread the population out and remove some of the leveling bottlenecks. I dunno man, with ZEM modifiers being what they are, dropping the additional dungeons would just narrow the level ranges where people go to particular places instead of being in Unrest, Paw, or Guk for 15-20 levels at a time. My wish would be for them to flatten out the ZEM in all classic->velious zones and just let people level where they can get a mob density they can manage instead of LGuk being virtually the only place to go from 25-45.
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May 2, 2020 21:44
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How does the population of these TLP servers tend to hold up? Do they tend to become ghost towns?
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May 2, 2020 22:19
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I would love a kunark or Velious launch. So many chill low level zones that barely get used at their proper level. Would be a nice change of the boring cb, ur, uguk, luck path
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May 2, 2020 22:21
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Philonius posted:How does the population of these TLP servers tend to hold up? Do they tend to become ghost towns? They usually last for over a year unless they have some weird rule sets. Mangler is just over a year old and has a super healthy community.
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May 2, 2020 22:27
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Philonius posted:How does the population of these TLP servers tend to hold up? Do they tend to become ghost towns? They basically last a year, until the next new TLP servers come out. That's the point attrition kicks in really hard and mid sized guilds start merging and folding. It's pretty depressing if your guild is one that fails and you wanted to stay on the server.
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May 2, 2020 23:20
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Solarin posted:They basically last a year, until the next new TLP servers come out. That's the point attrition kicks in really hard and mid sized guilds start merging and folding. It's pretty depressing if your guild is one that fails and you wanted to stay on the server. That's a point in favor of P99 I suppose. Whatever flaws it has, at this point you can reasonably assume it'll be going strong 1, 2, 3 years from now.
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May 3, 2020 12:01
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While it is true some guilds will fold on mangler right now, just like they did on coirnav and phinny (agnarr is different), the raiding scene will continue to prosper. The guilds that survive will happily recruit the remainers. Many guilds are even splitting their guilds over two raids to do double the amount of raids (and loot!) Remember after PoP max raid size is no longer capped at 72 but at lower amounts, so this is barely an issue. Do not undervalue the Raid Instancing on TLP's compared to p99. Unless you want to be batphoned at any time, on TLP's guilds can schedule their raids at specific times and no interference from anything other than server downtime can change that. Also right after an expansion the most popular zones spawn easily above 20 to 50 picks depending on the population density. No need to wait 26 minutes for that one froglock to spawn.
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May 3, 2020 12:12
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onesixtwo posted:Working as intended! Hah, that phrase... it's burned into my memory. I use it sarcastically at work all the time. It's just perfect.
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May 4, 2020 14:49
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Philonius posted:That's a point in favor of P99 I suppose. Whatever flaws it has, at this point you can reasonably assume it'll be going strong 1, 2, 3 years from now. Solarin isn’t wrong, but there’s more than a bit of hyperbole going on. While there truly is a dramatic shift of population when new TLPs come out, even low pop TLPs like Coirnav and Agnarr have healthy populations. Usually 1-2 euro time raiding guilds, and 3-4 US raiding guilds. Pair that with off-hours folks playing and you might be hard pressed to get groups in oceanic prime times, but I’d venture active server populations of the lower activity TLPs are as high or higher than p99 in general.
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May 5, 2020 09:32
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Mangler looks like it has 12 active raiding guilds clearing content in era. Phinigel’s progression looks similar, and you can see the drops when other server launches happened, but they still maintained population deep into expansions. Click the expansion bars to drop down the data for those expansions. koreban fucked around with this message at 09:38 on May 5, 2020 |
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May 5, 2020 09:35
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Phinny still has 3 active raiding guilds and we are in TDS. If you go gold during the anniversary event you get a free heroic character you can use on Phinny if you like.
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May 5, 2020 12:10
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koreban posted:Mangler looks like it has 12 active raiding guilds clearing content in era. Yeah, Phinny is still healthy if you're looking for raiding in the US. We're down to 2 active guilds, but that doesn't tell the whole the story - OGC still split raids, and Resolute is having to waitlist people every night. Both guilds are extremely healthy right now. The odds of Phinny not making it to live with at least 1 guild raiding is extremely low. Now, leveling up and getting caught up? That might be tougher.
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May 5, 2020 14:28
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My posts were more for Philonius’ sake to show how server populations decline but still remain relatively healthy. I might give Aradune a shot when it drops, though I’m not super jonesing for classic EQ at the moment, and I don’t have the time for top-tier raiding.
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May 5, 2020 16:08
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xZAOx posted:Yeah, Phinny is still healthy if you're looking for raiding in the US. We're down to 2 active guilds, but that doesn't tell the whole the story - OGC still split raids, and Resolute is having to waitlist people every night. Both guilds are extremely healthy right now. I’m in the process of doing that now actually. Are you still playing on phinny? I’m Szinga on phinny. In OGC.
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May 5, 2020 18:25
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Rallos posted:I’m in the process of doing that now actually. Are you still playing on phinny? I’m Szinga on phinny. In OGC. Yeah, I'm in Reso (Brumans). I pretty much just log in to raid and do progression with a set group on the weekend.
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May 5, 2020 19:16
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xZAOx posted:Yeah, I'm in Reso (Brumans). I pretty much just log in to raid and do progression with a set group on the weekend. Ahh. Cool. Added ya to friends. If you’re ever feeling bored or farming something I could get xp from I’d greatly appreciate any help. I got a bunch of level 100 gear from the FFA raid OGC runs but I gotta get to 100 to use it.
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May 5, 2020 21:04
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koreban posted:Mangler looks like it has 12 active raiding guilds clearing content in era. Theres also 2 Euro guilds on Mangler clearing all content that aren't listed.
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May 6, 2020 09:26
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