Why should the server be altered for people who don't care about their toon, don't care about advancement or grind or flagging, don't care about goals or feel invested in their character. That's not an atmosphere that sounds healthy for longterm life.
I'm not burnt out of playing my characters or the game, I'm burnt out of flagging guild characters because they can't make US raid times. Playing other peoples characters is not a normal part of playing MMOs. I have no interest in playing other people's characters aside from trying to help the guild and individual players. At this point you are telling me I should feel a sense of reward to flag other people's characters. Bananas! Maybe ask the old AK dev who was implementing 85/15?
85/15 wasn't brought to AK in a time of F2P multibox ease. We had paid subs and many people were playing one toon at a time. Influxes of entire guilds fleeing toxic shithole servers wasn't really a thing. It's not really a comparable situation.
Here's an example of an unknown unknown. For all we know Sony put in all kinds of junk to prevent certain tactics like rooting bosses, or it could be a simple bug.
It's impossible to know for sure, but based on everything I've seen in my life of coding and gaming, I feel like the latter is wayyyy more likely. Now I wanna try and find out though...
New custom zones? That would be awesome Torven I think, mentioned once quite some interesting stuff, that could be done. (when subject was, how recreating content is more time consuming than creating new content) About 85/15, I vote against it as well. I'm one of those impatient new players. Took me over a year, to get to lvl 65. And it may be another year or two before I get EP flags. Haven't even started working on them. I'm in no rush. My to-do list is soooooo long. Actually way longer. I'm glad it is not too easy. And this is coming from someone who has record number of deaths, I just can't prove it. (off topic: btw, where is my badge, achievement for this?!? )
I like this idea, i dont think we need to skip content, but the ability to be more flexible to attend raids and not having to go back from scratch and doing them chronological would seem like a huge benefit to me. This is greater then having 85/15 imo.
Hopefully forever. Google is saying the sun will envelop the earth in about 7.59 billion years. By then, I hope the TAKP server will have been relocated to a new planet in a far off solar system that the survivors from earth terraformed to continue our way of life. Torven, Robregen and the crew will be keeping things operational, but in their cyborg forms.
It's been mentioned but I'm going to put in my 2 cents as well as a non-raider and family guild member. Yes, there are other guilds here than those that seemingly have been mentioned in this thread so far. On old AK, people looking for group content needed only be of an appropriate level to access zones other than TOSR, EP and Time. This was true for nearly the entire existence of the old server. But it is not true here. So we have to alt access where those exist. But also do trials, etc... That is all fine and well for those who want the be EP. But a lot of us just want to hang out and enjoy being with friends. A lot of my friends simply just don't have the time for all that. But there are some 11 PoP zones that meet this definition and only 4 can be seen as old AK had them. All of them see a big xp drop off as mobs hit mostly lb by 62. Only half of two of the zones (PoN and PoD) still have good content in that respect from 62+. Now that it has been a year, could we please open those up. For the raiders out there consider this: it would address the 85/15 issue for some zones at least. But it would not reduce the amount of effort needed to get to EP. You would still very much earn it but without the burden of being stuck to doing in a rigid order for many where you could have come to say RZ/TZ/VZ on the right day but couldn't because you didn't have MB/alt access. There is more to this game that the end game zones, let us see it like we used to on old AK. Folks miss that.
And yet somehow, most of the guild hit 65 in those zones in a matter of (2?) days. Maybe there are more areas to try with higher risk/reward. Recall that for years, AK didn't have level-based access, and those were it.
the main benefit for me as a non EP player would be the level based PoV/PoS/HoH/BoT etc access. Right now the main way to do it as told to me by most in alliance is pay plat to someone who can come do it for you for PoS/PoV. I did it for 3 and just sat in corner doing nothing. (not a real accomplishment obviously). As far as the back flags. That is very similar. A very nice guild will do a back flag event and allow other to tag along. Those who do, don't get to experience the content. It just an evening of waiting a few rooms behind raid and then moving up to hail certain mobs. I was flagged for Tactics thanks to Temerity. Although I have less sense of gratification than if it was level based, and I did the work to level. I have no idea though if the 85/15 thing would be good for this server. A level based access like alkabor is my main desire. Maybe account based flagging? One way I like to stay engaged is trying new classes. For certain I would not want to do all the flagging on each.
85/15 would be cool. I think a different version of it though. Allow people doing flags out of order that way. But make it only less than Time. To get in Time, make it require all flags.
Nag has had a good amount of new people coming over from P99 in the last few weeks. Pretty much all of the new recruits are currently almost fully ep flagged thanks to us doing some backflags on our off raid days and from other guilds who help us out with backflags. The amount of time required these days to get at least ep flagged as either someone who is in a guild or not guilded can most likely been done in a month or two depending on your playtime. The problem that Time guilds face are when you rush thru to get new people time flagged is they just don't have the gear or aa to survive anything in P4-P5. If people want to get into places like bot, cod, hoh or tactics or their own, feel free to do the alternative access quests. I did this on one of my box's just for fun and to do something different. The server is not going any progress any further, there is no rush. Enjoy the journey and have fun.
Suddenly, deciding to face pull the four way during Vulak ring makes complete sense! Well, I think the situation on a server like that would pan out differently than it did here. Look at Test server before transfers were allowed for a similar situation (sure, people could multibox, but much like the rest of Live at the time, it wasn't particularly common and was almost always limited to two). For much of that period, there was just one major old timer top end guild, that eventually dropped off as leadership lost interest, another higher end guild that managed to get into elementals at least (Primal Brood), and finally what was basically a serverwide pick-up raid system that anyone could join, which was responsible for most the backflagging. That's the end balance point of every server, I think, but when its mostly single boxes (or all single boxes), it will get there way faster because you won't be able to box through the lower stuff.
TBH if you want to encourage more new people to stick around on the server it isn't the 85/15 rule that will do it - It's that darn mouse scroll thing. Remove the hard-code that blocks mouse scroll and you would have 150-250 more players within a few blinks. By virtue of having more players than more back flagging will happen.
This is the original client which didn't have the mouse wheel. For mouse wheel to work, it would have to actually be added with a client code change, if even possible (or wanted). If people can't play without it, they don't want an experience from this era IMO. They want a TLP or other Emu server.
That type of mouse chase cam doesn't exist yet in this era. The main client for TAKP is the Mac OS client that was used to play on the real live EQ server. I think on P99 they modify the client and intentionally cripple UI features to make it suck but we use an 'official' unmodified client and try to make everything work as it did on real EQ.
Please remove the hard-code that blocks bard song window and Quarm will be accessed by 2-3 more guilds within a few blinks.
We should also remove the hardcoded hax that disabled pay-to-win options, and experience multiplier potions, and the special code that enabled GoD autoporgression after 3 guilds kill quarm in the same week. While we're at it. You know.
What about removing the hidden dev faction mod, that makes named spawn less often. And makes tradeskills fail more?
