Sure, and I agree in theory. In practice we are all old and have jobs and kids and partner faction. Time for our 20 year old elf sim is limited these days. I miss the/who all zone. I mostly log in to raid. I'm trying to do more, because I love this game, but flopping on the couch and saying "xbox on" is winning more and more.
I was attracted to TAKP because of the many QoL features: being able to three box, unlimited transfers of toons between accounts, inventory search tool, the Spell Guide, MGBs, people giving away (or selling for pennies) items that take hours & hours of plat grinding on other servers, etc. I took my time leveling my first trio but a big reason this is my EQ "forever home" is that now I'm largely self-sufficient. I can quickly PL 1-40, alts have access to KEI, Bot9, haste, and other buffs that make the early grind more enjoyable. I can rez myself and summon corpses if things go sideways deep in a dungeon. This might be an anti-social take that goes against how others think the game should be played, but it's the most enjoyable way to experience EQ for me (And I hope TAKP is around for years because there's still a lot in-game that I want to do!) I'm similar to Tecmos in that I haven't found the loss of /w all #zone to be that big of an issue. My trader now has buttons for certain classes at 65 instead of zones, or I'll check the lower ranges if I'm looking to level alts. But I also don't think the removal of the function has improved anything either...
I plan to get around this too by planting "scouts" in zones I frequent, just level one dump-off toons to check what's going on in that zone and see what's being camped. I like doing Ice Giants in Everfrost, for instance, so this would be an ideal zone for such a scout. If I see a trio of 50's in the zone, it's a good bet they're camping the Ice Giants.
I don't like the combination of /who all and /anon and what it turned into. I think there are two competing interests here - being /anon and not wanting to be seen/disturbed versus wanting to check up on everybody and see what they're doing, possibly looking for an empty zone to play alone in. Maybe it's to socialize with people asking to join or when they're leaving, which is like a subtle form of bullying even if not intended that way, as people often just leave once they get tells. It's not possible to satisfy the /who searchers without taking away the do-not-disturb aspect of /anon. It's already annoying to see anon users because it's seen as denying you information. Those who are searching the /who list for empty zones don't have a tool for that due to /anon, so the next best thing is to assume there are no anon players, and if there are, those people are judged and looked down on for not wanting to be disturbed. This is the issue with allowing zone population to be inspected without being in the zone. If you're hiding from your guild or coworkers or sniping a rotated spawn or whatever, someone could /who all you even by accident and catch you. Having to be in the same zone is the balance between these things and that way the people in that zone can also see the players who can see them 'in person' or in local /who. And just to be clear, there is no such thing as "/who all zonename" in any EQ era and there never was. It was an eqemu thing that happened on TAKP and P99 by accident - we disabled all the GM commands so that the server can be a legit server where everything is done with the same restrictions as on the real game, but this one was missed. It's an admin command and somebody likely found it by accident. I discussed it with the team and we feel that this is the correct course of action. On a personal level, I wish EQ didn't have /anon, but it does and while I haven't used it often, I do understand that it's important to people who use it. I think the /who all zone thing caused even more grief for /anon users and there was a thread specifically about that which made me look into it and fix this. On modern EQ they have a guild UI that lists players and their location, but even in that it doesn't show your location if you use /anon. I don't know why they chose to show anon players as [ANONYMOUS] instead of totally hiding them, but I would guess it was to strike a balance between /who users and do-not-disturb users. I wouldn't be against having some way to check if a zone is empty/idling, but I think people would still try to find out who those players are by doing other searches by level/guild/class, instead of traveling to the zone to find out. You guys are all max level and have wizards and tons of coth bots spread throughout all the good zones. In PoP the 5 or so zones that are useful for exp are all within a 5 minute travel from the hub zone where you're bound. When you zone in, the people occupying the zone can also see that you're present, unlike with a remote search tool.
You could go a step further, PL few rangers (to around 40 or so) and skill up their tracking. This way you could also check if some mob of interest is up and ready to be harvested ;-)
Good points, Solar. I know web development has slowed down since cancer took Speedz, but you could imagine a "zone status" webpage with real-time updates on whether zones were up or down and showed how many toons were currently in each zone. No toon names, anonymous or otherwise, just an indicator of overall zone activity.
I think you're missing the point. This isn't about the 60+ crusty crowd who can simply run from their starting point in PoTranq to the 4-5 xp zones off of it. Most in that level range are part of one of the raid guilds anyway and those are easy to parse and then look to see who's in those zones. This is more about new (unguilded) people coming in that expect this feature when they want to try to get a group in random zones outside of those and most in those zones and level ranges are unguilded unless they're alts. I am concerned about the number of players remaining/joining this server when that Login server fills up with competition with all of these QoL items. I feel like a lot of people are not taking stuff like this seriously. And I don't understand the bullying/stalking thing at all. Has this happened that we are not aware of? I hope this hardline decision is not based on one event that happened to one person. Stuff like /ignore works to stop bothersome tells.
Why would new players come in expecting this feature? I learned about /who all zonename from this thread.
Isn't it common knowledge if you play on other Emu's? lets be honest, how many actual people new to EQ are there at this point? They're trying out the server from other Emu's most likely.
I mean, where are these new people who are struggling to level up and aren't max level or aren't in a guild with 50 guys who have every class at max level to help them out? Isn't that what the thread is about? Maybe one of you social butterflies can attract some like minded people but I think the reality of it is that EQ has maybe a couple thousand people playing it total across emus and live EQ, most of them are the PQ/P99/TLP type people that nobody wants to play with, and we're only getting older and dying off slowly. Maybe we can collectively come up with something better and carry on the legacy, I don't know. I mean, we love this game and we've been at it for almost 25 years for some of us. For me, I'm glad to be helping out here and fixing up stuff but I am not all creative and motivated enough to do some other grand project. I guess it's natural that the people who have been going hard for however many years are going to drop off once they've accomplished their goals. Hopefully more people start here and maybe the cycle happens again, but I don't know what else we could do with TAKP. The idea was that it's like AK, so people who hadn't experienced all that stuff can do it with our emu and feel like they were there too. I don't know if there is a next step other than maybe adding special events like anniversary stuff or things that make it faster to finish/quit.
This is the first emulated server I've played on, and likely the only one I ever will play on. I joined after playing on Live for 12 years then taking a break. Is that so uncommon, especially for a server that attempts to accurately recreate how official EQ once was rather than present custom content? Do most people find out about TAKP from other emulated servers?
terrible for anyone who wants to camp or kill something privately without everyone knowing the death timer of mobs having a 24/7 available reference of every trioable/grpable mob in the game and when it was killed would create a very different server experience lots of people would create easy tools to collect zone status with number of chars in all zones, refreshed every 2-5 mins then you could just have your own little guild timers webpage that tells you when things were killed in typically empty zones and get timers for pofear, pohate, naggy/vox, kunark dragons, yael, va`dyn, noble dojorn, drusella, grieg, tov, dain, yeli, venril, trak, vp, phinny, zlandi, etc all this without even needing to be online in-game, or track or scout anything yourself this sort of omniscience would be revolutionary for an mmo
I can make a webpage that shows who killed it when, and when it's due to respawn. Would that get people to log in?
The opposite, I would think. I will say seeing who or how many where in a zone was really nice while leveling, but seems like its not as important in PoP. I think people are misatttributing a broader trend in reduced players to a specific TAKP policy. This is a 24 year old game, after all.
Ok so the webpage will just be hidden, but when you kill Gaukr he drops a password that you can use to access it.
did LOL hopefully password changes daily and Gaukr spawn is excluded from all play nice policy rules, and the entire upper floor is a PvP arena with the teleporter pad disabled
The corpse drag distance is still one of the biggest qol changes for me to this day. Many new players are often drawn to zones like HS and velks and the reduced distance completely changed how CRs work there making the risk much higher to die there without a way to corpse summon. Flagging will be likely be the biggest obstacle for new players to raiding with their own chars, but it doesn't look like there's an akurate way to implement a qol improvement to alter that.
They aren't choosing TAKP; that's the whole point. They come here, play around a little and then leave before making it very far. Many players don't want to join a server and be PL'd straight to the endgame. In fact as someone who has done quite a bit of recruiting for NAG, I can tell you that players who get handed level 65 on a silver platter tend to not stick around. "Earning it" makes the endgame so much more enjoyable. There are a number of reasons new players choose to leave (boxing and mouse wheel being the biggest). /who all zone is a missing QoL that makes TAKP look so much less desirable than other emus... it's absence makes the leveling experience feel even emptier than it already is. So with other emu options on the table and without understanding how awesome everything else here is, they leave. Do I think adding /who all zone back in would magically fix the problem this thread proposes? No. Do I think its removal hurt server population? Absolutely. You don't have to listen to us. After all, we're your guests who play here for free. Maybe you don't care about a dwindling population at all, and that's fine. But the thread asked "why are people logging in less?" and the majority provided this answer. That seems pretty straightforward to me.
I know the mouse scroll thing is practically a meme at this point, but over the years I bet I've seen it mentioned hundreds of times in Alliance. I don't know how many people that's actually been a barrier to playing for, but I have to imagine it's some.
It was certainly a challenge "unlearning" my mouse wheel habits, but it also taught me to make better use of different camera angles to see what's around me, particularly when fighting something in the open like Hill Giants in Rathe Mountains, to see if adds are approaching me. Made me better aware of my surroundings.
Personally i can't imagine playing in anything but first person, like an entirely different mmo. So many different experiences with EQ, what a game.
Yep, this is what I do. And on a 3 box server, you can easily get a full overview of the area just by pointing toons in different directions. That is, if you don't overlap your client windows.
I mostly play in 3rd person so I can quickly pan around, zoom in/out, and keep up with what's happening all around my toon. I sometimes switch to first person (which feels like putting blinders on) via a one-key shortcut that toggles camera views. Mouse scroll is nice but IMO less useful than that setup. Not that it's super relevant; it's just the lack of a familiar thing that seems to turn off TAKP noobs.
Abashi is a reliable narrator Sometimes I wonder how anyone ever figured out the zonenames near Qeynos Spoiler
As someone relatively new who is taking the leveling process slowly, I don't really agree with this. For one, it assumes that people are coming from another EMU: maybe that's the case, maybe not. Also, as has been pointed out, during the leveling period (i.e., before 65) you can easily use / all level range more easily than using a specific zone command. Even better, that will show you where people around your level are. And finally, most people in this thread seem to want to use it to avoid other people, which would argue that having it in game makes the world seem emptier than it already is. I'm not sure how "boxing" is an issue that makes people choose not to play here, but if it lowers some of the toxicity I see on some other EMUs discussion forums and discords, that seems like a plus to me.
I'm strictly a solo player, I do not box at all. It's just a personal choice of playstyle. I'd rather play one character semi-competently then play three at once half-assedly, especially since I plan to roll a Bard next. I feel limited to what I can accomplish at times without help, but the fact that most people box and I don't doesn't turn me away from TAKP.
Loads gives a good example of how boxing might turn someone away (although wouldn’t it be easier to find help because many people have 3 toons to help you rather then one?) You’re never going to make everyone happy, this is true in EQ and in life. Some people are turned off by boxing, but aren’t an equal number turned on by boxing? I absolutely love boxing and wouldn’t play on this server or any other that didn’t allow it. Boxing allows me to use my limited playtime efficiently. It makes it so that if I only have an hour to play I can still accomplish something in that hour. I don’t have to rely on other people or burden them with what I want.
