Is it OUR fault?

[Kherryn]

That was probably the most rational and thought-out explanation about the casual (read: non-raider who won't see EP and such) problems, Coprolith.  It's interesting to see that both raiders and non-raiders have the exact same problems...it's just that it's on a different level/area.  Although the mentality from some raiders that casuals simply haven't done everything (yet they have) gets old and laughable fast.

[Coprolith]

That was me being nice Urim.
"You wouldn't like me when I'm angry"
:D ==>  :mrgreen:

[Ragash]

Coprolith angry = enough mathematical proofs and equations to make most people break out their old college books.

[Tardar]

Catrika you couldn't be any more wrong IMO.

Your ignorance is showing.  If getting to TIME was so easy, then we wouldn't be having this conversation.  Then every level 50 toon would be in TIME.  Everyone would have the uber loots, and the game would be extremely boring.  

The whole idea of having different gear in different LDON camps is to make you explore and experience the whole expansion.  Not just the easiest part of it, which is obviously the only thing you want to do.  

Keep in mind also, part of the draw of EQ is the social aspect.  Sony wants big guilds, that become well oiled machines, by winning and losing together.  They want us to make websites, and discuss the game.  If the content were as easy as you want, then we wouldn't need big guilds.  There would be no challenge.  

You were right about one thing though.  A person's gear, aa, or level does not make them better than anyone else.  Just means you may have more hp.  Big deal!  Don't forget though, if you want all those hp, you have to work for it.  That means long boring difficult plows in VT.  That means plowing for hours to Isle 4 in POA and failing to spawn the Avatar.  If you only want to to play an hour at a time, that's great.  Do what makes you happy.  That's not punishment, it's the challenge.  If you choose not to accept the challenge, fine.  Good for you.  Some people enjoy that challenge.

[Bryc]

The whole idea of having different gear in different LDON camps is to make you explore and experience the whole expansion.

While I agree with the intent, the implementation went awry. Casters can stay in the most populous zone (BB) and gear up fully. Leather classes need to farm the LEAST popular zone, for the same armor.

A better implementation would be to have the BPs and Bracers in Butcher, the Legs and Gloves in Guk, the Arms and Caps in Everfrost, etc. Then all classes would have equal incentive to explore.

[Kashmiir Battlekat]

I am also going to pipeup on one thing that some folks have not taken in to consideration.

Uber Guilds and how they get phat loot.

Do understand that phat loot is not handed to "Ubers" on a Silver Platter once they get through the time sinks of getting in to zone XXX.

The mobs to fight for these loots are TOUGH. It takes many hours, days and even weeks of engagement to beat these mobs. Death after death after death with extreme frustration. It takes EXTREME teamwork and  knowledge/skill to kill most of these high tiered mobs. These skills and teamwork do not just 'happen' they mature through many hours, days, weeks, months and even years of playing together. Your average family casual raiding guild simply does not have this 'Military' like teamwork down to a science and thus would never kill these mobs even if they gave them access to the zones.

Do keep that in mind please :)

Edit: Corrected some spelling and grammar. I suck at spelling and grammar --hehe

[xaoshaen]

It is just so typical of the hardcore players mentality to think that their needs and wants are different from those of casual gamers.

Eh, I'd say it's more typical of people to think that their needs and wants are different from others. We all like to think we're 'special' until cold reality beats the illusions out of us.

When they've beaten the toughest zone available to them they have 'beaten the game' and scream for new content. Newsflash: casuals "beat the game" too. They beat the toughest zones available to them. There are even tougher zones in the game, but in practice they are unreachable either because
a) SOE put a timesink in front of those zones that keeps hardcore players out for a few months. For casual player that timesink is virtually impossible to overcome without vegetating into a mindless drone. Or
b) The zones require a power upgrade that takes months if not years of AA grinding and gear upgrades to attain, just to become even remotely doable. Yay, more vegetating. New expansions are coming out much faster then casual players can progress thru the old content, and thats a good thing too because without them people would simply quit on account of the game becoming too boring

I have to disagree here. Take, for example, Veeshan's Peak. It's a zone that's now available for anyone who really wants to get into it. 90% of the key is soloable, and Trakanon is easily killable with a couple of groups of decent players with bazaar gear.  Without the rabid competition over the quest camps that occurred during Kunark, the whole quest can be done over the course of a week of moderate play. VP still has gear that would be an upgrade for a lot of casual players (41% haste for example). Every time I've gone with a few friends to clean house though, there's been nobody else there and a full set of spawns for us.

Sleepers Tomb and North ToV are all accessible to casual players, requiring a single kill or a bit of a run to enter, respectively.

Realistically, the only zones that are still even moderately exclusive are:
1) Elemental Planes
2) Time
3) High end GoD.
4) Vex Thall

At least on my server, even the elemental planes are becoming fairly crowded. At last count there were a dozen guilds, roughly 1200-1400 people, that were elemental flagged (a couple of the guilds are really large), with at least two more only needing one or two kills to get there. I know of other servers where there are even more people flagged for the zones.

Content that was once considered "hard core" definitely does trickle down to the casual player.

The biggest thing I'm hearing is not that casual players want more content, but that they want better content, which tends to equate to better loot and better exp. Certaintly the amount of content targetted at casual players far exceeds that which is targetted at the hard core players.

I frequent over a dozen zones on a regular basis, and i never ever see an EP+ flagged player there other then to farm items for cash. Pre-LDoN, EP+ flagged player flocked to PoFire like newbies to Paludal, and a lot still do on a regular basis when they are not raiding. Saying that casual players take the road of least resistance and concentrate themselves in a few zones is the height of hypocrisy.

I'm going to take it that you're not EP flagged, because Fire just doesn't support that many groups, and Earth is better experience anyway  :lol: I'll certaintly agree that grinding isn't my favorite part of the game, and that most people will gravitate towards areas that will let them minimize the time they spend doing this. On the other hand, I know that I often wind up getting less than stellar exp, simply because I'd rather do something other than a pure grind with my time. This may put me in the minority /shrug.

Newsflash #2: xp grinding is by far the most boring aspect of the game. You can't blame people for wanting to get over it as fast as they can and flock to high ZEM zones. And thanks to mudflation (which is turn is caused for the largest part by hardcore players pharming and selling items that casual players cannot obtain themselves), a couple of thousand pp will buy you gear that makes hunting in just about every pre-PoP zone a moot point. The risk-vs-reward ratio of doing Kael raids is near infinite, because there's 0 reward in it for the present day casual player.

That's odd. My Beastlord is still wearing his White Dragonscale Helm from a Tormax kill a while back. The Avatar of War and King Tormax still drop pretty decent loot for casual players. I'm trying to figure out exactly what hardcore players farm and sell that a casual player couldn't get on their own if they wanted to. I'm sure there are some, but in all honestly most of the items I chose to farm for cash were open to pretty much anyone who wanted to give it a shot. I sold off a bit of Ornate, some drops from Droga, a bunch of tradeskill junk (which I am now kicking myself for, but that's another story... damn shawl!), and some CT gear.

All these points were already discussed in the first half of this thread, in much more detail (and a much calmer state of mind). Just as the discussion is starting to get constructive, and people actually start thinking about solutions to the current problems with the state of EQ that would benefit casual and hardcore gamer alike, the thread suddenly degenerates again because some people feel the need to enlighten us with their views that casual gamer should just stfu and stop whining. Well you can take your 'enlightened view' and stick it where the sun don't shine. As my pappa used to say: if you aint got nothing nice to say, STFU.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and conjecture that where someone gains their experience isn't the heart of the problem. Even for an EP flagged person, the additional spots to grind in amount to a handful of camps in Fire and Earth, which are hardly enough to justify the hue and cry being raised. So, this then leaves the time not spent grinding. We can largely disregard the hardcore, non-raiding players for the purpose of this discussion, because they have access to the same content as the casual player, they just have more time to spend there. We'll then consider the non-raiding player ('casual') and the raiding player ('raider' or 'hard core'). Obviously, the raider spends a good chunk of time living up to his namesake, often in areas unattainable to the casual player. What would you like to have made available to the casual player to do in lieu of raiding?

Overall, we have the following content available to the raider, but not the casual player:
Time
Time B
Fire
Earth
Earth B
Water
Air
Vex Thall
High end GoD.

I'm not really sure that this disparity merits all the fuss that's being made over it, to be perfectly honest.

Newsflash #3: like it or not, casual gamers account for 95% of Sony's revenue for this game. Without them the game would be dead instantly. The reverse however is not the case. Instead of whining about the casuals whining, try joining the discussion in a constructive way, because its in everyone's best interest

I'd certaintly be interested in hearing where you came up with the 95% figure. Like I say, on my server there are, at a bare minimum, 1200 accounts with EP flagged toons. You're now talking about a server population of 23,800 casual accounts just to make up for the EP flagged folks. This doesn't count the people who are in Vex Thall, or those who play 40 hours a week but aren't into the raiding scene.

[feralize]

When they've beaten the toughest zone available to them they have 'beaten the game' and scream for new content. Newsflash: casuals "beat the game" too. They beat the toughest zones available to them. There are even tougher zones in the game, but in practice they are unreachable either because
a) SOE put a timesink in front of those zones that keeps hardcore players out for a few months. For casual player that timesink is virtually impossible to overcome without vegetating into a mindless drone. Or
b) The zones require a power upgrade that takes months if not years of AA grinding and gear upgrades to attain, just to become even remotely doable. Yay, more vegetating. New expansions are coming out much faster then casual players can progress thru the old content, and thats a good thing too because without them people would simply quit on account of the game becoming too boring

Beating the "toughest zone available to you" does not equate to beating the game. That is only true if you've beaten THE toughest zone in the game. It's called progression: the only constant common denominator between casuals and ubers. You beat Kunark dragons, you move onto Velious. You kick arse in Velious, you move onto Luclin etc etc. When a casual player beats the toughest zone available to him/her they still have numerous, tougher, options available. That does not ring true for hardcore uber guilds. Not that I really sympathise that much with them because that's the path they've chosen to take with the time that they have available. And really, this only happens to a very select few people. Personally, I hope I never am in a position to say "I've beaten the game". After that, what else is there?

As for timesinks, they, like previously "high-level" zones, become more easier to work through as time goes on and the average players gear gets better. But that's kinda the crux of the matter. Everything gets easier for everyone in a very gradual fashion so new content is always opening up to all but the most hardcore of players unless you make a deliberate attempt to not level, not get plat and not improve your gear. I haven't known too many people who play like that. Then again according to Catrika you'd get the answer that these timesinks were so incredibly easy you can accomplish them by just doing an /ooc in PoK for X number of people to complete PoN hedge event and an hour later you'd be done with it :roll:

Saying that casual players take the road of least resistance and concentrate themselves in a few zones is the height of hypocrisy.

Newsflash #2: xp grinding is by far the most boring aspect of the game. You can't blame people for wanting to get over it as fast as they can and flock to high ZEM zones.

All types of players take this path but if you asked those players I'm sure a lot of them would say that "to have fun" is their #1 goal in the game. The definitions of fun are very broad though, for some xp grinding is fun because they are steadily improving their characters abilities and the light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter as each level/aa point passes. The problem, and this stems directly from players incapacity to not compare themselves with other players (gear, levels, aa) especially at the high end, is that light in the tunnel keeps getting pushed further back as each expansion comes along. Regardless though, no-one is forced to do anything in this game. The game is what you make of it, end of story.

Newsflash #3: like it or not, casual gamers account for 95% of Sony's revenue for this game. Without them the game would be dead instantly. The reverse however is not the case. Instead of whining about the casuals whining, try joining the discussion in a constructive way, because its in everyone's best interest

Yes and most casual players are, I assume, having fun. If not, why are they playing? Other than the age-old "if I put 10 hours into the game why shouldn't I get exactly the same reward as what an uber player gets in 10 hours" complaint (which I guess those disagreeing on will just have to agree to disagree), what exactly are the casuals whining about?

[Coprolith]

Really getting tired of all the excuses people. Where the heck does this angst about casual players being able to get gear as good as yourself come from anyway? Its not what casual players can obtain, its about how long it takes them to obtain it. 3 years ago hardcore players were saying exactly the same thing about their Sleeper's Tomb/NToV gear. I don't hear anyone complaining that my current gear is approaching ST/NToV quality now. Casual players/guild will always be gimp compared to hardcore players. No casual player is denying you your right to your uber-gear, you've worked for it. If i spent 5 years of doing LDoN mission to completely gear up in the best available armor available to me, then I've earned it. If a casual guild raiding only once a week finally sets foot in VT after 5 years of playing EQ, even tho most of their members are bazaar/LDoN equiped, then they've earned it.

We all get what we deserve, when we deserve it. Anyone saying otherwise is spewing elitist crap, period.

[Kashmiir Battlekat]

I suppose the Uber versus the Casual debate could go on forever.

I think it boils down to the basic premise from an Uber Guild stand point of:

I had to kill XXX mob to obtain YYY-001 Uber Equipment.

In order for you to obtain this same quality of gear you also should have to kill XXX mob to obtain YYY-001 Uber Equipment.

If you cannot kill XXX then you dont deserve YYY-001.

I suppose that it in a nutshell really.

Ya know what the worst thing is that Sony ever developed for Everquest? The ability to Dye Armor any shade you wished. To me that is the worst thing ever implemented.

[xaoshaen]

Really getting tired of all the excuses people. Where the heck does this angst about casual players being able to get gear as good as yourself come from anyway? Its not what casual players can obtain, its about how long it takes them to obtain it. 3 years ago hardcore players were saying exactly the same thing about their Sleeper's Tomb/NToV gear. I don't hear anyone complaining that my current gear is approaching ST/NToV quality now. Casual players/guild will always be gimp compared to hardcore players. No casual player is denying you your right to your uber-gear, you've worked for it. If i spent 5 years of doing LDoN mission to completely gear up in the best available armor available to me, then I've earned it. If a casual guild raiding only once a week finally sets foot in VT after 5 years of playing EQ, even tho most of their members are bazaar/LDoN equiped, then they've earned it.

What excuses? What angst?

The fact remains that outside of the zones I listed above, casual players have access to every zone in EQ should they choose to persue it. I'm still not sure where the whole "not enough content" argument comes into play.

We all get what we deserve, when we deserve it. Anyone saying otherwise is spewing elitist crap, period.

I think that's a little naive, but then perhaps I'm just overly cynical. At any rate, this seems more like a statement a hard core player might make: sure, casual players don't have access to current raid zones, but they will eventually. They'll get what they deserve when they earn it.

[Kashmiir Battlekat]

They'll get what they deserve when they earn it.

That is perhaps the most intellegent thing said in this entire thread.

Let me define "They" though:

They = Everyone.

[Lorathir]

Well...would anyome object to this scenario...

Let's assume for example, GoD raiding force spends 6 hours on a raid and obtains the Chestguard of Scooby Doo.

What if a casual, lvl 65 player did a quest that takes 6 hours too - and obtains a Chestguard of Scrappy Doo? Half the stats of the Scooby BP - maybe a quarter?  What if it could be upgraded by doing a similar quest, similar timesink to make it the Scooby BP? Say, a total quest time of I dunno - 18 hours, 24 maybe in 3, 4, maybe 5 sittings? You could face mobs tuned to your level with increasing difficulty in perhaps an instanced dungeon.

What do you think? Risk vs Reward is represented there, time taken to get the item is tripled, maybe quadrupled when compaired to obtaining it the raid way. Raiders get their 60+ man event they like, soloers/two groupers who can't put in the online time end game guilds require get the same bp. Log on, do your Scooby Doo quest for an hour or so, log off and pick up again in a few days time - maybe you can only 'EQ' at the weekend.

Anyone see any problem with this?

[Aneya]

We all get what we deserve, when we deserve it. Anyone saying otherwise is spewing elitist crap, period.

Corp, I agree with you that we reap what we sow. However there are some people that don't listen to reason on both sides of the spectrum. If they insist on ranting, let them and put them on /ignore. In the old days of usenet we used to have killfiles sadly forums don't have those so we just have to do it subconciously.

When it comes to statistics you are a real stickler for correctness and I respect you for that. However if we are to solve this problem, the same attention to detail applies and the problem is far more complex. What we are dealing with is the social cultural context that has evolved around eq and gaming in general. If we are at fault for anything it is oversimplefying the problem.

If you have ever looked at Nick Yee's stuff you can get a feel for just how complex the problem is. http://www.nickyee.com

In one of his more recent articles which is based on several of his previous works plus a strong back ground in Social Psychology,
http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/000428.php

We have the following factors influencing the psychology of a player.

Dynamics

• Relating
  
• Loyalist
  
• Mediator
  
• Aesthete
  
• Performer
  
• Egoist
  
• Leader
  
• Manager
  
• Theoretician
  [/list:u]
  Traits
  
  
  
  • Modesty
    
  • Need for Order
    
  • Dutiful
    
  • Achievement
    
  • Warmth
    
  • Estraversion
    
  • Assertiveness
    
  • Trust
    
  • Compliance
    [/list:u]
    Motivations
    
    
    
    • Group/Lead
      
    • Relationships
      
    • Role / Immersion
      
    • Achieve
      
    • Grief
      [/list:u]
      
      That is
      9 factors in Dynamics
      9 factors in Traits
      5 factors in Motivations
      
      Assuming there are only 2 degrees for each factor, 0 and 100,
      total number of combinations there are:
      512 possible combinations of Dynamic factors
      512 possible combinations of Traits
      32 possible combinations of motivation factors.
      
      Total there are 2 to the 23rd power number of combinations before factoring in degrees. Thats approximately 8 million. We are talking about a multivariable problem that goes beyond most peoples ability to grasp.
      
      Assuming an even distribution of eq players among the 8 million combinations, no 2 eq player is playing the game for the same reason. This is easy to prove, half a million players into 8 million combinations is 0.0625 players per combination. Even if we reject half the combinations as being unlikely, there are still 0.125 players per combination. From this we can argue that no single individual can say their personal experience represent those of other players let alone the majority of eq players. However this does not take into account of skew based on culture etc and I don't have any data on that nor would anyone be able to come up with it without some serious research.
      
      Before we can solve the problem we have to understand the situations. To understand the situation we need to understand just how people and these social cultural factors interact with the game. Any solution that does not take this into consideration will fail eventualy.

[Lorathir]

Kash, how you taunt us so with the ability to edit. Maybe if I raid.. :P

Wanted to clarify my use of 'quest' in my last post. By quest I didn't necessarily mean non-combat encounters - quite the opposite.