Back in May of this year I re-subbed to EQ to join in on the newly released TLP (time locked progression) servers to capture some of that long lost "nostalgic classic" EQ experience.
Let me say from the outset that is has been a mixed bag of experiences.
My first encounter with EQ was when Velious had already been released. I missed out significantly on the classic era (not so much Kunark) so by joining in on the TLP I hoped to at least see more of the original stuff.
From that point of view it has been a lot of fun and despite some of the "quality of life" changes that can't be rolled back (trivial death penalty, maps) that make the game less risky, I still got to have fun in places like Unrest and Mistmoor with my low to mid level characters.
With that said however I think there are a number of things that we can learn from the TLP in light of what Pantheon is/wants to be and all that it represents.
This is the bad side of the TLP.
Please note, this is not a bag against anyone or anything in particular (DBG included), just the facts. If they are painful facts then so be it.
1. Customer Support.
This is non-existent. DBG (Daybreak Games, or is that Dey break games?) started with a minimal GM support that became all too hard, then started a guide program that was so emasculated as to be useless in that guides could not do anything, but pass the buck up the line where it would probably disappear in the endless list of support requests.
The official line was "Police yourselves (and adhere to the TOS and PNP)". Open slather for the worst in humanity to let reign where possible given the almost zero support.
2. Third Party programs.
Rampant use by major guilds and individuals with multiple accounts using functions of 3rd party software specifically banned in EQ. At the top of this list is botting, spawn sniffing, zone wide mob visibility and character warping.
3. Boss Mob Contention.
EQ was built in a non-instanced model. Fine when it was 16 years ago and no one knew much and most people had a single account and communication was in chat channels and the population spread was over a number of servers.
The situation was mostly self balancing when boss raids were on the cards and competing guilds generally managed to play nice and set up a rotation so everyone got a go.
Bring in the TLP 16 years later, the server population is so large that a second one needs to open. Huge guilds with years of experience, start a rotation like the old days only to see it quickly dissolve because of personalaties (mostly the meagalomanical/controlling types) and it's a free for all with the biggest ones poop-socking spawns 24/7 with bat phones.
4. DPS Racing.
When DBG effectively withdrew support their view to general mob contention was "it's a DPS race". This resulted in "mage armies", due to the "unclassic" power of modern pets that could not be undone kill stealing mobs and pushing legitimate camp holders out of their camp.
5. Character names.
I've seen a number of character names that somehow got through the filter that you would not want your child to see and ask "what's that name mean daddy?".
And they are still in game months later because of you know what....
6. Pseudo RMT.
SOE/DBG made a reasonably smart business decision when they introduced the Krono. This is a 30 day game play token you purchase with DB Cash. It's tradeable between players and your accounts.
Instead of items being put for sale on websites and buyers placing themselves at subsequent risk of scamming, the krono allows a player to trade it for plat or items being sold by other players in game.
Far more secure for the buyer, the seller gets game time and DBG gets income. Everyone wins. Except when it's on the TLP.
Krono, like a drug is abused to it's limit. There are those players that solely survive on krono and there is a method to their existence.
Create "mage armies" consisting of 6 to 72 accounts (yes, I know of a player that has 72 accounts, all run by a 3rd party program) and camp spawns 24/7 that drop items desired by the market.
Some of this is botted (as the auto loot system makes it easy to gather the loot).
Then sell said items in game for more krono or selling the items for real world cash on websites thus perpetuating the cycle of exclusively locking down camps and excluding other players.
"Mage army" players also powerlevel other classes within thier accounts for eventual RMT as well.
Krono is a disease on the TLP and the willingness of richer players who couldn't be bothered to camp stuff and would rather "play to pay" only makes the situation worse.
This is the ugly stuff. A lot of it could not be considered legitimate gameplay. Bad behaviour, racing through content, RMT and illegal 3rd party programs.
What can we learn to ensure that this never occurs in Pantheon?
I think as a start, the ability for a single person to run multiple accounts so easily through macroing and see spawns before they pop and have zone wide visibility is key to the issue.
Cut that out and you reduce the problem dramatically.
Part of the issue with EQ is that has zero security when it comes to the data being presented to the client. It's a fact that a spawn will "ghost" in the zone some time before the actual pop. See that info and you can bring your army/guild and prepare for it well before it appears and well before anyone else can get there who isn't cheating.
Pantheon needs to have encrypted data packets and encrypted data structures to stop the proliferation of 3rd party hacks exposing critical information that can be abused.
I'd even say that a change of encryption key take place every so often (on update cycles?) to stay one step ahead of the hackers.
Data must be secure in memory and on the TCP/IP stack.
Second main issue is macroing. Too many games are susceptible to key code injections, forcing the client to accept the inputs as if it came from the keyboard.
Probably a more difficult problem to solve, but it would need to be looked at.
Customer support. Need I say more? Players cannot "police" themselves. Most people behave well enough. It's the rotten few that spoil the experience for the rest of us.
A GM presence and guides with actual powers to take action to halt the malcontents and keep order in game is a must.
RMT is a major concern to all but those that see the game as a way to make money and when money is involved any thought for other players' enjoyment goes out the window.
Mechanisms inside and outside the game (that can be used in game) need to be examined carefully for possible RMT abuse.
Fortunately we have 16 years of gaming experience from multiple MMOs to draw from and we all know some of the worst that other games have done, but we need to be aware of them and how to best avoid a similar thing happening in Pantheon.
I want this to be a great game. I don't want see RMT spam on chat, box armies, 3rd party cheats and general bad behaviour without consequence.
Now is the time to ensure that Pantheon is built with security first and foremost so we can all enjoy the game for many years to come.
I have to agree on most, if not all, of your points. I've played every TPL release except for this last one as well as Project 1999 --- Today's gamers won't care about the rules and will disrupt gameplay with trains, hacks, ect just because that is their "enjoyment" of the game... cheating the system somehow, someway. The community blacklisting them will mean nothing. There are so many players in MMO's these days that only a select few notorious players might get blacklisted --- But these players always will have their own support group. I proposed a player run justice system similar to Archeage due to customer support (in any MMO, mind you) being very very slow, but it wasn't well received here.
I'm not really sure what to say to your post except that I hope its not the same. I'd love to see some direct responses to some of the things you brought up. No general sweeping answers, but some hard yes or no's on how some of this will be combated.
I agree with the OPs assessment of TLP servers, but there are a few things that must be taken into consideration when comparing it to Pantheon. Just like project1999's blue server, the TLP servers don't reflect a normal game's population or playerbase. On EQ servers during the classic era, not only did you have less players per server (usually around 1k-1500), but you had all the hardcore players spread across 20 some odd servers instead of all on one. So p99 and TLP servers are highly concentrated with those players and it really changes the game entirely. That, among other things, is the main reason I stopped playing the progression servers after the first one. It just didn't feel authentic in any way. P99 was much closer, and even they have chosen to only have 1 PvE server and as a result, its perpetually top heavy and ridiculously competitive.
The point being, a new game with multiple servers will not be as lopsided. VR has also already stated that they will not be promoting RMT via item shops (Kronos). The last issues will be preventing hacking and botting. With those things under control, I don't think we will have to worry about the emu/tlp environment infecting Pantheon.
Well written posts sofar, I also played on Lockjaw but ended up taking a break after couple months, those 12+ armies, as friendly as some of them were!, just werent my cup of coffee, I am lookin forward to their next TLP experiment with only 1 account per physical machine and will be back for another round of eq-fun :)
Lokkia said:.....
6. Pseudo RMT.
SOE/DBG made a reasonably smart business decision when they introduced the Krono. This is a 30 day game play token you purchase with DB Cash. It's tradeable between players and your accounts.
Instead of items being put for sale on websites and buyers placing themselves at subsequent risk of scamming, the krono allows a player to trade it for plat or items being sold by other players in game.
...
IMHO Krono is horrible for all servers and games. Many games have it: WoW has the WoW token, Eve has Plex, Wildstar has CREDD. I do not like when real money is exchanged for in-game currency - it cheapens the gaming experience for everyone.
Thank you Lokkia for your report on the TLP. I gave up on EQ's hosted TLPS back when they were first introduced b/c they aren't the same as the origianl game but it is very insightful to see what happens in these servers in the present.
I think the biggest most important thing from what you mentioned would be the encription of the data sent. There will always be people willing to find a way to break it but making it just that tiny bit harder goes a long way to to reducing the amount of people doing it. If it is just as easy as downloading a .exe and running it a ton of people will do it but if it requires real knowledge to break the encryption then a lot less will do that. That being said though I have no idea how much data/what data needs to be encrypted and how or if it would affect game play or not.
As for the macro sort of issue the best I could come up with would be to have a speed limit on "keyboard inputs" a normal person can only type at some finite speed where those macros don't have that limit. A simple rate of typing metric might help or at least make it more similar to using in game macros.
What migh help this overall issue is: Make working for VRI, as a GM, Guide the “coolest” job anyone could have. With an income that is sustainable in the persons general, local, economy. The evolution is occurring, new job markets need to be recognized as the old job markets are fading away. Let the art major and philosophy major be top end viable candidates.
What migh help this overall issue is: Make working for VRI, as a GM, Guide the “coolest” job anyone could have. With an income that is sustainable in the persons general, local, economy. The evolution is occurring, new job markets need to be recognized as the old job markets are fading away. Let the art major and philosophy major be top end viable candidates.
I played on Lockjaw for a bit as well and it was rediculous... I sat there and scratched my head wondering why?? I guess not all people go back to a progression server to enjoy what once was? You know, to make friends, join groups, guilds etc. to progress and have fun.
I am still completely puzzled as to why someone would come and solo an EQ progression server.
/agree Dullahan
The TLP servers for EQ1 are not indicative of the rest of the genre. The population, the dev involvement, the GM'ing and CS, none of it is representative of any MMO gaming, not even earlier EQ1 itself. Those servers are like botting/macro writing labs for Computer Science grad students, and DBG doesn't care because they make gobs of money over and over again from the same content they released a bazillion years ago. Seriously, if you are DBG, do you really care why someone wants to have 72 accounts on a server that is all your old stuff that you put no dev effort into? No, you don't.
And EQ1 TLP servers are 16 years and 21 xpacs later. This phenomenon of botting/macroing didn't happen overnight...it took some time. Really.
Venjenz said:/agree Dullahan
The TLP servers for EQ1 are not indicative of the rest of the genre. The population, the dev involvement, the GM'ing and CS, none of it is representative of any MMO gaming, not even earlier EQ1 itself. Those servers are like botting/macro writing labs for Computer Science grad students, and DBG doesn't care because they make gobs of money over and over again from the same content they released a bazillion years ago. Seriously, if you are DBG, do you really care why someone wants to have 72 accounts on a server that is all your old stuff that you put no dev effort into? No, you don't.
And EQ1 TLP servers are 16 years and 21 xpacs later. This phenomenon of botting/macroing didn't happen overnight...it took some time. Really.
Not when those people are paying 150-500 a month in sub fees, or using kronos that other people used to pay for sub time. DBG made a lot of money of the new TLP's. You have to count all the EXP potions that were bought also :p
I agree with Lokkia all these issues need to be addressed and stopped to the fullest ability, come launch for Pantheon. Customer Service and GM's are just as important if not more important than designers and programmers. you need a good police force to keep a game fun!
I have been on a TLP EQ server, and... it's bad. The worst is a change in the mentality of players. There are people who have so little respect for the game itself, the result is all that matters, so they powerleveled a team of shadowknights just so they could harmtouch a Kunark-era raid boss, effectively avoiding all or most of the fight, using an ability that did not work in such a way or to that extent originally.
Where is the feeling for the game? Might as well have a hacking program that kills the boss and emails them the loot.
I wonder about that psychology. They do it all just to win, but in the process they destroy everything that made winning worth the effort. And yet they keep doing it.
Of course, when one guild starts doing it, others have to do the same or they will never get a kill. So, the rot spreads.
The TLP players are mostly long time (10+ years) players of EQ. Goofing around with 6 man SK harmtouch hit squads on Kunark mobs is all they have left to entertain themselves. 16 years and 21 xpacs later. It wasn't like that until the last couple years. You have to keep the age of the game in mind.
Aethor said:Well yes, but I came to TLP to play the game as it used to be, in other words, specifically with the purpose to avoid the effect of the age of the game...
Then run your own P1999 server, invite your friends only, and be done with it. In every other case, the TLPs are part of meta gaming for 16 year EQ1 vets, who want to see how fast they can go from lvl 1 to teabagging Nagafen and Vox. And every time a new TLP opens, they have a chance at a new personal best. That's the crowd of the TLP.
Your idyllic EQ1 setting of total n00b wonder and awe requires an entire playerbase of the same thinking. Only way you'll do that now is to either a) get in a time machine and go back to 1999, or b) run your own P1999 gig.