Six Hour Lockouts on Heroic Adventures and Lowered XP Post Lvl 100 Outside CotF & TDS

[Fry]

Six Hour Lockouts on Heroic Adventures and Lowered XP Post Lvl 100 Outside CotF & TDS

As we move into The Darkened Sea, we've made a few changes to ensure that adventuring in the newest content will be the best way to gain experience to advance their characters in both levels and AA points. Playing in the newest content should always be the most attractive, and demolishing content from several expansions ago should not be the fastest way to advance your character.

Once you hit level 101, content released prior to Call of the Forsaken will grant less experience. This includes tasks, rewards, and farming NPCs. If you’re currently planning on banking rewards and tasks from pre-Call of the Forsaken content to help level through The Darkened Sea, you will likely find the rewards to be less-than-awesome once you ding 101. We encourage you to participate in the newest content, and find places in The Darkened Sea to adventure with your friends.

Each Heroic Adventure Will Have a 6-Hour Lock Out

Heroic Adventures are great because they offer scaling content to players of a variety of levels. This content has a long shelf life for players since it can be accessed by players of a wide range of levels.

It’s not really a fun experience to sit in one Heroic Adventure for hours and days at a time, grinding experience to advance a character. Adventure is all about going out into the world of Norrath and doing things! To address this, once The Darkened Sea launches we have placed a lock out of 6-hours on each Heroic Adventure. Our goal is to reward players that explore more of the content, without punishing the players that prefer running a few Heroic Adventures a day with their friends.

We wanted to let you all know about this prior to the launch of The Darkened Sea, so you can start planning how to spend your time in this expansion. We’re excited about the 21st expansion to EverQuest launching on November 11th, 2014 and we hope you are too!

If you’re an All-Access member, you can purchase and play this expansion two weeks early (starting on Tuesday, October 28) and you can take 10% off your purchase of either the Standard or Collector’s Edition of The Darkened Sea!

Offical EQ Forums Post

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Reasoning for this? I am guessing they don't like people being anti-social in heroic adventures, and want to try and force people to buy CotF and TDS expansions so they can level to 105? I am really at a loss for these changes, anyone have ideas?

 

[orion949]

It’s not really a fun experience to sit in one Heroic Adventure for hours and days at a time, grinding experience to advance a character.

Really? Thank you Devs, for telling us what is, or is not fun for the Player! Im sure players had no idea how to have fun in the game until they were mandated how to do it.

Some players love epic grinds, getting hopped up on Mt. Dew and Doritos for a 12 hour grind and having the sense of accomplishment and bragging rights when its all said and done is absolutely something that some players live for.

Granted, Im not one of them, but I still feel like its not the place of the Devs to try to force the Player to have "fun" the way they mandate rather than at the sole discretion of the player. (also assuming you are not interfering with other Players fun with your play style that is)

 

[Nicedreamsbt]

I really think the people who still play eq love grinding mobs. I have not played another mmo that has this feature where you set up a camp where a named spawns and grind. I really hope they will have it in eqn but I do not think so. All the new mmos avoid this kind of game play and it sucks.

 

[JimJohnson]

If you love grinding mobs you can grind mobs. They did not remove the fun out of it. They removed the reward so you might try to grind mobs in the new zones leaving old zones that you slaughter like a stamped pack of buffalo running off a cliff.

You could be thanking them so you didn't get a reality check when you do all the work and get no exp on ding thinking its broken.

 

[Sum1]

It's bullshit, though.

In a backwards way they just nerfed HS and decap farming for exp... as well as SK swarming.

And you can bet your ass they thought of that before they did it.

 

[fenzurdapanzer]

i think its a good idea. It forces players to deal WITH players. If you wanted to avoid real life players, play a game that isn't an MMO. When I first started playing this game, most of the fun was getting to a camp, getting trained and having to CR. Like JJ said, if you still wanna avoid RL players, go nuts in those old zones...just will take you longer than you expected. I'd be ok with them deleting zones. Condense the population so they aren't so spread out.

 

[Kkthnx]

It will just push people to newer zones, killing the old ones, and over populating the new ones, causing lag issues and lack of camps

 

[supertimmy]

Condense the population so they aren't so spread out.

by itself, i don't have any issues with this. but if this is the eq dev's intent, they should do it with a carrot, not a stick. i was really looking forward to doing rof progression at 105 with my shitty geared monk as the tank because, you know, it would be fun. and i still will do it, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth that the exp rewards are going to be castrated.

 

[dewey2461]

I'm honestly surprised the HA's didn't have lock out timers before.

Anyone asked them to boost the chance of a named now that they limited the number of times you can go through the HA's ?

 

[hawthorne]

Well, guess I have no real interest in returning to EQ now. Following the WoW model isn't something I like. WoW does the reduced XP after a new expansion launches thing too. And apparently I am not allowed to adventure in HAs all the time if I want to, I have to go do "other" stuff. Ah well.. save me a bit of money I guess.

I was really considering coming back too. Well, FFXIV will have a new expansion shortly too. And I keep hearing interesting things about ArcheAge, although I can't stand forced PvP. Guess it's time to dabble some more.

 

[aspire2008]

The thread on SOE live for this just exploded in not even 24 hours and counting yet. Noone likes being told how to play the game lol.

 

[William12]

I give it 3 days until they reverse the decision. That's what the optimist in me thinks

 

[Quackanator]

Predicting a post from SoE something along the lines of

Due to public demand for lockouts on HA's and after wide consultation with the community SoE has decided to implement a Pay-Per-HA policy that will ignore the 6 hour lockout. This is what seems fairest option to balance new content exploration with the tedious grind in repetitive missions and had the most player preferences and so will be implemented.
In ancillary news and after wide consultation and after much public demand, the paladin AA mount line will all now have the same graphic of magical flying princess princess ponies with unicorn horns and fairy wings. Stay tuned for the matching armour set available soon from the bazaar.

 

[JimJohnson]

If they allow people to just farm HA they might as well stop doing any development.

I personally think they should stop doing instanced zones all together.

 

[Zero0003]

Yep I agree. The more people that stick to HA the more out of tuned they are with the expansion and what it offers. At least this makes people go out to see the content and actually have a challenge.

 

[fenzurdapanzer]

yup, instances turn a MMO into just a multiplayer game...sometimes not even that with all the botting. I like it. makes me actually WANT to play again rather than most of you saying it turns you off.

 

[nbkanvz]

You're in our world now!

 

[Sum1]

Yep I agree. The more people that stick to HA the more out of tuned they are with the expansion and what it offers. At least this makes people go out to see the content and actually have a challenge.

But what if that's not what people are looking for out of the expansions? Why should people be forced to stay at the very bloody edge of content? Mob exp erosion already happens as levels increase.... it's just the way it is. Artificially handicapping it even more sends the wrong message to the player base.

As someone who's just come back after 3 years I'm AMAZED at the game changes that have occurred. It's like they took MQ2 and pulled significant chunks of its functionality out and implemented it, all the while turning the game itself into a pay-to-go sort of fuckin iphone app.

 

[aspire2008]

How is it the players fault that they can't implement better game design to start with. After 15 years, you would think they would have learned. 10 or so of those years since instances have existed.

I mean if you make an HA in which the only 2-3 task steps is kill 15 mobs and hail npc and it awards you almost equal currency to doing a task that takes longer and has 8 more steps involved. Which one do you think a player is going to choose?

 

[aspire2008]

This is exactly what I mean by less content over the years. They haven't come up with anything new recently. My guess is they use some software to generate those tasks in the first place. The software is probably limited in the things it can do, and the devs have grown accustomed to just using the same thing over and over instead of trying anything new.