"Ask Not What SoD Can Do for You ..."

I don't know how to fix SoD. I just know I would come back for sure and start over if they did fresh servers.
 
Have fun playing with the very few that would start over with you I guess. I enjoy the lore, and the uniqueness of the server, but a loss of everything would give me scant reason to return.
 
1) Population sucks
2) Economy sucks
3) Low end content 1-65 sucks (and it has always sucked for the most part)
4) Low end level 65 content sucks (and it has always sucked for the most part)

I agree with the p99 playing clowns that the game would be immensely better without dualboxing but it hasn't been possible for a long time maybe even ever. You can't wipe the server without enough players and you can't get enough players because of how stagnated the game and community is. SOD is an unbelievably niche game for a dying crowd with far too much of an investment needed to really get to the better parts of the game.


I played wow for 7 days and threw up every day I played it and whoever told me Pandaria was a good expansion and the best since burning crusade was a fucking liar and a terrible person.

Sorry for being a debbie downer. But I can't see how SOD thrives without somehow finding a way to get a large influx of players.
 
The best post I've seen in here was the suggestion to revamp low end raid content to be remade and tailored as non-18 man content.

Also how is it the year 2014 and you're still arguing about the existence of tank bots. Literally no guild has ever said fuck this living person I would rather play guy who quit 6 years ago bot outside of raiding necessity where the living person wasn't capable of doing x because of gear/aa's.

Maybe you're displeased because you wanted to be a tank and had trouble finding a group without maxed aa's and whatever stats you felt were relevant. However the problem is actually that there is/was just a lack of people to group with. When I rolled my alts I had a lot of time sitting in athica /whoing every zone and every class/level trying to see what zone had anybody I could potentially group with and the reality was every zone where I could be anything but deadweight/"leeching" was empty and dead. The only people I ever saw doing anything were low end groups at cractees and a constant stream of dudes duoing eldenal entrance who begged me to group with them because they couldn't find anybody else to actually do anything with.

Good luck finding somebody to level with if you don't want to dualbox either, I don't think I saw a single soul the entire time I leveled my necromancers and mages to 65.
 
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Reading through this forum thread all I can say is, really? I asked for ideas of how we could help attract new players and the thread gets hijacked by unproductive and mostly untrue whining.

We have been playing this game for more than eight years and still find it fun. We have tried other games and found them unsatisfying - we always come back to SoD. There's tons of good content at all levels. The staff put a lot into this server. They listen to the players and actually work toward fixing bugs. Most games out there only care about your $$.

This thread can be deleted. I'll look for information elsewhere.
 
Like I was saying, more account drives. The more advertising the better. The content is there and is attractive to people that wanted to continue playing in an EQ world without the massive expense. How does P99 advertise?
 
Atada said:
Like I was saying, more account drives. The more advertising the better. The content is there and is attractive to people that wanted to continue playing in an EQ world without the massive expense. How does P99 advertise?
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they dont have to. people are looking to play original EQ and they go there.

I had an amazing fun time leveling my bard for the first time on SOD because i could find groups whenever i wanted to exp. On P99 its a similar thing because being forced to single box makes it so more people are grouping / leveling / touching dicks.
 
If the lack of other new players to play with is the #1 factor against keeping new players, that's kind of hard to fix. Unless a critical mass of players joins up all at the same time, they're probably not gonna be able to sustain the fission reaction for very long.

Splitting the tiny trickle of new players into an array of starting cities doesn't help but that is such an old stick that it's hardly worth shaking. Sure they could hop into the portal minigame they know nothing about, but it would be a lot simpler if they didn't have to.
 
Ryst said:
Reading through this forum thread all I can say is, really? I asked for ideas of how we could help attract new players and the thread gets hijacked by unproductive and mostly untrue whining.
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Good redirect back to the original point of this thread!

I think 3 of the biggest things are :
1) Getting 2.5 out and clean.
-I know of people as well as read of several people on the forums that have talked about coming back and giving it a try once 2.5 is ready. If 2.5 doesn't crash everyone to death, it could be a huge boom. Test the crap out of this and then when it's in good shape, advertise, tell your friends etc, maybe an account drive / exp bonus thingy.

2) Give more benefits for grouping with people -> more people grouping -> more fun.
-People have said it a lot in this thread. We want to group, we want it to be more rewarding to group a bunch of people together but a lot of the times, it's just more efficient to box. I made some suggestions previously in this thread about giving groups of 3+ more $ incentive for grouping opposed to 2-boxing.

3) Zone crashes
-I applaud the staff for trying to fix this with the server change and I don't know what much can be done, but it's a pretty game-breaking issue waiting for people to recover from zone crashes. Maybe 2.5 might make this better?
 
Zaela said:
If the lack of other new players to play with is the #1 factor against keeping new players, that's kind of hard to fix. Unless a critical mass of players joins up all at the same time, they're probably not gonna be able to sustain the fission reaction for very long.

Splitting the tiny trickle of new players into an array of starting cities doesn't help but that is such an old stick that it's hardly worth shaking. Sure they could hop into the portal minigame they know nothing about, but it would be a lot simpler if they didn't have to.
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You hit the nail on the head with the 'critical mass'. Part of this issue is that old players don't roll alts continually (like they do on p99.) I think we have too much high end content and that SoD is too mature. There is almost no reason to start new characters from scratch because at 65 the game basically restarts and becomes this extremely long/fun brand new game.

On p99 many many people have multiple level 60 alts. This is because, when you level to 60, max xp, and get those few drops you want there is not much left to do.
-Yes, you can raid sky or clear fear/hate for hours a sitting, but there is a very low limit to this being worth it...
-You can then bat phone raid, which doesn't actually take up that much time and is usually done around leveling alts.
-You can camp your VP key which is about as much time as as maybe 100 SoD AA (if you are very unlucky...)
-You can finish your epic, which has guides and is fairly easy to do at this point (especially if you are in a raiding guild. Many epics can be multi quested...)
-You can farm cash/cash drops to gear alts.

I just summed up the entire p99 end game in less points than it takes SoD to get through tiers that are worse than BoE. If you want to keep playing in p99, you need to roll alts. Vet players are cycled though with new players and everyone is LFG together. Vet players in end game gear are not so horribly far off from fresh 60s that they can't group together (as they are in SoD.)

Again, SoD has a huge 'end game' with mega long quests and many many tiers of bosses. Vets typically don't start over at level 1 because of the time investment, and because of this new guys don't get the help they need from the vets. It is kind of a vicious cycle where the end game gets heavy and the low level game gets empty. I think we are at the logical conclusion of this cycle where very few people want to start a game with zero population for 65 levels (and this conclusion is hurting the end game because there is no new infusion of fresh blood.)
 
Ryst said:
Reading through this forum thread all I can say is, really? I asked for ideas of how we could help attract new players and the thread gets hijacked by unproductive and mostly untrue whining.

We have been playing this game for more than eight years and still find it fun. We have tried other games and found them unsatisfying - we always come back to SoD. There's tons of good content at all levels. The staff put a lot into this server. They listen to the players and actually work toward fixing bugs. Most games out there only care about your $$.

This thread can be deleted. I'll look for information elsewhere.
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Hey I will actually apologize for what I said because a bunch of cool quests were added last time I played for low level players. So somewhat of what I said was untrue and for that I am sorry . That said the whole allure to this game to me was never the thrilling low level content but rather the social aspect the game somewhat enforced or necessitated compared to every other game today. When there aren't any players around to interact with its a very desolate and saddening experience. Getting glimmers of existence through ooc or maybe even dalayas beginners isn't the same as finding people in low end dungeons/zones. Daffie is basically right. Ignoring raid guilds and 65+ shit the best times I had in this game were doing stupid shit with people like farming lasanth at sub 54 or whenever the monsters turned lightblue (Thanks Felyn) and then teleporting the group to frosthorn to run into DFS and clear parts of it before lasanth repopped and we ran back there in some crazy drive to min/max aa experience. Or being level 52 or something in red sun mines trying to camp the councilor and wondering how the hell we got 30 goblins on us.

For experienced players there is little to no reason to level an alt anymore and if you do its usually a race to get relevant as soon as possible. I can count the amount of times I've seen people try and do legitimate alt playthroughs on one hand.

I don't think there is any way to attract new players short of the new client, the game has a lot of issues and trying to convince people to really play it is daunting and like I said the people who are willing to do it are very niche.
 
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This one time I tried to start a guild to do on tier progression. All the new players got mad we weren't handing them random tier 8-9 loot and left for other guilds who would give them free tier 8, man that ToT/Valor b loot is real real important.
 
Thade said:
This one time I tried to start a guild to do on tier progression. All the new players got mad we weren't handing them random tier 8-9 loot and left for other guilds who would give them free tier 8, man that ToT/Valor b loot is real real important.
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I think we can conclude from your statement that fomelo and its predecessors are to blame for the slow death of the server.
 
Zaela said:
Splitting the tiny trickle of new players into an array of starting cities doesn't help but that is such an old stick that it's hardly worth shaking. Sure they could hop into the portal minigame they know nothing about, but it would be a lot simpler if they didn't have to.
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Having a multitude of starting locations is a poor choice that mmos just keep making. Cities are surrounded by low level crap with a newbie dungeon nearby, all of them. How exciting. If the mayor of Qeynos really cannot deal with the Blackburrow problem then maybe it is time for a new mayor. My vote is for Nash. Added bonus: The world is immediately loaded with easily trivialized content and quests, woot.
 
I started back in January from the recommendation of a friend named Grubbz. I felt pressure, as I usually do, from him, to try and get to max level but I started a rogue and legitimately wanted to work to max level slowly and work on learning how to play rogue with the new mechanics I had not encountered from just playing normal EverQuest. I have to say that I did have a sub for a little bit to get the speed boots reward, and I was pretty happy with the game. I have to say that the early quests were awesome, and the level capped zones are an interesting idea.

The real gem to me was the rogue class in general, and the fact that you could break into houses at night and steal items for small amounts of coin and experience, and I really enjoyed the flavor of it all. Really, this server to me was a spiritual successor to EverQuest and I was pretty excited. I think what made me decide to take a break from it though was the awful client and the issues I had running the game and the lack of people to play with. The people that I grouped with were very focused on leveling as fast as possible and I was more interested in exploring zones I had never seen.

I know that there's not a lot that will fix the lack of players, but I think being on the EQEmu list with an updated client will help a lot, and I really hope that eventually you guys get there because that's what I am waiting for at the moment.

-Xanrin
 
How to force groups to happen (and this is a double edged sword) don't allow boxing and give larger group exp bonuses per number in the group. Increase cash split per number of group members.

The server is littered with people 2box farming which makes grouping pretty stagnant. Due to low server population this may hurt sometimes but at least you would only have an option to solo or make a group - the latter being more hope for the future and gets newer server folks into groups.
 
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Atada said:
How to force groups to happen (and this is a double edged sword) don't allow boxing and give larger group exp bonuses per number in the group. Increase cash split per number of group members.

The server is littered with people 2box farming which makes grouping pretty stagnant. Due to low server population this may hurt sometimes but at least you would only have an option to solo or make a group - the latter being more hope for the future and gets newer server folks into groups.
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Pretty sure if you outlawed boxing about 70% of the server would disappear. Between the 50% that are boxes and lots of people quitting it'd just kill the server.
 
Atada said:
How to force groups to happen (and this is a double edged sword) don't allow boxing and give larger group exp bonuses per number in the group.
Click to expand...

That is a really bad idea followed by a really good idea. Generally increasing xp rates is good and specifically doing it by incentivizing desirable behavior (grouping, server funds, lesser used content, dancing monkeys, etc...) is even better.
 
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