There are still group/6man zones that are fun and not trivial for high end people, and saying that doing seb or lguk "on tier" is as challenging as high end raids is ridiculous. You sound like you've never actually done most high end stuff here and are making assumptions.
Not really, and not enough. And I have done as much raiding on SoD as anyone, it is mindless and boring, it is the raid leader who does most of the work of herding the sheep, the puller gets a bit of extra interaction, but mostly it is just standing in a corner waiting for someone to bring you mobs and then you spam out your routine. Good group content isn't like that, or shouldn't be.
I played on p99 and on two of the real progression servers and a whole lot of the nostalgia wears off when you do that stuff again compared to newer games with much more robust character design, combat mechanics, questing and tradeskill systems, etc. Some people genuinely feel that Kunark/Velious was the pinnacle of MMOs and that's fine, but there was a whole lot of awful shit from that era that I do not miss at all, and that's why I come back to this server every so often and not p99. There is no single game that satisfies every type of player, and there won't ever be, because different people prefer different mechanics, difficulty curves, time investments, lore, you name it.
It's not about satisfying everyone, it's about how SoD currently only satisfies a handful of raiders and nobody else. I play modern MMO's too, you are never going to compete with the quests of TSW and you are never going to beat the PVP of WoW's arenas and battlegrounds. But the standard soloing and group progression of that early era of EQ is something I've never seen done as well since. This game had that originally and then threw it all away.
Saying there is no way to progress is just silly. Your version of progress and mine must be incredibly different. Doing literally anything besides sitting in Athica is worthwhile. You seem to be implying that if you can't do things at the same level as a high tiered person who has put years into their character, then it is progress.
No what I'm saying is that all the players are high tier raiders now. So a new player, even if they find the motivation to level to 65 alone, they find a dead spot in the game where you have to wait forever to find a pickup raid doing tier 1 stuff, or even treasure maps. Bounties help but it isn't enough and the lower the population gets the worse it gets at this point. Raid guilds want 250 AA's and a certain standard of gear and achieving that without a raid guild is not fun or even possible for some people. If you can beg or schmooze your way in to a raid guild, even one or two helpful players from that guild will transform your progression because it's enough to do tier 1 raid content, get your spells etc. But for me this is the point the game becomes broken. You either play alone doing stuff nobody cares about, or you get pulled up through the raid scene and mudflation ruins the gameplay.
Also assuming everyone who gets to high tier is also a jerk is pretty narrow sighted. I will use myself as an example, because I don't want to put anyone on the spot, when I create exp groups I literally don't care who comes. Yesterday my group was Acepar, Chiz, Fulgrin as DPS (all beastlords, and all "low end" in relation to tomes and exp) then me boxing Vitali and Crynel. We had a final member, but I don't remember who. Maybe my alt leeching exp. Either way, we all went to FR and killed Bloodfires. Is that the best group? Absolutely not, but it didn't matter. We had fun and hung out for a while killing monsters together. Sure there are high tier people who would see those tells and think to themselves "Uh, nope not class X with Y tomes, not worth taking" but not everyone is that way. I genuinely enjoyed my group with them, and others I find just LFG in ooc.
I'm not particularly talking about raiders not accepting people in groups, I think they are jerks because they become raid obsessed and consider themselves so special, the elite. Some of them are special I'll admit, but a lot of them are still just noobs who got carried along on their guild's coat tails. They don't have anything special about them except the gear they got just for showing up on a raid and pressing the buttons they were yelled at to press.
The problem here is lack of new blood really. It boils down to there being so few new characters that making a guild or even a group without some sort of combination of new and old can't happen. So you will have a fresh group with some healer sporting 80 tomes, or a tank with 9k hp. The problem isn't the characters, but the mindset of the player. Is it worth 30 minutes to buff, then a 15 minute run to an obscure zone to get okay exp but relive a nostalgic period of my play here in SoD? Or do I spend 30 minutes buffing and 3 minutes running to a zone that is newer, so more polished and a bit more friendly to new players? That is the question you have to ask yourself or others when you're making these groups. Most of the time people don't want to waste their time zoning 7 times to get to an obscure place without some sort of motivation.
More players wouldn't help, especially nowadays, because everyone is a sheep who asks what is the best zone and then goes there. It is the duty of the game to balance it out so there are several places to go and each have comparable XP, difficulty, and rewards. The 30 minute buffing thing is ridiculously tedious, but so is grinding in FR every time just because it is the l33t spot.
I agree with some of this, but again I can definitely feel the venom literally dripping from the words in this. You are upset with the current state of the game, and it is all high tiered players fault. The people who've played this game religiously for years and years are clearly the reason people have moved on and left.
While I would love to see some way for people to really progress in a meaningful way outside of raids, it's a slippery slope and hard to balance anything around. How much out of raid time equates to in raid time? How much effort should getting gear solo be, compared to getting an item 17 other people need to help you get? If I can get a Healing 5 item with a week's worth of effort, can I get a Healing 6 item with 2 weeks? healing 8 with 4? Where do you draw the line. Anyone can have a meaningful and fun experience in SoD without raiding, but what it sounds like is you want everyone to share in your vision of fun, whether they want that or not. You want it to be like the good old day, where things were super hard and challenging and would love to see other people enjoy that style again too. The problem is, what if I don't like that style of play? What if I actually enjoy where I am now, able to heal well and melee some monsters with a cane that heals my party. I like my clicky items, and I like my spells that had to be farmed by killing hard high tier raid monsters in a tower. Everyone wants something different, and what you consider fun isn't what others might.
None of that matters, a better designed game can cater to everyone, or at least get close. Essential items should be groupable, and raid gear should be mostly resists and utility for raiding, but which doesn't gimp the rest of the game's content and it also means that if you find raiding boring, you can choose to not do it and not be left out. You are right I want people to share my vision of fun, because I think it is better. Your vision of fun is what the devs has made this game into and now it has no players.
While you make some good points (high tiers camping mid tier camps for cash) you also seem to only be recalling the "good" parts of EQ. EQ had all of the same problems that shards has. High value items were camped 24/7. Epic quest drops were perma camped to either be used or multiquested away. None of the issues you've mentioned are really new issues.
Not all the same. In early EQ if an item was camped you could get on the queue and because it was 6 individuals, you had a better chance of getting in the group once someone left. Once Kunark came along, most of the older camp spots were empty, so for new players or twinks, it was far easier to get stuff like Yaks SMR etc. And the thing with epic weapons is that it only bothered a small percentage of players, many people didn't even care about their epic, and many more weren't at that point yet. SoD just has more bottlenecks and the problems are more severe.
One of the main reasons you see high levels camping ToLL and such is because there's nothing more valuable in the game to camp. There really aren't any high tier xp dungeons. Any zones (Overgrowth, Citadel) that offered more cash reward or better xp were for some reason deemed "too good" and nerfed right out of competition for a good place to xp or farm with high tier toons.
That was my point. The game is made entirely for the few people at the top of the raid tiers. Personally I think it's better to not attempt to keep them playing forever, because they just further push the MMO 'wealth gap' equivalent. It is better to have people play the server for a few years and then move on, if it means a healthy supply of new players that will go through the same progression. The problem with catering to people who have played hardcore for several years is that to deal with those players you have to take something away from everyone else. It's not like there is a huge budget and team of devs to develop all areas equally.
