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New EQ Producer Introduces Himself

Posted by Zonk on from the first-day-jitters dept.

The new producer for Everquest Live, Craig Knapp, has put up an introductory letter to the community on the official site. He discusses his expectations going into the job, and mentions some of the issues he'll be addressing going forward. From the letter: "First, we'll be instancing the Plane of Time to alleviate the bottle neck that many of you may face as a result of higher populations. Second, at the request of the players, we're going to combine the servers that have established a voluntary rotation system for raid targets. The Rathe and Karana will now be combined. The communities on The Rathe and Karana servers have put forth an extraordinary amount of time and energy to create their rotational systems and we want to do what we can to support these players and their chosen play style. As a result of this change, Bertoxxulous and Tholuxe Paells will be combined."

8 of 20 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Explanation for a non-EQ player? by porksoda · · Score: 5, Informative

    I gave up my Evercrack addiction about 4 years ago so I guess my knowledge isn't terribly up-to-date, but I think I can answer your questions:

    1) The Plane of Time is (probably) the high-level zone that most high-level guilds would like to loot and pillage aka raid. Here's a sample of what you run into there. Bottlenecks are caused by having too many guilds all vying for the same zone to raid at the same time, hence

    2) raid target rotations were implemented. They're kind of like sign-up sheets for the running machine at the gym, AFAIK.

    3) I don't know.

  2. Re:Explanation for a non-EQ player? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Plane of Time is the end level content from a two year old expansion. It is a place many guilds can upgrade their equipment/gear easily.

    On Povar for example, their are about 10 guilds who raid Plane of Time.

    Their tiers of mobs that grow in difficulty as you advance through the zone. The further you advance in the zone, the longer it takes the mobs to respawn.

    The last mob, Quarm, takes about a week to respawn.

    So, these 10 guilds get together, and instead of fighting/racing for the right to kill the mobs, they instead, take turns killing them - rotation.

    Plane of Time changing to a fully instanced zone, (it's partially instanced, but we won't get into that right now), will allow all 10 guilds to gain loot 10 times as fast.

    As far as I know, the new producer is just for EQ1.

    I've just come back to Povar after a 9 month hiatus. I don't know the current situation of rotations on Povar since the server mergers, but I hope it helps you get the idea.

  3. Perhaps I'm missing something... by C0rinthian · · Score: 2, Insightful

    but if two servers have established their rotation, wouldn't merging them completely FUBAR that organization? I don't know about anyone else, but I'd be pretty upset to suddenly have twice as many guilds raiding the same zone.

    1. Re:Perhaps I'm missing something... by JExtine · · Score: 4, Informative

      Sounds like they instanced the zone in which the guilds were rotating their raids. If you are not familiar with the idea of instanced zones, it means that basically all the guilds can go and raid at the same time in their own private version of the zone. It's an increasingly popular way to do dungeons/zones in MMORPGS these days...

    2. Re:Perhaps I'm missing something... by Dachannien · · Score: 3, Informative

      The alternative is merging a server that has a self-imposed rotation policy with one that doesn't have such a policy. The chaos resulting from that situation far outweighs that required to fit the guilds from two servers onto one list. Besides, the reason for the merges in the first place is a sharply-declining population, so the assumption being made here is that (especially with instancing) on the merged server, it'll result in a full, but not necessarily overburdened, rotation list.

    3. Re:Perhaps I'm missing something... by JExtine · · Score: 2, Informative

      Well, his annoucment just mentioned them instancing the Planes of Time, so it seems like the rotation policy would still be needed for other raid bosses. Since the policies are enforced by the comunity, it'ld make sense to merge the two together rather than with servers that don't have any sort of policy.

  4. Re:What's with the shard names? by jwilloug · · Score: 2, Informative

    I found them a useful window into the EQ lore, personally. Xev and Tholuxe, for instance, are minor deities (the gods of luck and capitalism, respectively) who have never appeared in game, but I found them intriguing enough to work into my rogue's personal pantheon. I probably never would have heard of them if not for the server names, indeed Tholuxe may well have been created simply because they needed a new server and were out of gods.

  5. Rathe, Karana, Bertoxxulous? by Mr_Silver · · Score: 2, Funny
    The communities on The Rathe and Karana servers have put forth an extraordinary amount of time and energy to create their rotational systems and we want to do what we can to support these players and their chosen play style. As a result of this change, Bertoxxulous and Tholuxe Paells will be combined.

    You know you're getting old and not "with it" when you read that three times and realise that you haven't the faintest idea what he's talking about.

    Now if you'll excuse me, I have my comfy slippers on and a pipe to smoke ...

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