Does PoP Suck?

by Moorgard on 2003-05-06

My guild is small, we are about 3 groups total when everyone is online. We raid together about twice a week, and do some pretty neat things with 2-3 groups. We are almost all level 65.

I just scribed my last Planes of Power spell (which happened to be Malos) yesterday. I now have a complete 61-65 spellbook. I bought only one spell from each type (ethereal/spectral/rune), after collecting the rest from parchment drops.

We are now keyed for Valor, Storms, Crypt of Decay, Bastion of Thunder, Halls of Honor, Lair of Terris, Torment, and Tactics. We did not use the large 75-100 person raiding methods to acquire access to any of these zones. In all cases we used the single group alternate entry quests to reach zones.

There is really nothing else for us to do, uness we want to start all over with Grummus and Behemoth and 75+ random other people (we don't want to do that).

We are not interested in chasing the plane of time. For that matter, we skipped vex thal, sleepers, and veeshan's peak too. Let's just say we have a low tolerance for huge slow moving raids, repetive farming of non-exp zones, and racing for highly contested content.

Ordinarily, a guild wouldn't say it had finished an expansion until it had completed all the high-end content available. You didn't "finish" Velious until you cleared NToV, raided ST (perhaps waking the Sleeper), and killed the three monarchs. You didn't "finish" Luclin until you killed Seru and the Emperor in Ssra and cleared Vex Thal (we'll leave out Inner Acrylia because it couldn't really be completed). The high-end content dictated the "end" of the expansion.

Yet Ximix is kinda correct; for all practical purposes, his guild really is finished with Planes of Power. Yes, they can keep farming exp and items ad infinitum, but they've hit the wall as far as how far they can progress. Why is this the case?

Really, it's because Planes of Power was different than any expansion before it. While PoP offered a lot of handy content to all players, the vast majority of what was included in the expansion was geared exclusively toward high-end raid guilds. Though every expansion from Kunark on included ubermob encounters, no addition to EverQuest had been so focused on that level of the game.

Admittedly, such content was needed desperately. High-end guilds were fighting over a handful of mobs and zones, with basically nowhere to go. Planes of Power was designed to feed the need by providing a path of progression that would widen the playing field while providing rich rewards at the top end of the game.

But never before had an expansion also proved so limiting to the vast majority of players. In the Kunark days, your guild might not have been able to kill Trakanon or enter Veeshan's Peak, but you could still experience over 90% of the expansion's content without having to be in an uberguild. In Velious, you could pick a faction that matched your guild's ambitions--lower-end guilds could align with the Coldain, while more powerful folks sided with the giants or dragons. In Luclin, you could... well, Luclin was a freaking mess, but like the expansions before it, over 90% was open to all players of the appropriate level.

Yet in Planes of Power, level isn't enough. You have to be uber; you have to accumulate flags; you have to farm gear; you have to dedicate hours and hours to the game. While this has always been true of the "endgame" of each expansion, with PoP these are the requirements to see about 50% of the content.

So all this begs the question: Does PoP suck?

Well, let's consider Ximix's case. PoP gave his guild additional levels, new spells, and new places to hunt, besides the PoK portal system and new quests/items available in the first two tiers of PoP zones. That certainly doesn't sound like a bad thing, does it? Without question, Ximix's guild is more powerful than it was before, even without being uber.

Yet also consider the limitations. All those old Luclin zones where Ximix and his friends used to get experience are now completely useless for that purpose. Planes of Power not only encourages you to get experience in its zones, it practically requires it. No matter how fun the Temple of Cazic Thule might be, if you can only get a fraction of the exp there that you can get in Valor, then nobody is gonna go to CT. The reality of hard numbers will always outweigh the intangible of fun for most people, which puts a heavy responsibility upon developers to ensure that those two factors are balanced. Planes of Power didn't do a real good job of that.

But probably the really frustrating thing about someone in Ximix's position is feeling cut off from so much content. Though non-uber folks were denied access to one or two zones in previous expansions, think about all the places you can only experience via a raiding guild: Halls of Honor B, Sol Ro's Tower, Air, Earth, Earth B, Water, Fire, Time A, and Time B. That's a total of nine zones that an awful lot of players are very likely to never see. When you pay full price for an expansion but can only see about half of it--and have no real shot at the majority of nice items included therein--you have to wonder whether it's really worth the price of admission.

Does PoP suck in other ways too? Uberguilds might say so. All those people stuck at the Rathe Council roadblock aren't too happy at the moment. They've fought through months of flag progression to be stymied by a single encounter. Now normally I don't put a lot of stock into such concerns; anyone who remembers how the Avatar of War and Lord Seru were deemed "impossible" knew that progress was being made. But after weeks and weeks of the best guilds in the game all working on the same encounter without success, it's time to simply accept that the encounter is broken, either accidentally or deliberately.

Read the uberguild sites and boards. Almost all of them are losing people to boredom and frustration. That's what happens when your progress is halted--and it's the biggest danger for any gamer, whether you're at Ximix's level or Furor's. When people get too frustrated with a game, they move on. While there might not be a lot of compelling places for frustrated players to go at the moment, it's likely that there will be soon.

EverQuest is in need of two things right now, quite badly. First, it needs another full-blown expansion that will offer a lot of compelling content to the high-level but non-uberguild player. We're talking multiple zones that range in difficulty from just above NToV to Vex Thal, but without the bullshit hassles of a VT-like key quest. Second, it needs the Rathe Council to fall. Lock uberguilds into months of Plane of Time farming if you must, but the PoEB roadblock has to go, and the content beyond it has to make people drool. High-end players have to be able to say "yes, it was worth it" for the health of the game. Even players who will never reach that level of content care about it, and need to know it's out there and working.

So the question still remains: Does PoP suck? For some people, yes it does. And it's pretty important for that to change.