Death of a Game - Everquest franchise

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Elidroth

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Tauro said:
And Epic made a cool 3 BILLION with Fortnite in 2018... there simply is no reason at all to pump money into old MMOs.. better do a fucking "Battle Royale" (or just make 10) and hope for some small percentage of what Epic makes...
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There's a perfect example of the problem. People see how much Epic made, and think, "I need to jump into that pool and I'll make a shit ton of money". NO, you won't. Epic already did it. PUBG already did it. Why would you even THINK you could get a slice of that pie? Being perpetually behind the curve is how you piss away a lot of money in game development.
 
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Sadre Spinegnawer

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Immersive, persistent world rpg mmo's have yet to find their narrative in the online world post 2010. It is 2018.

This is why I say, niche is the way to go, as far as market strategy goes. And niche can become a buzz, remember.

My nephew who is in his 20's is proud of his vinyl collection and his stereo. Go figure. Niche can work.

The apparent weakness here -- that it is a persistent world that only pays off after long char development -- can be a strength. Time can be a strength. Slowness can be a strength. Not being able to nerf your way to the top can be a strength. Not allowing bots can be a strength.....
\
Ok, now I realized, I am talking about an impossible world. This world can only happen with a subscription model where people agree to gameplay being highly policed to avoid exploits.

Sad truth. Not enough want that to warrant substantial capital investment.
 
Locnar

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Sadre Spinegnawer said:
Immersive, persistent world rpg mmo's have yet to find their narrative in the online world post 2010. It is 2018.

This is why I say, niche is the way to go, as far as market strategy goes. And niche can become a buzz, remember.

My nephew who is in his 20's is proud of his vinyl collection and his stereo. Go figure. Niche can work.

The apparent weakness here -- that it is a persistent world that only pays off after long char development -- can be a strength. Time can be a strength. Slowness can be a strength. Not being able to nerf your way to the top can be a strength. Not allowing bots can be a strength.....
\
Ok, now I realized, I am talking about an impossible world. This world can only happen with a subscription model where people agree to gameplay being highly policed to avoid exploits.

Sad truth. Not enough want that to warrant substantial capital investment.
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That is the key, and I want to believe the niche is big enough to allow it to happen. Only through deep slow character progression and investment. We need to return to the days of a ingame character PERSONA.
 
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Tauro

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Elidroth said:
There's a perfect example of the problem. People see how much Epic made, and think, "I need to jump into that pool and I'll make a shit ton of money". NO, you won't. Epic already did it. PUBG already did it. Why would you even THINK you could get a slice of that pie? Being perpetually behind the curve is how you piss away a lot of money in game development.
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Yeah.. so lets do something new and never seen before/bleeding edge new tech ... lets call it "EQ Next"... what could go wrong? ;)

Daybreak should do a EQ Battle Royale and EQ Mobile, then use the money they get from that to do a real EQ3 with a modern engine, maybe it will work. Cant be worse then what they tried until now to make money?

Real niche games work, but Daybreak with their owners (still russian investment company?) are not the right company for that.
 
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Tuco

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Elidroth said:
Then he got fired a couple weeks later, we implemented the ideas we wanted to do in the first place, and the players LOVED it. It was that same meeting when he actually asked me what we use to make cutscenes in EQ.. I asked if he'd ever actually played the game? He says, "Of course!", and I replied, "Where have you EVER seen a cutscene in this game?", at which point he suddenly had another meeting to go to. Dude was a total sham.. He's one of 3 people I would NEVER work with again, ever, in any way.
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I feel intensely uncomfortable anytime there is a "cutscene" (NPCs spawning and talking to eachother in the real world...) in EQ. Especially with epic quests where you just handed an NPC an item and aren't sure if this dirty ass engine running old oil code is going to misfire and you're going to have to submit a GM ticket (good news is the GMs in EQ just go along with whatever).
 
Tuco

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iannis said:
Some kind of a way to reuse old zones seems like it would be practical design. And good for the playerbase. You wouldn't want 100%, but there's a percentage.

I can't even imagine the sprawl that is EQ these days. They've been pushing 2 xpacs a year for 18 years? At least 5 zones per xpac? I quit early, in SoL, and the early xpacs had more than 5, but I have to assume that began to come down later. 100 zones, and that's just xpac zones?

Can't be. Some of those xpacs had to be zoneless or complete reworks of existing zones. I remember they dicked with Nro/Freeport/Commonlands. That must have been a full xpac. And it would have reduced the zone count.

20 year old game though... that's just monstrous no matter what you do.

Edit: I think as we've aged, our opinion of Smedly has gone up. It's easy to rage against the man when you're 20. As you start to see what he was up against it's impossible to not come to some grudging respect of the guy. I think Hartsman is the only one I'd rank above him. Smedly seems like he is/was very solidly competent. Not exactly faint praise in the land of online games.
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Here's a good representation of the sprawl. And this kind of sprawl is just repeated for all the game mechanics.
World-2018-02-22.png


It's actually one of the reasons why I love the game so much. There's so much shit layered in the game that the knowledge base is a stratification where few people experienced everything, much less remember it all. There is really no other game I know of like it.
 
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Tuco

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Elidroth said:
Realizing I'm limiting the audience, I'd still go with the idea that all content is NOT guaranteed to you. Being good at something, and playing with people who are also good at something, should entitle you to see/do better things. There should be plenty of content and lore to see as a casual player, but the really really special stuff would absolutely be locked behind hard content. Servers would be set up in such a way where you can have the WoW-ish experience where you get mini-maps, quest icons, etc.. but also some special servers where all that stuff is turned off. You'd have to actually explore the world and discover things. Very little if any "fast travel" in these servers. Something to make the world feel BIG again. Death would have penalties, and not just a 2 minute run back to your corpse. I'd really try to bring back the original FEEL of EQ with modern tech and an updated gameplay style.. Ideally with as little instancing as possible to keep everything/everyone in the world together.
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DBG botched the latest expansion by gating 90% of the content behind some Aristo designed (aka puzzle-combat style) missions. For the last few (since underfoot?) expansions people could come in and just bumble their way through with shitty groups or just them and their merc. Now they're getting BTFO until they put together a coherent trinity-based group and they are PISSED.

TBL : the most stupid and absurd extension | EverQuest Forums

Meanwhile, i'm having an absolute ball. I'm also recording a bunch of videos of me boxing the content in group gear because I can't stand the excuses coming out of the potatoes in this game whose ineptitude has been enabled by ez-mode content. It's funny because now the people having trouble progressing have to be careful about saying what is and isn't possible and preface stuff with comments recognizing that yeah, you don't need raid gear for this shit.

Jackr said:
Accolades to Tucoh and how he is able to box trials and missions. He is very skilled indeed, has dedicated a lot of time and effort into maximizing his group set up and aDPS. However he does not represent most boxers in this game.



I have a decently geared Battleworn and some EoK raid gear tank as a main, and keep 5 group geared toons in full RoS tradeskill conflagrant gear (clr, enc, wiz, wiz, wiz) and usually purchase 6 account expansions every year at expansion time. I have had no problems issues with completing progression tasks in EoK and RoS (except for Hero of Skyfire Mountains, had to do each toon separately). This expansion however already I've encountered roadblocks at Trials of Smoke and Empyr - Palace of Embers. The mechanics with massive AE making it extremely difficult for a single cleric to heal a group through, or a silence at the wrong time, and boss high resistance to wizard spells, or high hit points makes the early content impossible for a boxer to complete.



I figured this is Daybreak's way to tell us we needed to be GOLD to be able to complete progression in this game (free to play, pay to win), so converted all my group geared toons to GOLD status, purchased Tier 2 spells finally, bought raid focused arms for my wizards, raid shoulders for improved mana efficiency, and a raid necklace for improved healing focus for my cleric etc, optimizing for another try, even swapping out my enchanter for a second cleric, and yet again the mechanics with Smoke Trial of 3 is impossibly hard. My second cleric is low mana by the time we reach our second mob, and there is no time to meditate.



I've played this game for 15 years, and have had no issues with EoK or RoS progression with the same group geared characters, so there is NO need for anyone to call out lack of skills. I choose to box because I find it much more fun than waiting around for a good group, so no need for other players to comment on this as well.



My point is THIS expansion is different, and it's horrible. It's not even possible for skilled boxers to get through. In my opinion, Daybreak needs to do several things.

1. Decrease the ridiculous AE approximately 50% so a SINGLE healer can heal through. It's even too stressful for fully raid geared single cleric to heal though.

2. Take away the ridiculous Magic Resistance bosses in trials and partisan missions have (not everyone plays a melee or zerker) OR decrease their massive hit points.

3. Developers need to do these missions themselves in group geared toons, or listen to their players.



I really do love this game, and if changes are not made, you will be losing quite a bit of your base. You've already gotten your expansion money from me, but I certainly will not be subscribing
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Anyway, I think DBG stepped in it in this expansion and that post generally summarizes why. You can't build a clientele of one type over a decade and then switch to a different type of game. To your point I think a game with a living world that you have to group up to even survive in would be pretty interesting. There is just something very exciting about areas and content that doesn't fuck around, but I think WoW's approach of having everything ez and then having much more difficult options is the way to go. But DBG barely has the staff to make working missions, much less tune them multiple times.
 
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Sadre Spinegnawer

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Locnar said:
That is the key, and I want to believe the niche is big enough to allow it to happen. Only through deep slow character progression and investment. We need to return to the days of a ingame character PERSONA.
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It is still all about that niche / potential niche (not all people attracted to this kind of game are older!!)

Long term persistent worlds: what is the niche, and how do you tackle it? And does the niche warrant investment?

I think it is doable. But would require some pretty cunning thinking to actually solve this problem.
 
Punko

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With all its flaws, the original EQ was a far superior experience then all the later iterations.

5, 10, 15, 20 years of "working" on it all detracted from what made the original a great game. Things like letting every class bind without assistance, letting every class get a form of gate/teleport ... they simply made the game worse. Easier, but worse.

Its like someone continued developing Tetris for 20 years and ended up replacing every type of block by the square ones.
 
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Locnar

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All those "convenient" things helped to remove interdependence between players and are contrary to community building. The farther your game gets away from being a community, the more gimmicks and throw away content you have to pump out to keep people interested, but its always a losing battle when you go down that road of community killing.

In this day and age, I think the best bet (lets use Pantheon for the example) is for Pantheon to to create the modern EQ they are basically making AND on top of that release special servers with all those hardcore elements day 1 of EQ had. Call them the "old school" or "hardcore" or whatever you want servers, but let us choose if we want to play on the ezmode (standard) server, or the oldschool (corpse runs, no maps, HARSH death penalty, slow xp, only one account allowed per server, throw the kitchen sink of 1990's mud mechanics in there, etc) server.

This is the only hope I think we have of really getting and recreating late 1990's style MMO community. and pvp and non-pvp flavors too, of course.
 
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RobXIII

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Policing it 24/7 is key too. Just look how much people shit all over the EQ TLE servers (Krono farmers, no KS rule with the LOL DPS race winning all and kicking people from camps, people being shitty, bots, AE groups disrupting entire zones)

I think EQ did a good thing with the guide program. Just have a logical play nice policy, have volunteers remand it to actual real GM support and it's a start. But yeah that all costs money, so we won't see it for underfunded games or anything DBG related.
 
Dandai

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I don’t disagree that conveniences added with each EQ expansion/iteration came at the cost of player interdependence, but I think the problem is a little more complex than “the game was better when all melee were required to interact with spell casters when they wanted to change their bind location.”

WoW has been swinging the interdependence pendulum back and forth (for example, in chronological order we’ve seen highly specialized/unique functionality > not all classes viable/optimal in all content > all classes get interrupts/CC > bring the player not the class > class specific utility > class specific buffs) since 2004 and 15 years and 7 expansions later it [subjectively] still hasn’t found a good compromise.

However, if you forced me to name a single reason as to why WoW is still relevant 15 years post-launch, I’d say that their popularity is directly proportional to their willingness to tweak (sometimes radically) the interdepency formula and introduce novelty into a game that could’ve otherwise been pumping out by-the-numbers content.
 
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Dandai

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RobXIII said:
Policing it 24/7 is key too. Just look how much people shit all over the EQ TLE servers (Krono farmers, no KS rule with the LOL DPS race winning all and kicking people from camps, people being shitty, bots, AE groups disrupting entire zones)

I think EQ did a good thing with the guide program. Just have a logical play nice policy, have volunteers remand it to actual real GM support and it's a start. But yeah that all costs money, so we won't see it for underfunded games or anything DBG related.
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Not sure that it would be a strong enough incentive these days, but didn’t guides get a free subscription?
 
wilkxus

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Locnar said:
All those "convenient" things helped to remove interdependence between players and are contrary to community building. The farther your game gets away from being a community, the more gimmicks and throw away content you have to pump out to keep people interested, but its always a losing battle when you go down that road of community killing.

In this day and age, I think the best bet (lets use Pantheon for the example) is for Pantheon to to create the modern EQ they are basically making AND on top of that release special servers with all those hardcore elements day 1 of EQ had. Call them the "old school" or "hardcore" or whatever you want servers, but let us choose if we want to play on the ezmode (standard) server, or the oldschool (corpse runs, no maps, HARSH death penalty, slow xp, only one account allowed per server, throw the kitchen sink of 1990's mud mechanics in there, etc) server.

This is the only hope I think we have of really getting and recreating late 1990's style MMO community. and pvp and non-pvp flavors too, of course.
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Great Post, it would be great if one could re-create similar market and player experience conditions as EQ had in 1999 (mmo noobs with zero expectations). But the enormous problem facing you here in 2019 is you are partitioning an already miniscule niche (of impatient veterans with fixed high expectations) into even smaller niches that will not have enough player volume nor player patience (or new noob players through the servers' life) to sustain a playable fun experience through the content. I do not believe any EQ like game such as Pantheon will have the initial luxury to have more than 1 or maybe 2 custom servers.
 
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alavaz

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I think the downside of making things too interdependent is that you drastically lower the amount of players. As much as I'd love to have the original EQ experience I know that I just flat out couldn't do it for any sustainable amount of time. So like wilk said you basically wind up with degens and no lifers running the server with no casuals to Lord over because these days we know better than to waste our time.
 
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Flobee

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Is it possible to separate solo and group progression without one invalidating the other entirely?

Figure that out and maybe we can have our cake and eat it too.
 
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Locnar

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alavaz said:
I think the downside of making things too interdependent is that you drastically lower the amount of players.
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Which is why I think the path forward is to release special rules servers to cater to the minority of the niche who want 1990's MUD harshness. I know Brad and co. have stated in the past they are in favor of special rule servers (roleplaying, pvp, etc). This is what we should hope for. Let the EQ lite crowd have the majority of servers to box on and use death as cheap teleportation. Just so long as a hardcore server exists with corpse runs and all the rest.

I think if they do this, many will be surprised at how popular they are because when you are accomplishing X,Y,Z on your ezmode server, it will feel hollow knowing a few clicks down the server list is a much more meaningful experience to earn.

Same concept as how you feel about "winning" on p99 or EQmac compared to "winning" on some garbage box full of "quality of life" features that let you solo everything with no risk.
 
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