EQ Never

I remember Vanguard talking about raiding in a completely different manner. Basically, once your guild committed to raiding, that's all it would commit to. They talked about setting up camps outside whatever zone, having vendors and trainers within your camps (I believe there was a daily pay rate you needed to commit towards these NPCs as well), etc. This was before warping around all the continents and shit existed, so they clearly scrapped these plans, but that sounded pretty interesting. Obviously Vanguard was handling traveling a lot differently than most modern MMOs, but just something I remember them talking about.

Everquest_sl said:

You'll be back. They always come back.

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Somewhere out there, The Black Hand is flipping you the middle finger and saying "Don't bet on it".

Royal_sl said:

Somewhere out there, The Black Hand is flipping you the middle finger and saying "Don't bet on it".

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The Black Hand is a piece of shit who gets pussy hurt when he gets called out on game design. Then proceeds to ban people for it. I wouldn't listen to him too much.

OTOH he has a dream job working for the market leader in MMO design while you just post wrong-headed ideas on a messageboard.

Itlan_sl said:

I remember Vanguard talking about raiding in a completely different manner. Basically, once your guild committed to raiding, that's all it would commit to. They talked about setting up camps outside whatever zone, having vendors and trainers within your camps (I believe there was a daily pay rate you needed to commit towards these NPCs as well), etc. This was before warping around all the continents and shit existed, so they clearly scrapped these plans, but that sounded pretty interesting. Obviously Vanguard was handling traveling a lot differently than most modern MMOs, but just something I remember them talking about.

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This is the direction I wanted to see games go... How do you enhance the MMO experience based on what was originally there. I think this is a cool idea, among others, that we have seen games talk about. I think MMO's started out with the right ideas in mind with UO, EQ, DAOC, etc. Some how we went from enhancing the experience to eliminating it. Stuff like this is what I want to see in EQNext.

I just don't want to see a Trion Rift Storm Legion like travel system. It was tedious to travel in that game with roads having more mobs on it then off road. There is even a place where the road is going up a mountain, no off road option, and mobs are no more than five feet from each other. These mobs won't kill you and so are very little threat to your well being but fuck me if they didn't knock you off your mount making you miss being part of the zone wide event boss killing. Roads in that game might as well be cosmetic and not exist. I've asked Trion if they could at least lower the number of mobs on the road so that roads could be, you know, roads but even bringing that up on the forums makes the forum warriors come out asking if I want raid loot mailed to me on a silver platter. I'm all for danger of travel, I've done many of Qeynos to Freeport runs, but that shit isn't dangerous or fun.

As of now I'm enjoying the Vanguard land travel. Roads are safer to travel than off road and mounts have varying levels of stability which determines if you get knocked off or not when a mob attacks. Copy this and I can live without portals and flying mounts.

Rift's travel in the early days with the debuffs etc was a pain, and not fun.

Traveling from Qeynos to Freeport at level 12 or so was dangerous, scary and fun.

The first problem is with the trinity and the aggro model that created it. Aggro was an artificial creation for rooms that had no dimensions in early text games (that link someone posted earlier explained it). If you change the aggro model to be more realistic then the trinity isn't such a big deal anymore. What the new model would be, I don't know.

But if you keep the old aggro model then you have to include other classes into the required mix somehow. One way is to make them interchangeable. Vanguard did it pretty well, 3 tanks etc.

Another way is to expand the trinity to require other abilities, monk splitting, enchanter crowd control, druid buffs, etc. That then requires encounters that need all of those abilities to succeed.

Convo_sl said:

So I didn't want to hijack a different thread and since EQ is known for grouping I figured I would put this here. How do we evolve grouping? I feel like over the years it's actually taking a step back in some regards. I'm not just talking about CC/pulling rooms but an actual way to keep every player engaged with every pull. Unique abilities/debuffs that aren't always obvious. Players using certain abilities that open up other abilities for another class, things like that. Not just for the sake of doing it either. There should be a thought pattern in play. I should have to look at a mob and think about what might work to break his defense. I'd like to move away from trash mobs in zones. They are just time fillers.

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The only change you can do to grouping what people do during a fight. You can make a game about action combat where position and movement matter. You can make combat engaging rather than button mashing. You can create a system of combos that players can act off each other. Don't talk about evolving grouping. Talk about combat and content mechanics and players will invent new ways to interact with each other (like splitting, pulling and cc mechanics of yesteryear).

Woah.. a lot of content to go through here.

1st person view: EverQuest wasn't a 1st person view like so many of you have pointed out, with F9, you could cycle through views.. 3rd person, bird-eye, behind char etc. I know as an Enchanter, I HAD to be in 3rd person turning camera around to see the battlefield, especially in dungeons. When so many mobs have been named the same, the tank didn't really know if besides the "a dar ghoul knight" there was one or three more "a dar ghoul knight" pouncing on him, I had to know or cleric was running out of mana fast, which again, wasn't the best thing.

Death penalty in star citizen looks nice. I've read through the entire thing, even thought it's still a bit mild. I mean... you'll have to be dragged out of your pod like a dozen times to actually die. And even then, your skills get bumped to your beneficiary/relative and you start the process all over again. Now, if they put in a time limit, that'd be cool. I.e. you have lost a leg, you can't play for 35 minutes as long as operation and recovery will take, but I'm sure that won't be the case.

Slyminxy_sl said:

Woah.. a lot of content to go through here.

1st person view: EverQuest wasn't a 1st person view like so many of you have pointed out, with F9, you could cycle through views.. 3rd person, bird-eye, behind char etc. I know as an Enchanter, I HAD to be in 3rd person turning camera around to see the battlefield, especially in dungeons. When so many mobs have been named the same, the tank didn't really know if besides the "a dar ghoul knight" there was one or three more "a dar ghoul knight" pouncing on him, I had to know or cleric was running out of mana fast, which again, wasn't the best thing.

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Yes, some classes did use the F9 to change camera angles which gave them advantages. But can you call that 3rd person view? when you move in a dungeon, are using that same angle? I don't think so, you go back to First Person View and when the camp is set and the group is ready to grind you, then and only then, switch to that camera angle, right?

Are we really arguing that EQ is not a FPV game? :/

Personally I almost never, ever left third person unless I was moving through a particularly windy portion of dungeon. I played casters almost exclusively though, I imagine it would suck a lot more for melees. I definitely think of EQ as a third person game because I was in that mode more than 90% of the time. I just really hated not having situational awareness. One thing I noticed too is that as the game went on, it became more and more third person friendly. Early dungeons were very twisty and narrow, but every expansion made that a lot less so. Maybe it's a CC-class thing.

Grim1_sl said:

Traveling from Qeynos to Freeport at level 12 or so was dangerous, scary and fun.

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Yeah, I miss actually being afraid to die. Good times.

Laura_sl said:

Yes, some classes did use the F9 to change camera angles which gave them advantages. But can you call that 3rd person view? when you move in a dungeon, are using that same angle? I don't think so, you go back to First Person View and when the camp is set and the group is ready to grind you, then and only then, switch to that camera angle, right?

Are we really arguing that EQ is not a FPV game? :/

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I'm not arguing. I'm merely pointing out that EverQuest in it's innate design, had all kinds of views incorporated. 3rd person view wasn't used because of many dungeons and odd camera angels getting in your way. Even today, in F2P, I still go to first person view when pulling because I can navigate hallways better if I can see intersections in FPV. On my warrior that is. I don't however se FPV on the other boxed chars. Especially chanty and ranger.

Can you imagine Upper/Lower Guk, Sebilis, Permafrost Keep, Solusek Eye, Najena or Befallen run in WoW's 3rd person view? I know I don't.

I also agree, that zooming out of your character half a mile away, like we did in Wow's WOTLK Sartharion encounter, spoils the game.

I was a druid in EQ1. I tried 3rd person for a lot of things. I was so involved in the 1st person view in eq that almost everything except for avatar of war snare-kiting was actually easier in 1st for me. You learned how to do quick turns to check mob positions and flip right back to forward.

Honestly, I think maybe 5% of the EQ playerbase realized that 3rd person views were even an option. It took DAOC me and a lot of my buddies to say, "ok. this can work in a mmo".

Grim1_sl said:

The first problem is with the trinity and the aggro model that created it. Aggro was an artificial creation for rooms that had no dimensions in early text games (that link someone posted earlier explained it). If you change the aggro model to be more realistic then the trinity isn't such a big deal anymore. What the new model would be, I don't know.

But if you keep the old aggro model then you have to include other classes into the required mix somehow. One way is to make them interchangeable. Vanguard did it pretty well, 3 tanks etc.

Another way is to expand the trinity to require other abilities, monk splitting, enchanter crowd control, druid buffs, etc. That then requires encounters that need all of those abilities to succeed.

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i don't see anything wrong with conventional aggro behavior. without it, you just have people kiting mobs around and it becomes disorganized.

http://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/...og190810A.html

supertouch_sl said:

i don't see anything wrong with conventional aggro behavior. without it, you just have people kiting mobs around and it becomes disorganized.

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One of the main problems is that it's very unrealistic. Yes, I know these are fantasy games but even in fantasy worlds most combatants would be intelligent enough to ignore the tank and go after the soft targets who are actually doing the damage, or keeping everyone alive.

Throwing out the traditional model of aggro, then creating a more realistic (or at least different) aggro model is a great way to get rid of the trinity and create a new fresh experience in mmos. And that doesn't mean kiting either. There are numerous ways to change things. Personally, I would look at how actual battles work and try to emulate that (using limited collision detection, etc). But there are other options.

Part of the problem with modern mmos is they are all based on the same basic building blocks that EQ copied from dikumuds. So of course the experience never really changes and we all get bored so quickly. Almost every mmo is just a copy of each other with a different artistic skin and some minor peripheral tweaks.

Blow up the basic rules that have been copied for way to long and come up with something new, that is the best chance at creating an experience that will be truly memorable and different from what we have now. If devs continue to copy the trinity then they are committing themselves to being a clone. You can still make money doing that but that path is very worn out, old and tired.

Brad came back and was Game Designer on VG when he came back.

They moved him to eq 3 Next while ago.
That is why for the 6th Anninversary of VG he was listed instead of developer as Co Creator of VG.

Also silus is on VG dont hate him but dont like him either he frankly maybe good coder but he his pota content and many things in VG, and eq 2 Itemizations was 1 the things that killed raiding in both vg and eq 2 they were shit.

Smokejumper aka Polejumper only thing he brings to the table is SOEmote in other words nothing he his Smeds tool he drove eq 2 into the ground, last heard he was Senior Producer for eq 3 which is fucking scary.

As much as people Hate or love Brad, when Brads Head is on straight he dont have to worry about budget running it, all he has more creativity in 1 fucking finger then those 2 above.