EQ Never

Mr Creed_sl said:

They'd be 10 years old then, instant collectible item. Better register while supplies last!!

Seriously though its the same thing as Blizzcon, one announcement and alot of smoke and mirrors. Its kinda expensive just for seeing some short videos of EQN and playing PS2 on a bigger screen then at home...

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Is there still no tangible information on how EQN will differ from classic?

Holy shitballs, is my neckbearded atheist fedora wearing ass getting precum over EQNext? I think so.

Xander_sl said:

Is there still no tangible information on how EQN will differ from classic?

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Well the statements from Smed and others clearly say they had been working on a WoW-like version and scrapped that and went in a totally different direction. Since at the core WoW and EQ1 gameplay isnt far apart, it is safe to assume it will be nothing like EQ1. No specific details though.

First let me preface this with saying this is strictly a comment and inquiry in terms of design. I, in know way, intend this to be a "remember when" EQ post or to bring back the glory days but I would really like to know why or even how? So please, do not look to much into this....

I have played nearly every MMO under the sun since playing EQ. In most cases I have beta'd, hit max level, and participated in end game content. In recent years I have felt the very casual essence of gameplay. I did not "need" to group though I did in most cases. I attempted to learn the people on my server, sorting out good players from bad, watching guilds form, etc. Essentially outside of EQ2 Nagafen it really didn't play to my advantage or to anyone else's to care much about your surroundings. You played a linear questline to level, you queued up to interact with people from other servers that i would never see again only to gain a currency for my next piece armor, and ultimately I picked a guild that could achieve what ever level of raiding I was interested (WoW really did this best). However, all of this was very singular. I didn't say there was anything wrong with that process but, that leads me to a very different design & process.

In playing EQMac the last three or four weeks, my experiences was very different (again, nothing about the EQ glory days). I logged on and I found myself instantly questioned if I would help kill something. Given I was newbie level but they needed just enough (my pet mainly) to help kill a mob that dropped a newbie quest armor item. I found myself in a conversation, level partner, and someone added to my friends list. Then heading up to PoK, I asked a couple of questions to help get me back on my feet, and was given a donation here and there, some added advice. Everyday, 2-3 times a day, someone comes by the PoK and MGB's. I went to Padual, heard people doing camp checks, finding out that people were combining groups of friends to make full groups to level. Getting on the next day only to receive a tell to ask if I wanted to group again. People looking for components for tradeskilling, ports, etc. If nothing else it appeared that the game could not go on without the assistance of someone else.

Now I say all of this to ask what? why? how? What makes "modern" MMO's to where you can be self sufficient? Is it questline, meaningful items on NPC's, auction houses, etc.?

I want to say that in EQ stuff just wasn't readily available and the only way to gain or achieve anything was to out into the open world or dungeon and kill for it. (In some cases quest for it which also required for you to go out and do the same.)

I'm curious to what others think creates two very different experiences? I personally think there needs to be a balance of then and now but what aspects of design would promote that balance? How can EQNext encourage people to depend on one other and making each decision relevant and vital to the gaming and player environment yet without causing a hindrance or inconvenience to the diverse masses that may potentially play?

*This may be an unfair questions as my experience in other MMO's may reflect my own personal actions and playstyle depending on my time and availability.

Hope this all makes sense because it's a serious questions of what EQNext could or may actually attempt to accomplish.

it's a very interesting observation, and you are definitely onto something

I haven't had the time nor desire to play other MMORPGs so my experience with them is limited (only through reading up), but EQ does provide a unique experience due to a combination of things.
Non-instanced content being the primary thing, and secondary how fucken rare some things can be... I don't think (I could be wrong here) there is any other MMORPG where you camp a single monster for days/weeks to get a single item.

So there is a lot of competition and co-operation required to progress, and it's just plain awesome...

LDoN was of my most fun times in EQ

@muligan
sounds like the intimacy of a smaller more static population than anything. if there are too many people, people are coming and going and to be treated like a commodity. (then again, eqmac might attract diff type of person. less mmo games to play on mac, more happy to get what you get? )

eq servers had large populations at one point and still provided the same kind of experience.

One of the key reasons that EQ was different from other MMORPGs was because you was forced to deal with each other in the game world. You couldn't hide yourself away from the bad people by going into instances, and the bad people couldn't use instancing and numerous quest rewards to progress without worrying about their reputations hindering them.

In essence, the lack of instances and quest reward mudflation made the game world actually feel like an alternate reality because your characters reputation and actions mattered. Most modern games do not feel like alternate realities. They instead just feel like a game. That's not a bad thing in and of itself, but I want to log in to an alternate reality rather than just play a game. I want my character to have a life of its own in a world unlike my own. That's what I had back in the Kunark, Velious, Luclin era of EQ. I felt that for the most part, that sense of virtual reality was lost when Lost Dungeons of Norath introduced instancing and Planes of Power introduced fast travel.

EQ also pulls in a different type of player, especially now considering it's age. It's mechanics and world space are not as action oriented so the ADHD crowd usually go somewhere else.

A lot of you touched on some of my thoughts (causes) to contribute to some of the differentiations I have noticed...

First - Instances... I think instances have taken some of the playerbase and "hidden" them away. To take it a step further, when they added cross-server LFG/LFD/LFR to construct and complete groups, this also took away from the playerbase and made it nonessential for a server to be knowledgable of its local player base.

Second - Items seem to come from two paths, currency based or raid based. Because there are some set of vendors requiring X tokens as a reward from completing said instanced dungeons this encourages players to grind out instances by using the aforementioned tool(s) that connects you with a number of random players across several servers. Again, taking away from the local player base.

Lastly, due to items being gained primarily from vendors, this takes a large part of the economy out of the players' hands. Economy is based on the needs of items and currency. Since group and raid items are purchased primarily via a currency that is only relevant to NPC's and the items gained is only usable to the player that purchased the item, this really skews the economy. I then have no need to find a tradeskill or means to gain money for progress and no need to do anything but grind instanced dungeons. Services are also taken out of players hands (this happened in EQ as well and I understand the reasoning) but summoning corpses, KEI, rezzes, porting, etc. gave players a way to make a little cash.

Now, that doesn't make any of these games bad that have went this route but what will EQNext be...? Which side of the fence will it fall? There are some major design decisions to be made in all of this and could easily make or break a game. I enjoy some of the luxuries in modern MMO's but at the same time, I feel that those dependencies is the reason I play the genre.

Dandai_sl said:

I can't speak for all EQ servers in the history of EQ, but I know for a fact that during Tribunal's heyday there wasn't half the population that could be found in Orgrimmar alone on Ner'zhul in WoW after a patch/expansion.



First: Mulligan, have you played WoW since they added cross-realm grouping with your bnet friends? The only restriction (afaik) is you can't do current-tier raids with people cross-realm (they're worried about breaking up guilds...).

As for the observation that in most MMOs these days you interact with players on other realms that you will never see again, well, it's a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't situation. On the one hand, maintaining a server-only dungeon fosters the community really well (and I personally find it to be more enjoyable). I think people play MMOs to interact with other people, not to play a single player RPG with other players around doing single player things.

Unfortunately, the other hand is the dreaded dead server that had a thriving population at one point then lost it due to whatever number of reasons you can come up with. Server merges are a really poor way to manage this because people have names they're attached to (names that will inevitably be taken when they have to move to a new server), friends that might not be active at the moment but could/will return at some point that they don't want to abandon, and maybe even server pride/nostalgia that ties them to the game and keeps them logging in.

I think a one-server-per-region approach with several instances of "uninstanced" content once the zone reaches a certain population might be the best solution to this. For example, let's say you want to go to Lower Guk to find a group. Upon crossing the threshold into Guk (you wouldn't necessarily need to zone, but I would think that the load screen would make it less messy to handle server-side) you would be placed in the first non-full instance of the zone. Let's say that Guk supports 5 groups of 6 people so when Lower Guk 1 reaches 30, Lower Guk 2 would be formed. Maybe have an LFG channel that extends through all instances of Guk and an OOC that is instance specific. If you're in Guk 2 and the group invite you receive is from Guk 1 then you can exceed the soft population cap.

You could do some neat stuff with that method I think (like randomly spawning minibosses that require a couple of organized groups). You might want to hard cap the zone at 40 or something to prevent massive zergs, but to incentivize killing him make him drop a couple pieces of better-than-average (for that dungeon) loot. I'm not sure how you'd want to handle loot, but I like how WoW handled their "rare" spawns in 5.2 where the tagging person/group gets the loot off the boss while everyone else gets the currency and achance(independent of the tagger's chance) to get what the rare spawn has on its loot table.

Anyway, what kind of creative solutions would you gentlemen offer to the problem of having open-world content that had you interacting with players you would actually see again?

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or, since it's 2013, you could easily make a dungeon like lower guk or sebilis only 3 times larger, enough to support 10 groups or more, and make 10 or more dungeons just like them to spread out the population even more still. it's not very complicated, the industry just seems to think that it is.

etchazz_sl said:

or, since it's 2013, you could easily make a dungeon like lower guk or sebilis only 3 times larger, enough to support 10 groups or more, and make 10 or more dungeons just like them to spread out the population even more still. it's not very complicated, the industry just seems to think that it is.

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Or fuck me, would it be so difficult to have MOB density change as player density goes up? Make dungeon bosses dynamic and (somewhat) unpredictable spawns? Can't we do better to ensure all players can enjoy the same content while playing together, than to totally segregate them?

Dandai_sl said:

If it's an open world dungeon you're still eventually going to have a population problem (given that the game is popular enough). What would you do to solve the overcrowding problem? Making it 3 times larger will just mean that 60 people will be the max capacity instead of 30.

I mean, I know it's not impossible task, but unless your world is so large and sports so many similar level dungeons that the supply can spread out the demand, overcrowding is inevitable without some form of instancing. Many people have cited an EQ example of Kaesora being an excellent dungeon that was almost never used andneverhad the same population as Sebilis (or later Droga/Nurga). On Tribunal people would often times afk at the entrance to Sebilis waiting to get in a camp there instead of packing up and going somewhere else. You could argue that the incentives were better in Seb than other dungeons, but that's exactly my point. You would need to make multiple dungeons, make the rewards roughly equal, and geographically spread them out such that the risk of over crowding would be very small.

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You're right with that. And considering that "dungeon with static and roaming mobs" is probably alot quicker and easier to create then "instance with tons of scripted and tuned-for-5-players encounters", they can just throw more dungeons at players if it seems like they get too crowded without taking 10 months to fine tune it. If the game makes levels mean alot less then being over/under-tuned doesnt even matter much, dungeons would just be done earlier or later on the advancement track depending on their difficulty.

They can mix up the camping mentality by having nameds that can spawn anywhere in the dungeons or at least specific wings, and nameds that roam.

As I've said for almost a decade now here, elsewhere, and the reason I got blackhanded on FOH:

This industry has regressed to such a level of shit the past 10 years. This isn't some subjective opinion about 'what makes an mmo an mmo'; it's an objective analysis based on the potential type of gameplay afforded by this medium, compared to the type of gameplay that designers actually design, which is nothing but pseudo-single/multiplayer mini-dungeons dictated by marketing heads and window-dressed on a server in order to collect sub fees. That's the reality such as it is, not subjectivity, not rose-colored glasses, but the truth. That's *it* as it is, without euphemisms such as accessibility sprinkled on top. The fact of the matter is that these 'game designers' are designing to appeal to every living, breathing human under the sun, from 80yr old granny, to sally soccer mom, to tiny timmy, to stay-at-home dad, to hardcore joe. They know, based on their little marketing heads, that if they do this, they can design in such a way to maximize retention of most of these demographics. This is garbage design, and it should be called out by all of us.

Do you think it's a good mmo design paradigm to sit in Orgrimmar all day and queue for dungeons, pvp, and lfg raids, grouping with people you never talk to and will likely never or interact with again. Is that good design in any objective sense of mmo design? Cue Zehn or The Black Hand to chime in about how 'I have a choice to interact if I want to' bullshit. No. I don't have a choice because it wasn't designed that way; it was designed for a single and multiplayer experience, not an mmo one. And it was done to maximize the amount of money they could make, not for any gameplay reason outside of being accessible to every single human alive.

Do you think it's a good mmo design paradigm to homogenize and make generic every single class and role in the game? Is it good design to equally homogenize every single piece of loot based on a formula? I can't fucking tell you the name of any item my characters had post-TBC because it didn't fucking matter whatsoever.

The stories about EQ above still hold true, whether you played over a decade ago or you play it now. It's a better designed mmo because it involves people with people, and through that involvement and interaction, it's what makes the game worth playing - it's what makes it massively. Apparently, WoW designers are too busy snorting coke off hookers' asses down on Newport to understand what mmo design is anymore.

But hey - it's cool coz Bobby got his zillion dollar raise.