EQ Never

Azeth_sl said:

Considering hosting a website for the purpose of an EQN guild. Probably too soon to do so, but I may get serious about this game.

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If you are actually serious and have a serious group of people (i.e. not a random forum guild) I will give you guys private forums here if you want.

tad10_sl said:

Since we're on the subject.

I'm not convinced FTP is a long-term solution to anything. I think its working okay now, but ultimately you have to mudflate items in the cash shops and make the game PTW which leads to players leaving.

I know Smed & co. saw population and cash spikes when they converted to FTP I'd like to know how that's going now.

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This only happens in shitty games. Turbine has done fantastically well with their cash shops long term.

Draegan_sl said:

This only happens in shitty games. Turbine has done fantastically well with their cash shops long term.

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Yet all their games suck - I'm curious where they'll be in a few years. I expect a huge shakeout in the industry, and soon.

LOTRO and DDO have been going pretty strong for years now, so you don't have to wait a few years. DDO is actually a really good game to play casually. I know the FOH crew had a lot of fun with it for a few months. It's getting a bit dated now, but they just had their first expansion. LOTRO is it's own animal, I don't like it, but it's doing very well with multiple expansions.

Turbine was the first company to do cash shops right.

Droigan_sl said:

I was a mage with summoned bags in EQ. Those were the devil. Lost my jboots in those once. I did petition that, but got back a message from a gm that it was my fault, they would not get them back (which was the right thing to do, it was my mistake). Lost a godly amount of, forgot the name, the bricks you got in that ice dungeon with the spiders. Velketor? They were heavy and encumbered you without the bags that removed weight. I forgot to empty those so many times... EDIT: For those that did not play EQ, summoned bags would vanish with all items inside them once you logged off for more than 15 minutes. /end edit

The reason bags are used in most games is because they are an easy implementation of a feeling of item based progression that causes little to no change on the dynamics of the game. I like that there are many slots in my character sheet to upgrade. However, each one that can fit an item with stats will change the power of the player, meaning you need to scale the world after it. This is the reason (I think, without being a developer), that games avoid having 10 ring slots even though we could easily fit it with 10 fingers. In fact, it is unrealistic to only have 2 slots. If jewelry gave us stat boosts in real life, we would all look like rappers. But adding 8 more slots in a game would create a player with far more power, so the game would have to be balanced around that. Much easier to limit it to two. Increasing the amount you can carry with new and more bags will give you no power, but still adds an element of progression.

I doubt bag progression, for lack of a better term, is going away any time soon. But, I am not sure I mind that aspect. Inventory management is such a large part of RPGs, it would feel odd to play one without it. Weight restrictions is one of the first things I remove in games like The Witcher and Skyrim, but for a game like EQ, the removal of that would change entire classes.

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I don't mind the weight restrictions as that is realism... bag progression is somewhat realism but here you get into a problem with your interface... that is the UI which we use to interact with the game elements.. make that crap searchable / sortable in different ways like any database view... most games don't do it and it drives me nutso... If i could add up the minutes i spent in inventory management ..

that's a very interesting point

"Bag progression" is quite a big aspect of EQ, there's a guy on the Mac server that has been chasing 100% weight reduction bags with different icon graphics for the past seven years and finally achieved it
http://eqmac.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=12008

I doubt you'll see this shit in any other game ever

but bags are quite important in EQ, and that's cool !
there's the common ones that drop weight by a little, and expensive ones that drop weight by 100%, then rare ones that weight less (for monks), and rarer ones that have to be tailored and require high skill + rare drops... such a relatively simple thing that adds progression without affecting the power curve

never thought about it so much before, but it's really well done
EQ is so amazing

tad10_sl said:

Yet all their games suck - I'm curious where they'll be in a few years. I expect a huge shakeout in the industry, and soon.

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Well that's subjective. Although I've never made it to the endgame, I do play LoTRO off and on and enjoy it. It reminds me of EQ for some reason, more so than other mmos anyways. Their community is very much like EQ's, much more social, etc. I like their version of FTP too, it's kind of a combo between F2P and B2P.

Zacx_sl said:

that's a very interesting point

"Bag progression" is quite a big aspect of EQ, there's a guy on the Mac server that has been chasing 100% weight reduction bags with different icon graphics for the past seven years and finally achieved it
http://eqmac.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=12008

I doubt you'll see this shit in any other game ever

but bags are quite important in EQ, and that's cool !
there's the common ones that drop weight by a little, and expensive ones that drop weight by 100%, then rare ones that weight less (for monks), and rarer ones that have to be tailored and require high skill + rare drops... such a relatively simple thing that adds progression without affecting the power curve

never thought about it so much before, but it's really well done
EQ is so amazing

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Funny how little things like that were a pain in the ass but managed to add something to the game that is just missing now. Currently you get a bunch of boxes and that giant 2h weapon takes as much space as a pebble. Its stupid but developers have gotten so lazy and dumb down their games so much its crazy when you go back and see some of the stuff that has been stripped out.

People love to bitch. They bitched about Sand Giants, specters, son of arugual, inventory mini game etc and developers have listened. They removed some of the danger, the thought and flavor from the world and now all we have is 12/40 space slots and bland as fuck worlds and they know exactly every step you'll take, every mob you'll kill in order from start to finish.

No wonder games suck, some ass hole scripted every bloody step you'll take, every mob you'll kill and even the number of each all the way from start to finish. Take those rails and stick them up your ass please.

Caeden_sl said:

I think gw2 does weapon skins right. Flavor ones like pirate outfits would be on the store whereas all the badass armor is earned in game

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GW2 had the right idea, or claimed to before launch. Implementation in the close to a year they've been live is lacking though. They made many weapon sets but most available through the gem shop, and only one(?) armor sets and its also gem shop only.

Agraza_sl said:

They vastly under-utilize the fashion aspect of these games. 80% of their art team should be on worn equipment/illusions/mounts full-time

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Spot on, imo. I certainly paid alot of attention to looks even in EQ. Luckily as a caster the clown suit problem wasnt an issue.

GW2 sounded like they have alot of people working art assets, but the results just arent there. It's a vast untapped potential though.

tad10_sl said:

People will pay for entertainment. Make the game free to check out and level to 20 or 30 and leave it at that. If it's good, and you spend a little bit on marketing people will pay. WoW didn't make its billions being a FTP game.

FTP is what's killing MMOs.

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Going mainstream is what killed MMORPGs (past tense with regards to having a fantasy world and not just a fantasy game). Mainstream is all about the bottom line, and that leaves making a world in the dust in favor of, well, what we have now be it sub based or F2P. 90% shit with the 10% that could be good constantly in danger of being dragged down into the cesspool. You're not getting that genie back into the bottle though.

Basically Droigan is right, if you want more then a game you're fucked. although I slightly disagree with his conclusion. I dont think you need 100 mill, but you ARE going to need more then Kickstarter puts out currently, and you also dont want corporate financing because it'll pervert the game's foundation. So right now, it's not going to get made. But I doubt it takes 20 years for someone to come back to making a fantasy world instead of a fantasy game.



So to add some substance (well, speculation and wishing) about EQN to this post, I'd like a dye system similar to GW2 where you have commons and rare dyes of most colors. Items should come with restrictions regarding which colors they can actually take though, at least in some cases. The fear of everyone making their bronze bp look like rubicite is unfounded because armor graphics have advanced enough. The dev team can design anything they want to stand out as special with an entirely new skin unique to it. Worked for GW1. That allows people to dye without eroding someone's e-peen over having a special look (no offense, could as well be my e-peen because i definitely used some items for looks when not doing cutting edge content).

tad10_sl said:

Yet all their games suck - I'm curious where they'll be in a few years. I expect a huge shakeout in the industry, and soon.

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If you can handle the not so great graphics, DDO is actually a very good game.. ( of course its dungeon after dungeon and not open world ) but the character customization is amazing and seeing the content once is well worth the experience imo. It is deep and complex, unlike 99% of everything today.

Draegan_sl said:

Turbine was the first company to do cash shops right.

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Absolutely not. They have one of the most greedy cash shops on the market for LOTRO. You could play in the noob zone, and the slightly less noob zone next to it for free. After that the zones had all their quests locked out unless you paid for the quest packs. Each pack was like $7-8 worth of store points. So it was $100+ just to unlock the quests for the vanilla game. It is another $60ish to unlock the quests for the expansions. So roughly $160 just to have access to quests. They also have a bunch of missions/skirmishes/whatever the fuck that you have to pay to unlock as well. I don't remember all the details, but I remember enough to know that is NOT how a shop should be run. They made the game as unforgiving as possible to either force a subscription, or screw people on the upfront cost of playing the game "for free".

Maybe DDO was different, but I thought LOTRO's setup was disgusting. If you want to advertise your game as F2P then the players have to be able to realistically play the game for free. I can see selling some QoL features to encourage people to spend some money, but locking out something as vital as quests was pure greed. I sent a nice "go fuck yourself" email to turbine and uninstalled the game. Anyone who tries something similar won't get a dime from me. Unlike say games like GW2 that I happily spent some money on. Make a fun game, and a fair store and I don't mind giving some "thanks for the fun" donations.

The thing is, if you played a couple of characters to like level 20, you could afford the next tier of xp zones via the earned turbine points. If you did another character to 20, I think you could unlock everything up to 50. It's been awhile since I messed around on it, but while it appeared pretty shitty at first if you only played one character, there were fairly reasonable workarounds. I think it was 3 characters to 20 (maybe 4, I know the FoH board had a post detailing what you needed to do to unlock shit for free) to unlock the base game, then like 2 more to unlock the new classes and most the moria content? I think when they went to the other expansions after that, like Rohan and shit, that the price to unlock stuff became more of a full "you must purchase this expansion" type deal, realistically.

DDO was very different. I've played F2P Lotro and I didn't find it that horrible but maybe it is. DDO's cashshop was amazing.

tad10_sl said:

I'm not convinced FTP is a long-term solution to anything. I think its working okay now, but ultimately you have to mudflate items in the cash shops

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Why?

Rezz_sl said:

The thing is, if you played a couple of characters to like level 20, you could afford the next tier of xp zones via the earned turbine points. If you did another character to 20, I think you could unlock everything up to 50. It's been awhile since I messed around on it, but while it appeared pretty shitty at first if you only played one character, there were fairly reasonable workarounds. I think it was 3 characters to 20 (maybe 4, I know the FoH board had a post detailing what you needed to do to unlock shit for free) to unlock the base game, then like 2 more to unlock the new classes and most the moria content? I think when they went to the other expansions after that, like Rohan and shit, that the price to unlock stuff became more of a full "you must purchase this expansion" type deal, realistically.

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I guess if you really like making alts that isn't so bad. I'm more of a two character kinda player though. I usually make a healer, and dps in MMOs. Having to make half a dozen alts just to keep leveling my burglar was really obnoxious.

I'm not against the idea of unlocking quests in zones, but the price has to be right. Charging $7+ per zone is just outrageous. It also shouldn't be advertised as F2P if they want to do that. Even if it's cheap.

Has anyone ever played the dungeon called Grey Stone in Vanguard? I did it tonight for the first time in years and my god, its the most boring thing I have ever done in an MMO. Im not sure if its because they went f2p and dumbed everything down or what, but even 5 dot mobs were dying in 2 seconds flat. It was horrible I couldnt wait to leave. I hope to hell EQ Next is not like that.

Itzena_sl said:

Why?

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Because people stop buying the old and busted.

..assuming a static player base. Which is amassiveassumption to make where most of the evidence for every MMO ever supports the opposite.

Lost Ranger_sl said:

I guess if you really like making alts that isn't so bad. I'm more of a two character kinda player though. I usually make a healer, and dps in MMOs. Having to make half a dozen alts just to keep leveling my burglar was really obnoxious.

I'm not against the idea of unlocking quests in zones, but the price has to be right. Charging $7+ per zone is just outrageous. It also shouldn't be advertised as F2P if they want to do that. Even if it's cheap.

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It depends on your playstyle for LoTRO. I like to do the achievements, etc and have a couple of toons, so getting the needed points isnt' that bad. It just happens. And they have made some of the zones free that they use to charge for a couple years ago. Anyways, I found LoTRO's shop to be very workable. Especially if you keep an eye out for the deals and save some pts for them. It is even possible to never pay a dime if you are truly dedicated.

I don't mind paying for the expansions. Getting the zones needed to level I found was easy to do and didn't cost me a dime. Even have been able to get extra storage, crafting extensions, and other goodies without opening my wallet. I can see how LoTRO might be rough if you try to race to max level without doing any achievements etc though. And I don't know what the endgame is like, so can't speak to that.

Overall, I like LoTRO"s cash shop. It makes sense. You pay for the content you want to play, or you work a bit for it. Seems fair to me. I pay 60 bucks for much less when I buy a crappy single player game.