EQ Never
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Rombo
Lord Nagafen Raider
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I dont like this option, it will still removes us from the world and remove all competition aspect. So many times i was camping something in EQ and part of the fear was actually someone walking by my camp and the risk of being kill stealed forced players interaction. Be it like ''sup, been here for 3 hours, coo?'' ''- yea coo, just passing by'' to straight out cold war ambiance where the other player didnt reply back and you knew shit was about to get intense. It made the reward so so so much satisfying. It also fucks up mudflation if every group in the area receive the message a boss popped and we can all kill him in our lill instance for more loot and down the drain goes the value of the items.
Imo, most instancing problems would be fixed by the simple change that you shouldnt be able to breeze to cap lvl like WoW. Make leveling a bitch. Make the ding sound oh so much more rewarding. Bring back hell levels where death can cost you all the exp you worked so hard on collecting. This alone will split the population mass and balance the players across the world in a more natural way so we're not fighting all at the same spot for the same mob.
If you make it so that the key is a more dependable drop but you have to get to the highest level mob area and the place where you get it has really nasty pulls it could alleviate that, or since most of the bosses are non instances give this key accessed boss a lockout so no group has a reason to intentionally farm the key more than once that day.
bixxby
Molten Core Raider
- 2,750
- 47
The weather sound effects were fucking perfect in EQ2. I remember on more than one occasion being tricked into thinking it was raining outside by the sound effects in game.
my good reason is that only a mentally retarded person would have continued playing EQ after Luclin. So while EQ may have had some good expansions later on, I wouldn't know about it because in my world EQ only consists of vanilla, kunark and velious. It's like people that still play WoW after the abortion that was WOTLK
You really don't have to kick a player in the nuts to add a sense of danger. I hate to use the Dark Souls example again, but there it is.
You spread the playerbase out by having a huge, sandbox, open world. Not by a bunch of draconian rules.
Utnayan
F16 patrolling Rajaah until he plays DS3
- 16,314
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Solution is fairly simple. One issue with static content.
1) In EQ with slow content consumption and a higher leveling curve, non instanced content with static mobs/placeholders had people going to designated popular areas because they knew what was there (Named mob spawn and loot population/amount of mobs/repop) which left several under-utilized areas as a result of not having anything really spawn there = long wait times/camp spots/under utilized content which was designed to spread that wait for players.
The solution is very simple when you think about it. Create those static dungeons across the leveling model, you can still slow the model down, but now split the loot and named mob's dynamically across the entire server to pop in place of each other no matter what dungeon they are in. To avoid conflicts of story, create a separate mob table that has it's own dungeon designated mob which will access the same loot table on death in a subset. What this does is spread folks around already created dungeons and off to less populated ones because they will know the loot in said dungeon will still be available and on the same random's as any other dungeon - while also maintaining lore by placing in those static designated NPC's per dungeon spawn set (With their own placeholders) Basically, more or less, loot pools between the entire server.
To have a static immersive world dictated by community, you cannot have anything instanced and you need to keep relative worlds small. That doesn't mean you need 240 10k mac character capped 3k max concurrent server blades either. Instead of instancing the zones/dungeons/overlays, and then instancing dungeon content on top of that - just split each one into it's own persistent server. No, there is no way to avoid player bitching when they cannot log in or have to wait to get into the game. That comes at the expense of having a static world and all it's possibilities instead of the fake garbage we have right now with 56 overflow instances of Antonica.
1) In EQ with slow content consumption and a higher leveling curve, non instanced content with static mobs/placeholders had people going to designated popular areas because they knew what was there (Named mob spawn and loot population/amount of mobs/repop) which left several under-utilized areas as a result of not having anything really spawn there = long wait times/camp spots/under utilized content which was designed to spread that wait for players.
The solution is very simple when you think about it. Create those static dungeons across the leveling model, you can still slow the model down, but now split the loot and named mob's dynamically across the entire server to pop in place of each other no matter what dungeon they are in. To avoid conflicts of story, create a separate mob table that has it's own dungeon designated mob which will access the same loot table on death in a subset. What this does is spread folks around already created dungeons and off to less populated ones because they will know the loot in said dungeon will still be available and on the same random's as any other dungeon - while also maintaining lore by placing in those static designated NPC's per dungeon spawn set (With their own placeholders) Basically, more or less, loot pools between the entire server.
To have a static immersive world dictated by community, you cannot have anything instanced and you need to keep relative worlds small. That doesn't mean you need 240 10k mac character capped 3k max concurrent server blades either. Instead of instancing the zones/dungeons/overlays, and then instancing dungeon content on top of that - just split each one into it's own persistent server. No, there is no way to avoid player bitching when they cannot log in or have to wait to get into the game. That comes at the expense of having a static world and all it's possibilities instead of the fake garbage we have right now with 56 overflow instances of Antonica.
Zehnpai
Molten Core Raider
- 399
- 1,245
Phasing is probably going to see more emergence as they work the kinks out of it in any game that actually moves forward. Tie in to social site concepts and you'll be golden. The long and the short of it being that you're always in a personal phase. If you're in an area that is supposed to feel populated/crowded the game shows you other people starting with group mates, friends, guildmates then fills in the rest with people who have a similar play time as you, people you've grouped with in the past, etc...and finally as a last resort if not enough people are found will just throw random people into your phase. However if you're near the bottom of a dungeon or whatever it would only show you perhaps groupmates and friends or something.
It solves the over-crowding issue without introducing fucking channels (I'm in freeport.4 which one are you in? Okay, switching to Freeport.7 lol!). It solves the problem of social dungeons without turning them into a McDonalds drivethru. There's a whole litany of advantages here that would take me forever to list them all.
The biggest problem however is reconciling phases. I had a diagram for this at one point but the jist of it is imagine I'm friends with Tad and Utnayan but they have each other on ignore. In my phase I see Tad and Utnayan. Tad sees me, Utnayan sees me, but neither of them see each other. Utnayan starts fighting a mob, what do all of us see? What does Tad see if I start helping Utnayan? Does he see me fighting empty space? What if Tad wants to help me fight? Does he now see the mob and Utnayan?
It solves the over-crowding issue without introducing fucking channels (I'm in freeport.4 which one are you in? Okay, switching to Freeport.7 lol!). It solves the problem of social dungeons without turning them into a McDonalds drivethru. There's a whole litany of advantages here that would take me forever to list them all.
The biggest problem however is reconciling phases. I had a diagram for this at one point but the jist of it is imagine I'm friends with Tad and Utnayan but they have each other on ignore. In my phase I see Tad and Utnayan. Tad sees me, Utnayan sees me, but neither of them see each other. Utnayan starts fighting a mob, what do all of us see? What does Tad see if I start helping Utnayan? Does he see me fighting empty space? What if Tad wants to help me fight? Does he now see the mob and Utnayan?
Khane
Got something right about marriage
- 19,875
- 13,393
I don't like the idea of phasing. "Hey we're standing right next to each other but I can't see you because I haven't fulfilled some stupid mundane requirement to be in your phase". No thanks.
If you want to show me what the world was like before I arrived here, do it caverns of time style.
If you want to show me what the world was like before I arrived here, do it caverns of time style.
Big Flex
Fitness Fascist
- 4,314
- 3,166
Many, many of the positive features (Not saying that hell levels was a positive element) in EQ1 or even early UO were due to a fuck up, a lack of foresight or poor understanding of the repercussions of mechanics. Early MMO success stories can almost all be attributed to beneficial accidents, whereas anytime an MMO developers attempt to deliberately design or implement features.. they're terrible.
Zehnpai
Molten Core Raider
- 399
- 1,245
Er, did you even read what I wrote? 8( Stop thinking WoW and start thinking how you can use the technology.
Zehnpai
Molten Core Raider
- 399
- 1,245
I remember when they admitted kiting in EQ was a bug and one day they actually tried to fix it. The backlash on flameplay was hilarious because it broke pulling mobs as well. I think what makes it even more tragic is if we had played EQ the 'intended' way 99% of shit would have been unkillable. I remember one guild on our server getting a warning for pulling Dain down the well saying you're intended to fight him in his room and pulling him out is an exploit.
Utnayan
F16 patrolling Rajaah until he plays DS3
- 16,314
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No. That was the explanation given by developers. Which was about as hilarious when Ester said cloth caps dropping off warders was working as intended.
Levels were hard coded, and all of it was meant to slow down progress in key areas of content/dungeon overlap because they didn't have enough higher level content finished, and they needed to slow the funnel down of high level players entering very limited (and very few) static areas. They "fixed" it when they had more content flow.
Rombo
Lord Nagafen Raider
- 763
- 198
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And thats what made EQ emergent, shit like that. Later when WoW was released they had strict rules shutting all the emergent gameplay down. I remember some elite quest mob in ashenvale that you could kite and then pull to the guards at 49% and have the guards kill it. That was just one example. Another was the world bosses and pulling them near a graveyard and then graveyard rushing them. Or pulling the world bosses into the opponents quest hub and having it destroy evryone etc... Well they fixed that shit right away and made sure that none of that shit could ever be done again, making the game more and more strile as it went on.
Another thing I HATE is grouping mobs so you always pulled what they intended you to pull instead of using your skills to pull singles, etc... This goes for both EQ2 and WoW.
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They did not fix the hell level thing until after luclin if im not mistaken. By then there was more than enough content, hell if thats the reason, some conspiracy, why did they not fix it when they released Kunark? Kunark alone gave enough high level content where this was no longer an issue.
BubbySoup
Golden Knight of the Realm
- 125
- 45
I see your point but the simple solution would be that having someone on ignore doesn't mean you can't interact with them in some meaningful way. There is no reason you shouldn't all be able to see each other, just that Tad and Ut wouldn't be able to communicate with each other. If phasing does ever get to this stage, I think it would be bad design that you could phase someone out by putting them on ignore.
Qwerty on Friday must give us his Thumbs up or Down on game controllers for this.
If it can be played on Atari 2600 controller only leet players like him use that controller.
If it can be played on Atari 2600 controller only leet players like him use that controller.
I think splitting should be a fundamental part of the mechanism of an MMO, just like Crowd Control used to be. A lot of WOW people keep talking about the 'trinity' of healing, tanking, and DPS. Back in EQ days, DPS was a given, and CC was what one needed in dungeons. Monks gave one another option with splitting and were vital for raids. I like the idea of more individualized classes with roles. I don't mind some overlap, such as the SK/Monk FD one, but really the more classes that can do something, the less meaning those classes tend to have in my opinion.
I really hope EQN isn't taking the WOW vision of everyone being able to do everything.