Convo
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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EQ Never
- Thread starter Convo
- Start date
Shards of Dalaya (a heavily modified Everquest server) did some things really well, and trading is one of those things.
First off, items that are bind on equip can be unbound for a price that is roughly the cost of buying the item from scratch from someone else. So it wasn't any use to sell items that were bound to you because it cost just as much to unbind it, but if you really wanted to trade it to a friend or an alt, you could unbind and do that. You could also dismantle it which made it un-usable, but you could then sell it to merchant for some plat, which was at least a little something - good for when you get an upgrade.
The best thing though is that they have a global auction channel, so it works like the East Commons tunnel where people manually trade, but you can do it even while you are out adventuring or whatever, so you don't need to stand in that tunnel for hours to try to flog an item. Also people followed better etiquette and they actually auction properly. And also, you can have an NPC merchant give you a basic cost for any item, so you can just sell to a merchant if you are in a hurry, or you can use their price as a "price check". So you then /auction Selling a Flashy Whatever Longsword - 50 plat or best offer.
You then start getting tells from people, someone will offer 52, someone else will offer 55, maybe someone who really really wants it will offer 65. Then you do /auction Selling a Flashy Whatever Longsword - 65 plat best offer from Flux.
Then you wait a moment and you do:
/auction Selling a Flashy Whatever Longsword - 65 plat best offer from Flux - going once!
/auction Selling a Flashy Whatever Longsword - 65 plat best offer from Flux - going twice!!!
And usually just before you sell it someone else will come along with a better price, and it can take a few minutes until the bids stop coming in and you sell to the highest bidder. It works great, like a real auction, and it means that people get to manually sell their gear, and people (who are online) get a chance to buy it if they have enough money/determination to buy it. And then you can mail it to them or meet in person. And usually because the mailboxes were in towns, people would just do all their auctioning in towns. You could make this a bit more aesthetically pleasing but the idea I think is great.
First off, items that are bind on equip can be unbound for a price that is roughly the cost of buying the item from scratch from someone else. So it wasn't any use to sell items that were bound to you because it cost just as much to unbind it, but if you really wanted to trade it to a friend or an alt, you could unbind and do that. You could also dismantle it which made it un-usable, but you could then sell it to merchant for some plat, which was at least a little something - good for when you get an upgrade.
The best thing though is that they have a global auction channel, so it works like the East Commons tunnel where people manually trade, but you can do it even while you are out adventuring or whatever, so you don't need to stand in that tunnel for hours to try to flog an item. Also people followed better etiquette and they actually auction properly. And also, you can have an NPC merchant give you a basic cost for any item, so you can just sell to a merchant if you are in a hurry, or you can use their price as a "price check". So you then /auction Selling a Flashy Whatever Longsword - 50 plat or best offer.
You then start getting tells from people, someone will offer 52, someone else will offer 55, maybe someone who really really wants it will offer 65. Then you do /auction Selling a Flashy Whatever Longsword - 65 plat best offer from Flux.
Then you wait a moment and you do:
/auction Selling a Flashy Whatever Longsword - 65 plat best offer from Flux - going once!
/auction Selling a Flashy Whatever Longsword - 65 plat best offer from Flux - going twice!!!
And usually just before you sell it someone else will come along with a better price, and it can take a few minutes until the bids stop coming in and you sell to the highest bidder. It works great, like a real auction, and it means that people get to manually sell their gear, and people (who are online) get a chance to buy it if they have enough money/determination to buy it. And then you can mail it to them or meet in person. And usually because the mailboxes were in towns, people would just do all their auctioning in towns. You could make this a bit more aesthetically pleasing but the idea I think is great.
Was this a third party or Sony's doing? Hopefully they decide to implement that scheme into next. It seems like a nice balance b't having easily accessible trade without forcing people into an interface and maintaining immersion. Tangent, It's to bad that IP laws weren't stricter/easier to enforce in terms of video game design or maybe we wouldn't have had so many WoW clones and more innovative design/content. Being as it is you'd think someone would've been able to cherry pick all the dime qualities from MMORPGS from the last 20 years and implement their own genius to create a WoW killer by now without actually becoming a WoW clone in their attempt.
Third party, it's a privately run server and it got quite successful in the early 2000's, and SOE tried to shut it down. So they relaunched with a new name and changed almost everything about the game that was EQ specific, so every zone and every mob name got recreated with a whole new set of lore. So bats, wolves, Sand Giants, etc. they are ok, but Froglok, Iksar etc had to get changed. So it's almost like a whole new game but with EQ's engine, zones, and artwork. The guy who created it was a total coding wiz kid and he did an unbelievable job, and then when he left to pursue his own company dreams, he left the game to a team of people who now maintain the game. Some come and go but there have been a lot of very talented players who have come and gone but left some really good content behind, like some really good lore or a zone they designed or whatever.
I personally think they took some stuff too far just because they got so carried away with their ability to change *everything*, so it has ended up where some things changed that I don't think ever needed to change. But it's kind of 50/50 and half of what they changed was just plain better. Since I first played it in about 2004 or so, I have never been back to EQ since. I did P99 for a while too, but I prefer SoD (full name is Shards of Dalaya).
The trade mechanics was something they were very anal about. A lot of the players wanted an auction house or a bazaar, but the staff completely rejected the idea. There is a text based trading system kind of like a bazaar which you access via the bank, but the /auction channel is where most trade is done, and everyone uses it.
At one point they did experiment with NPC's who you could hire and put your gear on, but that went eventually and the way it's run now is how everyone seems to like it.
p.s. There are some other features from that game that SOE would be totally insane to not implement themselves.
I personally think they took some stuff too far just because they got so carried away with their ability to change *everything*, so it has ended up where some things changed that I don't think ever needed to change. But it's kind of 50/50 and half of what they changed was just plain better. Since I first played it in about 2004 or so, I have never been back to EQ since. I did P99 for a while too, but I prefer SoD (full name is Shards of Dalaya).
The trade mechanics was something they were very anal about. A lot of the players wanted an auction house or a bazaar, but the staff completely rejected the idea. There is a text based trading system kind of like a bazaar which you access via the bank, but the /auction channel is where most trade is done, and everyone uses it.
At one point they did experiment with NPC's who you could hire and put your gear on, but that went eventually and the way it's run now is how everyone seems to like it.
p.s. There are some other features from that game that SOE would be totally insane to not implement themselves.
Yep, poetic justice. =) They are nice ideas because they improve on EQ without changing it TOO much - unlike games like WoW (and everything else) which changed things so much that it became almost like a different genre. If SOE are really serious about sandbox gaming and going back to EQ's roots, they should definitely at least have someone 'study' Shards of Dalaya.
fitting and fortelling. with the fall of foh, so goes the fall of the casual mcmmorpg. eq next will usher in a new golden age for all of us, taking us back to real gaming.
SMED, DO YOU HEAR ME?
Yeah, for me it all boils down to one thing, either Smedley has some balls, or he makes another WoW clone. You can't have both. There have been enough failed WoW clones now that it's surely not even a risk to attempt a hardcore oldschool mmo. It makes sense to try it now. We knew all along that it would have enough fans to make it survive comfortably. The industry ignored this and chased the filthy teeny dollar. But now it's time to get it right. You hear this smedders? What's it gonna be?! You either make the game you know EQ players want, or you are this guy:
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tad10
Elisha Dushku
- 5,518
- 583
Nothing good will happen in the MMO space (barring some kind of indie brillance) until the shit idea that is FTP MMOs are gone. Smed still plans on FTP EQNext AFAIK.
Ugh...they're seriously making EQN FTP? I don't mind a game like GW2 how they have their FTP setup, where you have access to the entire game...but Sony's idea of FTP for their games is dumb. Both EQ and Vanguard they basically make the game unplayable as "FTP". To unlock everything you have to pay a subscription anyway...not really FTP...more like trial play.
Randin
Trakanon Raider
- 1,925
- 879
Well, it is worth keeping in mind that eq and vanguard were sub games that were later taken f2p, and not launched as such. It seems to be a weird habit amongst game developers to, if they're moving a sub-based game to f2p, to come up with the least hospitable free play experience they think they can get away with, and try to nickel and dime you for everything they can. When developing a game to be f2p from launch, they seem to get slightly more reasonable in what they offer the player. Don't know why that is, but it seems to be the case.
I haven't played Planetside 2, so I can't speak from direct experience, but I haven't noticed too many complaints about how they're handling their f2p system. So I wouldn't completely dismiss the idea of SOE comming up with something reasonable for EQN; not yet, at least.
I don't know about EQ but that's not completely true about Vanguard. There are some classes restricted to level 20 but the ones that aren't you could play all the way to the end and do everything you want without spending a single dime. And even the restricted classes, the cost of the potion to unlock them is about a dollar or something.
I would say that their f2p model in that game is extremely generous. The problem is that it's totally pay-to-win too, which basically makes everything you could possibly achieve in the game no longer special. It's great for a casual disposable game but for a more serious long term game, it would be horrible.
xzi
Mouthbreather
- 7,526
- 6,763
Planetside 2 did F2P well IMO. Some of the more "powerful" weapons are expensive and you have the choice to just pay money if you don't want to save for a few days. And then they have shit like skins for vehicles that you can only get with real money. That's how F2P should be. Nothing that actually effects the game in the slightest (I'll even let boosters like xp/rep/whatever boosters for pay only). Just add skins, reskins, and fun little shit like extra pets or something stupid.
An example of terrible F2P is DDO, only being able to enter some dungeons/areas if you pay a little bit extra for it. Now that shit needs to stop.
An example of terrible F2P is DDO, only being able to enter some dungeons/areas if you pay a little bit extra for it. Now that shit needs to stop.
As long as you can't buy gear, then I am fine with F2P aspects. The second you can buy gear or anything that improves your characters abilities is when it crosses the line for me.
Nirgon
YOU HAVE NO POWER HERE
- 12,820
- 19,788
Planetside 2 seems fine and to be going in a good direction. It sticks to its roots and therefore is popular with the in crowd, and more are coming to it en masse because of its growing solid community core. There is a huge demand for serious games and not some "do your dailies"/free epics shit.
Mr Creed
Too old for this shit
- 2,380
- 276
They'll have to monetize the game somehow. You better get that reality into your head this year or you will be dissapointed. I like the LoL/PS2 F2P style, but I'm not sure how well it would work with MMORPGs.
My main hope/expectation is a slow progression game that does not try to equalize the playerbase every few months, but with small enough increments to make that acceptable. No or very limited PvP is a given in this context (maybe like EQ, special servers with a clear "no balance for you" warning).
- some way to reskin looks onto different stats (see GW2 or TOR, possibly through item shop)
- Dyes done exactly like in GW2
- crafted and common drop items as a baseline instead of everything being magical
- EQ1 style faction system where the player choice influence how the game world views that character, starting with character creation and influenced by in-game actions
- huge public dungeons. That does not mean the game cant have the "3 turns, a room and a boss" style of content, but craft it into the world in a way that at least kinda fits.
- a character progression system that is designed with a 10 year run in mind and doesnt break down with the first expansion. If you have classes, have a common pool of abilities/passives that everyone can learn. AAs are great.
- make the acquisition of abilities part of the gameplay instead of auto-granting them or just selling them at trainers. Learning basic slashes at the warrior school is fine, to learn the advanced skills you need to find a mentor and get him to like you enough to teach you. have enough diversity/choices in the game that not everyone seeks the same mentors (faction barriers can make that unlikely anyway, and someone putting in a lot of effort to befriend a wood elf mentor as a troll would stand out like that iksar running around freeport). Have something like lockpicking in the game (with force, magic or thief skills) and then have thieves easy ways to find a trainer, but a hard to find/convince trainer for the other characters.
- I am torn on the idea of companions as a general feature as opposed to the traditional pet class thing. It would be an interesting topic though so I list it here
I guess I want a character that was played a couple of years to somehow be the sum of that playtime, and not be "current level cap plus 2 months of grinding the latest tier of items". You can approach that in a lot of ways, the question is does anyone want that or am I just a tiny minority in this regard?
My main hope/expectation is a slow progression game that does not try to equalize the playerbase every few months, but with small enough increments to make that acceptable. No or very limited PvP is a given in this context (maybe like EQ, special servers with a clear "no balance for you" warning).
- some way to reskin looks onto different stats (see GW2 or TOR, possibly through item shop)
- Dyes done exactly like in GW2
- crafted and common drop items as a baseline instead of everything being magical
- EQ1 style faction system where the player choice influence how the game world views that character, starting with character creation and influenced by in-game actions
- huge public dungeons. That does not mean the game cant have the "3 turns, a room and a boss" style of content, but craft it into the world in a way that at least kinda fits.
- a character progression system that is designed with a 10 year run in mind and doesnt break down with the first expansion. If you have classes, have a common pool of abilities/passives that everyone can learn. AAs are great.
- make the acquisition of abilities part of the gameplay instead of auto-granting them or just selling them at trainers. Learning basic slashes at the warrior school is fine, to learn the advanced skills you need to find a mentor and get him to like you enough to teach you. have enough diversity/choices in the game that not everyone seeks the same mentors (faction barriers can make that unlikely anyway, and someone putting in a lot of effort to befriend a wood elf mentor as a troll would stand out like that iksar running around freeport). Have something like lockpicking in the game (with force, magic or thief skills) and then have thieves easy ways to find a trainer, but a hard to find/convince trainer for the other characters.
- I am torn on the idea of companions as a general feature as opposed to the traditional pet class thing. It would be an interesting topic though so I list it here
I guess I want a character that was played a couple of years to somehow be the sum of that playtime, and not be "current level cap plus 2 months of grinding the latest tier of items". You can approach that in a lot of ways, the question is does anyone want that or am I just a tiny minority in this regard?