EQ Never

Vonador_sl said:

Not really. Some people like to suffer actual consequences when they fuck up; it makes ultimate success all the more satisfying, therefore increasing enjoyment of the game for those who are patient/skilled enough to succeed. It's not even conjecture - see: Demon's Souls, Dark Souls.

This whole kiddie-circus 'everyone who participated deserves the same trophy, no matter who wins!' mentality is such carebear bullshit.

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AMEN.

As I much as I want EQN to be based around a first-person experience, have a perilous world with innovative AI and combat while taking away the quest grind, Im pretty sure nobodies expectations can be met by this game. After WoW, when it was realized how much money can be made by the genre, it sold out. Its a business, and it always was, but lets not kid ourselves when we fantasize about what this game is going to be about: maximizing profit. Its obviously just conjecture, but I would posit that the market for "casual" MMOs is greater than the one that a lot of people on this board/thread (including myself) would like.

Aside from that, there most definitely IS a market for a hardcore MMORPG. Look at all the people that play hardcore mode on PoE/D3, Dark Souls, indie rogue-likes ect. To the people that say "Yea well I dont have the time to do x for y hours anymore", that's unfortunate for you, but the point is really moot because that group of people who ARE willing to do that, has grown. There are more teenage high school kids and gamers on the internet gaming than any point previously, so that demographic has only gotten larger. There's absolutely a market for that game, but I'm sure it isint as large as the "casual" flavor.

Smed is talking a big game about sandboxes, changing the environment, dynamic gameplay, and all I can think about when I read that, is Vanguard.

Daidraco_sl said:

Its a deluded thought to believe a harsh death penalty will make you enjoy a game, more.

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Human psychology is not one of your strong points is it

Vonador_sl said:

Some people like to suffer actual consequences when they fuck up; it makes ultimate success all the more satisfying, therefore increasing enjoyment of the game for those who are patient/skilled enough to succeed.

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someone gets it!

Lemmiwinks_sl said:

After WoW, when it was realized how much money can be made by the genre, it sold out.

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I am unsure about this realy. As you said there might be a market for less easy MMORPGs and I agree. It is however way smaller than the market Rift or SWTor tried to reach. However that is exactly the point. They tried and failed. They tried to beat WoW on its turf and it didn't work. They all try to reproduce WoWs success but maybe that is impossible even. Now if there realy is a market for an MMORPG of the kind we wish EQN to be, there might come a developer aiming for that niche.

Most of the newer games failed because they were all able to be beaten, even by casuals, usually within the 30 days. When all that is left is shooting for a +3 on a couple of slots with several huge fraction grinds to get there people pretty much have just said fuck it. No character attachment, little reason to fully develop alts (who the hell really wants to fill those little bars again?) and you aren't even out of the free month asking "WTF do i do now?"

I fully expect EQN to follow the GW2 path on leveling. Its different enough and hasn't been tried to death and if done right could be interesting. I doubt they'll get it right but hopefully there will be more to the game than pharming 4 or 5 event chains to max level while dumping a back pack full of mostly useless trash at the vendor every 30 minutes.

cinge_sl said:

One thing I would like to see from future games is a Live event team. Events run and operated by actual people(instead of just s script) that give one time only rewards. You can make events that just appear without warning and reward the person(s) who find it or give a warning and have a competition or such. Make level requirements so its spread out to people of all levels etc. Unfortunately this is just added cost and will most likely never happen.

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That kinda stuff worked in EQ but it wont work in a mondern game I think.

The added cost aside, I think public backlash makes this a very difficult, maybe even impossible goal for a company. If you look at any special event in the last years you can see a very strong sense of entitlement in the majority of players that results in ALOT of bad word of mouth and publicity on any kind of event. Nearly a year ago TOR had an overall well done event, but still people complained because the temporary changes impacted their planned evening, or that the event was too long, too short, unfairly taking place during someone#s vacation week, unfair in making you enter a pvp area for one step, etc. All kinds of baseless complaints. GW2 had alot of whining about each of their three temp events too. And those are at least available on every server. I'm well aware that all those complaints are retarded, but as a company you have to consider the PR implications of your GM team giving very rare or one-of-a-time items away basically on their whim. The player whines will be heard on the moon.

People whine about super rare mounts to the 1% raiders, but companies still do it. People will cry but they , for the most part, still play the game.

I can think of 1 in WoW, the AQ openening where 1 person out of the entire server got a title and mount. Neither of which can ever be gotten again. I don't remember hearing too many complaints about it and it didn't really effect the game nor its popularity. The items can be ilussions, mounts, tittles, hell even armor/weapons with maybe a unique effect/clicky. Doesn't have to be a uber item that beats anything currently in game.

As for events that effect people who don't want to get involved at all, could easily limit it to specific area/zone etc. But again, I've seen these events cause crying/whining, but almost every time its just words and the players soon forget about it while still playing(infamous zombie/infection event in WoW).

Hell given the general stance of this thread, ignoring the cesspool that is the "masses" seems to be the prevalent idea.

I want a Guise of the Deceiver and Amulet of Necropotence. IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR?!

Faris_sl said:

I am unsure about this realy. As you said there might be a market for less easy MMORPGs and I agree. It is however way smaller than the market Rift or SWTor tried to reach. However that is exactly the point. They tried and failed. They tried to beat WoW on its turf and it didn't work. They all try to reproduce WoWs success but maybe that is impossible even. Now if there realy is a market for an MMORPG of the kind we wish EQN to be, there might come a developer aiming for that niche.

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Thats the thing. These companies saw the $ Blizzard made by WoW, and attempted to copy is "formula" to capitalize. This includes minimap in right corner, !'s, ?'s, skill bars, skill trees, ect. Some of the things that WoW did were improvements to the genre, no doubt. But that isint my point.

Its like the pop music industry. A popular song comes out that hits the top of the billboards. So what do the record companies do? They try to copy the "formula" to make some dollars, because that's whats popular/good/profitable at that time. You see this ALL THE TIME. What we have in this genre is exactly this. You heard WoW's song, and man, was it great when you heard it. Then come along the other guys trying to ride off their coattails. Sure, they're good songs in their own right, but people can't shake the feeling of "Hey, I feel like I've heard this a thousand times before". A lot of people are getting tired of the same old songs being played on the radio all the time.

What is going to/needs to happen, is a new song needs to be released that deviates from the formula. Nobody really knows what it will sound like or how good it will be until theyre listening to it.

That's all just tied to economics. Once the cat is out of the bag (WoW), the market fills, then floods with copycat products. We've seen a lot of shallow rushjobs and outright cons (VG) that try to capitalize on the bull market.

The silly thing about MMOs is that you can create them like CoD or Madden variants but the core mechanics need to work, something resembling balance between classes and an egalitarian progression scheme. Within that model, you can cater the to poopsockers by giving them vanity trinkets that allow anyone to see how big their ePeen is. However, none of the post-WoW knock-offs were ever even "finished"; all developers had to do was under-promise/over-deliver with core mechanics.

The MMO crowd wants a great deal of sometimes mutually exclusive ideas to live in the "one game", and with some clever design, I believe this is possible but publishers are just looking for changing the coat of paint on the house and calling it day. Just like with any boom-bust cycle, MMOs will go back to niche status once the market for them crashes, spawning the next EQ/WoW game. Unfortunately, we have to wait for them to crash the market for MMOs to get the MMO we want and daresay, deserve.

Itlan_sl said:

I want a Guise of the Deceiver and Amulet of Necropotence. IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR?!

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i got a guise of the deceiver during a GM event once. that was fucking sweet. i still remember the wizard on my server who got the staff of al' kabor (1 per server i think). i believe rare events and rare rewards are a good thing. someone is always going to complain about something. fuck them.

etchazz_sl said:

i got a guise of the deceiver during a GM event once. that was fucking sweet. i still remember the wizard on my server who got the staff of al' kabor (1 per server i think). i believe rare events and rare rewards are a good thing. someone is always going to complain about something. fuck them.

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I was in a GM event once....I kill the big bad guy. My wife gets an earing (Mind you this is Kunark.) that is something like +10 to all stats +50 HP/Mana and I believe some kind of aura, completely unique and awesome.

I get...A cloth mask, +8 str/+8 Stamina (On my mage.).....I was so sad, so very sad. haha. But about a week later, another GM apologized and said I got the wrong item, and changed the stats up to be +8int/stam, +80 HP/Mana. Which, for Kunark, was pretty good.

Ukerric_sl said:

Remember more, yes.

But it's the same way with, say, war. Everyone who experienced war, directly, remembers it. Vividly. But somehow, I don't think they really "enjoyed it more".

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So you're saying everyone here has the MMO equivellent of PTSD?

Seriously though...as dumb as I think it is to advocate heavy time loss (From bad CR's)...Adding a danger element to the game does make "victory" taste a bit sweeter. It's a VERY fine line to balance, and I think EQ, during the early years, was a little too harsh. I think WoW is a little too easy. But WoW being easy comes mainly from the fact that gold is essentially useless, you literally make it to pay for repairs, that's it. In a system like UO, even when it became easy to get reses, gold loss (Through items) was a serious threat because gold was always in demand.

There is a place in between WoW and EQ that the developers can find to give death some bite, without souring the total of the experience. Both sides are staw manning pretty damn hard here.

Ukerric_sl said:

Remember more, yes.

But it's the same way with, say, war. Everyone who experienced war, directly, remembers it. Vividly. But somehow, I don't think they really "enjoyed it more".

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Oh my God that's hilarious. Way to go punctuation Nazi.

Itlan_sl said:

I want a Guise of the Deceiver and Amulet of Necropotence. IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR?!

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You can have, sure... but 3min duration on a 30min timer. Isn't that just so much fun?

cinge_sl said:

People whine about super rare mounts to the 1% raiders, but companies still do it. People will cry but they , for the most part, still play the game.

I can think of 1 in WoW, the AQ openening where 1 person out of the entire server got a title and mount. Neither of which can ever be gotten again. I don't remember hearing too many complaints about it and it didn't really effect the game nor its popularity. The items can be ilussions, mounts, tittles, hell even armor/weapons with maybe a unique effect/clicky. Doesn't have to be a uber item that beats anything currently in game.

As for events that effect people who don't want to get involved at all, could easily limit it to specific area/zone etc. But again, I've seen these events cause crying/whining, but almost every time its just words and the players soon forget about it while still playing(infamous zombie/infection event in WoW).

Hell given the general stance of this thread, ignoring the cesspool that is the "masses" seems to be the prevalent idea.

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Dont get me wrong, I'm all for rare, hard to obtain items. Just playing devils advocate here, and in todays market making a choice that gives you negative customer backlash is not made lightly, especially when the upsides are fairly limited. EQ dealt with a very diffferent market and customer base so it was less of a problem (the "moar for me fuck everyone else" attitude was there less so because in EQ you needed those other players to advance). WoW got away with it because it was, or is(?), the only game that mattered to the market at the time. Where would a disgruntled MMO junkie go when he was pissed about someone getting a uique mount he cant get?

On the other hand, make a decision that pisses of the unwashed masses in another MMO and watch them scuttle back to WoW. This isnt what I do or support, but it's something the company will consider, so implementing something a good part of the player base will be in uproar about has to have some pretty good upsides. I dont see unique items handed out by GMs (guaranteed bias claims, no matter how false, along with a badly researched kotaku news entry) as having enough upside. At least not in a game that wants to be a success on the scale a SOE project will be expecting. Some small indie company could do it I guess? Dont expect it for EQN.