dude, the point is that it took very little effort to get people into your group. all you had to was conduct a "/ all" search and send people tells.
EQ Never
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Yep. There was another, from reworked PoH, Anathema I think? Wasn't as good but worked alright. I can't remember if it was in game before BoW.
EQ did a very good job creating an all around need for every class. While some not as popular as others, the content was designed around those numbers as well. Buffs, crowd controls, debuffs, etc.
Our guild was a very fast paced, stay alert type. Paladins and SKs were extremely important for clearing trash, Kiting, OTing and had to stay sharp during the main events. While we primarily used Warrior rotations on main mobs, the SKs and Paladins were durable and had their roles. It was also dependent on the user too. I've met some Warriors in my days that weren't worth a shit. You could put them in the best gear and they still couldn't keep agro on multiple or even single mobs. They would break mezz, or all around just didn't have a clue about the mechanics of the content.
For grouping, we had a group within our guild that consisted of a Paladin tank during exp/quest times, and I would put him up against a pickup warrior any day.
The diversity in the classes was much more drastic than today, but so was the design of the content. Unfortunately, there is a relatively small group of people left from the 'glory days,' that grew up on these game mechanics. The demographic has changed and if SOE wants to draw subscribers, they're most likely going to have to stick with what the new generation is accustomed to.
Our guild was a very fast paced, stay alert type. Paladins and SKs were extremely important for clearing trash, Kiting, OTing and had to stay sharp during the main events. While we primarily used Warrior rotations on main mobs, the SKs and Paladins were durable and had their roles. It was also dependent on the user too. I've met some Warriors in my days that weren't worth a shit. You could put them in the best gear and they still couldn't keep agro on multiple or even single mobs. They would break mezz, or all around just didn't have a clue about the mechanics of the content.
For grouping, we had a group within our guild that consisted of a Paladin tank during exp/quest times, and I would put him up against a pickup warrior any day.
The diversity in the classes was much more drastic than today, but so was the design of the content. Unfortunately, there is a relatively small group of people left from the 'glory days,' that grew up on these game mechanics. The demographic has changed and if SOE wants to draw subscribers, they're most likely going to have to stick with what the new generation is accustomed to.
Tolan
Member of the Year 2016
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It could have been better, though. As a ranger, I always felt as being varying degrees of superfluous. It became worse with the introduction of beastlords, until SOE ultimately decided to lump is into the DPS category. Ranger was an extremely fun class to play with a good amount of self-suffiency (not soloability) even though we were mostly gimped relative to our class description. If we had our own armor tier (scale) between chain and plate, it would have been spot on... even with BL's overwriting our group buffs.
Anyway, that's just one example. I'm sure rogues could dis on berserkers a little, though rogues had a little more circumstantial utility.
Class definition and balance could have appreciated much more attention than it was given as the game expanded.
Been playing EQ again lately with some rerolled folks and I must admit I do miss class diversity. Been fun seeing how unique, and powerful classes can be at their different roles. That is something that has been lost for sure in recent years. The goal being to make everything as vanilla, and equal as possible. I'm not sure if we will ever see that again though. People will look at a necro/bard soloing and then at a warrior "soloing" and the screams for nerfs will begin. I don't ever recall that kind of thing back in the day. Though I must admit that I only ever read FoH when it came to EQ information.
Khane
Got something right about marriage
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I don't see why we can't have a marriage of old mechanics and new. Instancing being a prime example. It seems a lot of the EQ reskinned crowd abhors instancing, whereas I think it was a great advancement for the genre and can be vastly improved upon. I'm going to use Chardok as an example here because I feel it is the epitome of what people want when they think of a dungeon crawling experience. It was vast and sprawling with tons of leaps in difficulty and even had raid mobs (the royals). Plus it was just fun to adventure through and it even had its own faction that you could get amiable with and run through the zone unharmed and even visit a few vendors (if I am remembering correctly).
Current instanced content philosophy:
Linear setup
Small in size
Small level range of mobs, no power jumps
No respawns (or long respawns and no boss respawns)
Fixed guaranteed bosses (with a few chances at rare spawns here and there)
Player number limits
Meant to be repeated over and over in linear fashion
If you throw out that philosophy and take Chardok, as it was in Kunark and turn it into an instance you now have the style of dungeon most of us want. Bring in respawning as it occurred back then, remove guaranteed bosses and put back the spawn timer and randomness of named mobs and you have a good start. This will allow players to dungeon crawl once again. Taking it a step further remove the limit on the number of players. When you zone into an instance the leader of the group and anyone they've promoted can invite as many people as they choose into that instance. Once inside the dungeon players can choose to attack it as they see fit, they can stay in one large raid style group, they can split into smaller groups of 5 and go into separate areas of the dungeon, etc. This allows players to choose to have the entirety of it to themselves, or to invite other players for a more social experience or to tackle the harder content deeper in the dungeon. Instances have a lock timer of 24 hours, once you zone into the instance you are locked into that instance for 24 hours, you cannot reset or rejoin another instance trying to cherry pick for named mobs via tracking skills.
Taking it even a step further have a "public" version of each instance. Upon entering the zone line players are given a choice to either start their own version of the instance or to join the public one. In the public version there are both higher spawn rates on named and higher percentage chances of the better loot in each named's loot table dropping. It would have to be enough of a difference to entice people to go into the public dungeon over a private instance, maybe even have named that only spawn in the public version or items that only drop there. Even if you are locked to a private instance you can still join the public instance at will.
Raid mobs exist in both private and public versions. Respawn timers for raid mobs are every 7 +/- 2 days, guaranteed for the public instance. They would follow the same loot principles as named (higher chance at dropping better loot in the public version and to a higher degree since they are raid mobs), or simply the private instance drops are bound and the public instance drops are not. If you kill any of the raid mobs in a private instance you are locked into that instance for 7 days (guaranteed 7 day respawn in private instances) and you are flagged against killing the public dungeon raid mobs for 72 hours. The "flag" would be more of a debuff that made you do 1/3rd the damage to said raid mobs and take triple damage from them.
I think this would give enough of a benefit to running the public dungeons that people would use them first if they could, but if they were overcrowded or overcamped they could open a private instance so they had something to do. I'm sure you guys will poke holes in this idea.
Current instanced content philosophy:
Linear setup
Small in size
Small level range of mobs, no power jumps
No respawns (or long respawns and no boss respawns)
Fixed guaranteed bosses (with a few chances at rare spawns here and there)
Player number limits
Meant to be repeated over and over in linear fashion
If you throw out that philosophy and take Chardok, as it was in Kunark and turn it into an instance you now have the style of dungeon most of us want. Bring in respawning as it occurred back then, remove guaranteed bosses and put back the spawn timer and randomness of named mobs and you have a good start. This will allow players to dungeon crawl once again. Taking it a step further remove the limit on the number of players. When you zone into an instance the leader of the group and anyone they've promoted can invite as many people as they choose into that instance. Once inside the dungeon players can choose to attack it as they see fit, they can stay in one large raid style group, they can split into smaller groups of 5 and go into separate areas of the dungeon, etc. This allows players to choose to have the entirety of it to themselves, or to invite other players for a more social experience or to tackle the harder content deeper in the dungeon. Instances have a lock timer of 24 hours, once you zone into the instance you are locked into that instance for 24 hours, you cannot reset or rejoin another instance trying to cherry pick for named mobs via tracking skills.
Taking it even a step further have a "public" version of each instance. Upon entering the zone line players are given a choice to either start their own version of the instance or to join the public one. In the public version there are both higher spawn rates on named and higher percentage chances of the better loot in each named's loot table dropping. It would have to be enough of a difference to entice people to go into the public dungeon over a private instance, maybe even have named that only spawn in the public version or items that only drop there. Even if you are locked to a private instance you can still join the public instance at will.
Raid mobs exist in both private and public versions. Respawn timers for raid mobs are every 7 +/- 2 days, guaranteed for the public instance. They would follow the same loot principles as named (higher chance at dropping better loot in the public version and to a higher degree since they are raid mobs), or simply the private instance drops are bound and the public instance drops are not. If you kill any of the raid mobs in a private instance you are locked into that instance for 7 days (guaranteed 7 day respawn in private instances) and you are flagged against killing the public dungeon raid mobs for 72 hours. The "flag" would be more of a debuff that made you do 1/3rd the damage to said raid mobs and take triple damage from them.
I think this would give enough of a benefit to running the public dungeons that people would use them first if they could, but if they were overcrowded or overcamped they could open a private instance so they had something to do. I'm sure you guys will poke holes in this idea.
othree
Bronze Knight of the Realm
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Bingo. I never understood the cries of difficulty finding people to group with. I always just "/ all <class>" and sent tells to people who were not in dungeons already. Generally it never took longer than five minutes to fill a group.
Of course, if you had a shady reputation it did indeed become much harder to find people wiling to group with you. E'ci was a very connected community, as the vast majority of players on my server were very active on the IGN boards and later the community boards Alkrun created.
Rod-138
Trakanon Raider
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As a Druid that was terrible at eq, I had to constantly try to crack jokes and keep the good humor flowing to get groups. I was a good solo'r, but I wanted to hang with my bros no matter how useless I was. Anyway, as a bad player playing a bad class, I didn't think getting groups was that tough, you just had to bring something to the table
Some people just like to click a button and do a dungeon. They don't want to put any effort into wrangling 4 strangers to do something specific. Also, the whole not enough tanks and healers usually screws up the ease of making a group. LFG systems work really well since they tend to be cross server.
It's funny, but we had a regular Druid in our steady EQ group from 99-01 and he was the same way, but the times we swapped him out kills took longer and the group just went slower, and we died more frequently due to no spot heals and utility. Plus, ya know, if he wasn't around, who woudl've powered all our alts?
If you were really a bad player, you probably would've rerolled and been one of the 'entitled' clerics.
Dungeon finders and Raid finders are wonderful tools. However, I think there is plenty of room for open world adventure without those in a properly designed MMO that isn't based on farming instances.
As a career long Rogue I never had a major issue with the Berserker class coming into introduction. There were times it became a bit unbalanced, and you would see them out DPSing Rogues, but again I feel the skill of the player really made the numbers what they were.
I always made certain to receive every DPS buff during raids, to use the proper discs at the proper times and my name would always be on the top of the parse list. But I consider myself an elite raider.
I like the skill sets of the classes in EQ. Simple, not flashy, but served their purpose and if used right would stand your character out against another of your class. And in the later years, I always felt that a rogues ability to survive during a wipe was important.
With this said, implementing a parsing/report program into the game would be something I would be for. Nothing tacky, but maybe a "mission report" that shows an individual breakdown of each participants performance. I.e Everyones DPS, how many times a a cleric is successfully getting off a heal per mob. Stats that could help judge members performance and something you could use to call out group or raid members to help them get on their game.
I always loved that Vanguard let you have two targets, an offensive target, and a defensive target. I feel like more games should include this in their design, but don't. Anyone know why?
Off/Def target was/is awesome. Everyone talks about remaking EQ hell I would love to see a proper VG with a non-shit game engine and finished and polished. You could take 2-3 people and go have all kind of fun with all the random crawls they put in. I have to say it was second to EQ for me in the "journey" of leveling and for us anyways it almost seemed like we leveled to fast cuz there were so many places we wanted to go. I would really love for them to take some aspects of that and put it in EQN.
Flipmode
EQOA Refugee
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I agree. They should aim for a polished VG instead of EQ with new graphics. Then they would have a hit. VG is solid, just buggy and unfinished.
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The problem with the genre, like so many others, is that it's attracted those people and is now "popular". We are the minority. These people, who want everything to be dumbed down because they're slow as molasses in February, are the majority. Game designers that want to get rich design for the majority.
these little conveniences people advocate do nothing but detract from a game's pacing which is vital for creating an effective fantasy world. fast-travel and things of that nature are fine in single-player games as an alternative to frequently traversing enormous areas. let's stop pretending most gamers need "quality of life" features when they're sitting on their asses for several hours.