Make the default dungeon public, with new instanced versions spawning when it gets too crowded. Let people who want to solo the dungeon spawn their own instance. A huge dungeon with lots of camps and spawns, public version for people who want to PUG it up, private version for people who want to farm shit for their low level alts or not deal with anyone. Best of both worlds
EQ Never
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Mr Creed
Too old for this shit
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Dungeon design could use massive improvements towards the way they were set up during EQ and Classic WoW. Regardless of instancing or not, tube dungeons suck and the only reason for doing them is +gooder points. Seriously, if any designers read this: whenever you want to make a tube dungeon, just cut the crap just place the three rooms with the bosses. The straight corridors between them are pointless.
I think you can enjoy a real dungeon crawl with respawns and the like even if it is instanced. The open social dungeon idea is good, I prefer it, but it has both pros and cons, mostly based on population. I leveled in charasis most of my time in the 50s and we were the only group in there more often then not. Thats pretty much the same as instancing the thing. So I would not argue against instancing itself but against the intern-level design these AAA games dare to release to the public.
Here's another thought that could buy us some posts until August: Can you do an economy based on trade-skilling (UO, EVE, SWG maybe?), while still having a fairly item-centric game like WoW or EQ? How do you merge item decay or item loss with rare drops? I know EVE has such loot and its simply priceless but just as destructable as your mass produced tech 1 items. Somehow I think that wouldnt fly with the DIKU players, but making harvesting and crafting more relevant would be nice. Did Vanguard achieve anything on that front?
I think you can enjoy a real dungeon crawl with respawns and the like even if it is instanced. The open social dungeon idea is good, I prefer it, but it has both pros and cons, mostly based on population. I leveled in charasis most of my time in the 50s and we were the only group in there more often then not. Thats pretty much the same as instancing the thing. So I would not argue against instancing itself but against the intern-level design these AAA games dare to release to the public.
Here's another thought that could buy us some posts until August: Can you do an economy based on trade-skilling (UO, EVE, SWG maybe?), while still having a fairly item-centric game like WoW or EQ? How do you merge item decay or item loss with rare drops? I know EVE has such loot and its simply priceless but just as destructable as your mass produced tech 1 items. Somehow I think that wouldnt fly with the DIKU players, but making harvesting and crafting more relevant would be nice. Did Vanguard achieve anything on that front?
You could have the EVE system without the item destruction on death part, just use something like tribute that EQ to replace it. In EVE good items were rare even if you did the hard content alot, I don't know how you translate that into a pve mmo where 40 people are raiding and kill a boss and expect some drops. We have been down the road of the boss dropping some kinda piece for the craftable gear and it doesn't really work that well.
I would leave gear like it is and add augments that are crafted only personally, trying to marry the two systems is too hard. Or lots of crafted potions or stuff like engineering items in WoW that had charges. If you did that kinda stuff and some houses and boats and guild halls you have a pretty decent crafting system already. EVE also made crafting take alot of time because of the factories and it took a dedicated player to make profit on it.
Of all the PVE mmos L2 prolly had the crafting system that was closest to not sucking.
I would leave gear like it is and add augments that are crafted only personally, trying to marry the two systems is too hard. Or lots of crafted potions or stuff like engineering items in WoW that had charges. If you did that kinda stuff and some houses and boats and guild halls you have a pretty decent crafting system already. EVE also made crafting take alot of time because of the factories and it took a dedicated player to make profit on it.
Of all the PVE mmos L2 prolly had the crafting system that was closest to not sucking.
Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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The corrolary being that the amount of gear entering the game is unlimited. Which generates its own problems in cascade of solving one.
Rezz
Mr. Poopybutthole
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Gear decay (not a fan, but a solution), tribute style vendors, bind on pickup drops only in instances, being able to "DE" gear down to base components to be sold/used in crafting, checks during fights so that duplicate items don't drop and instead another item is used until no other items remain then extra gold is dropped. Lots of ways to combat having unlimited access to gear. I would much rather deal with the problems related to unlimited gear (most games deal with this in some way since EQ1 days, as most games are instanced to a degree) than not being able to enjoy parts of the game at all or in most cases weeks/months/years later.
Edit about item centricity and market reliance on tradeskills/crafting:
So there's lots of ways to make an economy that revolves around people killing shit and tradeskillers supplying necessary pieces to allow that killing. Components to gear being dropped by mobs, durability that never hits "useless" but through TS'd items can be patched on the run and even above the normal durability limit giving a boost to statistical ratings on the item. Out of combat potions that effectively stack to infinity and can be set on auto-use for when combat ends with a minute cooldown (or a simple tally that tells you how many HP you can restore out of combat and you drink pots to refill that tally. Lots of korean games do this) and these potions are only player crafted. Augments/Ornaments/Patches/Whatever you attach to gear slowly decay with time/use (not death) but the gear itself doesn't decay. Mounts require player made feed/fuel/whatever that if not used slow the mount to 66% of max speed and high quality shit can improve the speed to 125% of whatever it's normal max is.
Bring back the concept of food/drink that EQ/VG/FFXI used, and make shitty basic "You just don't get weaker" the only thing vendors can provide, while tradeskilling people can create higher quality shit that lasts longer, provides bonuses, etc etc. Make all non-storyline specific gear craftable as well. Limit people to 1-2 tradeskills unless they spend giant stacks of coin (or a rarely used concept, spending XP. Open your third slot by dropping from 48 to 47. Or it drops all combat skills by one full rank if we go with skill based systems) or a combination of needing to craft top level shit whatever disciplines you have and then donate them. PVP gear (if it exists) could be craftable but require PVP required drops. Kill gear resets completely, but allow crafted gear to bridge gaps for newer players when possible so they don't start 2 expacs behind and be useless even at max level.
Creating a crafting/tradeskill centric economy isn't that difficult, it just requires there to be a gear/component drain in the game that compliments the created stuff entering the system.
Bring back the concept of food/drink that EQ/VG/FFXI used, and make shitty basic "You just don't get weaker" the only thing vendors can provide, while tradeskilling people can create higher quality shit that lasts longer, provides bonuses, etc etc. Make all non-storyline specific gear craftable as well. Limit people to 1-2 tradeskills unless they spend giant stacks of coin (or a rarely used concept, spending XP. Open your third slot by dropping from 48 to 47. Or it drops all combat skills by one full rank if we go with skill based systems) or a combination of needing to craft top level shit whatever disciplines you have and then donate them. PVP gear (if it exists) could be craftable but require PVP required drops. Kill gear resets completely, but allow crafted gear to bridge gaps for newer players when possible so they don't start 2 expacs behind and be useless even at max level.
Creating a crafting/tradeskill centric economy isn't that difficult, it just requires there to be a gear/component drain in the game that compliments the created stuff entering the system.
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The main problem with non instanced content is not the items that drop, usually this pretty much self regulates itself ingame. But what does suck is the campers and if the game is popular it will be flooded with 100s of Chinese farmers to get the items. this is where the problem lies and new solutions need to be made. Who gives a shit if we have huge sprawling dungeons with tons of hidden away loot by using rare spawns and place holders and such if the shit will just be camped 24/7.
Convo
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Lithose
Buzzfeed Editor
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I don't think you could do it with rare drops, no. With very common drops, where you treat raids like item mines, maybe.
The only way a rich economic system and a drop system could be combined, is if you could only wear so many dropped items. Like lets say in the game magic items took "soul power"--which was a stat you start out with say, 10 of. Most magic items take 5 each to wear. All "magic" items are dropped, they are stronger than crafted items, and don't decay but obviously you can only wear a few. Then you can have a skill that builds up this "soul power" stat--and maybe some magic items will be considered strong, not because they have far higher stats, but that they take less "soul power" to equip. (Kind of like how some items were good in early EQ not because they had exceptional stats, but because they weighed nothing.)
This way, most players might be able to wear 5 ish dropped items on a super-built up character. But their other 5 gear slots would need to be crafted. If this is done smart, you could even have it so as new tiers come out, the magic items would have higher soul power requirements--and part of the "soft cap" skill gains in new expansions would be building your soul power score to once again be able to equip 5 or so of the current tier magic items.
Anyway, I think a system like that could work.
However, in the bigger picture--things like weight dictating how heavy your armor can be, were good systems in RPG's, that really should have been kept in MMO's--because they gave power to items without that power having to translate directly into stats. For example...If I had a 10 Strength chest, at 10 weight--and another 10 strength chest at 5 weight, the second chest might allow me to wear a heavier set of boots or shoulders--so, in a lot of ways, the second chest is a lot stronger, without character stat inflation. A "soul power" like system can accomplish this, too.
I know most developers shy away from this stuff due to complexity and assuming their customers are retarded--and for the general masses, they are probably right. I just wish as more niche MMO's come out, they start viewing armor and weapons with negatives AND positives again, so it's not a boring case of everything getting better through one type of stat inflation.
Lithose
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Two things. The first being is that if you have experience or "other" rewards for doing instances, you don't have to make loot consistent--and you can make drops rare, even within an instance. Yes, it will suck getting to the end and only getting gold and gems, but if you work it right and allow characters to gain power through experience, it's not a total waste of time (You got your "badges", but it's in soft power experience terms--so it won't lead to burning the usefulness of this dungeon out sooner.) Also, given the higher value of items when they do drop (Due to rarity) and the fact that nothing should be BoP, so money collected on runs can eventually buy items from luckier players who might not have gotten their own item though, people should use instances like "camps", without having to compete--and without lending too quickly to the problem of infinite gear.
On the converse, as some point you WANT the economy to be saturated with certain items. If we have the third tier of content coming out, as a designer, I'd want "tier 1" items to be fairly easy to acquire through the economy by now, because you want people to catch up. And unlike WoW, where you offer artificial methods of "catch up", by doing dailies ect, I'd rather have the player economy handle it--so new players can buy their gear, and experienced players who have left overs can sell it to said newer players. (Which would foster traffic to player shops and vendors.)
You'd have to balance those two aspects pretty well, but I could totally see an economy working even in an instanced game. And then you offer other rewards for community dungeons. Slightly higher experience rates, slightly higher drop rates but really tune these dungeons to require coordination and successful groups. So community dungeons should be more efficient from a strict systems stand point, but that efficiency is watered down by needing to compete with other players and the larger risk/time investment that comes with that kind of competition.
That's easy : NoDrop, as fun as a monk with Dual SoD + Cloack of Flames + Fungi was... NoDrop/AccountBound kills 99.99% of Chinese Farmers.
With some serious crafting (kinda like Diablo3 1.7 but not worthless/super_random) even "crappy items" can be used/recycled.
You could even include BiC Augment, Dain Shawl, Epics2.0, QuestSpells for some "eternal upgrades".
Now it's not perfect, but i prefer a game where "almost nothing can be traded" to a fucking Chinese farmer heaven like Diablo3.
You could always pay 15 Chinese to kill Vindicator for a BP... but at least make it as inefficient as possible for them....
Anyone have any details on what kind of activity chinese farmers were doing in EQ?
I remember the 2-3 websites that sparked up during the EQ days but I'm not sure what exploits they were harnessing. I do remember hearing of a merchant in a zone somewhere that would buy some milk or something for more than the other merchants sold it for.
What were some of the exploits they used to bot or actually manually perform to generate such massive amounts of gold? Was it straight up bot camping rare mobs or what? I know in FFXI, they were using bots to camp rare mobs (known as Notorious Monsters) and also fish botting for a while. What about EQ though?
I remember the 2-3 websites that sparked up during the EQ days but I'm not sure what exploits they were harnessing. I do remember hearing of a merchant in a zone somewhere that would buy some milk or something for more than the other merchants sold it for.
What were some of the exploits they used to bot or actually manually perform to generate such massive amounts of gold? Was it straight up bot camping rare mobs or what? I know in FFXI, they were using bots to camp rare mobs (known as Notorious Monsters) and also fish botting for a while. What about EQ though?
eq didn't have many asian players to begin with. most servers just had that one asian guild that liked to grief other guilds.
the chinese farming process is mostly automated and i don't see how that would have been possible in eq. what would they have farmed anyway?
Well, that's what I'm wondering. I know for sure there were some websites that started up and I don't know how they were making all their money. One guy cashed out for a huge chunk of money, little gnome guy name started with a 'Y' I think. Wish I could remember.
People still have difficulties understanding social interaction/non-instanced content is what made EQ what it was. If you want to make a MMORPG not a MMOLobbyPG, instant content is anathema. Yes there is the possibility of farmers, yes you might get cockblocked by a pubescent low self esteemed gentleman, yes it will make it harder for you to get your shiny.knife.of.blistering.fairy.valor. Its not perfect but if you want a game with consequences compromises are necessary.
Having your entire endgame become inaccessible to your average working gamer is not a minor compromise, it pretty much vaporizes a huge part of the game for most players.
What if group content was non-instanced and raid content (with no raid size cap) was a variation of non-instanced and instanced. I honestly feel like the answer is not black or white. It's somewhere in between like many people have said here. The question is how far up or down the spectrum do you go?
You want to promote social interactivity but also allow worker gamers to access content.
People bring this up all the time and it is a poor argument for two reasons if we are discussing the lifeblood of what made early EQ what it was
1) Only a small percentage of the player base were having their panties in a wad over end game content
2) Not as big as a factor as #1, however getting our panties in a wad was part of the appeal of EQ for those of us who were bleeding content connoisseurs, the competition was salivating.
And that's just taking into account the argument from an EQ perspective. The argument gets even less appealing when there are multiple options to avoid the average gamer getting their panties tussled because they don't have enough content, eg ship a game with ample content.