Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

The difference in required participation was definitely increased in WOW compared to EQ. More people have to do more things and with the instancing they could make mobs quite a lot more scripted and interesting. EQ has moved forward with its raids and stuff as well but for the interest of the discussion I believe most folks are talking about EQ when WOW released.

To the cutting edge EQ raiders the scripting, while more involved than EQ, wasn"t leaps and bounds above they level they had to play at before. They just had to learn the script, figure out the pattern and keep slamming it until it was perfected. There was definitely more of it and it was more involved but it wasn"t a completely new playstyle.

But a large majority seldom got to experience the mobs with "phases", multiple effects, or multiple adds, and the level of play required was definitely above what they were used to coming from EQ. Hell, just look at the whelp room in UBRS and at how many folks could not do it or would bypass it 95% of the time because it was too hard.

The level of individual involvement definitely went up for the smaller groups, while some of the 40 mans had some of the familiar press the same button repeatedly. But the 20 mans are riding an edge where everyone has to be doing what they need to be doing when they need to do it. The margin of error is much smaller.

Its a great thing to get everyone involved but it also gets to the point where you can"t relax and play/enjoy the game. You have to be on your toes a lot more while grouping in WOW and it tends to wear folks out after a while.

Gaereth said:

The difference in required participation was definitely increased in WOW compared to EQ. More people have to do more things and with the instancing they could make mobs quite a lot more scripted and interesting. EQ has moved forward with its raids and stuff as well but for the interest of the discussion I believe most folks are talking about EQ when WOW released.

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Very valid point. I was thinking more of the stuff from Omens of War up.

Cadrid said:

It"s not so much a matter of how good players look in comparison tobadplayers, but how good playersdistinguish themselvesfrom themajorityof players. FD pulling in EQ was something every monk had to learn, but the players that excelled with the class could do some crazy pulling/splitting with the tools they were given.

That"s how a game should be: most players indulge in what"s given, great players can take things to another level, and ALL players can enjoy the game as a whole.

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You can distinguish yourself by simply not sucking. I mean, there"s not much more to it. It"s a very relative term. You can attribute some kind of religious zen to it if you like, but the simple fact of the matter is that the ability to use fd was a very linear scale. I know visual aides help so here you go.

Suck -------------------------- Not Suck

Everybody fell somewhere on that line. There is not some mystical higher plane of existence that does not lie on the line that only true masters can achieve.

So we"re basically saying the same shit, it"s just everybody else likes to use marketable buzzwords. Next thing you know people will talk about how FD ushered in an era of paradigm shifts and how the ability to sploit pull Vulak"Aerr is one of our core competencies.

Anyways...

Again, it"s all a matter of how forgiving you are to terrible players. EQ was very forgiving. It didn"t matter if you sucked so long as you had a high playtime. WoW is a strong mix of both as very unforgiving (raids) and stupidly forgiving (pvp).

So yeah. Same shit, different lingo I guess.

I don"t know Zehn...I do agree that most folks fall on that line of suck and not suck but there are always folks that go past the not sucking and into the "OMG How in the hell does he do that??" zone.

Not sucking, to me, means you are adequate and nothing more. There is a world of difference between adequate and superb.

Any random bard/monk in my guild could pull decently. They got the mobs you wanted without the ones you didn"t or died for truly huge mistakes before getting to the group. One bard inparticular knew how to pull general rapeme from the deep castle to our set-up position across the bridge. He did it by using an instant bard ability on the tick or some shit so everything else would still forget him. Despite trying he couldn"t show the other bards how to manage it. I thought he was beyond not sucking, but maybe that shit was standard and most bards could do it.

I still remember clearly when the suck/not suck line was obvious for the first time in wow. "Watch out, dark glare coming up" "WTF MOVE IDIOTS". After that it was hard fielding 40mans for naxx because the difficulty just went up and you found out at the end of AQ40 your guild had 10-50% of bad players.

Overall tho I think it was a good thing(the 40man thing wasn"t tho, unforgiving content and 40slots=bad design imo), you couldn"t just sleep your way thru content, even tho mixed in there were a few random encounters that sucked because there was simply nothing to do, like early AQ40 when the tank would get melee/uppercut/melee/UB by a twin emp in one/two round and random crushing blows in general. However with wow it was the first time I actually enjoyed PvE, at least the first few times we were running thru content, farming was boring as hell.

I think hard content and fast paced gameplay are a key to making encounters not too boring. Everything that"s just a gear check is pretty stupid, I wish future games raid encounters will be based on wow end game raiding(without consumables) cause it makes them at least a bit enjoyable. I haven"t raided in BC tho so can"t really comment on that, besides the few stories of untested content I heard.

I think the real difference in the suck/not suck scale between EQ and WoW is that in WoW everyone has to not suck past a certain point to accomplish anything. In EQ you just needed a few people to not suck, pullers, tank, a few healers.. and the rest just needed to not suck enough to avoid ganking agro and you win. Obviously thismay have changed past GoD, and probably did because we started seeing more dependency on individuals in osme of the Ikkinz raids, Uqua and Inktuta.

But for average groups there wasn"t that fine of a line unless you were soloing in EQ. As a necro I could solo pull nameds from deep into Chardok using snare, FD, levant and a zone line. Of course that was borderline exploiting, but that is what made EQ fun.. WoW doesn"t have this, and it replaced the desire for a puller (or whatever notsuck role) with scripted/linked pulls and encounters that forced you to do them the way the devs intended. It"s equally as fun for the most part, just different.

Twobit Whore said:

with scripted/linked pulls and encounters that forced you to do them the way the devs intended. It"s equally as fun for the most part, just different.

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WoW would be a better game if you weren"t forced to do everything the way the devs intended. What I am most interested in finding out about WAR and AoC (and .38 studios and Bioware games when they finally get annouced) is if any of the aforementioned games permits more freedom in handling solo/group/raid encounters than WoW (question number two is what is the ratio of bear ass quests to actual quests).

Well there is freedom and then there is "freedom". The former being exactly that. Free to do things however you can within the confines of the game. Single player games are the best example of this. Something like Fallout where you can plant a bomb and blow someone up, pickpocket them, go in guns blazing or use diplomacy/charisma to complete an objective. The latter is like EQ, doing things that are unintended to complete a goal.. such as snaring a named in a pack and running to zone, coming back in to find him still snared and alone. That is creative of course, but it is also borderline exploitation. I don"t think we will see much of this from anyone because all it does is lead to headaches for devs and other players.

It"s really 25 man raiding where you are forced to do things a certain way, up to there in WoW there is lots of freedom. I"ve done some of the endgame instances with crazy classes (4 priests+paladin in shadowlabs, we just mind controlled everything and had a blast), there was the guy who 5-boxed 5 shamans and would own everything in 5 mans and PVP. I"ve played against 5 man paladin, mage, warrior, etc teams in arena and it can be fun as hell.

Its just the dumb 25 man raiding where you are forced down very, very specific raid makeups, talents, strategies, etc.

All the freedom of EQ was from shitty coding.

Twobit Whore said:

. I don"t think we will see much of this from anyone because all it does is lead to headaches for devs and other players.

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What precisely is wrong with creating headaches for developers? The point of a game isn"t that developers have an easy time developing the game but that players have a fun time playing the game.

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I appreciate spronk"s point that there is some give in WoW at the 5-man level. I don"t think there is enough even at the 5 man level -- but credit where credit is due & etc. Some >>> none.

tad10 said:

What precisely is wrong with creating headaches for developers?

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There"s nothing inherently wrong with it, I think his point was that developers generally don"t go out of their way to create headaches for themselves. Things which are borderline exploits create problems for them, from encounter balancing to other players whining, hence the developers will go out of their way to limit the more "creative" gameplay.

It"s not necessarily a good thing from our point of view, but 2bit is right in that it"s the way things are going to be.

Players will always create headaches for devs, even in a game that is as limiting as you profess WoW is. Anyone can sit here and rattle off countless things that needed to be or should be addressed.. but devs are not going to specifically go out of their way to implement trouble. They get enough of it without intentionally creating it. Maybe you don"t remember all the shit that Verant/SOE tried to do to curb some of the unintended gameplay.. such as kiting DoT damage changes or limiting the number of targets an AE could hit, etc. Eventually they just gave up. A real company today isn"t going to give up and they are going to try and limit it as much as possible from jumpstreet. Players will still find ways to do things in their own manner and if it is severe enough then the devs will step in and adjust it.

Twobit Whore said:

A real company today isn"t going to give up and they are going to try and limit it as much as possible from jumpstreet. Players will still find ways to do things in their own manner and if it is severe enough then the devs will step in and adjust it.

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A bard kite killing an entire zone may be a little too much freedom but if a company is trying to make the proverbial WoW-killer limiting freedom (beyond excesses like the aforementioned bard) is the wrong way to go.

Your freedom is just broken mechanics Tad.

Draegan said:

Your freedom is just broken mechanics Tad.

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Hopefully you aren"t involved in the development of some of the more interesting-looking upcoming games.

tad10 said:

Hopefully you aren"t involved in the development of some of the more interesting-looking upcoming games.

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I could call for the same thing about you since we disagree so fundamentally about what we think an MMO should have or be. You love EQ and can"t get away from anything that isn"t EQ related. Is there any MMO that Brad McQuad hasn"t had a hand in that you"ve played for more than 2-3 months? Just checking

But all the FDing and Bard Kiting and using zone lines etc are broken mechanics that most people remember fondly. I doupt they were put it for the purposes they became.

Draegan said:

But all the FDing and Bard Kiting and using zone lines etc are broken mechanics that most people remember fondly. I doupt they were put it for the purposes they became.

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They weren"t, and this is why they cannot be recreated. They won"t be used in an out-of-the-box fashion because anyone that implements these types of mechanics will do so intentionally in which case it is placed inside the box. The next unintended fun will be something completely different, similar to the wall-walking in WoW.

I guess all the fun comes from breaking the rules and figuring out something that wasn"t supposed to work that way. I can understand that. But from a dev"s point of view, that sucks because that means you fucked up on your end of the job.