Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO

Quaid said:

I just hope they solve the issues with encounter mechanics rather than goofball solutions like zone-wide loot tables or dynamic spawn points. The best rewards should come from iconic locations that have been hand-picked to be experience defining moments in a player's progression adventure. Getting a Sword of Nostalgia from the Goblin King's Throne Room hits way different than getting one from a random spider mob in a side tunnel.

You can give even mid level mobs abilities that will absolutely fuck up a solo level 60s day (not just boring level based death-touches) but would be reasonable to deal with for a full group of appropriately leveled toons.

I'm very confident the team understands this, especially Shawn, so I'm not too worried.



Ya I think disenchanting makes a lot more sense in an instanced game, so you can create some item decay in a system with no pre-existing constraints on how quickly items enter the world. I'm not entirely sure what the point is in a persistent contested situation, where you can reasonably know only one Sword of Nostalgia is entering the world every 12 hours. Feels like it'll just incentivise high level players to treat lower level PVE targets like crafting resource nodes.

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I love your blind optimism. Never loose that child-like innocence.

TJT said:

Yes, creating a system that provides a pathway for items to exit the game mechanically (disenchantment) is a recipe for utter disaster. You just created a magical sinkhole that allows players to destroy items for a benefit. This is even worse than a malicious player destroying items for fun just to deny lowbies from getting them. As they have an actual reason to mog Crushbone now.

The classic MMO thrives on the Executioner's Axe looted 2 RL years ago trading hands for years and years. If you have enchantment and a destructive profession you need a way for players to get items at a high enough velocity to feed it.

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They added disenchantment? OOH that will def make this game suck ass if so.

Personally I don't see an issue with disenchanting(its found in harvesting nodes too), but find the problem to be that there is no real money sink at the moment.. so people who've been playing longer have accumulated weath purely from grinding, getting gold really isn't but a couple hours farming.. making it nigh impossible for someone starting to accumulate at the same rate due to how profit scales to level.. Enchantment material was expensive, but have been dropping pretty steadily over the last few weeks as more and more people have been going after it. BCM's(from high tier nodes) were sitting around 5g at one point, now you'll be lucky to get 2g.. and in some weird cases a 10g item can be traded for 1 or 2 bcm. So while the economy is fucked but I don't know if i'm fully onboard its for the reasons people think, and it's also a beta that'll get wiped in a few months.. Prior to people knowing about hides, it was really easy to sell BP's for 12-14s.. they average 10s, but now people get competitive and sell it for 6-8s often.

But i'm also under the impression that this is a very barebones, got the mechanics in, crafting system.. on top of really seems the endgame economic drain will be their whole "expedition system." Crafting at its current iteration seems pretty neglected.

gauze said:

Personally I don't see an issue with disenchanting(its found in harvesting nodes too), but find the problem to be that there is no real money sink at the moment.. so people who've been playing longer have accumulated weath purely from grinding, getting gold really isn't but a couple hours farming.. making it nigh impossible for someone starting to accumulate at the same rate due to how profit scales to level.. Enchantment material was expensive, but have been dropping pretty steadily over the last few weeks as more and more people have been going after it. BCM's(from high tier nodes) were sitting around 5g at one point, now you'll be lucky to get 2g.. and in some weird cases a 10g item can be traded for 1 or 2 bcm. So while the economy is fucked but I don't know if i'm fully onboard its for the reasons people think, and it's also a beta that'll get wiped in a few months.. Prior to people knowing about hides, it was really easy to sell BP's for 12-14s.. they average 10s, but now people get competitive and sell it for 6-8s often.

But i'm also under the impression that this is a very barebones, got the mechanics in, crafting system.. on top of really seems the endgame economic drain will be their whole "expedition system." Crafting at its current iteration seems pretty neglected.

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I have read this 4 times and I still have no clue what point you're trying to formulate.

Enough people hitting endgame we’re starting to get mild lawyerquesting in the discord. I look forward to Shawn’s slow realization of just what he has gotten into a descent into madness before the servers are blown up

Kithani said:

Enough people hitting endgame we’re starting to get mild lawyerquesting in the discord. I look forward to Shawn’s slow realization of just what he has gotten into a descent into madness before the servers are blown up

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With only a FRACTION (if they want to be commercially viable) of the population, they are already hitting the limitations of uninstanced content.

Couple ways to go about fixing disenchanting. One way is to make dust location bound or type bound. For example, DE'ing something in wyrmsbane gives Wyrmsbane Dust. Or DE'ing something that drops from an undead makes "Ghastly Dust". Both versions can be tiered. So if you're killing shit in Wyrmsbane, its ghastly dust. If you move over to AC next to WB - now you're killing the next tier of shit and their DE's are "Terrifying" dust, signifying level 15-25 mobs. Ghastly dust can come from any undead in the low level range to give a wider explanation, or again - you can limit it to the dungeon with "Wyrmsbane Dust."

Take that a step further, remove the quest lines that require you to farm uncommon to rare drops out of dungeons (like the Wyrmsbane Armor). Make them craftable, and keep the NPC that wont talk to you until you're the highest faction tier in place - but instead, selling the recipe for the armor. Now you need someone to make the armor, someone to make the materials, someone to enchant the bar with "ghastly" enchant (sold by that same rep locked vendor) - etc.

There - two steps to cut that bullshit off at the legs. Given the limitations of the way the game is designed (non-instanced) - we'll never be able to limit the shit out right. But the market will speed run into saturation and apathy. Enchanters can only level off the shit for 10-15 skill points and they'll have likely passed that point by the time they are rep enabled with the vendor. No ones farming gear that may or may not drop the slot theyre farming for. We're involving a LOT more people in the crafting chain. Spam DE'ing will only happen for a short while - loot will filter into the lowbies. Server maturity will make all the low level gear easily obtainable for the ones that join AFTER the rush. etc. etc.

It just feels like theyre trying to make the game more punishing than it really needs to be at the low level. As a full suit of wyrmsbane gear is NOT going to change a noobies life in any significant way. The imposed upon rarity of the gear is just some short sighted design that limits the nicotine of the game at the very beginning, when its needed the MOST.

Daidraco said:

Couple ways to go about fixing disenchanting. One way is to make dust location bound or type bound. For example, DE'ing something in wyrmsbane gives Wyrmsbane Dust. Or DE'ing something that drops from an undead makes "Ghastly Dust". Both versions can be tiered. So if you're killing shit in Wyrmsbane, its ghastly dust. If you move over to AC next to WB - now you're killing the next tier of shit and their DE's are "Terrifying" dust, signifying level 15-25 mobs. Ghastly dust can come from any undead in the low level range to give a wider explanation, or again - you can limit it to the dungeon with "Wyrmsbane Dust."

Take that a step further, remove the quest lines that require you to farm uncommon to rare drops out of dungeons (like the Wyrmsbane Armor). Make them craftable, and keep the NPC that wont talk to you until you're the highest faction tier in place - but instead, selling the recipe for the armor. Now you need someone to make the armor, someone to make the materials, someone to enchant the bar with "ghastly" enchant (sold by that same rep locked vendor) - etc.

There - two steps to cut that bullshit off at the legs. Given the limitations of the way the game is designed (non-instanced) - we'll never be able to limit the shit out right. But the market will speed run into saturation and apathy. Enchanters can only level off the shit for 10-15 skill points and they'll have likely passed that point by the time they are rep enabled with the vendor. No ones farming gear that may or may not drop the slot theyre farming for. We're involving a LOT more people in the crafting chain. Spam DE'ing will only happen for a short while - loot will filter into the lowbies. Server maturity will make all the low level gear easily obtainable for the ones that join AFTER the rush. etc. etc.

It just feels like theyre trying to make the game more punishing than it really needs to be at the low level. As a full suit of wyrmsbane gear is NOT going to change a noobies life in any significant way. The imposed upon rarity of the gear is just some short sighted design that limits the nicotine of the game at the very beginning, when its needed the MOST.

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Enchanting is already tiered and Wyrmsbane gear only gives tier 1 mats. The "high" level people farming it are doing it to skill up through tier one or sell it. Not sure about the alpha/beta, but on the public tests, there was hardly an economy to sell things on, so most everyone should have been there to skill up.

Disenchanting is it's own skill that can fail and takes some work (many items) per tier. From the skill ups needed, it actually looks like it's compressed atm, where tier 4 starts at around skill 40; DE (and probable enchanting as a whole) will get an overhaul once all the tiers are fleshed out. Last public test they were on tier 4 out of 5 or 6 (Blacksmithing had 5 tiers, down from 6, while LW and Tailoring still had 6), or at least that's how far I got. Around half of my enchanting skill was from previous tests, where it was much easier (enchanting metal w/o any other mats outside just metal bars).

For DE I used gear from Lost Tomb, which I farmed from 3 bosses while XPing when there with no competition. It got me to skill 18... Then I used the items that rarely drop in mining/herb nodes (mostly iron) to skill up enough to do tier 4, which was something like skill 40 - 50 in DE (for reference Blacksmithing/Tailoring/Leatherworking/Jewelcrafting all go to 300 atm). Don't remember what I left my enchanting skill off at, but I don't think it was even at 200, yet it was firmly in tier 4, which means it was less complete than the 4 trades listed above.

If they want to have DE/enchanting with low MAGIC item drop rates they should just move it all to ONLY using the rare drops from ore/herb nodes and the same items, that are only for DEing, dropping from every mob at a very low rate. Items rotting away is better than high levels dominating camps just so they can DE items to skill up or sell the mats.

Disclaimer: This was all from months ago in the public test, so memory on exact skill point level/amounts are hazy.

I think people are over-intellectualizing this and assuming there has to be some mechanical or economic incentive behind high-level players griefing low-level zones - "Maybe it's for disenchanting mats - nerf it!", "Maybe they need trade skill drops!", "Maybe they're farming skill-ups!". Sure, sometimes those will be true. But I think people are missing the much more obvious reality of what happens in "soft PvP" systems, especially in old-school MMORPG environments - A lot of players will do it simply because they can, and because negatively impacting other players becomes its own form of entertainment.

That's not even me being cynical. It's just observable MMO behavior going back decades. This is exactly what I've been talking about for months in all the debates surrounding instancing, open-world competition, contested camps, and "community-driven" friction in "EQ-likes". There's this romanticized idea that heavy player interdependence and contested spaces naturally create meaningful social dynamics. Sometimes they do. But they also create environments where a subset of players derive enjoyment specifically from exerting dominance, denying access, wasting other people's time, or psychologically controlling shared spaces. And importantly, they don't need loot incentives to justify it. The incentive is the disruption itself.

People underestimate how much MMO behavior is psychological rather than reward-driven. In highly social online games, power expression becomes content. Being able to lock down a camp, train people, monopolize a spawn, or make lower-level players miserable becomes a way for certain players to feel influential inside the world. That's why I've always thought the "players will self-regulate" argument was completely naive. Historically, they don't - or in "soft pvp" environments have no/little ability to do so.

The irony is that a lot of these systems are defended under the banner of "community," but hostile friction often damages community more than it creates it. There's a massive difference between organic social interaction and systems that encourage territorial behavior. This is also why I think modern MMOs need to be much more careful about how they implement open-world competition. Not because players should never interact negatively, but because developers consistently underestimate how efficiently players will weaponize inconvenience against one another once the novelty wears off.

Games like EQ got away with more of this because online worlds themselves were novel and players tolerated enormous amounts of friction for the social experience alone. In 2026, players are far less patient with systems where large portions of their session can be invalidated by a handful of bored high-level players deciding to "have fun" at everyone else's expense.

Neckbeards bitching about some raid encounter and having to camp for rare drops in a contested fashion to trigger it

Shawn: Yeah sounds like it sucks we will just remove it until we can make it better

Cue Neckbeards bitching that they can’t camp for rare drops in a contested fashion

Me chillin as a level 8 Ogre Monk dadquester