Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO

Kirun said:

In many older or "classic-style" MMORPGs, the latter is often the case. Soloing isn't discouraged through positive reinforcement of group play - it's made borderline unplayable. Certain classes can't function without external support, downtime between fights is excessive, and the experience gain is so meager that progress feels glacial. That doesn’t cultivate community, it just boxes players into a narrow corner and hopes they'll choose to socialize out of necessity.

One of the things I've always felt MMORPGs could and should explore further is a more aggressive system of grouping incentives, rather than solo penalties.

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honestly was with you for most of these last few pages of posts but then swing and a miss here.

There is neither functionally nor psychologically a difference between solo penalties and group bonuses. They are identical. Whatever is the most efficient becomes the standard and everything else is a penalty.

look we've all been armchair developers on these forums for decades we all know what we know and very little of what we say is really going to change anyone's mind. At this point if you don't realize that you're either preaching to the choir or speaking greek then that's kinda on you.

We're all retards. Players and developers alike. your job is to identify you brand of retard and get on board and not waste your time, life's too short to invest energy into anything else.

for good or for ill developers tell you exactly who they are, believe them. they all run a spectrum, from absolutists (we say they have vision (tm) ) to passivists, rule by committee public polls a/b testing types.

When you run into absolutist developers who think that tedium is what made EQ great, then ok, they are retards, thanks for telling me you are retards, now I won't waste my time. That's why I don't really follow these guys. I'm sure whatever game they make will be great for the 10 players they manage to attract, good on them, i wish them the best of luck, but sadly it isn't going to recapture the magic that those 10 players are still chasing.

Same story with that Epoch Wow Emu server. Seemed interesting at first. First thing I saw on their website is they were taking Wrath of the Lich King client and reverting back to TBC because they believed that TBC was the pinnacle of class design and balance of WoW. Cool, those developers are fucking retarded, stopped reading immediately and not going to waste a moment of my time thinking about them. Sorry for everyone who got all hyped up, turns out developers who don't have a fucking clue what they are talking about, also don't have a fucking clue about what they are doing and their launch was a testament to that.

If you run into the opposite, devs who listen to every scrap of feedback and implement majority rules on everything, then you best get to know the player base and make sure they are your brand of retards, cus they are the ones running the show. If you aren't careful you end up on a server run by fucking Troons (like turtle and other p-servers).

When it comes to games like this one they are led by this false premise that game design hasn't already been fucking solved. It has been solved, for decades, it's simple as fuck. you are doing it wrong.

These nirgon types (no hate) are all "chasing" this high they got from EQ like it was the girl they lost their virginity to, they use phrases like "you can't capture lightning in a bottle again" "never as good as your first" "you can never recreate that experience" blah blah blah. Its a lie, a retarded lie at that.

For these types they have no clue what made EQ work so they keep chasing game after game after game trying to relive that experience, they've failed so many times so many games they are just bitter as fuck, clinging to this next one will be "the one", or they've either convinced themselves "you can never relive your first MMO". That's why you got guys in here like "EQ had no maps, maybe that was the secret to it's success lets try that this time!" so you end up with this rabid group of autistic retards screaming about it being "immersion breaking to be able to see at night, the game should be unfucking playable for 12 hours a day!" and other such nonsense.

For the record, you can easily relieve your EQ experience in any game, any genre. hell you can pull it off in a looter shooter. it's easy. it's a solved problem, all you need is 2 things:

1) Dying has to hurt. Whether its exp loss or items or whatever, doesn't matter, they all ultimately translate into time. what matters is that dying is enough of a hindrance that you innately develop at least a small amount of risk aversion, which your brain translates into you attaching emotional value to your character. This is helped by;

2) The world is dangerous. Whether its mobs are more powerful than you thus they present a threat that should be tackled with friends, environmental challenges you must avoid, or just its full pvp enabled and roaming gank squads could be around any corner, the world must be dangerous enough for you to develop a respect for the world.

That's it. those 2 things are all you need for the human psyche to value your time commitment enough to make plans to avoid risk, safety in numbers/group up, develop a community, communicate with one another, work together to overcome challenges, face foes, etc.

if you put those 2 items on sliders and assign values from 1 to 10, you could rank every game ever made. Any game whose combined score is around 15 or higher will give you that virgin EQ experience, you can and will recapture "lightning in a bottle". An example, take a look at the hardcore wow servers. The world of Vanilla wow is hardly fucking dangerous, but 1 life servers with no respawn are a full blown 10 on the dying hurts scale. ignoring the solo/self found types they treat it as a solo challenge, on these hardcore rulesets where grouping is allowed you end up with these tight nit communities of players who group up almost exclusively, in open world solo content, because the penalty for dying is enough to warrant it. There is nothing innately "group required" to vanilla wow open world content, if anything it was designed with the opposite in mind, but if the death penalty is harsh enough people will naturally flock to it to avert risk. It's still not a 15 combined score because the world is only like a 3 on the danger scale, but you can start to see it getting close.

This is coming from someone who absolutely relived his EQ experience years later in Eve Online, and online spreadsheet simulator in space with 0 PVE and 100% pvp content, complete night and day difference from everquest, yet it offered the exact same experience for me, the player. I have the same nostalgia, the same immersion and comradery and community experiences playing Eve as I ever did playing EQ. I have as fond of memories of Y9G, a giant invisible box with POIs at set intervals and a static nebula as a background picture, as I do Lguk or Sebilis, zones i know like the back of my hand despite not setting foot in for 20+ years (until THJ). I remember the Reb gate in 6C or the M2>97x>y9g corridor the same way I remember the path through ice spiders retrieving corpses under Vox. Mostly I remember the friends and good times I had along the way, the human brain naturally starts to forgot about all the shit shows and low points & tedium, we only remember the good times, and I associate those good times to the activities I was doing when those memories were created, same as anyone else.

Some people get hung up and think it was the tedium that made those times good, it wasn't. The tedium is irrelevant.

see that's the thing, tedium != difficulty. it is the difficulty, the struggle that matters, not the tedium. You could have hello kitty island adventures with the brightest pastel palette imaginable where it never gets dark and if it were a difficult game with required grouping to advance and had harsh death penalties you would have the same everquest experience. "Night time being so dark you cannot see adds to immersion/realism" whatever isn't difficulty, its tedium.

Again if you were to rank games death penalties on a scale of 1 to 10 and the worlds difficulty on a scale of 1 to 10, pretty much every game has been getting easier and easier on both fronts, especially compared to vanilla Everquest. And the games that want to offer that "classic, old school" feel are not making their games more difficult, they are instead replacing difficulty with tedium, and they are inventing ridiculous game systems and mechanics that offer artificial group incentives and synergies, to try and force grouping. "Oh this class has a debuff that stacks with this other class but only in groups so that encourages group play" no that's artificial tripe.

As far as your "economy" stuff. Wizards/druids selling ports is no different hunters selling DM tribute buffs along with warlock summons using a bot army, or mages selling Power leveling in maraudon (or boxers selling PLing for krono in modern EQ). it isn't community, it isn't class dependencies, it is commerce. while some players enjoy that type of play, playing the auction house or EC tunnel merchant really has nothing to do with whether or not the game is immersive. those types of players thrive in any game that allows trading.

You don't need any of that shit to encourage grouping and community formation. Human nature/psychology is what should encourage me to group because i'm less likely to die and dying is painful to the point that I want to avoid it.

Not so much anymore, but for the longest time these games were all chasing mass appeal bucks, they want some of that WoW money, and WoW taught them that you have to make the game soloable and by that they mean less dangerous and no penalties for dying. That's the rub, WoW is a better game than they will ever be, they can't compete with WoW as a game, but WoW was a terrible world and what old school players are searching for are worlds, not games.

edit: also this

If you have a private zone that you can farm at your own leisure, dying is irrelevant and the world is not dangerous.

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i have no idea what you are trying to say. instancing vs not can be a component of making the world more complex or simply introducing friction between players to create conflict which can make it feel more dangerous (or less, if all the hard content is always dead), but generally is just a method of content distribution. Instancing or not has zero to do with a world being dangerous or death being painful or not, I have no idea where you are even coming from with this one.

Ok ill admit i haven't been following this thread in great detail as like I said, the devs told me who they were and I listened to them, but clearly I've missed some juicy drama y'all at each other's throats lol.

Kirun, I think you misunderstood me since your argument is agreeing with me. My point was Tedium is irrelevant as in, Tedium isn't what made these games good, it was the challenge, Tedium is bad and modern devs are replacing challenge with Tedium.

If I can solo effortlessly for 100 exp per hour or I can group and earn 200 exp per hour grouping doesn't have an exp bonus, soloing has an exp penalty. Adding extra artificial layers or rewards or mechanics to encourage grouping is just unnecessary fluff.

Im not saying you can never allow soloing. Im saying the world needs to be dangerous enough and the penalty for dying needs to be severe enough that soloing is a high risk white knuckle activity and results in most people preferring the safety of grouping, even if the exp/hr is the same.