Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO

I played a Bard in EQ1 and it was fun to pull. But it could get really repetitive sitting in the same dungeon room or at the same fort (sarnack, giant, rygorr) doing the same thing over and over. I don't mind if pulling is in Pantheon. I'd like to do it again. But I also wouldn't mind if every so often the group was forced to relocate either to find more mobs to kill or because a large group of bruiser mobs showed up and took over the camp room.

Draegan_sl said:

,neither did I strike up conversations with them unless someone fucked up and we had to either explain the fight or figure out what went wrong. Otherwise I just watched TV like

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I wonder how much more you'd have done that (Preemptively) if the fights were simpler to explain,butthe penalty for losing was far higher (Like experience loss). I think you'd have probably talked more, if only to shortly explain the encounters. And that's far more powerful than you realize.


I had to read a lot of sociological/psych bullshit for the "rationality" portion of my degree (Which is in essence the ability to quantify people's reaction in an equation--hah, ask Wall Street how that works.). But it did yield some insights into human behavior. For example--Very short conversations, ANY conservation in fact, forms a significant social bond in comparison to the absence of such--even if the people spend a lot of time in close proximity. Seriously, watch the video--it's not a statistically relevant experiment, of course, but there HAVE been experiments done on this premise (Ill try to remember the book I read with it. But to condense the video--when the woman doesn't talk to the people next to her, someone steals her radio multiple times and nothing happens. She says two words to the people next to her, just a "hello" and then when someone takes her radio, almost everyone steps in and stops him).

Anyway, mechanics that induce speaking, because of broader difficulty, might have a whole host of effects that are hard to see at first. (Or they could do nothing, meh--I wouldn't dismiss them out of hand though, people are quirky, even little things can produce large changes in behavior that are hard to see at first glance.)

Troy_Costisick_sl said:

I played a Bard in EQ1 and it was fun to pull. But it could get really repetitive sitting in the same dungeon room or at the same fort (sarnack, giant, rygorr) doing the same thing over and over. I don't mind if pulling is in Pantheon. I'd like to do it again. But I also wouldn't mind if every so often the group was forced to relocate either to find more mobs to kill or because a large group of bruiser mobs showed up and took over the camp room.

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Although I didn't mind pulling to spots I think a lot of us would rather move through a dungeon most of the time.. I'd prefer different areas to present different group techniques as you moved deeper into a dungeon. I think pulling is one of those techniques that should be included. I don't think we need to do away with pulling we need to make mobs smarter and advance those pulling classes.

Khane_sl said:

I don't understand how anyone can say pulling was stupid and doesn't make any sense. Draegan you play LoL and you play it a lot. People get baited and pulled away from their groups ALL THE TIME. And these are humans! Why does it seem so impossible that you can distract and separate enemies from their groups? It's a basic battle tactic. Bring back pulling.

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Here's what I said:

I hope this game doesn't have pulling, it's the dumbest mechanic ever. It's a left over of an age where tech and programming were limited. Aggro ranges are stupid. If a bad guy can see you, he should be doing something about it.

The only pulling mechanic that I think is valid is baiting a mob to chase you from some location over to your group from around a corner or something.

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I'm against a group standing in a doorway of a large room, pulling one mob after another to die while all the mobs are "watching". Games should be more organic. In HardcoreMMO land, you should have to worry about runners bringing in help. You should plan how you're going to take out a whole room of mobs. It shouldn't be that you have a large room of 20 NPCs that you can snag 5 of them because they are X feet away from another group, so therefore you're automatically safe.

I guess that creates super trains, but that makes the game fun and challenging.

Maybe a castle is full of level 20 (or whatever metric they use) mobs, but because a single group of level 20 people can't take that many mobs at once you have to come back at level 30. Oh my god, that castle drops level 30 gear! What? What's that? Your level 20 friend can HELP TOO BECAUSE HE CAN HIT THINGS? BRILLIANT! (And that level 20 might be able to snag a level 30 item to wear because who really puts in level restrictions on gear?)

--

Look, I'm all for being able to snag small groups or solo mobs and bring them to a safe place to fight them. That's a basic principle. I'm against slowly working through a large room pulling mobs because they are far enough away in aggro range that they don't "notice each other". That means you also design dungeons that support this theory too.

This also leads to a further discussion that players earn "experience" or "points" via completing achievement or objectives - thus objective based leveling. So you can design a dungeon where you can scale the walls, find a hidden passage via a Rogues detect hidden, or stealth/invis through areas and kill the big bad guy and not worry that players are skipping X amounts of trash thus losing X amounts of experience. The end goal is the end goal, and the result isn't any less character progression.

Draegan_sl said:

2) You're never going to have a game where people suddenly start talking to each other and become friends. Ever. Even in WOW dungeons back in the day with BRD UBRS or whatever, that were big dungeon crawlers, I didn't care about the random people in my group, neither did I strike up conversations with them unless someone fucked up and we had to either explain the fight or figure out what went wrong. Otherwise I just watched TV like Tad wants to be able to do.

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Running BRD with my 2 RL friends we made friends we added to our list for when we needed a mage to run dungeons without getting a headache. This was before they grouped you with people from other realms tho...

Draegan_sl said:

One has nothing to do with the other. Your assumptions are awful.

1) WOW dungeon design after Vanilla was pretty much shit. I think everyone can agree with that.

2) You're never going to have a game where people suddenly start talking to each other and become friends. Ever. Even in WOW dungeons back in the day with BRD UBRS or whatever, that were big dungeon crawlers, I didn't care about the random people in my group, neither did I strike up conversations with them unless someone fucked up and we had to either explain the fight or figure out what went wrong. Otherwise I just watched TV like Tad wants to be able to do.

Pulling doesn't make a break a dungeon, class/combat mechanics do as well as the design of the dungeon.

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Sorry you are dead wrong on number 2. Plenty of people talked in EQ (and DAOC for that matter ) ,even further games, but especially in EQ, it was common to chat in a pickup group even, people remembered each other and , gasp , actually made friends sometimes. More to the point, often in a group , the one anti-social in the group who didn't say a word stuck out more than the others who chatted some.

So there already have been games that do what you say never happens nor ever will.

So really , not sure if you are serious or maybe just run into that because you don't like socializing at all in an mmo , but plenty of people have and do start talking in game and , gasp , enjoy it.

I'd personally be miserable playing an mmo with folks who didn't care to talk and socialize with anyone they didn't already know.

Chatting happened because you had long downtimes due to mana regen mechanics and the mechanics of combat in general, had little or nothing to do with pulling. Good pulling prolly increased your kill rate and decreased your chat in fact.

I dont want to go back to the days of EQ where downtime was really obscene but I wouldnt be sad if we went back to a place where you had to sit and med for a couple of minutes if you went oom after a fight, and by a couple i mean two minutes to get fm again while resting and no more.

Yeah Drae, you're #2 is off the mark.

Lithose_sl said:

I wonder how much more you'd have done that (Preemptively) if the fights were simpler to explain,butthe penalty for losing was far higher (Like experience loss). I think you'd have probably talked more, if only to shortly explain the encounters. And that's far more powerful than you realize.

I had to read a lot of sociological bullshit for the "rationality" portion of my degree. Very short conversations, ANY conservation in fact, forms a significant social bond in comparison to the absence of such--even if the people spend a lot of time in close proximity. Seriously, watch the video--it's not a statistically relevant experiment, of course, but there HAVE been experiments done on this premise (Ill try to remember the book I read with it. But to condense the video--when the woman doesn't talk to the people next to her, someone steals her radio multiple times and nothing happens. She says two words to the people next to her, just a "hello" and then when someone takes her radio, almost everyone steps in and stops him).

Anyway, mechanics that induce speaking, because of broader difficulty, might have a whole host of effects that are hard to see at first. (Or they could do nothing, meh--I wouldn't dismiss them out of hand though, people are quirky, even little things can produce large changes in behavior that are hard to see at first glance.)

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When you were deep in those old WOW Vanilla dungeons, time loss was as much as a motivator. Not only that a 2nd or 3rd wipe might make soemone give up and you'd have to start from scratch because it took you 20-60m to get a group, get to the dungeon and start. This fights weren't mechanically difficult in any case.

I can't watch the video now at work, but perhaps a lot of us have different definitions or expectations of what "socializing" is in groups. Is it having some random conversations about the game in general (i.e. Patch Notes, Updates, other content, guild drama), is it talking about sports or other out of game events, or is just normal shooting the shit? I had bits of that normal chitchat in almost every game I play. Short conversations that result into a bit of socializing.

I think the duration of content is the problem, not the lack of mechanics. For example, WOW made you grind dungeons over and over for points instead of drops. This leads to efficiency behavior. People will start grinding out dungeons as fast as possible and repeat them. Because they also only took you 15-25 minutes to complete you never had enough time to create social bonds.

I think it has more to do with the duration of events (dungeon diving) and the motivation for having them.

The longer you are together with people, the more likely you are to speak with them in some social aspect. The longer something is known to be prior to starting it, the more prone you are to accepting breaks and other downtime. But if you know you have to do 5 dungeons today to get your new shiny, you're just going to rush dungeons as fast as possible because the dungeon itself is only a means to an end.

Which is why I detest token based loot progression.

Creslin_sl said:

I dont want to go back to the days of EQ where downtime was really obscene but I wouldnt be sad if we went back to a place where you had to sit and med for a couple of minutes if you went oom after a fight, and by a couple i mean two minutes to get fm again while resting and no more.

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That sounds about right

Mahulk_sl said:

Running BRD with my 2 RL friends we made friends we added to our list for when we needed a mage to run dungeons without getting a headache. This was before they grouped you with people from other realms tho...

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The key part was that 3 out of the 5 people in your group were friends. At that point you're probably more likely to create larger social circles because one is already created.

I mis-represented my point though in that quote. When I said I didn't care about random people, I meant I wasn't compelled to automatically try to get to know them unless something came up and presented itself to me. Perhaps that is my fault for not understand what people mean by socializing. Those dungeons had normal conversation in them if someone had to AFK for a while, or the healer died and had to run back. I still didn't care about those people outside whatever happened in the moment.

edit:
I'll take back what I said about the socializing aspect. It happens all the time for sure, I think my main sticking point is that content can't force you to interact with other people on a social level (I don't include discussing game mechanics for fights in this). It can prevent you from talking because of what I mentioned in my reply to Lithose about efficiency aspects of dungeon grinding.

Draegan_sl said:

Which is why I detest token based loot progression.

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Token based loot progression has its place, but only as a side dish to a main course. It's fine for the filthy casual people because they can still advance their characters and be rewarded for play. But the good stuff, the items people talk about, remember, and sell in the E.C. Tunnel should come from drops, not point-buys. So, I'm with you there.

Fair enough , I wasn't up for automatically wanting a life story of every group member also. But just even the mundane normal chit chat in random groups makes the experience for me anyway x1000 more enjoyable that the complete silence rushing through everything.

I might be in the minority, but I'm not sure this game will even get funded. People went pretty crazy about paying for EQ landmark.. which is basically a kickstarter. Brad's Vanguard exploits are pretty well know and I doubt that would give many people confidence to toss money at him. I had a lot of fun with Everquest, so I'll probably donate regardless, but I'm definitely curious to see how it plays out.

well since this seems to be some sort of wishlist rant fest in here..

I liked the bind soul mechanic, and the porting in eq1, specifically that wiz vs druid were different ports, and that the porter went with you. Some group asking me for a port to plane of hate for a corpse run was actually a risky proposition. in fact, I think it would be a great idea to make most of the port destinations (if there is going to be ports) risky/hostile. if they are used enough players will keep the area safe just with through traffic, if not, then you may want to be prepared to die.

Also leashing. there needs to be some sort of reasonable test for a leash length, (if any). someone who is level 20, shouldn't be able to run through a zone that is meant for level 20. maybe 1/10th of the way through before they die. unless they are real careful. how to implement that? no idea, maybe a factor of resists/miss of ranged attacks from the mobs etc? snares whatnot. but being able to run through damn near anywhere in most games in annoying as hell.

also pulling gorenaire onto kc was good times. so yeah fuck leashing in general.

I liked the buff someone else with whatever which ties into powerleveling, begging for sow or hell wolf form from some mid 30's druid before going into unrest. that shit was boss.

Twinking in general, was good times. And Instead of using bop and boe as a crutch for keeping a crafting market viable, make gear in general able to be broken into something that was useful and consumable (am thinking soul shots ala L2). some other method of having equipment exit the world. also make crafting somewhat of a pain in the ass, I recall the shitlots of plat it took to level all the crafts to make that fucking earing. it sucked. but at the same time rewarding.

Also, content that when you go into it, you are committing, whether it be due to back spawns or some other mechanic, plenty of groups would clear part of hate and then campout till x time the next day etc to finish it. that kinda shit was great you felt like you were really on some sort of adventure, you were disconnected from the rest of the world for a time. vs oh raid times over, better fuck off to town and check ah, click on some button to be right back where we were in whatever instance the next day.

Corpse runs. fuck yes. xp loss, absolutely. actually losing a level? please god.

Also as someone else mentioned dunno how the fuck many pages back, Negatives, for the love of Christ let there be lots of them. Attacking a fire elemental with fire? that better be doing zippo dmg or even better, heal/buff it or reflect the dmg. Selecting the right tools for the job and having various levels of draw backs for how poor of a choice you made really needs to be a thing. Resists need to fucking matter, and not be super easy to swap around, other then the base resists on the actual gear itself maybe only allow 10-15% additional from spells and enchantments an shit. I want to have to farm and maintain all sorts of shit.

Skills too, for everything. leveling blunt or some crap because you got something nice but have always been using daggers previously. Yeah it may kinda suck spending the time to level it, but it reinforces (whether you realize it or not) just how good your new toy is, if you are willing to go through with it.

Classes having significant differences in solo abilities. every god damn mmo these days makes every class able to solo to max level. Not that you technically couldn't in eq1, but there was a massive difference between a war soloing to max vs a druid or shm, etc. that shit needs to come back. it was imo a critical part of meeting people. many classes were far more effective grouping, and that built circles of friends, where as classes that could solo really well and the ones that chose to solo all the time felt the draw backs of not readily finding a group when they wanted to do group content, as they weren't making any friends. They would sit there max level at some zone in, begging for a group. in the solo vs non solo classes the trade offs were social vs xp vs access to content.

What else, oh yeah, fucking quest markers and journals and shit. fuck all that in it's ass. I don't want to be led around, I want to figure that shit out. quest items too, killed some random odd looking skeli? dropped some bone of aids? the shit is this? no idea... good.

No god damn skill macros. no pressing 1 and then 2 and then 2 and then 1! hurray your "uber". also I dunno how feasible this is but mobs need to do shit that is randomly defensive. not so much or so quick to make it pure twitch gaming but often enough that if you are sitting there doing some kinda mindless rotation you have to go, ah fuck, and do something else. hell if you could make it so the mobs recognize that ppl are following some sort of skill pattern, and to raise shields or some shit as soon as some stacked up buffed big hitter is about to come down on them. Just to screw with rotation kid that managed to press a few buttons in order for 20 mins straight, that'd be great.

Gear and mudflation, that will be a bitch to manage, but I can think of a few examples of items that stuck around for quite some time, like wiz legs from plane of fire, or hell the like level 5? or some crap instant cast tiny debuff stick that i'm sure piles of ppl had pretty much forever. damn if i can remember the name of it. not sure where i'm going with this point but on gear in general, no token bullshit, if rng hates your face, sucks to be you. everyone can't get everything, also seeing some vendor with all the "raid gear" on it is ass. I don't want to know everything about the endgame gear day one, also why the fuck can't i just kill that bitch if they have all that shit.

Oh and vendors, eq1's vendors please. vendor mining was a good waste of time and money, sometimes you struck gold or a huge amount of crafting mats from low levels etc other times it just sucked. but either way. it was good.

oh yeah, if everything can die. excellent.

rare spells and shit? sounds good, but i think they need a % chance to burn themselves out of your mind.

shit no ones gonna read all that anyways i'll stop here.

Soygen_sl said:

Dude, this is how a lot of people onthis veryforum became friends.

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Read my further posts, but not everything is absolute in any case.