popsicledeath
Potato del Grande
Enter: Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen!!!I also think that WoW's mistakes will heavily influence a new Diku-Mud and bring us full circle.
Enter: Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen!!!I also think that WoW's mistakes will heavily influence a new Diku-Mud and bring us full circle.
Who were you on FoH? Going to be someone else who claims to of just been a lurker and only registered in 2014 because of Pantheon?Hmm well... "From the pantheon kickstarter."
I guess being around these forums before the latest and greatest incarnation doesn't mean much.
Your asshole also apparently burns from eating Taco Bell. I'm gonna go ahead and say people have isolated experiences in life.........................I dunno man... I've been happily playing any number of SOE products since 1999. I've always received high value for my money, prompt and effective customer service, and have had a good amount of fun. I certainly have never felt 'lied to and back stabbed'.
...well... Maybe during Planes of Power/PoTime lol.
No. I wasn't "bitching" about it either, simply stating an observation.So what are you insinuating by bitching that"Landmark "alpha" is the furthest thing from a true alpha I've ever been in. It is more akin to the earliest stages of beta."
Is that a bad thing?
agreeThe Landmark Alpha experience is super legit. Ponytail is tweeting personally about development issues with a huge degree of transparency. Sometimes he's tweeting at 3am cuz he's still at work kicking ass.
Well aren't you just a little spitfire.The pantheon fans circle-jerk has nothing on the RR circle-jerk, that's for sure. At least their's will end with a semi and no happy ending... This one has gone on long and strong with no end in sight.
Then you say this...Listen, defining "difficulty" in video games is one of those stupid arguments that can go back andforth forever because, ultimately, it's subjective. I'm not going to labor my point for that reason, but I'm going to say this.
Do you know what the word subjective means?Arden_sl said:Progress in early EQ was clearly DIFFICULT. If you disagree with this, you either 1. didn't play early EQ, 2. are lying for some reason, 3. are just a damn fool.
So, difficulty isn't really subjective then. By your own admission, if something takes a long time, it automatically makes it difficult. In that case, Anarchy Online is probably the most difficult MMORPG to have ever existed in the West.Arden_sl said:Therefore, if progress in EQ was difficult, the game was difficult.
So, let's say I zone into Unrest, not knowing that there's a massive train on the other side. I zone in, die while loading, and now I have a corpse run back to the zone. Through no fault of my own, I've now lost a ton of time. If I'm a non spellcaster, I have to run back from GFay/Kaladim, I have to find a cleric to hopefully procure a res(assuming this is release, 96% resses don't even exist yet, but for devil's advocate sake, let's say it does)from a level 56 or higher cleric(likely going to take a while), and likely pay/tip that cleric, setting me back even more. Now, that's all assuming I can even get a res. I'm set back evenfurtherif I can't. Now, are you seriously going to try and warp that into poor "strategic planning" on my part? That's the game actively punishing you for something you have almost no control over. In fact, if you didn't have any friends/guildmates in Unrest, you hadnocontrol over it, because /ooc chat didn't go through zonelines. If that isn't tedium for tedium's sake, I don't know what is..Lithose_sl said:Difficulty in EQ
Lets not overestimate ponytail here. Its a twitter account. Anyone can be sending out messages. It still sends a great impression to gamers that 24 hours a day the guy is"on it", but it could be any number of people using ponytails twitter to keep people informed.The Landmark Alpha experience is super legit. Ponytail is tweeting personally about development issues with a huge degree of transparency. Sometimes he's tweeting at 3am cuz he's still at work kicking ass.
So what you are saying is all these e-mail updates I get for this KS are really just some 13 year old writing for his D&D campaign.Lets not overestimate ponytail here. Its a twitter account. Anyone can be sending out messages. It still sends a great impression to gamers that 24 hours a day the guy is"on it", but it could be any number of people using ponytails twitter to keep people informed.
My bad. I went back and reread your post about "SOE backstabbing, etc..." and didn't realize that was sarcasm in your comparison with the current McQuaid situation.I think you're mixing tones between two topics going back and forth.
Then your an idiot? Seriously. Who EVER zoned into KC and was shocked to see a train to zone?So, let's say I zone into Unrest, not knowing that there's a massive train on the other side.
So you want to remove death from the game because its inconvenient?I zone in, die while loading, and now I have a corpse run back to the zone. Through no fault of my own, I've now lost a ton of time. If I'm a non spellcaster, I have to run back from GFay/Kaladim,
Who looks for a 96 rez when your playing in a low level zone like Unrest?I have to find a cleric to hopefully procure a res(assuming this is release, 96% resses don't even exist yet, but for devil's advocate sake, let's say it does)from a level 56 or higher cleric(likely going to take a while), and likely pay/tip that cleric, setting me back even more.
Are you seriously constructing an entire argument over the fact you got killed zoning in to Unrest and that proves the game is tedious? If your not prepared to die hundreds of times over the course of a year then maybe MMO's in general are not for you. Neither are FPS's. If dying is that inconvenient to you stick to fucking Monopoly or Chutes and ladders dude.Now, that's all assuming I can even get a res. I'm set back evenfurtherif I can't. Now, are you seriously going to try and warp that into poor "strategic planning" on my part? That's the game actively punishing you for something you have almost no control over. In fact, if you didn't have any friends/guildmates in Unrest, you hadnocontrol over it, because /ooc chat didn't go through zonelines. If that isn't tedium for tedium's sake, I don't know what is..
Do you really think Obama carries around his cell phone and whips it out during lunch to toss out tweets? I'm just saying, its business. And most of the time a guy in ponytails position doesn't have time to sit down and start tweeting out updates. Like Obama, he has people to do that for him.So what you are saying is all these e-mail updates I get for this KS are really just some 13 year old writing for his D&D campaign.
Ok, I'll concede that there was an awesomeness to a "layered" feel of difficulty. (Your xcom example was what got me, I am a huge fan.)(Just to start; yes WoW was harder than EQ in terms of twitch difficulty. WoW raids were a ton harder to execute at the individual level, by leaps and bounds.)
I'm not so sure you are, either. You're attempting to define all difficulty as tactical, individualistic difficulty. Essentially the only difficulty that fits in your paradigm is very simple, cause and effect twitch difficulty. Anything larger, such as strategic difficulty, which often has more abstracted risks? You define as "tedium" or "artificial" and that's pretty preposterous on it's face. Sit down and play a game of chess with someone ranked highly; and then come back here and try to explain why you lost in such an "easy" game that used "artificial" difficulty like planning and risk assessment and didn't have much short term reactionary difficulty in it. (In other words, "artificial" difficulty can segregate players as much as "twitch" difficulty can--so by metric do you quantify difficulty if not based on the ability to learn and avoid it?)
Tedium, in games, is suffering boredom from something thatcan'tbe avoided, it's not really tedious of the penalty can be diminished or avoided completely. If deaths JUST happened in EQ, and you had no way to avoid paying the penalty?THATis tedium, because it's essentially just bilking you time with no way to reduce the penalty cost--there is no player involvement in obtaining a superior outcome. The input and outcome in that case would be boring, and rightfully called tedium. Now, you could be saying it's "tedious" to interrupt the action--but that has two problems, first, it doesn't account for all the "strategic" (Preparation) methods you could avoid long down times with (You say it's Artificial, but really it just means it's "strategic" difficulty), and it assumes the "down time" is some universal "play stop" but in reality the amount of risk this downtime caused was pretty organic. CRs in Guk were less risky than CR's in lower Seb, for example and CR's in high traffic areas were less risky than lower trafficed ones (But you could usually farm loot easier in lower traffic ones--all kinds of trade offs).
Why is that important? Well because scaling "losses" provide discreet choices for player risk and lets you scale reward with that risk in mind. If I want to place the sword of doom on a mob, and I want it to be rare; then if my game only has a pass/fail binary system in place, I have to make that mob a bad ass, because the only challenge is getting to him and killing him. If, however, that mob could skull fuck your corpse and force you to lose a level or the trash going to him could do that? Well then, I could make him easier and I'm willing to bet people would still avoid him and his "lair" unless they can REALLY assure their victory.
That's a pretty damn obtuse example...but you see how NOT constricting yourself to "anything to distracts from the action is TEDIUM! TEDIUM I TELL YOU!" gives you tons of ways to offer your players strategic choices in how they want to assess risk? Assessing risk and consequence in a game is FUN for a lot of us. Not everyone is into the "power" fantasy of games: where the objective is to mow through your enemies and overcome them by beating them in a specific and defined way (Just executing that one way well). Some of us like to approach games like stealth fantasies provide; where the core objective is actually about minimizing consequence. But you do need to HAVE varying consequences in your game to create those levels of risk and strategic choice.
EQ's "tedium", insomecases--provided that. It wasn't "artificial" difficulty, it was just a TYPE of difficulty you didn't enjoy, and that's fair. But some of us do--some of us prefer our Xcom to be strategic andpunishingfor bad strategies. (Which X-com did well, if you passed a mission but two guys were wounded? It could actuall be a tactical victory but a strategic set back--there were layered risks in everything.) It's fun to make strategic choices and weigh consequences beyond a "pass, fail" binary. And as much as you dub it an "artificial" difficulty--it does accomplish the same dynamic of creating graded achievements within the population over time, it just does it through a different method. And that method might appeal to gamers who enjoyed the concept of choice, consequence and strategy more than the regurgitation of APM's in a rigid sequence. (Many of us find THAT to be what's "tedious" in modern MMO's--playing Azeroth Rock Band with "Kill Garrosh" as the song 10 people need to play at 98% completion. Because there is literally no strategic way to get around that memorization/regurgitation except breaking your immersion and swapping to "the derp mode". )
But long a short? Anything that costs time is not blanket "tedium", that's a pretty silly way to look at things. There were deeper issues at play there, and some of them EQ just got stupid lucky revealing (Like again, how CR's had a organic risk vs reward to them since the risk changed depending on the setting and classes available--now I don't think CR's are a great mechanic themselves BUT that hidden nugget of "difficulty"? That's something that is great.)
Edit: Edit: Oh and btw, I retired before Garrosh, but up until early Cata? I was a raid leader for a guild who did heroics; we were a server first guild in Vanilla and TBC. Also, I was able to get Glad a few times here and there throughout TBC and LK with 3 man teams; so, no, I'm not just some baddy pining for the days of old. I'm simply saying there were deeper revelations in EQ beyond what you just saw on the surface. On the surface? Yes CR's were a poor mechanic, however, the effect of them? That was a good thing, for example.
I understand certain people like different things, but IMO those sucky moments in EQ is what made the winning that much sweeter. I never felt victory like that in any other game. Because you were dragged through the mud if you fucked up or were not careful, it made you respect the shit more. It made you have those moments where your heart was in your throat. This also s no longer in current games.stuff
"The first place I thought to check was the toliets.. brad? Brad? BRAD?!"
Maybe the lesson just took some time to sink in... anyway, EQ had some a good run pre-WoW and is still around a decade after it (not that I touched it since 2004 but it wasnt shut down either). You make it sound like SOE/EQ is in the same league as Horizons. With hindsight, one of the things SOE did well was fast expansions - even if the raid content was bugged as hell and generally half-finished (and I dont remember a finished endgame for any EQ expansion), the other 5-10 zones generally worked and came out at nearly the same pace that WoW did mere content patches which had like one dungeon/raid and that's it.WOW is what happens when a competent company creates and runs an MMO. I may not like the game or what it did to the genre, but I have mad respect for what the game was, what it accomplished, and how damn professional Blizzard ran it. You would think after getting curbstomped by WOW Sony would have learned a thing or two about running and advertising an MMO. But no, they have not.