Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO

Bringing back twinking like someone mentioned earlier could help keep a healthy lowbie population too.

Khane said:

Scaling is a pretty good solution for older content. Its kind of stupid for current content but it works really well for legacy stuff.

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You have to give the established Playerbase a reason to run it, or it becomes a ghost town. FFXIV’s job setup makes it very easy to level a class, so you see much more people leveling. Square Enix had to keep pumping up the rewards for MSQ Roulette to make established players want to even bother with that though.

Cybsled said:

Taste is subjective, but I fail to see how sitting in a fucking room for 5 hours is superior to clearing a dungeon. I mean, I guess it is easier to AFK and do something else while doing EQ1 style camping.

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Because, if I'm in a group, and we are camping, and someone has to leave, or a couple of people have to leave, you can replace them and keep on camping. If you're running an instance, and two or three people have to go, your run is over. Also, if I'm camping in a dungeon, I don't have to run an instance from beginning to end. I can stay in a spot and just pull the mobs that spawn in our area. The hook in camping is having the rare mob spawn, and hoping it drops the rare loot. I much prefer staying in an area for a few hours at a time, than being forced to run the dungeon from beginning to end ad nauseam.

The other issue is again, instancing breaks immersion. If everyone in the game gets their own copy of the dungeon, it's really not a MMO. The better solution is to make more dungeons for each level group, and make bigger dungeons that can support more players. I mean, it's almost 2021, making 7 to 10 dungeons per level group shouldn't be that difficult.

etchazz said:

The hook in camping is having the rare mob spawn, and hoping it drops the rare loot

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So basically you like loot box gacha mechanics, except in Soviet MMO, you’re in the box!

Dizzam said:

Is this supposed to be responsive to my post? I didn’t say the MMO market is shit or that the MMO market isn’t strong. And I did say that it currently isn’t offering what I want.

I’m also not following your analogy. I mean, I guess I understand where you’re trying to go, but I don’t see how this analogy helps you get there. I don’t have any reason to believe—and I’m guessing you don’t either—that a Honda with monster truck tires has the same demand relative to the auto market that a spiritual successor to EQ has relative to the MMO market. But the fact that EQ has been done before, was relatively popular, and still has a loyal following differentiates a spiritual successor to EQ from your Honda with monster truck tires enough that your analogy isn’t doing any work.

If you’re just trying to say this game won’t appeal to the masses, that’s also what I said.

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The “still has a loyal following “ is the part we separate on. You just have to look at TLP servers to see that they have a real shelf life of only a few months. If you want an MMO that captures THAT following, go for it. But you’ll have a ghost town in 6 months.

Cybsled said:

So basically you like loot box gacha mechanics, except in Soviet MMO, you’re in the box!

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In MMO's the rare loot is the real hook. There's a reason why people can still remember all of their loot from EQ 20 years ago, and hardly any of the loot from WoW, which was replaced a day or so after you acquired it.

etchazz said:

In MMO's the rare loot is the real hook. There's a reason why people can still remember all of their loot from EQ 20 years ago, and hardly any of the loot from WoW, which was replaced a day or so after you acquired it.

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Rarity has nothing to do with it. The speed at which the items are replaced is why people remember the EQ items and not the WoW items. Even the Rusty Short Sword you used the first week in EQ is memorable over the 15 different weapons you got before leaving the first quest zone in WoW

Camping is like deep sea fishing. I find it completely satisfying. The fun is seeing what shows up (aka the rares and their rare loot drops). There's a certain charm to fighting down to a specific area just to set up shop if you can break the initial spawn. And then there is a certain manageable stress of potentially losing the camp at any time due to a mistake and subsequent wipe. WoW dungeons were neat to see the first couple times, and in reality, they are farming rares as well, you just have to restart the instance and plow back through all the trash to the mob you want. The risk in WoW is non-existent though, nobody is going to take your camp. To me, WoW was just more spastic button mashing and AoE'ing, and the dungeons were unnecessarily long and tedious just to get to one mob for the loot item you were after, and if it didn't drop, you had to re-clear all the trash mobs and run it again. EQ was great about understanding you were there for one particular mob and for one particular drop. If you got to the camp, you didn't have to keep running and killing unnecessary mobs, you just killed the camp every 20 minutes. The only tedium remaining was the wait for the mob to drop the item, but that part is fun, and every 20 mins or so, you had the rush of hoping he could spawn and he could drop it.

etchazz said:

In MMO's the rare loot is the real hook. There's a reason why people can still remember all of their loot from EQ 20 years ago, and hardly any of the loot from WoW, which was replaced a day or so after you acquired it.

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People remember loot in WoW as well. The main thing people remember in a MMO is either overpowered shit or rare status symbol shit. For every cloak of flames or fbss, there were dozens of shit items no one cared about or were marginal upgrades to tide you over and we’re just as soon forgotten in EQ1. As is the case with nostalgia, we usually only remember the good and all the mediocre shit is purged because it didn’t leave an impression strong enough.

The real reason you don’t see as much OP loot is because it becomes a balancing nightmare and devs are more sensitive to that. EQ1 was littered with tons of items where Verent or SOE realized they goofed and removed them from the drop tables, and in some cases, nerfed the legacy items as well. That isn’t good item design, that is just poor testing and QA.

Cybsled said:

It does bring up a good point, though: How do you deal with a grouping required game that doesn’t have a healthy enough population for a given level range at any given time? How do you attract new players if your established Playerbase has long since moved past the low level content?

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This is going to be their #1 biggest issue to deal with. I don't think this game will draw the amount of players that most here think it will. Population wise, It will be along the lines of Project Gordon, around 120 active plays online at any given time. People from places like p99 aren't going to jump ship to pay a monthly fee for a game that has similar graphics and game-play leaving their established friendships and community. Sure they might try it out, but they will most likely go right back to what they know, back to their old stomping grounds. The same goes for WoW players and why most modern new released mmo fail. Why leave WoW, to play WoW, to start all over in a game with way less content. The people who are playing on TLPs or Live EQ, aren't playing an old school mmo, It might look like it, but the leveling speed it crazy fast, death means nothing, and it is completely P2W, most of the loot, other than no drop, can just be bought with real life money, Korno, etc.

So how do they really deal with a small population, which this game will most likely have, in a slow progressing group based game, level scaling?, loot scaling?, which all change the feel of a game.

Also, I really hope they are making this game as a passion project, and it's not about; Look at this untapped market, we can make a mint, someone will buy us out. Not happening.

ili said:

So how do they really deal with a small population, which this game will most likely have, in a slow progressing group based game, level scaling?, loot scaling?, which all change the feel of a game.

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The more that I think about it, the more that I think New World and Fallout76 have an almost perfect system that fixes most of this. The system where anyone can tap a mob regardless of being in a group or not. Loot is personal. Loot has different random rolls +0-10str, +damage to plants, etc, rare loot is still rare, and regardless of player level mobs never stop giving exp or loot. A lvl1 rat gives 10 exp, and some random rat loot, no matter what level the player is. If a player is under leveled for the encounter, the loot and exp also scales downward to the players level, a level 60 wound get a Pristine Glowing FBSS Of Murder, and max exp, the level 10 would get a Tattered Faded FBSS, and a smaller amount of exp that is level appropriate. Sure this might promotes Zerg play, but thats the whole point, to have people playing to together, grouped or not, to limit the amount of restrictions. This also fixes contested problems, quest mobs, rare loot camps, etc, and the drama that comes with that. From what I have seen on the EQ TLPs most people rather spend real life money tokens(Krono) on contested camped items, than to deal with that broken system, but they would camp themselves if they had a shot at the loot, like global tapping rules.

zzeris said:

Best description of EQ nostalgists I've seen. Mat'hir is also on point. People don't miss the buggy ass game except for griefers. People miss the randomized loot they scored off select mobs. They miss finally getting the FBSS or getting lucky and it only taking one day of camping.

The immersion argument is ridiculous. You know what ruins immersion? Zoning. Running from EC to WC and seeing your character frozen on screen and a loading screen. Or sailing to OT and falling off the boat and sinking to the bottom of the world instead of swimming.

I like to see the camping and griefing arguments because these are the things people really miss. They don't really care about the difficulty, exploring, forced grouping, etc outside of how it gave artificial limitations to others. Most people were addicted to adding one more piece for their 'runway model' to show off to others. Or they loved having loot that was no longer available or with very low drop percentages. Loot box gacha indeed.

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The immersion argument also drives me bonkers. You know what else breaks immersion? Walking into the “dangerous” dungeon that is the home of an entire group of baddies and being able to walk from the entrance to the deepest parts without seeing a single NPC. Just camp groups after camp groups.

Immersion my ass.

I remember late in Vanilla EQ it got so bad that you could zone into SolB and literally walk all the way to Nagafen's lair without seeing a single mob. People were so desperate for XP they were even killing the fire giants and had FG camps. I remember we used to keep the Azrak and Djinn spawn on lockdown to level people in the guild and get everyone golden efreeti boots/amethyst rings.

Tmac said:

Should have a talisman that can be bought or farmed for summoning players.

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Master Magical Guild NPCs in towns should beadle to port players to other towns, as well as bind characters. This always seemed weird to me that they didn't. Don't get me wrong the ports would cost a lot of money ( like 5pp (base) at level 1 in EQ ) to the point that you would think twice about doing it. Also the price would be based on you race,(if you are the race of that city, it's cheaper) level, (higher your level the more it costs), reputation ( the higher rep, lower costs, bad rep higher cost, if your rep is bad enough they won't port you. ) and how many ports the NPC has cast that day( the NPC gets tired of porting people after awhile, so the cost goes up. (this resets every day). The binds not so much. That being said they should be still available in times where you can't find anyone to do it. The same idea could function for NPCs buffing PCs, you would think twice about doing it, because of the cost.

Also on the Topic of group summoning. The summon spells and items should have a limited range, the higher the level of the character or the more expensive the talisman (Not cheap) the longer the range. This way you will alwasy have to travel some of the amount of distance, or teleport yourself to the nearest city, not just be summoned from across the world.

Tmac said:

That’s a lot of rules.

Just put a timer on it.

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That's no fun. Things like this should always favor a PC doing it over an NPC. An NPC doing it for you should be your last option. Reputation/Race should play a role in every interaction with a NPC, not just if they want to kill you or not. Also Money sinks are good.