EQ Never

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Convo

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etchazz_sl said:
i honestly don't understand what's wrong with that. what's wrong with core loot gameplay? the loot, and the extreme rarity of a lot of the loot, is what kept people playing EQ for all those years. it was the carrot which really drove the game. i think the mistake just about every game has made since EQ is not realizing that the stuff, and the accumulation of stuff, is what really drives these types of games. the rarer you make items, the more coveted they become. make said items tradable, and you also drive the economy. the accumulation of wealth (greed) is a very basic and very powerful human desire. it is also a great motivator to keep people playing your game.
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I agree and ideally in a sandbox the world should feel large and adventure for undiscovered loot should be a big factor that drives exploration.. Risk vrs reward. I'm thinking loot will matter though and maybe that statement was just a bit general.
 
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LennyLenard_sl

shitlord
195
2
etchazz_sl said:
i honestly don't understand what's wrong with that. what's wrong with core loot gameplay? the loot, and the extreme rarity of a lot of the loot, is what kept people playing EQ for all those years. it was the carrot which really drove the game. i think the mistake just about every game has made since EQ is not realizing that the stuff, and the accumulation of stuff, is what really drives these types of games. the rarer you make items, the more coveted they become. make said items tradable, and you also drive the economy. the accumulation of wealth (greed) is a very basic and very powerful human desire. it is also a great motivator to keep people playing your game.
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I don't think anyone is saying there's something "wrong" with it, just they want to find something different to stand apart. Let's face it, if you come out now with something anything like WOW (including a kill shit, get loot, level model), it'll be called a WOW clone, and people will tune out. So instead of out doing WOW at being a better WOW, find a new formula that is as successful, or more than WOW's. Whether or not it'll work, we'll have to wait about 3 years to see.
 
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etchazz

Trakanon Raider
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LennyLenard_sl said:
I don't think anyone is saying there's something "wrong" with it, just they want to find something different to stand apart. Let's face it, if you come out now with something anything like WOW (including a kill shit, get loot, level model), it'll be called a WOW clone, and people will tune out. So instead of out doing WOW at being a better WOW, find a new formula that is as successful, or more than WOW's. Whether or not it'll work, we'll have to wait about 3 years to see.
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wrong. the loot model is the reason WoW doesn't work. it is the complete opposite of EQ. in EQ, loot was extremely difficult to obtain. a lot of the items were extremely rare and took a very long time to accumulate. in WoW, most of the loot is handed to you on a silver platter just for logging in. items are also BOP in WoW which kills any type of economy. yes, there were a lot of raid level items in EQ that were no drop, but they had enough tradable items in the game and they made those items rare enough (cof, yak, SMR, GBS, FBSS, fungi tunic, etc...) that people played a long time just to try and get those items.
 
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LennyLenard_sl

shitlord
195
2
etchazz_sl said:
wrong. the loot model is the reason WoW doesn't work. it is the complete opposite of EQ. in EQ, loot was extremely difficult to obtain. a lot of the items were extremely rare and took a very long time to accumulate. in WoW, most of the loot is handed to you on a silver platter just for logging in. items are also BOP in WoW which kills any type of economy. yes, there were a lot of raid level items in EQ that were no drop, but they had enough tradable items in the game and they made those items rare enough (cof, yak, SMR, GBS, FBSS, fungi tunic, etc...) that people played a long time just to try and get those items.
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You are absolutely right, but I'm talking even bigger picture here. EQ and WOW and many other games are still "kill shit, get loot, level." The pacing of loot acquisition or rarity of loot is an important difference between them absolutely, but it's still a subcategory.

There are MMOs that have little to no loot, and there's MMOs with no levels. There's even MMOs with no (or significantly little) combat. Whether or not they are or were successful is besides the point.

As the Mughal mentioned earlier, "think planetside2" (paraphrase), perhaps they're looking at redefining what each of those things mean.

What exactly that will manifest as, and whether that's good or bad, who knows.
 
Royal

Royal

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WoW couldn't do the full scale gear resets with each expansion the way it has if gear took a comparable amount of time to acquire the way it did in early EQ, and without that you would unquestionably undercut the tendency of many players to resub for an expansion even after a lengthy absence.
 
Erronius

Erronius

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<Gold Donor>
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LennyLenard_sl said:
You are absolutely right, but I'm talking even bigger picture here. EQ and WOW and many other games are still "kill shit, get loot, level." The pacing of loot acquisition or rarity of loot is an important difference between them absolutely, but it's still a subcategory.

There are MMOs that have little to no loot, and there's MMOs with no levels. There's even MMOs with no (or significantly little) combat. Whether or not they are or were successful is besides the point.

As the Mughal mentioned earlier, "think planetside2" (paraphrase), perhaps they're looking at redefining what each of those things mean.

What exactly that will manifest as, and whether that's good or bad, who knows.
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Personally, I don't want an MMO that revolves around raiding for or acquiring gear, which is really what most MMOs are about. I'd even go further than that and say that I don't want a game that revolves around grouping for gear, should a game simply remove raiding. EQ1 and WoW were simply opposite sides of the same coin, and that coin revolved around gear defining who you were at a design level. WoW just took the paradigm and took it to a different extreme; both still were based on the same paradigm.

When I think about the games that interest me anymore, they are becoming less and less about acquiring loot/gear and more about character development, as well as playing as a part of a community. EVE has a lot of design flaws, but it has something that other MMOs are sadly lacking - community interaction and a sort of player-defined social metagame. I mean, I'd rather "play" e-sim than spend more of my time grinding for gear that will be rendered useless in the end.

In my mind raiding should be a rare occurrence outside of high-level PvP. Killing the same dragon animation repeatedly every week for a chance to get lucky on a loot table is complete and utter bullshit. A dragon showing up should be a "OMFG" moment, not one that is simply thrown in front of players in the form of a raid mob. A dragon should spawn and own players, destroy buildings and livestock, be nigh unstoppable and give players a REASON to work together besides"I want raid loots so I guess I need to find X other people to raid with, unless I play a game with LFR".

Players should, IMHO, be known by what they've done in-game, by who've they've fought for and against. Even if I'm just a crafter, I'd like to be known as someone who contributed to my faction/country/barony/etc by contributing via crafting or whatever else I choose to do. I want people to say"If you want some really good armor send Big Ern a tell, he'll hook you up with whatever you need. Tell him I sent you". I'd much rather be known and respected in a game for something like that than have to grind ad nauseum through the bullshit gear treadmill, especially knowing that it will reset eventually. Explorers should be known for how they contribute, by finding unknown dungeons or enemy faction movements. It should be that way for every type of player/class. Gear should be important but it should never be the MOST important thing in an MMO, imo.

When I hear people cry about one MMO or another, most of the time it's just another MMO that has gear-based progression, and is yet another in a long line of gear based games. Yet those same people don't seem to understand that they keep playing different games with only the most cosmetic of changes, and they act surprised when they get bored of"GEAR/XP GRIND ONLINE 5.0". Once you've played one, of COURSE you're going to tire of the others all the quicker until nothing is satisfying and you just flit from MMO to MMO like an old grognard. And it seems like most players haven't yet even grasped WHY they're unhappy with all these games anymore, only that they ARE.

Like, when I first heard of WoD, I wasn't excited at the prospect of another gear/xp grind. I was excited because I visualized starting a werewolf character, and tracking down and killing every emo glitter paperdoll"look at my new shoes"vampire that I could find. Nevermind that they said there would be no werewolves (iirc), my very first thought was"create character, define premise for existence, kill emo roleplay vampires". Even if I had to play in a sort of hardcore mode in order to do that I would in a heartbeat. It would be endlessly more satisfying being the terror that howls in the night, feared by all the vamps on a server, than having to grind out gear and XP endlessly in the most boring online existence possible.
 
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LennyLenard_sl

shitlord
195
2
I agree with you Erronius. I am interested in what they're going to do with WoD (admittedly I haven't really been following it closely). I also have to say, having been catching up on EQNext, I am more interested now in what they say they want to do than I was previously. It might very well suck, but at least it sounds like they're thinking about trying to do something different. So hopefully it won't be "Everquest with awesome new graphics!!! + the popular mechanics from various other games" but instead "Everquest, different and in a good way."

For some reason, I'm looking forward to seeing Crushbone again.
 
Q

qwertyqweqwertwqert

<Banned>
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Mughal_sl said:
If you want to know, ask.
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The one thing I would like to know though, is if Smedley actually realizes that some of us are still playing the likes of P99 and EQMac because that 13 year old ancient game is still more fun to some of us than any of the newer games - including projects that he has been in charge of (modern EQ, EQ2, Vanguard, etc).

The reason I say this is that whenever he talks about creating a revolution in MMO's etc, I take all of his comments with a heavy pinch of salt because he is responsible for all those 'fails' when he was actually sitting on the biggest 'win' of all time. I'm not trolling him, I just would love to know if he understands this view. The likes of EQ Mac only have a small population, but it's popular with those people IN SPITE of his best efforts. It's a low population because it's virtually unknown and it doesn't support PC players etc.. It's a low population because of him, not because it's not as good as WoW or anything else.

Everything he says gets me excited because he says all the right things. But like I said, I can't get too excited because talking about a true sandbox experience and a revolutionary MMO etc. this is coming from a guy who turned the EQ we all know and love in to a ghost town with mercs and crappy content galore and 2000 expansions and pay2win rip off micro (yet expensive) transactions all over the place. And then he gets a game like Vanguard which had the potential to be one of the best MMO's on the market, and he just sits on it for 6 straight years letting a few crappy interns tinker away with it over the years and boil it down in to something really bland, and then just before it breaths its last breath, he goes full retard with RMT that is a big slap in the face to those who stuck with it and yet it milks them for every last penny at the same time.

I don't mean to troll him... consider this just heavy criticism mixed with scepticism but realism.
 
Mughal

Mughal

Bronze Knight of the Realm
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"The one thing I would like to know though, is if Smedley actually realizes that some of us are still playing the likes of P99 and EQMac because that 13 year old ancient game is still more fun to some of us than any of the newer games - including projects that he has been in charge of (modern EQ, EQ2, Vanguard, etc)."
 
Convo

Convo

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Didnt really get into PS2.. Not that I played a whole lot. Mind elaborating a bit on that one?
 
Pancreas

Pancreas

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There is a core factor to MMO's that a lot of people have been soured against due to bad design. That factor is this:

Open PvP motivates community development better than any other element.

You can have a community spawn out of things as minor as hard to find creatures, or people sharing a favorite leveling spot. However, the strongest and most vibrant online communities are the ones that come together to dole out ass kickings, or to defend against said ass kickings.

So I think that just about every really strong MMO from this point on should make PvP the major conflict within the game. I mean some of the best PvE experiences come when the developers manage to simply mimic a portion of the struggle you face when dealing with other players. NPC's that use really smart tactics and coordinate with each other are scary and awesome to fight. But they are also time consuming and difficult to develop. Other players do that stuff for free.

This pvp needs to have some constraints however, or else no one will be alive long enough to play the game. Limiting the range in power modifiers (gear & abilities) players can employ is a good start. Giving players even more incentives to work together is another way to prevent the many vs one pvp that can frustrate.

Using the NPC's that populate the world to act as a sort of infrastructure for player conflict can improve the newbie experience. You join an NPC faction, that is somewhat protected in a city. It gives you a bunch of benefits, but it is also KoS to another faction. By working with this faction and completing tasks you are brought into the fight incrementally until you are involved in full out warfare.

There are lots of design choices that can be made to focus and improve the PvP experience... but it really needs to be allowed to happen IN the game world and not segregated to some over-hyped thunderdome. Otherwise any risk or threat it might pose is completely neutralized.
 
Q

qwertyqweqwertwqert

<Banned>
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Mughal_sl said:
My personal opinion is that monetization of old titles could be improved. Having said that the F2P move is what makes possible have these games still out and with a dev team. I would like to point that PS2 is pretty much the future direction of SOE in terms of gameplay.
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Yeah it could really be improved, and made cheaper preferably. I am thankful they survive, but I can't help but think that they only failed due to mismanagement in the first place. I know they were bound to dip in popularity as they aged and more competition came along. But with something like EQ, I think if the management were clever enough, it could have held strong, maybe even grown over the years like what happened to EVE. But SOE just don't seem to understand that it can be profitable to be nice too, make the game great, keep the players happy, and they will play in large numbers and spend a fair amount of money to keep playing. SOE only seem to want to milk us to death, inundate us with must-have expansions every 5 minutes and microsaction us to death. I don't know about everyone else but personally all that does for me is generate ill will.

Planetside 2 does seem to be a better thought out model for the future though. I personally found the game itself to be pretty boring and shallow and I couldn't wait to get back to Arma2, but the way it works is pretty good. I hope EQ Next gets 'done right' because it could be a huge success with that model.
 
Royal

Royal

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SOE/Verant was generating ill will long before their adoption of RMT and the rapid expansion cycle. "You're in our world now"? Only coming of age in a market with very little real competition can produce the degree of hubris that would make a gaming company not only latch onto that for a motto but also act like it's an inescapable reality for everyone concerned. It helps explain their blood from a turnip fallback position as well.
 
Q

qwertyqweqwertwqert

<Banned>
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Oh I remember. I first realized it in about 2001 as long time friends were quitting EQ, unhappy with how it was going, hoping to find better alternatives like DAoC and AC or whatever else was available then. I didn't quit until a bit later, but the regular expansions and withholding stuff like extra bank slots or whatever, was starting to become annoying. I don't think it was until around the SWG NGE disaster that I started seeing major hatred for SOE, but at that point I had nothing to do with them anymore, I was busy playing something else by then.

And then I remember when Sigil announced the SOE team up, and the fallout on their forum was pretty amazing. Some people walked away right then, and although many were probably just saying it, it was clear that SOE's reputation was really terrible by that point. But again, it didn't really affect me, until I started playing Vanguard and then it all started coming back.
 
W

Wuyley_sl

shitlord
1,443
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For those of us who are interested in EQNext but haven't played Planetside 2, could someone briefly describe what Mughal means on its play style, longevity, or anything else as it relates to each other?
 
E

etchazz

Trakanon Raider
2,707
1,056
Pancreas_sl said:
There is a core factor to MMO's that a lot of people have been soured against due to bad design. That factor is this:

Open PvP motivates community development better than any other element.

You can have a community spawn out of things as minor as hard to find creatures, or people sharing a favorite leveling spot. However, the strongest and most vibrant online communities are the ones that come together to dole out ass kickings, or to defend against said ass kickings.

So I think that just about every really strong MMO from this point on should make PvP the major conflict within the game. I mean some of the best PvE experiences come when the developers manage to simply mimic a portion of the struggle you face when dealing with other players. NPC's that use really smart tactics and coordinate with each other are scary and awesome to fight. But they are also time consuming and difficult to develop. Other players do that stuff for free.

This pvp needs to have some constraints however, or else no one will be alive long enough to play the game. Limiting the range in power modifiers (gear & abilities) players can employ is a good start. Giving players even more incentives to work together is another way to prevent the many vs one pvp that can frustrate.

Using the NPC's that populate the world to act as a sort of infrastructure for player conflict can improve the newbie experience. You join an NPC faction, that is somewhat protected in a city. It gives you a bunch of benefits, but it is also KoS to another faction. By working with this faction and completing tasks you are brought into the fight incrementally until you are involved in full out warfare.

There are lots of design choices that can be made to focus and improve the PvP experience... but it really needs to be allowed to happen IN the game world and not segregated to some over-hyped thunderdome. Otherwise any risk or threat it might pose is completely neutralized.
Click to expand...
couldn't disagree more. i think PvP is what is ruining MMO's. open world pvp leads to nothing more than gankfests and annoys such a large population of a gaming community, that most wind up quitting because being ganged up on and killed every few minutes is the absolute antithesis of fun. one of the things i liked most about EQ was that is was a PVE centric game. the community came from coming together with others in order to assist one another while exping, trading, and exploring in order to survive, not to wait around and gank noobs. just look at GW2; pretty much entirely PVP centered, and an absolute snoozefest of a game because pvp'ing, all day, every day just for the sake of pvp'ing is boring as fuck. if EQ next wants to have full pvp servers, that would be fine. i know some people feel the need to validate their existence through pvp'ing in video games. but i would hate the game to force everyone into pvp'ing, because i for one find it annoying and dull.
 
Q

qwertyqweqwertwqert

<Banned>
1,678
149
etchazz_sl said:
couldn't disagree more. i think PvP is what is ruining MMO's. open world pvp leads to nothing more than gankfests and annoys such a large population of a gaming community, that most wind up quitting because being ganged up on and killed every few minutes is the absolute antithesis of fun. one of the things i liked most about EQ was that is was a PVE centric game. the community came from coming together with others in order to assist one another while exping, trading, and exploring in order to survive, not to wait around and gank noobs. just look at GW2; pretty much entirely PVP centered, and an absolute snoozefest of a game because pvp'ing, all day, every day just for the sake of pvp'ing is boring as fuck. if EQ next wants to have full pvp servers, that would be fine. i know some people feel the need to validate their existence through pvp'ing in video games. but i would hate the game to force everyone into pvp'ing, because i for one find it annoying and dull.
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I wouldn't even know where to begin with that..
 
Tredge

Tredge

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
1,179
5,725
Mughal_sl said:
My personal opinion is that monetization of old titles could be improved. Having said that the F2P move is what makes possible have these games still out and with a dev team. I would like to point that PS2 is pretty much the future direction of SOE in terms of gameplay.
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While a fan of PS2, there are elements to this comment that have me concerned.
How does PS2 address problems mentioned above?

My fear is that this is headed towards an even more anemic item game with focus on fleeting cosmetic/status rewards.

I'm looking for a game that can give me what EQ lost and until developers can get past the stigma of "power curves are bad" and "everyone deserves to play on equal footing", then it will continue to be lost.
For me, EQ was about having what others didn't and that created value.
 
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