EQ Never

I'd love for a game to come along and make players "base" out of a certain city or area for days (or longer) at a time and then move on when they seek greener pastures. For me at least early EQ leveling was like that (it was lost once you had a couple of wizard pals, and even more with nexus/pok), and EVE was like that (dunno if jump bridges kill it there). It requires long travel times sure, but it also only works if an area can provide all or at least enough interesting things for a player that he doesnt feel compelled to cross the entire world twice each evening. Not sure a dev team could manage that even if they set it out as their goal. It certainly isnt going to happen through dumb luck.

@Dumar. Nothing wrong with flying mounts or quick travel as long as they're earned and not immediately or instantly available. Flying mount quest in VG was the biggest PITA but worth it when you finally got it. Same with quick travel, should be slow travel at start, then mounted travel, then eventually limited portal travel/flying mounts - requiring quests/keying/etc to access all portals/get your mount. If you do slow travel forever you'll just force everyone to roll a Druid alt for porting.

@Creedy eh, VG pretty did this much in the early days before SOE started making it easier. It just requires quest hubs, slow travel and slow leveling. You'd usually stay in an area for a week+ real time at a time working through the area's quests. And if there weren't enough, you'd generally stay there and grind until you were high enough for the next series of quests.

@Dumar again. Didn't like WoW's class design - played a priest in Vanilla and thought it was crazy that optimally I had to play a solo shadowpriest to endgame. I supposed the class design went hand and hand with the rejection of groups for leveling by making all (single & double pull) non-elite mobs soloable (and for my priesty any single-pull elite mob) if you were the appropriate level (contrast with EQ mob design where an even con mob still required a group to kill if you couldn't kite).

I'd like EQN to return to hard to kill mobs.

I still use old models in EQ. $$$$

EQ's original auction house was hoss. People had to be online and talk to each other in order to buy and sell things. Actual player/player interactions in an MMO? THIS IS MADNESS!!!!

Bellringer_sl said:

EQ's original auction house was hoss. People had to be online and talk to each other in order to buy and sell things. Actual player/player interactions in an MMO? THIS IS MADNESS!!!!

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Would love to see a new mmo that had all the old harsh systems that EQ had in it's heyday. But to be honest, I'm not sure I would actually play that game.

Auctioning is a great example of the pluses and minuses of old EQ. I just couldn't be bothered to stand in the EC tunnel to auction off my stuff, and hated having to go there to buy. Being an endgame raider it meant that EC tunnel was a serious investment in time to travel to. I loved it when they introduced standing vendors at first, but in hindsight it was just one of the changes that killed off old EQ.

Convenience sells, but convenience also kills community. I understand why mmo devs have stampeded down the McWoW path, the players demanded it. But sometimes the players are wrong.

I didn't mind EC so much but I don't think we'd ever go back to that development wise. Maybe a heavily moderated global chat channel where players can ban people for 24 hours with enough votes. Meh.

Over all I think AH's give you more than you lose. Its more the sum of all the other changes that is destroying communities in game.

IMO hub based questing being the biggest contributor to lack of community. Once you get a series or two off there is literally zero reason to be bothered with anyone else. Since its such a pain in the ass to keep things sync'd between players no one even bothers to try.

Kedwyn_sl said:

I didn't mind EC so much but I don't think we'd ever go back to that development wise. Maybe a heavily moderated global chat channel where players can ban people for 24 hours with enough votes. Meh.

Over all I think AH's give you more than you lose. Its more the sum of all the other changes that is destroying communities in game.

IMO hub based questing being the biggest contributor to lack of community. Once you get a series or two off there is literally zero reason to be bothered with anyone else. Since its such a pain in the ass to keep things sync'd between players no one even bothers to try.

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I'm not advocating questing to level - but it's not the hub-based questing that's the problem, it's the how it's implemented.

Instead of EQ style where the head/quest object/etc dropped from the mob when you killed it, whether you had the quest or not, WoW-style questing required you to have the quest beforehand to get the drop. This resulted in the problem you describe. If quest mobs always dropped their quest object, regardless of whether you had the quest or not, things would have worked so much better and I would have been able to finally get past level 30 in LOTRO.

qwerty_sl said:

Said this before but Shards of Dalaya does the best trading ever and I doubt it could even be improved upon. .

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Eh. I don't know about that. I really don't like auction houses or trade channels. The best trading method is where you can setup NPCs as shopkeepers for you in a bazaar area. Though there should be multiple bazaar areas per continent.

What AH's and trade channel prevent is trading as an occupation: going around a bazaar in some remote area, finding some items deals, knowing that item is worth more a continent over buying the item, caravaning it over and selling it at a large profit. Though this kind of merchant prince approach to gameplay requires slow travel, as well.

For it's brilliant one month run Earth and Beyond DID try that. It doesn't translate into a MMO the way you'd want it to. Eve does it better. What you need for a merchant prince style of gameplay is a robust auction interface that includes buy orders, actual player driven demand, and resource scarcity. You can skin it however you want to fit the genre.

But like the Wildstar guys said, that's a lot of work up front to make it and it's a lot of ongoing work to police it against RMT exploitation. It's a bummer they're gonna have just another ye olde shitty auction house but understandable and probably a wise decision.

qwerty_sl said:

Said this before but Shards of Dalaya does the best trading ever and I doubt it could even be improved upon. Here's how it works:

1) Trade is done in a global trade channel. So it's still like EC tunnel, only you don't have to be in that one zone, you can do it while you are playing. You can also leave that channel if you don't want to see regular trades.

2) Offer any item to any merchant in the game, and they will give you a good estimate of its price. You can then just sell it to that merchant for quick cash, or you can auction it to the players for around that price and hope to get more. But no more constant calls of "PC on x".

3) People do proper auctions in the trade channel. Seller starts by saying, Ykesha - 500pp or best offer. People auction their offer or send it via tell, and that person ups the price and calls it out like an auctioneer. Ykesha - 550pp - Lilandria. Another offer comes in Ykesha - 650pp - Driman. Then when the offers stop coming in they say: Going once to Driman... Going twice. Sold to driman.

4) You then meet face to face if you want, or you can mail it to them at a small cost.


The only issue I can think of is that the global channel works fine on a low population server, and also because most people just sell cheap items to a vendor or save them as twink gear, so only bother auctioning their best items. On a big MMO this would need tweaks obviously.

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It's not bad, but it's not what once was. Back in the day when it was still WR, they had NPC merchants set up in the major cities (obviously Newport being the most popular back then, as Athica didn't exist yet) in which you paid a certain amount a week in upkeep. You could also pay the upkeep fees upfront for long periods of time, eliminating the need to constantly have to pay the NPC merchant week after week. You'd set up the merchant with /cmd commands and then it would sell your items for you like a normal NPC, and you just had to come by it and type a command to get your plat from sells.

The more "Valuable" traders were the ones near the bank in Newport, and then any merchant in South Newport being the 2nd most valuable. You could sell your merchant spot to other players for a good bit of cash back then if you had one in a good spot. I had a merchant in Erudin first, which I actually got decent sales from since I constantly /auctioned about it, as well as having Shadamir's merchant right next to mine, who kept his merchant loaded up constantly like I did, thus giving players a reason to come to Erudin regularly. Then I was strolling thru NP one day and the merchant right by the clock tower next to the North Newport zone was available, and once I grabbed that spot my sells skyrocketed to the point where I couldn't keep items on my merchant for more than a couple days. I really loved this system, and hope I did it justice explaining it.

qwerty_sl said:

The WoW Druid was really good. The others, not so much. To me, EQ is better than WoW in every possible way, except for maybe animations or some other shit I don't care about but modern gamers seem to think is absolutely vital.

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So do you acknowledge that your viewpoint is in a tiny minority?

Now that's a bit extreme.

Itzena_sl said:

So do you acknowledge that your viewpoint is in a tiny minority?

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What does this have to do with anything? EQ's end game users were of a certain breed. Having those players want that type of game again is nothing abnormal. For any MMO to be around consistantly these days it needs to either cater to the niche, or develop something brand new. No more wow clones. Be relevant Itzena. Thanks.



Edit to include quote.

Because it's a business, not a charity.

And haters gonna hate.

Oblio_sl said:

So was there a big reveal about EQN at the Sony thing here in Vegas? Or any reveal at all?

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August 2nd is the reveal. This thread should become legendary at that point.