EQ Never

Lithose_sl said:

EvE isn't restricted by skill caps, you can have every skill under the sun. However, from what I understand, players tend to derive a kind of persona from the resource intensity of swaps. It's difficult to have everything prepped to be different classes all the time (Because your ship is like your class), so people are tend to flow into one class or role of their choosing--expanding beyond that takes a lot of money and preparation, and while it's done, it still makes the persona you are kind of sticky (Again, I've only heard this). And because gear can be lost, and because there is a restriction on where you can transfer shipsANDbecause of travel times--You won't just see people summon a new class before you. You get the sense that it takes some work to go back, switch ships and become something new. (Again, as far as I understand it.)

Click to expand...

This is basically nothing like how Eve is although it's not factually incorrect. I feel that most of the speculation on EQN is a lot like this paragraph. Someone explained it to somebody once and you use your own personal gaming background/bias and populate the facts having no first hand experience at all.

Skills in Eve are time based, and while you can hop into a ship and fly it decently in relatively no time, it takes a long time to specialize in each ship. ship != class. There's like 500 different ships in Eve and they range from shuttles to Titans. They do not correlate to the concept of a class. and people don't focus on one type of ship either. Ships are tools in the shed, right tool for the the job thing. Oh and swapping isn't exactly resource intensive in the manner in which you are speaking. For example if you need a screwdriver from the shed you've got shelves of the fuckers ready to go, dozens of screwdrivers or hammers to throw at the problem, maybe half a dozen power tools (more expensive ships) and 2 or 3 industrial sized pneumatic tools that take up half of the garage (Caps). Super caps are ships that don't even fit into the garage you have to leave out in the drive way and hope your neighbors don't come by and sneak off with it in the middle of the night.

And and gear "can be lost?" Gear is lost. If you die you lose the whole damn screw driver/circular saw/sand blaster. what's left of the flaming heap of drill bits and other parts is being scavenged by your enemies before your body is cold.

It's basically impossible to compare Eve to a typical fantasy based MMO game. But the one thing it does have is "roles", more specifically, roles in a given context. and you decide what that is and then you pick and fit ships to fit that role in whatever context you're going to be flying in. For example if me and my buddies are out looking to gank mission runners in low sec (Context) i'm going to select certain ships types to have on hand and i'm going to fit them a certain way.

You're referencing a game you've never played trying to justify decisions made in EQN regarding class swapping and saying "look it's not all bad". You don't know if it's going to be bad or not, nobody does really, not even the Dev's since they appear to not have a clue yet on the hard mechanics yet.

Initially when I saw the multiclass system including the weapon skills vs class skills and were talking about how long it would take to "tier up" classes I immediately thought Eve Online, not GW2, MtG, LoL, or whatever. But that's my gaming background and personal bias coloring my perspective. In reality it's not really comparable. There's a handful of correlations that can be drawn, sure, but it's silly to think they will be anything like one another.

What I do think/hope will be comparable to Eve, from someone who actually plays Eve:

Removal of grind. Dunno how quest/xp/etc will work but again my bias on the game is that it's not the focus. Class unlocks are lore/achievement based. You don't grind mobs for xp, you don't grind quests for xp, you have to go out and explore and interact with the world to find the unlocks for classes. Less hand holding/on rails/etc. Sure they've mentioned rallying Cries but that's like an overarching story line event that lasts months. your day to day activities are not predicated upon "earning xp/leveling up" nor is there going to be a "rush to level cap then the game starts" mentality either. I'm sure some people will try that, be the first to find X class or complete Y event but overall I think logging in your day to day activities are going to be more sandbox based. ie You decide what you wanna do without the carrot of xp hanging over your head.

Skills ~= Classes. Like eve if you wanted to you could go out and learn every single class in the game. it would probably take you the better part of a year or 2, and you'd suck at every single class, but you could, if you're that explorer/completionist gaming archetype and that's how you define fun. Most people will stay the class they start with, and unlocking classes will be done to augment their existing role.

Class System. This seems more like an ES game where you're class is "Adventurer" and you start with a template class and go out and find new unlocks to upgrade your template. Eventually maybe you find a class who's base template is better than what you started with (say Rogue finds the "assassin" class which has a different default slot layout (O,O,O, M vs O,O,U,M) so you actually change your class from Rogue to Assassin, but you're just further specializing the Role you enjoy playing. And all the while you've been finding and collecting all these ancillary classes, wizard, necromancer, shadow dancer, mage, etc, you sought them out for a certain ability that would augment your Rogue Role. So you get all the abilities you want and gear you need to augment it and make this idea you had work, but now the meta changes or whatever and you wanna try something different. So you drop your (now) Tier 5 Assassin and drop down to Tier 1 wizard, and you build that up from your pool of classes you've unlocked and start building that kit up. So given enough time playing 6 months a year or whatever you may have 2 or 3 "classes" that you've "maxed" out to where you want them with gear and abilities, those 3 "roles" you enjoy playing in groups. But to complete those 3 classes you've actually unlocked like 22 base classes in the game, and sure you can drop down to basic tier 1 of any of those 22. but really what you're bringing to the table is those 3 classes/roles.

I've never played TSW, but supposedly it uses a system like this. No idea how well players like that. But I know, from listening to people in D3--people really didn't like the thought of having to look at an encounter and swapping skills to suit the encounter. They wanted to be rewarded for building up a build, for investing in it. Now, the whole "tier"/"gear" system might be enough to cover that here, I don't know. D3 didn't have that because of how generic gear was and because of how easily swappable runes were. So, for example, in D3, if all skills NEEDED gear to even be viable, and you NEEDED to go find runes to make skills work, it might not have felt so cheap to swap skills on the fly, because you did have to do a lot of work to get alternate buildsviable.

Click to expand...

TSW is a classless level-less system where everyone can and does gain every skill/ability in the game and builds a "deck" of like 7 active + 7 passive skills, the active skills utilize/require a weapon of which you have 2 equipped limiting your active deck to 2 main weapon sets. It's basically almost exactly how EQN has been described thus far for classes, minus the concept of having to "find" and "unlock" classes based on the storybrick UI. I'd call it the "worst case scenario" for EQN if there were no limits to multiclassing that was free and readily available to all players.

It's "weapon based". well there's a couple of generic skill trees which aren't weapon specific but for the most part you build your active skills from 2 weapon trees. You save templates which are skill lineups and gear to fill whatever role you want/need at the moment. As a solo game it's fine, people tend to focus on something and specialize for that role. but the group/raid game just really isn't there to compare it. Early on when group dungeons were more the norm, you still had roles which needed to be filled in groups, such as "tank" "healer" and "DPS" and there were instances where you'd be grouped with a bad healer and be like "yo bro i got this, just switch to DPS" and you'd switch to healer so the group would stop sucking, but all in all the "switchability" on the fly wasn't really needed or warranted. you'd be better off finding a real healer rather than have someone specialized at tanking or DPS switching over to fill the role.

Making all game play roles available to all characters doesn't change the fact that all players are not perfect or even good at all gameplay roles. Other than making games faceroll easy so that those roles aren't even needed for group content and it's just everyone soloing in a group, I don't see how they can kill the "trinity" or rather, the concept of group roles in a group based game.