EQ Never

Will be interesting if they say most of the game is non instanced yet 24 man max raid groups. Does that mean you can build 2,3,4 raid groups and go out and fight? I guess loot will be personalized (otherwise its denial of service) so only 1 of the raid groups would get the loot from a boss?

Bellringer_sl said:

The fear of denial of service can truly hinder the splendor of a game... sigh.

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I agree.

Didn't Ponytail even use the denial of service line in regard to racial nightvisions?

People forget what made EQ challenging, rewarding and immersive. EQ raiding was way harder than WoW or other MMOs.... all WoW raiding is Dragon's Lair scripted whack a mole dance moves. The challenge is to not be bored and tired so you mess up your keystroke when you're queued up to do it. People forget what made raiding in EQ hard, challenging and fun.It wasn't the fight, It was the journey. Non instanced content forced guilds to have scouts at spawn locations, forced people to group up and rally at the drop of a hat. Forced people to be creative in ways to out-race other guilds, forced guilds to cooperate and form alliances, forced guilds into flame wars, conflict and rivalry. This is what made EQ what it was, not the fight itself. People are so missing this very important point

The difficulty factor of EQ wasn't even raiding, it was trying to unfuck a group that went sour somewhere in the bowels of Befallen or something.

tad10_sl said:

I think buffs have to blow up if you switch classes. Too cheezy to have everyone switch to druid spec, sow themselves, then switch out to normal spec.

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Buffs should be done GW1 style - make them an aura that takes up the respective slot but is always on. I know you guys *loved* your buff bots but that's another EQ remnant I hope this game leaves behind. If you want the buff, someone in the group should slot the ability.

If the aura is significant enough to have a cost beyond take one your 4 class slots then make it give block a certain amount of your mana/energy or reduce your regen, depending on what's more appropriate to their resource management system (if there is such an animal in the game). That is assuming buffing abilities are part of the regular class abilities. they might twist it a bit and give you 1-2 extra slots for passives like buffs and reserve the 4+4 for active abilities.

Underjoyed_sl said:

People forget what made EQ challenging, rewarding and immersive. EQ raiding was way harder than WoW or other MMOs.... all WoW raiding is Dragon's Lair scripted whack a mole dance moves. The challenge is to not be bored and tired so you mess up your keystroke when you're queued up to do it. People forget what made raiding in EQ hard, challenging and fun.It wasn't the fight, It was the journey. Non instanced content forced guilds to have scouts at spawn locations, forced people to group up and rally at the drop of a hat. Forced people to be creative in ways to out-race other guilds, forced guilds to cooperate and form alliances, forced guilds into flame wars, conflict and rivalry. This is what made EQ what it was, not the fight itself. People are so missing this very important point

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It seems pretty clear to me that flawed as it was, eq and similar games were built on party based mechanics... Think D&D class roles....why ? Because that was the point, you now can have other players with you there that you can depend on... and that was what made an MMO so fun and immersive before the solo to cap games came out.

Now designers are slowly stripping away the need for grouping and as a result you have mostly a solo-centric experience in MMOs that does not hold a candle to say Skyrim.

Reading 786 pages of this thread pretty much reinforces the thought that I will never play a MMO again.

Soygen_sl said:

So what you're saying is that the unemployed, stay-at-home moms and Euros made EQ difficult.

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yet the best guilds in EQ were still NA guilds filled with people in school or with full time jobs. Nobody was forcing those people to play. Overcoming adversity from other humans is infinitely more rewarding than scripted memorization encounters. You still want PVE content as a carrot and goal, but you need the player interaction to make those goals meaningful. That is why any MMORPG that employs instancing ultimately fails at it's core.

Vanilla EQ bosses:

Vox: cold aoe, fear, self heals
Nagafen: fire aoe, fear
Cazic Thule: auto-kill ranger every 30 seconds, gravity flux
Innoruuk: auto-kill ranger every 30 seconds, gravity flux

Strategy for all of the above is get your MR up and either FR/CR if it's a dragon. The only challenge was you vs your dial up connection when you had 40+ people in the same place

Convo_sl said:

Sounds like mob ping pong..

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There are alternatives to tanks and mob ping pong. How would you solve it?

Ambiturner_sl said:

Vanilla EQ bosses:

Vox: cold aoe, fear, self heals
Nagafen: fire aoe, fear
Cazic Thule: auto-kill ranger every 30 seconds, gravity flux
Innoruuk: auto-kill ranger every 30 seconds, gravity flux

Strategy for all of the above is get your MR up and either FR/CR if it's a dragon. The only challenge was you vs your dial up connection when you had 40+ people in the same place

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wrong. The challenge to Cazic was breaking Fear and not whipping at 3am in the morning trying to clear it then having to find outside help to revive your dead guild. The challenge to Innoruk was breaking Hate, the challenge to Nagafen was holding down the camp, making guild treaties and keeping others away while you were waiting for it to spawn. Then if it spawned at 6am in the morning finding people to kill it. Those were the challenges to those bosses. You're missing the entire point. This is why you morons play new MMORPGs for 1 month then quit then wonder why games are so fucking boring and easy now.

tad10_sl said:

I'll buy that skin if EQN is decent but I'd rather SOE let us kickstart EQ3.

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There ishttp://westeroscraft.com/so there could be EQ3 inside EQN maybe? And maybe you could put it on Kickstarter (I am being totally serious here)

Teekey_sl said:

Where's the Dark Souls MMO then?

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Dark Soul scales badly over time, # of players, variety etc. It has been designed as a solo game and it works well for that. Play 12 hours a week of that combat and you will want to take your eyes out with a spork.

I may be in the minority here but part of the attraction for me with the EQ combat system was seeing my character (rogue) get better at the things that happened automatically. Things like dual wield, double attack, dodge, spell fizzles, etc.. Something about that automation as your character slowly gets better at something was fun to watch for me. I think that's kind of lost these days, where the mmos are more action oriented (which has its own attractions itself that I enjoy too).

Long post, sorry.

EQ's difficulty was more of an efficiency model--kind of like D2, except far more group dependent. The efficiency model started to be dropped with WoW (Actually EQ, when raid caps were put in), but WoW vanilla actually kept a lot of the components of it up until the end. After TBC though, it was completely gone, all abandoned in favor of a "difficulty" paradigm. And that had a lot of pros, but a lot of cons too--I really think the move away from efficiency based difficulty really hurt, ironically, the accessibility of MMO's--which was the complete opposite of WoW's intention. The fact is, Vanilla bosses in WoW, up until Nax, were VERY, very easy. The difficulty really came from two things, managing large groups of people, in order to maximize group/buff interaction and role execution (Making sure auras were stacked, buffs were done, class types were positioned well) and efficiently dispatching impediments to bosses--IE trash clearing. Even guilds full of mediocre or bad players, as long as they were organized to kill trash very quickly and execute their very narrow set of buffs/auras/jobs, could kill the strongest bosses--because the difficulty wasn't really on them. It was more on acore groupof organizing officers, and management.

EQ used that kind of system almost exclusively. Bosses were a joke. But managing people? It took a lot of effort. You could pretty much tell how good a guild was, not by it's foot soldiers (Common members, except for how their gear gave them advantages) but by how they were organized, how their raid leaders could exploit positioning, buffs, pulls, and individual class abilities to really diffuse any personal difficulty in an encounter. Essentially, in EQ, and even in early WoW, as long as you had a strong core group of highly organized officers/management, and then a bunch of warm bodies who were able to show up on demand, when needed, you could raid the most difficult content and be successful.

That's what I refer to as efficiency based raiding--it's not about how well the healers perform, rather it's about how well the healers are managed so they execute simple tasks in an efficient manner. It's about managing time, not so much skill.So becoming better is more about using less time, less people, and being more efficient. You can make things easier byincreasingany of those (And lets face it, when it comes down to it? A player can usually find more time, or more people to play with but getting more skill? That's rare.)

That all ended with WoW's swap. Raid groups became smaller, and at first, many officers/management welcomed this, because it was HARD tracking and managing so many different people. And then buffs/auras/debuffs because more generic, less stack-able. They were weakened, made raid wide, and most of all far less exploitable by group composition. And both of these things sound good on paper. But what they ended up doing was decreasing the "fudge" room in any encounter. They transferred the difficulty of encounters from people who managed the raids, down to individual players in raids. (More so than previously).

And I think this really hurt a lot of casual players. The fact was, you couldn't even bring the soccer mom, or the pot head rogue anymore, because their role was too large. If they screwed up, it was too noticeable. You had less wiggle room to let good management and organization make up for their poor play. You couldn't have a slot split between two people who played 50% of the time, you needed a full time raider because there was too much to learn. You couldn't alter the groups and adapt to the specific boss to squeeze out more DPS--that was set in stone. You couldn't slightly stack the raid with more of a specific kind of debuff--that was now all homogenized. You couldn't position people better, to allow for more DPS in X or Y time period--everyone now had to be fluid because of all the variables in scripting. And, perhaps most of all, you couldn't just tell someone "okay, your job is just do X"...Because with less people, everyone had far more responsibilities and with more variables, everyone was required to learn more in terms of reaction, you needed people to be there more often to learn it, too--in the end, ironically, it was far, far less casual friendly, because the bar for being in a decent guild went from "warm body", to "super dedicated player who can execute complex tasks."

And so we got "modes" to change difficulty...but how does activating "super easy loot mode" make everyone feel about the game? Yeah...exactly. They go to get their loot and walk away feeling empty. It was a richer experience when even a bad player, but someone who was socially friendly and could be flexible about what the guild needed, could join a guild, and actually do fights that had some "fame" to them. They didn't have to put an * by their accomplishment and say "I did it...but in derp mode.)

I think early TBC kind of struck a good balance between an efficient raiding model and a difficulty one. But I just wish that a game would go back an really explore a nearly full efficiency based model again. Have tons of dungeons with only minimal scripting, and even if you use instancing--just don't have raid caps. If people want to waste their lock out on only getting 2 pieces of loot for 50 people? Then theinefficiencyof their zerg is the detriment, they don'tneedan artificial cap. If people cheese encounters to kill them? Who cares, the point of an effeciency system is not just to kill the boss, it's more about the loot. A zerg guild gets less.

Also, design encounters that reward social engineering, and management--make designing a raid to exploit the shit out of certain sets of class buffs, and group composition, like a little mini-game of itself (Like stacking a magic card deck). And don't contain those buffs to a few classes, have hundreds of variables. So a Rogue/Shaman/Enchanter could form a ridiculous combo, but at the same time a Wizard/Enchanter/Paladin could form another ridiculous combo. Have buffs change and alter depending on auras, group composition, interactions. Why? Because that kind of difficulty will be tackled by naturally more "hard core" players, the leaders of guilds, the officers, the raid leaders. People who KNOW more about the game. You've siphoned a bit off difficulty off the "lowest" tier player and transferred it to the hardcore--and this allows the lowest common denominator to play with more hardcore players, in the SAME encounters, but with different roles.

Sorry for the ramble....Just something I think was really lost when the difficulty paradigm was adopted.

Erronius_sl said:

I honestly wonder how big of an issue people would have with the FF jobs system.

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I remember it was lauded as a great idea in several threads over the last few years. I would like the switching to be tiered in difficulty/effort required. I have no illusions about anything like that being considered for EQN but here's how I would do it:

Easy switching:
Keeping your class but changing out class abilities for other class abilities of the same or different classes: can be done at any time (even in combat!) but is a channeled action that takes 5 seconds per tier, and the ability is on cooldown for another 5 seconds per tier (adjust timer as you like). The idea behind this is that switching to a skill you find you you need for an ongoing battle should be possible but difficult and put you into additional danger (perhaps smarter AI notices what you are up and makes it difficult to actually complete the channel, need your group to keep it off you). When you arent fighting its easy to switch your whole loadout of class skills in 2 minutes.

Moderate switching:
Changing your class within a subgroup of classes like "cloth caster" or "plate tanks" or "rogue-likes". Can only be done any time (even in combat) but is a 1-minute channel per tier (so effectively, doing it in combat is supposed to be near impossible but grats if you pull it off). When you arent fighting, its easy to switch your class in 5 minutes.

Difficult switching:
Changing your class into something entirely different from the class you currently feature. Example would be an engineer switching to archdruid. Requires you to visit a location or npc relevant to the class (a remote grove for druids, the academy of arcane magic for magicians, etc. Depending on where you are and what the travel options are it could be a matter of 10 minutes or several hours.


That's a pipe dream of course, the game is going to be designed accessible and at least the last option is too demanding for that. Still I am on board for making severe switching of class identity to require a token effort.

No game has required the interaction of classis EQ. In wow theres millions of players, tons on a server, but you don't see server forums like you did with EQ. non instanced content required people with different play schedules to coordinate, and the easiest way to do that was on forums. In eq most of us went to the forums to buy and sell pre-bazaar, find out if there was hate or fear raids, if our guild was part of a rotation for a boss to see when our spot was, when it was last killed etc. The general thread where everyone bitched about the ubers, the ks'ers, the loot stealers etc was where you really learned about your server, and who was there with ya. There where hundreds of players on my server who went to the forums every day, we knew each other, we loved or hated each other etc. In Wow you can see all content, level to max without ever using chat at all. You couldn't in EQ, you had to communicate unless you were just some freak necro or mage who hid in the shadows and had crap people skills.