EQ Never

Elurin_sl said:

Did you never play a caster in EQ? I remember having like 50 pages of different spells.

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# of spells in a spellbook is one thing, # of spells ready on screen and useable at any given thing was another. EQ2 has spellbooks and you'll have pages and pages of CAs/Spells similar to EQ1, the difference being that with their combat system people either end up with ton of hotbars (the ability/spell combat bloat people tend to refer to) or people jam tons of that bullshit into macros and justPRASS 1-2 BUTTANSall day long instead ofPRASS 60+ BUTTANSall day long. I mean, I don't care how many spells you had in your spellbook, casters weren't running around in EQ1 with potentially 100+ spells or abilities on their screen at once and combat wasn't reduced to furiously smashing fucktons of buttons nonstop (unless you gave in to futility and macroed everything which could have its own downsides).

I don't really have the time to dig up some of the worst offenders but this pic only scrapes the surface; I've seen pics of people with 8-10 hotbars up with 12 tiles per hotbar.

Lithose_sl said:

Not "needless", it's operant conditioning. There are "sweet spots" where irregularity can increase euphoria of rewards.

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Yah, I've made the case for different kinds of reinforcement before, and I think I made the case for more negative reinforcement earlier in this thread actually. That said, I think that the topic illustrates that you really have to be careful with this kind of stuff as what might work with Tad10 let's say, might also make me say"You know what, fuck this shit I'ma go play WoW". Not everyone is going to react the same way to a 4 hour CR or having to camp for days and days for your Monk pipe, nor will people still react the same way after 5, 10 or 100 4-hour CRs (arbitrary numbers of course). I also realize that I've also answered a question that I've asked many times in the past:"why don't MMOs utilize negative reinforcement more in their games?"and I imagine the answer might be the debate between what ispunishmentas opposed to what isnegative reinforcementand how easily it can backfire with people as opposed to positive reinforcement (people are less likely to leave your game in droves if you shower them with purples than if you overuse negative reinforcement).

As an example, when I started EQ1 I wandered out by Field of Bone, and I ended up dying at the very bottom of a low level spider-infested dungeon (don't remember what it was) when I fell through a trapdoor and couldn't find my way out. Now this was pretty low-level and I could have reacted any number of ways. It was a real PITA to get someone to come out there to help me out, but my reaction after a lot of cursing and getting angry was to be far more careful. Great, that's a success story. But then you have all the people I knew RL who would try EQ1 and die somewhere they shouldn't have been, lose what they spent a few days to a few weeks acquiring, and decide to quit on the spot. Point being, WOW had a lot of success by minimizing harsh negative reinforcements and maximizing the positive reinforcements (such as frequent quest rewards and showering players with lootz).

You mention "sweet spots" but I think that's really the key here. Too little negative reinforcement and you end up with people wondering why it exists in the first place (WOW vanilla era item durability perhaps) and too much negative reinforcement and you end up with a handful of grognards sticking it out while they mock the rest of the people that couldn't hack it and left. And I really think that is the legacy left behind by EQ1: you have a small part of the overall MMO playerbase who can't seem to understand that the negative reinforcement they accepted and dealt with in EQ1 was too much for a much wider spectrum of gamers and they tend to dig in their heals and declare that the negative conditioning couldn't have possibly backfired because they themselves stayed the course. There is probably a "sweet spot" in the use of negative reinforcement but it's almost impossible to discuss with a lot of EQ1 players because they view it on their own terms without considering (or at times, mocking) the people who simply felt that it went too far in EQ1 and the negative reinforcement became punishments that those players simply didn't want to have to endure.

Anyways I better stop now because I think the fucking banner ads are trying to tell me something