EQ Never

Caeden

Caeden

Golden Baronet of the Realm
7,762
13,044
You know, I don't really care about community maybe. I almost never pug. I play only with my pre-established guild. We do 95% of our recruiting using the forums/website. None of us really "live" in game. We pug a person maybe once a month and have all crafting in just about every game we have represented. As a tank, I'm always whispered soon as I log in on whatever game we're playing. At this stage I don't really spend time making new e-friends. If my IRL buds or my old TBC guild isn't playing it, I just don't play it.
 
Q

qwertyqweqwertwqert

<Banned>
1,678
149
Dragoon_sl said:
Instancing kills any community. Why do you kids champion this HORRIBLE game design tactic?
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I agree, it's tacky and I hate it.

As soon as I started hearing about EQ2 releasing with Commonlands_2 and Commonlands_3 etc.. my interest plummeted. As far as I'm concerned, instancing is completely unnecessary. If Vanguard did one thing right, it was to prove to the world that you can get by without it. If each race has its own starting area (and it should), then it wont be overcrowded, even in the first weeks. If the zone is like WoW with linear on-rails hub to hub gameplay, then it could still be an issue. But EQ was never like that, you had a huge forest to randomly explore so people just spread out all over the place. Vanguard used the same principle more or less and it worked perfectly.

I remember recently playing it, and with all the new F2P players, some of them were asking if the dungeons were instanced and if not, how could that even work. I explained to them in chat that there was no instancing, and the caves actually existed in the same world we are in right now. In fact when you are running through a forest, there's a chance that under the ground where you stand, is a huge dungeon with players in it. People thought it was very cool, and it is.
 
Soygen

Soygen

The Dirty Dozen For the Price of One
<Nazi Janitors>
28,572
45,200
Dyvim_sl said:
So with all these "tewwible features" why was EQ the top dog of MMORPGs for i dunno 6 years and people didnt drove off in pack on the arrival of DAoC or AC or some other competitor? It took them WoWs praise and terrible abominations like OoW to sail the masses to new shores.
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GoD did far more damage to EQ than OoW.
 
Q

qwertyqweqwertwqert

<Banned>
1,678
149
Soygen_sl said:
Indeed. Instancing is completely unnecessary when you have 86 people playing your game.
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Hur hur hur. It was full during beta and early release, and it may only have one server now, but that's full too. You can clearly see how the world works just fine with thousands of people and yet no instancing.
 
Soygen

Soygen

The Dirty Dozen For the Price of One
<Nazi Janitors>
28,572
45,200
Yeah, PoP was probably disappointing if you didn't raid. I was very active in end-game EQ, so I really liked that expansion and the competition that came with it. The "battles" for progression on Prexus during that period were pretty epic, drama-wise. GoD, however, was very broken and it turned a large portion of the raiding community away. That timed with the release of WoW was probably the largest exodus for EQ. It's been a slow bleed ever since.
 
Soygen

Soygen

The Dirty Dozen For the Price of One
<Nazi Janitors>
28,572
45,200
Yeah, I really liked OoW actually. It was the last expansion that I actively raided though. Just lost interest in the schedule of a raiding guild. I just couldn't do it any more after that and have not raided in any serious capacity since then(2005ish?).
 
Dyvim

Dyvim

Bronze Knight of the Realm
1,420
195
Plus OoW raids and also the Underground expansion (hello Mayong) introduced several interesting raid setups EQ.
A shame most raiders didnt expierience them and give WoW all the praise for the most compelling raid game -lol at that.
 
Q

qwertyqweqwertwqert

<Banned>
1,678
149
Soygen_sl said:
Yeah, PoP was probably disappointing if you didn't raid. I was very active in end-game EQ, so I really liked that expansion
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The problem for me is that the population was always at the end of the game, so the expansion packs were always playing catch up. In the weeks before the release of a new expansion, a lot of the hardcore players (which was a large percentage of the game), were twiddling their thumbs just waiting for the expansion to arrive. On release day, the entire world emptied and everyone went to the new promised land in search of the phattest loots and best exp.

I hated that because I wasn't in a big guild so we were always still working through old content and the whole thing became obsolete and we all felt like we were playing alone in the kiddy pool. But we got by, we teamed up with other smaller guilds to become big enough to succeed in Kunark and then Velious. But when PoP came along, the entire thing was just tuned for the big uber guilds, all the smaller guilds just got screwed by it. Half the people I knew, quit within weeks of it. All the lone ranger type players and supremo quad kiting wizzy/druids just had nothing to do and quit. All the small guilds ended up completely pointless, and most of their players had to go through that difficult conversation with their e-friends about how I am going to miss you guys but I really want to join X BIG GUILD because I want to see the new content, etc.

It sucked. But even worse, was how they *forced* everyone to buy the expansions, by making all the previous content obsolete and withholding things like extra bank slots or whatever. It's hard not to do that with higher level stuff, but they could have at least attempted to scale things more gently instead of just adding +100 to all the stats, and they should have left some of the older world zones as hot spots for XP, rather than just purposely making everything a ghost town except their new product that was a must-have for everyone.
 
Roxby

Roxby

Lord Nagafen Raider
84
1
Dyvim_sl said:
Plus OoW raids and also the Underground expansion (hello Mayong) introduced several interesting raid setups EQ.
A shame most raiders didnt expierience them and give WoW all the praise for the most compelling raid game -lol at that.
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If I recall correctly, Dyvim was busy raiding WoW during GoD =)
 
Dyvim

Dyvim

Bronze Knight of the Realm
1,420
195
No offense here Roxby but you must mistake me here for someone else, since i never subbed to WoW for many reasons.
 
C

Chakravartin_sl

shitlord
362
0
Quaid_sl said:
Can't dungeon spawns just be dynamic? Why does target_mob_01 only have to spawn at location X? Why can't he spawn at location X, Y, or Z? Why can't all the named in a dungeon's population have a %chance to spawn anywhere in the dungeon, or at least in several pre-determined places?
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EQ did this in the Underfoot xpac and people HATED it. I remember tons of bitching about never seeing some rock golem spawn in Pellucid Grotto because it could be in 5-6 place at once
 
S

shaiwan_sl

shitlord
11
0
Chakravartin_sl said:
EQ did this in the Underfoot xpac and people HATED it. I remember tons of bitching about never seeing some rock golem spawn in Pellucid Grotto because it could be in 5-6 place at once
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Yeah random spawning is just frustrating. IMO old school EQ did it right. Works fine as long as servers aren't super crowded out.
 
D

driedcatnip

N00b
253
3
LachiusTZ_sl said:
Insanely easy fix = Play PvP server
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Flipmode_sl said:
Not gonna get many PVE players in your game...

Never mind the inherent imbalances that exist in a good MMO with unique classes. Yeah...pass.
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inherent imbalances makes the game. normalize it and it is predictable. can't balance it around solo class vs class and have it perfect nor would you want to in a mmo. "that doesn't sound fun" is a juvenile response; fun is a meaningless term/metric. what it does it make it engaging.
getting +1stat means a hell of a lot more from a static spawn when it is contested than it is were you to get it in an instance.
pvp alleviates alot of the problems. pve is about entitlement. everything out there is a time deferred reward.

imo, a mmo is not mmo unless it has pvp. (blahblahblah yeah there are thresholds where things in pvp are completely op/bjorked)
 
Roxby

Roxby

Lord Nagafen Raider
84
1
Dyvim_sl said:
No offense here Roxby but you must mistake me here for someone else, since i never subbed to WoW for many reasons.
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haha, thats weird, we had a Dyvim who played on Rodcet nife EQ. Also who played on Medivh WoW with Ascent? Must be the wrong guy
 
Laura

Laura

Lord Nagafen Raider
582
109
Tol_sl said:
I think instances are decent for dealing with overcrowding. Mcdungeons are fucking lame, but so was the overcrowding in guk at times. I would love to see giant, sprawling dungeons intended for 30-40 people, and when they fill up, open a new server instance or something, but keep it to server instances if possible, to preserve that sense of community. I guess let X people make their own, since people will whine about their mob being camped or whatever, but have the default be a public version.
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No my friend. This is a very bad compromise.
If you spawn another zone of Crushbone (for instance) because the dungeon is crowded then the game will cease to be a virtual fantasy world and is more of a multiverse where there are more than one parallel universe with Emperor Crush at the same time. Not only it destroys immersion (how can you have two Naggy's at the time time?!) but it also separates the community and makes seeking an item from a named not that difficult since if your named is camped you just try the same name on the other channel/zone.

The solution is.
Make dungeons huge with different entry points (why do they have to have one entrance?).
Make plenty of dungeons of various sizes for each level range.
Stop funneling players towards specific areas (Questing, Linear Paths...etc).
 
Convo

Convo

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
8,792
664
The world should be spread out in regards to leveling. Hide some lower level camps in a predominantly high level areas. Reward the folks that make that trip with better XP mobs.
 
Dyvim

Dyvim

Bronze Knight of the Realm
1,420
195
Roxby_sl said:
haha, thats weird, we had a Dyvim who played on Rodcet nife EQ. Also who played on Medivh WoW with Ascent? Must be the wrong guy
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Played on SolRo only, anyway Dyvim went to retirement after PoP release, since the mid luclin modrod nerf really made the mage class a tag-along-for-coh, so i rolled a shaman to actually have utility in raid groups.
Just dragged over my FoHBoard name(lurker mostly) to RR.
 
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