The relationship SoE has with Storybricks makes me excited to see the faction system in EQN. I think it's safe to assume, based on the timing of it all, that after SoE hit the reset button on EQN they decided to build the game from the ground up using Storybrick's AI. From the limited information available about what Storybrick was trying to make before they signed on with SoE, under the hood their AI is a super complex faction system with lots of moving parts.
EQ Never
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Laura
Lord Nagafen Raider
- 582
- 109
I agree.
A big portion of what makes a game exciting is freedom. If you just try to restrict players from doing things like Twinking, Power Leveling and Buffing Lowbies... the game ends up being bland and you will feel detached from the world.
A big part of my amusement was going back to newbie area helping random people.
Or saving items for my alt to use.
Or getting a buff from a random stranger.
I honestly don't understand why game publishers feel they need to "balance" the game. It's not an eSport, let things be. Give players all the freedom they can have because it's a lot more fun than "balancing" the game.
Lithose
Buzzfeed Editor
- 25,946
- 113,041
This. One of the worst things, in my opinion, to happen to MMO's was the proliferation of "no drop" or "BoE". Don't get me wrong, I completely understand why they did it. But the effects the "cure" had were worse than the disease. People don't often think of how many things had to change to accommodate BoE/BoP game play. The effects on the economy, how you handle old content, farming ect--were all dramatically shifted.
I understand there would have to be shifts in how instances work, and even how farming works (Bots ect). But really, getting rid of the BoE tag would increase instance lifespans and make it possible for people to use the community to fill gear gaps, rather than having to shove tokens and loot work around in everything. I mean, imagine if when you see your 10th cleric bracer, instead of being frustrated, you go and actually contact the other guilds in your tier/skill range and make some trades? That's the essence of community.
And more than anything else, these artificial systems subvert that.
Mr Creed
Too old for this shit
- 2,394
- 287
Sounds great, I entirely agree with that. I would actually reverse the stain WoW put on the word 'quest' and include some menial repeatable tasks where it makes sense (bounties on orc scalps and the like). Those tasks wold be persistant/repeatable, maybe not always available if the game has some kind of event system but recurring for sure. Wether anyone does
Then quests would be once-per-character multi-step missions that actually deserve being called a quest. EQ1 epics or some of th few long and involved quests from WoW come to mind. If you do quests that way they can even give big xp, because you're not grinding 20 per hour all the time. Also, quests should give similar rare or special rewards to rare mobs, altered abilities and the like.
I'm thinking just Antonica or maybe another continent but then lacking some part of Antonica like the southwest or northwest, depending on wether barbs are in at release. Same as they went with 3 of 10 continents with PS2. I'm not expecting that much landmass at first but fairly regular additions that come quickly.
That's a reasonable concern, but it's also very dependant on individual expectations. With what little info we have I'm giving myself at least 50/50 of being happy with the result, while for you (no offense) I'd bet you are dissapointed. There are as many different expectations in this thread as posters (and some that dont care about the game and just want to troll you).
I think the thread went over that topic 40 pages ago, but the reason is they make more money that way. We are a niche interest group and catering to us brings in less money.
Miele
Lord Nagafen Raider
- 916
- 48
I don't see how somebody levelling an alt fast can and should bother developers. Who cares? Everything in modern games has been gimped left and right in the name of fairness or some equally interesting bullshit. Like levelling is so important that twinking the fuck out of an alt makes devs puke or something similar.
I had my 2 characters in EQ that I played all the time, bard and cleric, when I levelled an alt for a while, a warrior, it was a blast doing it with blade of carnage and scepter of destruction that I borrowed from friends in my guild, that and zek cultural armor of course. I can't understand how this impacted anybody else in the world, except that when I tanked for someone while levelling, mobs were glued to me all the time without fear of losing them to the trigger-happy wizard.
Artificial limitations are bullshit: if I want to gear up a level 1, let me do it, change it for PvP servers, but in all honesty who cares about PvP? Certainly not me, as long as it doesn't infect my PvE.
Ukerric
Bearded Ape
- 8,494
- 10,705
It's all in the context.
"Go to the forest next door, kill young red bears until you find an ass and bring it back" is a task.
"Go to Innoruuk's bedroom in Plane of Hate, and bring me his paperknife" is a quest.
The more I think about this the more I like it. Great idea. It would fit the lore of the game better aswell. I think MMOs should have less quest but the small amount of quests they do have are important and very long. To tell the story of the world whilst giving you freedom to explore it.
Pretty sure this is one of the first topics pretty much everyone agrees with? Progress!
Soygen
The Dirty Dozen For the Price of One
- 28,572
- 45,200
What would be some suggested methods on how to avoid the gold farmers ruining the worth of droppable items without punishing the regular users?
also regarding quests & whether they should give xp or not - what a massive time saver for the developers to cut down on the fetch quests etc
how do you know? it's never been done. WoW has been redone a hundred times; all of which have been colossal failures. EQ, on the other hand, has never been redone (and don't give me VG either. that game was a broken mess).
Zehnpai
Molten Core Raider
- 400
- 1,246
To dig deeper with Tad (I hate, fucking hate when we agree on anything) there are a few caveats I would add.
Killing mobs can add XP but that XP is only used to make you better at killing that type of mob. I dislike the concept of just generic XP being tied to generic advancement. Grats you killed enough random shit to get 100k xp, here's +30 hp and some strength. I'd rather 'ding' a level against goblin-kin and now have a 10% chance to behead low health goblins or now find 20% more gold on their corpses.
Quests giving items is only interesting/fun if you change how itemization works such that it's not just "Old shit++". In WoW the quest reward items might as well just have an auto-vendor option. I've posted before about how I think it would be fun to have a sort of pokemon style itemization game where you want to collect all 200+ items that drop in the game as they all have various useful effects. It would require an intuitive interface, limitations and so forth but I think it would be more entertaining to complete a quest to get the grappling hook from Zelda instead of a chest plate that has 50 more hp then your current one.
As far as faction goes, I haven't devoted any time to thinking of a better way to handle that shit. I don't know about everyone else but I'm getting kind of sick of doing quests/grinding mobs to get faction points that just result in a default gold sink enchantment for every time I upgrade my hat. I mean let's be honest after slaying a couple dozen gods, dragons and more you'd think some random faction would go, 'HOLY FUCKING SHIT YES HERE TAKE ALL OUR VALUABLES AND MY DAUGHTERS VIRGINITY" in exchange for me pledging my service to them as opposed to requiring me to spend 15 days right clicking on ground spawns just outside their village.
Killing mobs can add XP but that XP is only used to make you better at killing that type of mob. I dislike the concept of just generic XP being tied to generic advancement. Grats you killed enough random shit to get 100k xp, here's +30 hp and some strength. I'd rather 'ding' a level against goblin-kin and now have a 10% chance to behead low health goblins or now find 20% more gold on their corpses.
Quests giving items is only interesting/fun if you change how itemization works such that it's not just "Old shit++". In WoW the quest reward items might as well just have an auto-vendor option. I've posted before about how I think it would be fun to have a sort of pokemon style itemization game where you want to collect all 200+ items that drop in the game as they all have various useful effects. It would require an intuitive interface, limitations and so forth but I think it would be more entertaining to complete a quest to get the grappling hook from Zelda instead of a chest plate that has 50 more hp then your current one.
As far as faction goes, I haven't devoted any time to thinking of a better way to handle that shit. I don't know about everyone else but I'm getting kind of sick of doing quests/grinding mobs to get faction points that just result in a default gold sink enchantment for every time I upgrade my hat. I mean let's be honest after slaying a couple dozen gods, dragons and more you'd think some random faction would go, 'HOLY FUCKING SHIT YES HERE TAKE ALL OUR VALUABLES AND MY DAUGHTERS VIRGINITY" in exchange for me pledging my service to them as opposed to requiring me to spend 15 days right clicking on ground spawns just outside their village.
Abefroman
Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
- 12,597
- 11,941
You would have to throw money at the problem. Undercover buyers that buy a small amount from multiple sites then logging those ips. Then you could search all trades and interactions that person had and backtrack to expose the network. This of course means you would have to have the database tools in place from day 1 to do these searches in a timely manner.
Also have people that can respond to bot reports as soon as they come in and observe the person in question suspected of botting.
The way I see it, if this is a problem the game is experiencing some level of success. Back on Rallos Zek, just getting the few no-drop items that existed was something to work towards, so that you could have equipment in more slots that you didn't risk losing if you were ganked out in the world. It was always a balance of what you wanted to risk losing to increase your odds of winning a fight. To even go get some stat-less shin greaves and boots was something to do. They also looked like platemail, so it was nice to look cool, when plate was not a common look. I'm pretty sure twinks did that on non-pvp servers.
There was also a mediocre axe from solb that had some AE proc, but more importantly, was no-drop. To get a decent no-drop weapon was pretty valuable. Also, camping jboots when they were dropped.by Drelzna in Najena. A lot of people cited the ancient cyclops, but that came later down the road.
I was by no means on the cutting edge of raiding or leveling, but I had my own little list of things to accomplish and concerns that kept me interested and playing.
In regards to faction, I don't think any semi popular games (since EQ) have had a faction system with decisions and penalties. Kill dwarves for exp, dwarves hate you, but the exp is baller. Kill sir wembley or the hermit in the karanas, lose faction with 5 groups, think "wonder who they are - oh well, exp is great." Come to find out, one of those obscure factions have a quest for a snare necklace. Whoops! Consequences. The ability to do all of it, at a severe price (restoring faction in the other direction). The consequences and time add longevity to the game, and longevity is something everyone wants in the games they play.
Flobee
Vyemm Raider
- 2,785
- 3,251
Haven't seen it posted yet, new stretch goals on their website:https://www.everquestnext.com/
Pretty meh imo, but there it is
Pretty meh imo, but there it is
You didn't look hard enough. It has already been posted. It doesn't look like it will hit 66% before SoE live. Lets see if they really don't give the poster for free.
