Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO

qwertyqweqwertwqert said:

Kunark got the balance quite good, but by PoP it was basically just a raiders game and groupers started feeling left out, and the expansions just started getting mass produced to cater to the raider parasites eating up all the content as fast as SOE could make it.

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Kunark introduced the epics which everyone wanted regardless of play style. Outside of a few cases, it required the player to raid. Yes it was difficult but all it did was encourage people to reach out to others for assistance, whether it be creating/joining a guild, organizing their own raid, etc.

PoP was basically the same way, only swap epic quests with planar progression. There was tons of group content in PoP. Accessing the higher tier zones simply required the player to reach out to others to get there. So I see little difference between the two.

In a game that is actively promoting player interdependence, this is exactly how it should be designed.

For reference, I played EQ as a "hardcore casual". Meaning, I put in a lot of hours of play but mostly as a grouper. I did my share of raiding but always with smaller, more casual raiding guilds who were well behind the poopsockers and was perfectly fine with that.

Players need to stop screaming to have the game catered to them individually. If half the content is locked away to raiders only, then there is definitely an argument for change. But I see absolutely nothing wrong with 10-15% of the content being inaccessible to me because of my preferred playstyle. If I as a player really and truly want to experience that content, then it's on me to find a way instead of whining and bitching to change the game.

The other point is, the content is never blocked from any player permanently. Yeah, you may not get to see it in the first several months like the hardcore players will, but you will see it eventually. You had to be in a high end guild to be in VP when ROK was released, or NTOV or ST when SOV was released, but you could easily see those places a year later when the hardcores had moved on to other things, and your gear/level increases allowed you to access areas that you couldn't before. The problem now are the fucking crybabies like Qwerty who scream like a three year old girl because it's not fair that they can't go and play with the big kids. The issue is not contested content, the issue is catering to the lowest common denominators in games, which ruins it for everyone. There are plenty of care bear games out there for the Qwerty's of the world. Make one damn game for the rest of us.

I wasn't singling you out dumbass. I was agreeing with you that it's better to target a certain audience, which they've already stated they are - the grouper. Not raider. Not soloer. The grouper. that doesn't mean they exclude those other two play styles entirely. It just mans it's a minor part of it, which is good for the player.

Your stance is that poopsockers will consume all the raid content too quickly, forcing VR to then start designing more and more raid content which takes away the resources they do have to focus on that instead of the group game. And you maintain that because that's what they did in PoP. That's the part I disagreed on because you're clearly fucking wrong, as I pointed out.

Let raiders deal with thumb twiddling if they consume 10-15% of the game too quickly. That's on them. If the VR guys are smart, they'll stay true to their core vision for the game.

Certain truths have to be established. The fact that certain gamers will burn through content like a pyromaniac with a stack of old newspapers and can of gasoline in front of him is one of them. That's just a fact. EQ was the first "successful" MMO (some would say Meridian59, but ehh). They were the first to try out raids. But as soon as they saw that 99% of the player base wasn't keeping up, they should've put a stop to it. They didn't. Then comes along WoW. They see that 99% of the player base isn't experiencing raids. They introduce raid finder. Game lasts longer than anybody could've foreseen. Fact.

*shrug*

Longer than anyone could have foreseen? EQ is STILL going.. I'd agree THAT game has gone on longer than people could have imagined, and I worked on it for 8 years.

WoW is still going because it's a good game, not because of Raid Finder. It doesn't matter of it's not vanilla WoW, or whatever people have in their head that the game should be.. It's a good game. Legion is incredibly well done and fun. That's why it's still here. It's still fun to play.

I think Luclin and Kunark hit a very nice balance on raid/group content ratios. Luclin in particular did a good job of having a wide range of different tiers of raid content. If you were T1 coming into Luclin with full ntov gear then you really could care less about most raid mobs outside of Ssra/VT/Seru, this meant that a lot of lower tier Luclin targets (And a lot more of the Velious targets) were now opened up to the T2 guilds.

I hated "full raid" expansions like Planes of Power, it breaks immersion too much, the intended lines of play are too obvious. I really appreciate the idea that the developers provide a world and the world has everything from tadpoles to gods and what we choose to do is up to us. I also don't really like that so many epics require raid mobs. I can see the argument for sure but I think they did a good job re-balancing most of them later to involve alternate paths like UDB Trak etc.

Additionally, if the raiding is sufficiently difficult then it can have a much faster respawn time without watering down the competitive experience. Think PoSky in classic; it had the best loot (arguably better than most Kunark loot) but you rarely ever had drama there, instead guilds were busy fighting over the two good items that drop from Nagafen/Vox. The difficulty of PoS meant most guilds wouldn't get past the first few islands, and only the very top guilds typically beat the Bixie Island and went on to complete the zone.

Zaide said:

I think Luclin and Kunark hit a very nice balance on raid/group content ratios. Luclin in particular did a good job of having a wide range of different tiers of raid content. If you were T1 coming into Luclin with full ntov gear then you really could care less about most raid mobs outside of Ssra/VT/Seru, this meant that a lot of lower tier Luclin targets (And a lot more of the Velious targets) were now opened up to the T2 guilds.

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Luclin had a lot of cool things about it. AA was a big deal and brought a lot of players back. But one of the downsides of Luclin was the intense key farming at the end game.

Before Luclin on our server we had a bunch of guilds that competed at the top end, cock blocking and all that. I loved it. Was in the top guild but we didn't always win the race, far from it. The flame forums were glorious. Luclin changed all that. Our guild took over the server during Luclin because of the key farming necessary. The other guilds imploded. The rest of the server was still far from finishing Luclin even when PoP came out.

Don't get me wrong. It was great ruling the server, but I missed the race between guilds and all the drama that came from it. After that we raced the other servers for world firsts, got a couple and that was cool. But going back I would rather be training whole zones to fd on the other guild just as they are about to engage. Or trying to figure out who the spy is, etc, etc.

I don't want to get into a generational thing but the truth is the EQ target audience had different expectations of gaming. Prior to EQ, most people were use to investing a decent amount of time into games. It didn't matter if you played table top D&D or grew up on The Legend of Zelda, you played for hours and stuck with a game for a pretty significant amount of time. Now, EQ took that to the next level and tapped into people's drive to be geared up, max level, etc. but I don't think that's appealing to demographics that floods WoW. The generation the played EQ has less time and everyone younger than us was raised on instant gratification in gaming. Sure you have some Elder Scroll, Final Fantasy peeps out there but even then these games can be beaten in a matter of a week or two.

I think everyone really has a lot of valid points and truth from all perspectives. I think it's up to the game to decide what determines success. I also believe that more people are looking for something a bit "more" than what modern MMO's are offering. However, even then it would be a niche audience if you determine it by numbers. A good game is a good game bottom line but Pantheon has to decide if 500k-1m is a success because those sales interpret to 350k-550k after the first 30 days probably and you get you first set of updates to lock them in and start growing. If that doesn't work you have to give the masses what they want but i'm not even sure that will work as long as WoW is enjoyable.

Overall, you have to tap into the next generation of gamers and grow a new player base. WoW essentially did that but we just happen to support it. Our generation really makes up a small fraction of their numbers even if you take all of EQ, DAoC, etc. at their best.

Personally I think Pantheon needs to address the niche audience and target not only the old school but some of the new that might want to see what it's all about. We'll have to give a little probably in terms of some features but I don't think you necessarily have to instance everything and put in raid fingers. I think the desire for a community and some challenge is back but it can't be stifling either as many players have no idea what early MMO's are like.

If there's one thing I believe MOBA's and games like Overwatch have done is bringing back a little more community and the reliance on other people's to do their job and do it well.

Black Desert and the other Asian grinders prove there is a market for longer games. And EQ was a huge grind. If Pantheon goes that route, that's fine. Never have the kind of time to be competetive again, but EQ was great for casuals too. The group game dungeon crawls in open zones were a lot of fun, had really good gear and unique items.

The whole "our generation can no longer play for 8 plus hours a night, so you can't design games like that anymore" is so fucking dumb it's unbelievable. Not sure if you're aware of this or not, but there are people on this planet younger than you, they're called kids, and these kids play video games just as much and as long as we used to when we were kids. Can I play 8 hours or more a night anymore? Nope. Does that mean the game should be catered specifically to me and my limited play time? Of course not. I wouldn't expect them to.

I'd still like to see a game where there is contested content in the game, punishing as fuck, loot that is so rare I'd be willing to make sacrifices to false gods just to obtain it, and takes me months and months to reach max level. Why? Because I've played the game that was the opposite of all of these things. It was called Warcraft, and I was bored as fuck.

Isn't the point of MMOs to be disappointing?

That's what I'd gathered from the last two decades of them.