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

Dullahan said:

This doesn't make sense. If the game is harder, and you've earned rewards, then you deserve to make the experience easier on other characters. You're conflating two things that are mutually exclusive.

I'm actually against powerleveling as it existed in EQ because unlike conquering harder content and utilizing the rewards on a lower level character, anyone higher level could trivialize the leveling process. Don't think it should be prevented altogether, but there are ways of determining whether the benefit of spells and healing during combat made the encounter too easy for the xp recipient. In which case, the experience should be reduced, just like your experience from having someone do your homework for you reduces your knowledge for a test.

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Dullahan said:

Well, you obviously shouldn't rob group mates to twink an alt. Let's not get distracted here.

The fact that the game (in this case EQ) was hard is exactly what made powerleveling so enjoyable. Being able to revisit content where you struggled, with a new-found advantage, is intoxicating.

It's also hard to argue that someone hasn't "earned" an advantage if they've already obtained the items, or established relationships with people willing to help them level up their character. That meets the mechanical and social criteria for advancement in a game like Pantheon.

My only point, and hopefully something we can come together on, is that Pantheon can dispense with so much of the restriction found in new mmos and hopefully strike a balance, without it ruining the game.

As to mentoring, few things are more harmful to the broader community than allowing players to avoid the general population and fill their groups exclusively with people with whom they're already acquainted. If people are really concerned with damaging community interaction as a_skeleton_02 mentioned, mentoring has to be limited as well.

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Arden said:

Everyone has their own take, right? I mean, it's unlikely any two people would completely agree on every single aspect of any game.

What I want is a world that is as open, free, and sandboxy as possible. Will people do "bad" and "undesirable" things when you give them that much freedom? Sure. But forcing players to be "good" through restrictive mechanics isn't the answer to that problem. Telling players what is "appropriate" or "inappropriate" for them is a level of parental guidance I have absolutely zero interest in. Forcing players to experience things the way you want them to experience them is a recipe for a game on rails.

Just give me a cold, hard, indifferent world and set me loose. That's pretty much what original EQ was. If you've built the world intelligently, there is absolutely no need for it to adapt to me specifically. In fact, a world that caters in any way to me is the antithesis of what I want an mmo world to be.

Should your character have limits to what it can do? Absolutely. Building and progressing your character is one of the most foundational elements of an rpg. But those limitations need to be inherent to the character-- they shouldn't be represented by changes to the world around that character. Even if that ends up being a distinction that's only meaningful in appearance, I can tell you it's an important distinction nevertheless.

There's a reason people pine for the original EQ trilogy. Yes, that era had some limitations. No it wasn't perfect. But it was open and free enough to give people the feeling that anything was possible. That's the feeling I had when I played it, anyway. Once they started piling on restrictive mechanics in later expansions, I felt less and less like what I did mattered. Whereas, before, there were creative ways to pull of feats that I shouldn't have been able to accomplish, all of a sudden I was bumping into all these artificial roadblocks telling me YOU CAN'T DO THAT because it's "level inappropriate." Blah. Fuck that.

So Down with Trivial Loot Code, Down with Bind on Equip, Down with locked combat, and anything scaled can literally burn in a fire!

Down with all those bullshit, lazy, underhanded tactics.

Sure bad things may happen if you give people that level of freedom. But in my experience, it's much worse when you take that kind of freedom away.

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Dullahan said:

Mentoring is worse because it provides the player with all the perks of grouping, without having to be reliant on the broader community. Ideally powerleveling would not. Powerleveling is basically just an enhanced soloing for players who do not want to play with others, for whatever reason that may be. If crafted properly, assisting another player by buffing them and/or healing in between mobs would provide some benefit, but still less than if the player was in a fully functioning group with any additional experience bonuses that may provide.

There's no reason for developers to go out of their way to make it impossible to solo, or impossible for another player to benefit from your assistance as a higher level player. Let people play the way they want within reason.

The goal should be to encourage people to seek out their peers and learn to work with them. If the player never has to rely on people outside of their circle, those people become dispensable, and can be discarded and mistreated as they are in most current MMOs. For player reputation to exist in Pantheon the way it did in EQ, players you are unaffiliated with have to remain a valuable asset.

Abolishing the "abusive parts" results in very contrived and sanitized gameplay.

I can't speak for other people. I don't think most people agree with my position on mentoring and player freedom, because most people simply haven't done a deep dive into what made early MMOs, particularly EQ, a more enjoyable game.

Basically the problems Arden has described in a couple of his recent posts are a good summary of the problem as I see it.

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Arden said:

If you consider the original EQ trilogy poor game design then the discussion can stop here. Myself and a ton of others on this board consider TOT to be a flawed but fantastic form of game design. Are there things that I would change about TOT? Probably, but on the whole they nailed something that no one else has-- and a big part of that was the flexibility of the system (see lack of restrictive mechanics).

So let bygones by bygones bro. Accept that we enjoy different things in games and move on. You consider what we like "bad game design" and I consider what you like hand-held mushy bullshit. Great. No reason we can't like different things.

Oh and, not that it matters, but I've done plenty of high level raiding. It doesn't make me appreciate free game design any less, that's for sure.

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