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

zzeris_sl said:

WTF did you earn? Man I just lit that motherfucking named 15 ghoul with my badass level 60 and Fiery Sword of Preening dropped. My level one warrior is going to be so bad ass! I earned this shit! Time to go camp another level 15 named that low levels groups could be fighting instead. But I'm a badass and I earned this shit Yo!

Twinking only promotes solo playing. Powerleveling is what you want if you are going to socialize. Two different things and I'm all for powerleveling.

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And this is where I disagree with you. If you spend the time to farm drops, you've earned that - the same holds true if you have the money to purchase an item. If you want to say that low levels could be killing that mob, you are making the assumption you are farming low level gear. Even if the assumption holds it comes down to a matter of community/culture that the game has. Do you/i/anyone go asshole mode and intentionally make it to where I'm going to sit in my camp and ignore the world? Hell, anytime I farmed for gear I was announcing the rot drops and buffing lowbies. I find that just as social as anything else.

Tuco_sl said:

That shit happened but it was rare enough that it made the game interesting rather than ruined my leveling experience. Plus the guy doing the PLing would usually get bored enough to make it dangerous and kill himself.

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I liked/used both myself. I'm just saying his argument is dumb. In the later expansions of EQ (GoD and OoW) when gear started to get crazy you could do some insane shit powerleveling. great times.

ImmoralityTX_sl said:

And this is where I disagree with you. If you spend the time to farm drops, you've earned that - the same holds true if you have the money to purchase an item. If you want to say that low levels could be killing that mob, you are making the assumption you are farming low level gear. Even if the assumption holds it comes down to a matter of community/culture that the game has. Do you/i/anyone go asshole mode and intentionally make it to where I'm going to sit in my camp and ignore the world? Hell, anytime I farmed for gear I was announcing the rot drops and buffing lowbies. I find that just as social as anything else.

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You're totally right. I remember helping newbie players break camps or do corpse runs while I was waiting on a spawn. I remember when I was a lowbie getting to group with twinked characters. It was awesome the way XP flowed. I loved the bartering and trading of droppable items. And it was, indeed, nice to get to see high level characters in low level zones. It was something to aspire to. I think it is vital that PRotF allow items to be given to characters at any level with the exception of things like epic weapons, epic armor, and god drops.

Some have mentioned the problems with twinking toons with items like the Fungi Tunic or the Manastone. The problem there wasn't the twinking, it was the items. Those items were broken. The practice of twinking was not.

I'd like to see the brotherhood system make its was into Pantheon.

Correct me if I am wrong Brad, but if I remember from the old Vanguard beta forums, saddle bags on our mounts was originally supposed to be so we could keep a second set of gear on our mounts tied up outside the dungeon, so we would have gear if we wiped in the dungeon and needed to retrieve our corpses.

shabushabu_sl said:

This is a total pipe dream but here goes:

You have NON combat skills, like diplomacy and such ( D&D ) where you can talk your way out of something like that... or if you are a rogue and have stealth, perhaps you stealth out.. caster, invis out. Warrior or monk, Bare hand fist fights ? It would be awesome ! etc etc etc etc...

To simplify it, its a "solo quest" to escape and maybe based on your class some can get out, some have to wait for friends to get them.. damn that would be cool shit.

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I like the idea of using diplomacy to get yourself or party member out. Kinda makes diplomacy useful and worth the time grinding up your diplomatic skill.

Troy_Costisick_sl said:

You make a good point that allowing people to twink with their gear keeps older content relevant and encourages players to re-experience the low level zones, thus keeping them alive and populated for newer players.

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This reminds me of something that was kinda brought up at one point in this thread. Gear stats. Can they just be intuitive and straight forward and not ever-evolving? In eq2 they've reworked the gear and gear stats so much that pretty much nothing but gear from the last expansion is even relevant. I don't even KNOW what the "must have stat" is now.

I wouldn't mind see some mask type items that disguise a player as another race. Could help you gain access to hostile areas.

As long as we are airing out all of our wishes and dreams here lol.... I have had an idea for a special rule set server a long time that I want to share.

I would think this would be a stretch goal on the kickstarter. Or, it could be a specifically funded stretch goal that is supported by donations on the actual Pantheon web server AFTER the kickstarter is done. A sort of extra if you want it, donate to support it kind of thing.

Special Rule Set Server - Ultra Hardcore faction-based Tournament server
1. The server resets everything EXCEPT character name, race, class every month.
2. Faction-based PvP with full corpse loot
3. Basic equipment sold at each faction's main city, but the good equipment is in dungeons!
4. PvP anywhere.
5. If NPC guards kill you, you can not respawn for 30 minutes.
6. If an opposing faction player kills you, you can respawn, but you can not leave the your faction's main city (and some perimeter just outside the city to harvest for crafting and kill mobs for skill ups. This restriction lasts until the NEXT real day.
7. Total kills per faction and individual players go towards determining a monthly Winning Faction and Top Players.

Also please allow on 1 guild per character, none of that multi-guilding non sense. A real alliance system for guilds would be nice, even if its as simple as a small alliance tab next to your guild tab that shows participating guilds along with a shared chat channel.

Could also take alliances a step further and have alliance members name's show up a different color in the world so you can identify them quickly. Add in an option for enemy guilds and have their names show up red or something too. I imagine this wouldn't do much for PvE but it could be a fun addition for a PvP server.

Troy_Costisick_sl said:

Some have mentioned the problems with twinking toons with items like the Fungi Tunic or the Manastone. The problem there wasn't the twinking, it was the items. Those items were broken. The practice of twinking was not.

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There was absolutely nothing wrong with those items. Fungi Tunics were hard to get. Getting to the king was difficult, getting him to spawn was random, and then it wasn't even close to a guaranteed drop. That is precisely how loot like that should work. It was also an item that level 60 players wanted as well, it wasn't strictly a twink item. Far from it. That made it even harder to get your hands on if you wanted it for a twink. Whoever was willing to group with you to camp it probably wanted it for themselves.

I don't understand the logic behind "well if you can twink a character you're going to ruin all the fun for the low level groups in the area where the item drops". Why the hell would I be camping a sword that drops off a trash level 15 mob when I could camp a T-Staff, in a zone filled with other max or close level characters? EQ did this perfectly up and through Velious. The itemization was perfect. If I wanted to twink a monk easily I could just camp CoT in seb til I got a couple to drop (which was a level 60 end game dungeon and I wasn't hurting anyone's level experience) or if I wanted to be a super badass twink I could camp KC for a T-staff and The king in seb (also both end game dungeons and getting to the kind with a normal group was actually difficult). If I am good enough and have the patience and fortitude to farm those super rare drops I should be able to use them to make my low level character a god.

Putting level requirements on items is actually what causes bottlenecks in low level zones. When my level 1 character can use that level 15 sword but can't use the better level 60 sword that is when high level characters tend to swarm the lower level spawns. People are going to twink their characters no matter what. You know how much time I spent getting the mats for the vanilla enchants that could still be used on level 1 gear in WoW? I went out and bought white and grey items from not too well known vendors because their ilvls were high enough to get that level 35 req. enchant on them. WoW didn't want you to twink but I did it anyway and so did a lot of other people. Putting level requirements on items just forces people who are going to twink to farm the appropriate gear for each level range and that will cause lower level groups to have to compete with end game characters for loot. Which I still don't think is as horrible as people make it sound.

Amaru_sl said:

My main question here is, with the amount of obvious draw backs of flying mounts and the amount of other/better ways we can travel quickly (all which keep us on the ground with other players), what is the need for flying? Do we really want to see the team invest that much time and energy into finding the magic formula for adding flying without destroying the world? If one day they could find some magical solution to the flying epidemic then I am all for it, but for now I'd rather see time invested else where.

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This is my concern about flying mounts. As we can see with the discussions here, you can't just put in flying mounts and be done with it. There are pretty obviously downsides that have to be accounted for, and then you suddenly have a dev team spending way too much time balancing and correcting and designing one feature of the game.

Basically the argument for flying mounts boils down to: but maaan I really like flying mounts, they're cool.... And I agree, flying mounts are cool, but they're also a can of worms and it's not so easily solved with quick but-what-about solutions like anti-aircraft guns manned by npcs.

And for others, the big difference between flying mounts and other modes of fast travel like portals or player-summon spells is that those take you to a specific place, they don't let you travel to any place you want... like right into the buffing area of a mob designed to be at the end of an outdoor dungeon.

Troy_Costisick_sl said:

Yes! And those mobs should have important quest pieces for high-level characters to further encourage returning to the lowbie zones.

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Wait, no thanks. I don't need the level of interaction where max-level players are in newbie zones frustratedly clearing the entire thing waiting for some rare drop.

I'm good with just having ground mounts so high level players are visible, maybe stopping to help/buff lowbies occasionally, or help break a tough camp for them, or there hunting high level mobs whether guards or griffons or giants.

I don't think a good design to 'encourage' mixed-level interaction is having mixed levels vying for the same mobs.

On the subject of flying mounts , my argument against them (while agreeing with the whole world/skipping content problems ), is that the sheer amount of effort to do it is not worth it.

Basically there are always things , be it new zones , dungeons , mobs , races , classes and so on that add to the game , not causing potential problems of making the world "smaller" as flying would do , that should be done before time and money is spent on any sort of flight system.

And to the person asking why should we trust Brad now ? My answer is Brad made/participated in my favorite game of all time , EQ , and Vanguard to this day still came the closest to EQ for me. I'm hoping lessons he learned from the VG downfall will help this time around. Finally , and importantly ,look at all the shovelware , story mode , instanced everything , no real classes but ACTION ACTION ACTION combat , pseudo mmo's that have been released over the past several years. Why not trust Brad can do better for me and my niche than any of the current folks ?