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

Stop it guys. You're hurting my feelings. I dont want another WoW!!!

BoozeCube said:

It's not though this one has halfings and LFR.

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Like no shit, I legit just thought that was a picture of an Arakkoa from WoW. Id play a bird man, fuck ya.

Halfling bird strip club would be legit

Sevens said:

All that blog post is saying is that they are going to start putting in things they said they wouldnt.....A group finder tool is what Im thinking, ah hell prepare for a shit storm on the Pantheon forums

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They've actually said they were going to have a group finder since way back. When most people think of group finder though, they think of instant travel or queuing up for dungeons. That is not the intention of the proposed system. It's purely for helping people find groups with people who are not just looking for a group, but that also share things in common like play style and play time.

The thing I do take issue with though is caravans, which DOES trivializing the process of traveling. It's a half-step down a slippy slope to fast travel.

Really dislike mentoring too. I think Pantheon would be better served by something like Asheron's Call's Allegiance system to encourage or incentivize helping lower levels. Mentoring should be an absolute last resort and extremely limited.

Why would you ever release a game when you have morons paying a thousand bucks for "pre alpha access"?

This won't see a 2019 release, let alone a 2018.

Dullahan said:

They've actually said they were going to have a group finder since way back. When most people think of group finder though, they think of instant travel or queuing up for dungeons. That is not the intention of the proposed system. It's purely for helping people find groups with people who are not just looking for a group, but that also share things in common like play style and play time.

The thing I do take issue with though is caravans, which DOES trivializing the process of traveling. It's a half-step down a slippy slope to fast travel.

Really dislike mentoring too. I think Pantheon would be better served by something like Asheron's Call's Allegiance system to encourage or incentivize helping lower levels. Mentoring should be an absolute last resort and extremely limited.

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My whole thing is the way he was stressing the fact that some of the up coming feature will be counter intuitive to the Tenants...Yeah, I think they will be adding in group fast travel in the Looking for group tool. It might not take you all to the dungeon but it most likely teleport you all to one spot (the leader). And I also bet that the "maintaining the group" means you will be able to insta port replacement players to your group. And yeah I hate mentoring too... every game I have ever seen it in the mentored down player is in God mode and just destroys what ever zone they are in, nothing more than a PLing device, That whole blog post filled me with trepidation...I can see a slippery slope before us now.

Sevens said:

My whole thing is the way he was stressing the fact that some of the up coming feature will be counter intuitive to the Tenants...Yeah, I think they will be adding in group fast travel in the Looking for group tool. It might not take you all to the dungeon but it most likely teleport you all to one spot (the leader). And I also bet that the "maintaining the group" means you will be able to insta port replacement players to your group. And yeah I hate mentoring too... every game I have ever seen it in the mentored down player is in God mode and just destroys what ever zone they are in, nothing more than a PLing device, That whole blog post filled me with trepidation...I can see a slippery slope before us now.

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If it comes to instantly summoning players across the world or queuing into dungeons, i'll be the first one to oppose it. Fast travel should be avoided like the plague that it is. Even player portals should be reserved for late game and come at a cost. Otherwise the world will inevitably feel small and superficial.

Dullahan said:

If it comes to instantly summoning players across the world or queuing into dungeons, i'll be the first one to oppose it. Fast travel should be avoided like the plague that it is. Even player portals should be reserved for late game and come at a cost. Otherwise the world will inevitably feel small and superficial.

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You and the other 208 players should have a blast.

I don't mind LFG/LFR tools as long as they don't insta-port you to other people or places. That really irritates me and in my opinion takes away from the MMO experience. If there's a tool that helps piece the puzzle together fine but if you really want the right experience, you won't use it. People can talk to each other, build their reputation of how good they can play their class, and show they can be a good teammate. If they start getting too deep into this accommodating crap, you might as well play a single player game on a console and join whatever match you're looking for while you walk around the house until it throws you into game.

I noticed in MoP that I started losing a grip on where the fuck dungeons actually are and why Im there. Ok.. so like.. Im in a Brewery with Giant Bunnies and Alcoholic Spirits? Is this pre-hef-death playboy mansion? Traveling to dungeons was never really that bad once you got some basic conveniences. Potion Teleports were insanely handy and all it took was 30 minutes in OoT's to get the gems to pay for them. If you were popular, you probably didnt even need them and had a port whore. Or on the flip side, have a Bard. Not everyone was that lucky, or knowledgeable. But you could still get Peg Cloak and Jboots and life was that much easier.

All Im really saying is that all those options were available in early everquest and that is the game I think of when I think long travel times. Fast forward nearly 20 years and nothing is going to be comparable to the shit you had to put up with in EQ and you're going to have even more options to cut down on traveling. Just imagine for a minute how much easier life would have been in EQ if we just had a damn Zeppelin flying all around EQ. We'd probably all fall to our death several times because of how buggy it would be, but! when it did work....

Something about TP'ing to dungeons instantly, allowing you to switch one environment for another at the click of a button, with new team mates and new bosses.. it just seemed to get a little more pointless each and every time. Almost reminiscent of playing a CoD match or something, and thats not what Im looking for out of an MMO. WoW is enjoyable, but its developed itself into something entirely different than what I would call a traditional MMO.

If you really want to make this "no fast travel" thing work, you need to have a solid enough player base. It worked in EQ with 2500 player servers back then, because no matter where you went, there were people there. You go to Guk with your level 37 guy, there's three groups in your level range and one of them is likely to still have a spot for you. Or if you go to Mistmoore, same thing. No matter where you are, there's stuff for you to do. That is not quite the same on a 1000 pop Project 1999. Most of the dungeons are ghost towns. Guk is farmed exclusively by high levels.

You log in at Guk, shout your LFG, are met with silence, who the zone and see no one is there, but there is a group in Sol B, well then happy travels. Oh they disbanded by the time you got there, but there's a spot in a Kunark group. Do you get on the boat? Nope, it'll take an hour to get there, and by then that group might be history as well.

People don't switch locations in todays MMOs because that's what they want to do, they switch locations because where they are right now there's no action because every single MMO out there today has 99% of its zones deserted. There's just too fucking many of them by now. And given what Pantheon said about no instancing, that's a very thin line to walk. Either you have shit horribly overcrowded and you have late 1999 EQ where spawns were so incredibly hogged, Ritualist and Ass/sup were two seperate camps, claimed by two different groups of six, both arguing every night in ooc who the single spawn in the tower belongs to, neither making good exp or being challenged.

Or you have the opposite end where there's so much content for so few players, for example the colossal blunder Brad made with Kunark when he gave Iksars THREE fucking newbie zones, and in the end I wouldn't be surprised if there were still some mobs in Swamp of No Players that have never been killed. Walking through three abandoned zones to get where you want to go is a burden and not fun.

Most of those problems are solved by removing instances. It creates other problems (and we all went through them in EQ like camping for items) but the reason people aren't in zones in WoW style games are because soloing is super easy and everything group based is instanced.

No Fast Travel works fine in a game like the one proposed.

I have no problem with groups being listed for convenience, but I'm still not a fan of being instantly teleported to a dungeon.

I however also have no problem at all with things like classes that can summon or teleport group members around.

xzi said:

I have no problem with groups being listed for convenience, but I'm still not a fan of being instantly teleported to a dungeon.

I however also have no problem at all with things like classes that can summon or teleport group members around.

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I think this is the way to go. Give several casting classes the ability to COH, translocate, port, etc. Adds a nice level of utility to casting classes, helps build relationships and doesn't break immersion IMO.

I wouldn't start giving them until higher level though. Which should help make travel more meaningful at the lower levels, which is where it is most important.

Honestly, it shouldnt take you hours to get to a dungeon anymore. Thats the old skool mentality and the whole "its a part of the journey" thing is kind of played out. I was either alt tabbed out, running in a line with autorun on. Or I was watching TV. Nothing memorable happened unless a griffin swooped in and started kicking my ass, or similar. Nor am I on the side of just straight teleporting to the dungeon. I hope, and I already have a feeling that we'll have some kind of city to city transport that is, or almost is instant. That 3 hour trip to Odus is only cool when you read it in a book.

Which, if that is the case and we're TP'ing to druid rings, wizard circles, major cities, TP items, etc. then you should be getting to your objective within 10 minutes if I had to hazard a guess. Especially with mounts.

The dungeons should be points of interest, there should be reasons to go there other than just que up and whack a mob in dungeon runs. Special mats nearby, vendors, crafting stuff. Outside mobs to kill for crafting mats. Ways to take over the dungeon or change things.

Warping to the dungeons should cost something. Make instant things cost more. Make taking the road to get there worthwhile but not in a massive time consuming way. (Npc casts buffs on you as you go up the road to the entrance)

I still want to play in worlds not just theme parks.

Daidraco said:

Honestly, it shouldnt take you hours to get to a dungeon anymore. Thats the old skool mentality and the whole "its a part of the journey" thing is kind of played out. I was either alt tabbed out, running in a line with autorun on. Or I was watching TV. Nothing memorable happened unless a griffin swooped in and started kicking my ass, or similar. Nor am I on the side of just straight teleporting to the dungeon. I hope, and I already have a feeling that we'll have some kind of city to city transport that is, or almost is instant. That 3 hour trip to Odus is only cool when you read it in a book.

Which, if that is the case and we're TP'ing to druid rings, wizard circles, major cities, TP items, etc. then you should be getting to your objective within 10 minutes if I had to hazard a guess. Especially with mounts.

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I don't think anyone is expecting people to wait hours or even 30 minutes but travel should be by means of the world or the player. If people can cast spells, open portals, or whatever through way of discovering or loot then that's fine. Using a tool or feature of the game is just pointless. The entire point of a MMORPG was to bring the community and camaraderie of your pen & paper games to a digital world. Again, as long as the game feature doesn't just throw you across the world, i'm fine with it but what's the point of playing a Massive Online game if you really just a lobby and queue to dungeon crawl. Diablo did that 20 years ago and there's plenty of those games and they're not MMO's.

Also, MMORPG ranked Pantheon 4th. Edged out by another old guy on the block... Camelot. Spoiler... Crowfall is number 1. The people over there are just fanboys or possibly ignorant though they're entitled to their opinion I suppose. The 10 Most Wanted MMOs of 2018 - The List - MMORPG.com

But I don't know how to get to dungeons or figure things out and muh queues.

If the player base isn't filled with barely attentive morons the community won't have 200,000 idiots! Augh!