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

whats up pals looking forward to pantheon.

Dullahan said:

You won't be able to recreate all of those elements, but the problem is that no one is even trying to recreate the ones they can. Just having a game that doesn't hold your hand, where mobs are stronger than the player, where grouping is imperative, where death matters and creates tension, and where the UI doesn't reveal everything about every single item and ability is a good start. The problem is, no one is doing that. They're creating games, not worlds that promote discovery, discussion and immersion.

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No, they are trying to recreate what they can; the problem is that you can't just take a recipe and modernize 30% while leaving the rest the same. You have to modify everything otherwise or it doesn't come out right. And I'm not talking about making everything "WoW" or whatever. A -massive- portion of EQ's early bonus points (for some, apparently) come from content denial. If you release a game with a limited playerbase where only 10% get to experience 50% of the content, you will lose money and not retain subs. That is what a true EQ-clone game does in 2017. That game? Goes from 100k subs to 20k subs in 6 months and ends up as a $5 bargain bin item before the end of a year. And the reason why? There's actual games released right now that let you experience something akin to 90% of the game, for 90% of the population. The EQ, uninstanced 1999 model, works when you have nothing in life keeping you from playing the game. So you are there when the guild raids at 2am, or 1pm, or whatever the case may be where you are clearly mustering a force at hours that 90% of the population are working/at school/real life shit. That 10%? Is not going to pay -any- game's bills.

That world of discovery, discussion, and immersion you just mentioned? Only works when 2/3 the populace is on Dialup and Google doesn't exist. It's not that nobody is trying to recreate it; it's that the modern context of the entire world makes that pipe-dream literally impossible. Allakhazam, even at its height, was a joke compared to WoWhead or any number of major sites regarding video games. Shit, Gamefaqs wasn't even a thing when those specific aspects you mention were a major part of EQ.

The stuff you are calling for people to recreate -cannot- be recreated. That's the major disconnect here. You want them to be, but refuse to acknowledge that the entire world has moved past that point in time when those things could actually be a thing.

Edit - TL;DR

You can't make the gaming world ignorant again. That is what is required for your idea of a game to come true. And it can't happen.

Yes, if 50% of the content is contested raid mobs on timers, that would indeed suck. Fortunately, that's a strawman.

Around 10-20% of playerbases raided before mmos became lobby games. If more than 20% of the content is geared towards raiders, it would be a mistake. Dispensing with that horrible design, we can then have at least a good portion of that highly contested. There are also plenty of ways to prevent blocking that has never been attempted due to developers taking the easy way out with instancing. I can think of at least a half a dozen that would guarantee that no one guild downed every major target.

Beyond that, competition is good. I want exclusivity back in my mmo. There should be places and items I should not see or obtain while playing casually. I want the prestige that comes with achievements. I'd rather they err on the side of tedium before on the side of convenience. This entitlement bullshit has to stop for that to occur. Paying the same monthly fee should NOT entitle you to see and do everything.

There was plenty of information on the internet about EQ. I remember seeing screenshots the day the first monk entered temple of veeshan. We knew the strats, we knew the loot, but that didn't take away the sense of wonder when I first entered, nor did it diminish the accomplishment when we dropped our first dragon. That's because it wasn't purely about information, it was about the experience and the exclusivity of going somewhere few ever would. Just reading about how to do something is very different than you or your guild getting geared and keyed and learning how to do something yourself.

Discovery, discussion and immersion are all very possible.

I haven't seen anyone here who is asking to re-create the exact situation that led to EQ's weird, ball-crushing charm. That is gone. What created those exact circumstances cannot be duplicated. We know that.

I just want a (Western) game that truly tries to recreate hardship and mystery, and forces players to band together without retarded microtransactions.

Hardship I'm sure even Brad's team can pull off. Mystery? Forget about it. Maybe for the first month, after that even PUGs will start shitting on you for not watching the Youtube strats for a boss before you try it.

That was true for yesteryear but now you are talking about the generation of gamers who Stream and Upload everything.

Skanda said:

That was true for yesteryear but now you are talking about the generation of gamers who Stream and Upload everything.

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Yeah, i was just typing something similar. Aside from the streamers, there are already people jockeying to build pantheon resource sites - people who will be in pre-alpha, etc. I am more hopeful that bad info will posted rather than a lack of info for the whatever world first race that might occur.

We used to have someone in our EQ guild who refused to stop streaming new raids after expansion release because her 10 followers were more important than the guild's placement.

Ukerric said:

If you have competition for content, then you won't have (often) spoilers. Because if you can make the others fail, you can get the boss...

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Except the rewards from publishing your spoilers are greater than the in-game rewards of winning.

Youtube revenue, fame, career opportunities.... the contest has changed from "having the best loot" to "being the first to spoil the game on youtube"

Furor himself launched his career by spoiling EQ.

Single player games are still immersive and escapist, while MMOs are full of miserable people who expect you to do homework. It really wasn't like this in the 90s. In the 90s there was a shared experience of discovering and uncovering the virtual worlds. You had it in EQ, UO, Asheron's Call, The Realm, Meridian 59, Shadowbane, DAOC, AO...

Vanilla WOW (right from beta) was the first game where if you asked a question in chat people would say "go to thottbot retard" instead of discussing it and building a shared experience. The Blizzard community's hatred of typing and discussion was really the beginning of the end. To this day in wow whenever there is any discussion in chat channels in wow there are always a few guys going "STFU" and "STOP TALKING TO EACH OTHER" as if chatting is a sin

Who are these people are what is their problem? They are Blizzard fans. In Warcraft/Starcraft people would do this all the time. The RTS community has this thing where they always say "STFU" when anyone talks, I never saw this is any other genre until WOW.

The Blizzard RTS community was so much larger than the RPG community that they submerged it. The RPG community was never the same.

In EQ people would call each other retarded but they never treated chatting itself as a sin. Chatting was half the game.

Reht said:

Yeah, i was just typing something similar. Aside from the streamers, there are already people jockeying to build pantheon resource sites - people who will be in pre-alpha, etc. I am more hopeful that bad info will posted rather than a lack of info for the whatever world first race that might occur.

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So maybe the solution is to have the devs actively attack these sites with false info and fake reports. Maybe they need to attack these sites like they attack cheaters, or with the same vigour that HBO attacks game of thrones spoilers.

Streams aren't nearly as destructive as the information sites. Even worse are the simulation sites that simulate perfect play and tell you exactly what you should do to be optimal. There is no point in playing a multiplayer game if these things exist. It's like playing chess against a computer.

forensic said:

So maybe the solution is to have the devs actively attack these sites with false info and fake reports. Maybe they need to attack these sites like they attack cheaters, or with the same vigour that HBO attacks game of thrones spoilers.

Streams aren't nearly as destructive as the information sites. Even worse are the simulation sites that simulate perfect play and tell you exactly what you should do to be optimal. There is no point in playing a multiplayer game if these things exist. It's like playing chess against a computer.

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How are they going to do that? They need people to test and those same people will gather the data and keep it hidden from everyone until the game launches. That's what i would do. And i disagree about streams at least when it comes to raids, you can learn most of what you need to learn about raids between watching a stream for phases and some log diving.

Reht said:

How are they going to do that? They need people to test and those same people will gather the data and keep it hidden from everyone until the game launches. That's what i would do.

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Thottbot in WoW beta was already better than 5 years of Allakhazam because it was so easy to datamine wow. There are ways to make datamining harder, although maybe it's a losing battle, but it seems like Blizzard didn't even try. I mean Blizzard's lua scripting engine allowed you to almost fully automate your character at launch and only after several years did they remove these abilities.

My wow guild (overly competitive coming out of previous MMOs) built a distributed raid automation program (in beta for launch) using the built in (legal) lua scripts. The raid leader could remotely control every character including movement and actions. Characters would automatically act based on in game triggers. All of this was done using the lua system. It took blizzard over a year to start to prune away the API that made this possible. We literally ran entire 40 man raids where most people were just staring at the screen to re-init the script if it went wrong. Using triggered autofollows you could automate movement, and the API even gave access to directional information so you could automatically fix a character's facing. I've barely heard any public discussion of the blizzard-certified legal cheating that went on in early wow... and then there's all the illegal cheating which has completely consumed the game today.

If a company invested some resources they could make datamining (not to mention hacking, scripting, botting, etc) much harder. Gameplay might have to be designed with these restrictions in mind. They might have to hire some cryptographers and security people. They might have to limit their usage of free public testers, or have them sign stricter contracts and then sue the people who break them.

You are digging into a realm much deeper than i was talking about. Quite simply, someone somewhere will post strats for raids. Do this when this happens, do that when that happens - bring 20 healers, make sure they cure random effect, etc.. There is almost no way they can stop this level of info, your level, yes, if they want to or have the talent to.

Reht said:

You are digging into a realm much deeper than i was talking about. Quite simply, someone somewhere will post strats for raids. Do this when this happens, do that when that happens - bring 20 healers, make sure they cure random effect, etc.. There is almost no way they can stop this level of info, your level, yes, if they want to or have the talent to.

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It is an issue of degree, though. The less spoiling that goes on the more possible it is to enjoy the game. If wow could have just shutdown Thottbot and Wowhead it would have been like 10x as fun. You would still have handcrafted guides but those are both more fun and way way less complete and dominating.

It's the difference between:

< me > Has anyone seen Mooto?
< chat > check thottbot retard

vs

< me > Has anyone seen Mooto?
< chat > I'll track him for you if you help me kill this bixie queen

vs

I don't even ask because I can see him on the map using a legal addon that exposes all game info and that if you don't use you're considered an idiot

At least with ShowEQ people worried about getting banned, and people acknowledged it was cheating.

forensic said:

It is an issue of degree, though. The less spoiling that goes on the more possible it is to enjoy the game. If wow could have just shutdown Thottbot and Wowhead it would have been like 10x as fun. You would still have handcrafted guides but those are both more fun and way way less complete and dominating.

It's the difference between:

< me > Has anyone seen Mooto?
< chat > check thottbot retard

vs

< me > Has anyone seen Mooto?
< chat > I'll track him for you if you help me kill this bixie queen

vs

I don't even ask because I can see him on the map using a legal addon that exposes all game info and that if you don't use you're considered an idiot

At least with ShowEQ people worried about getting banned, and people acknowledged it was cheating.

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Has anyone seen Mooto?

Check Allakhazam/EQMaps retard

If wowhead and thottbot were the reasons you didn't enjoy WoW you have issues no game developer will ever be able to solve for you.

You aren't going to convince any of these guys that queueing for everything for instanced content with players you probably never see again isn't the pinnacle of MMO gaming.

Some of us prefer these things they view to be archaic.

Khane said:

Has anyone seen Mooto?

Check Allakhazam/EQMaps retard

If wowhead and thottbot were the reasons you didn't enjoy WoW you have issues no game developer will ever be able to solve for you.

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Except EQMaps was handcrafted and wasn't detailed enough to say where Mooto was. It also had a lot of error.

Allakhazam had even more errors and was user submitted, more like reading rumours than getting cheats.

Totally different than using one of the quest addons in wow that hooked in to thottbot and told you exactly where to go every time. Later versions even gave you optimal quest orders for maximizing xp gain. And then you didnt have to play your character, just use a perfectly legal macro that lets you mash one button to cycle thru all your abilties for max dps.

really not comparable

Those quest addons didn't exist at release.

Questhelper was the first one that did that and didn't come out until long, long after WoW's release. Thottbot and wowhead data was also very incomplete and required user input. Thottbot data was even straight up wrong in many cases.

You're wrong.