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

Soygen_sl said:

I agree that I can't do it any more either, but I also resign myself to the fact that a certain game "may not be fore me" and would still like to see those games get made.

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Be alot harder to put in the hours we all used too. Hell, im getting close to 40, but lucky (or unlucky) for me, is that im an insomniac and so them late nights when i cant sleep ill be playing. Hell, if the game was even worth playing. I could still make Aussie hours. lol 11pm til 3-4 am, easy peasy with my insomnia.

KCXIV_sl said:

Be alot harder to put in the hours we all used too. Hell, im getting close to 40, but lucky (or unlucky) for me, is that im an insomniac and so them late nights when i cant sleep ill be playing. Hell, if the game was even worth playing. I could still make Aussie hours. lol 11pm til 3-4 am, easy peasy with my insomnia.

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Back in 1999 - 2002 my real life friends were over 40 with kids and had jobs and spent quite some time playing EQ. Yes, they were casuals and took them a long time to level up but that didn't prevent us from playing and enjoying the game.

Funny when WoW was released my other non-gaming friends (and their kids) played World of Warcraft for an insane amount of time. My other friend, who's also married, used to spend an insane amount of time on WoW (it was scary... a lot more than the amount of time we used to spend on EQ).

My point is; getting older and have no time to play a game like EverQuest is a myth. And just because the game is a McDungeon/McQuest kind of MMORPG doesn't mean it won't be time consuming either.

Actually, on the contrary. My friends who played EQ with me... their kids never got into EQ but when WoW was released; their kids got hooked with it. Makes you think; EQ probably was never kids friendly (unlike some of you would like to make it seem so). In other words; a healthy percentage of EQ's population consisted of adults with jobs. When WoW was infested with a younger generation demographic.

Again to make my point a little bit more obvious; the idea of "we're not young anymore to play a game like EverQuest" is really inaccurate.

Regarding classes.
Something really bugs me about class design nowadays.

It seems that every class has an "insta-cast" abilities, abilities that require casting and abilities that require channeling.
Why??

This makes everything feels the same.
The reason why EverQuest classes felt different because almost 99% of caster spells required "casting time" while every melee abilities were instant. Switching from a Monk to a Wizard felt like playing a totally different game. But now when you play any recent game and play any class you'd find plenty of insta-casts spells and spells that require casting for almost every class in the game.

Laura_sl said:

Regarding classes.
Something really bugs me about class design nowadays.

It seems that every class has an "insta-cast" abilities, abilities that require casting and abilities that require channeling.
Why??

This makes everything feels the same.
The reason why EverQuest classes felt different because almost 99% of caster spells required "casting time" while every melee abilities were instant. Switching from a Monk to a Wizard felt like playing a totally different game. But now when you play any recent game and play any class you'd find plenty of insta-casts spells and spells that require casting for almost every class in the game.

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I agree 100%. The best part of playing a rogue on EQ in classic was you didn't have a bunch of buttons to press, you had one button that really set you apart from other melees, and that one button was all you really needed.
In modern MMOs, to make a rogue class, you'd have to have 24 skills according to most developers.

Hell with that.

1 passive and maybe 3-5 active skills at max.
-Pickpocket (for economy boosting, maybe exp bonus for kill after successful pickpocket?)
-Hide/Sneak (positional reduction on hide, sneak as a stealth)
-Backstab
-Stun Attack (3s, 60s cooldown).
-Passive, I would do something like evasive discipline (dodge attacks more often). Have everything else through gear.
D&D didn't have 3 hotbars worth of talents, it had rulebooks. Those rulebooks make the gameplay what it is, and those rules were 'passive' in current MMO terms.
EQ wasn't an active or skill based game. It had a lot of planning before you made your attempts to kill. It resembled D&D in a lot of ways, as you'd maybe reconsider doing an action because of how it could affect your character in some way.
Modern MMOs are almost becoming like modern FPS games. They are twitchy, they make you think on reaction instead of knowledge, and most older D&D players do not have the time for something like that. That's why EQ was such a big hit. It was like graphical D&D done right.

On topic again..
I still think EQ1 needs channeled spells, but only for casters, though (in custom classic-era mechanics).
Something like a reverse casting bar would be a cool mechanic if left to only casters. Tie it in to something like evocation skill for determining interrupts... that'd be unique without breaking the mold of what made EQ great.

I prefer the dozens of things to press. I don't mind having it just be 8 at a time like in EQ, but I at least need those 8. For that reason I only ever enjoyed the spell casters in EQ, the melees really bored me. Monk wasn't too bad because FD splitting and he had a few different abilities like a tail smack that could root I think. But generally I didn't like the melees, much preferred the newer style of giving even melees a hotbar with stuff to click.

But I also don't like instant spell casts. The cast time was very important because it added another resource. You had health, mana, and also time. When something happened and you had to react, you had to have mana in mind of course, but you also had to think about how long you had. Like if a train shows up and starts smacking people, you couldn't CH anyone and even a group heal was likely to not go off in time. It was quick heals or people die. As a dps it was important to kill something quick, and with your big nukes taking around 5 whole long seconds to cast, it was important you picked the right targets. Target one that someone else already picked and you end up nuking a corpse or having to start your 5 second all over again on some other target.

Nowadays stuff shows up, you tap 1234 and you shoot a whole bunch of spells instantly and they destroy everything.

Fish1_sl said:

The main issue is that you don't always even use any hp or mana in a fight...

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That's the main issue? Giving classes tools to control their own mana instead of mana being a constant cock-block to not only yourself, but your group? I'm fine being done with the days where you would sit around POK for an hour begging for KEI. Or worse, you'd not let a caster in your group unless they'd already got Kei'd. And fucking groups would break up when KEI wore off.

There's a fine line between infinite mana/energy/endurance/power and having it be a bottleneck and stranglehold on actually doing anything. Vanguard seemed a pretty good balance, with classes having tradeoffs. You didn't simply have infinite energy, you had to decide if it was and suffer tradeoffs to get energy back. Though the out of combat regen is absurd, in combat, you actually have to make decisions in the thick of things on whether it's more important to regain energy or assist in combat. I'm okay with that. Giving a player power and the ability to make decisions is far better than forcing them to sit on their ass for 5 minutes meditating or feeling they have to sit around begging for certain buffs before they even bother playing the game.

In EQ, the decisions were made for you. You got buffs, then even still sat on your ass using as little mana as possible. And playing a caster was pretty fucking boring. In vanguard you could at least auto attack or use wands since sitting on your ass wasn't a requirement of being effective.

It's true that as a blood mage I don't think I ever ran out of energy. But in any fight that actually mattered I had to be very deliberate and smart in every decision I made. It wasn't like energy was infinite. I had to be in control. And that was far more interesting and exciting than simply having to worry I'd run out of energy and the group would wipe and there'd be nothing I could do about it.

Active resource management is a good thing. If I can effectively give myself a zero-downtime scenario because I'm intelligent and can lower my overall DPS/Healing/Threat/mitigation output to make downtime a non issue its good design. If I can do max-DPS/healing/threat/mitigation and never run low on anything its bad design. If I can be smart, but still run low because the system is designed to punish intelligent, paced play its bad design. Make a system like that, and bring back overpulls, and resource stressing situations as realistic scenarios even in a good group. Then you've got a game that rewards active play, and smart people while punishing ADHD-facerolling mouth breathers. Voila, all of a sudden a good bard/cleric/enchanter/rogue/monk/etc stand out and great ones even more so.

Big W Powah!_sl said:

Active resource management is a good thing. If I can effectively give myself a zero-downtime scenario because I'm intelligent and can lower my overall DPS/Healing/Threat/mitigation output to make downtime a non issue its good design. If I can do max-DPS/healing/threat/mitigation and never run low on anything its bad design. If I can be smart, but still run low because the system is designed to punish intelligent, paced play its bad design. Make a system like that, and bring back overpulls, and resource stressing situations as realistic scenarios even in a good group. Then you've got a game that rewards active play, and smart people while punishing ADHD-facerolling mouth breathers. Voila, all of a sudden a good bard/cleric/enchanter/rogue/monk/etc stand out and great ones even more so.

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I very much want this, without going back to an exact copy of EQ. 10 minutes downtime after killing blue is excessive no matter the class imo. I liked food/drink as a concept in WoW, assuming the time from nearly empty to full is tuned suitably (which for me would be about 2 minutes). You're gonna notice if someone cant manage their resources and has to sit to drink more then he is up fighting, and in a crawl it slows you down and endangers your group.

And while we are on the topic of resource management and KEI, let me repeat that any buffs should be auras so you do not just throw someone a plat in PoK and then bring another dps. You want the benefit, you take the class, easy as that.

popsicledeath_sl said:

done with the days where you would sit around POK for an hour begging for KEI. Or worse, you'd not let a caster in your group unless they'd already got Kei'd. And fucking groups would break up when KEI wore off.

In EQ, the decisions were made for you. You got buffs, then even still sat on your ass using as little mana as possible. And playing a caster was pretty fucking boring. In vanguard you could at least auto attack or use wands since sitting on your ass wasn't a requirement of being effective.

It's true that as a blood mage I don't think I ever ran out of energy. But in any fight that actually mattered I had to be very deliberate and smart in every decision I made. It wasn't like energy was infinite. I had to be in control. And that was far more interesting and exciting than simply having to worry I'd run out of energy and the group would wipe and there'd be nothing I could do about it.

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But that was what EQ was all about.. Vanguard is just a WoW clone with endless combat and zero downtime like the thousand other button mashing adhd MMO's. It's not even comparable with EQ. EQ had a lot of sitting and medding but it served its purpose. It's a completely different style and experience. You either are happy to sit around or you're not, and I'd say that's analogous to you're either an EQ player or you're not.

Having to worry about 'energy' was also a key part of EQ. Yeah it slowed things down but wasn't that what EQ was all about? Being slow? It was about smoking huge amounts of weed and sitting in a dungeon, tripping balls and fighting stuff from time to time. And there was a lot of sandwich making and various other things. But that's the EQ experience. I think if you give quick regen and constant auto attacking with your wands and stuff, you are just making a different type of game. And that's yet another action experience that there are already too many of. He should be going for the EQ chilled and slower tactical experience because that's what the niche is all about.

Fish1_sl said:

But that was what EQ was all about.. Vanguard is just a WoW clone with endless combat and zero downtime like the thousand other button mashing adhd MMO's. It's not even comparable with EQ. EQ had a lot of sitting and medding but it served its purpose. It's a completely different style and experience. You either are happy to sit around or you're not, and I'd say that's analogous to you're either an EQ player or you're not.

Having to worry about 'energy' was also a key part of EQ. Yeah it slowed things down but wasn't that what EQ was all about? Being slow? It was about smoking huge amounts of weed and sitting in a dungeon, tripping balls and fighting stuff from time to time. And there was a lot of sandwich making and various other things. But that's the EQ experience. I think if you give quick regen and constant auto attacking with your wands and stuff, you are just making a different type of game. And that's yet another action experience that there are already too many of. He should be going for the EQ chilled and slower tactical experience because that's what the niche is all about.

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i started exercising because of EQ downtime. seriously. i'm playing one day and my dad walks in and asks me wtf my character is doing, i told him he was sitting recovering. Hes like "do some fucking pushups or something then while you wait, dont just sit on your ass." so I did. At the end of that winter, after busting out diamond pushups and bicycle crunches and shit while medding or auto running across WK, I walked into my first gym.

We wouldn't have childhood obesity if it wasn't for action combat and fast regen says I.

Mr Creed_sl said:

I very much want this, without going back to an exact copy of EQ. 10 minutes downtime after killing blue is excessive no matter the class imo. I liked food/drink as a concept in WoW, assuming the time from nearly empty to full is tuned suitably (which for me would be about 2 minutes). You're gonna notice if someone cant manage their resources and has to sit to drink more then he is up fighting, and in a crawl it slows you down and endangers your group.

And while we are on the topic of resource management and KEI, let me repeat that any buffs should be auras so you do not just throw someone a plat in PoK and then bring another dps. You want the benefit, you take the class, easy as that.

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EverQuest over exaggerated with that; it's true.
But World of Warcraft (which set the standards of all recent MMORPGs) went the OTHER extreme.

I think most of us would agree that a middle ground somewhere is a good thing.
I also want to make support classes important (HP Regeneration, Mana Songs, Healers...etc) but make it so smart players with correct character setup (gear, skills, abilities and tactical/strategical approach to a situation) should almost eliminate downtime (but not indefinitely). I want the content to be challenging enough that you would do a mistake or get unlucky (say once every 30 minutes) that you need to rest to regenerate your resource (that's when you're REALLY REALLY doing great).

Fish1_sl said:

But that was what EQ was all about.. Vanguard is just a WoW clone with endless combat and zero downtime like the thousand other button mashing adhd MMO's. It's not even comparable with EQ. EQ had a lot of sitting and medding but it served its purpose. It's a completely different style and experience. You either are happy to sit around or you're not, and I'd say that's analogous to you're either an EQ player or you're not.

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That's a very good point right there.
Complaining about down-time in an MMORPG catering to EQ play-style is like complaining about Turn-Based mechanic in a Civilization game. If you feel you want to turn Civilization into an RTS; then you're probably playing the wrong game genre... you should just go and play an RTS instead.

That 6-seconds "tick" system and that slow-paced resource-management combat with plenty of down time is what made EverQuest feel different. I am one of those who want to experience THAT exact same thing again.

EXACTLY! Thank you! They're making an EQ style game! Not a WoW clone!!! So things like staring at your spellbook while meditating for the first 35 levels will definitely be in because it was a great idea! Because you're either an EQ player or you're not and there's no possible way to build on what EQ started and make it better!

And if you want a game with more than 6 pre-mad character-model faces then go fucking play WoW because this is going to be an EQ STYLE GAME and having shitty outdated mechanics and systems is a PLAY STYLE!


Oh... you gays were being serious?

There's a big difference between a different style of play and ironing out the shitty mechanics. Enduring shitty mechanics isn't a style of play for anyone with any shred of self-respect. But let me guess, it wasn't ever EQ's fault because you just pushed EQ's buttons and EQ can stop drinking any time it wants?

It's not your fault, Fish1. Really, it's not your fault. Fish1... it's not your fault.

Fish1_sl said:

.... slower tactical experience....

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So, Vanguard was a WoW clone and EQ was a tactical experience?

Can't argue with it!

Big Flex_sl said:

i started exercising because of EQ downtime. seriously. i'm playing one day and my dad walks in and asks me wtf my character is doing, i told him he was sitting recovering. Hes like "do some fucking pushups or something then while you wait, dont just sit on your ass." so I did. At the end of that winter, after busting out diamond pushups and bicycle crunches and shit while medding or auto running across WK, I walked into my first gym.

We wouldn't have childhood obesity if it wasn't for action combat and fast regen says I.

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You must spread some reputation around before giving it to Big Flex again.

Fish1_sl said:

Nowadays stuff shows up, you tap 1234 and you shoot a whole bunch of spells instantly and they destroy everything.

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Yeah that's the problem... it destroys everything. You should be able to do that at lower (1-5) levels with autoattack. Then gradually learn about these cool things to build you into your character.

EQ1 did it great; You'd start off as a level 1 warrior, find out that warriors get dual wield early. Ok, cool, they must be melee focused compared to the other classes because I just tried a bard before this and they got dual wield 4 levels later and warriors get double attack sooner. You felt an attachment to your character, not like today's MMOs where they can hand out endgame characters for free because the journey sucks and the endgame is all of the content.

On that note, Cross-class skills was something I have yet to see another modern MMO do.
DAOC did this correctly as well; having specializations to the extent they did made the gameplay great. EQ1 did this correctly by having the spells/skills learned later for specific classes. You can do those abilities, except not as well as the class that specializes in it.

This is what makes a sandbox MMO by the way, not players building their own world, but players becoming a part of that world they are living in. Players making the content behind a game will make the gameplay feel stale and will detract from the sense of bewilderment as the players will know what to expect from the game they are playing due to having the tools that are available. (I'm looking at you, EQNext with Landmark)

Fish1_sl said:

I disagree with everything you say, and I wish you would stop talking like your opinion is the only one that's valid.

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It's fine that you disagree, but to be honest your opinion is not nearly as valid as mine. Firstly, I spent way more time using the system than you did, MUCH more time, and secondly design is my profession. I know the difference between what is personal taste and just outright good or bad design. Some things, even things people like, are just factually bad implementations, this was one of them.

Fish1_sl said:

The original combat design was a huge part of the game. It was presented to the fans right from the start and it's the main thing that got a lot of us interested in the game in 2004/2005 or so. There wasn't much competition then, everyone was just talking about EQ, WoW, and EQ2. So the idea of a whole new style of combat that was MTG inspired, was really exciting to a lot of people - especially MTG players. So the fact that it was dropped is not some minor insignificance to some of us. It was a massive let down and it's something I have wished would show up again sometime but maybe never will. The nearest I've seen was MTG Tactics by SOE, but that was too expensive to play.

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Listen very carefully, no matter how good the MTG system was in your head, or how much marketing spun it up, the systemwas bad. I've said it multiple times, and your refusal to just accept that it was bad and move on is bizarre. I am not sure why that is the case, but you are just spouting the early marketing spin that we also heard internally (and laughed at) in order to attempt to counter reality.

We cut the explicit chains/counters for the most part and everyone got a better combat system/class design for it. In fact, the class system is one of the things Vanguard is most hailed for, which would have never existed had we not fixed the unfun, non-functioning explicit chain/counter system.

But your version of history seems different to the one that I saw and read about. What I read is that the game was originally designed like a new EQ, players would go out in groups to hunt mobs, and crafters would tag along to try to harvest around them. But they kept running in to stuff that was too hard and didn't know where to go, and they bitched constantly on the beta forum. And this was a big reason why they decided to add all the quests, so that they would guide people through the game area by area. In fact I think I remember reading one of the devs on here say that they were all thrown together in literally the last year or so before release. All of these things matter. I even saw Brad post on the official forum saying that he hopes to attract former WoW players who had outgrown it wanted something a bit deeper. It seemed obvious to me that they became more obsessed with going for the WoW audience and forgetting about the old EQ1 players they seemed to originally target. To me that's a big part of Vanguard's failure, and something they need to right this time around.

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The quest system is a non sequitur in regard to combat. I've mentioned before why they were added, but if you want to talk about it we can do so in another line of questioning. You seem to assume that developers have the same access to information that the players do (i.e. Forum Posts), but we have access to MUCH more than that. Forums inform trends we see in the data mined from actual player behavior, but it is that real behavior that drives decision making.

popsicledeath_sl said:

EXACTLY! Thank you! They're making an EQ style game! Not a WoW clone!!! So things like staring at your spellbook while meditating for the first 35 levels will definitely be in because it was a great idea! Because you're either an EQ player or you're not and there's no possible way to build on what EQ started and make it better!

And if you want a game with more than 6 pre-mad character-model faces then go fucking play WoW because this is going to be an EQ STYLE GAME and having shitty outdated mechanics and systems is a PLAY STYLE!


Oh... you gays were being serious?

There's a big difference between a different style of play and ironing out the shitty mechanics. Enduring shitty mechanics isn't a style of play for anyone with any shred of self-respect. But let me guess, it wasn't ever EQ's fault because you just pushed EQ's buttons and EQ can stop drinking any time it wants?

It's not your fault, Fish1. Really, it's not your fault. Fish1... it's not your fault.

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Hahahaha.
I doubt anyone thinks EVERY EverQuest mechanic was flawless. I agree with you; there are many things that needs to be refined and sometimes "tuned down". But I don't want to compromise "the over all experience" just like what happened with WoW and Vanguard. They just went too far. Again; a middle ground (for down time) will hit the spot.

Big Flex_sl said:

i started exercising because of EQ downtime. seriously. i'm playing one day and my dad walks in and asks me wtf my character is doing, i told him he was sitting recovering. Hes like "do some fucking pushups or something then while you wait, dont just sit on your ass." so I did. At the end of that winter, after busting out diamond pushups and bicycle crunches and shit while medding or auto running across WK, I walked into my first gym.

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I studied and did homework during EQ1's downtime period. I have absolutely no doubt that the sheer amount of memorization, flashcards, and re-reading I did while waiting for 28 minute spawn cycles or whatever is a huge contributor in how I made easy A's. If I was playing wow in high school/early college I suspect I would have been fucked.

E: Probably not actually due to grade inflation and profs that didn't give much of a shit.

Denaut_sl said:

but it is that real behavior that drives decision making.

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What can be classified as real behavior, out of curiosity?

Designers need to have a set goal in mind and plan ahead for the future, in all aspects. If you are not following your own company's vision and instead listening to your data to determine what the people want, you are detracting from the entire original purpose of the game you are creating. There should be no need for data mining as long as you have a plan and stick to your guns. The only thing you should really listen to players about is when they directly question your intentions of the game. If they think the direction is going downhill, ask them why and how the developers can fix that. Interaction with the community is key. EQ developers used to interact with the community all the time. Instead today's developers tell mindless sheep what they are getting, and they better like it. That's bad, hurts your games' images and just shows your ignorance to the game's core values.

That being said, if your goal is to attract everyone and maximize profits instead of catering to a niche (like Vanguard was supposed to do) then sure, by all means, data mine to see what players are doing and act on that data. A game that changes its direction rapidly based on what the playerbase does instead of what the game originally offers hurts the game's image. Said game will lose its core fans if you modify too much about how it works. Example: NGE in SWG.