Your thoughts on instancing and zones?

[Ninen]

Originally Posted by LadyVex

Oh please. Did you actually play EQ or WoW? I mean honestly?

This is so incredibly wrong I don't even know where to start.

Having mass wars often had nothing to do with *skill* that you so graciously hand out to those keeping people from a specific zone or area. If you had played EQ, this would be more than apparent. Server ups, downs, start times, the ability to simply steal kills (In WoW by simply tagging, in EQ by realizing that if one raid tanked and actually had to heal, your warriors could throw on shit to dps, clerics too etc, who cares if it's not your tank!) and a host of other things allowed people to fuck with others and it had absolutely NOTHING to do with their *skill* in keeping you from the area.

No one said rights to a mob. You are however, entitled the ability to go somewhere, based on skill. Barring people from an area THEY CAN GET TO AND ACTUALLY THRIVE IN because you are a douche bag who decides to mass war is retarded. Training shit in Guk onto people because someone had Ass/Sup and you wanted it was not skill, but douchebaggery.

The only thing you juggled on a pvp server was the ability to create truces with other guilds or to have organizations that allowed you to kill shit unhindered.

Keeping people away from things they can legitimately do was very rarely something that involved skill, it was just low down cheating nonsense.

Instancing takes that away thank god. No server downs or ups to fuck with your time so that the boss mob spawns on US servers at a European time. (Gogo Arch Overseers). There is no ability to tag a mob before another raid group does to ensure you can do it; there is no one to snare kite some piece of shit mob until reinforcements arrive. No one to train you, to create ogre walls to keep you from rooms (Which I don't think is skill but fucking amazingly creative and made me lol hardcore.)

Instances ensure that the only way it's not possible to kill something is through sheer skill and experience. Pvp servers have not been about holding off the opposing faction/guilds for a very very long time. Having raided outdoor mobs on Sargeras, and having played on RZ for awhile in EQ, you have a very skewed sense of what you feel is OMG LEET HARDCOREZ 4 TEH LIFEZ!

In short, you're retarded.

I really have to wonder exactly what kind of douchebag you were in your EQ life, where *EVERY* social interaction you had outside your guild was negative.

Now, I'm sure you're using your SHIT colored glasses to try to offset everyone else's Rose colored glasses, using hyperbole and exaggeration; and all that. Or at least I hope you are. Because if you're just being plain truthful; then Wow's Instancing isn't saving you from the tards, its saving the normals from YOU.

[Venjenz]

Originally Posted by Lyenae

What happens if they all have similar risk/reward? What happens if what you need doesn't drop in the seemingly "best bang-for-the-buck dungeon." People hammered the shit out of Sebillis because it owned the other dungeons (namely original Chardok) on a TON of levels, and it wasn't just loot.

That's funny right there. Sebilis was popular because it had the most generous loot table of the crawlable Kunark dungeons. Gems dropped constantly, the mobs were all very enchanter friendly, and the breaks were easy. So people gravitated there based on best bang for the buck...period. every heavily populated dungeon in EQ was based on bang for the buck, either in terms of loot or exp. Why do the Fear or Hate break when Sky was so much easier to zone into, prepare for and grind? Maybe because of the gay loot tables in Sky as opposed to the cash loot (for its time) in Fear and Hate? Every expansion was the same. One dungeon/zone ended up being the best bang for the buck, so that's where everyone went. Everyone in EQ went after the most efficient way to slog the grind.

If the loot tables in Sebilis and Chardok had been reversed, Chardok would have been farmed constantly. Example of this can be seen in Lower Guk. Which side was always camped, live or dead? Same dungeon, same design, same layout, but dead side had a better loot table, so it got farmed way heavier than live side. basically, once you had your frog crown for the Halls of Testing grind, you never set foot in Live Guk anymore. Loot is the primary driver of where people go. The fact that you used the Kunark expansion's most glaring example of this to try and prove otherwise is hysterical. Hey, how often did people go to Najena once the JBoots were taken off the loot table and given to the AC?

Originally Posted by Lyenae

Unintended, undesired results are vital to MMO's. That's where gameplay depth comes from. People took their skills, knowledge, etc, and found ways to "get ahead", or how McQuaid would put it as "beat the system." Today anything borderline on playing outside the developers vision of gameplay is immediately branded an exploit. That's sad.

I highly doubt some of the 'unintended' bullshit excuses they came up for a wide variety of 'undesireables.' How can you develop the druid class with snares, dots, and sow... and then claim you never intended the concept of kiting? Are you fucking that thick? Who the fuck is in charge of designing your rules systems it they can't even come up with these extremely basic "undesired" combo's a 13 year old ritalin monkey behind a computer can? They claimed the same shit for monks FD, and other little tricks.

Instances/scripts force you to play a game a certain way. No one told you how to play the game in EQ. You could run through a dungeon, or you could camp what you needed. You had a choice. You could solo pull mobs, or you could AE farm the entire dungeon. Choice.

Instancing in WoW doesn't force you to play the dungeon a specific way any more or less than EQ did. Sure, a lot of boss fights in WoW are gimmicky, but where the fuck do you think Blizzard learned the gimmick boss fight from? Lady Vox was a gimmick fight ffs, and in vanilla EQ, everyone did it the same way. On the way to a boss in a dungeon, lots of ways to skin the cat in both WoW and EQ. The games are fundamentally equal, with the only real difference as far as dungeons and raids being that content in WoW is available to everyone regardless of what mood uber_guild01 happens to be in that day.

Oh, in EQ you can solo pull or AE? Holy shit, is that sorta like how some classes in WoW do single pulls, but prot pallies and frost mages (and others who have the know how) can do AE? Here's the thing, in EQ and WoW, the playstyle was dictated by the class, not the player. Not a lot of rogues in EQ did charm soloing, but enchanters and bards did. Not too many people besides wizards and druids quad kited too much, and I am not sure how many folks besides necromancers did a lot of fear kiting. AE dungeon clears were dependent on having 2 classes in a group in multiples - wizards and enchanters, so don't come now and make it sound like a rogue and shadowknight could go all sandbox and choose to go single pulls or AE the fuck out of Sebilis, depending on their whim.

and in EQ you can do one camp, kill one named mob for its loot, or crawl the whole damn place? What makes that any fucking different than a WoW instance besides the fact that in WoW, if you have the key/right to enter the instance, the content will be there for you despite a small legion of fuckheads who want to cock up your day? Seriously, besides cockblocking, leapfrogging and griefing, what's the difference?

[Venjenz]

Originally Posted by Ninen

I really have to wonder exactly what kind of douchebag you were in your EQ life, where *EVERY* social interaction you had outside your guild was negative.

Oh come the fuck on....like LadyVex was the only one who got a train pulled in LGuk? I derailed more frog trains in LGuk and Seb than I can count, all because some group of fucktards were pissed my group had set up shop. Because getting leapfrogged at Kael was such a rare occurrence. Sure it was.Nobody ever trained sand giants or the spectres to the docks in Oasis. No, that hardly ever happened. Casting a heal or buff on someone to give them aggro...nah, who would do sucha thing.

EQ had the same percentage of fuckheads as WoW, just a smaller overall population. The on ly difference in WoW is that the game allows you to progress IN SPITE OF THEM.

[gnomad]

Originally Posted by Sidhe

...That may begin to invalidate these niche games from a financial standpoint, but entertainment media do have things to offer the world other than really big profits.

Such as what? A single mediocre POS then they fade away into obscurity?

No company survives unless they make decent profits and especially when you are being bankrolled by investors.

I can't believe how many of you have absolutely NO GRASP of something that is taught in ECON 100 for dummies.

[Dumar]

people still ignore the fundamental question.

all of the whiners here say instancing removes the idiots, but that's the exact same thing a single and multiplayer game does. it's no different at all. you're not solving a problem in massively multiplayer games; you're just changing them to single/multi player ones. that's not a solution.

if you don't want to deal with people, then you don't want to play massively multiplayer games; it's really that simple. that's the whole point of them in the first place. why is that the point? because it's the only genre available that allows you that experience. all of the things many listed here as fun or desirable are the REASON single/multiplayer games exist.

you're changing the experience that an mmo can provide into some halfassed myopic multiplayer dungeon crawl. there is absolutely no reason whatsoever world of warcraft should be a mmo. it would serve all of us much better if it was just a multiplayer game.

this is why wow was so bad for this genre. because now, there's no going back. the challenge of mmo designers is not, i repeat, is NOT making 'content', but making worlds in which all of us can interact. THAT is mmo design, not boss scripts.

how you can argue against this is beyond me.

[Sidhe]

Originally Posted by Sidhe

really big profits

Originally Posted by gnomad

decent profits

EVE makes "decent profits." Hell, I'm sure UO still makes "decent" profits or EA, dark god of all that is unholy in big business gaming, would have pulled the plug. Either that or they're keeping the game alive just because they want to contribute something to gaming, which goes directly counter to what you're saying. (I don't believe this for a second of EA. I'm sure UO is still just making them boatloads, albeit smaller-than-WoW boatloads, of money)

You don't need to be Blizzard 2 to pull in decent profits, and you don't need to have World of Warcraft 2 on your agenda to be worthwhile to an investor.

[Ninen]

Originally Posted by Venjenz

Oh come the fuck on....like LadyVex was the only one who got a train pulled in LGuk? I derailed more frog trains in LGuk and Seb than I can count, all because some group of fucktards were pissed my group had set up shop. Because getting leapfrogged at Kael was such a rare occurrence. Sure it was.Nobody ever trained sand giants or the spectres to the docks in Oasis. No, that hardly ever happened. Casting a heal or buff on someone to give them aggro...nah, who would do sucha thing.

EQ had the same percentage of fuckheads as WoW, just a smaller overall population. The on ly difference in WoW is that the game allows you to progress IN SPITE OF THEM.

Sure there was the occasional bonus exp pull, err Train. And someone would leapfrog and you'd simply work out the math on the pulls and leapfrog them a couple pulls later when it was more beneficial.

Bad things happened. But you either rolled with the punches and came out on top (most of the time ), you took the Drama to the Community and let the people's court decide who was in the wrong, or your added someone to your shit list and got ready to blow some karma for a feelgood moment.

But there were also all the good things, saving someone and being saved in return; getting masses of group invites because random actions with the Joe Randoms got you on his friend list. Hell, half the time you did something for someone, it wasn't wholly altruistic; you were happy for the bonus exp when the train came, or you saved Joe Random because you knew after the mobs ate him, they'd come after you; or whatever. Enlightened self interest. Most players were on the same page in that regard. Even if you didn't make a friend, you showed respect and, very often, got respect back for it at some later point.

For your average player, they had goods and bads. But to hear her tell it, LadyVex was the most shit on player on her server however, such that the entire community rallied around trying to delevel her back to east commons.

Or something.

[Torrid]

Again, it is a logical fallacy to assume that no instancing = EverQuest. You can eliminate trains, camping, and kill stealing in a non-instanced game.

[LadyVex]

Originally Posted by Torrid

Again, it is a logical fallacy to assume that no instancing = EverQuest. You can eliminate trains, camping, and kill stealing in a non-instanced game.

This is very true, but instancing has done this as well, and also made many other things possible.

And Ninen, shit colored glasses? Wow, you're on Lyenae's idiocy level. I didn't exaggerate or bitch about EVERYTHING. I bitched about the fact you can't keep the old ways of farming, pvp and camping etc on some silly pedestal just because you think it was "awesome".

You really are a douche. I love it when people take posts to extremes. /eye roll

I obviously said all my gaming experience was bad; not just the farming/camping politics and the way people were able to screw you because of it.

And yep Ninen, also this all happened to me. /eye roll again

It couldn't have been commonplace in most zones or anything, NO WAY

Can we just get an automatic -10 internets for that stupidity please? Better yet, put Ninen, Dumar and Lyenae all in their own little forums so they can go back and forth about how they have the vision of future gaming and the rest of us will be dust in the wind.

Also it's super hilarious someone gave me -1 internets and said "sebilis wasn't the same thing over and over again, or anything, right?" when I was actually arguing AGAINST sebilis, since it was simply exp grinding and loot farming, and I didn't want agonizing dungeon crawls to get to a spot to stand around for hours.

I can't help but think several people on this board used int as their dump stat.

[BubbySoup]

I had that warm, fuzzy feeling running around Underhalls in AoC for the first time. It was good to actually see other players running about in a dungeon. It was great to run through a little section that was actually too high for me, but had just been cleared by some other players so I could have a little poke about, only to have to retreat just in case of respawn.

It took me twice as long as it should have to get my kills for the quest because I was competing with others for spawn points and I actually sat and waited a few minutes to get the named I wanted before anyone else grabbed him.

Sure, I could have had the entire thing wrapped up in half the time in an instance, but I am just fed up of playing in my own, personal bubble

[Izuldan]

Originally Posted by Dumar

this is why wow was so bad for this genre. because now, there's no going back. the challenge of mmo designers is not, i repeat, is NOT making 'content', but making worlds in which all of us can interact. THAT is mmo design, not boss scripts.

Go "play" more Second Life then.

[LadyVex]

Oh man I totally love this reputation thing.

"Not being able to handle multiplayer games must suck for an MMO player."

Gems of wisdom friends, gems of wisdom.

I still maintain you people used int as your dump stat. (Psst, next time use charisma).

[etchazz]

i mentioned sebilis purely as an example of a dungeon because of its size and non linear design and a few people took what i said and completely twisted around my words to fit their own narrow minded and short sighted view point. if you actually read what i said, i said to make several dungeons the size and depth of sebilis and you wouldn't need instances. i never said to take the actual sebilis dungeon and put it into a new game. yes, people went to sebilis because of the exp and loot that it provided. so what's wrong with making a game with 8 or more similar dungeons that all have great loot, great exp and are non linear? hell, you could still have scripted events, and plenty of things to do besides camp and make it fun as hell.

the problem is there are too many people who suck on the WoW teet and think that the only way to do things moving forward is the WoW way. i'm sure there are plenty of novel ideas floating around, but unfortunately we are probably never going to see any of them because everyone is so fixed on how blizzard does things that there doesn't seem to be any room for any originality in the genre. too bad.

[Maleficence]

Originally Posted by etchazz

so what's wrong with making a game with 8 or more similar dungeons that all have great loot, great exp and are non linear? hell, you could still have scripted events, and plenty of things to do besides camp and make it fun as hell.

Making dungeons "with great loot, great exp, and [that] are non linear" is the goal in both instanced and non-instanced content. If it's done correctly both approaches benefit from a great dungeon design. A great dungeon will be used both if its instanced or of its a global asset. Likewise, bad design will bury an instanced dungeon, while making a global dungeon a barren wasteland, acerbating problems in other dungeons.

The point of instancing is to regulate social interaction. Even if good design can arguably regulate social interaction it further complicates the design itself. Instancing removes the concept of social interaction, thus simplifying the overall design. A simpler design is one that can be produced with more consistent results and on a faster schedule.

Global dungeons also create an additional burden on design, since dungeons are interdependent on one another. If say there are 8 dungeons, then a failing in any one of those dungeons affects the remaining dungeons. Like for example, overcrowding may occur in the remaining dungeons.

Additionally, instancing scales perfectly with server population and level progression. Whereas global dungeons don't, they also have to be both massive to accommodate large populations while still accessible to smaller populations. All of those provide additional design complications.

So from a designer's point of view instancing provides clear benefits. It's not because designers are obsessively sucking Blizzard's teat. Most games face time and budget constraints, and instancing can help reduce the workload.

[Tropics]

Originally Posted by Sidhe

I'm glad that the MMO community voted you its representative for the wishes of 100% of the playerbase.

You know what? I fully respect that you enjoy the fact that the vast majority of MMOs these days are consensual PvP, instanced, and give every player some perceived notion of access to all of the content of the game due to their paying of a monthly fee. I'm glad that these games exist because you, and a large portion of the population, want to play them. However, please refrain from stating that no MMO ever created "should" deviate from this model. Lyenae's not trying to take WoW away from you.

Very very well put. Lyenae is completely correct. As a shorty on TZ we owned Steamfont, Elves that came into the zone to hunt were attacked. This actually lead to a huge amount of fun and a sense of roleplaying immersion to the game. The wars at the Lesser Fay/Greater Fay zone were amazingly fun, and yeah, us shorties were able to keep control of our Steamfont but we could not hunt in GF without serious combat and watching our back.

If you do not think that is fun sounding then great, no game is invented to cater to every single person. A game developed with open PVP in mind, not on PVP servers but built as a open PVP game from scratch, would cater to quite alot of the people out there. Would there be idiots? Yes, but then I have found that the idiots in a MMORPG tend to be much more prevalent in a non-PVP setting where they can exploit things like training people and leave the players with little recourse against them. Idiots on TZ who proved to be unable to get along with people normally got owned and blacklisted, life became impossible for them.

EQ's PVP servers tended to work very well. People looked out for others, for each idiot who wanted to corpse camp people or train people there were 3 higher level people who got off on being the hero and owning the corpse camping moron into going away. And all of this lead to a greater sense of community and role playing immersion then a game like WOW could ever dream of creating.