Evercracked.. Everquest Documentary.

[Merlin]

Originally Posted by bobyab

While I don't disagree that there was always that carrot of the high level game, I think of 3 distinct memories/era's looking back at the EQ years.

1. The True Noobie Days: How the fuck does my character get saved when the files aren't on my computer? Huh? You can 'loot' mobs? What the shit?! Did that guy just cast on a guard?! What the hell is a guild master and how do I give him this damn note? Oh fuck, I drowned again. First, I was running away from a 30 foot croc and run right into a specter. Excuse me while I change my pants. I know this one guy who's cousin's friend once saw Mayong Mistmoore, honest. Can somebody tell me how to get to 'Freepost'? WHAT THE FUCK, is that a werewolf? LOADING PLEASE WAIT...

2. The Leveling Grind & the Dungeon Crawls: Getting leet beta infos about Mechanics in Ak'anon and getting 15 levels in about 4 days. Using the uber Gator Smash Maul that I paid 400pp for to club away at these half pints and getting black pearls for my trouble... totally awesome.

Lower Guk and Sebilis were as good as it is ever going to get. They had their own communities. Someone that knew the places was a true asset, because you could get lost pretty damn easy. Also, Executioner probably had a waiting list 20 names long, but live side king? If you could find that camp, you were probably golden. You buddy up with the Rogue that could get you into the Sebilis Crypt, and you were on your way to becoming one of the richest bastards on the server.

3. The Raids: The first time you zoned into one of the original planes, and died 5 seconds later may have been the scariest shit you will ever experience in a game... Being one of 5 people left alive as the Avatar of War falls dead at your feet... Entering the Plane of Time and having the music pumping through your speakers... You want to get that same type of shit-yo-pants adrenaline rush? Try sky diving, drugs, or sex... because you won't find it in any other game, movie, or form of entertainment.

In a perfect world the original EQ would have 3 expansions. Kunark, Velious, and PoP. After that game over. You won EQ, feel free to resume your life~

God that's good shit! I miss those days. I can still hear the music in my head from being a noob in Qeynos attacking snakes and rats, running to sell my shit and running back for more rats and snakes. Getting totally lost trying to find the bank, first time zoning into BlackBurrow and hearing the creepy ass music and getting insta trained, running back etc...

There will never be another game like it. EVER. While one could be designed, the current player community just won't tolerate it, and that's to bad. WOW has singlehandedly killed MMOs. The "I want what I want and I want it NOW" crowd has won. Game over.

[Viktorr]

Originally Posted by Gallenite

That's an interesting take on it. That's not exactly what I meant, but I can see how you got there.

Absolutely - The outcome is what counts. The outcome is what determines if people get paychecks, or if they need to go look for a new job. Everything you do should be slanted heavily toward an outcome.

Would you agree that unfortunately bureaucracy of a company tends to suppress that end? As a consumer, I see that a lot.

Originally Posted by Gallenite

There's a couple different kinds of request/outcome types in getting to a given result, though. Here are a couple very rudimentary examples of what I mean.

Type #1: The Ignorant Request
Request: Asks for something that is technologically impossible under what current technology can provide. (e.g. I want all users to see see for 5 miles in the distance, while rendering a hundred 10k poly character models wearing of 12 pieces of runtime-composed attachments and high res base models on screen)
Outcome: Doomed for failure from the day of the request. No matter how good your team is, it's not going to happen. Your team will keep aiming for it, and they will do so at the cost of all of the other places you could have succeeded.

Why? Do you not have any control over your team? If it's impossible due to the current technological means, why keep aiming for it. TBH, your team doesn't have the resources to "keep trying". Sure, you may have some "visionaries" that "may" think it is possible. Separate them and look into their hypothesis, see if it may be possible. If so, work slowly, don't rush it. Your consumer base will thank you in the end for providing something that is NOT a gimmick, NOT buggy as hell or just plain doesn't work right if at all.

Originally Posted by Gallenite

Conclusion: Asking people to accomplish the undoable from a place of ignorance does work out well in the one-in-a-million case, but more often than not, yields a train wreck of spectacular proportions.

True, if you let it go as-is, without supervision or knowledge in what is currently possible. It's all well and good to look to the future and see what MIGHT be possible, but temper that with how fast or slow that particular technological advancement is coming about. It is easy to look ahead, but not so easy to really predict the certainty of such things.

Originally Posted by Gallenite

Type #2: The reasonable request, done "on the cheap"
Request: Our users want to be able to do some operation that requires us to scan the whole users-online list periodically. We could implement it in an hour if we just scan the existing unoptimized list of who's online, or we could change some lower level architecture to do it right from the outset, which could take much longer.
Outcome: It's a known problem with a known correct solution. A good programmer will tend toward wanting to do it right from the outset.

Why was he ignored in the first place?

Originally Posted by Gallenite

What you're pushing them to try is to do it the "less than correct" way, and only invest the time to do it the scalable way if the feature (or product) turns out to be important, which would only be relevant if you actually succeed and attract an audience.

Isn't the objective of EVERY MMO to succeed and attract an audience? You are looking at WoW and saying "How can I overcome that??" Why? WoW is nothing special at all. TBH, they are rapidly on the brink of losing everything they have built up. Why are you hesitating? I know why...you are scared of taking that "next step". Admit it.

Originally Posted by Gallenite

Conclusion: Do it on the cheap, scale it if you end up needing to - You already know how to solve it when you need to. Invest the extra time when it's smart to, and not a minute before.

Type #1, bad. Type #2, can be very good.

It's important to know the difference. Most don't. Hence, many explosions.

Cheap is good, but not necessarily always the best. Especially in this volatile market. If you invest the extra time when it's smart to...why be totally stupid the rest of the time? A minute before may be a minute too late.

EDIT: O.K. was drunk when I posted this. Sorry...it is a disturbing trend that has been happening with me. I need to stop. If there is anything here that doesn't make sense...well now you know why.

[EmpireF4i]

Originally Posted by Peon-Leon

When did they revamp Plane of Mischief? I remember being among the first to step foot in there on Druzzil, felt so bad ass. The zone was weird as hell and seemed unfinished. I remember trying to kill Bristlebane, it was about 5 of us rogues with a warrior tanking him...we fought him for like 30 minutes and his health didn't move a percent.

I think it was sometime during Luclin.

[Grizzlebeard]

I think PoM changed somewhere around LoY or LDoN. Might be wrong there but it was much later than SoL.

[Gilgamel]

Originally Posted by Kuro

On Emarr one of the early Fear attempts lasted 48 fucking hours.

As a rogue, I spent the bulk of that dragging corpses and praying that nothing saw me, falling asleep, and waking up to more corpses.

An endless stream of corpses.

So many idiots, and they all run towards the rest of the people with their "friends."

Hah, I think I was involved in some epic runs on emarr, but nothing that long. You probably remember navigating through fear using Kegolan corpses. Good times.

Anyway I think the biggest problem with new MMOs and every MMO since EQ is the advent of no-drop and the death of the marketplace as an actual location rather than some inhuman box you drop your loots into. On emarr it was east commonlands, and you knew damn near everyone in your level range. Instancing also destroyed much of that. You knew the good players, you knew the assholes, and you actually interacted with them on a daily basis whether you liked it or not. Nowadays each person in an MMO might as well be a number to me, because if they aren't in my immediate circle chances are I may never see him or her again.

Just like all the DAOC nerds talk about the good old days of darkness falls and community interaction old school EQ players(at least the ones I know) lament the loss of that community feeling of Guk or Solb, of racing the asians to Dozekar or happening upon a bargain in out of character while heading toward freeport. Even as far back as UO, where you could search for private seller's houses who had good prices, then recall back, and eventually come to know the person. Or fight with the same people at the graveyard night after night. It had that feeling of community.

WOW, the apex of MMO gaming at the moment is technically superior in a lot of ways. But its community has no soul. Maybe it did before the battlegrounds came in and killed world pvp, but not anymore. First thing any new MMO needs to focus on, before technical issues, before innovations and grand new ideas, is how to develop a community. Without that it's just a video game, and no matter how good it is players will eventually lose interest.

[EmpireF4i]

Ive never had any 48 hour runs but I have been in on some 8+ hour raids on something like Plane of Growth where it was just bards chain pulling mobs from the entire zone for hours on end, then getting the ogre walls up to tank Tunare. Then I remember just as she was about dead, "Fuck, Tunare is my god."

Instant KoS in your home town when you kill your own god.

[Goliath]

I did 52 hours straight of Maiden's Eye. Zero sleep, all by myself. I was having hallucinations about 34 hours in. I never even got the shard till a week after it. Worst experience of EQ for me.

[Gallenite]

Originally Posted by Viktorr

EDIT: O.K. was drunk when I posted this. Sorry...it is a disturbing trend that has been happening with me. I need to stop. If there is anything here that doesn't make sense...well now you know why.

Hahaha -- I'd be happy to reply to any of it, but I think what might have been missed is that I was speaking in the abstract, which appears to have gotten lost in the slight haze.

[Gilgamel]

Scott I'd be thrilled to have your insight on the subject of community vs convenience. On the one hand players always want the path of least resistance, and things like auction houses or instancing make things more accessible. But at what point does it become detrimental to the game(not necessarily the bottom line, but the quality of the game itself) when you remove all the community building facets in favor of a more user friendly approach?

Maybe I'm just waxing nostalgic here but I do think there has to be a happy medium between the things that were so frustrating about Everquest and the souldraining impersonality of WOW.

Maybe just do a few small things:
1. Automated auctionhouses with exorbitant fees. Still there for those who don't wish to partake, but rewarding for those who wish to wheel and deal in person like the good old days. I'd compare it to trading baseball or magic cards rather than being a bonds trader or an e-bay entrepreneur.

2. A few relevant noninstanced dungeons and raids, dispersed throughout all levels. Leave instancing in some places but make it worth people's while to venture into contested content and interact with their fellow player.

I'm sure there are some other small things you could do that smarter people than I could come up with, but I wouldn't think it would take a whole lot to improve things immensely.

[EmpireF4i]

I think one of the cool things about back in the day EQ was seeing that whatever class with that bad ass weapon or BP that only had a chance to drop every week or so.

[Menion]

Originally Posted by EmpireF4i

I think one of the cool things about back in the day EQ was seeing that whatever class with that bad ass weapon or BP that only had a chance to drop every week or so.

I loved the uniqueness of being one of only 3 Rangers with Mistwalker on my server. I used to proc the pet in E Commons and run around with it in the tunnel. People were always confused how a Ranger in green plate (Thorny Vine) could have a wolf pet.

[Ethanael]

How about that Pyzjn and that damn Glowing Black Stone? Fun times.

[Gallenite]

Originally Posted by Gilgamel

Scott I'd be thrilled to have your insight on the subject of community vs convenience. On the one hand players always want the path of least resistance, and things like auction houses or instancing make things more accessible. But at what point does it become detrimental to the game(not necessarily the bottom line, but the quality of the game itself) when you remove all the community building facets in favor of a more user friendly approach?

I think that community and convenience don't necessarily need to be opposed - The fact that a lot of people perceive them that way is an artifact of experiencing EQ, then WoW:

"EQ had some suck, WoW polished 99% of it away, and has 24x the audience. Therefore, the MMO world is a linear scale between EQ and WoW."

That's not an insult - As someone who's spent a lot of time playing both games, it's easy for me to fall into that trap too. But it is a trap, and it's not accurate.

What a lot of us are used to as being big community drivers were also things that were a collective pain in the community's ass. Necessity drove community bonding. It was a subtractive kind of fun -- "In the absence of other people, this sucks."

The trick is to find community bonding drivers that are additive. Make core gameplay fun, then have it made even more fun given more people. Additive fun. "This was fun, and now that I'm playing with real people, this is *awesome!*"

That is a much harder problem to design a game around (and to balance for the long term), and requires a different kind of thinking than most people (including me) are comfortable with, without putting in a lot of extra effort questioning things they take for granted. However, it's fun to try, and even more fun to prove some of it out.

- Scott

[wild_whiskey]

I'm sure a lot of people here were in raiding guilds, but I always felt at home in the level-sprawl guilds, where there were a few 50s who knew their shit and were just there to help the lowbies, a couple genuine newbs, and lots of people who had created tons of characters, levelled to 25 or so then re-rolled.

In those guilds there was always a token fem who would got lots of help every time she asked for something and would be bombarded by tells from the guys in the guild all the time. I remember ours, who was a Druid, sending me a tell, "I JUST GOT JBOOTS!!! I GOT MY JBOOTS." Amazing how the guild felt it was necessary to keep a camp of rotating members on Drelzna to KS it for a god damn druid! Stupid female wood elves, especially with that one face that had blondeish hair and blue eyes.

I sat at Drelzna for probably a total of 11-12 hours before I finally managed to deal enough damage to get the killing blow. There was always a mass of people completely ignoring any sort of courtesy or patience who went balls deep in Drelzna the second she spawned.

During the low levels I would go sit behind a group of people hunting orcs in the orc camp outside of Kelethin or inside crush bone and KS them with AE rain spells. It amazes me that we were able to get away with this kind of shit. Being a wizard had its benefits!

[Miele]

Originally Posted by Gallenite

I think that community and convenience don't necessarily need to be opposed - The fact that a lot of people perceive them that way is an artifact of experiencing EQ, then WoW:

"EQ had some suck, WoW polished 99% of it away, and has 24x the audience. Therefore, the MMO world is a linear scale between EQ and WoW."

That's not an insult - As someone who's spent a lot of time playing both games, it's easy for me to fall into that trap too. But it is a trap, and it's not accurate.

What a lot of us are used to as being big community drivers were also things that were a collective pain in the community's ass. Necessity drove community bonding. It was a subtractive kind of fun -- "In the absence of other people, this sucks."

The trick is to find community bonding drivers that are additive. Make core gameplay fun, then have it made even more fun given more people. Additive fun. "This was fun, and now that I'm playing with real people, this is *awesome!*"

That is a much harder problem to design a game around (and to balance for the long term), and requires a different kind of thinking than most people (including me) are comfortable with, without putting in a lot of extra effort questioning things they take for granted. However, it's fun to try, and even more fun to prove some of it out.

- Scott

I personally think EQ and to a lesser extent the EQ2 of 2004-2005, by being a lot more dependant on the interactions with other players, were pushing players like me towards the community rather than away from it.
I say this because I'm a player with an average to low tolerance for stupidity, I don't mind less skilled players grouping with me, I just hate when they are idiots spewing bullshits all the time and EQ did a good job in filtering some of those out in one way or another.

In short I want to play with cool people and that is what makes these games fun for me. Sure enough that some moments may become memorable due to something happening that is screenshot-worthy so to say, but as others have said on these boards, playing with other people is what pushes us to login everyday, to goof around with them, to share a first kill or a boring farm-mode boss and so on.

So you want to make a fun game and I want to play a fun game, but "fun" is such a subjective concept that you cannot find the magic formula for it (if you can, let me know). I'm 35 years old and I play pen and paper D&D since I was 14, most of them spent as DM. I designed a bazillion campaigns, tons of different encounters and I can say I used 90% or more of the monsters manuals I had my paws on. Sometimes I still fail to provide a fun encounter because 1 or 2 players at my table didn't like something (they rarely say it openly, but I get it nonetheless) and in over 20 years I should avoid these mistakes, right?

Is it fun to have a list of "chores" to do everytime I log in a game, before actually playing it?
Is it fun to approach every single encounter in combat with the same rotation of skills (priority system or not)?
Is it fun to have more than half of the abilities of a class go unused for 90% of the time I'm online (WoW approach) or having to mash through 18-22 hotkeys on every single fight (EQ2 approach)?
Is it fun to run a dungeon N times to get a single piece of gear that never drops?
Is it fun to limit the player basic resources, such as storage room, or playing the "manage inventory minigame" to make room for that stupid quest item?

There are probably a thousand more questions that developers should ask themselves before implementing a feature, yet all seem focused on things that are less relevant than these and sometimes fail to see what's going on in their own game.

It all has to do with goals to achieve: if a player goal becomes earning larger storage room rather than purging the world from evils (or goodies), I think we're on the wrong track, if it becomes amassing large amounts of currency to pay stupidly inflated prices for skills that shouldn't require more than a quest to obtain them, we're just doing unfun things in order to experience a 0.03 minutes long joyful moment, if I have to slay wildlife in a land filled with undeads and demons, we're really totally out of the line.
If I gather tons of gold, let me build a castle, not "learn to ride really really fast".

There are so many fundamentals flaws in current MMOs that listing them all would suck all the bandwidth of these forums, my point is that many devs focused more on putting small stupid carrots ahead of a player while at the same time losing focus on the big picture.

I'm a hero, I don't care about how many other heroes are out there, I want to feel like one. If me a my buddies kill a motherfucking dragon that would have burned down a village, roasted the people in it and raped all the goats, have the population of that village give me free blowjobs, food and shelter as reward, they should not even think of selling me their overpriced shitty stuff.

I rambled for way too long and probably in a random order.

Peace.