38 Studios Copernicus, Mercury and other stuff

[Lourdin]

Originally Posted by Cadrid

This is something I never considered, but is a solid point. I would go further and have the player receive a guide to the local fauna/areas that provide the tradeskill materials; for example, if you took Mining as a human newbie in WoW, it would point you to the kobold-infested mines near Goldshire and the various hills throughout Elwynn Forest.

My point exactly. And while we are at it the starting map for a newb area shouldn't be fogged over in mystery. It should be CLEARLY labeled and marked. We are not talking about great exploration here. We are talking about an area well know to the inhabitants. For starter quests, why cant the NPC giving the quest say, "Here give me your map, I'll mark the location where you need to go."

Not all the quests need to be this specific, just some of the starter quests. You can have other quests where the location is more ambiguous, "Somewhere to the north is a great tower..." Not marked on the map but the general location is given. WoW does a nice job at this but a first time player may need a bit more.

[Mr Element]

Just a random thought:

For whatever reason, I really liked how in EverQuest the common mobs names would be lower case and a rare would either be something with an extra adjective or a proper name.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Pretty much every game does that.

[Tred]

I'm quite partial to the "a orc warrior" vs. "an orc warrior" system. Now that's how all games should differentiate rare mobs. God damn "a orc warrior" 's were douche bags.

[Northerner]

Fire Beatles were much cooler than Fire Beetles as well.

[Mr Element]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

Pretty much every game does that.

I know its almost considered sacrilegious to disagree with you around here, but I'm staring at a "Forgotten Depths Slayer" right now. On WoW that is nothing special. Theres 30 of them around here. In EQ that mob would have been called "a forgotten depths slayer". If a rare spawned he might be named "an Enraged depths slayer" or "Griszk" or whatever.

[vynde]

Originally Posted by Believe

You fail to acknowledge that the majority of PVPers are complete douchebags that love to stalk others and attack them when they have the advtantage...and then corpse camp them for the following hour.

I agree that PVE should in no way be affected by PVP though, just horrible game design. Make abilities work differently (Different damage, durations, etc) on players and NPCs.

Not at all true. I love PVP(out in the wild, you can bring 10 friends to fight me even if i'm coming alone, and etc) but I'm a dueler at heart. I'll give you the perfect example: SWG Jedi hunting. For months jedi would whine, cry, and complain at how awful it was that some bounty hunter could track them down, kill them, take away hours and maybe days worth of exp, AND get a reward for it.

Well that was taken out, and now I'm seeing a lot of "I never realized it was so much fun till it was gone" type of posts, and the reason it was fun WAS the looking over the shoulder, the huge risk, and the rush of fighting to keep something.

Griefing seems to be rampant when there's something personal between the two participants, be it guild, some rivalry, etc. Otherwise, it's pretty much here and there. I even played on the PVP servers in EQ, for I think about a year, and in all that time only ONE dickhead comes to mind when I think about being camped. And that's because the guy was just a dick.

You have to think of those guys are basically the ninja looters in PVE content, or the people that'll use an exploit in the arena. They are the minority, and I think a game with PVP AND exp loss would only make the community better because that actually brings people TOGETHER.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Originally Posted by Mr Element

I know its almost considered sacrilegious to disagree with you around here, but I'm staring at a "Forgotten Depths Slayer" right now. On WoW that is nothing special. Theres 30 of them around here. In EQ that mob would have been called "a forgotten depths slayer". If a rare spawned he might be named "an Enraged depths slayer" or "Griszk" or whatever.

Probably because I'm right most of the time. As I am in this case. There's even a handy dandy list of all of the rare spawns right in game. And this is just wotlk.

Northern Exposure - Achievement - World of Warcraft

TBC/Vanilla had rare spawns as well, always with unique names. Now, maybe I misread you and your real gripe is that trash mobs don't have "a" or "an" prefaced before them. If that's what is really bugging you, then send a PM to Torrid. I'm sure for 50 bucks he'd be glad to code you a mod that'll do just that for you.

[Quince]

He meant the lower case letters for generic mobs and Capital letters for the names / unique mobs.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Originally Posted by Quince

He meant the lower case letters for generic mobs and Capital letters for the names / unique mobs.

Well even that was inconsistent. Some rares weren't capitalized and many capitalized mobs weren't exactly rare. Fortunately in WoW if you really miss that you might be able to mod it in. Most other games you'll be shit outta luck though, if they even have rare spawns that is.

To be honest what I would miss even more is the super rare spawns that don't make sense. Like the AC in EQ or the TLPD in WoW. I don't think there's a single object on WoWhead that has more comments then that fucking drake. Having shit like that is more fun to me then worry about the consistency of a naming scheme.

I'd like to avoid yet another EQ nostalgia derail so I'll cut myself short here since it appears I have another secret admirer. Don't worry Mr Element, if you ever feel unsafe disagreeing with me you can always take the cowards way out.

[Mr Element]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

I'd like to avoid yet another EQ nostalgia derail so I'll cut myself short here since it appears I have another secret admirer. Don't worry Mr Element, if you ever feel unsafe disagreeing with me you can always take the cowards way out.

I didn't neg you, prick. In fact, I probably already + you earlier when you were actually throwing around some good game ideas.

[Warrik]

Originally Posted by Believe

You fail to acknowledge that the majority of PVPers are complete douchebags that love to stalk others and attack them when they have the advtantage...and then corpse camp them for the following hour.

I agree that PVE should in no way be affected by PVP though, just horrible game design. Make abilities work differently (Different damage, durations, etc) on players and NPCs.

For me, PvP should not be just something you can do in a game. It needs to be the core function within the game. Daoc really gave a reason to PvP , but I think that much more could have been done with the concept. Arenas are nothing more than glorified duals.

[vynde]

Originally Posted by Warrik

Arenas are nothing more than glorified duals.

I wish. Ghostcrawler has made WoW PVP into musical chairs. I guess it's nice that every class get's a turn, but it's pretty stupid when he says "well I know that ability is OP but the class representation is so low so keep crying a river".

[Zehn - Vhex]

Originally Posted by Warrik

For me, PvP should not be just something you can do in a game. It needs to be the core function within the game. Daoc really gave a reason to PvP , but I think that much more could have been done with the concept. Arenas are nothing more than glorified duals.

There's two kinds of PvP. Competitive and griefing. You can't base a game on griefing or it will flop, end of story. And before you say "But Eve..." I welcome you to go actually play Eve and then come back and tell me in 3 years when you finally actually have something worth losing how much grief you actually were at the tail end of.

The second argument griefers like to give is "well if only a ~good~ game had griefing it'd do well!" without a hint of irony. The whole point of griefing is to dominate another player so badly he quits. Not exactly a business model any company is going to put large amounts of cash into.

Fortunately for the griefers that keep claiming griefing pvp is what keeps the world exciting and dangerous and blah blah blah, this is one area where you can have your cake and eat it too. EQ did it somewhat successfully for years with the Zek servers. Let that self-cleaning oven of hate romp on their own handful of servers while everyone else enjoys competitive pvp on other servers.

I would -kill- for a FFA pvp or perma death server in WoW. I've posted about it before in length so I'll just let your imaginations run wild with the possibilities.

Anyways...

That being said one of the things that annoys me most about GC is that he claims players would have a hard time adjusting to spells doing multiple things if they had different rulesets for PvP and PvE.

I find that hilarious as they fucking change that shit every patch anyway. We've learned to fucking cope. It's already done with Crowd Control spells. How hard is it to ask that damage spells do a fixed % of another players health in damage so we don't have insane scaling issues? Then you only have to balance that shit once and the only time it's called into question is whenever you add new abilities to the game.

Originally Posted by Mr Element

I didn't neg you, prick. In fact, I probably already + you earlier when you were actually throwing around some good game ideas.

I know. I was talking about the shitheads that'll completely miss the point. You say that you miss something about capitalization and rare mobs and say that WoW doesn't have these. I say that many games have rare mobs and if it's capitalization you miss that in WoW you can have it modded in. Someone responds with 'no.' They'd have to be a phenomenal level of retarded to not understand the discussion we were having.

[Rayne]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

There's two kinds of PvP. Competitive and griefing. You can't base a game on griefing or it will flop, end of story. And before you say "But Eve..." I welcome you to go actually play Eve and then come back and tell me in 3 years when you finally actually have something worth losing how much grief you actually were at the tail end of.

The second argument griefers like to give is "well if only a ~good~ game had griefing it'd do well!" without a hint of irony. The whole point of griefing is to dominate another player so badly he quits. Not exactly a business model any company is going to put large amounts of cash into.

Thank you Zehn. This is pretty much what I was getting at. And developers need to get this through thier heads. Keep the latter grouped into thier own version of your game if you're going to include that kind of play. With its own separate set of rules and balance. Don't mix the shit together, and then wonder "wtf happened?" when your entire game gets pounded into its own little niche because of your own ignorance and stupidity.