Rant: How Everquest is killing itself for me

[moltenfists]

during SOV i HATED figting dain with more than 24 people.

"target out of range" every fucking second is so god damn annoying

TOV at least the melee boxes are so big that you got a chance to hit form far away.

tunare....fuck those little focusers
get to SOL and sraa and some snakes are ok but some are not.


i have slowed my play time IMMENSELY since PoP because i hate going on raids where it is not even me pulling anymore because others can pull just as well anymore since the idea is now
"fuck it bring 3 we can mez em or off tank em"
so why not have th pally pull or the SK let the monk just do his DPS and STFU.

great fine i can watch TV and play now, but not when my DPS sucks because of mob OOR fucking every 3 seconds. it is retarded and the recent 150 person aren'dar kill on 7th made me sick as all hell. i am sad that it even happnd and frankly the game is losing it's skill as kreugan said.

/shrug back to DAOC for a bit then

[Rani]

Just wait until SWG, guilds there can be up to 500 ppl it seems

You aint seen zerg yet! hehe.

[Hika Mindsong]

Let's make an analogy with musical chairs. How many chairs make the game the most enjoyable when there are 10 people playing: 10 chairs? 1 chair? 3? 8?

That analogy describes a PvP environment, not PvE. Since EQ is, for the vast majority, a PvE game, I play to compete against the content, not other players.

While I understand the desire for players to exhibit competitiveness against each other, I would prefer it to be in a realistic context. Me and my twenty friends waking up before you does not constitute a good comparison of skill against the PvE content. Especially if me waking up before you completely prevents you from ever testing yourself against that content unless I feel like permitting it.

A better way for people interested in measuring virtual penises is to permit everyone equal opportunity at the content then see who can complete it with more skill, less players, whatever.

Such an environment is fostered by virtual spaces. It also lets those who wish to be more casual the ability to see the content they paid for, at their own pace, without affecting, or being affected by, anyone else.

If you want to practice the cursed sequence in Ssra all day long, you should be able to, and not worry about affecting anyone else.

Virtual spaces also lets those guilds who could care less who is first, who is leetest or who killed Bob the Undying with 6 or 60 just play the game.

The sense of accomplishment I get in EQ comes from my group or guild defeating an encounter (PvE). I get no rush when I beat some other guild to a spawn. All I get is a sense relief, and I also feel bad for the losing guild, because I've been in their shoes.

Virtual spaces provides solutions to several core game issues.

1) It lets players compete against content and measure their skill in a more measurable manner than "I was here first, neener"

2) It scales game content to server population.

3) It promotes a MUCH better sense of immersion in the game world. I've always loved being the only group exploring a zone, it feels much much more immersive than being in a zone with 120 people drowning in OOC and bumping into new groups every time you turn a corner.

4) It lets the game designers specify a cap. You can enforce caps by putting portal limitations on boss encounters, or entire zones. You want Nagafen to be a 6 man encounter? A virtual space limit of 6 players can be enforced.

5) In capless situations, it lets guilds do whatever they find most fun. Want to take 120 people and kill Grummus? Fine by me. Want to try with 6 all day long? Also fine with me.

The largest downside is that it reduces the chance for social interaction. (Racing for content is not very good social interaction). However there's nothing stopping the game engine from having "common" zones that have normal respawn and even boss mobs for those guilds to race to kill (in addition to their own virtual copies) if they enjoy that sort of competition.

People would XP (and therefore meet each other) in the shared instances of zones, and then could adventure in zones with private virtual instances.

All in all, it would make EQ (or the PvE MMORPG of your choice) much more interesting to play. Return it to its roots as a fantasy group game, where you build your character and test it against the content the game designers provide for you. It lets players play as they see fit, in no way does it demand you play the game in a certain fashion, the way EQ does now.

-- Hika

[Fendryl]

Originally posted by Szlia
Competition for content results in frustrations but also in excitement. Competition for content generates social interactions, even if they are negative ones, while virtual spaces reduce them.

I'd agree, even the negative interactions do partially add to the community of EQ; the drama -is- part of the interest. However, I'd also wager that it's something EQ could easilly do without, I'm sure if you could look at the numbers, you have more account cancellations from those frustrated & tired with the negative interactions, than those that stay around for them.

It's the same reason Trammel in UO is more popular than Felucia, it's the same reason there's only 3 pvp servers in EQ -- The majority of people don't want to compete with other players, too many other players are just not fun to compete with. If I want to compete with other players, I'll play on a PvP server, or I'll play a FPS where PvP is expected & balanced.

For EQ on a non-PvP server, the challenge of fighting Emporer Ssra is supposed to be fighting Emporer Ssra, not racing 4 other guilds to the spawn.

Let's make an analogy with musical chairs. How many chairs make the game the most enjoyable when there are 10 people playing: 10 chairs? 1 chair? 3? 8?

Musical chairs is a game in which the challenge is intended to be from the other players, EQ is not. Musical chairs after 1 person wins, you instantly can play again -- you don't have to wait a week to play again.

A better analogy is television or the newspaper; How successful would Survivor be if only the 1st person who tuned in Thursday night could watch that night's show & everyone else couldn't get a chance to watch until next Thursday?

[Ming]

The problem with virtual spaces is the mudflation. A group capable of defeating a given encounter is going to farm the holy hell out of that encounter. Scarcity is very important in an mmorpg. If people farm encounter x to get items x, y, and z those items will quickly become common which feeds mudflation.

They'd either have to dramatically limit the drop tables, or limit individual characters access to virtual spaces with invisible flags. (on the latter, for example: player x cannot enter virtual space ZZ if he has killed ZZ's boss mob within x hours.)

[Aspheris]

I'll try to make this short.

You can't really take the word on anyone about how the game should be.

It's true what they say there are more casuals then ubers and SOE knows the ubers are more adicted to EQ then casuals so why piss off casuals.

All sides cry for their own reason, I have been in uber guilds and alliance guilds and small guilds and guildless and everyone of them had a list of complaints.

SOE can not base content for FOH or and uber's because there are only a hand full of ubers compared to non-ubers.

How can you say this mob should be beaten by 18 people when they could be 18 people in VT armor or 18 people in Keal armor.

That's the problem there are guilds who will get to the 3rd and even 4th teir zones without VT and i know you can say well to bad go back to VT but from SOE's standpoint if you make em do it they may lose money.

LOY was made because people complained that getting flags in POP were to hard and unlike ubers many of the complainers quit and i mean quit 100% not cancel the account for 2 months and come back.

I think the real only way to limit zerg or whatever is a boss mob for everyone and we know ubers would not like that.

Think of it you get 30 people click on stone it brings you in, next group of 30 gets it's own zone.

But what happens then? There is no competition so that guild will try and try and try until they beat that mob uncontested and you will see tons of guilds posting what you killed quicker.

Also like everyone has said it's not always about skill sometimes and mostly in alliance guilds you take 90 because that's how many show up and you can't kick them out.

As for the serverwide 200 man flag fests well you know they do that because of uber guilds, see when we hit POV it was still pretty empty and only the top 4 or 5 guilds where flagged for pov/pos at the time and we liked it that way.

But we kept quiet about it but not others no they went to message boards and bragged about how the "suck" guilds wont get into pov and then we said they wont get into ponb then it was bot and so on.

That made all the "suck" guilds put aside their fighting and zerg and work together to get keyed and this will contiune and far as they can take it.

SOE is very smart they are not dumb like people say they know who is most likely to quit and who is just bluffing they know who would delete the toon they know who will cancel and never come back. This is the key to all your flames and rants.

I would even bet they have a team who will cross reference people who say they will quit vs. those who go through with it and they get their data.

I love pop i still like the idea but so many people will not see much of pop and that may be fine for ubers but not for everyone else and it's those everyone's who will delete and quit and not come back while you and me will just take vacations.

[Fendryl]

Originally posted by Ming
The problem with virtual spaces is the mudflation. A group capable of defeating a given encounter is going to farm the holy hell out of that encounter. Scarcity is very important in an mmorpg. If people farm encounter x to get items x, y, and z those items will quickly become common which feeds mudflation.

That's a common misconception when it comes to Virtual spaces. First of all I'd argue that with the limit of once per week spawning, you'd actually have less loot per guild that you do currently, given the numerous zone resets with crashes/etc.

The other point on mudflation with virtual spaces -- who cares? The only reason mudflation is an issue is because of competition for content, mudflation is bad in the current environment because those players getting inflated power ratings will be competing with you soon for content. In a virtual spaced environment, the 'end' result would just be 5 or so guilds at the same position that your current server's lead guild is at. That's not a bad thing, because they're not removing content from eachother though.

I do agree, however, that you might need to somewhat limit the frequency that you can switch guilds in such a system. Because if you could just Kill the AoW as Guild ABC, then reguild as DEF do it again, then reguild as XYZ and do it again, you'd burn through content faster. Limiting guildjoining to once per week would cover this though & it's fairly trivial to implement.

[SanadanMoonbow]

There is no real argument anyone can come up with against virtual spaces IMO.

The current game environment is good for the one guild on each server that can dominate all content. For the rest of the server it sucks, and is one of the main reasons I quit playing.

Guild competition is not fun. Competition such as AL vs. FoH is much different than interserver competition (alot less volatile) and virtual spaces would change the same server fights into friendly competition (such as AL vs. FoH) and that's how it should be imo.

Cockblocking and anything similar to it is simply childish IMO, but in the current game it's effective.

[Squig]

I no longer play EQ, but still follow the boards occasionally. I havent posted here before but decided to do so after reading Kreugen's post because it hit on so many good points.

First off, saying VI cant fix this in their current engine isnt correct. Furor's comment about DT'ing everyone under lvl 65 for an encounter tuned for lvl 65 characters is a little harsh but why not just teleport those people under 65 away from the encounter just like Nagafen does with people over lvl 53. This is obviously already in the engine.

Second, to stop Zerging VI could put a temporary flag just before you get to the main encounter area that only flags up to a certain amount of people (raid leader initiates and it flags the first 5 groups in raid or up to the number allowed for the event) The temp flag lasts for an hour or whatever is reasonable for the encounter. If you havent beaten the mob in the time limit you get teleported back to the zone in. Anyone without the flag would be automatically teleported to the entrance and the flag giver doesnt give out more flags until the first round expires.

I believe the hedge maze quest only flags 3 groups reguardless of how many groups are in a raid ? So then the only coding they would need to do is the "temp flag" part and it really shouldnt be that hard to put a timer on a flag....

The people bitching about how some mobs are soo hard and that only guilds like foh would beat them if zerging wasnt availible arent seeing the big picture. Mobs are hard because VI cant control the number of people atacking. So they make mobs so hard that you either have to zerg or be very skilled/geared like the uber guilds. Once VI has the ability to control the number of people that can raid a mob they can better tune it to be "challenging" but not rediculously overpowering for X number of people.

I hate the whole raiding system that has evolved in EQ. It's not a band of intrepid adventurers out to seek fame and fortune, its more like a mercenary army that goes around killing shit.

BTW if VI wasnt a bunch of greedy money grubbing bastards and used their brain they might see that the temp flag could be used in another way to make the game more fun. Why do mobs take a week to respawn ? - simple because if they took an hour then the uber guilds would kill em over and over and have all the loot from the mob and get bored. However since most servers are over crowded you end up waiting for mobs for several weeks some times if you have several powerful guilds on a server. Can we say boring ? Now lets take the temp flag idea and look at it from the opposite side - after you have beaten a mob it flags everyone in the raid AND your guild with a temp flag that prevents you from getting the first flag(the one that allows you to enter the encounter area) for 7 days. Then the mob respawns in a day. What this does is allow guilds to co-exist much better since they can all get a shot at every mob once a week, and it prevents cock-blocking which is just retarded anyway. VI wont do it though because it does speed up the rate at which loot comes into the game, but EQ is supposed to be a job not a game right ?

[Kether]

Once VI has the ability to control the number of people that can raid a mob they can better tune it to be "challenging" but not rediculously overpowering for X number of people.

That won't do shit except make the game worse.

X encounter limited to 40 people. Ok, let's make it challenging to the 'raiding' guilds. You know the type that has 1 druid that gets logged on to buff/debuff on a second comp and 10 clerics for massive CHing, with 1 Pal to BSS, some warriors, a few debuffers, and 20 DPS classes.

Ok, you can do that. Not a problem.

Then what do you do when a group of otherwise skilled and equally geared persons with a more even distribution of classes that wants to complete that encounter? You let all the 'undesirabe' classes ROTATE in since you can't take too many of them at once or you will fail due to shear game mechanics.

Or you make it so 40 persons of random classes can complete it. And you end up with something that an optimized raid force blows through without even a hint of risk.


The ONLY way you are going to get MEANINGFUL anti-zerg measures are if they mob and/or encounter is dynamically weighted against the force present against it.

[Squig]

/shrug there are always going to be some classes that are better at raids then others. Most of the classes that arent best for raids are MUCH better at soloing then other classes and frankly there should be a price to pay for that. VI just gave in to the whiners.

I gave one quick example. I didnt say it was bullet proof. As a further fix to the example you gave - No one can move past the flag giver without a flag or they get teleported to the zone right ? And your assuming I meant that the flag giver was right outside the main encounter room ? What if its not. What if its half way through the zone. And what if they put a trap that cant be disarmed just a short way down the hallway that debuffs everyone and just like the invisible wall that prevents you from leaving the emp room there is one that prevents you from going back. Now if you want those buffs from the non-dps classes you have to take em with you.

Im sure you can come up with some way to work around this example as well and we could go back and forth for a while until we had a pretty good system in place (Hey VI this is called testing in case you were wondering) but my point still stands that there is a way to correct the zerg tactic and cockblocking with very little changes to the code. It would just require VI to do something they dont currently do - test their product.

[Fendryl]

You don't have to combat zerging. If 80 people think 'fun' is all of them joining together & killing the ghoul lord, that's their perogative. The problem is when those 80 people impact upon your gaming experience.

Does it really matter to anyone if FoH were to use 25 people for one encounter, and AL were to use 80 people for the same encounter? No, because they're on different servers, now put them on the same server and it becomes a HUGE issue become 1 group's success (or in some cases, just the attempt), removes the opportunity from the other group.

If Thott & Furor want to compare virtual penis sizes they still can on the boards just like usual so that rivalry still exists, the key difference here is that it's even competition.

[Hika Mindsong]

If Thott & Furor want to compare virtual penis sizes

(sudden image of a profanity-laden chart graphic)

-- Hika

[Averagemonkey]

Most of the classes that arent best for raids are MUCH better at soloing then other classes and frankly there should be a price to pay for that.

Eh what? That might have been true at some point in the past, but certainly isn't now. Just read the thread: melee classes have the worst time in PoP raids. Guess which classes are the worst at soloing?

Whoever at Verant had the slightest bit of imagination about how to improve the capabilities of melee classes definitely left right before Luclin came out.

[Aspheris]

You don't have to combat zerging. If 80 people think 'fun' is all of them joining together & killing the ghoul lord, that's their perogative. The problem is when those 80 people impact upon your gaming experience.

I think this is one thing we need to define, what is considered impacting one's fun. I remember being in a smaller guild and clearing Fear when an uber guild comes in and says they want CT but will wait till we are done.

We knew we couldn't beat CT but wanted to see how much HP we could get out of him. So the leader tells the uber guild leader our plan and they say go for it.

Now they knew we wouldn't beat him so we aren't an cause for concern but i know many guilds who wouldn't even let us try because it was a waste of their time and if we can't beat it dont try.

So we faught him got him down like 8% and died, the other guild killed him and ressed use and that was it. I had as much fun trying it back then as when i first helped kill him and that is the fun that is EQ.

Fast foward and im in a uber raiding guild we go to Ntov and some guild wants to try Anry (whatever that lobster looking bastard is called) well i was like go for it but many in my guild at the time were like hell no! They suck they can't beat him they are in their way ect. Well the Guild leader said let them try and the flames in guild continued and the other guild failed and we let the mob regen to full and attacked and won.

But the fact that some in that guild were so offened to have this "lesser" guild waste their time and kill their mob it was kind of stupid. I can understand being on a raid all day and waiting more will make you upset but people need to have some tact or some feelings or somthing.

Same thing even today we will go up vs. a new boss mob and the guild who has killed it before will get all mad and say we will whipe or whatever and if we beat him they will come of with any thing they can think of to make the victory seam bad, this is just the style of the uber game in EQ.