Green Monster Games (Curt Schilling)

[Azrayne]

I don't miss solo grinding, but I do find I miss group grinding. There was something fun about just getting a group together and ploughing through mobs for a few hours while everyone chills out and talks shit, it definately lent itself towards a more social environment.

Obviously this type of playstyle shouldn't be the sole path to level cap, but it would be nice if it existed as an option. I miss dungeons being somewhere you go, not something you do, if that makes sense.

I'm also of the opinion that group content should always give better XP than solo content. The cap shouldn't be too big and soloing should definately be viable, but I think grouping should be the preferable option if you want to maintain any kind of cohesive community.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Well, the type of communities largest factor is going to be game size. If you want a 'tighter knit' community you're going to have to play games with either miniscule server sizes or are otherwise not quite as popular.

That's why I cringe everytime someone posts "WOW HAZ NO CMOMUNTY LIEK EQ DID OMG BIFRE!" Well no shit. You're probably going to know everybody in your little Podunk town of 50 people. Move to NYC and holy shit you don't even ~want~ to know half the people that live on the same block as you.

Doesn't mean there aren't awesome people in NYC that you'd have a blast hanging out with and doesn't mean that Sheriff Chester in Podunk isn't a pedophile.

Some people just aren't cut out for 'big city life.'

So yeah, want a surefire way to make sure your game has an 'awesome' tight knit community? Make your game a stinking pile of shit and the 16 people who are still playing the game as you shut it down will swear up and down it had the most awesome community ever and they can't stand WoW because it just can't compare.

[Clerica]

One way to create a community is to force them to buy/sell using their toons instead of using an auction house. Yes no auction house set up sucks for non prime time players but it was one of the most interactive set up in EQ.

How many of the former EQ players can recall the great moments in the trading zone for their servers? Seeing the hardcore and the casual mixing together in one zone and interacting with each other.

I picked up many a nice trinket from some of the ubers and actually got alot of freebie stuff when I just sat around asking where to go/what to do. Heck I can still recall some of the people that hung around there even though many of them stopped playing 4+ years ago.

[Cybsled]

One way to create a community is to force them to buy/sell using their toons instead of using an auction house. Yes no auction house set up sucks for non prime time players but it was one of the most interactive set up in EQ.

All that does is force gold farmer operations to pay some dude 10 cents an hour to spam the zone with all the worthless, overpriced shit he's selling. It also hurts the crafting element of MMOs, since there is no reliable means to supply raw materials (ie, you need to be online at the right time). Times have changed since ECom tunnels.

[Tudana]

Originally Posted by Flight

Please include options to just grind mobs rather than questing all the time.

Playing EQ1 again the last couple of months its amazing how much I don't miss doing any quests. At all. Not even a little bit.

Thnx

Agree, that is one of the things I have learned to hate in games in the last few years, the addiction to having a quest for every area and that being the means of exping. Oh and "hey! Can someone share ALL the quests for this dungeon please! kk thx" ...sigh.

Quests have all but lost all true meaning...

Put the grind back into mobs and camps with rare boss pops, with random loot table.

[Guiness]

Originally Posted by Azrayne

I don't miss solo grinding, but I do find I miss group grinding. There was something fun about just getting a group together and ploughing through mobs for a few hours while everyone chills out and talks shit, it definately lent itself towards a more social environment.

Me and some friends recently went back to FFXI, and the above quoted statement is exactly what I enjoyed so much about that game as well as EQ1, and subsequently forgotten after the past couple of years of solo questing ninety percent of the time in my mmo game play (wow,lotro,eq2).

If you are pushing yourselves for the best xp, the party grind is anything but dull, pulling mobs at the upper envelope of your group's ability means you all have to be on your toes, and yet there is still enough time in between pulls to shoot the shit, goof off and socialize without the incessant scurrying from point A to point B and all the leg work that questing usually entails.

I'm not saying that I don't like questing at all, I just kind of miss the concept of quest being on a little more grand scale, like Raincaller or the way that the main questline in Final Fantasy is tied to telling you and directly involving your character in the storyline of the game/expansion. I believe a happy medium will be found though.

[Gecko]

Originally Posted by Azrayne

I don't miss solo grinding, but I do find I miss group grinding. There was something fun about just getting a group together and ploughing through mobs for a few hours while everyone chills out and talks shit, it definately lent itself towards a more social environment.

Yes and no to this. I do miss the social aspects of grouping. In EQ and early WOW we had the same people so grouping felt like a team setup, and it was fun. However, I really like logging in for 45 minutes and doing dailies and feeling I've accomplished something. It sucked in EQ when our cleric was out and our group was SOL. I also felt bad for that poor bastard at the entrance yelling LFG for hours...

I don't miss hours and hours sitting in Old Sebilis performing ethnic cleansing on Frogloks, though. Well, maybe a little, and especially that fun feeling when your Chanter with the crappy dial up goes Linkdead while that 4 pull is incoming...

[Citten]

Originally Posted by Tropics

God that would suck. I seriously get too much of that in WOW, I want a slow paced combat game with strategy on which spell to cast, not some twitchy "try to shoot the eyes!!!" experience.

If you're too much of a simpleton to envision how this could be done correctly and made fun I don't know what to tell you. WoW is not a FPS, clicking fast in WoW doesn't equate to FPS style of combat.

Combat cannot be the same. It needs to be altered. It has the ability to be so much more than it is to feel like you're really fighting. The only greatness in fighting now is to increase your output and score card, the actual act of combat is not fun.

There is no reason not to consider different ways of approaching combat and implementing camera angles/zooms as an integral component.

[XadionDarkborn]

I will get flames for this- for many reasons- one of them as many know- I cannot really type what I am thinking accuratly because I am retarded.

Anywho...

In EQ1 when you looked at an item you placed it in your mind as an upgrade, or whatever to XYZ had to figure its DPS by either dmg/delay ratio or other- etc you had many ways of looking at an item- weapon - armor etc. When you did combat you had many factors of what to do...kite..semi kite then tank...tank...what you dont know...

I felt this way from almost day 1 with WoW- it was too much of a simple calculation. Sword is a 1dps..oh look a sword 1.1 dps lets get it. And now with item number levels...oh a 200 stat item, but then there are the ohh 220 item level epics oohh my!... I dont know maybe its the fact that the XXX of the YYY items where oh so formulic generic that they where bland and who gives a fuck...now the epics from fighting are the same...all wow items are some stupid spreadsheet of numbers put in to plop out X more DPS...all skills/spells are X dps or utility points and all balanced around PVP that makes PVE shit up the river...I dont know...I know that even EQ can be traced down (fuck everything) can be traced down to a mathmatical dice roll etc but it just seemed...better in EQ...slower combat or whatever you call it as the reason.

Hell everything is given to you in WoW even the agro meters- you can have an entire raid run by a robot...mage...oh no agro reaching take over..stop...okay resume..priest healing etc etc whatever it just is so fucking terriable- you get the formula you win, plain and simple- Okay raid we need 250k DPS to win, form up the usuals and lets review the rest to see if they meat the requirements...okay Bob the vet whos been playing for years and is awsome is 5k dps and Joey the rouge that ninjaed some sword is 5.1k dps..shit we are .1k dps off the mark to beat whateverthefuck the last boss...bring Joey.

In EQ you would want the vet, with 'inferior' gear but skill and experiance rather than some punk kid that can press evesorate alot while spazzing out to whatever kids listen to now days.

/rant off

Dont know what to say Curt...dont make a game that sucks please :-) and yes, we want it all-- good story, good characters and great combat. and imo PVP should be an after thought- not a focus.

[Drave]

Originally Posted by Tudana

Quests have all but lost all true meaning...

^ QFE.

[Bongk]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

Well, the type of communities largest factor is going to be game size. If you want a 'tighter knit' community you're going to have to play games with either miniscule server sizes or are otherwise not quite as popular.

That's why I cringe everytime someone posts "WOW HAZ NO CMOMUNTY LIEK EQ DID OMG BIFRE!" .

I don't believe this to be true. On a wow server you can only create community with one side anyways. So does say alliance on duskwood really have many more people than say Rodcet Nife in its prime? I do not think so.

Also than why dont the low pop servers have a thriving community?

It is because WoW fosters solo gameplay over group gameplay. Noone gives a fuck who youa re until lvl 80.

On seventh hammer up untill pop, I bet I knew, by name at least, 85% of the server over lvl 30. If you saw someone lvl 50 you didnt know it was like "where the fuck did they come from"

This arguement just seems flawed to me, Total game population means nothing its server population and wow serves while holding more people are cut in half by horde/alliance.

You are acting like eq server had 50 people and each wow server had 200k.

[Thengel]

Originally Posted by Bongk

I don't believe this to be true. On a wow server you can only create community with one side anyways. So does say alliance on duskwood really have many more people than say Rodcet Nife in its prime? I do not think so.

While it's true you can only communicate with one side, you still SEE the other side running around your 'shared communities' like Shattrath and Dalaran (Fuck both those places). You don't give a shit about looking at people's names any more. Then you join a xserver battleground and get to pull from a pool of 6X that number of random names. The sheer number of people isn't the ONLY reason, but it is a big reason you just don't give a fuck. Leveling speed is another though - you aren't going to recognize a new level 80 because, well, they just rolled up that guy last week.

[James]

Originally Posted by Thengel

Leveling speed is another though - you aren't going to recognize a new level 80 because, well, they just rolled up that guy last week.

This really has nothing to do with anything, though. After a certain point it was tough to keep track of new level 50s/60s/whatever on VZ even with a decidedly smaller level-cap community, AND a mentality that it paid to know the strengths and weaknesses of your opponents like the back of your fucking hand.

It's a pretty easy concept to understand. When you hit the level cap, and spend the majority of your time doing level cap things, you're probably not going to pay too much attention to little Timmy Bumfuck grinding his way through the 20s and 30s no matter if it takes him a day or a year to do so. Subsequently, if the end game is spent mostly inside of a size-capped raid, you're probably not going to pay too much attention to things going on outside of it save for the little bit of PoK/General/Trade drama that happens when you're buying raid mats in town.

[Zeste]

EQ and WoW's conditioning models were totally different.

EQ's success and resistance to extinction (as evident in the 100000 nostalgia threads) is that it's condition system was like this:

Rewards: Random and infrequent.
Punishments: Severe and frequent

This is a fantastic model for psychological conditioning. Random, infrequent rewarding is the strongest method of conditioning and has the highest resistance to extinction. This way, when the curve of rewards got smaller and smaller the longer you waited for the reward, your resistance to quitting was quite strong, you were willing to put up with TONS of waiting and pain in the ass situations to get your reward. How many times did I camp seb for the Undead bard to get the Singing Short Sword only to have Triton swoop down and destroy Trakkanon before my guild could even get 20 people there? But I kept going back and sitting there using my Siningsteel Helmet to try and glitch the Eye of Zomm down into Traks lair to spot that Bard!

This isn't my opinion on conditioning, it's got a huge body of psychological research behind it.


Now, WoW's conditioning model is alot different.

Rewards: Semi-Consistent and semi-predictable.
Punishments: Near non-existant.


This is a totally different model for conditioning. It is a much faster and immediate reward, so much so that players are conditioned to be averse to a delay of gratification or random, infrequent rewards. The average wow player would never, ever suffer through EQ style waiting and punishment/reward, but not because they can't, it's because WoW has spent the last 5 years conditioning them in a totally different manner.

EQ, the promise in the conditioning was "It's going to take a damn long time, and really piss you off, and really test your patience and ability to play. But when the reward does arrive, it's going to be so great that all the effort will be worth it." The human brain get's addicted to this style of conditioning and will resist the 'losing interest' impulse for a very long time. People would play and literally do nothing but farm AA's in the same camp spot for day and days, just for the chance to race another guild for the Boss that spawned every 3 days, and even then, you may not get the boss, and if you do, the loot was sparse and rare. But by god, your first Yelinak kill when racing another guild, that was stuff of legend. And if YOU actually got Yelinaks head? That just bought Sony another year of your business, no questions asked.

WoW, the promise in the conditioning is "It's going to be pretty easy and predictable, but we'll reward you every day, sometimes every few hours. It's not going to be some epic achievement, but you'll have something small to reward you every single day."

This conditioning method has a much weaker resistance to extinction. It's like a clock. As soon as those hand stops moving, you know it's broke and throw it away or replace the battery. How many people quit until Ulduar came out, since the rewards were just got? Got all their Valor badge loot, their KT and Maly loot... now what? There's no rewards, and no need for any patience or commitment since you know nothing is coming. You can map out your EXACT path for Heroism/Valor/Conquest badge loot, your exact time commitment for farming Honor and getting PvP gear, check your map for herb or mining nodes, everything. As soon as there is a pause or a drought in reward, interest immediately dies off.


There's a reason why EQ is nostalgic and seems like the "golden age" and WoW does not. It has very little to do with the "content" and everything to do with how the game doled out said content and how each company chose to condition the human brain.

[chu]

Originally Posted by Zeste

EQ and WoW's conditioning models were totally different.

EQ's success and resistance to extinction (as evident in the 100000 nostalgia threads) is that it's condition system was like this:

Rewards: Random and infrequent.
Punishments: Severe and frequent

This is a fantastic model for psychological conditioning. Random, infrequent rewarding is the strongest method of conditioning and has the highest resistance to extinction. This way, when the curve of rewards got smaller and smaller the longer you waited for the reward, your resistance to quitting was quite strong, you were willing to put up with TONS of waiting and pain in the ass situations to get your reward. How many times did I camp seb for the Undead bard to get the Singing Short Sword only to have Triton swoop down and destroy Trakkanon before my guild could even get 20 people there? But I kept going back and sitting there using my Siningsteel Helmet to try and glitch the Eye of Zomm down into Traks lair to spot that Bard!

This isn't my opinion on conditioning, it's got a huge body of psychological research behind it.


Now, WoW's conditioning model is alot different.

Rewards: Semi-Consistent and semi-predictable.
Punishments: Near non-existant.


This is a totally different model for conditioning. It is a much faster and immediate reward, so much so that players are conditioned to be averse to a delay of gratification or random, infrequent rewards. The average wow player would never, ever suffer through EQ style waiting and punishment/reward, but not because they can't, it's because WoW has spent the last 5 years conditioning them in a totally different manner.

EQ, the promise in the conditioning was "It's going to take a damn long time, and really piss you off, and really test your patience and ability to play. But when the reward does arrive, it's going to be so great that all the effort will be worth it." The human brain get's addicted to this style of conditioning and will resist the 'losing interest' impulse for a very long time. People would play and literally do nothing but farm AA's in the same camp spot for day and days, just for the chance to race another guild for the Boss that spawned every 3 days, and even then, you may not get the boss, and if you do, the loot was sparse and rare. But by god, your first Yelinak kill when racing another guild, that was stuff of legend. And if YOU actually got Yelinaks head? That just bought Sony another year of your business, no questions asked.

WoW, the promise in the conditioning is "It's going to be pretty easy and predictable, but we'll reward you every day, sometimes every few hours. It's not going to be some epic achievement, but you'll have something small to reward you every single day."

This conditioning method has a much weaker resistance to extinction. It's like a clock. As soon as those hand stops moving, you know it's broke and throw it away or replace the battery. How many people quit until Ulduar came out, since the rewards were just got? Got all their Valor badge loot, their KT and Maly loot... now what? There's no rewards, and no need for any patience or commitment since you know nothing is coming. You can map out your EXACT path for Heroism/Valor/Conquest badge loot, your exact time commitment for farming Honor and getting PvP gear, check your map for herb or mining nodes, everything. As soon as there is a pause or a drought in reward, interest immediately dies off.


There's a reason why EQ is nostalgic and seems like the "golden age" and WoW does not. It has very little to do with the "content" and everything to do with how the game doled out said content and how each company chose to condition the human brain.

That's all great except for the vast majority of wow players, the rewards are still out there and yet to be obtained.

And I think you're wrong on the nostalgic part. It has nothing to do with your conditioning hypothesis and everything to do with the fact that EQ was their first game.