Is it OUR fault?

[Hrann]

I do think EQ could use more content, and certaintly more adventure. I just think that this applies at all levels of the game...

Well, I guess we can agree to agree with this assessment.  :)

[Rhaynne]

Oh, undoubtedly. Snero's the man

lol... using Snerito is like cheating, Xao =P

[xaoshaen]

Hey, I helped PL him, so I just see it as a return on my investment :D

[Coprolith]

This could go on forever guys. I think we peaked a few pages back

Alrighty, let me try to stoke up the fire again  :twisted: . Here we go:

I do think EQ could use more content, and certaintly more adventure. I just think that this applies at all levels of the game, and don't see a massive gap between the content available to raiders and that open to casual players.

That last sentence is just the thing. It's not about how you see or think or feel about these things, its how the casual players feel about it, and how SOE responds to it.
How I, and many other casual players, feel about the current state of EQ is that the adventure is gone, and that the game is becoming increasingly repetitious, because there's nothing new to the 'new' content that has been added, its just more of the same. Endless xp crunching, endless cash pharming, endless camping for items, all for minimal upgrades. What a hardcore player thinks about that irrelevant. They spent most of their time raiding, with new raid targets on a regular basis. Their non-raiding sessions are not continuous like that of a casual player. They simply don't know what its like to go thru the game without getting any real sense of accomplishment or adventure.
How SOE responds is: not at all. They are to busy trying to keep the high-end guilds happy. In truth, the bulk of the guilt lies with SOE. For one thing, they've cut back on their staff by such an amount that they simply cannot adress every issue anymore. And secondly, they've allowed themselves to grow into the EverRaid mentality because the high-end players are voicing their concerns ...erm...how to say this nicely...ah yes... are voicing their concerns with 'gusto'.
The combined result of this is that a minority of the player-base are hogging the majority of SOE's resources.

But the fact remains that now that the casual players are finally starting to speak up, suddenly the hardcore raiders feel the need to stick their noses in because they presume to know what's best for the casuals. They presume to know the way how casual gamers feel about the current state of EQ. Their problems are much more important then those of others, and so they feel the need to belittle the problems of the casual gamers. If i hear one more hardcore raider say that casual gamers have plenty of zones to play in and can just do a lot of LDoNs to get their gear upgrades so they shouldnt complain I'm gonna puke all over them

I simply want my share of SOE's development resources. As long as SOE doesnt increase their dev staff capacity that would mean that hardcore raiders are going to get less. Tough noogies, welcome to my world, welcome to repetition.



How was that for heating things up?

/hugs

[Chackra]

Sorry if I'm being dense, but I'm not even sure what we are arguing about here.

This thread began with the question:  "Is it our fault?"  And the answer is basically "Yes, but Sony is an enabler."  

Many years ago, I used to live in a fraternity, and we got the old text-based Role-playing games.  Eventually, we got a system down and, working in shifts, we could finish a game in just a couple of days that would might take a solo player weeks.  If those games had been designed to be so convoluted that us "powergamers" could keep grinding at them indefinitely, it is very safe to say that the solo players would have found them impenetrable and horribly frustrating.

To an extent, I think everyone who plays EQ today is a "powergamer."  OK, we don't all belong to exclusive guilds, but every time someone looks up a quest on Allakhazams, or reads a zone walkthrough, he's taking part in what I call "assembly-line play" instead of roleplaying and adventuring.

It may not have originally been planned this way.  VI was breaking new ground with MMORPG's, but the "helpful" Web sites and communities that started to fill the gaps in the game design are now considered indispensable by nearly all players.  I mean, we don't call them "cheat sites", but what else are they?  Whether you're one of the fraction of a percent of players who actually any individual quest, zone or encounter, or whether you're one of the vast majority who looks up the info and uses it, we're all basically taking part in the same "game."  

I desperately want an MMORPG that is designed to be what the name says:  "Roleplaying."  By that I don't mean, "talking like a retarded Englishman," I mean basically the following:

1.   ACCESSIBLE QUESTS.   Not quests that require talking to dozens (or hundreds) of NPC's and wading through countless pages of apparently random drivel and then randomly killing hundreds (or thousands) of MOBs and turning various body parts in to see what happens.  I mean quests that are tailored to you, where you know who you need to talk to and where you either know what needs to be done or have some commonsense way to figure out exactly what you have to do and where the quest is heading.

2.   "ADVENTURABLE" ZONES.  Not zones with completely undetectable invisible floor pits and bizarre aggro ranges that are death on a stick until you get them figured out, which then turn into endlessly boring treadmills with just a very brief period of "fun" in between.  But zones that are fun to explore, with accessible hints IN GAME to let you figure out the tricks for yourself.  

3.   TRUE DUNGEON CRAWL INSTANCED ZONES.  Emphasis on the word "crawl."  Not the mad-dash timed races that LDON "adventures" are, but rather the old-fashioned PnP zones where you see clues, have to figure things out and have the time to really take in the atmosphere.  You know those yellow messages that come up every once in a while in LDON?  Like that, except they actually mean something, and you have to stop and smell the ocher every once in a while if you want to get out alive.  

4.   ZONES DESIGNED TO ACCOMMODATE LOTS OF INDEPENDENT GROUPS INSTEAD OF ONE RAIDING FORCE.  The reason exploring new zones is so intimidating is that they are designed to trap you once you get inside.  Of course in a "real" dungeon, you'd have killed everything behind you, so that wouldn't be a problem.  In a non-instanced persistent zone, that's not practical, but the current "run away like a maniac and train dozens of MOBs behind you disturbing everyone else in the zone" design simply was not a good solution.  Why not provide something else, like I don't know, maybe mini escape hatches inside the zone, or some sort of "get out of jail free" powers for all classes that would serve a role similar to that of Feign Death?

I don't know how everyone else feels, but if Sony made an expansion that was designed to be played from the point of view of the player's character, instead of something designed to be a challenge for people "roleplaying" a hundred guys in a dorm hacking a computer game, I would be all for it.  If somebody is such a "good" player that they could finish the new game in a couple of days, great, give them a medal and promote them to the "winner's server" or something.  But why do I have to suffer because of the way they choose to play?

Don't get me wrong, I'd miss you guys, and maybe we could come back here from time to time to say "hi", but if the purpose of this forum, Allakhazam's, guilds and everything like them disappeared tomorrow, I would be happy as heck about that.  The problem is doing that would require Sony to do two things:

1.   WORK – actually make a game that lets us figure out what's going on from inside the game, and uses the thing sitting on my desk that has a hundred times the processing power NASA's mission control headquarters had thirty years ago, instead of forcing me to keep reams of handwritten notes and access dozens of outside Web sites; and

2.   PLUG THEIR EARS to the inevitable screaming from people who cling more tightly to their support network than to the idea of actually having fun and accomplishing goals actually INSIDE the game.  

I am more than willing to do may part and let go of my support network if Sony will do their part.  My guess is that a very large number of players feel the same way.

The problem is that Sony is set up to listen to the very people who have the biggest vested interest in keeping those support networks going.

[Chackra]

Sorry for the double post above.  For some reason I'm unable to edit.

EDIT:  It was a quintouple post =P  You can't edit in the rants forums.  It's like that on purpose.  I deleted the 3 posts where you quoted your first, but left this one to letcha know.

- Rhaynne

[ghostryder]

I do blame Sony.

Sorry, in RPG's you level to get more options, have more possibilities, ect-

Sony, in it's narrow focus has limited the upper level to raiding if you want to progress-and each new expansion as of late has mostly focused on raid content-

Having single person LDON missions would have helped some, hell, AO was doing this 3 years ago (and is the game LDON pretty much ripped off in concept) but overall there's not a lot to do at 65 other than raid.

Perhaps introducing quested progression or decent tradeskillable armor and weapons would help, but other than playing on FV if you want a 50ac tunic you better be raiding.

Well, I've raided and raided, and I dread any more key farms, flag farms, and so on. It's a headache now, not an accomplishment.

The game and it's options should have expanded at the higher end, not narrowed- that's against RPG rules 101- and it's Sony's fault for going down that path.

[Strijder]

I have no problem with having rewards for hard core gamers, in loot, abilities, etc.  However, the current seperation between casual and hard core gamers is wide enough that friends can easily get seperated over time by flags and keys.  

I know former members of our family guild who are now Time-flagged that I haven't seen face to face ingame in over a year.  When you start breaking up the original friendships that form in game by artificial barriers, is it any suprise that the focus of the game turns to content and loot, and people start leaving both guilds and the game?

Take the EP's, for instance.  About one person per month seems to reach them in our family guild.  Once there, guess what... no one else in the guild is flagged for the planes, so he has to group with others if he wants EP's experience and drops.   Given a couple months of this, and it's no suprise that family guilds are bleeding to death from a steady loss of their higher level characters.

If the problem is keeping the riffraff  out of the big kids' playgrounds, maybe the high end needs to be instanced but unflagged.  Exp, drops would be dependent on kill rates & difficulty.  If the players can't hack it, they harm only themselves.  But they'd still have a chance to group together with friends.

[ghostryder]

Very good point, Stijder. Not only has the upper end put up barriers between players, but it has put on time limits as well.

To expand on my already mentioned points about narrow paths, when I look at the options I had at level 50 to now at 65 there's no comparrison.

When I logged on at 50, it didn't matter what time of day or night I logged on, or how much time I had to play. I could solo in a huge assortment of choice zones and dungeons if time was limited, group just about anywhere if the time of day was right, or work on a quest or part of my epic, up some trade skills or, if on the right night, raid with my guild or farm plat for a needed upgrade.

Now at 65 with all bazaar items long exceeded there's no point in farming plat, no point in working on trade skills when the resulting items are a downgrade, few zones to hunt in and even fewer to group in, pretty much have to log on n prime time for an LDON group and pretty much have to log on at a pretermined time to get flagged or raid-

geeze, now all of a sudden if I want to make any progress I have to log on when told to or i miss that raid or flag- that's kinda sad, all this work and now I'm stuck having my play style and time dictated to me because there's no other options.

And as mentioned I may be excluded from some activities because I lack a flag or a key or an item, forcing my teammates to backtrack in utter boredom or leave me behind.

So many other things could have been added at the high end, from examples from other online games to inovative new ideas but instead it's just more raid drizzle, and to make matters worse, not even remotely as interesting as raid content from months and years past.

The carrot on the stick has wilted.

[Leatherneck]

Scaling.  That's the problem, but it's also the solution, and I think a fair one.

Major encounters should be scaled to fit the force against it.  It should be level-range locked and there should be some hard ceilings and floors, but other than that, it should be totally based on what's coming at it.  The rewards should debatably be the same.

Take Fennin Ro for an example.  He has a set difficulty based on expecting 70ish people against him.  He was "tuned" for that.  And that's groovy.

But what if you want to try Fennin with 40ish people because that's all your guild can field at a time?

Now ideally, the server would calculate how many people are on his hate list (alternately in a certain "physical" range to prevent exploits), and scale the HP and DPS of the mob from there.  So, assuming all else is equal, Fennin would be about 40% of "normal", but it would be every bit as difficult an encounter as with 70.  Factors such as average AC by class, average Mana by healer/nuker, average resists, etc would figure in as well.

In fact, that would prevent bottom feeding by bringing this to bear obversely.  Trakanon being faced by a group of 70's would be significantly tougher than the Trak faced last week by a group of 50's on paper, but the fight would be subjectively just as difficult.

Drops would scale as well.  A raid of 65's on Velks would yield gear appropriate to the progression level where the raiders are.  So a Velk's raid could yield EP+ gear if that's appropriate for where the raiders are gear-progression wise.  It would know this by averaging out mana/hp/ac/etc of the people that actually engaged the mob and were on it's Hate List (no taking a group of 50's and killing Velk while using the vicinity system to bump the gear by having a mess of lvl 65's around).  

A group of 50's who take down a scaled version of Terris Thule would receive gear appropriate to where they are in terms of gear progression.

Average out the important stats, consult a loot drop table for appropriate gear given those averages and call it a day.

You'd likely want to increase the spawn-rate as well.  Uber guilders would have a reason to go back to Kael Drakkel and make KT dead.  Additionally, Family guilds would be more able to take their three groups of dedicated raiders to Ssra and snatch up AP's goodies whereas they couldn't do that now.

The challenge would be roughly the same.

The loot would be enticing for where that raid is gearwise.  An improvement, but not giving out gear inappropriate for the raiders taking on the challenge.

It'd require some refining, but it seems to me that this is the fairest way to go.