Quote:
Originally Posted by Zuranthium
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Exploration? LOL. PoP absolutely kills it. The whole game except for very specific "chosen" leveling/raiding zones becomes dead 99% of the time.
Social aspect? LOL. People just sit in PoP. There are basically never any more interesting encounters of meeting people and interacting out in the field. Everyone gets SoW/Clarity from a random person standing around and then just goes and teleports around to wherever they want.
AA's are NOT needed to balance classes better. That's something you can do by tweaking the skills and game mechanics themselves. AA's are simply a massive grind. Wow, there is some serious Pavlovian dog shit going on here.
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I think that by the time PoK books were added old world was already a ghost town, from all the previous additions. It was just a flower to the grave already covered with earth.
EQ had inherited problems even in original content design they never went back to address.
For example lets compare:
Crushbone - tiny cramped area, with lev 12 mobs roaming next to lev 5 mobs, caused continuous trains. On other hand - lots of good non generic loot.
Blackburrow - amazingly designed cavern system, and the only classic zone with truly 3-dimentional layout (not just floors, on top of each other like in RunnyEye, but uniquely interconnected system of tunnels and caves). YET - there is not a single name mob here! Not a single loot drop that can equal to what you can get in Crushbone.
Another pair:
EverFrost - a very large zone, but with lots of landscape features
vs
West Karana - dull and empty - no zone geography what so ever, no landscape features. Not even mobs in sight! Nothing. It barely had any players even in classic times, even before Kunark.
Now, Kunark comes along and does 2 things:
-zones that designed a lot better with features and geography
-much better loot drops from same level mobs - this one was HUGE mistake. It immediately made old world zones to devalue, with exception of selected areas/loot camps.
They should have given Kunark mobs either similar quality loot, or go back and rework the old zones that were terribly lacking. They never did.
Then Velious comes along and drops even better loot on same level range for 40+ level game.
And finally Luclin:
-Lev 25 mobs drop weapons with ratios of what 45+ named droped in Sol A/Permafrost
-Low level zones with insane ZEM
-and at the same time, the map of Luclin is poorly designed, with some zones clearly being superior in content and loot, while others super out of the way and worthless right from the start.
When people say that after initial EQ release all Brad McQuad did is smocked crack and talked about "Vision" - I am starting to believe: - its like expansions had no general oversight. No senior designer to make sure that things progress smoothly, and actually fit together. One designer was making one zone with one idea with respect to game balance, and another was working with completely different set of ideas.
So as you see here - this trend was quickly piling up. By the time of PoP - books or no books, didn't really matter. The game HAD TO BE OVERHAULED, but they didn't care - they wanted to sell another expansion.
Yes PoP actualy for the first time ahd interesting raids, but at least half of the zones again were poorly designed.
yes, Torment was awesome. Plane of Time- the pinnacle zone of entire expansion - SUCKED - there is literally nothing there.
I could go on for another 3 pages comparing in details what could have been done, and what wasn't, but I think you get general ideas.
They started good, but then were continuously pressed to get the next expansion out of the door, and ton of things went half done or not done at all.
And whats worse, they barely ever admitted to this flaws, and never fixed most of them.
Today, EQ lead designer is beating himself in a chest proudly saying "EQ is the largest MMO in the world - we 700 have unique zones!"
700 EMPTY zones, I may add. And then he comes in rerolled forums (
http://www.rerolled.org/showthread.p...s-free-to-play) and start asking questions - why people are still playing EMU if EQ is f2p???
Poor sob.