Quote:
Originally Posted by gnomishfirework
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EQ did a much better job than WoW. At least there was still incentive to do old world raids. I think planning on how you would have progression go a few expansions ahead of time is key. Old encounters will always get easier, but you can inverse their difficulty. The launch of a raid encounter should be very difficult. Every expansion should make it a little less so. Maybe 3 expansions out it's single group-able by well geared groups.
I'd like to see encounters require skill as opposed to just needing to know how the encounter works. Short of a FPS type set-up, I'm not sure how that's accomplished.
Still, you shouldn't be able to copy/paste a macro from the forums and just hit that one button constantly (like wow).
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Hearing you talk about these things just reminded me of a game that does that! Hmm, what was it's name...oh, yeah, that's right.
It's EverQuest.
I'm not sure what you mean when you speak of a dichotomy between "skill" and "knowledge of an event". I've been laboring under the assumption that one is merely an extension of the other.
It takes some measure of skill to move around on an EQ raid so that you don't spray your healers with silence or get deathtouched from standing in the wrong spot, at least in the sense that it's very possible to fail if you're not paying close attention. I mean, fundamentally, MMORPGs will never require the reflexes of a circus acrobat or the dexterity of a safecracker. What exactly are you hoping for?
A fully-buffed, appropriately-equipped raid warrior who is using a defensive disc can be killed by direct melee in less than 3 seconds if the mob isn't debuffed and he gets no heals. I assure you that it takes some degree of skill to survive, let alone succeed, in the modern raid game.
The problem EQ has with its older raid content isn't that its difficulty is trivial so much as that its loot is. EQ loot scales such that end-game group gear from a given expansion will be comparable to end-game raid gear of the previous expansion, notwithstanding things like spellcasting foci that may or may not fluctuate, and the raid gear has a modest edge in AC, which tanks love. Since this is the case, some people who have finished the group game for a given expansion have no gear incentive to go back and do raids from a previous expansion, as that raid gear will be similar or inferior to their group gear, though still potentially challenging to acquire.
Tanks can still benefit from a slight improvement in total AC, but casters sometimes are left out in the cold. For example, when the most recent expansion launched, House of Thule, the group gear that was available in that expansion was superior to all but the end-game raid gear from the prior expansion for casters due to foci, meaning that for raid guilds that had not yet beaten the previous expansion (meaning the great majority of all serious raid guilds in the game at the time), that expansion became semi-redundant overnight.
The thing that those guilds had been striving for nearly a year to accomplish, extracting the end-zone loot from that expansion, suddenly became an afterthought as the guild repositioned itself to progress through the next expansion. Needless to say, this is very anti-climactic and disheartening. This sort of grim reflection still causes people to leave EQ, to this very day.
(Just like when SoD launched and people in lower-end raid guilds that had been trying to get access to PoTime for years -- not for loot, but just to complete a long-running personal goal -- suddenly found that any level 1 character could just zone into PoTime by talking to a static NPC in PoK! I personally know people who left EQ in disgust over that development.)
Raid progression is sufficiently challenging that only the high-end guilds will actually complete a given expansion before the next expansion comes along and makes the previous one irrelevant to all but the melee classes (perhaps 2 guilds per server, or less, if general trends of the past 6 years hold). Depending on the difficulty of the bridge content leading into the next expansion, mid-tier guilds may be relegated to leapfrogging to the next expansion without ever managing to beat the first one until long after its loot becomes rot fodder, which goes against the very ethos of a game like EQ (always a gear-based game, especially in the raid sector).