A followup, since I'd hate to leave the discussion off on the note where I called you a, uh, retiree.
"Classic, classic" Yes, Classic was a good template. It was also a marketed product intended to maximize arbitrarily the server populations--easy to do given the novelty of the game at the time and the complete lack of competitors--and maximize the amount of time people maintained their subscriptions. The XPing curves and raid population requirements weren't meant as a test of one's honor or skill or whatever, they were meant to maximize profit.
So half of Classic was a collection of brilliant game-development insights, and half of it was a Skinner-box monetization model that no longer applies now that other companies have developed even more ruthlessly streamlined models.
This is similar to how NES games or arcade games are loaded with artificial difficulty, because the player must feel like they "got their money's worth" out of the cartridge by the cartridge playtime being artificially inflated by non-skill-related factors, or because the player must keep putting quarters into the machine to win. And the strategies for beating games that are "Nintendo hard" are never creative enterprises, they are just exercises in the 'cheesing' that you proclaim so vehemently to oppose.
So the idea of exactly reproducing Classic remains as arbitrary, meaningless, impossible, and unrelated to skill as it was before, and so too are your criticisms or proposed changes meaningless. Everyone who has poured effort into P99 has been working on adapting classic. Adapting, that's the word: changing things so they work for a smaller audience and the resultant smaller group sizes. Considering some of the excellent groups I have had as Enchanter, this must have been accomplished with great efficiency, and you being bored with it is definitely a "you" problem.
|