[loramin]

Originally Posted by Kich867 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Then I'm sorry, I genuinely don't get your point then. I've read all your posts and that was literally my best attempt at summarizing what I thought you were trying to say.

Fair enough. It's frustrating to have to keep repeating things when people won't read, but if you did you're genuinely trying to understand my point and not argue with a straw man, let me try again to explain it. But I have to go step by step so you don't pick one piece and try to ignore the bigger picture.

1. A good emulator recreates the original

First ... P99 is an emulator, right? The goal of any emulator is to recreate old software. If the emulator does that well, it will be indistinguishable from the original. If it does it poorly, the emulated thing won't be the same as the original.

Maybe you aren't a Street Fighter fan, so I'll use Mortal Kombat instead. If you make a Mortal Kombat emulator, and you don't hear "get over here" when people play Scorpion, there are really only two possibilities:

• people have since learned that Scorpion's trademark move is bad, and have stopped using it
• the emulator is not emulating the original well, and that move is weaker than it was in the original

Now, did you play the game P99 is trying to emulate, live EQ circa '99-'01? That's an honest/curious question, not an excuse to declare your opinion invalid if you didn't [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

2. Enchanters were a major grouping class in '99 (like Tanks/Clerics)

If you did, I truly expect you'd know that tanks, Clerics, and Enchanters were big grouping classes back then. Hell, I played a Shaman and soloed a ton, but when I did group (a fair amount) ... even as a class that was redundant (both Shaman and Enchanters are slowers) ... I still mostly was in groups with Enchanters (and also Clerics and tanks).

If you didn't play in classic, you might not believe me, and if so we can try and go over classic evidence, but I truly don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that most people who played in classic will remember certain classes as being core to the grouping experience.

3. On P99, everyone soloes more, but only charmers play differently in a major way

Here on P99 Clerics still mostly group: if you join a P99 group there is a high chance it will have a Cleric in it, and if not people will be looking for one. The same is true of the tanking classes. The same is also true (in reverse) for soloing classes: you mostly won't find Necromancers in groups, you'll mostly find them out soloing. And it's not because Cleric players like grouping more than Necromancers, it's that the game mechanics encourage different classes to play differently.

The only class where basic grouping/soloing preferences are different from '99 vs. P99 is Enchanter. Other classes used to (eg. Bards used to kite 100+ mobs, which was not classic), but our emulator has gotten more accurate over time, and now Enchanters are unique in this regard.

(But, as a side note, this isn't an Enchanter-only issue: they just exemplify it best. I leveled a Druid to 60 on Blue, and like many others I did it largely through animal charming ... but again if you look at classic evidence, you'll find root/rotting and quad kiting, not charm, were the Druid staples back in '99.)

Now again, if Scorpion players aren't throwing their spear and yelling "Get over here!", there are only two core possibilities: the players are different, or the emulator isn't emulating that aspect of the game well.

It could be the players! We do know things most live players didn't know ... not how to charm, as we've both seen plenty of evidence they knew how ... but more minor stuff like using -MR gear. Also, just generally all classes solo more here (one reason likely being that live servers were more crowded).

That's the crux of most arguments made against me in this thread: the emulator is perfect, it's just the players (the same argument was made for Chardok AoE, for combat bind wounds, for Whirl til You Hurl, for ...) But I don't find it convincing.

Again, every class soloes more ... but you don't see Clerics or tanks not grouping and spending their time soloing. The mechanics of the game encourage them to. And again, the mechanics of the game encouraged Enchanters to group back in classic, despite (us both agreeing that) they knew how to charm.

4. We know our mechanics aren't classic.

Thanks to Dolalin (although, again, I'm not trying to say his post has all the answers) we know at least some of the aspects of our emulator emulate things poorly. We know channeling (which makes a huge difference when charm breaks) isn't classic.

So, we know our emulator has one class not acting like it did in the original (Scorpion isn't pulling people in our emulator). We could ignore that our emulator has mechanics (eg. channeling) which are off, ignore the fact that Clerics and Tanks and soloing classes ... everyone but Enchanter ... still plays fundamentally the same (even as all clases do solo a bit more), and ignore that the whole goal of this place is to recreate '99.

Or we can say "it wasn't like this in '99, let's fix our mechanics".