[Opinion] EQ Next - Game Changers/Breakers

[ajellis6976]

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

I don't understand the hate towards instanced zones. Just because WoW instanticized the dungeons doesn't mean that it was a bad idea.

I mean, look at the way we (or at least, I) play P1999. I look for zones that are not that populated so I can get a group / get decent EXP. I skipped unrest almost entirely this leveling up path because often times there were too many people. And, if I had a group, some 6 people, that was awesome. Usually, though, I was wishing that we were the ONLY group in the zone so we could have more pulls. Sure, the higher level camp is there and that's fine, as long as they don't pull from us.

This extrapolates into the end game as well. We have a bunch of 'hardcore' raiders out there who want to slay dragons, and we all can't. Well, if things were instanced, we certainly could.

Instances that were difficult, and that produced loot on a weekly cadence, allows for a healthy server size without the need to grief each other and the necessity of a RnF board that plagues this forum. Do I think that being able to teleport and get assigned to random people from a pool of 50,000 is a good idea? No.

But, then again, if you want EQNext to be a success, and I'm going to assume you do, you are going to need subscriber bases reaching into the millions (hopefully). When talking about how to fit all those people in there - do you make 1000 servers with 1000 people each in them? That's way too many servers! And the bad ones get vacant and waste those peoples time. You need consolidation - you need higher numbers to have a community thrive if there are multiples. P1999 works because this is only 1 private server - not a brand new MMO catering to the multitudes.

The answer to this is instancing. Instance the dungeons because let's face it, at level 10 there will be thousands of people all wanting to go do those dungeons. Can you imagine 100 people in a dungeon like unrest? Can you imagine 1000? And if you don't instance, what is the answer? Make the dungeon HUGE!! But then the dungeon becomes out of scale for your world, with so many camps. You won't be able to memorize the layout or kill the choice rare because there'd have to be so MANY of them - enough to maybe satisfy 200-300 people at any given time.

The alternative to that, if you don't instance, is to make the WORLD huge - make everyone so spread out that we don't have this problem. Instancing gives us virtual real estate without the cost of spreading out the world to it's limits.

If I was going to redo it, I would certainly do instancing, with the following caveats:

24 hour timer on any instance - you go in, you're locked to it for 24 hours, no massive clears & reclears
No teleportation to instance - you have to find it.
No dungeon finder - you have to find your group.
Death = bind point, naked, none of this pansy spawning at the ent and walking back in.
Drops are not guaranteed - loot tables exist, but the item you want / any item doesn't necessarily have to drop.

I added the last one because the problem with instancing is item bloat. In WoW, everything is bind on pickup or bind on equip - very few things don't bind! Trading items is one of the best things about EQ to me, and I'd like to keep that going forward. If you want to keep items rare, then there needs to be thresholds to how many of X item can drop in a given day. This is already done by the laws enforcing p1999 (spawn rate, loot table, etc) and can be done in a more sophisticated way in the present day. THis way, FBSS are still awesome, they drop just as frequently, and are still tradeable. Giving everyone a FBSS per run sucks - and that's why instancing sucked in WoW - you are no longer special, just another toon.

After reading this post it became obvious, quickly, that although you play on p1999 you didn't or don't remember the early days of eq. Instances can easily be done without and as for tons of people wanting to instance in the same zone, you'll adapt.