So what's there to do in Velious anyway?

[t0lkien]

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

True, but teleports do not qualify as affecting game difficulty.

What teleports did was take a horrible, needless, disgusting timesink and throw it in the trash. Good freaking riddance. And this was even more true as the world had become more than twice as big as originally planned.

But this is clearly not true. It's all linked together. By making teleportation trivial you made the world smaller, reduced the value of two classes, reduced the value of a tradeskill and the items that needed to be farmed to supply it, reduced the value of the carefully designed and limited port items (the OT Hammer for example). This directly affects player interaction, the economy, the feel of the entire world. If this wasn't true you wouldn't be for them - it made your gameplay easier. Transport is not a timesink. The time it takes forms a baseline for the value of the things that reduce that time. All sorts of gameplay feed off that.

Class "balance" in EQ is not just about combat power. It's about utility, and situational usefulness. Casters tend to be lower on the direct power scale, but are high on the usefulness scale. What one class lacks, another provides. That's the point of class design. Which choice you make depends upon the experience you want. When you dilute those differences you dilute the gameplay and the fun, and the depth of the overall game. Asymmetrical gameplay is difficult to get right, but it creates enormous synchronicity and emergence.

As I said, what you are asking for is a different game - and that's fine (and is what EQ Live became). But there are already hundreds of games like that. Why are you in classic EQ if that's what you want? You are arguing for things that work powerfully against the experience that classic EQ creates. Don't you think that's a bit ironic? Maybe you don't want what you think you do - which is what I think is true of so many gamers in general. They argue for all these changes, and then when they get them they complain that the game is no longer much fun.

Actually, that's pretty much a life lesson right there.