EQNext?

[stormlord]

In this post I'm going to mention something I hope sony doesn't do with its future games. This assumes that sony survives the hacker attacks.

After SOF was done, UF came out. UF was a departure with respect to its high dps, high hitpoint mobs. It frustrated a number of people. SOF, by comparison, was a few notches easier. But that wasn't the worst of it. In that time period, I was still level level 80 and considering going up to 85 in the coming months.

Let me say before I start criticizing OMMs/Boomerangs that I enjoyed the OMMs. I've made a couple of posts in the past week about playing chanters in the OMMs. It was fun and reminded me what dungeon crawls were all about. I don't want it to appear that I only see black or white. That wouldn't be true. What OMMs did for me was to highlight how good Eq could be, but not inside the small world of OMMs. If you like breasts, as many men do, imagine a new game that comes out with a smiling monkey on the plastic cover and she has well shaped plump breasts. For a moment you're reminded how much you like breasts, but then it dawns on you that she's a monkey!!!! This is how I felt about OMMs. They reminded me of things I liked, but OMMs are not EQ!

So let me begin my tirade and let my furor unleash...

OMMs/Boomerangs were a departure just like UF was. But they were in the opposite direction. They were like monster missions, but even more convenient and repetitive. You could do OMMs in the comfort of POK. You could die over and over. Your gear was ignored. Your AA's were ignored. You were somebody else in the missions. So you're roleplaying a character that's roleplaying somebody else. Deja vu. And there wasn't much to see, either. Just 3 OMMs to do over and over again. So 3 missions... that's why it gets repetitive. You do it every day to get points to buy gear. I don't remember monster missions all that well, but they probably were the start of this. It's a pathetic shadow of what makes EQ the game. It's nothing compared to SOF.

The number one thing is that instead of playing through SOF from 75 to 85, or in that level range, players were in OMMs or Boomerangs. I think the intent of these was to level up players so they could enter UF with their friends. I think the intent was sincere and kindly. But I think it was misguided.

First off, the bean counters probably wanted more people buying UF. So the faster people could enter UF, the better, in their minds. Second, it might have been cheaper to make OMMs than it would have been to make SOF accessible to a smaller population of 75-85 players. But in this I am not saying it was cheap to make OMMs and Boomerangs. Boomerangs, though, would encourage people to buy UF. But I don't want to generalize too much.

What I am calling for is a SOF that would have been considerably easier. To understand the logic, all you need to know is that when UF came out a lot of people migrated to UF and SOF zones were left virtually empty. No, they were not empty, but they were a shadow of the days preceding them. So what do people who're leveling up do then if the zones are nearly empty? They don't do SOF. They do OMMs or Boomerangs. To remedy this you must make SOF easier so that it can be done by less people with lower levels.

What I would rather have seen is an increase in player offense/defense BEFORE UF was released. Then tune UF for this new offense/defense. OR just go back and lower the defense/offense of all mobs in SOF. Whichever is easier. If done properly, SOF would be eaiser for players that're leveling up and they could have played through SOF to catch up instead of playing the OMMs and Boomerangs.

Perhaps another answer is to make dynamic zones that actively respond to population over time. In this you measure the average population over a given period of time. So maybe if a zone is mostly empty for a couple weeks then the mobs become easier to kill. This way SOF would be easier after players have migrated to UF. Another thing you might consider when scaling difficulty is hte average level of the players in a zone.

None of this addresses unrelated problems I might have had with SOF itself. As i've mentioned in other posts, I hate the reliance on allah for information. With SOF, the reliance was strong as ever. To make the cored gear you pretty much had to look it up on the net or ignore the statistical differences between things. Either way, EQ wholly flunks as a modern game in this regard. It's a dinosaur.

It also doesn't address the empire of the triangle (healer, tank, dps). The early game in 1999 from 1 to 35 or thereabout is a good example of EQ's best days. That's my opinion. Back then most melees could tank somewhat. There was a feeling that you had time to recover from mistakes. Conversely, when things went wrong in the later game it ended fast. There was little time to correct. This narrowing of the gates was meant, I think, to challenge us as we gain levels. But I don't think it's fun. In my view, having time to think about an answer and executing it is better than having a high expectation with high chance for failure (for the less vigilant) and it's better than not having any challenge at all. So right here I admit I do not like high risk activities. But this does not mean I do not want challenge. I want a thinking mans game. I'm thinking something much closer to turn-based gameplay than real-time. Perhaps just give us a lot of hitpoints and flexible skills.

OMMs and Boomerangs, like UF and other things, showed me over the years that sony was putting out content that had lower and lower quality. It was almost as though the death of EQ was happening over a period of time instead of all at once and could be seen by looking at these signs. This is also a signature of mudflation. I don't know how sony is going to attack mudflation in the future, but it's my hope they do not repeat the past. Do not do this again, if you can help it. While I played the OMMs, what I really wanted was to be out there in SOF. But there just weren't enough groups and of those that were out there, they did not have enough HP/level to do the SOF content. In fact, I remember grouping with a 83 SK and some others with a couple mercs in our group. Even with that setup we wiped to named in Tosk. Inevitably, I ended up doing OMMs and most others did too. It was sad because OMMs and Boomerangs are so opposite to the spirit of EQ. They're in their own isolated worlds, with their own isolated gameplay. It's like they're an outsider that doesn't belong, almost like a cancer.

Don't let that cancer grow it's causing blindness in the dying patient. I guess it's pointless to argue over thus with respect to EQ or even EQ2, but it's not too late for future games. Maybe what I say here has meaning, maybe not. But I will keep these feelings and many others close to me. I will share them when I can, in the hopes that future games, when they fall, do not stumble in the same manner. Fight mudflation. Fight decline. Fight the cancers that result from them. Live. Don't give up until your last breath.

[Sparkin]

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

But go ahead and assume I haven't played it yet. Because it's just so good that nobody can dislike it, right? I'm not paying $50 to find out that I don't like the last level of the game (ok, I'm sorry, the last FOUR levels . . .I didn't include the other three because they'd be exactly the same as the first 46.) I don't even like raiding, which is why I never focus on endgame as a measurement of a game's quality.

Good post. This highlights exactly why pretty much all newer MMORPG's are failing for my taste. It has become far too widely accepted, by both players and developers, that all the leveling in these games should be a cookie cutter cakewalk of quests or w/e to the max level. If I ever invest a lot of time in another new MMO, it'll probably be because first and foremost the devs attempted to have that game actually start at level 1, not the cap.

Can't really say anything the OP listed sounds good, just my opinion. I want a game that brings real innovation, not more of the same things that everybody else is doing because WoW rakes in ridiculous cash by doing them.

[Goosefabba]

Im acutaly a fan of what SoE did with DCU online, only real downside is its low lvl cap and not enough endgame content.maybe if they made lvling harder also.

[wehrmacht]

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

Here're some more ideas
1) No pvp server. Instead, just have a dueling system that keeps track of wins/losses/opponents/top 100/etc.

LOL @ This crap