I think one of the most important things about EQ1 was that once we got a few expansions in, raiding was not super linear. In WoW, and most games since, you have a single active raiding tier, and upon release of a new raiding tier, the old one becomes obsolete. I feel like this is one of the single worst ideas in the history of the genre. It puts a shelf life on any raid content, so that new players miss out on all the past raiding, and it significantly devalues anything you get from a raid because it will be obsolete so soon.
The way I always described EQ1 raiding was that if EQ1 vanilla had a raiding difficulty of 1-5, then kunark had a raiding difficulty of 4-8, velious would have 6-10, luclin 9-12, and so on and so forth(those numbers are just made up to show an example). What was important that the content of each expansion had overlap with the expansion before it, so you always had multiple expansions of content to work through(unless you were on the super bleeding edge of raiding), and you didn't just abandon an expansion when a new one came out. Most raids for my guild started with us all meeting with at a central spot, and sending out our scouts who would sometimes be checking 10-15 different raid targets to see whats up and where we want to go. They were almost always checking targets spanning expansions, continents, and planes, which kept our raid nights varied and exciting.
This also created a solid progression path for new players and new raiding guilds. On my server we had 10+ raiding tiers where we split up all the raid mobs available, and new guilds had a roadmap of raid targets to work their way through, killing bosses and working their way up the ladder. The content started 3-4 expansions prior to the current expansion, and meant that even if you started a few years after content came out, you would still get a chance to experience it.
I believe it is absolutely crucial that we follow this model in Pantheon, to keep content as relevant for as long as possible and to provide a solid progression path for players and guilds.
Definitely agreed, although I'm personally fond of horizontal progression over vertical after a certain point in endgame overall. That said, what works for both - whether a truly flat, horizontal progression system or a non-linear raid system akin to EQ1 - is the lack of piling on levels with every expansion. EQ1 and FFXI, both fairly similar to each other, had numerous expansions where the focus was on broadening the available content and providing more activities at a previously-established level cap, which resulted in the sort of progression you saw in both games.
Comparatively, titles like WoW and FFXIV that bump the cap with every expansion are inevitably also bumping the item levels, and that is why you see tiers that are only relevant for the duration of their patch cycle and why the first quests in a new expansion give gear equivalent to what people bled over for months in the prior one.
AstralEcho said:That said, what works for both - whether a truly flat, horizontal progression system or a non-linear raid system akin to EQ1 - is the lack of piling on levels with every expansion. EQ1 and FFXI, both fairly similar to each other, had numerous expansions where the focus was on broadening the available content and providing more activities at a previously-established level cap, which resulted in the sort of progression you saw in both games.
Comparatively, titles like WoW and FFXIV that bump the cap with every expansion are inevitably also bumping the item levels, and that is why you see tiers that are only relevant for the duration of their patch cycle and why the first quests in a new expansion give gear equivalent to what people bled over for months in the prior one.
I completely forgot to mention this, but I agree 100% and it ties in so much, thanks!
100% agree. Especially important in an openworld game with no instances. Having a lot of potential targets allows for good server health because it can support multiple max level guilds without the real need for instancing.
Very much agree. I remember coming back to Wow during the lich king era and feeling like I had missed all the burning crusade stuff. The only thing old my guild would still do was the Naxx.
Alternatively, something else I liked was updating old raid zones with newer gear and more difficult bosses, so that even after their time had passed the content once again became relevenat and enjoyable for a whole new generation of players. Not to mention that it was fun again to go visit some things that hadn't been done in a year or two. I don't usually like rehashing content aka daily quests, but something you haven't done in ages I think is a bit different. Enough time has passed to make it fun again.
One of the best things about EQ was all the things that brought characters back to zones. Even if that was high level characters killing guards in steamfont, it created use of a single zone across a huge range of levels. In games today, once you out level a zone you are DONE and you never go back. You may as well uninstall that portion of the content. In EQ we were constantly going back and forth to older places because they continued to have value in one form or another. Of course over time, the original EQ zones basically died, but it took a lot longer than MMOs today.
I like the way you think sir. I think your post borders on the secondary issue of how loot is handled. I like the idea of items that are useful years later. Reminds of items like the insta click circlet of shadows. Which brings up a good point for another post. Will there be pre-nerf items. Items that were too powerful so they had to be changed but the original dropped items stay powerful. That is one of the main loot mechanics I regretted leaving behind in EQ. I have not played another game that handled it this way.
Krixus said:Of course over time, the original EQ zones basically died, but it took a lot longer than MMOs today.
There are many ways to prolong their remaining 'relevant' even further, or countering their 'aging' altogether. We even have a multitude of examples ready-made by other developers; assuming of course the thinking has taken place in advance and the areas have been designed, from scratch, with said intent kept in mind.
Which leds me to what @AstralEcho said, horizontal progression. Just as important, perhaps even more in our case, as Pantheon will be featuring a "downtime" mechanic of some sort. Horizontal progression can encompass many systems and as such, many areas, including the earliest ones. Again, if done right, if said areas have been designed from scratch with said intent in mind.
But this important distinction aside, good OP, i agree (with all of you); and thankfully i don't think we need worry about that at all ^^ The above however, i'd need to read about.
Content obsolescence is a terrible thing and all too common nowadays. To play devils advocate though, one side effect I can see with keeping existing raid bosses as high priority targets is that it doesn't give the smaller/newer raiding guilds on a server a chance to bite their teeth.
I literally quit World of Warcraft when all my previous achievements were rendered useless by level 50s task rewards (I won't even call them quests, WoW didn't have quests).
I agree, having a proper progression is very important. If you want to do a hard dungeon or raid, you should have to go back and complete some of the old dungeons or raids. Its a pretty straight forward way of making use of old content and not trivializing a player's past achievement.
Looks to be an unpopular opinion but I disagree. Progression is moving forward or up not side stepping into stagnation. RPG raiders play to advance their character through stats, skills, etc. If you want to remove that then might as well just remove large group content and stick with smaller groups makes it easier to bring in newer players to see older content while allowing the developers to push out same tier content at a faster pace. GW2 did this pretty well for their playbase.
This I agree with newer players getting into raids later on can be hard. The bringing along new players thing is a player created challenge not a game one. I'd be more than happy to go back on a dedicated night a week to help get newer players geared. Alts runs with newer players are always an option. Another is to use GW2 lockouts for raids with loot chance once a week but the raiders could go back on their main with others in guild to help get them gear since they would be the only ones elegible. It all comes done to how accepting of new raiders is the community?
I've said my piece and when the beating starts please not the face! :)
Yeah I agree completely. One of things I loved about EQ was going back to older zones and experiencing them again. The same is true for raids. I remember when we were getting geared up for the start of PoP progression we were still raiding a couple of Velious targets as well as Luclin targets to help us get ready for PoP. That is three expansions we were raiding at the same time. I found that really cool and enjoyed it so much.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned here is items with rare clicky effects are still desirable even after the raid itself doesn't drop the best loot so people still want to go back and raid those targets when perhaps they wouldn't bother for some of the more mainstream loot. So people still used to go back to raids (possibly solo because they were so overpowered for the older content) just to get the drops with the ulra rare clicky effect or other item bonus that wasn't found on any item from newer expansions. That was another thing that I loved.
The devs have talked about this concept before. They are incorporating a very wide level span in zones to keep them from becoming "dead."
I think a great idea might an established orc stronghold. Lowbie characters start out killing pawns in the out-lying areas, then move into the outer orc camps at a slightly higher level. Players would go on to other areas, but come back in mid-levels to attack the orc fort. Perhaps then they come back for a duneon-type encounter in the orc citadel interior, culminating with the orc warlord as a raid encounter. You could span 20-30 levels in one tiered encounter in one zone.
I would like to see as raiding advances level caps get raised that the older raid content becomes group content small raid even. I always thought it would be a nice way to reuse and keep it viable. And not saying in like a level 65 elemental geared cleric soloing undead trak for bard epic updates. I would like to see maybe a level 50 raid rebalanced to be a level 60 group encounter so it could be ran by groups leveli up after raiders abandoned it.
Endalmir said:Content obsolescence is a terrible thing and all too common nowadays. To play devils advocate though, one side effect I can see with keeping existing raid bosses as high priority targets is that it doesn't give the smaller/newer raiding guilds on a server a chance to bite their teeth.
The goal isn't to make all content relevant to high end guilds forever, the goal is to keep raid content relevant against group content for long periods of time, in a tiered structure so that new expansions and raids do not completely negate old content.
The high end guilds will basically always be staying in the top expansion, or maybe one back, but for everyone else they will have 3-4 expansions of content to work with.
Here is an example of Innoruuk/the nameless's old tier rankings from EQ1:
As you can see, even in 2009 they ran the tier list back to kunark bosses, which gave any type of guild that started a good progression path to move up.
Also, you can see how each tier having a mix of expansions. For example:
T1 has Venril Sathir(kunark), Trakanon(kunark), and The Va'Dyn(Luclin)
T2 has Zlandicar/velk/dtk(velious), the rhags(luclin), and banord paffa(PoP)
T3 several velious bosses, and xanamech from PoP
T4 has yeli/tormax(velious), itraer vius/grieg/THO/Vyzh'dra the exiled(luclin), and cazic thule from revamped vanilla classics
So even just looking at the first 4 tiers, we pull content from the first 4 expansions intermixxed. Luclin and velious both have raid bosses ranging from tier 1 to tier 8, PoP from tier 2 to tier 12.
Linkamus said: Liav, yes it is impossible to avoid it completely. But there are creative things the devs can do to mitigate it. One idea I mentioned earlier in the thread was to turn old raid gear into quest items for better gear. Another idea is to introduce quests that transform old raid gear into more powerful versions of themselves. Eq kind of did this with fabled gear, but I think it could work better without having to actually alter the old content.
I only see two results from this proposition:
Liav said:I don't think it's possible to avoid invalidating some content. That's just the nature of a numbers game, which Pantheon at its core really is.
What you're describing sounds like linear progression anyway in the OP, just linear progression with some healthy overlap.
Content will eventually become obsolete, but the goal is to overlap things enough so that you don't have the WoW experience of a new raid tier immediately invalidating all previous content. Group content will eventually provide gear on par with earlier raids to some extent, but it will most likely not cover all slots and will primarilly be used as a suplement.
Group content gear actually becomes really important, as it will slowly increase peoples stats by bumping some slots up to higher tiers to help guilds progress through content they might be stuck on.
deltaloko said:Content will eventually become obsolete, but the goal is to overlap things enough so that you don't have the WoW experience of a new raid tier immediately invalidating all previous content. Group content will eventually provide gear on par with earlier raids to some extent, but it will most likely not cover all slots and will primarilly be used as a suplement.
Group content gear actually becomes really important, as it will slowly increase peoples stats by bumping some slots up to higher tiers to help guilds progress through content they might be stuck on.
Sounds basically just like EQ for the first 4-5 expansions. (Not a bad thing)