Will Pantheon incorporate the idea of item levels, similar to how WoW has implemented them? To explain further, in WoW, every item has an item level(ilvl for short), and that ilvl is what determines the items stats. They know that an ilvl200 item will have A base stat, B stamina, and an x/y split of two secondary stats(for the most part). They basically turned item creation into the game into a mathematical forumla.
I spent a lot of time playing WoW after EQ changed so much that I couldn't recognize it anymore, and over the years I kept noticing little things that just made the game feel...inorganic. Things that really took me out of the game world and reminded me "hey, this is a video game", things that significantly hindered the immersion that I think EQ nailed so well. One of those "a-ha!" moments was looking at item levels(which cascaded into gear and stats in general, but that is a topic for another thread). One of my favorite items ever in EQ was Jenniy's Two-tone Cuirass, an item that existed as a wonderful pop culture reference, with interesting and useful stats, and I feel like this item can only really exist in a system with organic item creation like original EQ had, where you weren't balancing everything against some mathematical forumla.
From a developer standpoint, I get it. This allows fast creation of items, and easy balancing. You know that two ilvl200 items will provide roughly the same benefit to players, and can create an entire raid tiers worth of gear based on a certain ilvl with ease. I think it also severely hinders the developers though, as it makes it harder to balance things like procs(WoW weapons rarely have procs, and usually when they do they would just remove the stats on the weapon and compensate with the proc) and clickies, and makes it harder to really inject feeling into the items, so that they seem like actual pieces of magical treasure, and not just arbitrary computer processed stat buffs. It also allows them to put stats on items without worrying about an "item budget" of stats to use, such as the original quest sets(crafted, lambent, etc), where a warrior might get a piece of armor that had a few points of wisdom on it, without worrying that they "lost" their main stats for it.
Ultimately, EQ items just always felt very "real" early on, often being tied to places or bosses where we found them, and I think this was due in large part to the fact that devs were making each one of these items, rather then just plugging in a forumla.
So, do you think Pantheon should adopt an ilvl system for item creation? Does the ease of balance outweigh the boringness of having every item feel too similar? Is there a way to do item level while still allowing for devs to inject flavor and life into the items?
Do you really want this?
I too hope it does not, as items can be bought and sold to anyone or traded. I would rather have stats dictate the items worth and value. It doesnt mean a +1 mana regen stat only item is worse or better then a +25HP regen item.
Going purple to grey wasnt exciting in DAOC either.
Yeah, I hadn't even gotten in to item "rarity", i.e. a purple is better then a blue, which is better then a green, etc.. I think that system is 100% a byproduct of item level as a concept, and Pantheon hopefully won't be doing it.You shouldn't need to look at the color of the name of an item to its value, it should be something you can judge by looking at its stats.
Well said Delta. My vote would be for no item grade colors or item levels. There may be another use for colors, like to denote a nodrop item, but I think players should judge for themselves what constitutes a good item. Ideally, all items should be viable for someone to use in some way. Maybe creating a set of items that boost a particular stat for a specific build or maybe for a set of resist gear. That is the kind of itemization I want to see.
Doubtful, but it will exist anyway in a less intuitive form. Given enough time and data collection, people will know exactly what the best piece of gear to have is for a given situation.
VR would be the first developers in the history of MMOs to make every piece of itemization useful if they pulled it off.
I'm also against the 'item level' idea. Strongly. I am very capable of understanding what's best for my class, i am very capable of understanding, sans "help", whether a different item is better, or just how much better than mine. I am also expected, having reached such a stage in the game, to be aware of where, what and when i am going to need or count as a full upgrade :)
This idiotic system is not only superfluous for the average Pantheon player, but also potentially damaging. We have seen what it entails (from addons, to behaviour, to social trends) in.. other MMOs. Considering its superfluousness, i cannot see why anyone would request it given the risks. Again however, that's just me.
I am ok for having strips across the item with different colors such as epic items. Having an epic item 1=green, epic 2=blue, epic 3=purple etc.. This is ok with me, but it usually is no drop and for that character only, meaning green was good until level 25, now that your 26 level your epic now is grey and is not as good as your epic 2 for your level. It doesnt change the values to you, however its a warning your above your epic level for fighting mobs. This doesnt count as an item for sale, or tradeable either. It is usually no drop, and is reflected to your character only. It also has been known in some games to turn in your epic for an upgraded quest item, or epic increase.
Normal, rares and raid items i would rather they be left alone, so that the dev team can add more into quests, items, characters and the game as a whole. The more we ask for, the more it becomes a problem for the next team or expac dev team to keep up with it.
We really do not need to break the backs of devs with trivial stuff like this. I hope it stays clean so the focus is on other things.
Crazzie said:I am ok for having strips across the item with different colors such as epic items. Having an epic item 1=green, epic 2=blue, epic 3=purple etc.. This is ok with me, but it usually is no drop and for that character only, meaning green was good until level 25, now that your 26 level your epic now is grey and is not as good as your epic 2 for your level. It doesnt change the values to you, however its a warning your above your epic level for fighting mobs. This doesnt count as an item for sale, or tradeable either. It is usually no drop, and is reflected to your character only. It also has been known in some games to turn in your epic for an upgraded quest item, or epic increase.
Normal, rares and raid items i would rather they be left alone, so that the dev team can add more into quests, items, characters and the game as a whole. The more we ask for, the more it becomes a problem for the next team or expac dev team to keep up with it.
We really do not need to break the backs of devs with trivial stuff like this. I hope it stays clean so the focus is on other things.
Just to be clear, I'm not in favor of item levels...I think it makes things easier on the developers but takes a big tool away for them to get creative with gear.
However, I don't think I understand what you're suggesting with the colored items. Are you saying they would be colored by level?
I HATE "item level"'s.
I hate how they get used by the community, when people look solely at Ilvl and not the players skill or ability. I also don't think they work very well in general, when you have to "upgrade" to an item with more Ilvl but it doesn't work with your character's build as well as a lower Ilvl item.
Like most of my replies, I find myself going off(slightly)topic with ranting. Because I can't help but view this as a whole - similar to how I view having a death penalty be "significant enough"; that's not the whole picture and doesn't create a good game. You also need the content to be group centric, classes not overlapping ability wise, minimal teleportation/fast travel, etc, etc.
I view this in the same light as displaying levels for mobs (yes EQ colors gave a hint, aside from the even con directly labeling an npc) or going the extra step of hand holding and saying a mob is "elite" and shouldn't be soloed. The same as symbols floating above a players head, npc's head, or giving people an active minimap that displays you, your direction, the terrain/dungeon, the npc's, the pc's, the treasures, the gathering materials, the quests, etc.
In my personal opinion, I think there's entirely too much hand-holding going on with games these days. And yes, I understand this game is trying to strike a balance. I am more than happy to see how these things get implemented and try to be more clear with an opinion during alpha/beta.
People don't need the item levels, they don't need the item colors for rarity type. It just makes the game more streamlined by doing the thinking for the player - which I think is a big mistake. I can see and understand the VR teams concern with the current generation of gamers and having to make the game with them in mind too, or at least the learning curve. But I think of pantheon kind of like I do Dark souls (I do not play single player console games, but I, like most gamers, are aware there is a game called Dark Souls that is very difficult by comparison to other console games) where people will be logging in expecting a grouping game, expecting an "old school" experience. If you are expecting difficulty, you are not quiting at the first resistance you meet.
Lokkan said:People don't need the item levels, they don't need the item colors for rarity type. It just makes the game more streamlined by doing the thinking for the player - which I think is a big mistake. I can see and understand the VR teams concern with the current generation of gamers and having to make the game with them in mind too, or at least the learning curve. But I think of pantheon kind of like I do Dark souls (I do not play single player console games, but I, like most gamers, are aware there is a game called Dark Souls that is very difficult by comparison to other console games) where people will be logging in expecting a grouping game, expecting an "old school" experience. If you are expecting difficulty, you are not quiting at the first resistance you meet.
Coming from this as an avid Dark Souls franchise enthusiast, a lot of the rampant memes surrounding the difficulty of the game are misleading and do more harm than good. Dark Souls is a difficult game in that it requires patience, with a strong emphasis on execution. Once you master the patience game and begin to learn when you should be moving, blocking, rolling, and attacking, it's really not that difficult. You will be punished severely for your mistakes, however.
That said, Dark Souls has a very linear upgrading system for items. The earlier iterations of the game were a lot more vague, but as always, the results of the experiments with different upgrade paths were distilled into a formula and released online for anyone looking to optimize their build.
I agree that item level is really boring itemization and not needed or desired. I think it's worth saying, however, that obfuscating things too much is also undesirable. I think providing people with enough information to make informed gear choices is good. I shouldn't have to spend a thousand hours parsing with two different hats on to see which one is better. Fully optimizing your gear shouldn't be too obvious, or too convoluted. A certain balance is needed here.
If my stat window tells me that the Strength stat will increase my damage by x% per point and that Dexterity will increase my damage with thrusting weapons only and my ranged critical chance by x% per point, then I can infer from that that I'd be an idiot to wear a Dexterity hat while wielding a mace. This is just an example, but I think it illustrates my point. You should be able to use the information provided to you by the UI to make informed choices, but not have everything be as cut and dry as that.
For instance, if I have two hats and one increases my accuracy and the other increases my critical chance. I know what the items do, objectively, and the UI should have clear information about stat soft caps and diminishing returns. However, being able to pick between accuracy and critical chance may not be a straight forward as it seems, and may even require you to swap in accuracy gear for a mob that is particularly hard to hit.
TL;DR: I agree, **** item levels.
I also prefer no levels for Items.
I am not so sure about the text or box color, I guess a Color denoting an Items build quality would be ok. Maybe a quality Item would take less damage to the Item and cost less to maintain because the Item was made from the finest material by the best craftsman. I suppose a boring and exact +25 item durability and 0 to mystery would also work. I think almost no description of the stats other than a hint in the name of the Item would be fun.
Sometimes color is used to replace the feeling you would have about something in real life that is hard to get from a mass of pixels arranged into a recognizable pattern.
deltaloko said:Will Pantheon incorporate the idea of item levels, similar to how WoW has implemented them? To explain further, in WoW, every item has an item level(ilvl for short), and that ilvl is what determines the items stats. They know that an ilvl200 item will have A base stat, B stamina, and an x/y split of two secondary stats(for the most part). They basically turned item creation into the game into a mathematical forumla.
I spent a lot of time playing WoW after EQ changed so much that I couldn't recognize it anymore, and over the years I kept noticing little things that just made the game feel...inorganic. Things that really took me out of the game world and reminded me "hey, this is a video game", things that significantly hindered the immersion that I think EQ nailed so well. One of those "a-ha!" moments was looking at item levels(which cascaded into gear and stats in general, but that is a topic for another thread). One of my favorite items ever in EQ was Jenniy's Two-tone Cuirass, an item that existed as a wonderful pop culture reference, with interesting and useful stats, and I feel like this item can only really exist in a system with organic item creation like original EQ had, where you weren't balancing everything against some mathematical forumla.
From a developer standpoint, I get it. This allows fast creation of items, and easy balancing. You know that two ilvl200 items will provide roughly the same benefit to players, and can create an entire raid tiers worth of gear based on a certain ilvl with ease. I think it also severely hinders the developers though, as it makes it harder to balance things like procs(WoW weapons rarely have procs, and usually when they do they would just remove the stats on the weapon and compensate with the proc) and clickies, and makes it harder to really inject feeling into the items, so that they seem like actual pieces of magical treasure, and not just arbitrary computer processed stat buffs. It also allows them to put stats on items without worrying about an "item budget" of stats to use, such as the original quest sets(crafted, lambent, etc), where a warrior might get a piece of armor that had a few points of wisdom on it, without worrying that they "lost" their main stats for it.
Ultimately, EQ items just always felt very "real" early on, often being tied to places or bosses where we found them, and I think this was due in large part to the fact that devs were making each one of these items, rather then just plugging in a forumla.
So, do you think Pantheon should adopt an ilvl system for item creation? Does the ease of balance outweigh the boringness of having every item feel too similar? Is there a way to do item level while still allowing for devs to inject flavor and life into the items?
Item level is garbage. This isn't Diablo. You don't need color coding to tell you that one item is better than another.
deltaloko said:Crazzie said:I am ok for having strips across the item with different colors such as epic items. Having an epic item 1=green, epic 2=blue, epic 3=purple etc.. This is ok with me, but it usually is no drop and for that character only, meaning green was good until level 25, now that your 26 level your epic now is grey and is not as good as your epic 2 for your level. It doesnt change the values to you, however its a warning your above your epic level for fighting mobs. This doesnt count as an item for sale, or tradeable either. It is usually no drop, and is reflected to your character only. It also has been known in some games to turn in your epic for an upgraded quest item, or epic increase.
Normal, rares and raid items i would rather they be left alone, so that the dev team can add more into quests, items, characters and the game as a whole. The more we ask for, the more it becomes a problem for the next team or expac dev team to keep up with it.
We really do not need to break the backs of devs with trivial stuff like this. I hope it stays clean so the focus is on other things.
Just to be clear, I'm not in favor of item levels...I think it makes things easier on the developers but takes a big tool away for them to get creative with gear.
However, I don't think I understand what you're suggesting with the colored items. Are you saying they would be colored by level?
Remember the games that have color changes in the UI? such as grey, green, purple, orange in games like wow, rift, daoc, and so many others that used epic item colors?
If colors are the way to represent an approx. level grade item it doesnt hurt. However if you make the item useless its a problem with many of us.
Use color as a recommended level grade. So level 25 should be working on the next phase of the epic, since level 26 turns it to grey. Meaning that mobs around level 26+ should be fought with the next epic weapon as soon as possible. I would never hinder an epic item as, it looses its "epic feel" to the user. However working on the next epic could turn in parts of the quest to start making it slightly better then epic 1.0 half of the value of epic 2.0 until epic 2.0 is finished then it would turn purple.
grey is used as lower then your level should use.
green, purple, and orange are epic 1-3 colors.
These colors are anything used on the UI image only. Such as WOW epics being blue, to purple, and orange, red if i remember correctly they used later on.
Color can be used effectively to the user, however most of us in EQ understood very well what epic items where. We also understood that items in raids and normal trash mobs could be better then the existing epic items, or gear. This concept was very successful in EQ, where as WOW and the clone Rift used color to force the user into trading up all the time.
EQ players are not the same as WOW players by any means. We understood, and followed a much different path then those games.
We had to understand quests and item values geared to the mobs. So you see an EQ player would hate the very existance of item values, or levels, where as a WOW player might like the item level values, or just hate it and play with it.
Color can be used but it might have the WOW factor in it that would turn all EQ players off.
Open market items, are much better to everyone with no value to it. Understanding Resistance gear, HP gear, Regen gear mattered in the begining of EQ, later on didnt matter much because most gear had all specs to them. End game many years later didnt force the user to have straight Resistance gear only.
Simply put, I am also against item levels.
EQ did so many things right IMO. Leaving us to make our own determinations about gear was one. The color-based mob consider system was another, where the mere fact that the mob conned yellow still left some things to chance. Was it only 1-level above you or two? Red? Forget about it. It could be 3-levels higher than you or 30. I am ok with the "elite" indicators, however. I did always enjoy in other games when my group encountered a mob with an elite nameplate. We knew it was going to be a fight, and there may well be come great loot if we won.
GeekVerve said:Simply put, I am also against item levels.
EQ did so many things right IMO. Leaving us to make our own determinations about gear was one. The color-based mob consider system was another, where the mere fact that the mob conned yellow still left some things to chance. Was it only 1-level above you or two? Red? Forget about it. It could be 3-levels higher than you or 30. I am ok with the "elite" indicators, however. I did always enjoy in other games when my group encountered a mob with an elite nameplate. We knew it was going to be a fight, and there may well be come great loot if we won.
EQ didn't really leave people to make their own determinations about gear. Instead, several years of testing had to be conducted by the playerbase to determine what was optimal.
Stats were poorly documented or completely undocumented by SOE, and that did more harm than help imo. Letting people flail around in total ignorance isn't a good idea, to me.
Liav said:EQ didn't really leave people to make their own determinations about gear. Instead, several years of testing had to be conducted by the playerbase to determine what was optimal.
Stats were poorly documented or completely undocumented by SOE, and that did more harm than help imo. Letting people flail around in total ignorance isn't a good idea, to me.
Eh, total ignorance is really pushing it. Monks weren't flailing around wondering if this piece of gear with +INT on it did them any good. Sure, maybe they didn't have a perfect formula for X STA = X STR = X AGI = X DEX = X AC = X HP, but you knew what stats did what. The community eventually did figure it out though, but SOE didn't need to hold their hands about it. Perhaps that was part of the mystique of the game as well, that you didn't have a perfect manual for every little thing. It also help foster the great sense of community that was around back then.
FierinaFuryfist said:Eh, total ignorance is really pushing it. Monks weren't flailing around wondering if this piece of gear with +INT on it did them any good. Sure, maybe they didn't have a perfect formula for X STA = X STR = X AGI = X DEX = X AC = X HP, but you knew what stats did what. The community eventually did figure it out though, but SOE didn't need to hold their hands about it. Perhaps that was part of the mystique of the game as well, that you didn't have a perfect manual for every little thing. It also help foster the great sense of community that was around back then.
I would argue that.
People on Phinigel, 17 years later, still don't have a firm grasp on exactly how a point of STR influences your melee damage, or how much DEX influences your proc chance. There are people who still think DEX influences your critical hit chance, years later.
I know that DEX influences proc chance but I couldn't begin to tell you how much. I know that AGI influences avoidance (dodge, for instance), but I couldn't begin to tell you how much.
I think that's kind of unacceptable, personally.
@Liav
That's the thing though - people don't need to know that +1 str increases damage by .01 DPS/second. Just having a general idea that +Str equates to +damage is enough.
Part of the mystique of the game is figuring out which piece of equipment is better. You claim "instead, several years of testing had to be conducted by the playerbase to determine what was optimal" as a negative; whereas, I view it as a positive - just one more nuance of EQ that added to depth/knowledge of the game.
I remember arguments on my warrior if Platinum Black Pearl rings (agi/dex) or Platinum Fire Wedding rings (AC/HPs) were better at launch. And, because of it, I tested both combinations. Yes, the community most likely will figure out which one is better ultimately, but some people still swore that some items were better than others, even after the community had settled on a BIS item. You don't get that kind of discussion with overt information versus vague attribute descriptions. It's one more small cog that added to the community interactions and the creation of a virtual world.
I also don't want to see people running around in "color" significant gear with a score on it. Let people "feel" for their gear based on what they think benefits them. In time, the community will adapt and create the theories of what is the ideal gear or weapons for each class. This learning phase is what is so fun, everyone that is really into the game, puts in this secondary activity of research and "geeks" out about it.
@Raidan
The concept of "need" is a flawed way of looking at this to begin with. There's a lot of things we don't "need" that we will have because it's just intuitive to do so.
I'm not going to argue this with you for 5 pages because we'll never agree. You care about things that I don't care about, and I care about things that you don't care about. Having ambiguous stats, to me, is pants on head retarded and I will fight the developers to have relatively explicit information in that regard.
Letting people "feel" things and make gear choices based on that is just absurd. When you're dealing with numbers that small you can't tell anything without data. If you don't care about it that's fine, but I acknowledge that placebos exist and it isn't good enough for me to have to play with two different weapons for a thousand hours to figure out which one is better.
You're also neglecting to acknowledge that some items may have effects that can't be quantified in any practical manner.
I've stated my argument and you've stated yours, both of you. Neither of us are correct.