A request to the current developers:
I implore you to implement at least SOME form of the equivalent of Notorious Monster camping from
the early days of FFXI.
In my opinion that was the single most important factor that made XI so special,
whether they realize or admit it or not.
Yes, it is inevitably an element that a sizable amount of people truly and always will detest,
especially the element of butthurt that comes with someone else claiming the NM you wanted,
but that is not as important as what I think is a much larger group of people who understand
that notorious monster camping is THE end-all-be-all about a competitive PvE MMO.
If everything is either instanced, or just always sitting there always accessible to everybody,
it doesn't feel real, it doesn't feel special, it just feels like a boring trudge through yet
another storyline you likely don't care about.
There was no bigger motivating factor for people in that game. It was all about leveling and
gearing up and going to camp the biggest baddest NM's. To show everyone else on the server how leet
you were and make them jeleous of you.
There's so many things about it I can't even begin to decently describe in words that make it important
and special... like, the sense of TIME, the sense of clockwork, the sense of REALNESS that it gives
to a world, or really a server. There was only 1 tiamat, once a week, for a WHOLE SERVER of 10,000+ people.
That makes it pretty freaking cool if you're lucky enough to fight it.
There was something special about the dynamic of the 21-24 hour NMs...the 3 kings...
combined with the 3-5 day wyrms, the 2-4 day Argus and Lord of Onzozo... and the 2 hour lottery NM's
etc etc.
Anyways. I can't emplore you enough. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make this game have SOME form of competitive
PvE monster camping along the lines of early FFXI, in particular the end-game rotation....
I think probably a big difference between FFXI camping and EQ camping was that in XI it was first action gets the claim (which I find superior) compared to first person/group to do +50% damage (or whatever number). In that aspect I found it to be more true to the idea of contested content. It had more finality to it for me. Also the culture from what I hear was a bit different. Such as early EQ being a bit more polite in Named ettiquette (camp calls, moving along, getting notified when X group is done, etc). Where XI was a bit more cut throat. People would not hesitate to overcamp you. It wasnt unique to see 5-7 Large guilds at the bigger Named monsters all hoping to get first claim. And when 1 did the other groups would still stick around in the hopes of a slip up and a wipe. And when that happened it was open for grabs again. I will say that the Reddit AMA gives some idea of the direction VR is going.
PADPAD2 said: A good game should give players a choice. You can be the nice guys who cultivate civility if you like that, or you could be the cutthroat arsehats who don't hesitate to try and steal things at 1% whenever possible. Having a choice makes it real, it makes your civility, if that is your choice, actually mean something if you choose to do it. This cultivates a genuine sense of community and comradery, as well as genuine loathing and disdaine against the dickheads, just as life should be.
I agree 100%. EQ1 dev's mostly had a hands off approach, and let the guilds get justice their own way. Feuds came and went, but there was unwritten rules that people knew you didn't break or else. Either devs needs to be all in, or all out. Whatever the case, it worked for EQ1. I'm familiar with FF11 as well, and I feel that specific example is where it failed.
Ultra said:I hope they have NM and i hope there is one that drops something as amazing as kraken club!
Im not saying it wasnt cool, because it was awesome. But lets be honest, Kraken Club was one of the most broken things Ive ever seen in a game. So as awesome as it was and as funny as it was to see KC DRKs breaking the game, it has no place in a balanced game. Im all in favor of badass items, but there is a limit. Or at the very least if you are going to put something that powerful in the game, then be mindful of when emergent behavior and class design make a few seperate ideas into something game breaking. With any other class than DRK, it wouldnt have been an issue. So I suppose a simple fix (which SE never did while I was playing, if ever) would have been to make KC not equippable by DRK.
More on topic. I think on a PvE server it would be nice for their to be ettiquette in the stlye of early EQ. Whether players will honor it and if devs should enforce it is a different mattter.
As someone that is still actively playing FFXI to this day I can say without absolute certainity that the OP is 100% wrong in their assesment. This is ignoring the complete disregard for the rediculous amount of claim botters FFXI had.
As EQ has shown, and early FFXI, what you want is terrible design. Poop socking is not fun, and it drives players away.
Luckily SE saw this problem and started changing the items to r/e so gilsellers wouldn't continually screw other players, and changed the HNM system. This is also ignoring the NEW content that came in to help people with problems claiming HNMs.
This is coming from someone who was successful on all NM and HNM fronts and thoroughly enjoyed it at the time, and still saying this is bad.
Camping rare spawns was a staple of EQ gameplay. Being that it was one the main activity players engaged in, half a million players seem to think it was definitively fun.
Its possible they will make it less about sitting in a single spot, but camping mobs, whether it involves puzzles or crawling through dungeons, will be a part of Pantheon.
Camping is almost inevitable. How it is handled can be game making or breaking. There is a certain amount of predictability that must be present, but I also enjoy a bit of random surprise as well. Fortunately the dev team has a whole lot of experience with the entire process of camping. I am sure that they will not let us down.
Do not provide some hard-coded mechanice to 'fix' what can be handled by players actually talking to each other. I say this because if you, for example, lock an encounter by who first applied 1point of damage, eventually...invariably, you'll find yourself in a situation where you're getting your ass handed to you and, because of a stupid game mechanic introduced because people would rather have the game solve their social problems than actually having to deal with another person/group, nobody around can help you. You'll die and someone else will take your spawn, get the item they wanted, then take over your camp. Or walk away leaving you to do your own corpse run. Either way, you lose...all because you didn't want to have to deal with other people over a disagreement.
I have to ask Vandraad. What's wrong with that exactly. 1. I don't want people bypassing the challenge to content. If you claim it you had better had the stones to finish it or you deserve to die and it's perfectly acceptable to loose claim to someone else. Contested content remember? 2. I don't want people to interfere with my challenge. If I or my group are trying to down a boss I want to know what we are capable of as a team. Asking for help would defeat the purpose of that. I don't want your help. If I fail I die. If you want to steal claim at that point. I see no problem. That's my failure not yours. And it would be nice if you Rez me and my group afterwards but if you don't then that's my problem too. The difference is I wouldn't blame you for stealing claim. I'd see it as a totally legit tactic if I tried and wiped. However I would be Pissed about you not rez'n us. The other is fair play. The not rez 'n would be you being an ass.
On a separate note I would be fine with a call for help feature but it would either need to result in no rewards for anybody (or only the first group to respond to the call for help). But the group that had to be bailed out shouldn't get anything except humble pie and a lesson to learn from and try to apply next time.
Also as for social problems, I dont see them as that. Its contested content. Either you have completely friendly non-contested PvE which I like. Or you have contested indirect PvP on a PvE server which I also like. If the former then there is no issue because everyone is working on their own things but not necessarily against eachother. But if its the latter, then again its contested content (you either actually want this or you dont really want it), and I dont need to work things out. Other guilds are at best friendly rivals or at worst bitter enemies. So if the other guilds wipe then you take their mob (no hard feelings even if it happened to me) and to be a good sport you rez them but only after you show them how its done son. Im not saying you cant make agreements with other guilds about schedules or alliances, but I will say thats not really in the spirit of the idea of contested content to me.
No no no no... Let's go all hardcore. No first tap gets the kill thing. Just because you're there first, and get the first hit, doesn't mean some other group/guild can't come along and out dps you and claim the kill. You want competition, let's have competition. I would normally suggest that if you're that competitive, go to a PvP server but hey cool, cut throat buttholery in PvE works. The days of ettiquette are gone in MMO's. If you do not believe this play on any server in EQ, especially a progression server. People fake bids to raise the cost of real money game currency, they train you to take camps, they kill the sleeper so no one else in PvE can do so to get the same rewards, and many other things. There is no respect in games anymore. Just people trying to prove they have the biggest epeen. Hardcore. Make it so painful that only the most elite jerks in the MMO world will even play Pantheon. That way, you can have a server with a game that had the potential to recapture some EQ glory days with a server with 200 people on it.
hackerssuck said:No no no no... Let's go all hardcore. No first tap gets the kill thing. Just because you're there first, and get the first hit, doesn't mean some other group/guild can't come along and out dps you and claim the kill. You want competition, let's have competition. I would normally suggest that if you're that competitive, go to a PvP server but hey cool, cut throat buttholery in PvE works. The days of ettiquette are gone in MMO's. If you do not believe this play on any server in EQ, especially a progression server. People fake bids to raise the cost of real money game currency, they train you to take camps, they kill the sleeper so no one else in PvE can do so to get the same rewards, and many other things. There is no respect in games anymore. Just people trying to prove they have the biggest epeen. Hardcore. Make it so painful that only the most elite jerks in the MMO world will even play Pantheon. That way, you can have a server with a game that had the potential to recapture some EQ glory days with a server with 200 people on it.
While I don't ever expect to see the netiquette of the '90s return with Pantheon, comparing old games with dwindling populations, filled with elitists is nothing like the environment of new games with a healthy population. And while there isn't a whole lot of communication in single player mmos of today, I have run into many kind players in them - including in those involving PvP.
I cannot disagree more.
This game is supposed to be about the journey you take through the world and about the social aspects of a community that interact with each other in meaningful ways. Not about how "leet" you are and how much dps you can throw at a mob to steal it.
The premise of the game is to promote social interaction; the only interaction that this would bring is a torrent of abuse by both sides, the losers, complaining, the winners, gloating. This is not the kind of interaction VR have stated they want.
If you have a group that has camped a mob for however long for a quest they are trying to progress and the mob pops, so the group engages. Then another group comes along that is either a higher level, or better equipped or has a more dps makeup (none of which means they are better players, just a better position to take advantage) and they take the kill from your group, are you really saying that this is a game mechanic that is fun and acceptable? I can honestly say that anyone doing that to me would never be on my social list, ever. This kind of set up will encourage people to give up playing. Why would you want to play a game where you have been waiting patiently for hours to progress the story, only to have it stolen from you?
For Pantheon, I believe that this is a mechanic that could only work for a pvp environment, not a social pve one. No, infact I implore the developers to do the total opposite and allow the group who engage first to be allowed to complete their attempt.
chenzeme said:I cannot disagree more.
This game is supposed to be about the journey you take through the world and about the social aspects of a community that interact with each other in meaningful ways. Not about how "leet" you are and how much dps you can throw at a mob to steal it.
The premise of the game is to promote social interaction; the only interaction that this would bring is a torrent of abuse by both sides, the losers, complaining, the winners, gloating. This is not the kind of interaction VR have stated they want.
If you have a group that has camped a mob for however long for a quest they are trying to progress and the mob pops, so the group engages. Then another group comes along that is either a higher level, or better equipped or has a more dps makeup (none of which means they are better players, just a better position to take advantage) and they take the kill from your group, are you really saying that this is a game mechanic that is fun and acceptable? I can honestly say that anyone doing that to me would never be on my social list, ever. This kind of set up will encourage people to give up playing. Why would you want to play a game where you have been waiting patiently for hours to progress the story, only to have it stolen from you?
For Pantheon, I believe that this is a mechanic that could only work for a pvp environment, not a social pve one. No, infact I implore the developers to do the total opposite and allow the group who engage first to be allowed to complete their attempt.
It is interesting that back in the '99-'04 era this was almost a non-existant problem. Did it happen? yes. Did it happen every day? not at all. For the most part, as someone else stated there was a totally diffrent etiqutte back then. I am curious to see if this style of game forces a change back to that type of civility.
Maximis said:It is interesting that back in the '99-'04 era this was almost a non-existant problem. Did it happen? yes. Did it happen every day? not at all. For the most part, as someone else stated there was a totally diffrent etiqutte back then. I am curious to see if this style of game forces a change back to that type of civility.
I believe it very much will... in direct proportion to the amount of cooperative play the game demands. If Pantheon is challenging and risky so players desperately need each other (and aren't able to use systems like mentoring to avoid the greater community), a better environment where reputation matters will arise. On the other hand, if players can achieve a lot on their own with little fear of death, players will have little respect or regard for others.
Again, I don't expect to see netiquette from the 90s return, but by pure necessity, players will maintain a good reputation to succeed.
Camping is a must. It's just fun, and it gives you something to do when you're completing household tasks or at work because it doesn't necessarily require full time attention, just need to be on point every "x" amount of minutes. And if you're in a group, it's great for social purposes. Nothing much to do except get to know each other. Plus, with staggered spawn times, that's an easy and cheap way to develop hours and hours worth of content.
As far as KS'ing, as long as your reputation on the server matters, name changes and transfers are limited, and it takes considerable time to reroll up an alt, then most of the time, people won't steal your kill and ruin their rep. I think enough so, that no other fixes would be required. First engage is a terrible mechanic because you can just tag the mob from someone elses camp and have it chase you back to yours, while that entire other group can do nothing about it. If people are going to be jerks, they're going to be jerks. There is no way to stop it outside of paying attention and having the necessary fire power there as friends to get the mob.
I think doing the majority of damage to the mob is the way to go. But, the real deterrent will be reputation on the server and having a negative reputation somehow make the game less fun for those that are jerks. It's on VR to figure out how to do that. EQ did it ok early on just because of how hard and long it was to level and gear a new character. Plus, most guild leaders tried to keep their players in line, nobody wanted an alliance built up against them just to block them from content. Top guilds were too busy doing cutting edge content to really bother the general camping population.
Mathir: First engage is a terrible mechanic because you can just tag the mob from someone elses camp and have it chase you back to yours, while that entire other group can do nothing about it.
I think it is worse to spend time trying to take a mob down then a better equipped group steals it from you after the hard work you have already put in.
Mathir: If people are going to be jerks, they're going to be jerks.
I agree. It boils down to how much jerkanism (yeah I made that up) is acceptable. In my view a KS is way worse than a pull from a camp.
Mathir: But, the real deterrent will be reputation on the server and having a negative reputation somehow make the game less fun for those that are jerks.
The problem is, a jerk who shows total lack of respect in KSing will not care one bit about their reputation on a server. Especially if they have a group of like minded individuals. Also, the busier the server, the more KSing will happen and the less people will give a monkeys about reputation.
Dullahan: Again, I don't expect to see netiquette from the 90s return, but by pure necessity, players will maintain a good reputation to succeed.
The only way reputation will stop people from KSing is if it is measured by the game and has an impact on game play. If reputation doesnt impact on game play, the players who dont see a problem with with KSing wont care about it. Once KSing becomes common place, then more and more people will see it as the only way to progress, as everyone is at it.
How about a little of everything? An element of camping is important, as is the random spawned of names. I do feel like the idea of having some instances has its place in the game though. I'm sure VR has thught this through for their sector of subscriber base that does not have all the time in the world to camp. it's Important to fold in some ability to Log in with other friends (after the kids go down)and try some tough content with some certainty a mob will be avaliable to test their mettle. AS a general rule though I am against instancing as a norm.
chenzeme said:Mathir: First engage is a terrible mechanic because you can just tag the mob from someone elses camp and have it chase you back to yours, while that entire other group can do nothing about it.
I think it is worse to spend time trying to take a mob down then a better equipped group steals it from you after the hard work you have already put in.
Mathir: If people are going to be jerks, they're going to be jerks.
I agree. It boils down to how much jerkanism (yeah I made that up) is acceptable. In my view a KS is way worse than a pull from a camp.
Mathir: But, the real deterrent will be reputation on the server and having a negative reputation somehow make the game less fun for those that are jerks.
The problem is, a jerk who shows total lack of respect in KSing will not care one bit about their reputation on a server. Especially if they have a group of like minded individuals. Also, the busier the server, the more KSing will happen and the less people will give a monkeys about reputation.
Dullahan: Again, I don't expect to see netiquette from the 90s return, but by pure necessity, players will maintain a good reputation to succeed.
The only way reputation will stop people from KSing is if it is measured by the game and has an impact on game play. If reputation doesnt impact on game play, the players who dont see a problem with with KSing wont care about it. Once KSing becomes common place, then more and more people will see it as the only way to progress, as everyone is at it.
Your reputation does affect gameplay if you need people to progress. That means groups for experience, groups for questing, groups for getting mats for crafting, groups for dungeons and very little a player can achieve on their own. That was the big difference between EQ and games today - the game simply required more cooperative play and not a whole lot, particularly at higher levels, could be accomplished by yourself.
There will always be KSing. It exists in every mmo, pretty much ever. No amount of coding or restrictions will ever entirely prevent people from playing the villain. Thats just it though: we don't want to entirely eliminate the villain, but by way of heavy co-dependence, they can reduce it.
Dullahan: Your reputation does affect gameplay if you need people to progress.
It can only affect your game play if you cannot find a group of like minded individuals. As soon as you have a group (or worse a guild) where KSing is a part of that psyche (and the more players there are, the more likely this will happen), then game play repution will mean absoultely nothing to these people. Infact, the more "leet" the better, and so KSing is reinforced.
Dullahan: There will always be KSing
KSing cannot happen if mobs are "owned" by first tags and lasts until the mob is killed, the player is killed, the player zones, or the event times out after there are no registered hits for x number of seconds.
I guess we will have to agree to disagree and see how it is dealt with by Pantheon. Personally, I think it is much more frustrating to have a kill stolen rather than a mob pinched by a long ranged snipe.
chenzeme said:Dullahan: Your reputation does affect gameplay if you need people to progress.
It can only affect your game play if you cannot find a group of like minded individuals. As soon as you have a group (or worse a guild) where KSing is a part of that psyche (and the more players there are, the more likely this will happen), then game play repution will mean absoultely nothing to these people. Infact, the more "leet" the better, and so KSing is reinforced.
Dullahan: There will always be KSing
KSing cannot happen if mobs are "owned" by first tags and lasts until the mob is killed, the player is killed, the player zones, or the event times out after there are no registered hits for x number of seconds.
I guess we will have to agree to disagree and see how it is dealt with by Pantheon. Personally, I think it is much more frustrating to have a kill stolen rather than a mob pinched by a long ranged snipe.
KS does happen with first tag. You simply steal the mob by tagging faster. Its still stealing whether you claimed the mob or not. If anything, allowing a mob to become claimed is worse because one or two people can grief an entire group by simply getting the first hit in.
As to people seeking out like minded people who steal mobs, it becomes much easier for them to get banned when they begin to grossly abuse the rules as a guild.