Hi all,
First post, been lurking for a while.
Little about me: Casual gamer played EQ since vanilla, very close to Kunark release iirc. Played steady up to PoP where I lost interest, tending to bounce back every expansion release. In between those stints, tried WoW, SWG, Eve. Most recently I have been playing an early release fantasy survival game, Dark and Light until I lost interest.
Dark and Light has official servers and also allows the user to host private servers. It was very early EA at the time and each update and content addition brought many bugs and loss of hundreds of hours of work. That coupled with the EA stigma of server wipes on release, I thought I would host a private server. This was all with the intent to support myself and players on my server should such bugs wipe occur.
Using admin commands I set the level, skills and items to match what my GF and I had on the official server. Three days later I stopped playing. I took a 4 month break when my GF talked me into coming back to an official server. She picked a new one because our old was had zero population. EXP'd, harvested, tamed (mounts), and built our way back to where we were before. Slowly but surely the loss of population on existing server and the risk of wipes drove me to start the private server from scratch. My GF told me not to do it, because I would stop playing again. I didn’t listen and as usual she was right.
I always seem to be looking for something that can fill that void left by EQ many years ago. Reading through a few of the posts here about challenge, instant gratification, things people liked in EQ and want to see carried over got me thinking about my recent experience with Dark and Light.
The two takeaways from the private sever experience were:
1. No community - While I tried, albite halfhearted to get people to play, still no one did. So no interaction with others.
2. It came too easy. Even though I had earned the levels and items on the official server, I didn’t on the private. The simple fact that I could replace anything I lost and add anything that I wanted to without effort drove me away. What is the point of it all if I could get it with a few keystrokes? Even when I had the discipline not to it still had an impact.
Which brings me to the point of my post. At the time, these EQ features when added seemed like a great idea and / or a quality of life enhancement.
Bazaar - This added an easy way to find items that could upgrade your slots and an easy way for farmers to sell while still farming. Less reliance on researching camps and loot drop. We lost the EC tunnel, created greater contention for droppable loot camps and created exp grind mode where you could just grind exp and buy items as you leveled in the Baz. Worse, I feel this could have impacted PUG creation with loot camps in mind. All these could have a large impact on the community and players not being forced to interact with each other.
PoK stones - Yes it made life easier but it diminished the need for wiz or dru. Less thought to impact of time as a result of a potential corpse recovery or the 30 minute run to the camp. Those that may have sought out a porter in the past now would use the stone and never engage with said porter.
Item slot standardization - This one seemed cool, "hey all shoulders have xxx buff" next expansion will upgrade HP, END, MANA. Took much out of the careful thought and planning of your gear slots. Loss of immersion and more like ez mode.
F2P - I think this goes without saying, much as we may like or dislike the idea there is no effort behind it. Sure you make money in RL and there is an effort to that so it should count in a game right? No I don't think so, and this is coming from one who has spent some RL money on games. It's much like the private server, easy come and easy go. No immersion, no connection to the game and you will have a constant churn in the community eventually leading to no community.
One last thing for me personally, AA's I hated them and their addition. It seemed like a good idea at the time to me. Yet over time with each new expansion you had an ever increasing AA requirement as well as leveling requirement. If you left the game and came back or started a new character it was a mindless grind added on top of the already mindless lvl grind. Use some other form of alternate advancement or maybe gear slot leveling where you could advance an item in different ways.
tldr; I think community is key and all things should be earned through reasonable time and or risk investment.
I agree that AAs were over done. There needs to be an attainable limit before more are added. AA's themselves are a great concept. It was the implementation that I found lacking. Breaking up the ways a player advances alternatively between AA's and progeny would be positive.
Let most players be able to max out AAs and only those 12 hrs+ a day players even get close to being able to max out AAs and Progeny...but it should seem possible to attain before the next expansion, with most players achieving some combination of the 2 due to diminishing returns.. Like most things, balance is important. To little and players get bored. To much and players get overwhelmed.
Welcome to the forums.
I have been a vocal proponant of almost any system that would differentiate characters of the same class - for reasons I won't mention since this thread isn't really on that topic. Nonetheless I definitely agree that an AA system that takes *forever* to grind and then gets worse as level-caps increase is very much a disincentive to running multiple characters.
Rather than a system that kicks in at level-cap and gives bored maximum level characters something to do - not that such a system doesn't make sense for it does - I much prefer a system that lets you differentiate your character while you are leveling. LOTRO among other games uses that approach. It minimizes the disadvantage that you correctly point out about a level-cap based AA system.
Just reading your post reminds me of how I used to "meet" people just by requesting ports with my enchanter. After getting ports repeatedly from a few of the same porters, I generally established an acquaintanceship with those people, and that eventually led to grouping and real connection to those players (in the context of the game).
I made friends by satisfying all the "Can you spare a clarity?" requests back then, too (and got to know a lot of druids and shamans because of my constant begging for SoW). This was all before PoK stones, KEI, SoW potions, etc.
If VR can figure out how to establish some sort of optimal population on servers, I think they have a good chance of bringing back some of the magic.
I was on a TLC , no-drop server and AA's came a bit too late for me. By the time I was old enough to make it past the hard zones to get to other races newbie cities, the newbie/faction quests were too low. I wish I had AA's earlier on as I would have sunk more into AA's so I could keep my level down to be able to do the interesting and lore filled quests in foreign cities with interesting items/clickes that could last through to higher levels (I wanted a wee harvester! who cares if I was a mage and could summon bread myself- not the point- haha!) BEFORE they went trivial because I was a too high level.
Also, I liked running through lower level zones to travel because sometimes I would run into a named I had never seen (I'm looking at you, scruffy) or epic pieces and I could broadcast in general chat that soandso was up, or if I was attacked I could broadcast that soandso was hitting me and I would not attack so that someone working on the epic could try to run to make it to the monster and take over to get their epic piece because if I killed it, the loot would poof.
otterley said:Just reading your post reminds me of how I used to "meet" people just by requesting ports with my enchanter. After getting ports repeatedly from a few of the same porters, I generally established an acquaintanceship with those people, and that eventually led to grouping and real connection to those players (in the context of the game).
I made friends by satisfying all the "Can you spare a clarity?" requests back then, too (and got to know a lot of druids and shamans because of my constant begging for SoW). This was all before PoK stones, KEI, SoW potions, etc.
If VR can figure out how to establish some sort of optimal population on servers, I think they have a good chance of bringing back some of the magic.
I know right? It was magic and we didnt realize it until it was gone.
Anyhow very excited to see Pantheon and be a part of this!
philo said:I agree that AAs were over done. There needs to be an attainable limit before more are added. AA's themselves are a great concept. It was the implementation that I found lacking. Breaking up the ways a player advances alternatively between AA's and progeny would be positive.
Let most players be able to max out AAs and only those 12 hrs+ a day players even get close to being able to max out AAs and Progeny...but it should seem possible to attain before the next expansion, with most players achieving some combination of the 2 due to diminishing returns.. Like most things, balance is important. To little and players get bored. To much and players get overwhelmed.
AAs where over done, but a couple yrs ago they also forced you to merge AAs and repurchase a branded name. It was so shocking i just lost over 3000aas and never returned to EQ again on Live. I played TLP for abit but got annoyed by the cheating going on and the RMT sales. Its a very annoying culture those types of games provide.
My old mains in EQ were bard and druid. For me, the PoP stones killed a lot in the way of socializing for both those classes. Way back in the early days, even as a bard, I would get tells from folks asking if I could escort them to whatever zone, or across the Karanas with bard speed if they didn't have SoW, or wanted perma-invis. Once PoP released, everyone had near-instant safe travel between any two cities. Escort jobs became super rare. I missed it because it was always a break from normal stuff. A chance to meet someone new and chat for a half hour. Such a large chunk of what made EQ fun was the other players. The less we were "forced" to interact with eachother, the less fun the game became. I actually stayed with EQ until just about a year ago. Spent my time in "family guilds" and waiting for each progression server. Krono farming and RMT aside, even progression servers lost their charm for me once they reached PoP in many cases.
I really hope Pantheon will keep mechanics that require player interaction. I get it that people don't have as much time to play as 20 years ago, but guess what? You can't beat the game, so you may as well take your time.
We have a similar timeline of playing EQ it sounds like up to PoP. PoP drove me away but it because of the gameplay changes (although I think the travel stones to nearly anywhere drastically trivialized the size of the world... they should have just kept the nexus in the bazaar that allowed you to use wizard spires every 15mins... I thought that was the best compromise for travel because it still requires you to go on foot for quite a bit to a zone with a spire and then wait for the teleporter to send you to the bazaar, and then wait for the teleporter at the bazaar to send you to another spire likely not in the exact zone you were trying to get to but at least on the same continent.).
what drove me away from PoP was the allowance of server transfers from PvE servers to my PvP server. Fully plane of time geared players were transferring over when our server was just getting into PoTime and destroying us in pvp just because of the dramatic gear disparities (and you could tell that they had 0 skill, but gear that made them nearly invincible in pvp against non-plane geared players).