Do I want to look like a common poor citizen in drab brown ripped up armor in order to make someone who has way too much time/ or money/ or time and money look cool? Nope.
I want my characters to have a wide variety of interesting QUALITY looking armor. There can certainly be rare looks beyond that which I may never get, but no I don't want to look boring and dull all the time. I'm playing a fantasy game. I want to look the part of an epic hero. If I wanted to look like an everyday nobody, well I can do that all the time I'm not in game.
Oh. You meant "trophies" instead of "loot". MMO Viagra.
I'm going to go ahead and assume you have no idea what my post is about, based on your response.
Also, while I was leveling up my first toon, it was immediately obvious that a person I was looking at had rare loot. Seeing people with rare weapons and armor <-- trophies
Or maybe I do know exactly what you're talking about.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Oh. You meant "trophies" instead of "loot". MMO Viagra.
I'm going to go ahead and assume you have no idea what my post is about, based on your response.
Also, while I was leveling up my first toon, it was immediately obvious that a person I was looking at had rare loot. Seeing people with rare weapons and armor <-- trophies
Or maybe I do know exactly what you're talking about.
Seeing the loot was motivation for me to continue playing and wanting to be able to experience the harder content for myself. I no longer experience that in MMOs today, because everyone looks "cool" and nobody really stands out. I liked being able to look at someone and know that they put in a lot of effort to obtain the items, without having any knowledge of the harder content or having any idea what items they owned. In most MMOs today, I can get cool looking items very early on.
Maybe that's what you meant by using the word trophies, if so, then I guess you did understand my point. =p
One aspect that I actually do not want to look forward to, is Armor and Weapons with rarity ONLY coming from end game dungeons and mobs.
I remember one thing I loved about EQOA was that you could get cool looking/unique armor/weapons from mob camps. Granted, that game was grind centric, and you had to kill thousands of mobs just to level up, but I still remember being solo, and going to lower level camps (still light blue, before they greened out/no rewards), and killing thousands upon thousands of them just to get rare loot. I would save this for a toon I wanted to trick out, or would shout out in zones to get some good money.
EQOA was a great game for me, and it was an MMO that I really didn't want to reach end game in. I slowly... ever so slowly, progressed each day. Did things my own way. Read every quest, and tried to solve every puzzle. They didn't hand hold you, pointing you where you needed to go, and since this was pre-wiki, and Alakazham was barely starting out, you didn't have good places to search for what you needed.
I remember that the game had only ONE robe that was equipable to the Monk class, and it was a low level robe dropped by a mob that had 4 placeholders in a wide area. It was practically never camped, and very few, if any on my server, knew what dropped it. I would camp that mobs and would cycle among the 4 placeholders for hours on end to get the robe, but the reward, both in money and in satisfaction was very worth it for me.
Oh. You meant "trophies" instead of "loot". MMO Viagra.
I'm going to go ahead and assume you have no idea what my post is about, based on your response.
Also, while I was leveling up my first toon, it was immediately obvious that a person I was looking at had rare loot. Seeing people with rare weapons and armor <-- trophies
Or maybe I do know exactly what you're talking about.
Seeing the loot was motivation for me to continue playing and wanting to be able to experience the harder content for myself. I no longer experience that in MMOs today, because everyone looks "cool" and nobody really stands out. I liked being able to look at someone and know that they put in a lot of effort to obtain the items, without having any knowledge of the harder content or having any idea what items they owned. In most MMOs today, I can get cool looking items very early on.
Maybe that's what you meant by using the word trophies, if so, then I guess you did understand my point. =p
IMO, when you get armor at lower levels that looks as good as armor from higher levels, it really seems like that 10th place trophy that you got for participating. Your character should really reflect the time and effort put in.
Played: EQ1 (10 Years), Guild Wars, Rift, TERA Tried: EQ2, Vanguard, Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Runes of Magic and countless others... Currently Playing: GW2
If you want to see EARNED,FFXI loot is extremely RARE.Example you definitely know when you see a player with a Kraken club and that is rare if you ever see a player with one.
When i played EQ-EQ2 i thought loot was way too easy,you pretty much knew you were going to get your loot on a Boss kill.In FFXI you could spend months ,years getting a certain rare item.
The real problem with all itemization is it's worth.Now a days games like to speed ball players through level's.IDK if they figure players will quit if it is too much a grind or too hard ,none the less if you out level your rare items too fast,they have very little worth.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I hope for the death of game currency systems. Nothing worse than going to a vender to buy "loot". I want to get loot or loot componets in the game world, not generic badges but real items real components. Also rare loot, it should be exciting to find something good or valuable from a mob that dropped nothing special the last 1000 times you killed it.
A much overlooked mechanic in todays bland mmog, and removed in the name of "removing grind". Sad thing is, it didnt remove grind, it just made a new grind for game currency, boring and flat grind instead of exciting grind.
As neat as getting a nifty item is, I hope it's a distant distant DISTANT second to doing things in the world itself.
There's enough raid based max level item grinders out there for 50 lifetimes. Lets leave that to the other games. I don't want the purpose of my play to be to obtain shoes that have a little more INT on them than other shoes.
If this is going to be a different MMO, then let it be different. Lets not try to drag along as many tired old mechanics from previous MMOs as possible.
you have to know this isn't going to happen .. everything these days is cash shopped ... loot unfortunately will never have the meaning it once did unless we somehow convince a ton of people that f2p sux.
LFD tools are great for cramming people into content, but quality > quantity. I am, usually on the sandbox .. more "hardcore" side of things, but I also do just want to have fun. So lighten up already
The problem is time. We are now in the age of information. There is nothing you can 'hide' or put into a game that won't be dissected a million different ways telling you how to do it right. You can avoid it, you don't HAVE to read it - but when playing with those who do, it slowly urges you to do the same just to 'keep up'
The problem is time. We are now in the age of information. There is nothing you can 'hide' or put into a game that won't be dissected a million different ways telling you how to do it right. You can avoid it, you don't HAVE to read it - but when playing with those who do, it slowly urges you to do the same just to 'keep up'
Dont see it changing
Back in during Everquest, almost everyone was new to MMORPGs. The genre itself was just beginning. The idea of an open world to explore was new. Now pretty much all players on this forum are veterans to the genre. No amount of systems, changes, or attempts to bring it back to the 'good old days' in a game will ever bring back that feeling people want.
The problem is time. We are now in the age of information. There is nothing you can 'hide' or put into a game that won't be dissected a million different ways telling you how to do it right. You can avoid it, you don't HAVE to read it - but when playing with those who do, it slowly urges you to do the same just to 'keep up'
Dont see it changing
Back in during Everquest, almost everyone was new to MMORPGs. The genre itself was just beginning. The idea of an open world to explore was new. Now pretty much all players on this forum are veterans to the genre. No amount of systems, changes, or attempts to bring it back to the 'good old days' in a game will ever bring back that feeling people want.
I think most of us understand that there is no way to recreate the same feeling. But, it would be nice if game designers could find new ways to excite us again. lol The last time I was excited to play an MMO was 6 years ago. I'm bored of the genre due to the lack of innovation over the past several years, in large part because many companies tried playing it safe by copying the WoW model.
I think most of us understand that there is no way to recreate the same feeling. But, it would be nice if game designers could find new ways to excite us again. lol The last time I was excited to play an MMO was 6 years ago. I'm bored of the genre due to the lack of innovation over the past several years, in large part because many companies tried playing it safe by copying the WoW model.
I'm not sure how to relate this to the initial post that asked for the exact opposite of a new way to excite us.
The problem is time. We are now in the age of information. There is nothing you can 'hide' or put into a game that won't be dissected a million different ways telling you how to do it right. You can avoid it, you don't HAVE to read it - but when playing with those who do, it slowly urges you to do the same just to 'keep up'
Dont see it changing
Back in during Everquest, almost everyone was new to MMORPGs. The genre itself was just beginning. The idea of an open world to explore was new. Now pretty much all players on this forum are veterans to the genre. No amount of systems, changes, or attempts to bring it back to the 'good old days' in a game will ever bring back that feeling people want.
I think most of us understand that there is no way to recreate the same feeling. But, it would be nice if game designers could find new ways to excite us again. lol The last time I was excited to play an MMO was 6 years ago. I'm bored of the genre due to the lack of innovation over the past several years, in large part because many companies tried playing it safe by copying the WoW model.
I think the best way to excite us and keep us in the game would be to create a game that plays to the strengths of the genre. The massive open world with thousands of others. Put an emphasis on community, working together and the world and less on the individual heroes.
I've always felt with every MMO I've played that it can not create, as hard as it tries, a better individual experience than another can. RPGs will always have a better single player RPG experience because it doesn't have to account for anyone else in the world. Shooters and MOBAs will have the better balanced PvP experience because they don't have to worry about PvE content or balance. Action / fighter games can incorporate better combat systems. The one thing that MMOs can do better than anything else is create that world experience. It doesn't seem like anyone has tried in quite a while.
Played: EQ1 (10 Years), Guild Wars, Rift, TERA Tried: EQ2, Vanguard, Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Runes of Magic and countless others... Currently Playing: GW2
I think most of us understand that there is no way to recreate the same feeling. But, it would be nice if game designers could find new ways to excite us again. lol The last time I was excited to play an MMO was 6 years ago. I'm bored of the genre due to the lack of innovation over the past several years, in large part because many companies tried playing it safe by copying the WoW model.
I'm not sure how to relate this to the initial post that asked for the exact opposite of a new way to excite us.
The point of the post was to ask if others felt the same way as I do in terms of gear and accomplishment being nonexistent in today's MMOs. It's up to the game designers to be able to capture a similar feeling in a new way.
The problem is time. We are now in the age of information. There is nothing you can 'hide' or put into a game that won't be dissected a million different ways telling you how to do it right. You can avoid it, you don't HAVE to read it - but when playing with those who do, it slowly urges you to do the same just to 'keep up'
Dont see it changing
Technically you could have a game full of quests that can only ever be completed once by one person or one group. That would destroy the entire wiki system as no quest could be repeated so there would be no such thing as a walk through.
Of course the manpower to do so would be ridiculous and cost more than you could bring back in so it wouldn't happen. And any algorithmic way of doing it would still be dissected to the point of having walk throughs available again.
Yes , BUT -- there needs to be viable rare items for people to camp for as opposed to simply raiding. I want to camp a spawn for a week again for one item with a group, and never have to bind that item so it then becomes wealth added to my character. Without the lack of a bind feature ...... rare items will be pointless because it will simply become a "best in slot" modern raider .... which I detest.
Bring back non binding gear! Petition creation please ...
So far, my favorite style of loot was Lineage 2 but with that style comes it's own set of certain problems.
For one, there were no soulbound items that I know of.
Mobs rarely dropped full weapons/armor (which I don't agree with, because if they have weapons/armor you should be able to loot it), instead they dropped materials which crafters could turn INTO weapons and armor.
The best armor and weapons were so expensive and difficult to make, they became Clan property because they required a group effort to pull the resources together.
So if you got a new person, you formed a hunting party and went out and killed the mobs that dropped the mats in order for your crafters to make the gear to get them kitted out, or they got someone's hand-me-downs.
To me this echoes the practice in the middle ages of knights being sponsored by a lord because fine armor and weapons were just too expensive for anyone but the nobility.
I also liked it because getting someone's hand-me-downs created a bond. Also, over time those weapons and armor had a history.
"/clan Ok everybody Newguybob is set up a set of Diamond Etched Whoopass Armor so he's good for a while."
"Random clan member: Oh sh*t I remember that set. I wore that forever it felt like."
Newguybob: "Wow guys, thanks this is awesome. I'll take good care of it!"
With a loot system like that the Clan/Guild really matters and people pull together for something that in any other type of system is completely trivial.
Of course what sucked was the 20 man teams of bots roaming the landscape locking down the boss mobs with all the best mats and then selling them to the highest bidders and then turning around and selling the gold to the same players who are running around buying the mats from the mobs they have on lockdown.
Maybe those days are gone, but I have to say I really liked the group effort.
Still, I'd rather pull together as a team and kill a big bad than camp a mob any day. Camping is boring and by it's nature exclusive and creates hard feelings when someone grabs the mob out from under someone else's nose. I don't think hours/days of camping should be instantly invalidated by someone having millisecond faster clicking fingers.
I'd be ok with rare spawns/boss mobs having special items that dedicated solo/small group players could knock out to get special loots, but the equivalent or better gear should be able to be made by crafters using materials that people can pull together from killing big badasses or resource gathering in super-scary areas.
I still remember pulling together a crew to go down into Sol Eye to forge Wyrmsteel to take on Darathar. It was a crazy amount of effort for a little edge (too little imo) but man it felt good to bust out those wyrmsteel blades when the time came and our weaponsmith ( who had busted his butt grinding faction to get the recipes, and who had sat down in Infernal Forge of the Ages for hours making them) felt like a celebrity.
What I hate is how loot is in current MMO's where you get buried in crap loot constantly as a 'reward' for errandboy/girl 'quests' and upgrades are almost never special; but rather some tiny incremental boost.
To answer the OP I don't mind ordinary but I don't think everyone should have to look like crap though. Save the super shiny/particle effect type stuff for superamazing stuff, but everyone should be able to have a nice-looking set of gear.
Comments
Are rare looks a good thing? Sure.
Do I want to look like a common poor citizen in drab brown ripped up armor in order to make someone who has way too much time/ or money/ or time and money look cool? Nope.
I want my characters to have a wide variety of interesting QUALITY looking armor. There can certainly be rare looks beyond that which I may never get, but no I don't want to look boring and dull all the time. I'm playing a fantasy game. I want to look the part of an epic hero. If I wanted to look like an everyday nobody, well I can do that all the time I'm not in game.
Also, while I was leveling up my first toon, it was immediately obvious that a person I was looking at had rare loot. Seeing people with rare weapons and armor <-- trophies
Or maybe I do know exactly what you're talking about.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Seeing the loot was motivation for me to continue playing and wanting to be able to experience the harder content for myself. I no longer experience that in MMOs today, because everyone looks "cool" and nobody really stands out. I liked being able to look at someone and know that they put in a lot of effort to obtain the items, without having any knowledge of the harder content or having any idea what items they owned. In most MMOs today, I can get cool looking items very early on.
Maybe that's what you meant by using the word trophies, if so, then I guess you did understand my point. =p
One aspect that I actually do not want to look forward to, is Armor and Weapons with rarity ONLY coming from end game dungeons and mobs.
I remember one thing I loved about EQOA was that you could get cool looking/unique armor/weapons from mob camps. Granted, that game was grind centric, and you had to kill thousands of mobs just to level up, but I still remember being solo, and going to lower level camps (still light blue, before they greened out/no rewards), and killing thousands upon thousands of them just to get rare loot. I would save this for a toon I wanted to trick out, or would shout out in zones to get some good money.
EQOA was a great game for me, and it was an MMO that I really didn't want to reach end game in. I slowly... ever so slowly, progressed each day. Did things my own way. Read every quest, and tried to solve every puzzle. They didn't hand hold you, pointing you where you needed to go, and since this was pre-wiki, and Alakazham was barely starting out, you didn't have good places to search for what you needed.
I remember that the game had only ONE robe that was equipable to the Monk class, and it was a low level robe dropped by a mob that had 4 placeholders in a wide area. It was practically never camped, and very few, if any on my server, knew what dropped it. I would camp that mobs and would cycle among the 4 placeholders for hours on end to get the robe, but the reward, both in money and in satisfaction was very worth it for me.
I still wish I could go back to that game.
IMO, when you get armor at lower levels that looks as good as armor from higher levels, it really seems like that 10th place trophy that you got for participating. Your character should really reflect the time and effort put in.
Played: EQ1 (10 Years), Guild Wars, Rift, TERA
Tried: EQ2, Vanguard, Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Runes of Magic and countless others...
Currently Playing: GW2
Nytlok Sylas
80 Sylvari Ranger
If you want to see EARNED,FFXI loot is extremely RARE.Example you definitely know when you see a player with a Kraken club and that is rare if you ever see a player with one.
When i played EQ-EQ2 i thought loot was way too easy,you pretty much knew you were going to get your loot on a Boss kill.In FFXI you could spend months ,years getting a certain rare item.
The real problem with all itemization is it's worth.Now a days games like to speed ball players through level's.IDK if they figure players will quit if it is too much a grind or too hard ,none the less if you out level your rare items too fast,they have very little worth.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I hope for the death of game currency systems. Nothing worse than going to a vender to buy "loot". I want to get loot or loot componets in the game world, not generic badges but real items real components. Also rare loot, it should be exciting to find something good or valuable from a mob that dropped nothing special the last 1000 times you killed it.
A much overlooked mechanic in todays bland mmog, and removed in the name of "removing grind". Sad thing is, it didnt remove grind, it just made a new grind for game currency, boring and flat grind instead of exciting grind.
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
As neat as getting a nifty item is, I hope it's a distant distant DISTANT second to doing things in the world itself.
There's enough raid based max level item grinders out there for 50 lifetimes. Lets leave that to the other games. I don't want the purpose of my play to be to obtain shoes that have a little more INT on them than other shoes.
If this is going to be a different MMO, then let it be different. Lets not try to drag along as many tired old mechanics from previous MMOs as possible.
you have to know this isn't going to happen .. everything these days is cash shopped ... loot unfortunately will never have the meaning it once did unless we somehow convince a ton of people that f2p sux.
LFD tools are great for cramming people into content, but quality > quantity.
I am, usually on the sandbox .. more "hardcore" side of things, but I also do just want to have fun. So lighten up already
The problem is time. We are now in the age of information. There is nothing you can 'hide' or put into a game that won't be dissected a million different ways telling you how to do it right. You can avoid it, you don't HAVE to read it - but when playing with those who do, it slowly urges you to do the same just to 'keep up'
Dont see it changing
Back in during Everquest, almost everyone was new to MMORPGs. The genre itself was just beginning. The idea of an open world to explore was new. Now pretty much all players on this forum are veterans to the genre. No amount of systems, changes, or attempts to bring it back to the 'good old days' in a game will ever bring back that feeling people want.
I think most of us understand that there is no way to recreate the same feeling. But, it would be nice if game designers could find new ways to excite us again. lol The last time I was excited to play an MMO was 6 years ago. I'm bored of the genre due to the lack of innovation over the past several years, in large part because many companies tried playing it safe by copying the WoW model.
I'm not sure how to relate this to the initial post that asked for the exact opposite of a new way to excite us.
I think the best way to excite us and keep us in the game would be to create a game that plays to the strengths of the genre. The massive open world with thousands of others. Put an emphasis on community, working together and the world and less on the individual heroes.
I've always felt with every MMO I've played that it can not create, as hard as it tries, a better individual experience than another can. RPGs will always have a better single player RPG experience because it doesn't have to account for anyone else in the world. Shooters and MOBAs will have the better balanced PvP experience because they don't have to worry about PvE content or balance. Action / fighter games can incorporate better combat systems. The one thing that MMOs can do better than anything else is create that world experience. It doesn't seem like anyone has tried in quite a while.
Played: EQ1 (10 Years), Guild Wars, Rift, TERA
Tried: EQ2, Vanguard, Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Runes of Magic and countless others...
Currently Playing: GW2
Nytlok Sylas
80 Sylvari Ranger
The point of the post was to ask if others felt the same way as I do in terms of gear and accomplishment being nonexistent in today's MMOs. It's up to the game designers to be able to capture a similar feeling in a new way.
Technically you could have a game full of quests that can only ever be completed once by one person or one group. That would destroy the entire wiki system as no quest could be repeated so there would be no such thing as a walk through.
Of course the manpower to do so would be ridiculous and cost more than you could bring back in so it wouldn't happen. And any algorithmic way of doing it would still be dissected to the point of having walk throughs available again.
Yes , BUT -- there needs to be viable rare items for people to camp for as opposed to simply raiding. I want to camp a spawn for a week again for one item with a group, and never have to bind that item so it then becomes wealth added to my character. Without the lack of a bind feature ...... rare items will be pointless because it will simply become a "best in slot" modern raider .... which I detest.
Bring back non binding gear! Petition creation please ...
So far, my favorite style of loot was Lineage 2 but with that style comes it's own set of certain problems.
For one, there were no soulbound items that I know of.
Mobs rarely dropped full weapons/armor (which I don't agree with, because if they have weapons/armor you should be able to loot it), instead they dropped materials which crafters could turn INTO weapons and armor.
The best armor and weapons were so expensive and difficult to make, they became Clan property because they required a group effort to pull the resources together.
So if you got a new person, you formed a hunting party and went out and killed the mobs that dropped the mats in order for your crafters to make the gear to get them kitted out, or they got someone's hand-me-downs.
To me this echoes the practice in the middle ages of knights being sponsored by a lord because fine armor and weapons were just too expensive for anyone but the nobility.
I also liked it because getting someone's hand-me-downs created a bond. Also, over time those weapons and armor had a history.
"/clan Ok everybody Newguybob is set up a set of Diamond Etched Whoopass Armor so he's good for a while."
"Random clan member: Oh sh*t I remember that set. I wore that forever it felt like."
Newguybob: "Wow guys, thanks this is awesome. I'll take good care of it!"
With a loot system like that the Clan/Guild really matters and people pull together for something that in any other type of system is completely trivial.
Of course what sucked was the 20 man teams of bots roaming the landscape locking down the boss mobs with all the best mats and then selling them to the highest bidders and then turning around and selling the gold to the same players who are running around buying the mats from the mobs they have on lockdown.
Maybe those days are gone, but I have to say I really liked the group effort.
Still, I'd rather pull together as a team and kill a big bad than camp a mob any day. Camping is boring and by it's nature exclusive and creates hard feelings when someone grabs the mob out from under someone else's nose. I don't think hours/days of camping should be instantly invalidated by someone having millisecond faster clicking fingers.
I'd be ok with rare spawns/boss mobs having special items that dedicated solo/small group players could knock out to get special loots, but the equivalent or better gear should be able to be made by crafters using materials that people can pull together from killing big badasses or resource gathering in super-scary areas.
I still remember pulling together a crew to go down into Sol Eye to forge Wyrmsteel to take on Darathar. It was a crazy amount of effort for a little edge (too little imo) but man it felt good to bust out those wyrmsteel blades when the time came and our weaponsmith ( who had busted his butt grinding faction to get the recipes, and who had sat down in Infernal Forge of the Ages for hours making them) felt like a celebrity.
What I hate is how loot is in current MMO's where you get buried in crap loot constantly as a 'reward' for errandboy/girl 'quests' and upgrades are almost never special; but rather some tiny incremental boost.
To answer the OP I don't mind ordinary but I don't think everyone should have to look like crap though. Save the super shiny/particle effect type stuff for superamazing stuff, but everyone should be able to have a nice-looking set of gear.