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What ever happend to camping for xp?
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I am not interested in this mechanic.
Perhaps something can be done to capture the parts of it that were good and get rid of or mitigate the parts that made it shallow and repetitive?
Maybe some kind of arena like thing, where not that predicatable waves of things attack you at semi-defined intervals. Maybe with like a minute or two between waves and notifications for readieness etc. Maybe even with ramping difficulty if you succeed more and more.
Unless what you liked was the boring ad nauseum repetition of easy kills. Then I guess there is no middle ground with me, cause that is a waste of my time and you are going to have to pay me to "play" rather than having me pay to play it.
Play WoW, play Guild Wars, play anything else. The quests are largely similar. It's more monotonous than grinding because changing zones doesn't necessarily mean the quests will be varied to any decent (or in many cases, any noticeable) extent. The vast majority of quests are of a very limited set of "types" of quests and the only thing that changes is the NPCs you get them from, the zones they're in, and the models of the MOBs you're killing.
Most people don't even read the text quest anymore, and there have been add-ons in WoW forever to speed you through them, before Blizzard basically aped the idea and put it into their base game (i.e. QuestHelper), which tells you just how much those players are "into the Lore" and how much they love having the game basically waste their time by putting tons of text in their face. Even in WoW, people have been speeding through those Quests forever.
WoW used to be better than it is today, though... Dungeons were much bigger and had a ton more replay value. They used to be some really big dungeons there. There used to be some semblance of difficulty as well. However, some of the issues with the Quest to Level and Fast-Path-To-Max design can't be fixed by simply throwing more content in the game, that just exacerbates it. The content in that game has a ridiculously short shelf life. Who goes to Buried Crusade Overland zones anymore? Why would anyone. Once you level through them (via Quests, of course) they become functionally useless. With the way WoW scales stats and the way gear is instantly rendered obsolete when you hit certain level breakpoints or when major updates hit and they effectively "reset" everything... Even the quest rewards are designed to be extremely disposable.
Heroics are not that difficult. You speed through them a few times and get a few drops to hit an iLevel bench point and then you go grind raid content, which is so easy compared to the end game raids in EQ (which I experienced) that it isn't even funny.
Grinding in different zones in EQ bought different types of challenges. Hell, even grinding in different areas of the same zone bought different type of Challenges. People often went to different parts of the zone or dungeon based on group composition, gear quality, etc.
No offense, but there is no comparison between the grinding variance between each Elemental Plane and the planes below them, and the quest packages in WoW. Or SSRA Temple vs. Grieg's End vs. the Inquisitor zone and WoW Quest Variety. Especially when you realize just who varied a lot of those zones were within themselves. It is actually amazing that game designers could develop such deep content back then, and we're paying, arguably MORE in many cases, for something that laughably shallow by comparison. The grinders beat it out for variety of experience any day. NO one said they were perfect. All games have their own problems. One big issue EQ had was the fact that its graphic engine is just simply not up to par with what gamers expect from games these days, visually. Back then, WoW and EQII were a revelation, graphically, compared to EverQuest. That's a big issue for older games, because a lot of developers are pushing the boundaries graphically in an attempt to rope in users (often at the expense at locking out many users, ironically).
WoW's popularity also has a lot to do with the fact that out of the current crop of MMORPGs, it has the lowest system requirements and still looks pretty good (you can not like the art style, but it does look pretty good on Balanced or higher settings). Games like Vanguard, Age of Conan, and many others are a complete fail because casual players who aren't apt to upgrading computers to play a certain game will simply pass on them and play WoW instead.
And the big issue with Quest to level games isn't really how varied the quests are, it's that the content is all disposable. There is basically no reason to go back to those areas to do anything because all progression is shoved into Heroic Instances and Raids after reaching max level. The shelf life of the content is the issue, as well as the fact that the content is designed to make social interactions with other players as brief as possible (outside of Guild Content - even in LFR people kill stuff and then drop the raid, in some cases they drop the raid before it's over once they get the drop or quest item they need, and they barely talk about anything, unless they're insulting someone).
Lineage II basically gives you the first 85 levels for free these days. With the Mentor system and what not. However, 90% of your gameplay will be spent at 85+, and once you get to 86+ the quests stop giving a level+ per completion and you're limited mostly to daily quests. To level up in L2 legitimately without abusing their Cash Shop Runes, XP Pots, Vitality Maintenance/Replenish items, etc... You almost need to have no life.
Really, the XP required to level up in that game is incredible and the MOB XP tables are basically balanced such that you can't get anything resembling (what you would consider) a normal XP rate (for a grind-based PvE game) without running at least a 50% XP Rune at all times (which is available for the price of $15/month as a subscription, ironically). Even that will leave you getting blown away by other players stacking XP runes/pots (upwards of 4-600% XP Bonus vs. your 50) or betting up (character leveling unassisted 24/7, with a full group of others since accounts don't require a game purchase or subscription there anymore...)
The very early game in L2 is designed to, literally, deceive you ;-)
If you actually read my post you would have realized i wasn't talking about dungeons either. All i said was 1-80 dungeons beat out anything else for exp. I then went on to say grinding mobs > questing 1-80 and most definitively 90-100.
Hamstringing yourself? What? So what if mobs are on a leash? You can still pick out a spot with dense packs of mobs and that's your grinding camp. There's plenty of spots like that in all the games i've listed and i could have gone on to list more but I figured after 7 games of current, fairly decently populated mmos that was enough.
You're joking. There's way more than "handfuls" of mobs to sit on in WoW, the respawn time is more than fast enough to warrant not just "viable" xp/hr, but way better xp/hr than questing would provide.
You get more than enough gear from drops, and in the rare case you don't, there's many options available to you. You could craft, you could buy from AH which you'd have more than enough money to do so from grinding mobs, you could do 1 dungeon run every 10 levels or so.
Quests give a decent amount of gold, this is true but tell me something, why then is it the best ways to make gold isn't to "farm quests until you run out"? Lol, because they don't give the best amounts of gold for the time spent. If you ever wanted to make a lot of gold, it's always been grinding mobs for cloth/drops, or crafting materials and selling them.
So in conclusion, your entire post was flawed, mine wasn't. And if you want to continue to try to act like camping mobs is impossible in todays games, then like my previous post said, i listed a good number of games where if you want to contest my opinion, i'm more than welcome to prove you wrong.
Grinding MOBs has never been better than Questing in WoW, except maybe for some isolated level ranges in Vanilla. Other than very isolated circumstances, it was never better. I played WoW in BC and quit after a week actually, because Quest to Level was literally forced on you. I quit for like 2 years before I came back right after WoTLK launched largely because I didn't have a choice. Other MMORPGs were either terrible or the system requirements were such that I could play WoW on Balanced+ with 30+ FPS but those other MMORPGs would struggle to get 20 with the graphics set to the lowest setting (Aion, Age of Conan, EQ2, etc.).
If you were leveling faster via Grinding, it means you were blind and couldn't see the quest hub across the field, because it wasn't happening. When one Quest takes 3 minutes for something like 10k XP and MOBs are giving like 100 XP per kill (and those weren't one shot mobs back then), the quest wins by a landslide - with a disparity to large that it practically rules out grinding. It has always been that way. The game was, is, and has always been heavily biased towards questing for character [level progression].
WoW enforced grouping only within Dungeons, and those actually were kind of decent back before Wrath of the Lich King, however the Heroics back then were extremely gear-based. Since then, they have largely been faceroll - both Normal and Heroics - much smaller, and only there to facilitate gearing up for beginning raiding. Those instances are loot piñatas (as is LFR Raids).
However, WoW's contemporary - EverQuest II - did allow you to grind MOBs for decent XP Gain. It was a decent game but it had its own share of issues when it launched, which hurt it quite a bit. They later went back and put quests in everywhere which made the game no different than WoW, except EQ2 had a metric ton of content and was less linear in progression than WoW, and still allowed players the choice to grind at a progression-rate that was at least competitive with Questing.
EQ2 had insanely large public instance dungeons to grind, and contested overland zones for people to level in (as well as farm loot, and they had quests as well). WoW still really doesn't have anything like that.
It is this lack of imagination I speak of. Even the players can't see past the what is given to them. The "camp" is a poor mechanic but the essence of why you want to do it over questing and grind killing exists. The discussion was to spawn ideas for where the genre could have taken it. Many of you even went on discussing spawn mechanics. All the pieces are there but everyone fails to put it all together and spawns these endless debates.
It's tiring writing to deaf ears but so worth it when someone actually gets what actually going on.
You stay sassy!
I played it at launch, i was just saying for the sake that even "old school" games resorted to other means.
and yes, those games are still out there and you can camp all you want. Question is - why dont you play them?
instead whining how there are none lol
Comparisons are hard for people. I'll say something like "6 is bigger than 3." Then someone will try to imply I'm wrong by saying "Well 6 is a very small number." Uh, well that's fine if you want to give it that subjective label, but we're making a comparison here. And 6 is still bigger than 3.
Quest-based games are more varied than mob-grind games. If you want to toss around subjective labels like saying it's not very much variety, fine. It doesn't matter. However big or small you consider the variety in a quest-based game like WOW, it's going to be more than what a grind-based game offers. It offers a lot more of the variety that matters most (what you're doing) and a lot more of the variety that matters less (what you're seeing/reading/etc).
You then move onto some other subjective things, a few of which I agree with (general difficulty comments) and a few which are strange or unnecessary (ie it really doesn't matter if certain parts of older content is under-used by leveling players,) and other stuff which is just your legitimate subjective opinion.
But then you make the common mistake of trying to sum up WOW's success in one thing (engine performance) and that's of course easy to disprove since many MMORPGs have been out which ran perfectly fine on low-end machines and have failed to achieve WOW's popularity. The simplest examples being GW1 and every MMORPG that came before WOW, but many others did just fine when it came to performance on low end machines.
Recently I've hit on two of the bigger factors behind WOW's success (variety, and combat depth in another thread) in the hope that people will develop a better understanding of why WOW actually blew up, instead of seeing so many players fabricate these ridiculous ideas that it was advertising or engine performance or high-speed internet that somehow kept players coming back all these years, long after those elements were no longer relevant to them individually. And also to educate players on the fact that WOW is more varied and has great game depth, since most players don't really think things through to understand these factors deeply. (And in fact calling WOW shallow is a common insult, but when you dig into the details of WOW's decision matrix it's an insult which is pretty baseless.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Oh, I read your post:
The only time questing > grinding mobs in WoW lower levels is back years ago like before MoP or maybe before Cata even. But by far and large, dungeon running is superior to anything else
The "confusion" is that most of my grinding/dungeon running was done in Lineage 2. So doing dungeons is not that much different than going out into the field.
You saying the first part and then bringing in "dungeon running" was confusing to me as I am not completely knowledgeable about how wow works. I thought there was a differentiation but wasn't sure if you were bringing in a different activity or jus equating dungeon running with grinding mobs.
Dungeon Running in L2 is essentially camping an area anywhere in the game with the exception of the bosses (well, unless in the last few years they changed that mechanic but I doubt it) and grinding mobs.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Ahh i see now, well my apologies then. Yea, as you've already surmised i was talking about the instanced dungeons that are ran in groups of 5.
Though WoW does have areas reminiscent to open world dungeons similar to what EQ/L2 had(which is where i go to grind mobs cause of the density and potential rare mobs for loot) though they don't require a group to run them, more people -can- mean more exp if you split up the area effectively/kill fast enough to warrant the reduction in xp for grouping.
Just to give an example, one such area i remember grinding to high 50s(before the cataclysm) was in Eastern Plaguelands, in the bottom right corner of the map was an area with really nice density of mobs and the respawn time made it perfect for 1-2 people, maybe even 3 to run around. Was filled with humanoids and half of the casters too which meant silver/cloth drops and quick kills. Was a great area rogues looking to level lockpicking too. You'd go around and pick every mobs pocket, kill them, and rinse and repeat.
The problem is I provided you with examples in each of my posts as to how grinding can provide more variety, but also grant you freedom. Something you can't get from questing via GPS and ! marks.
This was ignored and then you post that I don't understand what you are saying in terms of how quests are varied and that quests are in fact far more varied because you can click in this order instead of that order when clicking to plant seeds for a farmer.
You don't take into account that many games have offered far more complex crafting systems without questing systems and you didn't need a quest for this variety. All you needed was to go out and gather, and craft.
This is all grinding IMO which doesn't count the different ways you can grind mobs as mentioned in my post and the previous post.
Thanks for the info and no reason to apologize that's why we discuss things on a forum!
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
You're straight up misremembering if you think quests give 10k exp while mobs give 100 exp at the same level range of mobs - quests. I'm sorry but no, you're 100% wrong. Straight grinding mobs has always been better than straight questing in WoW.
There are factors that would make questing better than grinding mobs, like if you're constantly having to worry about world pvp(which isn't an issue nowadays) or if your grinding area has someone there already(a lot of areas can only support 1 group at a time(by group i mean, separate groups of any size because while an area may not be good for 2 groups, it could be fine for 1 group of 3 for instance)
But mostly, those factors are a non-issue, as world pvp just doesn't happen on the level that it used to happen on, not even close. Most pvp servers, the only world pvp you'll experience is in Draenor, and even while there it's not that much which is sad but the truth. And if your camping spot is occupied by another person, you could either invite them to group and draw boundaries so you both get each others kill xp and aren't going after same mobs, or you pick another spot.
If you were leveling faster questing, then you straight up never even attempted to grind mobs or you just completely absolutely failed at picking out an actual grind spot. First off, when it comes to grinding mobs, you always grind mobs at minimum 4 levels(orange name) above you. Why? Because this is what gives you the most exp. Which means, actually want to be fighting mobs that are red to you and still die quickly so you're not forced to move as often.
Depending on your class, depends what type of mobs you might prefer to face. For instance, rogues/warriors are mage-eaters. So the more casters an area has, the better cause you rip through their low armor like a knife through butter. Casters generally can fight whatever. Hunters should also aim for caster mobs but can also generally fight whatever, the key to all is whatever dies fastest.
It'd do you well in the future, to not speak about things which you obviously are ignorant about.
Your comment shows either your lack of life or your lack of thought. Take your pick. You post on websites -- you need to get a life. You play MMOs -- you need to get a life. You disagree with me -- you need to get a life. My way of having fun is worthwhile -- yours is not.
Get a life.
Intended or not by the devs as you imply / state -- I do not doubt there is a correlation here.
Someone really needs to go through posts like this and summarize the points in a reusable format (I volunteer any of the rest of you).
Lots and lots of threads on what made the classics fun. I understand those who do not agree or who never understood it are worn out over the argument, but I am certain there are workable requirements in these threads.
Develop a few threads on the main deltas and you the start of a specification that would make a great kickstarter. Even though I too am starting to wonder whether any kickstarters will ever prove to be a boon to the genre.
Your examples:
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
It was scrapped because it was a terrible, tedious, and heavily disliked game mechanic.
There's a reason "Grinding" has negative connotations, and mob camping is grinding at it's worst.
LotRO, a quest based game if'n I ever saw one, totally has all that stuff, as I mentioned in an earlier post. If you're farming Westfold materials, you're making big $$ right now even though they aren't the highest tier. GW2's crafting system is pretty impressive, though I haven't played enough to understand what materials I can farm where. But I'm confident a regular player who cares about such things knows full well.
There are some new games that aren't so clear and where he has a point: Mostly Cryptic games, which have never been very crafter friendly. TSW doesn't have any material gathering other than drops.
But the point stands pretty clearly. Those req's are met by quest based games. Some games like LotRO even accommodate them via slayer deeds. The only difference is that camping for XP isn't a clear front-runner for gaining XP, and yes, oftentimes XP returns from camping are pretty weak. But in LotRO non-stationary camps can result in a crapton of materials and cash. And more cash from auctioning those mats.
There are certainly acceptable reasons for not liking LotRO or GW2 or any other game I mentioned. But that still doesn't line up with the idea that quest based MMO's take away your ability to craft farm, or just sit and farm mobs. Matter of fact, if you solely quest-level in LotRO, odds are pretty good you'll have to buy crafting mats at auction; while a grind-leveler will likely not have the same problem.
I think one of the issues was that camps were finite, there may be competition for quest mobs, but people just need them once then move on.
I still remember the camp checks in N Ro and Paludal Caverns, logged in, checked if I could get into a camp, if not, logged out. With how death was back then, I didnt want to venture out to far at the levels I was at. Killed the game for me.
This could be solved by sharding though.
Or we can twist it another way, why would anyone want to suffer throught the most boring and repetitive process known to man kind? People lose brain cells just by participating in that horrible grind
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Yup, praising these "features" of "old school" games really doesnt spell good games lol
"Game was so mindnumbing i had to chit chat to drive mindnumbness away" and they wonder why it disappeared
Its like their local shop had dreadful service and long queues so people "socialized" while waiting in endless queues, and then new shop opens with awesome service and no queues and some people saying its bu..crap and adveritse long queues in shops as "awesome feature"
As has been mentioned, in almost all modern games grinding mobs is the best way to go (you get drops/gold/mats as the bonus along the way instead just xp) and still pretty much noone does it. Not even those that complain here