We may or may not agree on the methodology. But I cant disagree with anything you just said man. And well said it was.
This partly plays into why I and at least Raidan hope for a varied approach to "endgame" activities. Though I think we have our own ideas about how to go about that. Im sure that VR will come up with something good. I know you arent happy with that term "endgame", but you know what I mean. Things to do to progress your character after max level.
1. I think its just a different culture that developed in XI vs EQ. There were things you could do to sully your reputation. Botting, Monster Player Killing, Ninja Looting, Betraying your LS was especially bad. But stealing claim after a group wiped was natural in XI. In fact you could get a bad reputation if you complained about it, because it was considered rude/dishonorable to be upset that another LS came along and finished what you started but couldnt finish. It did happen every once in a while to up and coming LSs, but after community backlash it didnt happen again. Tough love I know, yet there it is. But again I think this is a game culture thing and some what influenced by the Japanese population. Does that sort of answer it?
2. It was a few mins on the lockout (maybe 15?). That being said if the competition for the Bosses that held the pop items was heavy enough. My LS might not be able to get the required items to pop any one God more than twice a week. So either the zone would need to remain relevant to encourage competition. Or I wouldnt be against a Group or Guild specific Lockout (i.e. anyone involved in the spawn cant be involved in a new spawn for XX hours (72 sounds right).
3. Keep in mind the areas were huge and very dangerous even for max level players. It wasnt uncommon for me to be making my way with my LS through the interior palace (almost a maze really lol) and round a corner to find a full alliance of dead people (18 people).
4. I too long for endgame variety just as XI had and from what I gather EQ as well.
It doesn't sound that different from my experience in EQ, on both the pve and pvp servers. In EQ, if we failed on a boss that was easily accessible when a rival guild was present, you could pretty much expect they would kill it. There were some exceptions like if it was at the end of a raid dungeon that your guild cleared (maybe plane of fear, or plane of hate), but that was an exception. It could be considered bad form to take something from a guild after they did hours of work. It went both ways.
Appreciate the clarification and it doesn't sound too different.
And agreed with Dullahan, EQ didn't always act differently when it came to high end contested content either on a PvE server (I didn't play on PvP). But, for regular group content, camps were often respected more at least on PvE in my experience. I wouldn't really care to be honest whichever way the community went, but, I hope that the community is strong enough like EQ and FFXI that a "norm" is created.
You had guilds staying up all night..................and I mean all night, from dusk till dawn...........to get some spawns. I don't think anyone still wishes to do that.
Ok, I like some difficulty in MMO, but I have a life too.
there were no old people back then and there are no teenagers now or...is there no dusk/dawn now and there was then or...maybe...
LIFE was much quicker back then so you had more time to play games but with today's slowdown in daily life it takes increasingly longer to achieve the same goals in the time you were able to back then, leaving less time to dedicate to gaming.
95% of EQ's raids are in instances
"back then", the overwhelming majority of raids guild supported instancing raids
in FACT, it was implemented ON REQUEST of raiders
Instances increase the gear drops too much, making the rarity of item drops meaningless.
The only compensation would be to make items extremely rare off the raid bosses, meaning you might kill a boss multiple times and get nothing to balance the influx of items into the game world.
Instances will bring far more problems than they solve.
Eh, as long as the raid drops aren't tradeable, then i don't really care. IMO rarity should only be a factor in a tradeable item that can be bought or gotten by not "completing" said content.
As long as they make the raids difficult enough, then the loot from the raids is your reward for getting however many people together that worked in concert to down this raid boss.
Make the super badass raid items rare by virtue of it being really freaking hard to kill the boss. If we had faceroll raids like later WoW expansions then yes it becomes welfare epics. However if you look at a lot of dragons in places like North Temple of Veeshan in velious, or in Veeshan's Peak in Kunark, even 6 months to a year later some of the more casual guilds couldn't complete the content, they just didn't have enough players with the skillset.
Difficulty isn't enough to slow people down. As soon as one beats the event, the strategy will be passed around and others will be beating it in short time. Also, once you have a boss down, it isn't that much of an issue after as putting it on farm is very quick after that. Loot rarity is a part of EQ, it is why only the top guilds who were cock blocking people actually had similar looking geared players and it made winning an item on a raid mean a heck of a lot because not every person on the server had one. Compare that to WoW where every guild who could beat the content had players with those items.
That said, I don't see why raid items should be treated as special and group items not. You can make group content just as challenging as raid content outside of the large number of people to manage. If they are only making 24 man raid content, then even people management isn't even an issue as 24 people is easy to organize (compared to 50-70).
They said that raids would only be 15-20% of the content and not the main focus of the game, so raids should not be a source to easily obtain gear. If they make it with instancing, or where every guild can take on the same content at the same time, they essentially are giving raiders preferential treatment and faster gear acquisition.
Raiders should not have an increased drop rate (ie their own special boss per guild) just because they are raid.
Also, why should raid items not be traded? What is good for the goose, is good for the gander. You can't say raiding items should be special and not traded, but it is ok to do that with group items. Either trading is wrong, or it is not. This approach of "raiders are special and group players can piss off" is already heading us back to what started to run off a lot of EQ players and why WoW instance dungeons became popular.
If you look at EQ, they started to cater to the raiders and many of the group dungeons became solo/duo spots for the raid guilds because they were ridiculously geared up. The group players were treated as if they were second rate players. If Pantheon is not heading down that route (ie being a massive raid game), then raiding should not be given special privilege.
EQ RELEASED with a crapton of raid items being non tradeable. All the class specific planar gear was non tradeable for example. There were some boss items that weren't and some that were.
What is your obsession with binary thinking? Its not "trading is good or trading is bad". That's like saying that a country putting a block on imports from countries that engage in terrorist activity means they should block ALL importation of goods regardless. Its just ridiculous.
And i'm sorry but your argument about strategy being shared is just wrong. Even on P99 where you had players who knew the content inside and out regularly wiped trying to down dragons, particularly in places like VP. That argument is only valid when you have faceroll content like most of WoW's raids past BC.
And the whole overgeared players duoing a dungeon thing didnt happen till way down the line, like PoP era where there was already significant mudflation coming into play.
Yet again you set up a straw man and took my post to mean "raiding is the priority" when i in no way said or implied that. You then proceeded to put words into my mouth about how "raiders are special and group players can piss off"
Raiding by virtue of the fact that you have to get 5-10x as many people working in unison to acheive something is reason enough that they should get better loot. It doesn't have to be drastically better, but it should be better. Otherwise, don't put in raids. Just don't even bother.
Also, stop with the robin hood garbage. 50 teenagers and young adults who have the time to invest poopsocking raid mobs to get phat lewtz does not in any way shape or form affect your gameplay except out of pure jealousy. It's like saying nobody can have a porsche because you can't afford to have a porsche and therefore people who have porsches are ruining your life.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
Raiders had way too good gear in EQ. And I say this as someone who raided almost all expansions.
One of the first weapons to reach ATK/Delay parity, was the Edge of Eternity, a raid weapon, from PoTime, which I own.
The first group weapon to reach that statistic for groupers, was 9 EXPANSIONS LATER. ......9 !!!
Weighty Jagged Einhander, a weapon from Ashengate that wasn't easy to get for groupers.
It actually wasn't even parity at first, it was worse than the 9 expansion raid weapon but it's thanks to raiders, like me, who said that it was insane that groupers were treated so badly, that the weapon got patched with marginally better stats.
Groupers were actually taking on raid mobs in a group, because it was easier to group raids than to do the group content that resulted in crap weapons.
Did we deserve better stuff because we raided? Yes we did, we needed 54 people and had to log in to raid every night.
Did we deserve to be 9 expansions ahead in gear over groupers? NO WAY.
As a raider, someone could sit on their behind, not play the game for 9 expansions, log in...and still have better gear than everyone who didn't raid. It was insane.
Raiders had way too good gear in EQ. And I say this as someone who raided almost all expansions.
One of the first weapons to reach ATK/Delay parity, was the Edge of Eternity, a raid weapon, from PoTime, which I own.
The first group weapon to reach that statistic for groupers, was 9 EXPANSIONS LATER. ......9 !!!
Weighty Jagged Einhander, a weapon from Ashengate that wasn't easy to get for groupers.
It actually wasn't even parity at first, it was worse than the 9 expansion raid weapon but it's thanks to raiders, like me, who said that it was insane that groupers were treated so badly, that the weapon got patched with better stats.
Groupers were actually taking on raid mobs in a group, because it was easier to group raids than to do the group content that resulted in crap weapons.
Did we deserve better stuff because we raided? Yes we did, we needed 54 people and had to log in to raid every night.
Did we deserve to be 9 expansions ahead in gear over groupers? NO WAY.
As a raider, someone could sit on their behind, not play the game for 9 expansions, log in...and still have better gear than everyone who didn't raid. It was insane.
I am completely convinced now that you did not play Everquest until Luclin and beyond, like we've said over and over, Everquest after Luclin may as well be considered Everquest 2, so all of this post above is mostly irrelevant to what old school Everquest is about.
like we've said over and over, Everquest after Luclin may as well be considered Everquest 2, so all of this post above is mostly irrelevant to what old school Everquest is about.
We? Who is "we""? People who bailed on EQ after 1 year like yourself? People who don't know jack about the game?
You think you're a fan of EQ after bailing during Luclin, supporting an MMO for a year and then running off, and now you think you can tell others that they're not allowed to talk about anything beyond that first year pre-Luclin? Who are you?
I played all 16 years of the game and counting. Just because you didn't like 15 years of the game, doesn't mean you have a right to tell others that they're not allowed to talk about it.
You're like a guy who watched the intro of a movie, leaves the theater after 2 minutes, claims he's a fan of the movie and franchise, and continues to tell others they can't talk about anything beyond the first 2 minutes of the movie.
Who do you think you are, this is the third time you try to tell people they can only talk about what you want. Get out with that stuff.
Just registered on this forum and thinks he can tell others what they can and can't talk about.
I am completely convinced now that you did not play Everquest until Luclin and beyond
Uhm, I was the third person on my server to get my epic during Kunark.
And unlike some ppl in this thread, I can actually back up my claims and I didn't bail on EQ after a few years.
Don't reply to me again until you show your gear. I hate posers.
Rofl, this is so rich. Whether I played EQ beyond Luclin is not something I'd care to admit publicly. Especially after WoW launched, which by 2005, was doing everything that EQ was doing, and doing it better.
EQ RELEASED with a crapton of raid items being non tradeable. All the class specific planar gear was non tradeable for example. There were some boss items that weren't and some that were.
What is your obsession with binary thinking? Its not "trading is good or trading is bad". That's like saying that a country putting a block on imports from countries that engage in terrorist activity means they should block ALL importation of goods regardless. Its just ridiculous.
And i'm sorry but your argument about strategy being shared is just wrong. Even on P99 where you had players who knew the content inside and out regularly wiped trying to down dragons, particularly in places like VP. That argument is only valid when you have faceroll content like most of WoW's raids past BC.
And the whole overgeared players duoing a dungeon thing didnt happen till way down the line, like PoP era where there was already significant mudflation coming into play.
Yet again you set up a straw man and took my post to mean "raiding is the priority" when i in no way said or implied that. You then proceeded to put words into my mouth about how "raiders are special and group players can piss off"
Raiding by virtue of the fact that you have to get 5-10x as many people working in unison to acheive something is reason enough that they should get better loot. It doesn't have to be drastically better, but it should be better. Otherwise, don't put in raids. Just don't even bother.
Also, stop with the robin hood garbage. 50 teenagers and young adults who have the time to invest poopsocking raid mobs to get phat lewtz does not in any way shape or form affect your gameplay except out of pure jealousy. It's like saying nobody can have a porsche because you can't afford to have a porsche and therefore people who have porsches are ruining your life.
Get over your tantrum. Just because I showed you to be full of shit about RMT in EQ (Yantis/IGE) doesn't mean you have to respond like you are having an emotional seizure every time we discuss. Knock it off already.
Your argument is of a bias to have raids treated differently. You think raid gear should be treated special and non-drop, but group gear should be traded. It is a double standard, one that seeks to treat one form of play over that of another and it stinks of the same approach that Sony did by dismissing group play in EQ in favor of pandering to the tantrum throwing guilds who wanted their play to be special above the rest of the game.
I am not arguing that raid loot should be better or worse, merely showing how difficulty is really a component of increased coordination in large numbers. The smaller the raid, the easier it is to organize and as I said, 24 people (ie 4 groups of 6) is not difficult to organize. Yes, there is a bit more difficulty in coordination, but this idea that is some major accomplishment is bullshit and I have led raids in many games. The old argument of "Raid content is so much harder" was proven wrong multiple times by later games that showed that group content can be every bit as involved. Anyone who did any LoTRO grouping before they dumbed the game down knows this.
My point was that raid drops should not be treated as if they are the golden goose while group drops are dismissed. Saying that raid drops should not be traded, but it is ok to have group drops is hypocritical, there is no getting around it. It is "exception" based logic that makes up its rules as it goes.
You sit here and argue that player trading does not invalidate the effort of the person who has to gain it in play, but then turn around and go on about how raid gear should not be obtained in the same manner because it would invalidate the effort of the raider. It is an obvious double standard and no amount of word play or fallacious dismissals will change that. As I said, what is "good for the goose, is good for the gander", if it is invalidating raid effort by buying gear, then it is the same for group gear, saying otherwise is blowing smoke up peoples asses.
Also, as for the duoing/soloing by raiders, I didn't say it otherwise. The point was that they attended to raiders and they became the focus, leaving grouping in the dust. The point was about setting double standards to how game play is treated and considering that raiding is supposed to be a small subset of the game, going down the road of treating raiding somehow special over grouping effort is already a bad start.
As for the difficulty? Yes, it does get easier. Once your applied a solid strategy, raiding got easier and easier the next times you did it. Sure, there were some details to iron out over each successive encounter, but it got easier and easier. Going from first win to farm did not take long for a guild of quality players who listened and followed instructions. Not only that, but I found that most of the raids got a heck of a lot easier due to confidence and the ability to focus on different approaches.
For instance, on Dain Frostweaver, we used to go down and fight him in the pit, but it was chaotic with numerous adds and pops. It divided our raid and made the event last a long time. We won every time after the first, but it was always a long fight, filled with issues. That was, until I designed a strategy to pull Dain out to the zone entrance with a monk chain. We setup a CoH chain with one group at the pit drop. Then, we pulled and fought him there at the entrance CoHing every 45 seconds someone was banished to the pit. It was a ridiculously easy raid.
This turned a very long fight into a short 30 min event. He was on farm after 3 kills. This was the same with NToV, AoW, PoG, Sleepers, etc... Fact is, once you beat the encounters it gets a hell of a lot easier and if you are constantly having issues each time you do it, it is because your raid isn't organized or your strategy is crap which means you won it before on dumb luck.
Your lack of understanding of gaming mechanics is astounding. You can't seem to understand how systems are related, how other systems have an effect on game play, how this spills over and begins to create other issues in the game. Your understanding past that of just "video gaming" is non-existent and you continually attack (calling me jealous) rather than reason your postion.
Again, you do a lot of shit talking that I have taken you to task for. I think your knowledge of what happened in EQ and what is a concern of occurrence is is biased and greatly limited.
We may or may not agree on the methodology. But I cant disagree with anything you just said man. And well said it was.
This partly plays into why I and at least Raidan hope for a varied approach to "endgame" activities. Though I think we have our own ideas about how to go about that. Im sure that VR will come up with something good. I know you arent happy with that term "endgame", but you know what I mean. Things to do to progress your character after max level.
Well, my hope is that "end game" does not really exist in Pantheon (as we know it in games today). What I mean is, that if VR designs the content with extremely long leveling curves where most players are still progressing through the content by the time new content comes out, things that we know as "end game" today won't exist as it will all be "mid-game" content.
What I liked about EQs release schedule was that by the time a new expansion was released, the bulk of the players were still in the middle the previous content. For instance, you could start raiding at 47 and there were raids for the lighter side of that level range and then raids for the 50's and above. Also, group dungeon content existed up into 50 as well.
So, with the new expansion, it seemed to work seamlessly into the progression of the game. Plane of Sky was extremely difficult even after Kunark was released. In fact, there were bosses there that weren't killed until the next expansion Kunark.
Kunark and Velious also seemed to carry this kind of development style. Most players were not done with the previous content by the time new content was released and this gave a rich means for players to spread out and continue old progression as well as getting into new progression.
For most the game was always in a perpetual state of "journey", there was no real "end game" as we know it today where everyone is sitting around spinning their wheels farming complete sets of gear while they wait for the next expansion to invalidate it all (aka WoW). EQ treated content like it was a continuation of the world, not a gimmick.
The nice thing about this design is you can put in content that may be too hard for players knowing eventually, as new content is released, players will progress to a point where they may be able to handle it. So there is never the feeling of "end game", just continued progression.
This is why I harp on the details of gear rarity, my issues with player trade, etc... because these can harm the progression of the game. If raiders are all in instances gearing completely up and they are powering up through content too fast, well... what ends up being the issue? We have more "end game" mentality and those types existed, even in EQ. I think it would be a huge mistake for VR to allow content to be consumed too quickly. I know there are some who will play the game 24/7, consume it in record time and then throw tantrums. Those types should not be catered to, that is what mainstream games exist for. Their entire design focus is to cater to locusts and that is why we have "end game" focus in every game today rather than just general game play focus.
Raiders had way too good gear in EQ. And I say this as someone who raided almost all expansions.
One of the first weapons to reach ATK/Delay parity, was the Edge of Eternity, a raid weapon, from PoTime, which I own.
The first group weapon to reach that statistic for groupers, was 9 EXPANSIONS LATER. ......9 !!!
Weighty Jagged Einhander, a weapon from Ashengate that wasn't easy to get for groupers.
It actually wasn't even parity at first, it was worse than the 9 expansion raid weapon but it's thanks to raiders, like me, who said that it was insane that groupers were treated so badly, that the weapon got patched with marginally better stats.
Groupers were actually taking on raid mobs in a group, because it was easier to group raids than to do the group content that resulted in crap weapons.
Did we deserve better stuff because we raided? Yes we did, we needed 54 people and had to log in to raid every night.
Did we deserve to be 9 expansions ahead in gear over groupers? NO WAY.
As a raider, someone could sit on their behind, not play the game for 9 expansions, log in...and still have better gear than everyone who didn't raid. It was insane.
That was one of the reasons I left EQ around about the time GoD came out. I raided a lot in release up to early PoP and then got tired of the all the drama. I hated how the way PoP was designed caused so many problems with our guild and really started flipping the bird to groups.
By the time GoD came out, I was just grouping with friends mostly and it was getting so irritating seeing content being designed just to fit raiders. That is why WoW was appealing at the time. They really tried to cater to the groups again and the content while spamy was still challenging early on. Though I always preferred EQs form of play.
I tried to come back to EQ years later and I saw exactly what you are talking about with the later expansions. Man, the gear disparity was insane and I thought they were pandering to guilds back when I was first playing.
In the end though, I think they need to be very careful with the raiders in Pantheon. It is so easy to start on the path you experienced again which is why this need by some to dismiss discussion on this is baffling, It is like they don't think this very same path can happen again, just like they seem to think that gold selling won't be an issue, botting and boxing wont, etc... that some how release EQ magically makes all these problems disappear. /boggle
Raiders had way too good gear in EQ. And I say this as someone who raided almost all expansions.
One of the first weapons to reach ATK/Delay parity, was the Edge of Eternity, a raid weapon, from PoTime, which I own.
The first group weapon to reach that statistic for groupers, was 9 EXPANSIONS LATER. ......9 !!!
Weighty Jagged Einhander, a weapon from Ashengate that wasn't easy to get for groupers.
It actually wasn't even parity at first, it was worse than the 9 expansion raid weapon but it's thanks to raiders, like me, who said that it was insane that groupers were treated so badly, that the weapon got patched with marginally better stats.
Groupers were actually taking on raid mobs in a group, because it was easier to group raids than to do the group content that resulted in crap weapons.
Did we deserve better stuff because we raided? Yes we did, we needed 54 people and had to log in to raid every night.
Did we deserve to be 9 expansions ahead in gear over groupers? NO WAY.
As a raider, someone could sit on their behind, not play the game for 9 expansions, log in...and still have better gear than everyone who didn't raid. It was insane.
I hear what you're saying, but you're talking about a game that is like 9 years old at this point
The disparity between raid items and group/dungeon/world items up to velious was not that ridiculous. Velious a little bit, but def not in orig and kunark.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
EQ RELEASED with a crapton of raid items being non tradeable. All the class specific planar gear was non tradeable for example. There were some boss items that weren't and some that were.
What is your obsession with binary thinking? Its not "trading is good or trading is bad". That's like saying that a country putting a block on imports from countries that engage in terrorist activity means they should block ALL importation of goods regardless. Its just ridiculous.
And i'm sorry but your argument about strategy being shared is just wrong. Even on P99 where you had players who knew the content inside and out regularly wiped trying to down dragons, particularly in places like VP. That argument is only valid when you have faceroll content like most of WoW's raids past BC.
And the whole overgeared players duoing a dungeon thing didnt happen till way down the line, like PoP era where there was already significant mudflation coming into play.
Yet again you set up a straw man and took my post to mean "raiding is the priority" when i in no way said or implied that. You then proceeded to put words into my mouth about how "raiders are special and group players can piss off"
Raiding by virtue of the fact that you have to get 5-10x as many people working in unison to acheive something is reason enough that they should get better loot. It doesn't have to be drastically better, but it should be better. Otherwise, don't put in raids. Just don't even bother.
Also, stop with the robin hood garbage. 50 teenagers and young adults who have the time to invest poopsocking raid mobs to get phat lewtz does not in any way shape or form affect your gameplay except out of pure jealousy. It's like saying nobody can have a porsche because you can't afford to have a porsche and therefore people who have porsches are ruining your life.
Get over your tantrum. Just because I showed you to be full of shit about RMT in EQ (Yantis/IGE) doesn't mean you have to respond like you are having an emotional seizure every time we discuss. Knock it off already.
I'm so utterly fucking sick of your attitude. Consider this the last time i ever respond to you, you've officially been blocked. Feel free to post your walls of text and then go stroke yourself off at how awesome you are at forum PvP, i really don't care at this point.
Have fun.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
EQ RELEASED with a crapton of raid items being non tradeable. All the class specific planar gear was non tradeable for example. There were some boss items that weren't and some that were.
What is your obsession with binary thinking? Its not "trading is good or trading is bad". That's like saying that a country putting a block on imports from countries that engage in terrorist activity means they should block ALL importation of goods regardless. Its just ridiculous.
And i'm sorry but your argument about strategy being shared is just wrong. Even on P99 where you had players who knew the content inside and out regularly wiped trying to down dragons, particularly in places like VP. That argument is only valid when you have faceroll content like most of WoW's raids past BC.
And the whole overgeared players duoing a dungeon thing didnt happen till way down the line, like PoP era where there was already significant mudflation coming into play.
Yet again you set up a straw man and took my post to mean "raiding is the priority" when i in no way said or implied that. You then proceeded to put words into my mouth about how "raiders are special and group players can piss off"
Raiding by virtue of the fact that you have to get 5-10x as many people working in unison to acheive something is reason enough that they should get better loot. It doesn't have to be drastically better, but it should be better. Otherwise, don't put in raids. Just don't even bother.
Also, stop with the robin hood garbage. 50 teenagers and young adults who have the time to invest poopsocking raid mobs to get phat lewtz does not in any way shape or form affect your gameplay except out of pure jealousy. It's like saying nobody can have a porsche because you can't afford to have a porsche and therefore people who have porsches are ruining your life.
Get over your tantrum. Just because I showed you to be full of shit about RMT in EQ (Yantis/IGE) doesn't mean you have to respond like you are having an emotional seizure every time we discuss. Knock it off already.
I'm so utterly fucking sick of your attitude. Consider this the last time i ever respond to you, you've officially been blocked. Feel free to post your walls of text and then go stroke yourself off at how awesome you are at forum PvP, i really don't care at this point.
Have fun.
Finally! I wish you would have done this a long time ago rather than disrupting previous threads.
I see walls of text but all I hear is, Sinist's corpse tells you, "I... showed you with... logic... uggghh." Followed by guttural sounds and gasping.
What is with this walls of text insult? I see this a lot on the internet and all I can conclude is that people seem to think reading is hard. How far we have fallen in society these days that its people find the most simple tasks a chore.
What would be really nice is if you followed Hrimnir's example and just stopped responding to anything I post. Though that may be asking too much for someone who loves to troll with useless commentary as your above comment shows.
You raid supporters are talking as if Visionary Realms will place the same amount of focus on PvEvP and raiding that SOE did and that goes against everything that Brad has said about Pantheon's real focus, which is cooperative and challenging group content. Focusing on contested content, let alone raiding spits on the face of Pantheon's mission statement.
The less of a role that contested content and raiding play in the game, the better as far as I'm concerned. The best way to combat the issue of instancing is to have plenty of alternate paths of progression and offering equal rewards for each path. If you don't, then the majority will follow the singular path that offers the best reward, creating the very bottleneck and drama that brings about the need for instancing.
You raid supporters are talking as if Visionary Realms will place the same amount of focus on PvEvP and raiding that SOE did and that goes against everything that Brad has said about Pantheon's real focus, which is cooperative and challenging group content. Focusing on contested content, let alone raiding spits on the face of Pantheon's mission statement.
The less of a role that contested content and raiding play in the game, the better as far as I'm concerned. The best way to combat the issue of instancing is to have plenty of alternate paths of progression and offering equal rewards for each path. If you don't, then the majority will follow the singular path that offers the best reward, creating the very bottleneck and drama that brings about the need for instancing.
I noticed this as well. The expectations by some seems to be that raiding will be a major focus to the game and the arguments about features and balance seem to reflect that bias as well.
This concerns me as Brad has stated raiding is a smaller focus to the game, but I can not take solace in such a comment as I remember WoW and its initial claims of wanting to focus on mainly group content only to have that thrown to the curb with MC being increased to 40 man (it was originally supposed to be a 25 man) and the focus on group content was tossed to chase more and more raid content.
I enjoyed raiding in EQ, but I did not care for contested "raid" content due to the drama . That is not to say that I can not live with contested raids, but if VR goes the EQ route (ie PoP, GoD, etc...) then I know grouping will only be some passing activity for off raid times. That I am not interested in.
As for the "there needs to be equal paths for rewards", I am dead set against this. I have seen this in a few games and It really just turns the whole thing into a gimmick. If people want raiding gear, then raid. If people want group gear, then group. This idea that groups should receive the same rewards as a raid only harms the effort put into raids.
My argument about raiding/group gear being no drop or not was not to say that there should be equal paths to that gear, it was to point out the hypocrisy of treating raid gear with such reverence while dismissing group gear, not that people should have equal access to both because they don't want to do one or the other. I know I can live with not having raid gear because I don't want to chase the contested raids, but I can not live with grouping being a marketing gimmick that gets throw to the side in order to chase those demanding the game turn into another Fires of Heaven private game.
The importance of raiding will come into focus once we see how slow the leveling actually is, and how frequently new content is added.
If most people are max level after [choose any period of time] and there is still no expansion in sight, people will want to raid. Because what else would they do, if there is not going to be much pvp (at least at first)?
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
The importance of raiding will come into focus once we see how slow the leveling actually is, and how frequently new content is added.
If most people are max level after [choose any period of time] and there is still no expansion in sight, people will want to raid. Because what else would they do, if there is not going to be much pvp (at least at first)?
You're assuming that most people raid if there is nothing else to do, but it's been proven over and over that the majority of any game's population do not raid period.
The importance of raiding will come into focus once we see how slow the leveling actually is, and how frequently new content is added.
If most people are max level after [choose any period of time] and there is still no expansion in sight, people will want to raid. Because what else would they do, if there is not going to be much pvp (at least at first)?
You don't have to have raid content though. You can make some group dungeons ridiculously hard, requiring flawless execution (not twitch, timing and appropriate skill/ability selections) and a very strong knowledge of the game, not to mention some luck based aspects thrown in to keep people on their toes.
There is no reason why they can't have dungeons at the latter end of the existing content where there are mobs higher level than players can get which requires extreme effort and application to beat. Not only does this keep people busy who reach the end content, but it allows for some to return to that content at a higher level and complete it if it was too much for them back at that level (ie Plane of Sky). The idea that raids are a linear evolution of player contest was a technological limitation of the day, you can make group content every bit as challenging and complex as many games over the years have showed.
One thing though, if they don't make raids contested or where only one encounter spawns per cycle, it won't matter what raids they put in, it will be consumed in record time.
Comments
We may or may not agree on the methodology. But I cant disagree with anything you just said man. And well said it was.
This partly plays into why I and at least Raidan hope for a varied approach to "endgame" activities. Though I think we have our own ideas about how to go about that. Im sure that VR will come up with something good. I know you arent happy with that term "endgame", but you know what I mean. Things to do to progress your character after max level.
Appreciate the clarification and it doesn't sound too different.
And agreed with Dullahan, EQ didn't always act differently when it came to high end contested content either on a PvE server (I didn't play on PvP). But, for regular group content, camps were often respected more at least on PvE in my experience. I wouldn't really care to be honest whichever way the community went, but, I hope that the community is strong enough like EQ and FFXI that a "norm" is created.
What is your obsession with binary thinking? Its not "trading is good or trading is bad". That's like saying that a country putting a block on imports from countries that engage in terrorist activity means they should block ALL importation of goods regardless. Its just ridiculous.
And i'm sorry but your argument about strategy being shared is just wrong. Even on P99 where you had players who knew the content inside and out regularly wiped trying to down dragons, particularly in places like VP. That argument is only valid when you have faceroll content like most of WoW's raids past BC.
And the whole overgeared players duoing a dungeon thing didnt happen till way down the line, like PoP era where there was already significant mudflation coming into play.
Yet again you set up a straw man and took my post to mean "raiding is the priority" when i in no way said or implied that. You then proceeded to put words into my mouth about how "raiders are special and group players can piss off"
Raiding by virtue of the fact that you have to get 5-10x as many people working in unison to acheive something is reason enough that they should get better loot. It doesn't have to be drastically better, but it should be better. Otherwise, don't put in raids. Just don't even bother.
Also, stop with the robin hood garbage. 50 teenagers and young adults who have the time to invest poopsocking raid mobs to get phat lewtz does not in any way shape or form affect your gameplay except out of pure jealousy. It's like saying nobody can have a porsche because you can't afford to have a porsche and therefore people who have porsches are ruining your life.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
One of the first weapons to reach ATK/Delay parity, was the Edge of Eternity, a raid weapon, from PoTime, which I own.
The first group weapon to reach that statistic for groupers, was 9 EXPANSIONS LATER. ......9 !!!
Weighty Jagged Einhander, a weapon from Ashengate that wasn't easy to get for groupers.
It actually wasn't even parity at first, it was worse than the 9 expansion raid weapon but it's thanks to raiders, like me, who said that it was insane that groupers were treated so badly, that the weapon got patched with marginally better stats.
Groupers were actually taking on raid mobs in a group, because it was easier to group raids than to do the group content that resulted in crap weapons.
Did we deserve better stuff because we raided? Yes we did, we needed 54 people and had to log in to raid every night.
Did we deserve to be 9 expansions ahead in gear over groupers? NO WAY.
As a raider, someone could sit on their behind, not play the game for 9 expansions, log in...and still have better gear than everyone who didn't raid. It was insane.
And unlike some ppl in this thread, I can actually back up my claims and I didn't bail on EQ after a few years.
Don't reply to me again until you show your gear. I hate posers.
You think you're a fan of EQ after bailing during Luclin, supporting an MMO for a year and then running off, and now you think you can tell others that they're not allowed to talk about anything beyond that first year pre-Luclin? Who are you?
I played all 16 years of the game and counting. Just because you didn't like 15 years of the game, doesn't mean you have a right to tell others that they're not allowed to talk about it.
You're like a guy who watched the intro of a movie, leaves the theater after 2 minutes, claims he's a fan of the movie and franchise, and continues to tell others they can't talk about anything beyond the first 2 minutes of the movie.
Who do you think you are, this is the third time you try to tell people they can only talk about what you want. Get out with that stuff.
Just registered on this forum and thinks he can tell others what they can and can't talk about.
"I don't like what you like"...get over it.
Get over your tantrum. Just because I showed you to be full of shit about RMT in EQ (Yantis/IGE) doesn't mean you have to respond like you are having an emotional seizure every time we discuss. Knock it off already.
Your argument is of a bias to have raids treated differently. You think raid gear should be treated special and non-drop, but group gear should be traded. It is a double standard, one that seeks to treat one form of play over that of another and it stinks of the same approach that Sony did by dismissing group play in EQ in favor of pandering to the tantrum throwing guilds who wanted their play to be special above the rest of the game.
I am not arguing that raid loot should be better or worse, merely showing how difficulty is really a component of increased coordination in large numbers. The smaller the raid, the easier it is to organize and as I said, 24 people (ie 4 groups of 6) is not difficult to organize. Yes, there is a bit more difficulty in coordination, but this idea that is some major accomplishment is bullshit and I have led raids in many games. The old argument of "Raid content is so much harder" was proven wrong multiple times by later games that showed that group content can be every bit as involved. Anyone who did any LoTRO grouping before they dumbed the game down knows this.
My point was that raid drops should not be treated as if they are the golden goose while group drops are dismissed. Saying that raid drops should not be traded, but it is ok to have group drops is hypocritical, there is no getting around it. It is "exception" based logic that makes up its rules as it goes.
You sit here and argue that player trading does not invalidate the effort of the person who has to gain it in play, but then turn around and go on about how raid gear should not be obtained in the same manner because it would invalidate the effort of the raider. It is an obvious double standard and no amount of word play or fallacious dismissals will change that. As I said, what is "good for the goose, is good for the gander", if it is invalidating raid effort by buying gear, then it is the same for group gear, saying otherwise is blowing smoke up peoples asses.
Also, as for the duoing/soloing by raiders, I didn't say it otherwise. The point was that they attended to raiders and they became the focus, leaving grouping in the dust. The point was about setting double standards to how game play is treated and considering that raiding is supposed to be a small subset of the game, going down the road of treating raiding somehow special over grouping effort is already a bad start.
As for the difficulty? Yes, it does get easier. Once your applied a solid strategy, raiding got easier and easier the next times you did it. Sure, there were some details to iron out over each successive encounter, but it got easier and easier. Going from first win to farm did not take long for a guild of quality players who listened and followed instructions. Not only that, but I found that most of the raids got a heck of a lot easier due to confidence and the ability to focus on different approaches.
For instance, on Dain Frostweaver, we used to go down and fight him in the pit, but it was chaotic with numerous adds and pops. It divided our raid and made the event last a long time. We won every time after the first, but it was always a long fight, filled with issues. That was, until I designed a strategy to pull Dain out to the zone entrance with a monk chain. We setup a CoH chain with one group at the pit drop. Then, we pulled and fought him there at the entrance CoHing every 45 seconds someone was banished to the pit. It was a ridiculously easy raid.
This turned a very long fight into a short 30 min event. He was on farm after 3 kills. This was the same with NToV, AoW, PoG, Sleepers, etc... Fact is, once you beat the encounters it gets a hell of a lot easier and if you are constantly having issues each time you do it, it is because your raid isn't organized or your strategy is crap which means you won it before on dumb luck.
Your lack of understanding of gaming mechanics is astounding. You can't seem to understand how systems are related, how other systems have an effect on game play, how this spills over and begins to create other issues in the game. Your understanding past that of just "video gaming" is non-existent and you continually attack (calling me jealous) rather than reason your postion.
Again, you do a lot of shit talking that I have taken you to task for. I think your knowledge of what happened in EQ and what is a concern of occurrence is is biased and greatly limited.
Well, my hope is that "end game" does not really exist in Pantheon (as we know it in games today). What I mean is, that if VR designs the content with extremely long leveling curves where most players are still progressing through the content by the time new content comes out, things that we know as "end game" today won't exist as it will all be "mid-game" content.
What I liked about EQs release schedule was that by the time a new expansion was released, the bulk of the players were still in the middle the previous content. For instance, you could start raiding at 47 and there were raids for the lighter side of that level range and then raids for the 50's and above. Also, group dungeon content existed up into 50 as well.
So, with the new expansion, it seemed to work seamlessly into the progression of the game. Plane of Sky was extremely difficult even after Kunark was released. In fact, there were bosses there that weren't killed until the next expansion Kunark.
Kunark and Velious also seemed to carry this kind of development style. Most players were not done with the previous content by the time new content was released and this gave a rich means for players to spread out and continue old progression as well as getting into new progression.
For most the game was always in a perpetual state of "journey", there was no real "end game" as we know it today where everyone is sitting around spinning their wheels farming complete sets of gear while they wait for the next expansion to invalidate it all (aka WoW). EQ treated content like it was a continuation of the world, not a gimmick.
The nice thing about this design is you can put in content that may be too hard for players knowing eventually, as new content is released, players will progress to a point where they may be able to handle it. So there is never the feeling of "end game", just continued progression.
This is why I harp on the details of gear rarity, my issues with player trade, etc... because these can harm the progression of the game. If raiders are all in instances gearing completely up and they are powering up through content too fast, well... what ends up being the issue? We have more "end game" mentality and those types existed, even in EQ. I think it would be a huge mistake for VR to allow content to be consumed too quickly. I know there are some who will play the game 24/7, consume it in record time and then throw tantrums. Those types should not be catered to, that is what mainstream games exist for. Their entire design focus is to cater to locusts and that is why we have "end game" focus in every game today rather than just general game play focus.
By the time GoD came out, I was just grouping with friends mostly and it was getting so irritating seeing content being designed just to fit raiders. That is why WoW was appealing at the time. They really tried to cater to the groups again and the content while spamy was still challenging early on. Though I always preferred EQs form of play.
I tried to come back to EQ years later and I saw exactly what you are talking about with the later expansions. Man, the gear disparity was insane and I thought they were pandering to guilds back when I was first playing.
In the end though, I think they need to be very careful with the raiders in Pantheon. It is so easy to start on the path you experienced again which is why this need by some to dismiss discussion on this is baffling, It is like they don't think this very same path can happen again, just like they seem to think that gold selling won't be an issue, botting and boxing wont, etc... that some how release EQ magically makes all these problems disappear. /boggle
The disparity between raid items and group/dungeon/world items up to velious was not that ridiculous. Velious a little bit, but def not in orig and kunark.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Have fun.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
What would be really nice is if you followed Hrimnir's example and just stopped responding to anything I post. Though that may be asking too much for someone who loves to troll with useless commentary as your above comment shows.
The less of a role that contested content and raiding play in the game, the better as far as I'm concerned. The best way to combat the issue of instancing is to have plenty of alternate paths of progression and offering equal rewards for each path. If you don't, then the majority will follow the singular path that offers the best reward, creating the very bottleneck and drama that brings about the need for instancing.
I noticed this as well. The expectations by some seems to be that raiding will be a major focus to the game and the arguments about features and balance seem to reflect that bias as well.
This concerns me as Brad has stated raiding is a smaller focus to the game, but I can not take solace in such a comment as I remember WoW and its initial claims of wanting to focus on mainly group content only to have that thrown to the curb with MC being increased to 40 man (it was originally supposed to be a 25 man) and the focus on group content was tossed to chase more and more raid content.
I enjoyed raiding in EQ, but I did not care for contested "raid" content due to the drama . That is not to say that I can not live with contested raids, but if VR goes the EQ route (ie PoP, GoD, etc...) then I know grouping will only be some passing activity for off raid times. That I am not interested in.
As for the "there needs to be equal paths for rewards", I am dead set against this. I have seen this in a few games and It really just turns the whole thing into a gimmick. If people want raiding gear, then raid. If people want group gear, then group. This idea that groups should receive the same rewards as a raid only harms the effort put into raids.
My argument about raiding/group gear being no drop or not was not to say that there should be equal paths to that gear, it was to point out the hypocrisy of treating raid gear with such reverence while dismissing group gear, not that people should have equal access to both because they don't want to do one or the other. I know I can live with not having raid gear because I don't want to chase the contested raids, but I can not live with grouping being a marketing gimmick that gets throw to the side in order to chase those demanding the game turn into another Fires of Heaven private game.
If most people are max level after [choose any period of time] and there is still no expansion in sight, people will want to raid. Because what else would they do, if there is not going to be much pvp (at least at first)?
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
You're assuming that most people raid if there is nothing else to do, but it's been proven over and over that the majority of any game's population do not raid period.
There is no reason why they can't have dungeons at the latter end of the existing content where there are mobs higher level than players can get which requires extreme effort and application to beat. Not only does this keep people busy who reach the end content, but it allows for some to return to that content at a higher level and complete it if it was too much for them back at that level (ie Plane of Sky). The idea that raids are a linear evolution of player contest was a technological limitation of the day, you can make group content every bit as challenging and complex as many games over the years have showed.
One thing though, if they don't make raids contested or where only one encounter spawns per cycle, it won't matter what raids they put in, it will be consumed in record time.