After spending some time in Project 1999 I won't accept players being locked out of content by other players.
I would accept forced rotation of content. Yes sounds horrible but if this game is going to have places where groups and guilds are going to keep others out I won't play it.
I was happily playing Project 1999 until I wanted to get my Jboots. The masterquesting shit got me so upset I went from playing 10 hours a day to zero. Probably for the best because the situation would have gotten worse from there on.
If you have a game where large guilds are going to decide which player or group of players get to do which content that is unacceptable to me because it is a PvE game and not PvP. So I want mechanisms in place that will force players to leave after a certain time to allow others in.
<snip> So I want mechanisms in place that will force players to leave after a certain time to allow others in.
Modern games call these mechanisms 'instances'. They work exceptionally well to give every player a fair chance at special loot, flags, etc, even at obscure times of the day or night. They even manage to tick one of my personal goals, using the computer to solve a problem. I would prefer minimal instances, but can accept them where they serve a purpose or solve a player's problem. Balancing the server work-load isn't a player problem; that's the issue that instances most often address.
'Instances' seems to be a dirty word around Pantheon supporters, though.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
I do not think we need instances this can be very easily handled by clocking the time each person or guild group is monopolizing a spawn or dungeon or area. They will then get no more loot or experience and be forced to leave thus opening the area to others.
Of course this will probably lead to guilds tagging an area but at least one guild or a group of people will not control a spawn or dungeon for long stretches of time and in some cases never give up the area.
After spending some time in Project 1999 I won't accept players being locked out of content by other players.
I would accept forced rotation of content. Yes sounds horrible but if this game is going to have places where groups and guilds are going to keep others out I won't play it.
I was happily playing Project 1999 until I wanted to get my Jboots. The masterquesting shit got me so upset I went from playing 10 hours a day to zero. Probably for the best because the situation would have gotten worse from there on.
If you have a game where large guilds are going to decide which player or group of players get to do which content that is unacceptable to me because it is a PvE game and not PvP. So I want mechanisms in place that will force players to leave after a certain time to allow others in.
A solution to this would be to have multiple random spawning areas for a mob that drops awesome loot, this way no guild can lock down one area as they have no clue where its going to spawn.
<snip> So I want mechanisms in place that will force players to leave after a certain time to allow others in.
Modern games call these mechanisms 'instances'. They work exceptionally well to give every player a fair chance at special loot, flags, etc, even at obscure times of the day or night. They even manage to tick one of my personal goals, using the computer to solve a problem. I would prefer minimal instances, but can accept them where they serve a purpose or solve a player's problem. Balancing the server work-load isn't a player problem; that's the issue that instances most often address.
'Instances' seems to be a dirty word around Pantheon supporters, though.
Loot timers are used to solve that problem, too, but I just don't think it's the perfect solution. Besides, it also leads some folks to accuse the developer of artificially throttling g progression to milk their wallets, despite the original intention.
I would personally prefer a system where drops weren't by chance and were tailored to each individual. A set drop would be scattered across multiple wings of a raid that weren't necessarily done all at once, but I pieces. Maybe with smaller group quests that lead up to the raid encounter for each piece. But those pieces would drop based solely on your success in taking down the boss at the end of the quest chain, not by farming it over and over for a chance.
After spending some time in Project 1999 I won't accept players being locked out of content by other players.
I would accept forced rotation of content. Yes sounds horrible but if this game is going to have places where groups and guilds are going to keep others out I won't play it.
I was happily playing Project 1999 until I wanted to get my Jboots. The masterquesting shit got me so upset I went from playing 10 hours a day to zero. Probably for the best because the situation would have gotten worse from there on.
If you have a game where large guilds are going to decide which player or group of players get to do which content that is unacceptable to me because it is a PvE game and not PvP. So I want mechanisms in place that will force players to leave after a certain time to allow others in.
A solution to this would be to have multiple random spawning areas for a mob that drops awesome loot, this way no guild can lock down one area as they have no clue where its going to spawn.
A solution to this would be to have multiple random spawning areas for a mob that drops awesome loot, this way no guild can lock down one area as they have no clue where its going to spawn.
This is a good solution to what can be an ugly problem.
Randomize spawn locations and timers to make monopolizing mobs much more difficult.
Another solution is using quests to trigger certain spawns. Specific raid mobs might require completion of guild quests to spawn (perhaps in a private instance), while others would remain random open-world spawns or triggerable by completing a 30 minute - 1 hour group quest.
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do. Benjamin Franklin
I do not think we need instances this can be very easily handled by clocking the time each person or guild group is monopolizing a spawn or dungeon or area. They will then get no more loot or experience and be forced to leave thus opening the area to others.
Of course this will probably lead to guilds tagging an area but at least one guild or a group of people will not control a spawn or dungeon for long stretches of time and in some cases never give up the area.
I wasn't claiming you were thinking of instances. Only that the industry is. That's a tool/feature they developed that solves the condition you described. What do you think a developer is going to do, use something they already have or develop a new timing system? Developers have no incentive to develop a new technique to a problem they've already solved (in their minds).
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
<snip> So I want mechanisms in place that will force players to leave after a certain time to allow others in.
Modern games call these mechanisms 'instances'. They work exceptionally well to give every player a fair chance at special loot, flags, etc, even at obscure times of the day or night. They even manage to tick one of my personal goals, using the computer to solve a problem. I would prefer minimal instances, but can accept them where they serve a purpose or solve a player's problem. Balancing the server work-load isn't a player problem; that's the issue that instances most often address.
'Instances' seems to be a dirty word around Pantheon supporters, though.
Loot timers are used to solve that problem, too, but I just don't think it's the perfect solution. Besides, it also leads some folks to accuse the developer of artificially throttling g progression to milk their wallets, despite the original intention.
I would personally prefer a system where drops weren't by chance and were tailored to each individual. A set drop would be scattered across multiple wings of a raid that weren't necessarily done all at once, but I pieces. Maybe with smaller group quests that lead up to the raid encounter for each piece. But those pieces would drop based solely on your success in taking down the boss at the end of the quest chain, not by farming it over and over for a chance.
Loot timers simply don't work. They've been in games seemingly forever. The Ghoulbane camp in Upper Guk in EQ1 was one of those. Almost every paladin wanted that sword. It was pretty low level, around 15-20, but was a stepping stone for further paladin swords. Even a randomized timer didn't prevent groups or even individuals from controlling that camp. It seemed that camp caused a lot of the 'bad behavior' in the early game.
'Success on taking down a boss..., not farming it...". This has always been an option. But how many people left the Ghoulbane or JBoots camps if the item didn't drop? They camped it. That even satisfies your 'end of the quest chain' condition, just consider the surrounding mobs as a 'quest'. Trying to change this behavior is trying to change human nature. Instances at least provide a mechanism to minimize 'bad behavior', accommodating each players 'wants' in a form that doesn't infringe on another's space.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
After spending some time in Project 1999 I won't accept players being locked out of content by other players.
I would accept forced rotation of content. Yes sounds horrible but if this game is going to have places where groups and guilds are going to keep others out I won't play it.
I was happily playing Project 1999 until I wanted to get my Jboots. The masterquesting shit got me so upset I went from playing 10 hours a day to zero. Probably for the best because the situation would have gotten worse from there on.
If you have a game where large guilds are going to decide which player or group of players get to do which content that is unacceptable to me because it is a PvE game and not PvP. So I want mechanisms in place that will force players to leave after a certain time to allow others in.
A solution to this would be to have multiple random spawning areas for a mob that drops awesome loot, this way no guild can lock down one area as they have no clue where its going to spawn.
Yes this is acceptable.
Yes, I have been saying this for a while. I didn't like the over instancing EQ did along the way, but they did start to have more place holders and random loot dropping named. This way, it is harder to monopolize a spawn/loot. They say they are going to make huge/open dungeons, so if you have 6-8 valuable spawns, you could make it that each maybe could accommodate an area that may allow 2-4 groups of 'campers'. If only 1-2 spots are being camped, then it will spawn there, if they are all being camped/killed, the chances of it spawning would be up, but it could spawn anywhere. I don't want it to where loot is just given away and if it drops everyone gets it, but you could make it so you on average would get a drop as a group in the same time frame if it is only your group or 4 in the area. I saw someone mention the jboot quest, and yes this was a pain with often 3-6 people waiting in line (often afk) to kill the cyclops...A larger cyclops island, that you had to kill cyclops and random spawning points would of maybe made it better, and put more random (I believe the spawn did have a random like +/- 30-60 minutes) on the timer (maybe being influenced by number of cyclops killed, 1 cyclops killed -10 seconds.).
This is of course, just for the random dungeon drops, or even have whole loot tables for the place holder/spawns for a whole dungeon....But the actual boss mobs would still be the big loot/target, they would remain, like they have said.
I agree about the dye system, it is a very simple way to get some custimization for the players. Then again, I am not sure how new it is since I dyed my gear in Guildwars 2005 and I am far from certain it was the first game using the mechanics.
I think EQ1 was the first MMO that introduced equipment dyeing (but I could be wrong )
UO had/has Dying before that..
and as usual with most features UO did it
Ah, never played UO - my bad
DAOC and GW1 both had gear dyeing in them.
Was considered basically a given until WOW and L2 succeeded without it.
WoW has gear dying and transmogrification. EQ introduced dying as well. Gear dying wasn't in any of the really early MMORPGs. It came later, so the fact that WoW succeeded without it wasn't a factor. Gear dying was not a priority until a bit later on, to be frank.
People demand a bit more customization now than they did back in 2005.
Also, L2 has been on a tailspin in the west since 2006 of 7 (C5/Interlude timeframe). The only thing keeping that game alive is Pay to Win Lock-In on top o fa quasi-Free-to-Play model.
I think people mistake overall game popularity for revenues. Games like L2 will always bring in revenue because you have to spend a lot of money in order to be competitive. This is why it has lost most of its players, but NCSoft is okay with that as long as those remaining spend increasing amounts of cash. Theyv'e even practically legalized RMT with the NCStore!
<snip> So I want mechanisms in place that will force players to leave after a certain time to allow others in.
Modern games call these mechanisms 'instances'. They work exceptionally well to give every player a fair chance at special loot, flags, etc, even at obscure times of the day or night. They even manage to tick one of my personal goals, using the computer to solve a problem. I would prefer minimal instances, but can accept them where they serve a purpose or solve a player's problem. Balancing the server work-load isn't a player problem; that's the issue that instances most often address.
'Instances' seems to be a dirty word around Pantheon supporters, though.
Loot timers are used to solve that problem, too, but I just don't think it's the perfect solution. Besides, it also leads some folks to accuse the developer of artificially throttling g progression to milk their wallets, despite the original intention.
I would personally prefer a system where drops weren't by chance and were tailored to each individual. A set drop would be scattered across multiple wings of a raid that weren't necessarily done all at once, but I pieces. Maybe with smaller group quests that lead up to the raid encounter for each piece. But those pieces would drop based solely on your success in taking down the boss at the end of the quest chain, not by farming it over and over for a chance.
Loot timers simply don't work. They've been in games seemingly forever. The Ghoulbane camp in Upper Guk in EQ1 was one of those. Almost every paladin wanted that sword. It was pretty low level, around 15-20, but was a stepping stone for further paladin swords. Even a randomized timer didn't prevent groups or even individuals from controlling that camp. It seemed that camp caused a lot of the 'bad behavior' in the early game.
'Success on taking down a boss..., not farming it...". This has always been an option. But how many people left the Ghoulbane or JBoots camps if the item didn't drop? They camped it. That even satisfies your 'end of the quest chain' condition, just consider the surrounding mobs as a 'quest'. Trying to change this behavior is trying to change human nature. Instances at least provide a mechanism to minimize 'bad behavior', accommodating each players 'wants' in a form that doesn't infringe on another's space.
This was the case for most "camps," and this happens to an extent in later games as well. Selling Loot Rights was a thing in EQ2, and many people got geared out by farming Platinum and buying Raid Gear.
In WoW, guilds sell raid clears with drop priority.
In EQ2, players were selling carries through Tipt and Vxed when Gates of Discord launched, as well as Uqua runs for people who needed the gear (you could literally control those named with a 1-2 groups of guildies.
This always happens. It cannot be stopped unless you lock loot to the players in the party immediately, like in Diablo III, and monitor everyone to make sure things aren't getting sold off in this way.
I think instances are fine if it's just a container for content. Doing a dungeon run when it's already overrun with players isn't fun *at all* when you only have an hour or two to play. There is almost nothing you can accomplish there.
The obsession with making a video game like Real Life is a bit of a fallacy. People don't play MMORPGs to live in them. They play to have fun.
I don't have a problem with instances for most group content or PvP.
I also think fast travel is a thing and I wouldn't play a game without it. I'll never waste 2 hours traveling and dying on route from one place to another, like I did back in the day in EQ. There are too many other good games out there to waste my time dealing with inconveniences for the sake of nostalgia.
The genre has moved on, so I'm very cynical about this attempt to capitalize on nostalgia.
<snip> So I want mechanisms in place that will force players to leave after a certain time to allow others in.
Modern games call these mechanisms 'instances'. They work exceptionally well to give every player a fair chance at special loot, flags, etc, even at obscure times of the day or night. They even manage to tick one of my personal goals, using the computer to solve a problem. I would prefer minimal instances, but can accept them where they serve a purpose or solve a player's problem. Balancing the server work-load isn't a player problem; that's the issue that instances most often address.
'Instances' seems to be a dirty word around Pantheon supporters, though.
Loot timers are used to solve that problem, too, but I just don't think it's the perfect solution. Besides, it also leads some folks to accuse the developer of artificially throttling g progression to milk their wallets, despite the original intention.
I would personally prefer a system where drops weren't by chance and were tailored to each individual. A set drop would be scattered across multiple wings of a raid that weren't necessarily done all at once, but I pieces. Maybe with smaller group quests that lead up to the raid encounter for each piece. But those pieces would drop based solely on your success in taking down the boss at the end of the quest chain, not by farming it over and over for a chance.
Loot timers simply don't work. They've been in games seemingly forever. The Ghoulbane camp in Upper Guk in EQ1 was one of those. Almost every paladin wanted that sword. It was pretty low level, around 15-20, but was a stepping stone for further paladin swords. Even a randomized timer didn't prevent groups or even individuals from controlling that camp. It seemed that camp caused a lot of the 'bad behavior' in the early game.
'Success on taking down a boss..., not farming it...". This has always been an option. But how many people left the Ghoulbane or JBoots camps if the item didn't drop? They camped it. That even satisfies your 'end of the quest chain' condition, just consider the surrounding mobs as a 'quest'. Trying to change this behavior is trying to change human nature. Instances at least provide a mechanism to minimize 'bad behavior', accommodating each players 'wants' in a form that doesn't infringe on another's space.
You misunderstand me. The drops for a set would not be random, would not be repeatable. Once you've taken down the boss once, you get the gear tailored to your class for completing the final quest associated, then that boss is no longer useful to that character.
Eliminate any need to farm these bosses. For anyone. Having to farm bosses for drops is the type of RNG folks like Torval hate. Focusing, instead, on the quest journey to get to each encounter (taking WoW's new raid, for example, 11 epic quest lines, one for each boss), expanding the encounters for each individual boss so that they're done individually or in groups of 2-3 at most, and then the focus becomes more on completing the audit associated than clearing trash and repeatedly downing the same boss mob.
I highly doubt raid guilds will be camping a boss when they have no continued incentive to down it.
<snip> So I want mechanisms in place that will force players to leave after a certain time to allow others in.
Modern games call these mechanisms 'instances'. They work exceptionally well to give every player a fair chance at special loot, flags, etc, even at obscure times of the day or night. They even manage to tick one of my personal goals, using the computer to solve a problem. I would prefer minimal instances, but can accept them where they serve a purpose or solve a player's problem. Balancing the server work-load isn't a player problem; that's the issue that instances most often address.
'Instances' seems to be a dirty word around Pantheon supporters, though.
Loot timers are used to solve that problem, too, but I just don't think it's the perfect solution. Besides, it also leads some folks to accuse the developer of artificially throttling g progression to milk their wallets, despite the original intention.
I would personally prefer a system where drops weren't by chance and were tailored to each individual. A set drop would be scattered across multiple wings of a raid that weren't necessarily done all at once, but I pieces. Maybe with smaller group quests that lead up to the raid encounter for each piece. But those pieces would drop based solely on your success in taking down the boss at the end of the quest chain, not by farming it over and over for a chance.
Loot timers simply don't work. They've been in games seemingly forever. The Ghoulbane camp in Upper Guk in EQ1 was one of those. Almost every paladin wanted that sword. It was pretty low level, around 15-20, but was a stepping stone for further paladin swords. Even a randomized timer didn't prevent groups or even individuals from controlling that camp. It seemed that camp caused a lot of the 'bad behavior' in the early game.
'Success on taking down a boss..., not farming it...". This has always been an option. But how many people left the Ghoulbane or JBoots camps if the item didn't drop? They camped it. That even satisfies your 'end of the quest chain' condition, just consider the surrounding mobs as a 'quest'. Trying to change this behavior is trying to change human nature. Instances at least provide a mechanism to minimize 'bad behavior', accommodating each players 'wants' in a form that doesn't infringe on another's space.
You misunderstand me. The drops for a set would not be random, would not be repeatable. Once you've taken down the boss once, you get the gear tailored to your class for completing the final quest associated, then that boss is no longer useful to that character.
Eliminate any need to farm these bosses. For anyone. Having to farm bosses for drops is the type of RNG folks like Torval hate. Focusing, instead, on the quest journey to get to each encounter (taking WoW's new raid, for example, 11 epic quest lines, one for each boss), expanding the encounters for each individual boss so that they're done individually or in groups of 2-3 at most, and then the focus becomes more on completing the audit associated than clearing trash and repeatedly downing the same boss mob.
I highly doubt raid guilds will be camping a boss when they have no continued incentive to down it.
Most of my exposure to the 'bad behavior' of the Ghoulbane camp came in the form of one player farming the area, locking down the corpse, and having a guild mate log in and loot. Since alts are a major thing, a guild of 100 people might have 100 paladins who want/need the sword. I've seen guilds with 300+ people in the game, maybe more. A 'waiting list' of only 10 people on an item with a respawn timer of 4 days results in a single spawn being permanently camped for 40 days. How long should someone not in this 'clique' have to wait in order to have a chance at a specific piece of loot? Scaling isn't an answer, as MMORPGs have shown that guilds can and will monopolize loot spawns to exhaustion.
I'm not familiar with the specific WoW example you cite, but if it turns out to be a form of a 'triggered', private spawn, how's that any different from the instances many Pantheon advocates seem to hate?
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
<snip> So I want mechanisms in place that will force players to leave after a certain time to allow others in.
Modern games call these mechanisms 'instances'. They work exceptionally well to give every player a fair chance at special loot, flags, etc, even at obscure times of the day or night. They even manage to tick one of my personal goals, using the computer to solve a problem. I would prefer minimal instances, but can accept them where they serve a purpose or solve a player's problem. Balancing the server work-load isn't a player problem; that's the issue that instances most often address.
'Instances' seems to be a dirty word around Pantheon supporters, though.
Loot timers are used to solve that problem, too, but I just don't think it's the perfect solution. Besides, it also leads some folks to accuse the developer of artificially throttling g progression to milk their wallets, despite the original intention.
I would personally prefer a system where drops weren't by chance and were tailored to each individual. A set drop would be scattered across multiple wings of a raid that weren't necessarily done all at once, but I pieces. Maybe with smaller group quests that lead up to the raid encounter for each piece. But those pieces would drop based solely on your success in taking down the boss at the end of the quest chain, not by farming it over and over for a chance.
Loot timers simply don't work. They've been in games seemingly forever. The Ghoulbane camp in Upper Guk in EQ1 was one of those. Almost every paladin wanted that sword. It was pretty low level, around 15-20, but was a stepping stone for further paladin swords. Even a randomized timer didn't prevent groups or even individuals from controlling that camp. It seemed that camp caused a lot of the 'bad behavior' in the early game.
'Success on taking down a boss..., not farming it...". This has always been an option. But how many people left the Ghoulbane or JBoots camps if the item didn't drop? They camped it. That even satisfies your 'end of the quest chain' condition, just consider the surrounding mobs as a 'quest'. Trying to change this behavior is trying to change human nature. Instances at least provide a mechanism to minimize 'bad behavior', accommodating each players 'wants' in a form that doesn't infringe on another's space.
You misunderstand me. The drops for a set would not be random, would not be repeatable. Once you've taken down the boss once, you get the gear tailored to your class for completing the final quest associated, then that boss is no longer useful to that character.
Eliminate any need to farm these bosses. For anyone. Having to farm bosses for drops is the type of RNG folks like Torval hate. Focusing, instead, on the quest journey to get to each encounter (taking WoW's new raid, for example, 11 epic quest lines, one for each boss), expanding the encounters for each individual boss so that they're done individually or in groups of 2-3 at most, and then the focus becomes more on completing the audit associated than clearing trash and repeatedly downing the same boss mob.
I highly doubt raid guilds will be camping a boss when they have no continued incentive to down it.
Most of my exposure to the 'bad behavior' of the Ghoulbane camp came in the form of one player farming the area, locking down the corpse, and having a guild mate log in and loot. Since alts are a major thing, a guild of 100 people might have 100 paladins who want/need the sword. I've seen guilds with 300+ people in the game, maybe more. A 'waiting list' of only 10 people on an item with a respawn timer of 4 days results in a single spawn being permanently camped for 40 days. How long should someone not in this 'clique' have to wait in order to have a chance at a specific piece of loot? Scaling isn't an answer, as MMORPGs have shown that guilds can and will monopolize loot spawns to exhaustion.
I'm not familiar with the specific WoW example you cite, but if it turns out to be a form of a 'triggered', private spawn, how's that any different from the instances many Pantheon advocates seem to hate?
No no, WoW doesn't work that way, I was just using their new raid as an example of how focus can shift from farming the boss for his/her drops to the journey leading up to and culminating in the encounter, one that does not drop raid gear but is simply a prerequisite for completing the quest chain that rewards the gear (or, alternatively, having the boss drop the gear not as chance, but as a rule). Piece out the raid, with different quest chains culminating in taking down one or a few of the raid bosses for the final reward (raid gear). Place these bosses in different wings of the raid, geographically, so that someone facing one raid boss was not interfering with another group facing a different wing or raid boss.
The reason instances were used as a solution in the first place is because the goal was to farm the bosses for their drops. Remove that incentive to repeatedly kill bosses as quickly as possible.
There are a lot of ways to mitigate content monopolization without destroying competition or resorting to instancing. Random world repops and variance are a start. A full repop (like in EQ on patch/maintenance days) allows numerous guilds a chance at content.
Beyond that, just designing content so that you cannot park a character on major spawnpoints would counter a lot of abuse seen in EQ. Imagine dungeons, especially raids, designed so that you had to commit an entire guild to clearing down just to check if a boss was up. No tracking, training down, or sneaking to check a mob allowing neckbeards to monitor every spawn in the world. That design with variance allows multiple guilds to check locations all over the world.
That doesn't mean everyone is entitled to everything, but a little unpredictability would level the playing field to some degree.
After spending some time in Project 1999 I won't accept players being locked out of content by other players.
I would accept forced rotation of content. Yes sounds horrible but if this game is going to have places where groups and guilds are going to keep others out I won't play it.
I was happily playing Project 1999 until I wanted to get my Jboots. The masterquesting shit got me so upset I went from playing 10 hours a day to zero. Probably for the best because the situation would have gotten worse from there on.
If you have a game where large guilds are going to decide which player or group of players get to do which content that is unacceptable to me because it is a PvE game and not PvP. So I want mechanisms in place that will force players to leave after a certain time to allow others in.
A solution to this would be to have multiple random spawning areas for a mob that drops awesome loot, this way no guild can lock down one area as they have no clue where its going to spawn.
Yes this is acceptable.
I think it would be great if some mobs even spawned in different zones completely. We move around zone to zone why wouldn't they ? It would add a little touch of realism if they traveled the world as we do, and also give more people a chance at taking down the surprise spawn. Might be kinda fun not knowing whos going to be around the next corner! Of course super high end raid bosses might have to have a few dungeons they hang out at... We don't want little wood elves in Kelethin screaming "ahhhh its Nagafen in the newbie zone!, RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!!" Or do we???? lol
mounts Why is auction house bad, broker system good? Arent they both basically a way to auto-sell?
I think the issue is about global/local sales. But then again I didn't read the original message so I might be off and I'm too tired to go search for it.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
mounts Why is auction house bad, broker system good? Arent they both basically a way to auto-sell?
Lets just say I don't enjoy waiting 3-4 days on a bid to see if I won something only to be outbid at the last moment. I've been stuck dealing with this BS in DDO lately. Auction price 40p, buy price 40,000p. Even if I wait to get the item at the price it's actually worth, I've already out-leveled the item. Assuming someone else does not outbid me 1 minute before the auction closes, at 2am my time. As a seller, I'm stuck reposting items that do no resell every few days, even if I only log in to play on weekends.
A broker system, like the EQ or EQ2, the seller sets a price. If you meet the price the item is sold. As a seller, the item will remain available for purchase until sold or I choose to remove the item. All I have to do is periodically re-evaluate market prices to make sure my goods are within current price ranges.
City of Heroes was a mid-way between the two systems. The seller could set things up at an undisclosed price, allowing the possibility of someone bidding for more. The buyer could set a buy order allowing the purchase of items at his desired price point is someone posted the desired item for sale in the desired price range while the buyer was offline. (e.g. the seller puts the item up for 200, there is a buy order for 500. Both parties were happy) Buy and sell orders lasted until fulfilled or canceled.
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do. Benjamin Franklin
Comments
I would accept forced rotation of content. Yes sounds horrible but if this game is going to have places where groups and guilds are going to keep others out I won't play it.
I was happily playing Project 1999 until I wanted to get my Jboots. The masterquesting shit got me so upset I went from playing 10 hours a day to zero. Probably for the best because the situation would have gotten worse from there on.
If you have a game where large guilds are going to decide which player or group of players get to do which content that is unacceptable to me because it is a PvE game and not PvP. So I want mechanisms in place that will force players to leave after a certain time to allow others in.
I would totally be down a reset version of EQ except decent animations and better graphics.
Would like to keep quality of life improvements like the updated UI (including the new find item functionality just added).
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
Benjamin Franklin
'Instances' seems to be a dirty word around Pantheon supporters, though.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
I do not think we need instances this can be very easily handled by clocking the time each person or guild group is monopolizing a spawn or dungeon or area. They will then get no more loot or experience and be forced to leave thus opening the area to others.
Of course this will probably lead to guilds tagging an area but at least one guild or a group of people will not control a spawn or dungeon for long stretches of time and in some cases never give up the area.
I would personally prefer a system where drops weren't by chance and were tailored to each individual. A set drop would be scattered across multiple wings of a raid that weren't necessarily done all at once, but I pieces. Maybe with smaller group quests that lead up to the raid encounter for each piece. But those pieces would drop based solely on your success in taking down the boss at the end of the quest chain, not by farming it over and over for a chance.
This is a good solution to what can be an ugly problem.
Randomize spawn locations and timers to make monopolizing mobs much more difficult.
Another solution is using quests to trigger certain spawns. Specific raid mobs might require completion of guild quests to spawn (perhaps in a private instance), while others would remain random open-world spawns or triggerable by completing a 30 minute - 1 hour group quest.
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
Benjamin Franklin
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
'Success on taking down a boss..., not farming it...". This has always been an option. But how many people left the Ghoulbane or JBoots camps if the item didn't drop? They camped it. That even satisfies your 'end of the quest chain' condition, just consider the surrounding mobs as a 'quest'. Trying to change this behavior is trying to change human nature. Instances at least provide a mechanism to minimize 'bad behavior', accommodating each players 'wants' in a form that doesn't infringe on another's space.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Yes, I have been saying this for a while. I didn't like the over instancing EQ did along the way, but they did start to have more place holders and random loot dropping named. This way, it is harder to monopolize a spawn/loot. They say they are going to make huge/open dungeons, so if you have 6-8 valuable spawns, you could make it that each maybe could accommodate an area that may allow 2-4 groups of 'campers'. If only 1-2 spots are being camped, then it will spawn there, if they are all being camped/killed, the chances of it spawning would be up, but it could spawn anywhere. I don't want it to where loot is just given away and if it drops everyone gets it, but you could make it so you on average would get a drop as a group in the same time frame if it is only your group or 4 in the area. I saw someone mention the jboot quest, and yes this was a pain with often 3-6 people waiting in line (often afk) to kill the cyclops...A larger cyclops island, that you had to kill cyclops and random spawning points would of maybe made it better, and put more random (I believe the spawn did have a random like +/- 30-60 minutes) on the timer (maybe being influenced by number of cyclops killed, 1 cyclops killed -10 seconds.).
This is of course, just for the random dungeon drops, or even have whole loot tables for the place holder/spawns for a whole dungeon....But the actual boss mobs would still be the big loot/target, they would remain, like they have said.
WoW has gear dying and transmogrification. EQ introduced dying as well. Gear dying wasn't in any of the really early MMORPGs. It came later, so the fact that WoW succeeded without it wasn't a factor. Gear dying was not a priority until a bit later on, to be frank.
People demand a bit more customization now than they did back in 2005.
Also, L2 has been on a tailspin in the west since 2006 of 7 (C5/Interlude timeframe). The only thing keeping that game alive is Pay to Win Lock-In on top o fa quasi-Free-to-Play model.
I think people mistake overall game popularity for revenues. Games like L2 will always bring in revenue because you have to spend a lot of money in order to be competitive. This is why it has lost most of its players, but NCSoft is okay with that as long as those remaining spend increasing amounts of cash. Theyv'e even practically legalized RMT with the NCStore!
This was the case for most "camps," and this happens to an extent in later games as well. Selling Loot Rights was a thing in EQ2, and many people got geared out by farming Platinum and buying Raid Gear.
In WoW, guilds sell raid clears with drop priority.
In EQ2, players were selling carries through Tipt and Vxed when Gates of Discord launched, as well as Uqua runs for people who needed the gear (you could literally control those named with a 1-2 groups of guildies.
This always happens. It cannot be stopped unless you lock loot to the players in the party immediately, like in Diablo III, and monitor everyone to make sure things aren't getting sold off in this way.
I think instances are fine if it's just a container for content. Doing a dungeon run when it's already overrun with players isn't fun *at all* when you only have an hour or two to play. There is almost nothing you can accomplish there.
The obsession with making a video game like Real Life is a bit of a fallacy. People don't play MMORPGs to live in them. They play to have fun.
I don't have a problem with instances for most group content or PvP.
I also think fast travel is a thing and I wouldn't play a game without it. I'll never waste 2 hours traveling and dying on route from one place to another, like I did back in the day in EQ. There are too many other good games out there to waste my time dealing with inconveniences for the sake of nostalgia.
The genre has moved on, so I'm very cynical about this attempt to capitalize on nostalgia.
Eliminate any need to farm these bosses. For anyone. Having to farm bosses for drops is the type of RNG folks like Torval hate. Focusing, instead, on the quest journey to get to each encounter (taking WoW's new raid, for example, 11 epic quest lines, one for each boss), expanding the encounters for each individual boss so that they're done individually or in groups of 2-3 at most, and then the focus becomes more on completing the audit associated than clearing trash and repeatedly downing the same boss mob.
I highly doubt raid guilds will be camping a boss when they have no continued incentive to down it.
I'm not familiar with the specific WoW example you cite, but if it turns out to be a form of a 'triggered', private spawn, how's that any different from the instances many Pantheon advocates seem to hate?
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
The reason instances were used as a solution in the first place is because the goal was to farm the bosses for their drops. Remove that incentive to repeatedly kill bosses as quickly as possible.
Beyond that, just designing content so that you cannot park a character on major spawnpoints would counter a lot of abuse seen in EQ. Imagine dungeons, especially raids, designed so that you had to commit an entire guild to clearing down just to check if a boss was up. No tracking, training down, or sneaking to check a mob allowing neckbeards to monitor every spawn in the world. That design with variance allows multiple guilds to check locations all over the world.
That doesn't mean everyone is entitled to everything, but a little unpredictability would level the playing field to some degree.
Why is auction house bad, broker system good? Arent they both basically a way to auto-sell?
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
Lets just say I don't enjoy waiting 3-4 days on a bid to see if I won something only to be outbid at the last moment. I've been stuck dealing with this BS in DDO lately. Auction price 40p, buy price 40,000p. Even if I wait to get the item at the price it's actually worth, I've already out-leveled the item. Assuming someone else does not outbid me 1 minute before the auction closes, at 2am my time. As a seller, I'm stuck reposting items that do no resell every few days, even if I only log in to play on weekends.
A broker system, like the EQ or EQ2, the seller sets a price. If you meet the price the item is sold. As a seller, the item will remain available for purchase until sold or I choose to remove the item. All I have to do is periodically re-evaluate market prices to make sure my goods are within current price ranges.
City of Heroes was a mid-way between the two systems. The seller could set things up at an undisclosed price, allowing the possibility of someone bidding for more. The buyer could set a buy order allowing the purchase of items at his desired price point is someone posted the desired item for sale in the desired price range while the buyer was offline. (e.g. the seller puts the item up for 200, there is a buy order for 500. Both parties were happy) Buy and sell orders lasted until fulfilled or canceled.
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
Benjamin Franklin
Thanks.