Oh god plz don't throttle me...

[Wrathis]

Originally Posted by Tenlaar [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Exterminate all human elements? That is a gross exaggeration. Many people, myself included, prefer the "human elements" of grouping with people and going off to kill things instead of the "human elements" of sitting in the EC tunnel by myself or grouping with somebody for 45 seconds while they cast a port and I hand them plat.

That almost sounds like prostitution when you mention the tunnel, 45 seconds, money exchange..

But hey it is a human element. That's probably where port whore came from.

Anyway, I dont see the argument against AA that much. Sure we can add new gear for horizontal progression but eventually its going to get stale and has for a lot of people. Thats why they make 15 different alts.

[Daldaen]

Originally Posted by BennoFlo [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

AA's made the game shitty imo.

Added a million factors that change balance.

What you just described sounds awesome. It made classes that suck and have no purpose at various levels of gameplay , much better. Like rangers with Endless Quiver and Archery mastery.

Classic EQ had some classes that were just god awful and AAs helped to fix them. Like.. rangers.

[JayN]

Luclin was horrible!

I really loved the 2 month un-itemized content, thats when I stopped playing

[loramin]

The thing I hated about AA was the pressure to never stop XPing. Now don't get me wrong, I loved the AAs themselves (Cann V for the win), and I enjoy leveling, but the SOE developers specifically made AAs to be a giant timesink. As a result, unless you played 40 hours a week, AAs kept you in a never-ending game of catch up.

Now I know, EQ always has always had pressure to XP, but leveling pressure was different from AA pressure. With levels (even the later ones from PoP and such) if you took a break and came back, or just didn't have tons of time to play, or even if you started a brand new character, you could catch up without too much trouble. Then once you hit max level you could relax with the (comparatively) slow crawl of equipment upgrades.

AAs changed all that to "never stop XPing, or you'll fall even farther behind then you already are." I guess they could be cool on P99, but it would really depend on how they were implemented.

[Tewaz]

AA's were a time sink back then...but people are so much smarter about leveling right now.

On EQMac you could get like 6 AA's an hour Shaker paging in PoP.

[Clark]

I enjoyed Luclin. Would like to see it and AA's after Velious is expended. Classic.

[Xelris]

Regardless of what direction the development takes, it will take a direction. Eventually even Velious content gets stale and you'll have a slightly expanded situation as compared to Kunark now, and given stagnation can lead to the server fading out...but I doubt they'll let that happen.

I'm actually very curious where they're going to go with custom content. Shards of Dalaya did this from day zero and it's a very interesting game, but it suffers from lack of population. In a lot of ways the midlevels serve as a canary in the coal mine as to how the health of the server actually is, and in SoD that's where the problem was, as well as Live servers (if you try to level on any of them, you're pretty much solo from 1-65. It's pretty terrible).

It's my hope that they take a multi-pronged approach similar to what SoE tried to do, and enhance the midlevel as much as the high end, and this is coming from a high-end-centric player. They can just as easily fix rangers and druids with spells without adding AA, for example.

I actually liked that I had no pressure to level on my character on Live before AA hit... it made the game much more sandboxy. I could screw around and help people without worrying about the damn level curve. Once AA went in, harmless fun comes at a cost because that's time you could be grinding AA, and it becomes much harder to try other classes because the time element before maturation goes up ridiculously.

Anyway, there's a ton of zone files not in use and all kinds of fun things that can be implemented without going the same route SoE did. Will be fun to see.

[Mandalore93]

Would love to see luclin without bazaar and cats maybe although neither really bothered me. AAs won't be an issue given the huge amount of game knowledge everyone has now especially with AoE groups.

[Daldaen]

Originally Posted by Tewaz [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

AA's were a time sink back then...but people are so much smarter about leveling right now.

On EQMac you could get like 6 AA's an hour Shaker paging in PoP.

Yea we were doing about 12-14~ AAs for a full group per hour AOEing PoFire. Was glorious.

[Clark]

Originally Posted by Daldaen [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Yea we were doing about 12-14~ AAs for a full group per hour AOEing PoFire. Was glorious.

Impressive dang.