EQLive new Race/Class vote

[a_gnoll_pup]

got this in my email

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>my reaction when

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[FoxxHound]

YEAH! Black people make the best rogues...

[Sirken]

dark elf bards.

GG

[Millburn]

GNOME FREAKING BEASTLORDS, FUCK YES!

I've been asking for that since Luclin. CLOCKWORK SPIDER WARDERS? Aw Yisssss

[Itap]

Dwarf Shadow Knights? what in the literal fuck

[Laugher]

DE bard seemed fun, kinda didn't understand how a DE ranger would do much of anything old world [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] not that it matters these days.. imo they should just make gnomes a universal race like humans; give em all classes give or take 1-3

[Sirken]

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

DE bard seemed fun, kinda didn't understand how a DE ranger would do much of anything old world [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] not that it matters these days.. imo they should just make gnomes a universal race like humans; give em all classes give or take 1-3

my live server was Vallon Zek. so when i say DE Bard, thats the context im thinking. and adding bards to the dark team would have been game over for the server.

[stormlord]

The whole idea of making races better at certain things sabotages the ability to choose your own path. If you choose a race that's physically strong and you play as a pure caster then you're gimped compared to playing a race that's a strong caster. It discourages you from making your own choices.

What they have to do when they design games is to make the races different in ways that don't force players to weigh one against the other. This way you can choose a race based on the aesthetics and not have to be crawl through a minefield of advantages and disadvantages.

////now in reverse////

The whole idea of making class-types better at certain things sabotages the ability to choose your own path. If you choose a class-type that's physically strong and you play as a pure caster then you're gimped compared to playing a class-type that's a strong caster. It discourages you from making your own choices.

What they have to do when they design games is to make the class-types different in ways that don't force players to weigh one against the other. This way you can choose a class-type based on the aesthetics and not have to be crawl through a minefield of advantages and disadvantages.

Please note the above is sarcasm.

I see nothing wrong with having races be different, especially if they make up for it in other ways. A game that's diverse will be able to balance the races so that advantages and disadvantages roughly even out. More broadly, I wouldn't want to play a game that's perfectly balanced because they tend to be too linear. The games that're deeper can't be perfectly balanced because there's so mcuh s*** going on, but they try.

So essentialy there's no problem with racial differneces because it roughly evens out, if the game creators did their job. It also gives you a means to make you feel your race is unique. In deep(er) games they also give you lots of freedom to make your setup unique. Of course, some setups tend to be more effective which is the result of developers not doing a perfect job of balancing - again, perfect balance is out of reach.

For example, I really like how halfling warriors in classic everquest can hide, whereas the barbarian warriors can't. The barbarian warriors of course have higher warrior stats, but hide is an awesome ability. However, this may not be perfectly balanced if hide can't be something that's needed. And how do you judge how much is needed? How do you know how often a player will need hide and how does this translate to warrior stats? This highlights just how difficult it's to balance this kind of system PERFECTLY - it's all but impossible.

This is why perfektly balanced systems are so cut and dry and boring. They have to make it that way in order to perfektly calculate everything so that they can ensure everything is absolutely fair.

I'm not against choosing our path in games. I prefer skill-based games that allow you to change your setup as you go, so you can untrain previous skills and train new ones. Of course, permanent racial differences or other permanent tratis can have an impact on this ability to choose our path. AS I already stated, these (permanent) differences should even out in the end, but perfection isn't to be expected.

Lastly, I can understand making all races perfecktly equal if they're humans in the real world, but fantasy games aren't set in the real world. There can be fairies, bears, ogres, giants, fish and angels and anything! Some will be extremely strong, some can swim extremely fast and nimbly, some can fly, some can shoot venom, some can change their body to be like another, some can mentally move across the universe, and so on into infinity. There's no law that bears and ogres have to have the same class-types or the same abilities.

Perhaps this whole thing would be easier if races in RPGs started to look less humanoid. Maybe because they resemble humans so commonly, the expectation is they'll all be equal.

[Thulack]

It's gonna come down to DE ranger vs Gnome Beastlord with probably the beastlord winning.

[Swish]

This exact concept ruined EQ2... ogre wizards/high elf SKs? Bye.