Shadows of Luclin Your opinion?

[Charball]

The AA in SoL were the best thing out of that expansion. As for the kitties on the moon and the lore being all strange...so what? It's a fantasy game, if the developers wanted Pugs on Pluto then go for it. The raiding in SoL was great, SSra temple was a blast and had some really great loot. If SoL were to ever come out on p99 it would have to be with out the bazaar because that truly did end trading as we knew and loved it. I also think the bazaar is what lead to the never ending inflation of all prices. Lets get back to the AA: As I walk through EC tunnel right now I see a bunch of warriors/bard/SKs etc all wearing the same top tier gear and they pretty much do all the same dmg. AA led to a whole new level of customization, where if you worked really hard then you got a good payoff. I loved the grind for AA because, like most MMOs, once you have the best gear and the max level, there's nothing left to do but become a sad lonely trader in EC trying to make as much money as possible for your endless twinks. That fucking sucks. Alternate Advancement gave max level characters something to do.

tldr - I'm down with SoL for the AA and the zones....bazaar excluded.

[Kevlar]

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

I thought LDoN had some good concepts. At the time I wasn't in an uber guild or a real raiding guild. The idea of something instanced was welcomed by my group of regulars. I also didn't mind the alternate currency system introduced: getting so many shards per instance and then buying from the vendor for decent items.

LDoN was a casual-player-catered expansion and that alone would have made it unpopular to many. I have to confess, I could have taken LDoN or left it.

Nowadays, I hate alternate currencies in MMOs. If an NPC vendor sells something, make it buyable with the land's currency. It's a shortcut at solving the content-by-expansion problem. Instead of spending the time to design a new system that fits into the existing world, or updating the existing world to support a new subsystem, you can lock content to itself! Meh. I might vote for it if I were on the dev team and had major time constraints, but I'd feel dirty about it.

LDON put the nail in the coffin though because it killed competitve raiding. People complain about poopsocking, but really competition is what drove EQ. The scarcity of rare spawns and boss mobs made EQ about as competitive as you can get in a non-pvp centric game.

Alternate currency and item slots really kill it for me too. Its like taking that proverbial carrot and slicing it up into sixteen different pieces and hanging them all out on the end of a stick. Nothing but extra timesinks. I'd rather camp drops for different colors than have to try to fill up a bunch of gem slots in my underwear.

[Orov]

Why was Luclin bad?

Cats on the moon.

/thread

[Lagaidh]

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

LDON put the nail in the coffin though because it killed competitve raiding. People complain about poopsocking, but really competition is what drove EQ. The scarcity of rare spawns and boss mobs made EQ about as competitive as you can get in a non-pvp centric game.

I could understand that perspective from an end game raider, but I always felt like that was the loudest minority. Makes sense, the creme rose to the top, had more personally invest and so made the most noise where content was concerned.

Given only p99 as an example, could you really blame a single game provider at all for taking the dispute of raids out of their daily work?

I certainly don't.

[Savard18]

It is very rare to find someone who thinks Velious was terrible. It still may be the single best expansion ever for any MMO - at least for those who experienced it and raided during that time.

You can't go from something that dominant to Luclin. You have an expansion that goes from the fantasy/D&D feel of Dragons, Giants, Dwarfs, and Gods to Cats, Aliens, and Snake people.

EQ was a hard game, Velious was a hard expansion, which is what made it so great. Luclin was what changed the game.

Luclin

Travel:
Nobody is arguing that the Nexus made things easier, cause obviously it did, but making things easier was the beginning of the end for classic EQ. Horses also killed the need for SoW and jboots. This was the start of easy travel in EQ.
My grade: Done differently might have been better, but overall - F.

Bazaar:
Not much else can be said, they should have made the bazaar have NPCs to sell your items for you, everyone was afk anyway. Trading was made easier and more impersonal.
My Grade: F

Zones, Content:
Some decent zones, and some ok ideas, but overall the Moon theme was a horrible idea. The monsters were silly and had tons of HP. Getting your key was death. Raiding scripts were different and not terrible, the bosses themselves were kinda boring. Mentioned in another post, PC killed most old world areas 8-20.
My Grade: D-


Race:
Cats are dumb, but it wasn't game breaking.
My Grade: C

Class:
Beastlords might have been a fun class to play, but they actually are a worthless class. They bring nothing new to the table that another class doesn't already have covered. Filler class, easy to play. From what I hear they are still worthless for raiding on Live.
My grade: F

AAs:
Needed for raiders and powergamers - and it created a gap between casual gamers and the rest. This was a good idea until each expansion had 20000 AAs per class. Not everyone enjoys grinding like that.
My grade: (Luclin Only) A

Overall I give the Expansion an F, which is much better than some of the newer ones that could have easily gotten a Z.

PoP was better than Luclin due to them returning to the killing off Gods thing, even thou PoK crushed old school travel for good and made the game 10x easier. LDoN and LoY on the other hand.... yikes. Not good.

[Lagaidh]

I liked AAs I admit. It allowed me to fix my base AGI and get things I thought should have always been available like 2-handed bash (I was always and forever will be a bluebie).

The downside to them, from my perspective, were the AA requirements that raid guilds ended up having. On one hand you could say, yes, AA gave more to do to the maxxed. On the other hand, you ended up in the same boat: you'd get all the AAs worth having, and require anyone you raided with to have done the same.

There will always be a difficult task in MMOs of bringing both the hardcore and casual populations to the same game and trying to give each group the content they crave at their own paces.

What I never understood about live EQ was: why did they cater more to the hardcore? It was obvious after Wow launched that the hardcore were the minority. I have at different times been both kind of player and enjoyed each mode of play. I'd still take casual over hardcore. I guess that's why I always bristled when the hardcore side had one more "required" thing to do to stay maxxed: key, AA, piece of gear, augments.

Oh yeah. I fucking hated augments.

[Mardur]

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

Are you quitting p99 emu because you twinked that ERU SK with 60K and then they announced that they weren't going to copy blue server toons on to the red99 beta?

Weaksauce [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I didn't even know they decided to not allow character copies. I just realized that EQ is still boring to me.

Might pop in on red99 to check things out though.

No point in really putting time into anything when I've got military service lined up.

[Atmas]

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

I liked AAs I admit. It allowed me to fix my base AGI and get things I thought should have always been available like 2-handed bash (I was always and forever will be a bluebie).

The downside to them, from my perspective, were the AA requirements that raid guilds ended up having. On one hand you could say, yes, AA gave more to do to the maxxed. On the other hand, you ended up in the same boat: you'd get all the AAs worth having, and require anyone you raided with to have done the same.

There will always be a difficult task in MMOs of bringing both the hardcore and casual populations to the same game and trying to give each group the content they crave at their own paces.

What I never understood about live EQ was: why did they cater more to the hardcore? It was obvious after Wow launched that the hardcore were the minority. I have at different times been both kind of player and enjoyed each mode of play. I'd still take casual over hardcore. I guess that's why I always bristled when the hardcore side had one more "required" thing to do to stay maxxed: key, AA, piece of gear, augments.

Oh yeah. I fucking hated augments.

First and foremost, f 2hbash (PvP caster).

AAs were awesome because they were a good way to improve your character without having to rely on RNG for loot. From a business perspective it gives something for the people at end game something to do.

I think you cater to the hardcore because in the end they will be the ones who keep playing and the ones you are more in danger of losing because they have run out of things to do. A lot of people dislike WoW because it is so easy mode, and quite often major accomplishments are trivial weeks later by changes, or even when they are performed by lack of difficulty.

I also hated augments. Getting better gear and tossing the old stuff was classic and AAs you would always keep the benefit of as you got new ones. Augments were just too much for me when they were introduced. I quit before really having to worry about them.

[TheBlob]

Well as someone said earlier in the thread it is obviously inevitable that at some point everyone will have equip from Sleeper's Tomb or NToV (or whatever the highest zone in velious is), and we will need new content.

Now I agree that Luclin killed interactions with bazaar, began killing travel with nexus, and that most of the zones sucked bad, the vah shir and beastlords werent that awesome and the mobs were ugly as hell.

But I agree too that the AAs and ssra temple were awesome. A point that wasn't mentioned about AAs is that they permitted you to stay level 52 if you wanted to kill Nagafen or Lady Vox at some point. Now, if you are level 52 and want to kill them, you have to stop exping or else you're gonna bust the level cap.

As a related question, I don't know anything about programming and such, but how hard would it be for devs to implement new contents (zones, mobs, quests), using old-world graphics (for example a lowest guk or a sol C)?

As said before, the problem with new expansions is that they take the gameplay too far away from the old world, thus leaving the old faction systems useless. It would be cool to see new zones, but in the old world.

[Mardur]

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

I thought LDoN had some good concepts. At the time I wasn't in an uber guild or a real raiding guild. The idea of something instanced was welcomed by my group of regulars. I also didn't mind the alternate currency system introduced: getting so many shards per instance and then buying from the vendor for decent items.

LDoN was a casual-player-catered expansion and that alone would have made it unpopular to many. I have to confess, I could have taken LDoN or left it.

Nowadays, I hate alternate currencies in MMOs. If an NPC vendor sells something, make it buyable with the land's currency. It's a shortcut at solving the content-by-expansion problem. Instead of spending the time to design a new system that fits into the existing world, or updating the existing world to support a new subsystem, you can lock content to itself! Meh. I might vote for it if I were on the dev team and had major time constraints, but I'd feel dirty about it.

There were so many things wrong with LDON.

First of all, the raids. I understand this was a "casual-aimed" expansion (considering GoD was up next...) but the raid instances were a waste of development time considering they were buggy, difficult, and had terrible rewards.

Augments were mostly bad. The biggest problem was that now all of a sudden regardless of if you're the most casual or the most hardcore raider, you needed another 20+ items to flesh out your character. And your ONLY option of getting them were LDON instances. A few expansions later augments became abundant enough that they weren't a big deal, but this was almost as bad of an addition as charms were in LoY.

What this meant was countless hours grinding Miragul's Menagerie for AC and hate proc augs. No point in even implementing the other dungeons when this was the only one most people saw. And this was a major problem, if you had a spell or something in an "unpopular" instance... well, you're mostly screwed until you beg and plead for people in your guild to waste 40 hours in Mistmoore or whatever. Not to mention Miragul's was the worst considering every dungeon was a migraine-inducing white, especially the spider one with all the cobwebs. Yet the very few nice items in this expansion were all conveniently located in one dungeon. Turned my love for Everfrost into boiling hatred.

And then the design of the dungeons. Some douchebag designed some generic hallways and rooms and copy / pasted for awhile until the expansion was done. This was the beginning of lousy, uninspired "hey we're in another room that looks exactly like the last 20" dungeon design. Crawling a dungeon became more about how quickly you could run through it and gtfo for points to run it again, than actual "crawling."

Finally, this expansion was paradise for MQers. You can cheat to your heart's content in your own little box that no one ever had a chance to come across. Not to mention how ridiculously fast you could accumulate LDON points and phat lewtz with a map and /warp. Get instance, zone in, /who named, /warp named, kill, loot, exit, repeat. You didn't even have to wait on spawn timers anymore.

This became even more fun when they added that one random instance zone in GoD (I think) that never expired and was full of non-aggro melee mobs. The zone had no loot, nothing. Most people didn't even know it existed. It's like it was implemented specifically for people to run MQ scripts to AFK level.