Plane of Fear

[Halladar]

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

Im pretty sure that the first big brew-ha-ha about "zomg melee sucks this isnt classic!" was a good example of how fun it is to balance things out in the face of ppl delusional to what classic-EQ actually entailed in the first place.

Why do you think they are delusional about it? You think all these posts are made just why exactly?

I have a question for you bubbles. Why did verant put in hell levels in the first place? Why is it that as you level, you become increasingly less powerful than a mob of equal level to yourself?

So, from the sound of your post you go back a long way. Plane of fear opening and all that.

But do you ever think about the big picture and why things worked the way they did?

[Caelor]

My impression was that hell levels were a mistake that was left in; like the halfing exp bonus. True or false?

[Elerion]

I seem to remember hell levels were simply a byproduct of the xp scaling curve they used and not an intended effect. Some dev letter from around the time they smoothed the curve out might have the details.

[Aeolwind]

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

My impression was that hell levels were a mistake that was left in; like the halfing exp bonus. True or false?

False. Hell levels were a math calculation flaw that wasn't "fixable" till After POP. There was a drastic coding change around that time and they were able to go back into the XP modules without hosing every character in the DB.

[Halladar]

We probably have someone here who played in beta. Beta is kind of artificial, but did they have hell levels then?

My personal thinking is that Verant was totally freaked out by how many players they had, how fast they were leveling, and how little content they had for them when they got past about level 30 or so.

So they put in hell levels to slow everyone up.

Kind of like "they built all these crackerbox houses, and Jesus people bought 'em."

Then someone like Abashi can come along and say it is all "working as intended." When the reality is they never really knew what was intended.

[Aeolwind]

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

We probably have someone here who played in beta. Beta is kind of artificial, but did they have hell levels then?

My personal thinking is that Verant was totally freaked out by how many players they had, how fast they were leveling, and how little content they had for them when they got past about level 30 or so.

So they put in hell levels to slow everyone up.

Kind of like "they built all these crackerbox houses, and Jesus people bought 'em."

Then someone like Abashi can come along and say it is all "working as intended." When the reality is they never really knew what was intended.

Yeah, there were very few 50's in the beta though. Hell levels were literally a coding flaw though. There was something like a "if @level / 5 then @xp x2" Ugly, but it shows why I should never touch the source....

[Halladar]

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

False. Hell levels were a math calculation flaw that wasn't "fixable" till After POP. There was a drastic coding change around that time and they were able to go back into the XP modules without hosing every character in the DB.

Okay Aeolwind. Were hell levels in eq on day one? That is an awful hard one to prove or disprove. I know 1 or 2 of the first level 50's were some rogues that leveled with an enchanter using the old whirl till you hurl bug. That only took like a month or something.

Here is a theory: about two weeks after launch someone goes to Smedley and gives him a projection about what percentage of the server will be level 30, 40, 50 in 3 months, 6 months that sort of thing.

Then about a week later without being announced, a code change was put in on the server.

And hell levels now existed.

I could be wrong. But disprove me.

[Halladar]

Look, please don't get the idea I am angry. It is hard to explain my position on this. I hope you don't take any of my posts to mean I have any personal animosity to you or any of the devs here.

I have a lot of theories about EQ, the way it started, and why things turned out the way they did.

I could well be wrong, a lot of what I think would be unverifiable unless one of the original dev team for live showed up and started talking.

I like to analyze and think about things like this. If anyone knows anything about this sort of thing, I am happy to be proved wrong.

Just to say one thing though, eq was a great game. I still can't believe that bunch at Verant produced it back in the day though. And a lot of things that were, didn't really need to be that way, that is an opinion though.

[Aeolwind]

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

I could be wrong. But disprove me.

I wasn't in the beta so I can neither prove nor disprove if they were in the live beta. All I can say is this, it was almost 6 months for the first SK to hit 50 on emarr.

[yaaaflow]

My understanding of hell levels (and this is just I believe what was posted when they were taken out) is as follows: The developers intended to have the amount of xp to level increase at 30->35 by X amount, spread out among the levels. Then from 35-40 it would increase by Y amount, spread out among the levels. And so on, for 40-45 and 45-50. Except a bug in the code had that full xp amount applied to just the 1st level in each of the ranges, so level 30 would take the regular xp amount + X, and the rest of the levels would proceed normally. And so forth.

At the very least that is approximately what Verant posted about it when they ended up removing hell levels.

My question along these lines is why is it on this server that hell levels are 29/34/etc rather than 30/35/etc?