[Opinion] EQ Next - Game Changers/Breakers

[RevengeofGio]

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

I don't like you anymore Tom.

Saying nice things about instancing. Get a load of this guy! [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

They may help fix a problem, but god damn they ruin my immersion! [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I agree and don't agree at the same time [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Maybe they could instance when the population gets past a certain point entering the zone?

[xCry0x]

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

I suppose there is also no reason that a game would need to have ONLY instanced dungeons or ONLY non-instanced dungeons.

/shrug

I agree with this but it is hard to implement really well and I honestly cannot think of how I would like it to be done.

When I played WoW i missed the open world competition for things. I missed doing camps like lguk or seb where when you get in a crypt group there is this sense of "awesome, all this great shit can drop to earn me money". I missed the feeling of dominance from racing to the world spawns. They had a few in original WoW (emerald dragons and 2 other guys blanking on their names) but they were primarily secondary targets with lower priority than the instances.

At the same time, the lack of instances makes the playability of the game suck for people who have real life obligations.

This server is a perfect example. Every guild as far as I know maintains a CST/EST raid schedule, ie be on at 5/6pm CST on raid day so we can see what is up and move on hate, fear, whatever.

That is great, but I am in California and that is 4PM for me. I am lucky enough that my job is flexible enough that I simply decided to come in earlier and leave earlier to be home by 4 but shit, if you worked a typical 9-5 + drive time you would easily be 1.5 hrs + late for every raid (aka miss most of it).

In WoW you could have east coast & west coast guilds because you could schedule raids based around the play times of the players and that was honestly very nice although casual.

I could see some sort of combination put in where using EQ terminology:
Seb = non instanced therefor trak = non instanced
kc = non instanced therefor vs = non instanced
All the outdoor dragons obviously non instanced

vp = instance
Hate = instance (including inny & maestro)
Fear = instanced (including ct & draco)
Sky = instanced (including nobles)

This would allow shit like trak to cock block lesser guilds on getting keyed to VP, this still maintaining the tiering of guilds.

It would also allow casual guilds to actually be casual and have set raid times and still accomplish shit like killing gods etc.

[Thulack]

Not sure if it has been talked about but people that want a token system for raiding here should be all for instancing since its basically the same thing.

[skipdog]

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

The problem is you can't compare EQN to classic EQ. It will be NOTHING like classic EQ. It'll have more in common with the newest MMO's. That means virtually nothing in common with old school EQ. So when I see this thread, I just shake my head. EQ Next is not EQ, it's more like the newest Star Trek movies. They're pluggin into the sandbox stuff in minecraft and freerealms and second life and adding it their re-envisioned EQ.

EQN is EQN. Take it for what it's. Don't compare it to EQ because it's like apples and oranges.

Do you have info about EQN that we don't?

I cannot fathom how you can make such sweeping statements regarding EQN when we barely have any information about it.

[fennixad]

instance system will destroy the fun of ec game.

[khanable]

That model looks fucking stupid

Looks like some shitty korean knock off

I hope they don't take this WOW/Korean style of armor on.. stuff is so god damn ugly

[August]

Originally Posted by t0lkien [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

http://www.warcraftrealms.com/activity.php?serverid=-1

Unless I'm misunderstanding that site (and it's a little hard to read IMO), that's an average of around 700 players per server per day, with peaks of no more than 1500 o_O

If that's even ballpark, that 40k active connections figure is (and I mean this without insult) laughable. I kind of knew this because 40k active connections is in the realms of CCP's server tech, and that stuff is world-wide and absolutely cutting edge. I suspect it may even exploit some unreported quantum bug in time and space [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

http://massively.joystiq.com/2008/09...-server-model/

That WoW data may not be current/complete though...

Yes you are misunderstanding. warcraft realms is a ui mod that hasn't been in wide use since 2008. Based on census data back then there were times when the mod picked up over 35,000 active connections on a server. They extrapolated that the cap was at 40k. Keep in mind that some servers are rated for higher load than others.

Nowadays, servers work in clusters and 'battlegroup realms' where there are several servers together. Almost all content is instanced, and this mod is no longer up to date.

Also, and I know this won't get me far in internet fake-world points, I work in software and have several friends that work @ Blizzard who corroborate 'more or less' these numbers, back when I was an active player (2004-2009). I obviously have no proof and won't use it as a pedestal, but I have no real reason to lie, either.

[t0lkien]

I'll take your word for it August. I have a friend at Blizzard too, but he's an art guy who I don't think would have a clue even if I asked him. The point is really moot anyway, as I think the reasons Blizzard implemented instancing probably had less to do with server load and more to do with the design choices they made, now that I think about it - at least once they'd upgraded their tech past launch and Vanilla WoW. I can tell you that in other MMOs instancing is used as a tech solution to solve a perceived problem of potential load - witness EQ 2 and Neverwinter etc. It was the "solution" adopted by the server guys on the MMO I worked on as well.

I understand why people liked Heroics and personal/guild instances, but as I said, they make it a different type of game. And one I'm just no longer interested in playing, personally.

Re. that picture, that Warhammer/Asian art style just confirms the vibe I picked up from the Smedley interview. I can pretty confidently say I won't be giving EQ Next any time whatsoever.

However, this has all given me a great idea. Now to find someone who knows someone at Sony...

[stormlord]

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

Community is what brings MMORPG's to life. It's the difference between Diablo 2 and Everquest. And those games are worlds apart compared to say, WoW and Diablo 3.
Things that kill community:

-Solo to max level with efficiency. Obviously if you can just solo and deal with no one but yourself, you will opt to....

-Anything endgame or groupable is instanced. Instancing encourages linear dungeon crawls that are tailor made for any random group of people to complete as long as they are the correct level range. Every piece of loot is massively farmed by the server and easily obtained by anyone...

-Making all travel instant. Maybe we don't need to wait 20+ mins a boat these days. But instant porting around the map makes the world seem artificially small. Horses and hearthstones are good enough.

If you disagree with the majority of this, I have a hard time understanding why you aren't playing WoW. It is clearly the best "modern mmorpg," if that's your thing.

I 3/4 agree. I've been playing Wurm Online off/on over the past year and the only teleporting it has is after you die you can choose to select a city to spawn in, but since your loot is on your corpse then you cannot just spawn conveniently wherever you want to. I play on Chaos and the map is huge and tough to travel on and there's no in-game map. However, I'm not completely against teleporting. I liked how teleporting worked in Ultima Online via hte recall/mark spell system. Evenso, teleporting changes things. It reduces the value of building and maintain good roads. It reduces knowledge somewhat about the map. It makes the game more like a "Select where you want to go" experience than a immersive experience in another world.

I do think that with huge maps a game does probably need some teleporting. It all depends how it's used and how powerful it's. It depends whether you want a traveling game or a different game.

Some people consider these traits game-breaking or old school. Me, I'm not sure. I like them. Does that mean I'm a masochist? Again, I don't like that label. I like to survive in games.

Look at this:
http://www.gameskinny.com/9ltw7/mmos...mmo-s-go-wrong

...............
To understand that, let's go back in time about 16 years to the dawn of the MMO genre. By today's standards, those early games were brutal, punishing events that relentlessly smacked down players by being too difficult and unfair. But were they?
............

I don't know whether to believe what that article is saying or not.

I do know I like survival games. Don't Starve is an example of one. I like harsh rules. However, I like it to be intuitive. I don't like when a game doesn't give me options. By "options" I mean you have to work at it. I don't mean a "Give Me What I Want" freebie button. I want to have to learn how to do things. I really really like it when dungeons have secret places and secret passageways and tricks and bells and whistles. Corpse runs, for example, are fun if the loss isn't too great and you get better as you learn more. It's also during those tense times when bad things happen that you're going to ask for help. Players who normally wouldn't talk to others will talk to them when they or others need help. In this way, bad things bring players together. And it's not a fake bad thing like a scripted event. It's real and the feelings between players are heightened.

Loss is as valuable as gain. If we always gain, we don't truly gain. It's not how you respond to success, it's how you respond to failure. True success means getting up after failure and succeeding.

The only downside to all this is that it taps into how our brain actually works in reality. Reality latches onto the learning/reward system in our brain. It's self-sustaining. It's a risk/reward ratio. But games can also hook onto this system. If they remove the risk and maintain the same level of reward, they can addict players much faster. Either way, games will tend to be addicting because our brain self-reinforces learning/reward. When games simplify their component parts and only have the parts that're addicting, they become something like a casino, but without the world. This is when the whole thing becomes very obvious to an observer.

At their core, games are like parasites and reality is just a less efficient parasite. The difference is small. BUT if you don't play reality then you will die. And THAT is a BIG important difference.

[Grahm]

Didn't read thread so don't know if it was mentioned, but obviously instances are going to need to be in any newer MMO. Look at the 1k people we have here and the literal every day crying over how TMO gets this, or someone is always camping that.

But what I am thinking of are not instanced dungeons, but instanced zones. Think every 60-100 people a new zone opens. Besides the first zone, a newer version of the zone can only be spawned whenever atleast 20-30 people want to get in, or else you have to wait in a que and farm outside of the zone etc etc......

New zones would have a decreased chance for the "bosses" to pop right at zone in. But to also get it where you have to use multiple zones, or wait for the zone you would like, would have to have a max instance limit, say 3 per zone. So say you really like Mistmoore, but its packed, you have to go to Overthere. Same here, if there are already 3 full instances you have to wait for your spot, or go somewhere else.

Raiding is a whole other subject, but I always thought it'd be simple as hell to do instance raids is 2nd best gear while open world raid bosses drop top end gear. But a full 2nd tier skilled player can beat a full top end mediocre player in a duel.