LDON

[fadetree]

I'd like to see PoP, but with the transport stones disabled except for the absolutely required ones, and no ridiculous paludal zem.

[Robben]

The PoK books turned the old-world zones into ghost towns.

I too enjoyed the PoP raids, but those books really diminished the scope of the game.


The devs seemed to completely neglect the old zones once Luclin/PoP came around and it killed that portion of the game

[myriverse]

They neglected the old zones before Luclin/PoP too. So...

[Yumyums Inmahtumtums]

Neglected until Ldon that is (at least from a storyline pov)

Mistmoore crypts were the best.

[Kika Maslyaka]

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

Exploration? LOL. PoP absolutely kills it. The whole game except for very specific "chosen" leveling/raiding zones becomes dead 99% of the time.

Social aspect? LOL. People just sit in PoP. There are basically never any more interesting encounters of meeting people and interacting out in the field. Everyone gets SoW/Clarity from a random person standing around and then just goes and teleports around to wherever they want.

AA's are NOT needed to balance classes better. That's something you can do by tweaking the skills and game mechanics themselves. AA's are simply a massive grind. Wow, there is some serious Pavlovian dog shit going on here.

I think that by the time PoK books were added old world was already a ghost town, from all the previous additions. It was just a flower to the grave already covered with earth.

EQ had inherited problems even in original content design they never went back to address.
For example lets compare:

Crushbone - tiny cramped area, with lev 12 mobs roaming next to lev 5 mobs, caused continuous trains. On other hand - lots of good non generic loot.

Blackburrow - amazingly designed cavern system, and the only classic zone with truly 3-dimentional layout (not just floors, on top of each other like in RunnyEye, but uniquely interconnected system of tunnels and caves). YET - there is not a single name mob here! Not a single loot drop that can equal to what you can get in Crushbone.

Another pair:
EverFrost - a very large zone, but with lots of landscape features
vs
West Karana - dull and empty - no zone geography what so ever, no landscape features. Not even mobs in sight! Nothing. It barely had any players even in classic times, even before Kunark.

Now, Kunark comes along and does 2 things:
-zones that designed a lot better with features and geography
-much better loot drops from same level mobs - this one was HUGE mistake. It immediately made old world zones to devalue, with exception of selected areas/loot camps.

They should have given Kunark mobs either similar quality loot, or go back and rework the old zones that were terribly lacking. They never did.

Then Velious comes along and drops even better loot on same level range for 40+ level game.

And finally Luclin:
-Lev 25 mobs drop weapons with ratios of what 45+ named droped in Sol A/Permafrost
-Low level zones with insane ZEM
-and at the same time, the map of Luclin is poorly designed, with some zones clearly being superior in content and loot, while others super out of the way and worthless right from the start.

When people say that after initial EQ release all Brad McQuad did is smocked crack and talked about "Vision" - I am starting to believe: - its like expansions had no general oversight. No senior designer to make sure that things progress smoothly, and actually fit together. One designer was making one zone with one idea with respect to game balance, and another was working with completely different set of ideas.

So as you see here - this trend was quickly piling up. By the time of PoP - books or no books, didn't really matter. The game HAD TO BE OVERHAULED, but they didn't care - they wanted to sell another expansion.
Yes PoP actualy for the first time ahd interesting raids, but at least half of the zones again were poorly designed.

yes, Torment was awesome. Plane of Time- the pinnacle zone of entire expansion - SUCKED - there is literally nothing there.
I could go on for another 3 pages comparing in details what could have been done, and what wasn't, but I think you get general ideas.
They started good, but then were continuously pressed to get the next expansion out of the door, and ton of things went half done or not done at all.
And whats worse, they barely ever admitted to this flaws, and never fixed most of them.
Today, EQ lead designer is beating himself in a chest proudly saying "EQ is the largest MMO in the world - we 700 have unique zones!"
700 EMPTY zones, I may add. And then he comes in rerolled forums (http://www.rerolled.org/showthread.p...s-free-to-play) and start asking questions - why people are still playing EMU if EQ is f2p???
Poor sob.

[moklianne]

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

The PoK books turned the old-world zones into ghost towns.

I too enjoyed the PoP raids, but those books really diminished the scope of the game.


The devs seemed to completely neglect the old zones once Luclin/PoP came around and it killed that portion of the game

Kunark added a whole separate continent as did Velious, the only reason the classic zones were still used were because they provided enough exp for the new levels in Kunark and Velious. Also, you can't continuously expand zones into (and beyond) the size of West Karana. Traveling becomes even more tedious than it already is.

PoP raiding and the expansion as a whole I consider the pinnacle of EQ. I say this after playing and raiding in all expansions leading up to VoA (a few years old now). TSS and SoF were great as well.

It would be awesome if features from future expansions could be voted upon and implemented after Velious is complete. Such as, most of PoP with the exception of the easy porting (books) everywhere, Luclin without trader mode or set the spire portals to every hour instead of every 15 minutes, Epic 2.0's from OOW, etc

[webrunner5]

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

When people say that after initial EQ release all Brad McQuad did is smocked crack and talked about "Vision" - I am starting to believe: - its like expansions had no general oversight. No senior designer to make sure that things progress smoothly, and actually fit together. One designer was making one zone with one idea with respect to game balance, and another was working with completely different set of ideas.

So as you see here - this trend was quickly piling up. By the time of PoP - books or no books, didn't really matter. The game HAD TO BE OVERHAULED, but they didn't care - they wanted to sell another expansion.
Yes PoP actualy for the first time ahd interesting raids, but at least half of the zones again were poorly designed.

yes, Torment was awesome. Plane of Time- the pinnacle zone of entire expansion - SUCKED - there is literally nothing there.
I could go on for another 3 pages comparing in details what could have been done, and what wasn't, but I think you get general ideas.
They started good, but then were continuously pressed to get the next expansion out of the door, and ton of things went half done or not done at all.
And whats worse, they barely ever admitted to this flaws, and never fixed most of them.
Today, EQ lead designer is beating himself in a chest proudly saying "EQ is the largest MMO in the world - we 700 have unique zones!"
700 EMPTY zones, I may add. And then he comes in rerolled forums (http://www.rerolled.org/showthread.p...s-free-to-play) and start asking questions - why people are still playing EMU if EQ is f2p???
Poor sob.

Well the big problem was after the first release of EQ they started needing more developers for each zone. And if you play a Puller class, ergo Monk, you will find that X amount of the zones are alike but different. Meaning say 3 different developers designed say 5 zones each. All different mindsets with different pathing, spliting difficulty, etc.

So that is what I think made some zones great and other sort of sucked. More expansions put more pressure on the developers and some were good at it, others not.

I agree, WK, SK and NK all sort of sucks mobs wise, and feature wise. The Overthere is not far behind but at least has some mobs in it. Only a Bard can like it lol.

If you still play live like I do at times, it is SCARY how many zones there really is now. And they are doing a Lot better job at them than they did in the past. Live is really pretty cool if you just take your time on one toon and think past PoP. Start one up and play it the hard way like we did years ago you could spend 5 years and never find, or be in all of the neat places, there are on live. It is that good.

I don't want to hear about PoK stones and Cats on the Moon. You DO NOT have to use them if you don't want to. You are allowed to play a Human Monk and walk 12 zones if that is what you want. Hell it isn't a race to the top just like it should not be here.

[Tewaz]

Add the Plane of Tranquility as the only PoK book and you could add all of the content of PoP without the negatives.

[Erydan Ouragan]

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

Exploration? LOL. PoP absolutely kills it. The whole game except for very specific "chosen" leveling/raiding zones becomes dead 99% of the time.

Najena, Dalnir, Gorge of King Zorb... There's empty zones on p99 as well.

Social aspect? LOL. People just sit in PoP. There are basically never any more interesting encounters of meeting people and interacting out in the field. Everyone gets SoW/Clarity from a random person standing around and then just goes and teleports around to wherever they want.

So instead, people sit in EC tunnel, get SoW and Clarity from a random person standing around and teleport around to wherever they want from a druid or a wizard.

AA's are NOT needed to balance classes better. That's something you can do by tweaking the skills and game mechanics themselves. AA's are simply a massive grind. Wow, there is some serious Pavlovian dog shit going on here.

Everquest by itself, is a massive grind. First you grind the levels, then the plat to buy decent gear, then with the decent gear you farm the plat and buy the resist gear, or camp it, and then you start doing raids and farm the dkp or whatever system your guild uses and get raiding gear.

Sure you could tweak the skills and game mechanics, modify spell/skill values and adding new ones to bring balance, but i'd prefer AAs. It would be yet another long grind but hey, that's what the game is about and in the mean time, i get to have fun with my friends, so why not [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[moklianne]

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

Sure you could tweak the skills and game mechanics, modify spell/skill values and adding new ones to bring balance, but i'd prefer AAs. It would be yet another long grind but hey, that's what the game is about and in the mean time, i get to have fun with my friends, so why not [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I actually enjoyed AA's, the problem is that they quickly became an e-penis measuring stick above your level. "You only have 1K AA's? lulz"

The AA's in Luclin and PoP made a lot of sense, there were very few garbage AA's. If you look at live today, there are thousands of AA's that have minimal value vs their cost.