Making grouping great again

[Chortles Snortles]

how to make elf frens a foreign concept to p1999ers
(LOL)

[Stonewallx39]

It is interesting how so many posts descend into RnF…

If we could change the incentive so that grouping was as good or a better option then solo, you’d push people together in mutually beneficial relationships.

You could nerf things, make the game harder for some classes, remove recharge, so on and so forth. At the end of the day does any of that fulfill the legacy of classic Everquest? A vibrant community full of players trying to overcome a hostile world to adventure and experience something different.

Making the game less fun will push players away (kill vibrant community) which is why I advocate for making grouping as good or better experience as soloing. The game should be enjoyable as well as difficult. Making connections and facing down incredible challenges is what most of use remember from our time in classic. Balancing these two things will keep our little project alive and well pushing forward into the future.

I just wonder if there’s a good way to get these ideas in front of the project team and to hear their perspective on how these could fit in or pitfalls they’re looking to avoid.

[starkind]

EQ will always become top heavy and full of twinks after a year or so its the way it is you cant undo that without tearing out its guts and making it a wow clone which also sucks

enjoy it for what it is, and have an alt that can solo for when u dont feel/cant get grps which most of us in our old age are inclined to do

i'm infavor of bringing resists in line with mob power scaling the way it scales with melee so at the very high end your only landing root on light greens without help

that along with nerfing velious items and nerfing channeling will help bring a lot more vibrancy to the world

also charming should cuz negative faction hits the minute it lands on certain npcs and ONLY be restricted to a specific npc sub type, so if you charm a guard somewhere ur gonna take huge faction hits

really only necromancers should be able to comfortably solo and clerics maybe the undeads and paladins cuz they are sick awesome with DW helm, everyone else should be begging those three classes for grps and divine favor post 40

also if u havent solo'd a warrior or rogue untwinked to 60 u are a whiner

and even a lvl 1 rat or moss snake should be able to 1 shot a lvl 60 if it gets lucky with a hit 1, in 1000 times (has to land the hit tho) make the world fearsome and remove the stat bloat from velious, the planes. (or cause some horrific wasting disease (that doesnt leave a buff up and doesnt go away when u die (and is transmissible with contact between other players, trading items or bumping hitboxes)) that slowly drops max hp to 1 point) only a lvl 60 cleric can cure if u beg them again [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[cd288]

You literally don’t need any other mechanical change to the game to make grouping the goal of players besides a group exp bonus. Just give a group a bonus that scales depending on amount of players in the group and their respective levels. Problem solved.

The fact of the matter is that any mechanical changes you make to gameplay to try and make things harder will eventually be overcome by players to some or all extent. The simple fact will remain that solo exp is faster and so no one will group.

[Keza]

Originally Posted by cd288 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

You literally don’t need any other mechanical change to the game to make grouping the goal of players besides a group exp bonus. Just give a group a bonus that scales depending on amount of players in the group and their respective levels. Problem solved.

The fact of the matter is that any mechanical changes you make to gameplay to try and make things harder will eventually be overcome by players to some or all extent. The simple fact will remain that solo exp is faster and so no one will group.

The only thing this does is force people to group. FFXIV forces people to do groups and even raids for the main story quest yet literally no one speaks - despite people droning on about "community" - which is just their friends and guildmates they've deliberately sought out. It's fine for the sake of story, but it doesn't build community. If forcing grouping is your goal then why not make it impossible to get exp solo? Then people can group, never speak and level up. (* Forgot to mention FFXIV, as with all themeparks, is piss easy.)

Making the game more difficult and requiring grouping in certain circumstances advocates an organic formula for socializing. No one on the planet remembers any given group they had in a themepark MMO, but I remember some random Japanese guy helping my dumbass 14-year-old self too stupid to use auto-translate go through Korroloka Tunnel and finish the quest to unlock Ninja in FFXI. Why? Because you can't solo it at level 30, which is when you unlock advanced jobs. If I could have solo'd it then I wouldn't remember it at all, and it'd be meaningless to me. Forcing people to group for the sake of grouping is similarly meaningless. No more meaningless than my argument though, since classic is classic.

As for people overcoming mechanical challenges... if players couldn't then why even play? But making the content harder doesn't make it a "fact" that soloing will still be better, it makes soloing harder because the game is harder, and any mistake or poor luck while soloing results in heavy drawbacks compared to grouping.

[cd288]

So now if you’re moving the goalposts from getting people to group to it only mattering if people are social while grouping, nothing you really proposed makes people more social while grouping.

[Keza]

If your only interest is to get a group in EQ for the sake of getting a group then the argument of boosting exp in groups isn't for the sake of grouping itself, it's for the sake of leveling your 100th character faster in an ancient emulator.

I presumed any person wanting groups to be more commonplace would consider the primary aspect of grouping in a game like Everquest to be about socializing rather than merely gaining exp, which is extremely easy to do for almost every class.

Anyway, enjoy not saying anything in your posts and claiming you're right.

[Manakim]

I'm going to say it again, exp here is alot faster compared to my 1999 memories. I've remade a wizard here and got to 50 something really fast, while also playing my necro main. Back in the day, it took me over a year to hit 60. And no, it's not that we have more knowledge about the game today, i've done the exact same route i did in my main back in the day, and it was suuuuuper fast.

[Tewaz]

The exp per kill is accurate.

The kills per hour are not.

Standard dungeon group here holds all the mobs in what would be considered multiple camps in 2000.

I remember camping NG in Seb in 2001 and we only killed the bugs and a few patrols. There was a group in the entry hall, exit hall, hallway to the other two areas, and one at the pyramid.

We were laughing at the other groups because ours was the best loot camp.

[Ooloo]

Yeah I remember in vanilla classic on Povar in cazic thule, there would be a group in each corner of the temple courtyard, and usually a slightly higher level group inside the temple on the second floor. And there seemed to somehow still always be mobs up and trains frequently.

Sigh.. those were the days.