EverQuest NextFollow

1 - fair enough. makes sense, really.
2 - part one, yes, part 2 , why? if you go to the local 7/11 do you have to do tasks to buy a big gulp and a frozen buritto? that's just silly.
3 - no.
4 - what? are you a *********?
5 - nope nope nope. i seriously hate PvP. i've never played a game where i enjoyed PvP. there are enough things in norrath that want to kill me, why would i want to have to worrying about some 15 year old with no life and a rich daddy who can play 24/7 running around trying to gank me just cause it makes him feel like his teeny epeen is significant?
6 - got no problem with this. sometimes i think EQ suffers for allowing lower level toons to level to rapidly - you can PL to 85 in just a matter of hours. this is fine if you already know how to play your character, and are just rebuilding say, another shaman on another account, to use to buff the alts on your main account... but otherwise, it can make for a horrible player.
7 - meh.. i don't like that, but i don't hate it... i'd say 10% of the level.. a whole level is kinda harsh. say you're lvl 50, 90% of the way in, look out TRAINED, bang, you're now lvl 49, because someone is a jerk. not exactly fair. now, if ALL zones were instanced, like guild wars then i'd go along with your whole level loss. there can be no trains unless YOU cause them, so you'd deserve what you get.
8 - just, no. why? thunderstorm. power loss... die because LD... power is out 3 hours. all your stuff is gone because a lightening bolt hit a transformer a mile from your house. not a good idea. people would abandon the game like lemmings.
9 - this is just stupid. good idea to make sure no one raids.
10 - i like this one, actually. instead of just 1 epic weapon, every slot slot has an 'epic' option. i've thought they should add an epic BP quest for years.
11 - yup. agree totally - and will add that you will have to make sure you check every one of the 10 rings for type and style, because some combinations of the wrong things can cause the rings to cancel each other out, or even combine and cancel out the bonuses from another piece of armor.
12 - part one, yes.part 2, yes to the GM and his godly powers. the rest of it is just lame. you've just killed pick-up groups. no one will ever go LFG because they'll be terrified of ending up grouped with a hacker. guilds would exist of only people who know each other IRL, because one little misjudgment could get 60 people banned. kind of a dumb idea, in my opinion.
13 i decided at this point that you were just being silly. at first i thought this was a serious post, but this was the proverbial straw from the proverbial camel that made me realize you were just being goofy and amusing yourself.
14 so, on THIS one i decided i should pile in with you have have a little fun as well . Not only should gear rot unless you repair it, it can also poison you if you go to long between repairs. enough combat, your BP will get all banged up, right? with jagged edges, and those will cut you and give you lead poisoning or gangrene and the like. ignored long enough, it can slowly cause your death, and such a death will carry an extra level loss as a penalty for being lazy.
15 - not only can money fall out or the bank get embezzled, until you finish the epic raid events " The Brothers of Leemen must DIE!" and " Lynch Merrel!" your whole bank could disappear and take all of your ( and everyone who uses that bank's ) stuff, AND cause you to lose 50% of the stuff you loot ( chosen randomly) to disappear from your inventory for up to the next 90 days.
16 - with the reduction to one 12 slot back pack, you do get 2 4 slot pants pockets, 1 2 slot shirt pocket, and 2 2 and 2 4slot jacket pockets. you must remember to remove your jacket before a fight, or the effect of the jacket cut the stats of your BP by 50%. if you were carrying 2 backpacks ( at a 50% reduction by itself) it would mean that the jacket and the 2 packs would reduce your combat stats and regen by 100%. so take the jacket off before you get into a fight.


I really hope you were being silly.... because if you were serious about most of the 16 items above, you are describing the perfect game for me to avoid like the black death.

EQ Next will most likely be casual in that you can play on an Ipad or in Unity. That's just the state of the genre. The new Star Wars game proved that the end is nigh for what we are used to thus far in MMO's.

Maybe EQNext could have servers set at various levels of difficulty, like Easy, Medium, Hard and Brutal. They could even have a Cheater's Server where hacking is tolerated! That would reduce hacking on the "straight" servers... maybe. I wonder if the allure of cheating is the "illegality" of it? In any case, this design approach is used by a lot of solo games so no reason it couldn't be applied to a MMO.

Edited, Jun 18th 2012 7:34am by Sippin

EQ-style graphics exist reasonably well in a modern form: warhammer. They even made certain races have too few armor looks and some newb armors more interesting than the next 35 levels worth... so with a bit more thought and development it could be done fully right.

Import EQ's lore and familiar zones into what warhammer is... (without pretending to do PVP) and you'd have a smooth running game. Warhammer's tome of knowledge (quest log/personal lore) was really well done. The public quest mechanism was interesting. Give that game EQ's content and it would be something worth playing... ...and yes Warhammer borrowed heavily from WoW, but mostly good things (if you ignore the pvp stuff).

Talent trees and cut-and-paste quest arcs to level aren't something to do in EQnext though. Non linear journey is good, and EQ has always been able to have a high-end end-game.

That some of my hopes.

Note that I am not against pvp. Just not for EQ since they've never really done it right.

Points taken Remianen.

I suppose I actually like a "sandbox with many tunnels". LDoN in it's heyday was a nice tight example of this: you all wanted something from the vendors... the more casual you had played up the that point the more of the vendor stuff you could use (in theory), but those that played intensely finished things off faster and actually maxed out the gear options.

Kunark and Velious both did interesting things with this as you could retrace the journey and alter factions to gain more content/rewards if you wanted. PoP was pure linear once you knew what to do, though I concede some of the alternate flags weaken that argument. I personally hated PoP for years but have gained more appreciation for it in recent times. So I guess what I really want is lots of variety/options.

But not phasing... for those not aware that is content so linear you are in the same zone as someone and can't see/interact with them because they aren't on the same quest arc stage as you. WoW did a bunch of it with Cataclysm and it made grouping a hassle outside of premades.

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PvP you said what I meant better than I had said it.

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I suppose what I really want is EQNext to make me want to play it longer than the 2 months every other game has held me outside of EQ. EQ I keep coming back to.

I agree. I remember having to grind out ridiculous amounts of North Ro "adventures" because I was a rogue (big DPS) and most of my friends were clerics (so the 1492 pt armor was their goal). God I hate NRo missions now.



Honestly, I think we're doomed in that respect. I played TERA from headstart until about 2 weeks post-release. I loved that game. The combat system, and even the graphics. I read all the whines about their female models and thought, "Are these people NEW?" Go look at Lineage II's dark elf females. Hell, look at WoW's Night Elf female. Stay at the character select screen for a couple minutes and watch the character hop up and down for no reason other than to make her boobs....well, you know. Why do people never complain about unrealistically designed male models (again, WoW's Night Elf male is an example)? Anyway, I quit playing TERA at the end of those two weeks but forgot to cancel my account. As a result, I got dinged for a YEAR'S sub to the game. Guess I'll be playing Tera after all, eh?



WHAT? U r weird! Age of Conan needed MORE linearity. They needed an NPC that would tell you exactly where each quest could be found and whether it was worth doing!

That was sarcasm, by the way.

I personally prefer sandboxes. The problem is, there are so few (EVE and Ryzom come to mind) that unless they have large budgets (which EVE does but Ryzom does not), can give uneven results. I don't need a game developer telling me what my goals are.



I was gonna say. Go look at the Test patch notes for next Wednesday's "June patch". Here's an example:

- Bristlebane has been shuffling his Deck of Spontaneous Generation and has thrown in a few new tricks. (Five previously unobtainable items that resulted from combinations of mischief cards can now be created.)
- A previously unobtainable item that Einhorst McMannus has been after for many years can now be found.

How many years has it been since Bristlebane cards dropped? Didn't they stop dropping after the first PoM revamp (what, 11 years ago?)? And it took this long to put lion meat in the drop table?



The main problem with hotzones in my view is, because the devs don't play their own game, they don't know which zones suck and why. All they see is design intent, not actual datamined player feedback. The dev teams of some later games (City of Heroes comes to mind) use actual player behavior to direct their design decisions. Not what players SAY, what they DO (which is often completely contrary to one another). Datamining would've told Elidroth that Plane of Disease has always been a hated zone and that Dranik's Scar's only real activity has usually been related to grabbing Hollows missions. Otherwise, it's a transit zone. He always puts headscratching zones in every hotzone set (that's what convinces me he doesn't play the game).



The way it was explained to me by a former lead designer is, EQ's system is antiquated and there are only so many workarounds they can do before it starts to resemble the proverbial house of cards. Also, an xp bonus tied to a group would benefit some people (like you and me) far more than others. Nobody wants to get it to the point like in was in Earth & Beyond (full group = 500% more xp) but that was several problems compounded (the biggest being, there was no group range. So 5 soloers would group up for the bonus and then go to the four corners and center of the zone and solo). And your portable bonus idea flies in the face of the whole purpose of hotzones. They're designed to get people to congregate in a smaller subset of zones, in order to possibly facilitate grouping. That has failed but the purpose can still be served. You just have to give people a reason to group up actively. Offering better loot drops while grouped as well as a real xp bonus would help there.



No it wouldn't. They could change them monthly since there is already a monthly patch scheduled. Problem is, hotzones need an item and designing the item (usually an aug) is time consuming, apparently. Not like most of the augs are actually any good though.



For EQ, sure. That horse left the barn years ago (and is probably dead on another continent by now). I think PvP can work (EVE is proof of that) but it's really not worth devoting significant resources to. Even if you do it "right" (by whatever means you choose to define it), it's not going to attract a critical mass of players because the vast majority of the market is not willing to subject themselves to the typical behavior in PvP. This is a case where the few spoil it for the many. No one wants to be teabagged after losing a fight, especially if the fight was against someone significantly higher level/gear/skill. In addition, if your game is not hacker proof (or at least hacker resistant), there's another factor to consider (and budget for). So a game that's expected to have a relatively low number of players (and thus, lower revenue) having to spend more money on CS (GMs) and tech (coders to close holes) to combat "cheating" just doesn't look attractive to anyone looking to finance a game. Aventurine almost went belly up after Darkfall (a very well made FFA PvP game) failed to meet expectations.

I agree there's no real downside to including PVP in an MMO altho if it's obviously unbalanced the weaker classes will complain royally. But that's part of the game, as frustrating as it might be. And all the more rewarding if a so-called underpowered player manages to beat a supposedly overpowered player!

I also think BG would be a great idea in EQNext, especially if it allowed players from different servers to interact. (This might pose problems if they include FV-type servers, but cross that bridge when we come to it!)

TOR did really well in inital sales. It logged some 1.7 million units sold. They seem to be having retention issues though. They dropped some 400K subs so far this year (perhaps more.) I think the game has replayability issues. It's a great story driven game, but once you play thru the story, are you wanting to do it again? We'll see if it has the same staying power that EQ does, though I'm skeptical (licensing fees to LA are typically really high, so they need a fair number of subs just to cover that cost.)

I'm not exactly sure where I said (or even remotely indicated) it's a failure.

Edited, Jun 26th 2012 3:42pm by amastropolo