Beefcake said:On TLE EQ2 server, at max level, I actually spent a lot of time harvesting mats in low level areas for sale. The high level mats were over harvested and cheap as hell on the broker. Very few people ever harvested low and medium mats, but all crafters needed them to level. I made a pretty penny harvesting and selling those mats.
I was not denying anyone access to those mats, I provided a needed service.
No different for people hunting low level mobs to loot stuff for sale.
People want this stuff, and they are usually too lazy to get them on their own.
The devs have the ability to pump up the spawn rate in any given area. They often do this at expansions and releases, especially in newbie areas. They can also lower them.
That would be a simple solution that would not harm anyone.
Batwings..used to need these from newbie areas, pay a lower level a few plat to go round and kill a couple stacks worth, gives them exps and some cash, and promotes community between the low levels and the high levels. In other words thinking about your impact is helpful...
Beefcake said:Several times, I was a newbie in an area that higher levels were slaughtering in. They would be looking for something specific. They didn't need most of what was looted. Many times, they would see me killing, open up a trade window, and give me some cool stuff.
The loot was nothing to them, but big upgrades for me. This is how communities get built.
This would not happen if you guys got your way and locked them out.
Not all high levels "pay it forward" however that's what I have been talking about. Hopefully we have a community that is aware of the impact they have on the area they are in. I think..for the most part that will happen, unless we get the insidious gold and plat farmer crew infesting our game.
Even if the devs agree that something like preventing drops from gray mobs or even preventing attacks on gray mobs is a good idea - I doubt if it is worth the effort to put this in the game when it launches.
The critical things at launch are stability, a very attractive starter zone to suck new players in to the game when they give it a test hop, a very good character creation page because that is the first thing new players see, and IMO all else is secondary with anti-griefing mechanisms not near the top of the list.
Personally I wouldn't mind at all protecting lower levels from unfair competition from high levels especially in the first zones. While some of us push for a lot of competition in this game I'm in the camp that prefers cooperation and a pleasant atmosphere over an exciting drama-filled one.
The one constant in this tread is everyones dread of the plat farmers / sellers....They are not the problem, the plat buyers are the problem, eliminate them and the plat farmers go away. Most games ban the bots and sellers but go light on the buyers. No no no. Ban the buyers.
Hard and fast rule of MMO's.
Some players are going to farm. It happens.
But farming isn't griefing. It's just another legit way for players to obtain resources for them to have fun in the game, same as you.
Besides, making friends is a skill many need to learn, and I daresay, master.
I made many friends while running into high level "farmers" by offering to add off-class buffs in exchange for certain drops, and by simply being chatty, and not interfering.
I even ended up getting invited into a really good guild doing that.
Worst case, after being polite and nice, ask them if they can send you a tell when they're done. It often works.
My point is, relax...it's a game.
Wait your turn, or go do one of the other 999.999 things the game has to offer until the spot opens up. Your toon isn't going to get old and die.
corpserunner said:Hard and fast rule of MMO's.
Some players are going to farm. It happens.
But farming isn't griefing. It's just another legit way for players to obtain resources for them to have fun in the game, same as you.
Besides, making friends is a skill many need to learn, and I daresay, master.
I made many friends while running into high level "farmers" by offering to add off-class buffs in exchange for certain drops, and by simply being chatty, and not interfering.
I even ended up getting invited into a really good guild doing that.
Worst case, after being polite and nice, ask them if they can send you a tell when they're done. It often works.
My point is, relax...it's a game.
Wait your turn, or go do one of the other 999.999 things the game has to offer until the spot opens up. Your toon isn't going to get old and die.
Exactly.
corpserunner said:Hard and fast rule of MMO's.
Some players are going to farm. It happens.
But farming isn't griefing. It's just another legit way for players to obtain resources for them to have fun in the game, same as you.
Besides, making friends is a skill many need to learn, and I daresay, master.
I made many friends while running into high level "farmers" by offering to add off-class buffs in exchange for certain drops, and by simply being chatty, and not interfering.
I even ended up getting invited into a really good guild doing that.
Worst case, after being polite and nice, ask them if they can send you a tell when they're done. It often works.
My point is, relax...it's a game.
Wait your turn, or go do one of the other 999.999 things the game has to offer until the spot opens up. Your toon isn't going to get old and die.
Several great points in here. Camping something that is below your level is -not- griefing. Locking players out of loot tables based on level is another example of these games becoming roller coaster rides I do not want to be on. "Hmm, I'd like to go try to find that item, but the train has already passed it and I can't go back. Damn." Do people have specific experiences where they weren't able to enjoy content because high level players prevented them from ever having a chance at it? I remember specific experiences of cooperation like my froglok skin tale, but I don't remember ever being completely blocked. Are these hypothetical fears, or are they based on past experience?
If any single particular thing in this game is desirable, you can count on people camping it. I don't think someone should be punished for wanting it and farming it, regardless of level.
The underlying issue is the couple things people have mentioned in this thread - an item with an absolutely bonkers amount of health regen. Why did the fungi tunic exist in the first place? It totally trivialized the game until like level 30. It needed to be nerfed or scale with level or something.
Avoid these few super OP items, which ruin the game imo, and you don't have a hugely profitable spawn that ubers camp maliciously. This removes plat farmers from contesting the area and now you have only alt farmers which I think are hugely beneficial to the game.
Lastly, any exchange of out of game money for in game items or money should be banned. Both sellers and buyers. Sevens is 100% correct on that.
Sevens said:The one constant in this tread is everyones dread of the plat farmers / sellers....They are not the problem, the plat buyers are the problem, eliminate them and the plat farmers go away. Most games ban the bots and sellers but go light on the buyers. No no no. Ban the buyers.
Agreed Sevens it takes two to do the dance. :)
Shucklighter said:corpserunner said:Hard and fast rule of MMO's.
Some players are going to farm. It happens.
But farming isn't griefing. It's just another legit way for players to obtain resources for them to have fun in the game, same as you.
Besides, making friends is a skill many need to learn, and I daresay, master.
I made many friends while running into high level "farmers" by offering to add off-class buffs in exchange for certain drops, and by simply being chatty, and not interfering.
I even ended up getting invited into a really good guild doing that.
Worst case, after being polite and nice, ask them if they can send you a tell when they're done. It often works.
My point is, relax...it's a game.
Wait your turn, or go do one of the other 999.999 things the game has to offer until the spot opens up. Your toon isn't going to get old and die.
Several great points in here. Camping something that is below your level is -not- griefing. Locking players out of loot tables based on level is another example of these games becoming roller coaster rides I do not want to be on. "Hmm, I'd like to go try to find that item, but the train has already passed it and I can't go back. Damn." Do people have specific experiences where they weren't able to enjoy content because high level players prevented them from ever having a chance at it? I remember specific experiences of cooperation like my froglok skin tale, but I don't remember ever being completely blocked. Are these hypothetical fears, or are they based on past experience?
Based on past experiences over the years. If we have a cooperative community..that shouldn't happen. But someone camping mobs in an area...(ever watched a high level clean out a huge amount of low level mobs at the same time...wait for respawn and do it again? I have) yeah you can send them a tell..if they aren't afk ..having their pet do all the work. :P
If Pantheon has enduring items, spread throughout content of all levels, people will go back to those areas and farm them until their eyes bleed in 2016. We know better now about how important an item like circlet of shadows, necklace of superiority, or fbss will be now. There needs to be some measures to counter this behavior without preventing it.
The first and most obvious is to offer some alternatives. As fun as it was to get an fbss in EQ, by not having another comparable option (other than maybe swirlspine), it created a rather brutal bottleneck. That quickly gave way to things like guilds monopolizing the spawn followed by powerful casters solo farming the camp later. That can be prevented by creating similar items elsewhere. Not so many as to destroy the item's prestige or value, but enough to service more than one group at a time on a server with hundreds of people wanting the same item.
Then there's the skeletal warlord or rune branded girdle from Kunark. The warlord spawned throughout the dungeon making it almost impossible for a single group to lock down. Then the girdle dropped off a mob that could spawn anywhere in the dungeon where a krup could spawn.
Those measures coupled with some better AI for green con mobs would make farming low level content more trouble than it's worth for most people. Especially if one was getting no experience. Convincing people to group to farm items from green mobs should be less profitable than just doing content closer to your level.
It seems to me that saturating the loot table with enough upgrades to prevent farming will run in contrast with the idea of "enduring" items.
Making low level mobs "more trouble than it's worth" is a solution, but I personally think that would make for pretty terrible gameplay. How will you retroactively complete lower level quests? Is there really an expectation on the dev to give every single individual mob in the game unique parameters to make old quests able to be completed?
You might as well just instance low level content then, or have a level restriction on the zones.
Been waiting a bit to reply to this, as I can see both sides of the coin here. However, I honestly don't recall, in my many years of playing EQ1 and WoW, such an abundance of high level players preventing me from levelling and what-not that I didn't enjoy the game. Did I run into higher level players farming an area that I wanted to be in? Sure, but this was more of an issue in games like WoW where I NEEDED to be in that area to make the ! and ? gods happy. I don't foresee such an issue in Pantheon--at least, not in such a magnitude that the devs need to come up with some game changing mechanics to prevent an issue that hasn't even BECOME an issue yet. I'd rather wait-and-see than take drastic measure from the get-go. Even in WoW it was a rare occurence, but maybe I just got lucky...
Shucklighter said:I think the use of this term 'locked out of content' is getting out of hand. When dungeons and camps are not instanced, then you are going to have situations were you want to kill in a particular area and you are unable to do that because someone or some group is already there. When this happens, you find a different camp in that area, or you head to a different area. It really doesn't matter whether it's another group occupying that spot or a solo player who is higher level. You're not locked out. You just don't have the opportunity to instantly do what you want, and so you can wait, or you can choose to do something else. I really can't think of a situation in early EverQuest, even on TLPs, where a prime experience camp was permanently, or even mostly, occupied by a higher level character and I could never fight there.
This is really the crux of this whole argument. Too many people what to be able to do exactly what they want exactly when they want to do it. Entitlement culture is a cancer (I'm a millennial and I hate that my generation is tagged with this, but unfortunately it's too often true). This may sound excessively harsh, and I'm not aiming this comment at anyone here, but the idea of deserving the same rewards for less effort is mind-boggling. Sometimes "effort" is patience. Have there been times when I wanted to go farm or group at a certain camp but couldn't because someone else was already there? Absolutely. That doesn't mean I sulked off or logged out. You start a conversation with that person and see what they are trying to do. I have had experiences where the high level camper offered to allow my group to camp there for exp while they helped out of group in exchange for the drop they needed. Or worse case scenario, ask them to let you know when they are leaving so you can move in and do something else in the man time. You also don't know how long they have been waiting for that camp. Maybe they waited for 3 hours while someone else was there before you even showed up. Too many people want to proclaim themselves victims immediately without knowing the whole story.
As others have said, I don't think there needs to be a "solution" to this other than learn to be social and work things out. Open a dialog with people. Obviously there will be some a-holes, but that happens when humans are involved, it's part of life. Instancing and trivial loot codes have too many negatives of their own to justify implementation in my opinion.
I hate to say it but I have to disagree that doing what you want, when you want and expecting camps instantly is the crux and I will explain why below. What you said has validity, but please consider the following as well:
Everyone seems to be speaking from their own experiences here, which is fine. Some say they have never experienced the OP's topic as being an issue, personally I have experienced it as an issue and seen walls of texts on forums and in game chat about it since 1999.
Again, there is no right or wrong answer here, there is only finding what minimizes the negative experience for most and what maximizes the positive game play experience the most.
I think people definitely should be able to re-visit content for whatever reason they choose, but I hope it will be limited as I feel awful for the people with little or no time to play due to work, children, social life, or whatever, as they definitely ARE locked out of content by the out of work level 90 that sits there and camps and farms the living @#$% out the mob with an account full of characters all day and night for weeks on end on a second box and mains/raids on a primary box or camps it for their second account "alt" and pretends they do not know the person etc, and is technically "doing nothing wrong". Anyone tried to get an AC ring on p99? No, you are not "locked out" in the literal sense of the term but unless you have from an avg of 4 to 8+ hours to wait around just to get your turn never mind actually see the ring drop, you are probably not going to see your turn to camp the AC ever come up and are in that situation effectively "locked out" so to speak. Not everyone is instantly nice as pie and will give up a camp to level approp. people... I definitely would, but that's just me.
I amost feel like the people that can play 24/7 want the ablilty to camp as they like and have it "work itself out" and the people that can only play a few hours here n there want it to be addressed as an issue, and based on that I am seriously glad that VR is looking into a ways to make re-visiting previous content a more balanced and fair thing for both sides than it has been in the past and not a frustrating experience for one and pure ongoing profit for the other.
Thank you VR, for listening to our concerns and ideas and taking them so much into consideration
I do not think the sky is falling.
So many people here have no faith in the community and believe that we are all douchebags that intend to grief people until they leave the game.
Maybe, just once, wait for a problem to occur in THIS community before begging for an intervention.
You are all comparing events that happened 10-15 years ago or on remade servers that cater to a population of griefers.
I have some hope this community will be better. Take a good hard look at the people on the forums here And compare them to the forums of the games you talk about. Those forums are full of bile and whine. These forums are generally positive. That gives me hope.
If there are a few bad apples, give the community a chance to fix it before asking the Devs to limit everyone's play so that you get your precious item.
Thank you Portal there ARE two sides to this story. I guess we'll have to wait and see what the Devs cook up if anything. The "sense of entitlement" to access any camp you please..works on the other side of the coin too...the high level camping the low level area for a few days. A newbie coming out of the starter gate isn't going to wait around for a few days until "Himself or Herself" decides to move on to more challenging vistas. Need to see both sides here for a more equal view. Again, we might just have a community that acts like a community for the most part. But it is good to bring these discussions up...no matter who thinks who is "entitled" :P
Beef, I feel you man, and I appluad your optimism, but the reality is that there is a TON of fully toxic P99 players from various iterations of various severely toxic and greedy guilds over the years just salivating and waiting to come here and explore the meta content and forum lawyer etc, and whether one calls it competitive, or another calls it toxic, we are all going to have to deal with some really high numbers of devious, untrustworthy, highly intelligent and cunning hateful collectives of individuals in the game. I've watched EQ and mmo's since Mud's and MUSH's and I think the worst I've seen it is P99. Find a p99 vet and sit n talk to them for a few hours, you will be shocked to know a lot of what really happens/happened behind the scenes when things are left to "work themselves out". Most of those peope were not social on the forums and only posted to forum lawyer to save themselves from potential bans. The truly toxic people have probably not yet posted here at all.
In my mind, I too hope that things will be all cake and pie too and that everyone will just be for the most part a really cool community with minimal greifing and just enough "problems and waiting" to make things interesting, but everyone needs to remember what these forums are here for too... they are here for people to express concerns in their own way without judgement or absolute negation from others, and cite examples from experience and from there the dev's will make their decisions and just because chicken little yells the sky is falling, I highly doubt a dev team as experienced as VR will pander to it. Most of the conerns I have seen are very, very valid indeed, even though I see a lot of people saying they are not an issue and won't be. I'm not a math person, but I know human behaviour pretty well and I know that locks are only there to keep the honest people honest. If someone really wants to get into your home, a small rock the size of a potatoe will gain entry into almost any building, but people are mostly honest and will not try to do this or bypass a lock. Take all the locks off everyone's doors and will everyone still be as honest?
These forums are also here to allow the devs to look into being pre-emptive re: problems, and discuss whether or not to in fact address a situation pre-emptively. I am sure they fully remember how nerfing EQ2 into the ground after listening to the whining of EQ1 killed it at launch so I have no fear that they will not ever knee-jerk reaction to anything said on these forums and implement a seriously bad idea.
Keep the faith in Team VR, keep the positive ideas coming, but we should still explore the negative in order to bring out the positive imo.
And for the record, I am not the type of person to go for an extreme nerf in one direction or the other, I am only interested in maximizing everyone's fun.
My 2 cents when it comes to comparisons to EQ TLP and P1999......you really need to consider the fact that EQ has effectively been out for 18 years, 18 years of finding out exactly how anything and everything works. People playing on P1999 and the TLP servers, by in large, know all these ins and outs, if not, google does. Compairing high level player farming in a 18 year old very static in nature game to a new game, much further down the road in the trials and errors of game development is very much like compairing apples to oranges. Even EQ1 dident experience, to the degree talked about here, these types of farming issues for several years.
Portalgun said:I hate to say it but I have to disagree that doing what you want, when you want and expecting camps instantly is the crux and I will explain why below. What you said has validity, but please consider the following as well:
Everyone seems to be speaking from their own experiences here, which is fine. Some say they have never experienced the OP's topic as being an issue, personally I have experienced it as an issue and seen walls of texts on forums and in game chat about it since 1999.
Again, there is no right or wrong answer here, there is only finding what minimizes the negative experience for most and what maximizes the positive game play experience the most.
I think people definitely should be able to re-visit content for whatever reason they choose, but I hope it will be limited as I feel awful for the people with little or no time to play due to work, children, social life, or whatever, as they definitely ARE locked out of content by the out of work level 90 that sits there and camps and farms the living @#$% out the mob with an account full of characters all day and night for weeks on end on a second box and mains/raids on a primary box or camps it for their second account "alt" and pretends they do not know the person etc, and is technically "doing nothing wrong". Anyone tried to get an AC ring on p99? No, you are not "locked out" in the literal sense of the term but unless you have from an avg of 4 to 8+ hours to wait around just to get your turn never mind actually see the ring drop, you are probably not going to see your turn to camp the AC ever come up and are in that situation effectively "locked out" so to speak. Not everyone is instantly nice as pie and will give up a camp to level approp. people... I definitely would, but that's just me.
I amost feel like the people that can play 24/7 want the ablilty to camp as they like and have it "work itself out" and the people that can only play a few hours here n there want it to be addressed as an issue, and based on that I am seriously glad that VR is looking into a ways to make re-visiting previous content a more balanced and fair thing for both sides than it has been in the past and not a frustrating experience for one and pure ongoing profit for the other.
Thank you VR, for listening to our concerns and ideas and taking them so much into consideration
I agree that P1999 and TLPs are horrible reference points. Riply explains it well in the post immediately above this one. While I was on P1999, I saw worse community relations (at least in the end game) by far than I ever remember in early EverQuest. That said, how can your level be too high to camp for JBoots on P1999? And is this a suggestion that there should be a time limit on how long someone should be able to camp an item, rather than camping it until they either give up or get it? I'm definitely not a fan of that plan. JBoots were difficult to obtain, and that was part of their appeal. Not everyone had them. They weren't automatic.
The only suggestion I have is for the devs to handle this topic with kid gloves, and not go too extreme in one direction or the other. Regardless of what anyone posts and suggests on these forums, the devs will have their own outlook and proceed accordingly. You can bet on that.
This is one topic that if I were on the dev team and they were picking who to work on this, my @#$ would have been first to yell "NOT IT!" because I fully realize how touchy this subject is to a lot of people.
It could be that this problem doesn't actually exist in Pantheon:
1. Perhaps AI changes (brave/cowardly type mobs for eg) and their individual 'priorities' may mean that high level campers will find they scare off all the mobs - including the placeholder - by their sheer power and ability to 2-shot any mob. These same AI changes may mean more fleeing/training mobs bringing too many adds for it to be easy to 'camp' the area efficiently.
2. Perhaps item drops will not have a clear 'bestest of bestest' OP item, or small group of them, that acts like a magnet to all and sundry. It may be items, combined with the stat system in place, have 'broader' appeal, with many items having 'comparable' power in certain circumstances, or modes of play.
3. Perhaps the number of environments will mean players need to focus on many 'end points' from a gear perspective, meaning they can camp the 'cold' items if the 'poison' items are all being camped. Or even the 'heat' items ... or 'wind shear' ones ...
4. Perhaps player-driven crafting is central enough that these 'outlier' items are mere variations on what a crafter can do - given the incentive. These crafted items could be a better interim alternative while you wait for the item campers to realise the price of the item they are camping keeps dropping as people seek cheaper, crafted, alternatives.
5. Perhaps the robust reputation centric group nature of the game will ameliorate the bahaviour of all but the most egregious 'gold farmer' players. These few will be known and shunned by their peers, eventually having to decide whether to become de-facto 'gold farmers' or amend their ways in the hopes of getting back in the good graces of the very people they need to group with in order to succeed in the greater challenges ahead. Where this fails, a tell to their Guild alerting them to the damage to the Guild's reputation this form of activity is generating may be sufficient to have the Guilds plice their own player-base.
6. Perhaps Pantheon will have clever data-driven systems to analyse and detect gold seller behaviour. From here their GMs may track activity and determine if these players are merely, and legitimately, padding their own pockets with platinum, or actively seeking to subvert the game by selling plat for actual RL currency! For the latter they may track the buyers and sellers, hitting both with the ultimate Ban-Hammer!
7. Perhaps the sheer scale of the zones, the number of mobs and the variety of activities that can be engaged in will be such that players will almost never encounter this type of 'perma-camped' situations.
There are many things that can be done...
... but given the many differences in play-style that the innovations to be seen in Pantheon will generate, I would certainly caution any move towards imposing code-based solution to what may not surface as a problem. It may, however, be that these very innovations create a new monster problem that will need to be dealt with....
Only time, and good alpha/beta testing, will tell!
Evoras, once camped a Giant's ring for a very very very long time indeed...
Liav said:It seems to me that saturating the loot table with enough upgrades to prevent farming will run in contrast with the idea of "enduring" items.
Making low level mobs "more trouble than it's worth" is a solution, but I personally think that would make for pretty terrible gameplay. How will you retroactively complete lower level quests? Is there really an expectation on the dev to give every single individual mob in the game unique parameters to make old quests able to be completed?
You might as well just instance low level content then, or have a level restriction on the zones.
You tend to jump to the extreme, but I think there's a balance in there (as I suggested). Some items that are very unique, but only applicable in a particular situation like a class or build specific item, are unlikely to be coveted by everyone. Those pieces would not need alternatives.
For the other general use items, like haste or a specific type of weapon, could have similar alternatives in a limited fashion. They could also put the most prized items on mobs that are hard for a single player or group to lock down in one camp. There are solutions to this problem without constantly forcing everyone into an extreme bottleneck, or making radical changes.
I don't see making lower level content harder for higher levels with a bit of AI standing in the way of doing old lower level quests. It just may mean they have to seek out a player or two to help them. I personally like the idea of lower level areas still being somewhat dangerous to higher level players.
Dullahan said:Liav said:It seems to me that saturating the loot table with enough upgrades to prevent farming will run in contrast with the idea of "enduring" items.
Making low level mobs "more trouble than it's worth" is a solution, but I personally think that would make for pretty terrible gameplay. How will you retroactively complete lower level quests? Is there really an expectation on the dev to give every single individual mob in the game unique parameters to make old quests able to be completed?
You might as well just instance low level content then, or have a level restriction on the zones.
You tend to jump to the extreme, but I think there's a balance in there (as I suggested). Some items that are very unique, but only applicable in a particular situation like a class or build specific item, are unlikely to be coveted by everyone. Those pieces would not need alternatives.
For the other general use items, like haste or a specific type of weapon, could have similar alternatives in a limited fashion. They could also put the most prized items on mobs that are hard for a single player or group to lock down in one camp. There are solutions to this problem without constantly forcing everyone into an extreme bottleneck, or making radical changes.
I don't see making lower level content harder for higher levels with a bit of AI standing in the way of doing old lower level quests. It just may mean they have to seek out a player or two to help them. I personally like the idea of lower level areas still being somewhat dangerous to higher level players.
I didn't consider it to be that extreme.
I just find it patently absurd for mechanics to exist that make content harder for someone above its level. It's nonsensical to me. Having a level 50 have more trouble with a level 30 mob than a level 30 is laughable to me.