Zircon said:
...That's exactly my point. You said EQ was borderline softcore. By any reasonable modern standard, it wasnt. A very common stance taken against those that wish to return to EQ-type standards are rebutted with arguments that hardly anyone in today's market would be willing to play such a punishing game. Unless you were suggesting that EQ was softcore (which I argue is false) and that's the type of softcore game you desire, then you are promoting something even more punishing than EQ was and approaching survival game levels.
If you take a PVE death in Black Desert Online today it hurts way more than EQ did then at higher levels. Yes you lose nothing in the dozen free to play MMO's and phone games that come out every day, they shouldn't be a basis for discussion. I saw something on my facebook with a dragon named Mr. Pickles with "1 million active players!". Actual Classic EQ was really solid because you had an era when you had no max level clerics. This goes back to my point about max level cleric res being OP. When you have a cleric bot running around with a group giving them 96% res you remove the death penalty for them and consequently you remove their fun, there is no reward without risk. There are lessons to be learned from the past. Max level res should not give a level 20 who dies 96% return, it makes no sense. It basically means you can only play the real game right at server launch or don't bother at all.
For example, the sleeper raid would not happen in a game like Black Desert Online. Taking death after death like this for 4 hours straight.
http://kotaku.com/the-surprising-and-allegedly-impossible-death-of-everqu-1785741600
Granted res went from 90% classic (an already insanely high number) to 96%.
For you to delevel from maxed out in EQ took quite an effort, basically a deliberate effort, and it's not even going to be possible in Pantheon.
For sure though, when EQ released and everyone was level 30 and you took a death and got a 35% res or whatever the numbers were, it hurt. Those were the good old days that I personally want back. I mean I played an epic weapon cleric, res'd fully wiped raids plenty of times, no one lost anything except the time it took to rebuff.
Further I'm not defining hardcore by amount of time spent. Wiping on a raid, getting a bunch of 96% res, waiting a half hour for everyones mana to come back and buffs to be recast is not "hardcore" to me. I'd rather the rebuffing not take so long but the repeated wipes to actually hurt more. By more I mean to actually hurt 'at all'. I'd have a different philosophy than the EQ designers where their design was you can attempt a raid boss as many times as you want as long as you're willing to sit in timeout for a while each time you fail.
Zircon said:This goes back to my point about max level cleric res being OP. When you have a cleric bot running around with a group giving them 96% res you remove the death penalty for them and consequently you remove their fun, there is no reward without risk. There are lessons to be learned from the past. Max level res should not give a level 20 who dies 96% return, it makes no sense. It basically means you can only play the real game right at server launch or don't bother at all.
And that's the issue I think Dorotea was getting at. This is true for you but I would argue isn't true for the majority that you seem to have built up in your mind. If that were the case those successful modern MMOs with zero death penalties wouldn't be so wildly popular and no one would be having fun since they have no risk. Almost no games would be fun for that matter, as even in RPGs, FPS, etc when you die your punishment is going back to the last save and having to work back to where you last were. For many people the reward and fun is the journey. EQ wasn't fun or unfun because of the death penalty for me and my friends, the fun was the social experience of a group focused game with tons of class diversity and interdependence. It was entirely unfun when you couldn't find a cleric for the couple hours your res timer was active and you lost 2+ hours because some other group trained yours but you sucked it up and carried on because the rest of the game was so enjoyable. It WAS fun getting an invis and dragging your corpse to where a cleric in the zone was grouped and having him help you out for a donation of plat (or free if he was in a good mood).
The bolded text is a rather toxic outlook.
>If the game was instanced or solo-driven I would have no interest. Mounts or no mounts, don't really care. From my point of view they are welcome to take liberties on most parts of the game. What I don't want, and I don't expect that I'm alone, is a toned-down EQ<
I don't want things toned down any more than you do.
Very likely I want a lot more solo content than you do. But not solo-driven just able to be solod albeit more slowly and with crappier gear for someone soloing to maximum level. To me there is an enormous difference between group-driven and forced-grouping. I agree with the former - wouldn't be here otherwise. I emphatically object to the latter.
Very likely I want more instances than you do - I strongly dislike it when other players on a pve server can bar content to others by camping it for long periods of time. Instancing certain bosses is a way around this. But you and I probably would view an instance-driven Pantheon with equal levels of horror.
But my comment, that you replied to, was focused on the thought that ONE element of the game was so critical that even if every other decision was in favor of making things more difficult and challenging the game wouldn't be worth playing. I disagreed and disagree. Give me no death penalty and 15 other things making things difficult and I can be happy even though for decades I've been bewailing the reduction or elimination of death penalties in MMOs.
If we are strongly encouraged to group, most content requires groups (even I agree with this), leveling is slow and lacks shortcuts such as EQ2's mercenaries and agnostic dungeons or Rift's Instant Adventures, traveling is far more laborious than is common today without numerous instant travel options, crafting and harvesting are ...robust etc this is not a toned-down EQ even though you and I might differ with the developers on more than one of their design decisions.
By the way we are on the same side on the issue this thread focuses on. I don't see how servers with different rulesets divide the community any more than the same number of servers with the same ruleset. Given that the intent is to make transfers between servers something less than common. I do feel that hardcore versus softcore is the most compelling basis for differentiation (with the exception of pve versus pvp if there is enough real interest in pvp). Progression servers - too soon. Free-trade servers - never have seen a great point to that. Roleplaying servers - and I speak as someone that has roleplayed for decades - nice but not essential. I can roleplay quite well on any server the main benefit is when naming rules are enforced. Time zone based servers - not needed, it isn't hard to encourage people in for example the European or oceanic time zones to pick a particular server.I have pointed out in other threads that a server can have a ruleset making leveling significantly harder or slower with trivial changes in the code.
@General
I'm happy with VR's answer on this thread that they're open to multiple rulesets. I'm not anti-VR. I do think the gap between people who want softcore/hardcore feel to the game is significant, and discussing multiple ruleset servers (the point of this thread) isn't a complete waste of time even though it's mostly theoretical.
@Iksar
They are on record not catering this game towards modern MMO philosophies. It's clear that people like games that force progress and let everyone win, thats how games are developed nowadays oneADseven posted a link addressing the subject of death penalties> http://www.wolfsheadonline.com/the-death-penalty-mechanic-and-loss-aversion-in-mmo-design/ I assume you wouldn't agree with this. Pantheon is supposed to break from that mold. You said you wanted an EQ with a lessened penalty basically. A "toned down" EQ. That's really fine, it doesn't bother me at all that's what you want. If there are people on a softcore server finishing content first or whatever, to me that's just fine, my guess though is that group is in the minority but I don't have any data to back that up. Like @Kilsin said, that feedback will come in beta.
@dorotea
It sounds like we agree and you would be joining me on a hardcore server. In respects to your camping though instances are a bad solution to the problem. The problem is more about static spawns and overpowered items. It was addressed on the latest stream. They acknowledged the issue of having a "must have" item that only comes from one place and their desire to avoid it. I personally liked being able to sit in a certain area and grind for a bit though because you could play the game more passively. Intent focus and constant movement was more draining. VR said there would be a combination of both. EQ probably released with too small of a world though. There were less than a handful of places you could make meaningful progress in classic, I remember being in the groups you describe, with a multipage waiting list on the side of my desk. The problem was the group was not only getting the best experience available but also farming a high value item. Agree this is poor game economics. This is where WOW took the easy road and just instanced everything.
A toned down EQ you could pretty much already get a taste for, because that was max level EQ. It was challenge without risk of setback and I have a very sour taste for it. I remember sitting around town naked, waiting for a res from a random someone which would take an easy 10 minutes or more after a raid wipe. Then sitting around with res effects waiting to get full mana, getting full mana, buffing everyone, no mana, more waiting... Then finally we would get another go at it, fail, rinse repeat. Six hours later the boss died/didn't die, no one realistically lost anything. Killing the thing wasn't worth the 6 hours of hassle for the moment of satisfaction killing it. I didn't play EQ for the gear, I played it for the challenge, and the max res and complete heal rotations (or whatever class I was playing at the time) bored the hell out of me. Now I know I'm not alone on this, this is why people beg Sony to start new progression servers, why there is so much interest in private EQ servers and classic reboots.
Saying people can't delevel is taking the "instance" way out like Blizzard did. If a guild is raiding successfully most times, and once in a while having a failed raid where there's 3 or 4 wipes and they're losing levels, to me it means they're not getting enough xp from the successful raids. I'd rather see VR fixing the other side of the equation not just like I said before:
bool canLoseLevel = false;
This also means one successful raid doesn't just max everyone out, it's tuning. If a guild is raiding constantly and dying repeatedly then yes, they should be losing their max level (or more). They need some combination of gearing up, getting more people, L2p'ing, etc.
@Zircon - Perhaps you're not considering another break in the mold that VR appears to be striving for. Which is the notion that the journey is more important than the destination. It's cliche, and it's a really high hope IMO. But if accomplished the impact of a death penalty system at end-game could a sliver of impact. In fact it will be for the vast majority of players, many of whom are quite used to hitting cap level, maybe doing a little bit of dungeon/raid work, and then restarting with an alt.
In fact, if you add in the proposed Progeny system maybe the whole notion of end-game stagnation is entirely a non-factor, and whatever the scaled death penalty looks like if you're cap level is something that is really only something considered by the most die-hard type A personalities, who will be a vast minority of the game's population. Perhaps you're one of them. But an alternate server ruleset to "justify" that seems grossly unbalanced to me in terms of investement for VR.
The last thing the game needs are diversions like this,going for manageable and sustainability might be better.
Remember;A jack of all trades,master of none-Keep focus on the values
I'm all for options,and in a good multiplayers all types of players have a meaningful role.
And I believe these roles should be interconnected,not devided
Maybe we should be rewarded differently for what we do,not get the same reward regardless of what we do
And part of me does question the *play-your-way* thinking a bit.
If it is allowed for everyone to have the same fulfillment ,no matter how they play and what they do
Why would players even try excelling when everyone gets to the same point anyway?
It doesn't encourage anyone to excel at a specific part of the game,what would provide meaningful incentive to keep on playing?
Maybe the -play your way- idea, is merely a tool to win over bigger crowds?
Pvp,raids,dungeons,Pve is all of equal importance ,in a great game they are interconnected.
If a gaurd is on duty and has different rules for everyone ,he'll find trouble soon and won't be able to focus on what he is paid for;to keep an eye
-For you we'll apply these rules,and for you the other rules because that is how you want it- is not going to work and distracts them from their goals too,just like how the gaurd would be distracted when a mob stands in front of him asking -why is he/she allowed to do that and not I?-
Ironically this seems a little asocial ,like some children in school not wanting to work on a project with the nerdy one,begging their teacher to be put in another group.
Zircon said:If you take a PVE death in Black Desert Online today it hurts way more than EQ did then at higher levels. Yes you lose nothing in the dozen free to play MMO's and phone games that come out every day, they shouldn't be a basis for discussion. I saw something on my facebook with a dragon named Mr. Pickles with "1 million active players!". Actual Classic EQ was really solid because you had an era when you had no max level clerics. This goes back to my point about max level cleric res being OP. When you have a cleric bot running around with a group giving them 96% res you remove the death penalty for them and consequently you remove their fun, there is no reward without risk. There are lessons to be learned from the past. Max level res should not give a level 20 who dies 96% return, it makes no sense. It basically means you can only play the real game right at server launch or don't bother at all.
This is exactly why there shouldn't be a 96% rez. Resurrection should not be a free and easy way to bring people back. It should definitely be more convenient than running back to your corpse and grinding back all of the exp, but death must still have a price. Both the cost to the caster in mana and time taken to regenerate it, as well as the need to gain back experience and probably wait out a resurrection effects.
Imo, a normal resurrection at max level should give you back around 50% at most. Anything higher should require expensive reagents.
NEXTLEVL said:I believe the devs have stated that they don't want to split the community up like that, nor do the majority of the playerbase wish to see dev resources used for fine-tuning mechanics/values on a secondary casual ruleset server.
That is important you brought that up, it has been hurting many games breaking up communities to different servers. The new fad, lets allow modding and allow 10000 servers to be listed with only 100 actually full at the start. It trickles off and then you see 0/64 all the time.
In a larger scale mmo like EQ, WOW all of them, it was important that they kept the totals down to manage player base and grouping, guilds, social interactions.
Adding in 20 servers at the start is not a good idea, unless we can fill that many at the start. Opening new servers on the fly, when needed is a much better system, getting new players to join that.
Merging servers is a bad thing, it makes it look like we are losing too many people, and also joins communities together that may not wish to compete with one another.
So yes doing it right from the start matters, and spliting communities up from the get go is the worst idea and short lives the game. This has been proven already in many games much smaller.
I'd say once beta begins, they can review metrics, as well as polls to get an idea which rulesets have the most support. They could start conservative with just 1 roleplay server, 1 hardcore server PvE, 1 harcore PvP server, and then the rest just normal mode. If the pvp server is bursting at the seams (it will be), they could add an additional. With the way they're doing sharding, consolidating servers really won't be as big of a deal or an undertaking as it was in the past. They will take it slow, but if Pantheon is anything like most mmos, it will only accommodate a few thousand people simultaneously, which will be a tiny fraction of the people who will be playing the game. In other words, not a huge risk.
>It sounds like we agree and you would be joining me on a hardcore server. <
Quite possibly. That rather depends on how hard the basic ruleset servers are and what the breakdown is between soloable content and purely group content.
While I remain unconvinced that the "breaking up the community" argument is at all relevant to what rulesets they make available, it is clear that this argument is one of two compelling reasons not to have too many servers at launch. The other, of course, is a marketing/optics/spin reason. Merging servers too early in the game's life cycle DOES send the message that the game is a flop and the truth or falsity of this belief is entirely irrelevent. It will be a self-fulfilling phrophesy. FDR said "We have nothing to fear but fear itself". Whether or not this is true, we most definitely have fear to fear - it can kill us.
The inevitable corollary is that the starting areas will be quite overcrowded at launch. Not only will the population be swelled by people trying the game out but likely to leave fairly soon, but all of us will be at the same level at start, by definition. An early start can reduce the crowding by letting more comitted supporters level to other zones, but this benefit is probably outwieghed by the risk of not having the starter areas populated enough with long-term supporters with an incentive to help and encourage other new players.
I hope that starter areas will be designed to make overcrowding less of an issue than it could be. If you have a traditional mechanism that the first player to tag a mob owns it and no one else gets quest credit for that mob you will need to stand in line and take numbers to complete any "kill 6 giant bunnies" type quests and that would be hare razing.
Mechanics to make the start more civilized, more cooperative, and less cutthroat competitive can be hoped for. Quests to do things that other players cannot interfere with, for example. Pick 6 flowers where the flowers don't disappear for more than a brief period when one player picks them. Instead of kill 6 giant bunnies - do damage to 6 giant bunnies. This gives the same impact as allowing anyone that hurts a mob to get credit for it without adopting that mechanic for the game as a whole.
It isn't just that I much prefer players not to have to compete too much with eachother but a highly competitive start in a temporarily overcrowded area won't be pleasant for most people trying the game out. But all of this is way off topic. On topic - we should have a small enough number of servers that they start off overcrowded and add more if they are TOO overcrowded or stay overcrowded.
I see this turned into a ressurection thread haha. I agree that there should be no 96% xp rez, and I think it should be XP loss and a repair bill on gear upon death. Maybe have some class abilities that make corpse retrieval easy and some professions that make repairs cheaper. To get back to what the OP mentions I don't like the idea of "hardcore" and "casual" servers. Pretty sure this isn't going to be a casual MMORPG there is no reason to make special servers for that purpose. Besides, what would the casual server entail? No death penalty, no durability loss, lower mob hp, higher player dmg, etc. I am willing to bet a lot of players would flock to the easy mode server (human nature is to take the easy route). That is not what this game is supposed to be about. Or worse still having a hardcore pvp server with permadeath...would have about 10 players on it, waste of resources.
Special ruleset servers should be reserved for the usual RP and PvP. Keep it simple.