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I said come in! posted:Also, Josh Strife put out a really great video that talks about what we have been talking about quite a bit in this thread https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4Gaz8oxzJ4
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Jun 23, 2022 20:45
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I said come in! posted:Also, Josh Strife put out a really great video that talks about what we have been talking about quite a bit in this thread https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4Gaz8oxzJ4 Nobody should take seriously anything said by a man who holds a mug for more than 15 minutes without drinking from it. Also he conflates interface adversity, which creates no fun memories, and adventure adversity, which does. Bad UIs are just bad. We have to deal with them often enough in the real world without glorifying them in games. You can have fun, satisfying encounters without having a UI that actively fights to prevent you from playing the game.
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Jun 23, 2022 22:17
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Having to put a group together yourself isn't "interface adversity".
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Jun 23, 2022 22:40
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I've mentioned it before but I have a problem with the way everyone talks about old games & MMOs: 1) They weren't really harder than modern MMOs. There's nothing made before like 2010 in an MMO that can compare to the difficulty of modern wow raids. 2) I don't agree that they were "just tedious" either It's why I don't like this video. I think people are just really loving bad at understanding why things make them feel the way they do, so a lot of discussion about game design gets collapsed into a discussion about difficulty. Oh everquest was too hard, no other games are too easy. The simple fact is that there isn't anything in modern MMOs that really compares to a dungeon party camp in everquest. It's relaxing, it's social, you have moments of stress & excitement, and it's also one of the more rewarding things you can do in the game, both experience and loot-wise. I wouldn't call orienteering in everquest "engaging" or interesting, really, but it is a skill you build over time. Building skills in games feels pretty good, like that's where the feeling of fun in a game comes from according to Raph Koster's A Theory Of Fun. I'm not saying any of this is better than wow really, but it is different from wow, and it doesn't exist in modern MMOs so it's not surprising there are people that miss it. That doesn't mean they appreciate all the adversity they've overcome, that's silly. Printing out a map isn't a satisfying obstacle. Maybe it would be today now that nobody owns printers anymore. Also there's a bit where he talks about how back then old MMOs didn't have to worry about their retention because they were the only game in town and that is ridiculously wrong. Raph Koster says that in the year after everquest released, UO churned through twice as many players as everquest got box sales. Ultima Online's subscriber base grew that year.
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Jun 23, 2022 22:51
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re 1) not sure harder means just raids
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Jun 23, 2022 23:02
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Yeah EQ was a far far harder leveling experience than WoW's (I only played WoW pre-BC). I never raided in any of these games so I can't comment.
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Jun 23, 2022 23:16
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Yeah I don’t really care about top-end difficulty. I don’t want to raid or do Mythic+ or PvP. I just want the base game to have some semblance of challenge - it’s really hard to care about so much of the rest of the game when it doesn’t effectively mean anything to the content I want to play.
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Jun 23, 2022 23:20
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I mean I could say the same thing about 5-man dungeon difficulty too. If someone air-dropped you into the middle of a fight in either game but you knew what your buttons did I'm pretty sure you'd eat poo poo in deadmines and be just fine in crushbone. I've been leveling on p99 and the only time there are any problems are (A) having to run through a much higher level zone to get somewhere or (B) I just forget to con something before fighting. Remembering to press C is, indeed, a skill, but I'm not sure it qualifies as difficulty.
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Jun 23, 2022 23:37
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Anyone who doesn’t think the OG MMOs were harder never did one of the Asherons Call dungeons that required long jumps over instant kill pits.
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Jun 23, 2022 23:40
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I think the fundamental issue with everquest is that the skill ceiling for most activities is just entirely through the floor. There are some exceptions when you start getting into like, Weird poo poo To Do With Bards or whatever, but most deaths are just you being crushed in the unforgiving iron jaws of mathematics because you fought something or attracted the attention of something you shouldn't have. That makes the world very dangerous, which creates a feeling of exploration. I wouldn't say it makes for a game that is difficult in the sense we talk about games- that is, it requires you to be really good at something to succeed. It requires persistence and consistency, which are also skills, but it's completely disjoint from wow, which will generally ask for you to have like, reflexes, a refined muscle memory for your class's abilities, etc. It's not really possible to be good or bad at most activities in everquest, and for the handful of roles, like pulling, that it is possible to be good or bad, being good usually means having an encyclopedic knowledge of the way the game's aggro code works or how pathing works around various corners. It's certainly not possible to be good or bad at leveling outside those exotic cases.
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Jun 23, 2022 23:43
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EQ difficulty comes from having to deal with unexpected contingencies, and piling on those contingencies when you gently caress up (a normal pull -> unexpected adds/patrol -> a naked corpse run). It isn't a deep mechanics challenge, but honestly most of WoW's "press the button when the icon lights up" is tedious busywork anyway. I'd much rather have things the EQ way. Even then, it's absolutely possible to be bad at some classes, Enchanter comes to mind especially.
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Jun 23, 2022 23:47
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Enchanters kind of make my point- when something goes wrong, they are the only class that has any durable recourse, so they are seen as a difficult class. Everyone else just kind of dies. They are the class with A Skill Ceiling so the EQ community talks about them like the big brain class for skillful players, when at the end of the day, the game still has a 6s GCD and a maximum of 8 abilities. If you are willing to sit down for 5 or 10 seconds in the middle of the fight and swap out buff spells so that you can use up to 10 abilities you are like this next level godking. Everquest is a zamboni race.
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Jun 24, 2022 00:01
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Idk if it’s really related to difficulty, but often my favorite part of EQ was scrambling to fix poo poo when things go bad. Yeah maybe you have a chanter but also maybe they get one-shot by their hasted former-pet Drolvarg waking up and now the necro is snare kiting some mobs around a room while the beast lord heals the bandaging warrior 150hp at a time and the druid is trying to med enough to refresh his root or something. A lot of classes had enough gameplay width to do whacky things when poo poo went wrong and you had a huge incentive to try and do them because a wipe is a huge pain. Again, not sure where that relates to difficulty, but whatever it is is what I miss about MMOs now.
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Jun 24, 2022 00:07
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EQs difficulty was always about the time investment required to accomplish anything. Also I suppose the social investment to get groups, form guilds, trade, etc. There was also an air of mystery about things that just can’t exist anymore due to the early age of the internet and how information was shared.
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Jun 24, 2022 00:07
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Tainen posted:Anyone who doesn’t think the OG MMOs were harder never did one of the Asherons Call dungeons that required long jumps over instant kill pits. that's just memorizing where the pits are lol d&d online has a billion traps in many dungeons where you need a player to disarm them or they just instagib most builds on highest difficulty, and people now just know to not bother if they don't have anyone who can
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Jun 24, 2022 00:15
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30.5 Days posted:Enchanters kind of make my point- when something goes wrong, they are the only class that has any durable recourse, so they are seen as a difficult class. Everyone else just kind of dies. They are the class with A Skill Ceiling so the EQ community talks about them like the big brain class for skillful players, when at the end of the day, the game still has a 6s GCD and a maximum of 8 abilities. If you are willing to sit down for 5 or 10 seconds in the middle of the fight and swap out buff spells so that you can use up to 10 abilities you are like this next level godking. Everquest is a zamboni race. Whereas nowadays you have to press buttons as fast as you can because designers are afraid that if your fingers don't have anything to do for more than three seconds you'll realize how shallow their game is and uninstall.
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Jun 24, 2022 00:16
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Yeah. I like FF14 but sometimes I miss the days of being able to just chill out and relax while playing EQ with some friends and not having to worry about my rotation and trying to maximize my parsed DPS or whatever. Then again I'm old now and have kids so there is no chance in hell I'd ever be able to commit to something like that again. At least not until I'm retired. Maybe when the OG MMO generation starts to retire there will be some form of boom in incredibly slow paced timesink MMOs again?
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Jun 24, 2022 00:33
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Old MMOs were about situational difficulty and modern ones are about scripted difficulty, I prefer the former. Auto attacking in Asherons Call in a challenging zone is much more interesting than anything modern WoW does, to me. It’s much more adaptive and engaging than memorizing encounters and practicing some dumb rotation until it’s muscle memory, which is just artificial difficulty imo.
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Jun 24, 2022 00:33
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Groovelord Neato posted:Having to put a group together yourself isn't "interface adversity". It is if you don't see other players as people, but as a necessary component to get your reward. They're just npc companions with variable competency and availability. This is why so many players accepted WoW and FFXIV doing the group making for them.
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Jun 24, 2022 01:08
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And good riddance to them.
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Jun 24, 2022 01:09
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I can't say I ever really enjoyed shouting "LFG" into the LFG channel every couple of minutes before giving up and maybe seeing like, 2 dungeons in WoW before the group finder.
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Jun 24, 2022 09:12
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30.5 Days posted:I mean I could say the same thing about 5-man dungeon difficulty too. If someone air-dropped you into the middle of a fight in either game but you knew what your buttons did I'm pretty sure you'd eat poo poo in deadmines and be just fine in crushbone. I've been leveling on p99 and the only time there are any problems are (A) having to run through a much higher level zone to get somewhere or (B) I just forget to con something before fighting. Remembering to press C is, indeed, a skill, but I'm not sure it qualifies as difficulty. Old MMO difficulty is like a turn-based game difficulty. It's not about twitch skill, it's about knowledge of what to do and actually doing it. Doing what you have to do when you have to do it. Remembering to con everything every time is a skill. Utilizing patience is a skill. Acting deliberately is a skill. They're not the flashy skills but they are mentally rewarding. It's like the skill of Dark Souls that is not being greedy. It takes literally no twitch skills to pull it off and it's not even hard to know you have to do it, but actually holding back on that one last hit that you kinda know will get you got but you really want to land it - that's a skill (and I feel like newer Soulslikes eliminated a lot of this when they got tighter and faster). Old MMOs exercised a lot of those kind of background skills by being janky and weird. When they got refined they eliminated a lot of the mental busywork and discipline players put towards dealing with those jagged edges. And some players miss that stuff.
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Jun 24, 2022 10:36
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Truga posted:that's just memorizing where the pits are lol It wasn’t like that - in AC you can’t just walk off cliffs, you need to jump. So, instead of “surprise” Dark Souls-esque difficulty, it was more a test of skill assuming your jump skill was sufficient (i.e. it became a question of whether you could judge the distance and direction well enough to make a clean jump that didn’t land you in the pit). PrinnySquadron posted:I can't say I ever really enjoyed shouting "LFG" into the LFG channel every couple of minutes before giving up and maybe seeing like, 2 dungeons in WoW before the group finder. I mean sure, but I’ve been playing p99 again for a few days now and I’ve already made stronger social connections with a few players than I ever did in some other games. In my experience, games with group finder do FIND you someone to play with, but completely remove the need to actually interact with the other players in any meaningful way that extends beyond the core gameplay. Although the pacing of EQ helps quite a bit here too.
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Jun 24, 2022 13:56
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drat Dirty Ape posted:EQs difficulty was always about the time investment required to accomplish anything. Also I suppose the social investment to get groups, form guilds, trade, etc. There was also an air of mystery about things that just can’t exist anymore due to the early age of the internet and how information was shared. If people still want the same sort of rush nowadays then playing gatchas and not spending any cash should give a similar dopamine hit.
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Jun 24, 2022 14:13
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Older MMOs weren't harder, we just hadn't invented wikis yet. Its like saying that crossword puzzles were harder back in the day because you didn't start doing the puzzle with the solutions already written out for you by a crossword puzzle streamer and you didn't have some guy named Huntyr screaming at you if you didn't already look up the answers before starting.
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Jun 24, 2022 14:18
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We literally had Classic WoW launch a couple years ago and prove "you just had more time" and "you just thought it was different" weren't true. There's a reason MMOs changed the way they did so it's not surprising a lot of people see nothing of value in the old ways, but there genuinely was something there some players appreciated that has since been lost.
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Jun 24, 2022 14:23
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PrinnySquadron posted:I can't say I ever really enjoyed shouting "LFG" into the LFG channel every couple of minutes before giving up and maybe seeing like, 2 dungeons in WoW before the group finder. I don't agree with a lot of the nostalgia with old MMOs but having and maintaining near-level social connections so you have a list of people who play around the same time who might be interested in helping was often just something you did. At least, I played healers a lot and because of how easy it is to make friends when you have so much to offer it would kinda be expected you'd have that. I can't say I shouted 'LFG' anywhere near as often as trying to fill maybe 1 missing slot with a rando.
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Jun 24, 2022 14:32
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I certainly don’t have as much time as back in college to put into an MMO, but I do have a good amount of it that I could be putting into modern MMOs and mostly don’t because they aren’t the kind of game I want to play for a long time. Like yeah I know I’ll progress more slowly than 20 years ago but that’s fine if I’m playing a game I actually like.
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Jun 24, 2022 14:52
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CYBEReris posted:I don't agree with a lot of the nostalgia with old MMOs but having and maintaining near-level social connections so you have a list of people who play around the same time who might be interested in helping was often just something you did. At least, I played healers a lot and because of how easy it is to make friends when you have so much to offer it would kinda be expected you'd have that. I can't say I shouted 'LFG' anywhere near as often as trying to fill maybe 1 missing slot with a rando. I spent a lot of time pre-wrath playing a Rogue so  I think the only people I ever had on my friends list were people I knew IRL: the few times I did do a dungeon, most people already just pieced out once it was done and they got what they needed.
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Jun 24, 2022 14:58
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PrinnySquadron posted:I spent a lot of time pre-wrath playing a Rogue so A Rogue that makes no alliances and disappears after the job is done, now that's role-playing
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Jun 24, 2022 15:04
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PrinnySquadron posted:I can't say I ever really enjoyed shouting "LFG" into the LFG channel every couple of minutes before giving up and maybe seeing like, 2 dungeons in WoW before the group finder. Everquest is interesting because it's (arguably?) much easier to find a group than it ever was in wow (until group-finder). You find a level-appropriate zone with people in it via /who, you travel there, and you ask if there's room in anybody's group. They are already there, you don't have to armtwist anybody into doing it. You really only have to wait if all the level appropriate camps are packed. This changes later on when you have to convince people to help you with various tasks like epic quests, but ideally by then, the people you've met while leveling have turned into friends you can rely on. The big issue is that for many areas, especially at level cap, frequently the camps ARE packed. And then you DO have to wait in line for a spot. Or at least it was like that at the peak of everquest's popularity. e: it's even worse for specific camps that drop specific must-have items. At one point a very desirable rare drop in everquest was turned into a quest reward just because the camp had 24h+ waiting list or something insane like that. 30.5 Days fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Jun 24, 2022 |
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Jun 24, 2022 16:40
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Yeah I honestly don't spend that much time spamming LFG in P99 EQ. You go to the zone you want to do stuff at, and just see what groups have room when you zone in. If they're all full, you can either wait or try a different zone (and it's pretty cheap/easy to get a port from a druid or wizard if you aren't one). I imagine it's different with instanced dungeons where you have to find a group before you go in, but throw that on the pile of just yet another reason why instanced dungeons suck.
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Jun 24, 2022 18:39
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30.5 Days posted:e: it's even worse for specific camps that drop specific must-have items. At one point a very desirable rare drop in everquest was turned into a quest reward just because the camp had 24h+ waiting list or something insane like that. *suddenly has flashbacks of camping for the flowing black silk sash*
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Jun 24, 2022 18:41
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Sachant posted:Yeah I honestly don't spend that much time spamming LFG in P99 EQ. You go to the zone you want to do stuff at, and just see what groups have room when you zone in. If they're all full, you can either wait or try a different zone (and it's pretty cheap/easy to get a port from a druid or wizard if you aren't one). I imagine it's different with instanced dungeons where you have to find a group before you go in, but throw that on the pile of just yet another reason why instanced dungeons suck. poo poo on my paladin I was getting tells and having people work to get me wherever.
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Jun 24, 2022 19:37
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This is also a benefit of having group content be The Content for most players. Everyone is incentivized to get a group running and keep it running smoothly, there's not really a backup plan.
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Jun 24, 2022 20:05
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CuddleCryptid posted:Older MMOs weren't harder, we just hadn't invented wikis yet. Its like saying that crossword puzzles were harder back in the day because you didn't start doing the puzzle with the solutions already written out for you by a crossword puzzle streamer and you didn't have some guy named Huntyr screaming at you if you didn't already look up the answers before starting. The information was available mainly because Verant tried to hide it, of course.
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Jun 24, 2022 20:58
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Also the existence of wikis isn't a good reason to not try to add secrets or puzzles or hidden content to the game that players can choose to figure out on their own if they want to. There are still EQ mechanics that are, at best, a guess at how they work numerically, because everything is decided on the server and the formula isn't public.
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Jun 24, 2022 21:09
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PrinnySquadron posted:I can't say I ever really enjoyed shouting "LFG" into the LFG channel every couple of minutes before giving up and maybe seeing like, 2 dungeons in WoW before the group finder.
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Jun 24, 2022 21:42
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I miss the super weird group compositions you'd get in early EQ by just grabbing whoever is LFG and killing whatever you can with whoever you've got kiting groups owned too, just fill the group with whatever as long as you've got someone who can snare and someone with high ranged threat abilities then just snare + kite everything in range while the rest of the group murders it
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Jun 24, 2022 22:30
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blatman posted:kiting groups owned too, just fill the group with whatever as long as you've got someone who can snare and someone with high ranged threat abilities then just snare + kite everything in range while the rest of the group murders it Abusing the fact that mobs will max-threat beeline anyone lower than 20% HP or whatever, just keep yourself at 15-20% HP and put SoW on and pull an entire zone running in circles while everyone else AoEs it all down.
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Jun 24, 2022 23:18
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