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Judgement posted:I don't know if there's anybody at this point who would still be hiding out in this dead forum that isn't already aware, but City of Heroes is actually back from the dead, sort of. Without going into the entire stupid story about how it happened, all of the game's code was recovered and there have been a couple of (barely) private servers running for the last few years. I've had an absolute blast on Homecoming, and that's without coming in with any nostalgia for the game. I never really played it when it was live, so I was pretty much a newbie with Homecoming, and it was so drat fun grouping with people and doing fun missions and making crazy characters. I even got into doing a bunch of the high-end Incarnate stuff with some goons and it ruled. I should play more. It's been a while but every time I come back it's a great time. It definitely has a lot of weird jank and all of that, but in many ways it seems like it was ahead of its time, and as an overall experience it's still just great.
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Oct 20, 2021 19:34
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LegionAreI posted:I don't think SE ever confirmed if this stuff was wishful thinking or if it really did anything but it was the god's honest truth to anyone who was serious about crafting. Hell, my Monk friend was a cook and even for HQing consumables they used the same chart! It actually took until 2016 to be officially de-confirmed by SE.
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Oct 20, 2021 19:46
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OH MY GOD IT WAS BULLSHIT AFTER ALL That is absolutely hilarious. Thank you for that!
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Oct 20, 2021 21:57
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Judgement posted:The big one still is Homecoming, which has even expanded on the game past the point it was at when it got shut down. New powersets mostly based off existing ones, a new archetype that's a sort of blaster-tank, some new story arcs. And it sort of ties in to the existing discussion because one of the big changes it made was that they realized literally every player just took Stamina and Hasten anyway, so Stamina and the rest of the Fitness powers are built right into every character now. Power pools are available as early as level 4 now. Hasten for everybody! And Incarnate Abilities, the game's "end game" system that was tacked on in the last few years of it's life, are incredibly easy to acquire even without doing any raids. Balance? What balance!? Defeat those Snakes! The Fitness pool being inherent was added to the original game, due to the aforementioned "Stamina is mandatory and paying the three-power tax for it sucked" issue. But changing exactly when you can take pools was a good one. I think one of the veteran rewards for City of Heroes lowered fast travel powers from level 14 to level 6? Or maybe 4? The point is, "it's way lower so you can take them sooner, and delay the prerequisite power or even skip it entirely if you want." It kinda hosed with the balance a bunch, but ha ha holy poo poo that horse has long since left the barn so gently caress it. They eventually made the "you can get your fast travel thing super early" applicable to everybody. Of course, they also had various powers that let you move quickly, like the rocket board that let you fly (but suppressed all your powers and wouldn't let you cast new ones), and Ninja Run which was weaker Super Speed combined with a weaker Super Jump, so while having a real fast travel power was nice, it was no longer mandatory. quote:In terms of other features it brought to the table that sadly never really took off into the wider MMO world, how about that Mission Architect? Create your very own stupid comic book stories! Pick from a series of locations, choose the enemy groups or create your own, spend hours writing dialogue and painstakingly setting mission parameters and complex encounters, then watch in horror as the mission you made just bugs out and ignores it all anyway! Should have just made a one-room XP farming map like everybody else, you loving IDIOT! I think the tools given to us for the mission editor were basically simplified and stripped down versions of what they used? It was a cool feature, and as I recall, the devs were expecting it to get used for XP farms, just not to the extent that it was. And it's not like "let's farm these enemies that are no real threat to me" wasn't prevalent before, this just made it super easy by giving you small, linear maps to do it in. For those who haven't seen it, you know that thing earlier about "defense against smash/lethal is super good because most poo poo has at least a little of it"? Well, what you could do is make a character with fiery armor as a defensive power, which could trivially hit the damage resistance cap of 90% against fire. You could also make enemies with powers of your choosing. So you'd have enemies that did mostly fire damage, except that those fire attacks had a tiny token amount of smashing or lethal damage, so as a result even if they did manage to get that 5% chance to hit you (and some would, ideally you'd be facing a lot of these guys), it did barely any damage. And if the damage did start adding up to the point that your built in self heal wasn't getting the job done, they were dropping Inspirations constantly (basically potions; they'd restore health or endurance or boost defense or accuracy or damage or what have you), so you could just pound those and you were functionally immortal. quote:God I still love City of Heroes Me too, fellow goon. Me too. 
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Oct 21, 2021 00:32
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A bunch of us have picked up City of Heroes and there was a great user-created mission called something like Trademark Infringement where all the enemies were ripoffs of popular characters (a Bart Simpson knockoff called Simpleton, a Statesman knockoff called The Guy On The Box, a Twilight Robert Pattinson called Sparkle-pire, etc, etc). Was so fun coming across new enemies.
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Oct 21, 2021 14:01
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STO and Neverwinter both had the mission creation thing. I never played STO but the neverwinter forge basically was worthless unless you were trying to make a XP farm anyways, and then I think they decided that they were tired of people ignoring the official content because they were all playing the same 3 hyper-optimized XP farms and shut it down. It's not really clear to me how you can incentivize the creation or consumption of actually-good content and MMOs have been trying to do it since second life.
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Oct 21, 2021 21:14
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LegionAreI posted:I don't think SE ever confirmed if this stuff was wishful thinking or if it really did anything but it was the god's honest truth to anyone who was serious about crafting. Hell, my Monk friend was a cook and even for HQing consumables they used the same chart! They did and it's all complete bullshit. https://old.reddit.com/r/ffxi/comments/4ulgh1/official_ffxi_developer_ama_with_producer_akihiko/d5qp5k5/ e: oh there was a new page lmao
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Oct 22, 2021 01:03
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Judgement posted:Should have just made a one-room XP farming map like everybody else, you loving IDIOT! This is another good story to put on the pile. For people that didn't play CoH: when they released the Mission Architect, there was some understandable concern over people using the missions to mass farm EXP. You could already sort of do this in the wild by just jumping around to various missions via the randomly-generated mission NPCs (the radio/newspaper contacts), or by clearing specific missions without actually completing them and then resetting the instances so you could clear them again. Obviously, they still wanted the old world stuff to predominate instead of everyone hanging around EXP farming in Architect missions all day, so they tried to be careful in putting in safeguards to make EXP gains significantly less if you used custom enemies with limited powersets or had shorter maps with fewer objectives. Naturally, they hosed up and forgot something, though, and it was a big something. One of the factions, the alien Rikti, had an enemy type called a Communications Officer. The Communications Officer was piss weak in direct combat, having only single mediocre gun attack and the ability to summon other Rikti through a portal, but, for some ancient design reason (possibly them being rare and important targets during normal Rikti missions), gave substantially more EXP than an equivalent enemy. You had entire maps that were filled to the brim with enemy groups composed of nothing but Communications Officers, all of whom keeled over like a reed against the average player, and who could summon additional Rikti that would give even more EXP. It's hard to overstate how completely and totally this hosed up the game's EXP curve. Before Comm Officer farms (which were eventually nicknamed "meow farms"), getting to level 50 was a reasonably time-consuming achievement, especially if you didn't have a dedicated group. You'd have to get together with a bunch of other people shouting in a LFG channel, you'd have to get some decent missions, you'd all have to travel to wherever the mission was, and then you'd have to clear the thing. Most missions weren't awful, but there were some truly ghastly nightmare factions and maps in the game that could slow your progress to a crawl. Comm Officer farms could be started instantly, could be cleared in a couple minutes by even the most ramshackle group of random archetypes, and were completely consistent in the map and enemy type. I had a character I decided to try getting to 50 off of Comm Officer farms, and it took maybe a couple of days of infrequent playing to boost myself all the way up. It was the nightmare scenario for every MMO designer. It didn't take long for them to patch out Comm Officer's bonus EXP, and they even made a threat in the patch notes that they'd be winding back the level gains of particularly egregious powerfarmers, though I dunno how severe or widespread this was. The characters I got to 40-50 off of Comm Officer farming remained untouched, although I didn't rush more than a couple through that way. Culling Comm Officers didn't completely kill EXP farms, although they did become harder to do (mostly involving farming easy-to-tank Archvillains like Lord Recluse, or having the aforementioned building full of fire dudes vs. the Fiery Aura tank). It's one of those features that did result in some genuinely wonderfully creative contributions, and I had a lot of fun messing around with it, but the fact that no other MMO's really ever tried anything similar outside of Cryptic's other games is likely because the Mission Architect was such a stark cautionary tale. 30.5 Days posted:STO and Neverwinter both had the mission creation thing. I never played STO but the neverwinter forge basically was worthless unless you were trying to make a XP farm anyways, and then I think they decided that they were tired of people ignoring the official content because they were all playing the same 3 hyper-optimized XP farms and shut it down. It's not really clear to me how you can incentivize the creation or consumption of actually-good content and MMOs have been trying to do it since second life. I don't remember much about my time with Neverwinter (aside from vaguely liking it and also the hilarious negative Astral Diamond auction house glitch), but I do very distinctly remember clearing about five levels off my plate in the aptly named "HULKAMANIA" map that was filled with nothing but Hulking Ogres to mow down. God bless that designer.
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Oct 22, 2021 01:20
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for me, All Points Bulletin (APB) was a really memorable experience. the cops vs robbers gameplay itself was super jank and somewhat unfun, but other than City of Heroes I had never played an MMO in an urban setting before. one of the best thing to do as the cop faction was to use non-lethal weapons which would not kill enemies but stun the poo poo out of them them. as we all know, stun locking is the most egregiously annoying misfeature to ever grace MMOs, so naturally they let players do it  the other insane thing they did in APB was that they allowed full customization of vehicles, player clothing, etc. I made a killing in beta off of creating random superhero logos, putting them on tshirts and selling them in the in-game market. keep in mind this was 2010 so wearing superhero tshirts was peak Geek is Chic. One PvP aspect of the game was that you could get missions as a cop to go stop criminals from doing their thing. my friends and i themed ourselves as Black Dynamite-esque crime fighters cleaning up the drugs in the community. On one of these missions, the Honkey Patrol encountered its arch nemesis. A white nationalist van covered in, well.. covered in confederate flags and a bunch of poo poo I'd rather not repeat in polite company. After an epic car chase and showdown in a parking garage, we stunlocked them mercilessly and threw their dumb asses in jail  it's no wonder the game died. i think they tried to lock some of that poo poo down via moderation but the cat was already out of the bag. i guess it lives on in some Korean MMO relaunch zombie state, kind of like Hellgate: London.
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Oct 23, 2021 17:25
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cmdrk posted:for me, All Points Bulletin (APB) was a really memorable experience. the cops vs robbers gameplay itself was super jank and somewhat unfun, but other than City of Heroes I had never played an MMO in an urban setting before. one of the best thing to do as the cop faction was to use non-lethal weapons which would not kill enemies but stun the poo poo out of them them. as we all know, stun locking is the most egregiously annoying misfeature to ever grace MMOs, so naturally they let players do it Wow I forgot all about APB. It was tons of fun but I remember stun guns being broken as poo poo and I vaguely recall... something annoying about something that seems like it should've been a "safe zone" but it wasn't and just getting stun gunned forever. I also remember it putting me as a green newbie against dudes with souped up rocket launchers which was also annoying... But man that was a fun game.
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Oct 23, 2021 21:32
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APB was a real fun and unique game, and there was still a small goon enforcer group when it was relaunched as APB: Reloaded. It got taken over by hackers pretty quickly though 
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Oct 24, 2021 01:06
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Anyone remember Crimecraft, that sounded like it was supposed to be a APB/GTA-esque game but wound up being a really lovely team-based third-person shooter with like a persistent lobby world? lol
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Oct 24, 2021 02:07
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MMO-adjacent perhaps, but I think this thread would be a great place to spin some yarn about MUDs. has anyone got interesting MUD/MUSH/MOO experiences?
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Oct 24, 2021 04:27
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cmdrk posted:MMO-adjacent perhaps, but I think this thread would be a great place to spin some yarn about MUDs. has anyone got interesting MUD/MUSH/MOO experiences? brace yourself for a short and mediocre post about my MUD experiences: I decided to try one once, picked at random out of a list of top 100 MUDs or something. I spawned into the town square, someone immediately RPed a very awkward greeting where they ruffled my hair and I immediately logged out
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Oct 24, 2021 04:54
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The closest thing I ever played was Legends of Kesmai and I was way too young to understand anything that was going on other than I was a martial artist. It had some interesting ideas, and I could be totally butchering this because it was 20+ years ago, like when you died you got sent to the underworld where your quest was to reclaim your organs in an Egyptian mythology themed area.
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Oct 24, 2021 05:49
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APB collapsed because they spent way more money than it should've taken to make the game they made - which was a pretty fun time I ran with a group of goons. Stun guns were harder to hit with than normal guns so I always found the people melting down about them incredibly funny (the game had local open mic so when you were arresting a perp you could hear em).
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Oct 24, 2021 14:13
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I had a couple friends who were really into a certain cyberpunk MUD. I tried it once, couldn't figure how to get into one of the sleeping capsules you're supposed to use when you log out so I just disconnected and never logged in again,
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Oct 24, 2021 18:21
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Because I was thinking about it earlier, I am actually going to go massively off-topic for the thread and talk about something City of Heroes did that I thought was really cool. Don't worry, I'll throw in some complaining about something else at the end. So the major Hero Guy, who was the dude front and center on the box, was Statesman. Think "Superman crossed with Captain America" and you've got the idea well enough for the purposes of this story. One of the major things the game did is "there's a mighty fuckload of alternate universes out there, with changes from major to minor." One of these universes was "what if the Nazis won World War II," as you do in these things, and it was exactly as terrible a place as it sounds. They had their own Statesman, as many universes do, and his name was Reichsman and I don't think that needs further elaboration. His defeat and capture was seen as pretty important for reasons that I also don't think need elaboration. So anyway at some point they add what they called Task Forces for heroes and Strike Forces for villains, which are "a bunch of connected missions that take a group and usually have a big boss to fight at the end," and the plot for both the hero and villain versions are very similar. It starts with trying to steal an Important Plot Thing (heroes try to stop it, villains actually do it). Then once you got the information from the Plot Thing, you go to the bombed out shithole part of Paragon, where heroes find "oh poo poo they let out Reichsman" and villains find "oh poo poo they tricked us into letting out Reichsman." Who, for some reason, is SUPERCHARGED and absolutely wrecks everybody's poo poo. This is where things start to diverge, but the broader point of "find out how and why he's supercharged" is the same, and once you figure it out, here's the bit that I think is really cool. Reichsman is superpowered because he has a rad machine that's siphoning powers from alternate versions of him, so he doesn't just have his own power, he has the power of a whole shitload of Statesmen. The hero solution to the problem is "infiltrate his home dimension for a power source you can use for a Science Gun that will cut him off from his powers, this will bring him down to your level and then you can beat him. But the villain solution is to go to Lord Recluse (the Box Villain, basically) and say "hey I need the help of your four second-in-commands to pull this poo poo off," and then when you get there, you beat them down and shove them in the Power Siphon Machine to swipe their powers, get on Reichsman's level, and kick his rear end that way. Same problem, very different solutions. And to get things back on track, complaints, although they're shorter. City of Heroes added some tutorial missions to explain things to new players. The Hero version had you join a fledgling super group, and the characters were fun and decently written. The villain version had you joining some sort of contest that was run by and populated with a bunch of shallowly written unpleasant assholes and it loving sucked, and there was no way to say "you're an rear end in a top hat who is obviously going to double cross me and also I hate you, eat a bag of dicks."
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Oct 24, 2021 22:15
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That's a cool post. For whatever it's worth, cool stuff is always on topic. I don't think the original intent has ever been to complain about stuff. Just share stories from nearly dead MMOs.
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Oct 25, 2021 00:06
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I played a ton of Ultima Online in college. UO broke a lot of new ground but they massively miscalculated the griefing tendencies of the player base. Ultima Online used to do Halloween-themed servers where you'd log in as a random monster or a farm animal or something. It didn't take long for people to cycle through until they logged in as a higher level monster and then camp the spawn in point to the server. You'd log in to try this new server and immediately die and the lag was insane because everyone was on dial up. There were NPCs that would stand around the cities and ask to be taken to another city. The intent was that players would escort them and make a little cash. Players soon figured out that they didn't take a reputation hit if they cast a firewall and then led their escorts through it. The NPCs would die to the flames and then the player could loot their clothes/weapons that could be sold for more than they would have paid as a reward. Every spell required reagents to cast and while they spawned in very limited quantities out in the wild, the only way to get them in reasonable quantities was to buy them from NPC vendors. The problem was that the vendors had finite quantities and with the way fast travel worked, a player could easily hit every magic shop on the server in a short time and buy out all the vendors. I remember spending hours trying to get spell reagents because none of the vendors had any stock. In a similar vein, the servers could only keep track of 'x' number of spawns. When players tamed an animal and put it into a stable, that spawn was locked up until the player released their pet. People would stable dozens of animals and after a few months, spawns became more and more rare. I can remember walking around for hours on a Saturday looking for animals to kill for leather and not finding any. Half the fun was reading and posting to the Ultima Online newsgroup which had notable posters as Raph Koster and Jeff "Dundee" Freeman who went on to work on Star Wars Galaxies. Dundee, who didn't work for them at the time, would organize events in-game that were usually pretty fun. The events became regular enough that a little community formed within the newsgroup. Several of the regular posters, including Dundee, moved to Everquest when it came out and started a guild there.
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Oct 25, 2021 04:16
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MechaCrash posted:Because I was thinking about it earlier, I am actually going to go massively off-topic for the thread and talk about something City of Heroes did that I thought was really cool. Don't worry, I'll throw in some complaining about something else at the end. But do you beat the Reichsman to a sick nu metal soundtrack?
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Oct 25, 2021 04:20
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Ormus Sucks posted:I played a ton of Ultima Online in college. UO broke a lot of new ground but they massively miscalculated the griefing tendencies of the player base. Ultima Online used to do Halloween-themed servers where you'd log in as a random monster or a farm animal or something. It didn't take long for people to cycle through until they logged in as a higher level monster and then camp the spawn in point to the server. You'd log in to try this new server and immediately die and the lag was insane because everyone was on dial up. Koster's posting about EQ is pretty funny because you can tell that he spent all his time thinking about and trying to design against griefing and it drove him insane. You can tell he heard about everquest and they were just like "yeah there's no pvp" and he was like WAIT YOU CAN JUST DO THAT?! gently caress
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Oct 25, 2021 05:34
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It's not that he isn't aware you can't do that. He knows full well you can. He very specifically did not want to, and never seemed to understand that player policing doesn't work. Or, as it was so succinctly put long ago, "Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad." He wrote a column about the history of murder in Ultima Online, but needless to say, I strongly disagree with his conclusions. I feel that if you give people the ability to be complete shitbirds to each other, then enough of them will jump on it with both hands to make everything noticeably worse. The players cannot be trusted to police themselves, because either they have no tools with which to use any punishment that sticks or matters and they're toothless and pointless, or the tools to do things that actually matter are given to the players and holy poo poo that is a terrible loving idea don't do that gently caress holy poo poo piss no don't. I feel that the real takeaway here is that if you want to run an online space, you are absolutely going to have to moderate the poo poo out of it. The problem with Twitter, as we now know (the article was written in June 2018), is that the people in charge have lovely policies that they apply inconsistently.
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Oct 25, 2021 05:55
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An additional factor, present in both Koster's and Bartle's writings, is that all the prior knowledge came from games with a couple hundred users per server, where it was feasible to seed and manage a self-policing community. UO increased the population tenfold, a late change it wasn't designed for, and that's when it turned out that approach didn't scale above a couple hundred players, which was entirely new knowledge at the time and naturally met with doubt.
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Oct 25, 2021 08:55
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Yeah, not expecting the number of players they got and not realizing that these things do not loving scale is a serious mitigating factor. This is, of course, the hazard of being a groundbreaker: you're going to make some absolutely catastrophic mistakes because how the hell are you supposed to see it coming? I mean, poo poo, it's just an artifact that generates mana, it's just a land in a funny hat. How expensive could THAT get?
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Oct 25, 2021 10:15
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The post a few pages back about FFXI and the earring camping brings back memories. Moldavite Earring! FFXI followed the EQ gearing style, where there was very little "progression" of gear except for weapons. You wouldn't have a +2 strength belt at level 10 and then get your +4 strength belt at level 20 - there might only be a grand total of 1 usable strength belt for the first 50 levels, dropped by a rare spawn. Leaping Lizzy was the quintessential example - a level 10 rare spawn that would drop a pair of low level boots that were pretty much the best in slot for every weapon using class for about 50 levels. There were some situational items that could work, but the fact that this level 7 pair of boots were great for everybody meant Lizzy was constantly camped. And this would be a total free for all, with people standing around waiting to immediately claim her on pop. The earring at least couldn't be sold, so there was only a rare bit of competition - soloing the goblin was tricky so I'd have to log on every 2 hours and schedule a friend coming to support my character, or blow a load of expensive consumables to kill it. No idea how many tries it took, but I'd get ptsd every time I'd walk by that stupid cave.
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Oct 25, 2021 10:19
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FFXI is great because it's like parallel universe EQ what i'd really like to know is how the hell people managed to level all the subjobs they needed to be viable before trusts were implemented, because not only is soloing dogshit but getting gear for everything is a massive timesink. like the first time I tried to play, I seem to remember needing like 6 jobs at various levels just to live my red mage dreams where i'd need rdm + x, but to level x i'd need y, but to level y i'd need z, but to level z i'd need social skills
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Oct 25, 2021 11:18
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blatman posted:FFXI is great because it's like parallel universe EQ For me, there was a lot of bargaining. "I'll play Bard (a very boring but essential job) at linkshell events if you promise to help me level monk (DDs were then, and now as always, a dime a dozen even if they were more fun to play)." Some of the leveling was true suffering though. For a period, SMN was a useful subjob for WHM primarily because of the auto-refresh trait but to level SMN to 37 you'd either do it incredibly gimped with just carby (i.e. pray and beg your friends to carry you) or you have to spend literal days travelling around to get avatars so you can actually contribute. Of course getting avatars was another travail. To claim the power of an avatar you need to defeat it in an instanced battle. Originally there were only max-level versions of this fight so before you could learn summons for your job you had to have another one at max or nearly max level to participate in the battles. The fights themselves weren't super difficult but the entrances to the battlefields were often in dangerous areas, and anyways you needed a full party to clear the fight itself. Later they added a level capped "mini" version of the fight which was aimed at lower-level people so it did you a solid (a kindness which was rare in classical FFXI) and gave you an item that let you teleport instantly to the arena. But there was a twist: that kind of teleport is very valuable because some of the arenas were in areas that could take an hour to run to, and were deep in very dangerous mob territory. So a lot of players would level SMN to 20 to unlock the quests and then never do the battle itself because as soon as you did the quest was complete and you couldn't use the teleport anymore.
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Oct 25, 2021 11:45
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The worst thing is that the 'mini' quests are really bad and require extremely timely uses of potions and kiting with your carby.
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Oct 25, 2021 11:48
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I'm not a City of Heroes expert having only had a brief surface level experience with it when it came out, though I played it to level cap when homecoming came out so I like old coh stories. I do appreciate how well that game nailed the comic book nonsense tone where there's just lots of alternate universes and alien invasions and poo poo. I didn't know the whole Reichsman story but I find it really funny because that's not the only evil Statesman, since there's another alternate earth where there's Tyrant who is basically a Statesman from a world where all the super heroes are evil and is the major villain of an expansion.
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Oct 25, 2021 13:37
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Glagha posted:I do appreciate how well that game nailed the comic book nonsense tone where there's just lots of alternate universes and alien invasions and poo poo. This is in part because a significant amount of CoH's DNA came from the Champions tabletop setting, which is what they originally tried to license when first making CoH. When that failed, they mostly just took the Champions setting - itself already highly derivative of Marvel/DC's work - and filed off the serial numbers to get what you saw in the base game. They eventually started branching out into their own mythology, but the comic book kitchen sink tone was a consequence of them aping a work that, by necessity, had to be as open as humanly possible to encompass the fantasies of GMs and players.
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Oct 25, 2021 18:22
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30.5 Days posted:Koster's posting about EQ is pretty funny because you can tell that he spent all his time thinking about and trying to design against griefing and it drove him insane. You can tell he heard about everquest and they were just like "yeah there's no pvp" and he was like WAIT YOU CAN JUST DO THAT?! gently caress I was reading his blog today and he linked to https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/a-brief-history-of-murder-in-ultima-online which is a long (and great) essay on how they tried to design around player killing in UO. And you were on the money: quote:The result was an exodus driven not only by the more modern 3d graphics of the newer game, but by the safety. Everything I had thought about the impossible admin load of having a PK switch with a large-scale game was disproven in short order, and players wasted no time in telling me bluntly that I had been drastically and painfully wrong. PraxxisParadoX fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Oct 25, 2021 |
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Oct 25, 2021 18:49
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What I'll say is that UO had a massive churn but it was still growing, just not as fast as similar PVE games. When they rolled out the trammel/felucca split, there was the largest ever boost in player numbers ever in UO, it I think doubled in size overnight as a shitload of people returned to the game. Then, the game never grew, ever again. The new pve friendly UO did not outperform everquest, and it didn't take long for the gains to boil away. Koster was long gone by then, though. That's not to say that I think open PVP is inherently good, but I think that in the end koster was correct that the weird organic nature of the world was the thing that made it work. It's not the only good way to design a game, or probably even an especially good way to design a game, but it was the way UO was designed and it didn't really work great without it.
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Oct 25, 2021 23:22
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Also SWG had a fairly ok PVP flagging model (I think? could be misremembering) and more importantly a game that was designed around that style of play, and koster got to focus on the stuff he wanted to focus on instead of trying to figure out how to bend the internet to his will. SWG had plenty of problems of its own but it didn't have the specific problems UO had, either before or after the split, and that's nice.
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Oct 25, 2021 23:26
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I think Ultima Online's biggest problem with PKing is that, ultimately, Raph didn't realize what absolute loving savage animals the players would be. Eve Online has a similar level of laissez faire "gently caress it, figure it out yourself, you're allegedly adults" poo poo, but Eve was built from the ground up with the lessons of Ultima Online already in place. UO's systems were built to handle a few people deciding to be the bad guy. It was not ready, on a systems or customer service level, for a bunch of people realizing that if you want ten liches worth of gold, you can kill ten liches, but it's much easier to let someone else kill ten liches and then gank him and take the prize.
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Oct 26, 2021 00:25
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All right. Hopefully we can get those Rift Chloromancer and Vanguard Blood Mage posts. In the meantime you guys will get Bards in Everquest. They were the coolest class in the game and arguably the closest a player could get to playing with GM powers. It was also the class that was coded so differently from every other class that it inevitably led to constant headaches when things broke. The dev Prathun had a post on the forums that I love to quote which said "Bards are... bards." Bards were pitched to players as this mix of fighter and caster, dual wielding weapons while singing songs to help their party or hurt the enemy. In reality, the melee aspect of bards was always subpar and only worth doing if you were stuck near the mob anyway. The real fun part of bards was the variety of songs they had, how you could stack them, and all the wild poo poo you could do because of that. The general mechanic of bard songs was based around the "tick," system. One tick is six seconds and a tick is when the server updates player information. Your hp and mana regen come back in 6 second intervals. There were other ticks that occurred in the game (like an infamous agro tick I'll talk about later) but the important one was the six second server tick. Bards had "spells," they casted called songs which all took 3 seconds to cast and lasted 10ish seconds. There were notable exceptions to the cast time and duration rule, but they were niche songs used for specific purposes. Originally, the designers of EQ expected a bard to just sing one song at a time and be done with it. They never considered people would look at the cast time of a song, then look at the duration of the song, and decide to just cycle through songs to keep multiple buffs up at a time. This technique was called twisting, and required you to press the song you wanted to cast, press it again after the buff landed to stop that song, then press the next song button. Rinse and repeat. I have no clue why the original devs didn't see this coming. An interesting aspect of this is that back in original EQ and with the shittier clients, most twisting was limited to 3 songs depending on lag. Otherwise songs are getting dropped and you aren't achieving the coveted 100% uptime of the buffs/debuffs you've casted. But there was a weird delay that existed in songs fading off that lead to the "phantom tick." You could very easily twist 4 songs at a time which was dope. Hell, if you were on top of it and the lag wasn't too bad, you could get decent uptime on 5 songs. Another important aspect of bard songs was how their power was determined. There was mild improvement in the quality of songs as you leveled, but the biggest impact came from instruments. Instruments acted as a multiplier on certain modifiable aspects of songs (like the amount of hp regenerated per tick or the amount of AC given from a buff song). They weren't small increases either, it was literally like 80% to 240% better depending on the instrument. Each song fell into the category of singing, stringed, percussion, brass, and wind and you needed to equip an instrument of that type to improve the song. The original instruments were almost always stuck in your secondary hand and you couldn't wield a primary with it equipped. It wasn't until the bard epic quest during Kunark that gave bards a sword with every instrument mod at 1.8x improvement. With Velious, they introduced instruments that could be equipped in the primary slot which allowed you to wield a weapon in your secondary slot. Luclin introduced Denon's Drums which could be put in the range slot and then PoP brought instrument mods put on pieces of armor. While every other casting class is dependent on their mana to cast their spells, bards only require mana for a few select songs and abilities. The things bards need mana for does end up being pretty important like Charm, a long distance AE damage song that is never used, and Fading Memories (more on this later). The downside of this was that bard innate mana regeneration was the worst in the game and their mana regen could not be buffed by enchanter clarity line spells or their own mana regen songs. This meant bards were completely dependent on worn flowing thought (item effect that increases mana regen, caps at 15 mana/tick) and AA mana regen (caps at 4 mana/tick for PoP). Mana regen was really the only thing that made bards feel mortal relative to other players. Getting back to the good poo poo though. So you as a bard were gifted the ability to twist songs when it wasn't originally intended and you had the ability to drastically improve your songs in a way that was very difficult to balance due to how it scaled, and none of it costed mana really with a couple exceptions. Then the devs were also kind enough to be like "what kind of songs should we give bards? I don't know, everything?" Bards had a song that was an imitation of just about every class defining spell for everyone else, just slightly worse and with a shorter duration. Charm? Yeah. Haste? For sure. Snares and DoTs? Hell yeah. Fear? AE no less. Mana drains and damage shields? Arguably better than their caster counterparts. During PoP, the only things a bard couldn't do that other classes could was summon an item/pet and buff hp/stamina. They had a song for everything else. And even had their own wild poo poo like Highsun which gates a mob back to it's spawn point (perfect for isolating a placeholder spawn for a named mob that likes to roam). Granted, in spite of all this cool poo poo, playing a bard as a part of a group or raid was not very fun. Group bard was formulaic as all hell. Haste, buff, maybe debuff for the fight, regen song between fights, pull if you're lucky, mez if you need to CC. Snooze fest. You picked the same 8 songs every group you were in and you hoped you had to pull and CC otherwise you'd die from brain atrophy. Raiding as a bard wasn't much different because you had a role you provided which dictated the songs you used and that was it. Luclin and PoP fights just meant you were twisting FOREVER and it was the same 4 songs on repeat depending on your role. For most fights the main tank had a bard dedicated to improving the tank's survivability, a bard for a group of DPS to increase their output, and usually a random bard used for giving the entire raid AE resistance buffs and regen. Snore. I had to find ways to make it fun for myself, like trying to cover more people with buffs using creative twists or adding more songs to twists to see how it improved raid outcomes. But let's talk about the good poo poo. Kiting was the peak of easy soloing for most casting classes. In EQ it was a technique dependent on improving the run speed of the the caster because they had to stop for the full duration of their cast time. Bards didn't need to do that. They could move while casting their song no problem. But, regardless of this, bards had the single best run speed buff in the game that made you feel like you were using a move speed cheat. So kiting as a bard was trivial. To the point where just running and DoTing things was boring as gently caress. So when Quad kiting was big among wizards and druids, bards took it a step further with AE kiting. By Kunark, Bards had four AE DoT songs. They had real small radii which meant they were originally intended for you to stand and sing them, supposedly in an AE group. gently caress that though. In original EQ, it was possible to use a keyboard combo to create something called an auto circle. There was an autorun keybind that you pressed at the same time as the direction you wanted to turn as well as control (which was the default strafe key I believe?). Depending on how long you held the control I think changed the radius of the circle, which allowed people to fine tune the size to perfectly match the radius of the AE bard songs. People were pulling a poo poo load of mobs and AE kiting to their heart's content. Amazing exp and with practice it was relatively risk free. I already posted about the problems massive AE kites in HoHa caused, and the only reason they caused the shitstorm they did was because it was so easy to pull 50+ mobs and kite them with little actual risk outside of a lag spike. The auto circle trick didn't work on AK sadly, and the old client prior to Hobart's update prevented reliable AE kiting, but I was able to do my fair share in PoV and it was fun as all hell. But AE kiting didn't always work because of collision mechanics and the size of mobs would mean their reach to hit you was longer than the kite radius. It was also kind of slow because the damage on the AE DoTs wasn't great until fully modded. That was when you could pull out the tried and true method of reverse charm kiting. You pull a shitload of mobs that are all at a level your charm song works on. You charm one and send it into the pack to get slaughtered by the rest. Right as it gets low health, you break charm. Kill it with a DoT then pick your new charm target. The most reliable way to break charm was to cast an invis on yourself. For the most efficient kiting you wanted instant cast invis and there were only three options. Boots of the Mosquito (a rare drop from a pain in the rear end camp buried deep in high level CT), Goblin Gazughi Ring (ultra rare drop from a deceptively hidden low level mob that's on a spawn cycle in LoIO), and the prohibitively expensive invis potions. You could still use longer cast time clickies or invis song, but it slowed things down an appreciable amount unless you were real good at timing your long cast time invis (and 3 seconds is an ETERNITY if you are watching your charm target get crushed). This was the best exp you could get outside of AE kiting and it was still lightning quick. I stacked AAs reverse charm kiting both PoN nightstalkers and PoD courtyards and made bank doing PoN and PoGrowth by selling the gems I got from both. And if all that wasn't enough to make bards happy, the devs kept on giving with PoP. Bards got a mixed bag with Luclin AAs. Like the AA that said it increases song range really only worked on group beneficial songs and Jam Fest went through 3 or 4 iterations before the devs said "gently caress it," and stopped trying to fix it. Jam Fest was an AA designed to make the game think the bard casting the song was actually 1-3 levels higher than they actually were which would slightly increase song modifiable values. The version that existed on AK would only apply the increased values to the bard who casted the song and other bards with the jam fest AA who were targeted by the song. This happened regardless of whether it was a buff or debuff making Jam Fest a detriment in PvP if it was bard against bard. So to make up for the headaches the PoP devs gave bards Fading Memories and Boastful Bellow. Monks and Shadowknights were almost always the ideal pulling class because they had feign death. Quickly being able to drop agro was perfect for bringing stuff to your group or desired area and then find a way to separate it from the pack. Bards could pull, and do it very well, but it required a lot of creativity and practice to pull off if you didn't also want to do a lot of CC. Fading Memories changed that. Instant cast full agro drop with an infinite duration invis attached to it. It costed 900 mana, which was a hefty cost even at PoP mana pools especially with a cap of 19 mana/tick. But good god was it worth it. Pulling in raids was something a bard could actually do reliably now. Deep diving to your favorite camp and fading off the trash was such a relief. Unclusterfucking a moment with a fade could save massive headaches. Sitting someplace invis indefinitely without having to worry about reapplying was nice. Hell, training to a corpse and fading off was a massive time saver on CR (but you usually only had one shot with a naked mana pool). Fading Memories gave way to a manipulation of a different kind of server tick. As mentioned, mana and health was updated every six seconds. But mob agro existed on an interval that occurred more frequently. I want to say once every one or two seconds the server would check agro. But there was still this delay from an action to a check and this allowed for creative people to do something called tick pulling. I inadvertently pulled this off before I knew about the mechanic and it's the perfect example of the mechanic in action. When I was trying to solo The Brood Mother in the bottom of Velk's, I managed to train myself with most of the spiders around her and I desperately mashed my fade button to clear agro. Now none of the spiders in that train could see invis EXCEPT the brood mother. So I'm sitting there for half a second watching them walk away when the brood mother sprints directly at me. In any other circumstance, all the rest of the spiders around the brood mother would have followed her because a mob in Everquest yells for help and agros everything between its location and the puller. But every other spider merrily trotted back to their spawn point. They were still on the prior agro tick and I couldn't agro them again until I performed an action against them on the next agro tick. Pulling off this technique took regular practice because mobs pop into the world at different times, meaning their agro ticks happened at different times, so teasing it out took trial and error. But back to the AA gifts. Boastful Bellow had a brief period (and should have rightly stayed as such on AK) as the single best pulling tool in the game. 1 damage instant cast spell with a small very easily resistance stun attached to it that had limitless range and no line of sight requirement. It could be used through DA and could be used without breaking invis. It was perfect for PoP. With the mana limitations on bards, it meant a bard could pull a target but could not repeatedly use fade to attempt to do so. This still meant most raids and groups used monks and SKs as de facto pullers. But hot drat could a bard pull off some wild poo poo with Bellow. I could easily and reliably pull Lord Dolj from his spawn point buried deep inside to the entrance to Velk's by standing in a certain spot in the first room and just tapping bellow. A mob has something called pursuit range hard grained into it. The mob will not chase a target that has agreed it until the target is within a certain distance. So as long as you were able to target something and get inside its pursuit range, you could pull it. There were so many cool tricks to getting that target too. Bards had a song that was a copy of a spell called bind sight, which changed the spell caster's perspective to that of their target's. So you could find the perfect angle to target something by using the eyesight of all the little buddies they surrounded themselves with. Add that with the Kunark era Singing Steel Helm and you could visualize just about anything from a distance. The helm had a clickie effect called Eye of Zomm which summoned this floating eye that the caster's sight was bound to for the duration of the spell. You could move it around and peek around corners but the duration was pretty short. The best part of the eye was that it was always summoned a set distance in front of the caster regardless of obstacles. This meant you could summon it on the other side of a locked door to see everything on the other side. And let's say you want to get on the other side of that locked door? Send a charmed pet that summons through the door to attack a target you picked with your eye of zomm and break charm at 95% hp to get summoned through to the other side. An interesting quirk of the eye of zomm was how it interacted with zone walls. In classic, Kunark, and Velious if you summoned an eye into a zone wall, it would randomly appear somewhere else in the zone. So you could click the helm to summon and re-summon eyes until you got it in a spot to visualize a target you were aiming for. Unfortunately the graphics update to Luclin meant they were doing something different with zone wall coding which meant the eye you summoned would just fall through the world and despawn. It wasn't all gifts with AAs for PoP, like the Fleet of Foot AA that was supposed to increase run speed even further actually slowed down bards, but bellow and fade more than made up for any bad AAs. Probably the most niche little dumb quirk to bards in EQ that is worth mentioning is about pricey little things called spell components. They were required reagents used to cast a spell that were consumed on cast. Because bards were coded differently, spell components weren't consumed when they normally would be. I had a theory that this was because instruments were coded as a spell component that couldn't be consumed, so this gummed up the wires if certain clickie effects on items were used. For example, I mentioned in a previous post that a defining quest of PoP was The Binden Concerrentia which was a necklace that allowed the user to teleport back to the plane of knowledge. This teleport consumed a component called Quintessence of Knowledge, an alchemy potion that was pretty expensive to make and buy. Gone every time you needed to gate. But not for bards. No quintessence, no problem. Gate away, my wayward son. And it was like that for every clickie that needed a component. That's all the dope poo poo I can write up right now, but I fuckin loved playing a bard. There was definitely more wild poo poo to the class and I might post it later but this was already a monster. If I do it'll be about all the solo strats that allowed bards to collect some of the biggest scalps in the game.
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Oct 27, 2021 08:00
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One of my favorite parts of classic EverQuest was illusion spells occasionally giving you positive faction standing in dungeons. You could turn into a fire elemental and walk around Solusek A friendly to the fire goblins or turn into a werewolf to become friendly with every mob in Velk's lab. Using minor illusion to turn into a nearby object (usually a torch) also set you to a neutral faction that was usually overlooked by the devs and was useful in obscure scenarios like bypassing the negative faction penalty that all races had with Skyshrine and Yelinak. The faction I had the most fun with, though, was the earth elementals in The Hole. The Hole was a large sprawling dungeon with high mob density, a good zone experience modifier, and had a lot of mobs needed for epic quests. It was once a hidden underground city of Erudite heretics, but they delved too deep and unleashed a horde of earth elementals from Brell Serilis' home plane of the Underfoot and got wiped out. There were three distinct npc factions represented in the zone. Earth elementals serving Brell dominated upper and lower level cavern areas and held the majority of the city. A small group of hostile ratmen controlled a prison area beneath the palace in the upper level of the zone. And there was a large tower in a cavern below the city full of Erudite ghosts. The areas held by each faction were pretty well separated, but there were 2 or 3 ratmen that would path to a courtyard at the entrance to the city and 3 ghosts that would follow a long path from the tower and through the city who would eventually reach the same courtyard as the ratmen. The courtyard was an end point for roaming earth elementals too, and all the mobs that reached it would glitch walk into a wall next to a fountain for about a minute before warping back to their spawn point and restarting their route. A well known trick for the zone was creating a level 1 halfling rogue that worshiped Brell and using the rogue sneak and hide skills to walk around without drawing aggro. People used this for corpse recovery runs and to check whether Master Yael, a 3 day spawn at the bottom of the zone, was up. It worked because the earth elementals were friendly to Brell followers and neither the ratmen or ghosts could see through rogue sneak/hide. If you happened to have a high level character that worshiped Brell and was a gnome, dwarf, or halfling you could benefit from the same positive elemental faction and you'd just need invis for the ratmen and invis to undead for the ghosts in order to have easy access to the whole zone. The only dangerous area was the courtyard where the ratmen and ghost roamers overlapped and it was easy enough to avoid the danger by peeking around the corner and checking for ghosts as you entered. By coincidence my character was a gnome enchanter that worshiped Brell. This meant I not only started amiable to the earth elementals, but could cast an earth elemental illusion on myself and use a faction raising spell to max out my standing with them. Having ally status was mostly useless but I was able to spend a lot of time killing and exploring in the zone without dropping my faction low enough to become kill on sight. Enchanters had both regular invis and invis to undead, so running around was low risk. Even if I screwed up I could mez and memory blur to drop aggro and keep going. People usually took 2 groups to reach the epic mobs deep in zone, due to some hard hitting and highly resistant golem mobs and how easy it was to overpull in the crowded city area. Thanks to arbitrarily choosing a deity at character creation and the ability to turn myself into a floating clump of dirt, I was able to waltz in and knock out both parts of my epic quest in the zone with zero effort. As I spent more time exploring the zone and experimenting with different enchanter tricks, I figured out I had the ability to cheat more than my own epic steps. I had a couple of shaman in my guild working on their epic and one of the NPCs they needed to kill was High Scale Kirn, an iksar shadowknight located deep in The Hole on the highest floor of the Erudite ghost tower. He spawned in non-aggressive and was on his own faction, unrelated to anything else in the zone. Shamans needed to hand him an item then kill him to progress their epic. Sneaking a shaman down to the mob without aggro didn't seem feasible, but I thought pulling Kirn to a shaman sitting at the zone in probably was. Getting to the spawn point was just a matter of switching invis spells when needed. There was a convenient spot at top of the stairs in the tower where Kirn could be pulled without aggroing any ghosts. The tricky part was getting an invis to undead cast off after pulling him, which was necessary to make it safely back past the ghost NPCs on the lower levels of the tower. Throwing a mez on him (and his low level shadowknight skeleton pet), then invising and waiting just outside the tower for it to wear off made that easy enough. Keeping a good distance ahead while pulling him gave me time to switch to regular invis in the courtyard and get past the ratmen. There was a one way drop near the start of the zone, but enchanters had a gravity flux spell I could use to fling myself back up a cliff and reach the entrance. Once Kirn caught up, root and memory blur allowed the shaman to do the turn in. All this worked fine, but wasn't quite enough to earn the prize. After the turn-in, the game would spawn a different version of the Kirn NPC for the shaman to kill. And instead of using his current location it would spawn him all the way back in the ghost tower on the other side of the zone. Grabbing him the second time was a bit more difficult. The new version of Kirn spawned in hostile/scowling and was a living NPC in an area packed full of undead with an unpredictable aggro radius that ignored the z-axis. Using invis to undead to reach him again wouldn't work. If he aggro'd early there would be no way to see him running down the stairs until he was right on top of me and he'd almost certainly hit me with a ranged harm touch and drop my invis as soon as he had line of sight, resulting in ghost aggro and a swift death. Fortunately the enchanter spellbook had plenty of tricks to fall back on for when things got weird. As it happens, the shadowknight pet belonging to the original Kirn wouldn't despawn with Kirn when the turn-in happened. I think this was because I was still technically on its aggro list but it could have been something more esoteric. It would also stay in the tower because I'd mez it a tick or two after mezzing Kirn. By the time it woke up, I'd be well outside of its chase range. There was also an obscure feature of tab targeting in EQ where you could save a target by tabbing from it to yourself and only ever pressing tab again when you had yourself targeted. It didn't matter if you targeted 20 other things in the meantime, you'd always go back to the target you originally pressed tab on. I'd use the tab trick to save the original shadowknight pet as my tab target and re-target it after spawning the second version of Kirn. I could then cast bind sight, which had no range limit, and look through the eyes of the pet. Since it had reset to its spawn point by then, it would be standing next to the newly spawned version of Kirn. By targeting that Kirn, I could make my way back to the tower and spam my /assist macro as I walked up the stairs. As soon as he aggro'd, I would know because /assist would put my name in the target window. He turned out to aggro from the top of the first flight of stairs and once he was chasing me all I had to do was hightail it back to the zone in. And the shaman would get a kill on a semi-annoying epic mob after 10 minutes of standing around picking their butt. Beyond taking out epic mobs, just hanging out in the zone without aggro and a lot of gimmicky enchanter spells was fun. There were rooms you could only get into by pushing summoning mobs through walls. One of which had Neriak symbols and the weird firepots that were an alleged hidden teleportation network that was never implemented. You couldn't levitate in the zone, but gravity flux and parkour could get you into odd places. There was cool architecture like a multi-level collapsed library and distinct palace, market, and temple areas. And for some reason there was a full dock area on a tiny lake in case anyone felt like sailing a boat down there. Charm soloing the ghosts also turned out to be good aaxp during Luclin. It was super relaxed because there was no competition and I could minor illusion as a table to turn non-aggro when I wanted to take a break. Fighting the ghosts also revealed additional weirdness. One type of ghost was what you'd expect, hostile and undead. Another type of ghost was indifferent/non-aggro and was usually undead. I could get to amiable faction with them using the enchanter faction raising spell. Some of them would then /con indifferent after casting invis to undead, which was standard when NPCs couldn't see you due to an invis spell. Other ghosts, sharing the same faction, would stay amiable with invis to undead up, which meant they weren't flagged as undead. So there were angry ghosts and non-angry ghosts and non-angry ghosts that secretly weren't ghosts. And none of it meant anything, because that's how EverQuest went. gnoma fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Oct 27, 2021 |
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Oct 27, 2021 21:10
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gnoma posted:Grabbing him the second time was a bit more difficult. The new version of Kirn spawned in hostile/scowling and was a living NPC in an area packed full of undead with an unpredictable aggro radius that ignored the z-axis. Lol I ran into this same problem when I soloed Radir the first time and had Spirit of Radir spawn all the way back in the tunnel across the zone. This pre-dates when I started but I remember people used to say you could /targ with unlimited range, but for NPCs you had to know what their actual database name was. Meaning /target Venril wouldn't work but /target Venril_Sathir01 would work. But that could just be one of those urban myths early EQ was known for.
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Oct 27, 2021 21:58
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All the fun things you could do with faction spells in EQ was really unique, kind of makes me want to play again but then I remember the grind and everything else. As a bard you could get a whole bunch of masks that would cast illusion spells of various races on you and even some elementals too I believe. Early on you could also cast those enchanted clicky item spells while you were crouching, and if the spell finished it would make you go into a T pose cause it had no idea what to do with that. I would use the Dark Elf mask to get into Neriak and have a lot of very suspicious Dark Elves staring at me because they could not choose Dark Elf/Bard as a race/class at all.
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Oct 27, 2021 22:07
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gnoma posted:Fighting the ghosts also revealed additional weirdness. One type of ghost was what you'd expect, hostile and undead. Another type of ghost was indifferent/non-aggro and was usually undead. I could get to amiable faction with them using the enchanter faction raising spell. Some of them would then /con indifferent after casting invis to undead, which was standard when NPCs couldn't see you due to an invis spell. Other ghosts, sharing the same faction, would stay amiable with invis to undead up, which meant they weren't flagged as undead. So there were angry ghosts and non-angry ghosts and non-angry ghosts that secretly weren't ghosts. And none of it meant anything, because that's how EverQuest went. But, what if it did mean something... That was one of the things that always fascinated me about EQ. All of these weird factions made you wonder about deeper plots to be discovered for these NPCs. At best it was an unfinished, half-thought dream. In reality it was probably a mistake or convenient work around for some technical issue. For instance, this random guy, Barodreth Firefingers lives in Erudin, gives out newbie crafting quests, and is an absolute unit. For some reason though, he is on three factions for the elves, who live on the other side of the world. One of those factions is 'King Tearis Thex', the king of the high elves, who barely ever made any appearance in the game, despite apparently being alive and a part of the game since it's beginning.
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Oct 28, 2021 02:29
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