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Dizz
Feb 14, 2010


L :dva: L
wasn't there some EQ moderator of some sort who got murdered by a player?

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Sintor
Jul 23, 2007
Not that I recall, but it did remind me of some quality GM/guide dramas that I had forgotten about.

That guide Tweety that blew a gasket and made some wild rant post:

http://web.archive.org/web/20010414021753/tweety.bowlofmice.com/tweety/try_being_a_guide.html

Then you've got the guide that snapped and death looped a bunch of people in Veeshan's:

https://www.ign.com/articles/2000/11/22/everquest-guide-kills-characters

Still searching for the one that got caught on one of the Zek servers porting around, killing people, and taking their poo poo to their actual character.

Dizz
Feb 14, 2010


L :dva: L
I know there's one of a dude who got too invested in eq and became hella unhinged because he couldn't find any real friends locally and he left some red flags on his only friend's answering machine before going out and assaulting a woman with a spiked mace, but i vaguely remember seeing something about someone way back when being upset about something and murdering an EQ mod or something similar to that.

E: here it is, the mace dude https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y48ITnS1jk

Dizz fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Sep 21, 2021

Sanguinia
Jan 1, 2012

~Everybody wants to be a cat~
~Because a cat's the only cat~
~Who knows where its at~

I tried to play Everquest in 7th grade. I didn't understand any of the control, it took me forever to find my way around the maze of a city I was in, the game did nothing to really direct me, and when I finally got out into the world I was killed by a level 1 rat.

That was my last day of Everquest.

Dizz
Feb 14, 2010


L :dva: L
my first experience with EQ was a luclin demo or something. it was a classic window where it was tiny and the UI was like half the screen. i had a DE SK at freeport as my starting town.

i got to like level 8 or 9, died in EC on some big hill at night because a skeleton aggroed me, and quit when i saw i was naked and couldn't find my corpse.

shirunei
Sep 7, 2018

I tried to run away. To take the easy way out. I'll live through the suffering. When I die, I want to feel like I did my best.

Dizz posted:

I know there's one of a dude who got too invested in eq and became hella unhinged because he couldn't find any real friends locally and he left some red flags on his only friend's answering machine before going out and assaulting a woman with a spiked mace, but i vaguely remember seeing something about someone way back when being upset about something and murdering an EQ mod or something similar to that.

E: here it is, the mace dude https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y48ITnS1jk

That dude played on p1999 red during the same time period as me when this happened...while I was also living in Sacramento. Freaked me out at the time and made me gently caress off to blue.

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



Did anyone else play EQOA? It feels like it's really under remembered despite being like the second console MMO ever

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

Frog Act posted:

Did anyone else play EQOA? It feels like it's really under remembered despite being like the second console MMO ever

I knew a guy in high school who loved it and used to talk about it all the time, but I never played it myself. I'm really curious about it, though. There's so little out there that I can find about EQOA.

Dizz
Feb 14, 2010


L :dva: L

shirunei posted:

That dude played on p1999 red during the same time period as me when this happened...while I was also living in Sacramento. Freaked me out at the time and made me gently caress off to blue.

please tell em you killed him a few times

Vinestalk
Jul 2, 2011
Uhhh let's dip our toes in a slightly more chill topic than the toxic culture of P99, mental health, and assault/battery.

Any SWG posters got a good primer on the whole pre-CU -> CU -> post-CU shitstorm and the wild ride it took the community through? I had a friend who loved SWG but I never played it myself and I've heard a lot about how pre-CU was something of a golden age for the game.

Freakazoid_
Jul 5, 2013


Buglord
A short version of a much longer, more complicated mess from the early Ultima Online days, and I'm probably missing some important parts.

The Counselor Program, a volunteer group of players who were recruited to help new players, suffered a number of abuses by GMs during its run. To put it simply the GMs were treating volunteers somewhere between workers and a harem. Promises were made about promoting to paid positions, promises that were never kept. Long hours were encouraged as GMs dumped their workloads onto them. Anyone who spoke up were kicked out. Anyone they didn't like were also kicked out with no warning.

Male GMs in particular were corrupt as hell. The volunteer program had a number of women in their ranks. The male GMs would communicate with them often and eventually, some of them ended up flirting, having phone sex, and at least one of them hooked up for real. These GMs had no issues at all giving these women whatever they wanted. Money, items, houses... If female volunteers wanted a castle and wanted it placed smack dab in the middle of a bunch of already existing players houses, the GMs had no problem deleting those existing houses.

Eventually, as word finally got out, things got better.

And then the program was cancelled.

The volunteers sued. Legally, Origins violated Colorado labor laws. The real reasons were more complicated, a mix of genuine abuse that was never settled and gamer entitlement. Four years later, a settlement was reached.

30.5 Days
Nov 19, 2006
It's interesting that the takeaway from this has been "don't have volunteers in MMOs" for companies. Origin's poo poo was completely over the top, including having actual shift schedules for the "volunteers".

Maguoob
Dec 26, 2012

Sanguinia posted:

I tried to play Everquest in 7th grade. I didn't understand any of the control, it took me forever to find my way around the maze of a city I was in, the game did nothing to really direct me, and when I finally got out into the world I was killed by a level 1 rat.

That was my last day of Everquest.

That sounds almost like my experience in the original Neriak (Dark Elf city) except I also accidentally attacked an NPC and got killed. That and I didn't quit. Also ending up in the Lavastorm Mountains because it was pretty close to the entrance to Neriak in Nek forest.

I mean if you didn't accidentally killed yourself by attacking an NPC in EQ, did you really even play the game?

Rhymenoserous
May 23, 2008

30.5 Days posted:

It's interesting that the takeaway from this has been "don't have volunteers in MMOs" for companies. Origin's poo poo was completely over the top, including having actual shift schedules for the "volunteers".

I was a smurf in UO, can confirm we were treated as employees. I didn’t get propositions for sexual favors but there was absolutely some of that going on. There were always clouds of drama around certain GMs and certain Smurfs. Id name names but honestly that poo poo was 20 years ago.

cmdrk
Jun 10, 2013
Happily I can report that the EQ guide experience was not that bad. I recall there was a requirement to commit something like 4-8hrs per week to guiding, in order to keep your free Live account (which I guess is the equivalent of paying $1.25/hr :v:). Or maybe I never got propositioned because my Ogre wasn't sexy enough :ohdear:

Nunes
Apr 24, 2016
I liked to sit outside of Oggok and try to make friends with the people who were killing the guards. I would roleplay a friendly ogre and give gifts of wet, unfinished pottery projects.

knox
Oct 28, 2004

Frog Act posted:

Did anyone else play EQOA? It feels like it's really under remembered despite being like the second console MMO ever

EQOA gang, came here to post about it. Two of my friends were the first level 50s in the game, played on Castle Lightwolf server; Remedy gnome cleric & uhh Tangible gnome rogue I believe. They told the GMs to make Ceremonial Vestments robe a drop/wearable item and it became the most sought after item in the game, that and whatever the black robe was called I think Spectral Robe or something.
Then they quit pretty quickly because there was no content whatsoever. The devs thought it was going to take month+ to hit max level but didn't count on high school drop outs setting alarms after 3 hours of sleep to continue duo'ing to max level in under 14 days.

The friends I met on SOCOM 1 on PS2 (first console game using headset to talk to other people) have played many MMOs and other games with me, though not really of late. The industry is pretty poo poo overall so nothing worth grouping up together on.

Harrow posted:

I knew a guy in high school who loved it and used to talk about it all the time, but I never played it myself. I'm really curious about it, though. There's so little out there that I can find about EQOA.

That's because it was one of the earlier multiple console games on PS2 and there wasn't any technology to easily record your experience/take screenshots/etc etc. You played with a keyboard on your loving lap with the controller, but it was it amazing fun.

The awe I felt playing EQOA as a 13/14 year old probably can't be duplicated. I did get screwed over by two people after playing their characters to a high level and they then changed the password on the account- high school friend and other SOCOM1 friend lol. Early lesson everyone is an rear end in a top hat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQISTRCgPZ0

knox fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Sep 22, 2021

Dizz
Feb 14, 2010


L :dva: L
EQOA had a keyboard in your lap? Why didn't they make a controller like the one for PSO

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



Dizz posted:

EQOA had a keyboard in your lap? Why didn't they make a controller like the one for PSO

I think it just wasn't popular enough, but iirc most people just used a regular USB keyboard plugged into their PS2. I did and I was only 12 at the time, so that was about as sophisticated as I got with peripherals.


knox posted:

EQOA gang, came here to post about it. Two of my friends were the first level 50s in the game, played on Castle Lightwolf server; Remedy gnome cleric & uhh Tangible gnome rogue I believe. They told the GMs to make Ceremonial Vestments robe a drop/wearable item and it became the most sought after item in the game, that and whatever the black robe was called I think Spectral Robe or something.
Then they quit pretty quickly because there was no content whatsoever. The devs thought it was going to take month+ to hit max level but didn't count on high school drop outs setting alarms after 3 hours of sleep to continue duo'ing to max level in under 14 days.

The friends I met on SOCOM 1 on PS2 (first console game using headset to talk to other people) have played many MMOs and other games with me, though not really of late. The industry is pretty poo poo overall so nothing worth grouping up together on.

That's because it was one of the earlier multiple console games on PS2 and there wasn't any technology to easily record your experience/take screenshots/etc etc. You played with a keyboard on your loving lap with the controller, but it was it amazing fun.

The awe I felt playing EQOA as a 13/14 year old probably can't be duplicated. I did get screwed over by two people after playing their characters to a high level and they then changed the password on the account- high school friend and other SOCOM1 friend lol. Early lesson everyone is an rear end in a top hat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQISTRCgPZ0

Honestly I think there was something truly unique about EQOA and the way it bridged the mechanical/moment-to-moment-gameplay gap from more complicated games like EQ/DAOC/UO and what the genre would eventually evolve into with WoW. it did WoW's fast travel system first, with the carriages that you could take between settlements as long as you'd visited them, but retained the expansive feeling of EQ by making all of the zones interconnected, massive, and distinct. it was also really impressive in that it only had a few loading screens baked in, you could travel from one end of the continent to the other without encountering any.

If I was an absurdly wealthy billionaire reviving EQOA would be on the top of my frivolous garbage list, because no game has ever matched it's aesthetic, use of a preexisting setting in a way that wasn't a colossal fuckup (looking at you, EQ next), and willingness to straddle different genre conventions. I think the EXP debt in particular was a great solution to the problem of death, and I loved how every capital retained the flavor of it's EQ counterpart but with the appropriate historical changes

I guess I have major rose-tinted glasses since I was a kid and never made it to end-game, but I am convinced that as an adult EQOA would have the same appeal as, like FFXI retail does today - big world, neat challenges, unique systems, not as soul-crushing to level as other games of the era, great aesthetic. I'd pay ridiculous and disproportionate amounts of money to get to make another Qeynosian Monk or get to kill beetles in Kelethin again, but it's basically the only semi-popular MMO from the era that's never had a private server and is unplayable in any format today. fuckin sucks!!!!!!!!

shirunei
Sep 7, 2018

I tried to run away. To take the easy way out. I'll live through the suffering. When I die, I want to feel like I did my best.

Frog Act posted:

I think it just wasn't popular enough, but iirc most people just used a regular USB keyboard plugged into their PS2. I did and I was only 12 at the time, so that was about as sophisticated as I got with peripherals.

Honestly I think there was something truly unique about EQOA and the way it bridged the mechanical/moment-to-moment-gameplay gap from more complicated games like EQ/DAOC/UO and what the genre would eventually evolve into with WoW. it did WoW's fast travel system first, with the carriages that you could take between settlements as long as you'd visited them, but retained the expansive feeling of EQ by making all of the zones interconnected, massive, and distinct. it was also really impressive in that it only had a few loading screens baked in, you could travel from one end of the continent to the other without encountering any.

If I was an absurdly wealthy billionaire reviving EQOA would be on the top of my frivolous garbage list, because no game has ever matched it's aesthetic, use of a preexisting setting in a way that wasn't a colossal fuckup (looking at you, EQ next), and willingness to straddle different genre conventions. I think the EXP debt in particular was a great solution to the problem of death, and I loved how every capital retained the flavor of it's EQ counterpart but with the appropriate historical changes

I guess I have major rose-tinted glasses since I was a kid and never made it to end-game, but I am convinced that as an adult EQOA would have the same appeal as, like FFXI retail does today - big world, neat challenges, unique systems, not as soul-crushing to level as other games of the era, great aesthetic. I'd pay ridiculous and disproportionate amounts of money to get to make another Qeynosian Monk or get to kill beetles in Kelethin again, but it's basically the only semi-popular MMO from the era that's never had a private server and is unplayable in any format today. fuckin sucks!!!!!!!!

https://sandstorm.kiekko.tv/
Looks like someone has setup a rudimentary private server that works with an emu

cyrn
Sep 11, 2001

The Man is a harsh mistress.
There's about 15 minutes in this 3 hour interview where Jeff Butler talks about how he perceived the dynamic between him and Brad McQuaid at Sigil that is just stellar. The full thing is interesting but this segment in particular is easy to connect with a lot of the original EQ design. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTWdpXvxneQ&t=7623s

A couple of choice quotes.

Regarding McQuaid's thinking about gameplay: "Why would I hand you a map? If I gave you a map I would be screwing you out of the satisfaction of learning that you don't walk into that little alcove [...] in this dungeon. I would be cheating you out of the knowledge of the world that is your reward for exploration and cooperation with your fellow players."

About the game McQuaid wanted to make: "Brad brought his desire for the game that he wanted to see not from Everquest, but from games prior to it, MUDs. His favorite games were MUDs. His desire was to see a 3D MUD that more or less matched the visceral experience that he had in text come to life. That was his inner vision for what he was hoping to see and play, which never happened. [...] He was striving toward a goal that hadn't yet been realized in any massively multiplayer game."

Dizz
Feb 14, 2010


L :dva: L

cyrn posted:

There's about 15 minutes in this 3 hour interview where Jeff Butler talks about how he perceived the dynamic between him and Brad McQuaid at Sigil that is just stellar. The full thing is interesting but this segment in particular is easy to connect with a lot of the original EQ design. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTWdpXvxneQ&t=7623s

A couple of choice quotes.

Regarding McQuaid's thinking about gameplay: "Why would I hand you a map? If I gave you a map I would be screwing you out of the satisfaction of learning that you don't walk into that little alcove [...] in this dungeon. I would be cheating you out of the knowledge of the world that is your reward for exploration and cooperation with your fellow players."

About the game McQuaid wanted to make: "Brad brought his desire for the game that he wanted to see not from Everquest, but from games prior to it, MUDs. His favorite games were MUDs. His desire was to see a 3D MUD that more or less matched the visceral experience that he had in text come to life. That was his inner vision for what he was hoping to see and play, which never happened. [...] He was striving toward a goal that hadn't yet been realized in any massively multiplayer game."

what i dont get is they could at least make basic maps that don't show you hidden traps or tunnels.

or they can make them more lore-y and keep them half unfinished or something due to the mapmaker being in danger or it being a long time since the map was made.

E: this would also give players incentive to edit the maps themselves as well with notes and other landmarks.

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



shirunei posted:

https://sandstorm.kiekko.tv/
Looks like someone has setup a rudimentary private server that works with an emu

Oh wow, thanks for this, I’m gonna have to keep my eye on it - I’ve seen a few revival attempts come and go on Reddit over the years, but I always hold out hope someone will crack the code, as I recall it was pretty amenable to solo play

cyrn
Sep 11, 2001

The Man is a harsh mistress.

Dizz posted:

what i dont get is they could at least make basic maps that don't show you hidden traps or tunnels.

Maybe it is harder to get without the surrounding context, but I saw this as Jeff Butler presenting an example Brad McQuaid's side of an argument the two of them had disagreed about and heavily discussed, as a way to illustrate the gameplay McQuaid thought was rewarding and wanted in the games he was making. Whether there are other better or workable ideas about maps is not really in the scope of what they were discussing in the interview.

cmdrk
Jun 10, 2013
Shawn looked a little uncomfortable with Jeff channeling Brad with "BITCH, LEARN THE MAP".

Vinestalk
Jul 2, 2011

Dizz posted:

what i dont get is they could at least make basic maps that don't show you hidden traps or tunnels.

or they can make them more lore-y and keep them half unfinished or something due to the mapmaker being in danger or it being a long time since the map was made.

E: this would also give players incentive to edit the maps themselves as well with notes and other landmarks.

A mapping function was added with LoY, the 5th expansion, which allowed players to chart zone lines and landmarks in game. People were able to share these maps by taking the file that was created and uploading them to websites. It didn't take long for there to be fully fleshed out maps of every zone, with and without notations.

Could there have been something the original developers provided to make the game easier to navigate? Maybe. But Brad had "The Vision," and the aftermath from the release of the mapping tool showed the community had mixed feelings about the whole thing. LoY in general was considered a small content expansion with a lot of QoL changes (Drogmors, Armor dyeing, Tradeskill Tool, revamps to alchemy/research/poison I think?, and obv. mapping) that split the community. Some people enjoyed the idea of not having information spoon fed to them while some enjoyed the idea that they didn't have to print out maps from eqatlas just to get to the new expansion content they bought.

blatman
May 10, 2009

14 inc dont mez


LoY had two other important features: playable frogloks and a new equipment slot: the Charm

Charms were originally a unique piece of gear that would change stats based on whatever criteria was set by the item dev, so you could end up with a charm that gives you bonus strength at night or hp regen when it's raining or whatever. This lasted for awhile until players started just using whatever charm gave the most stats for the least effort and now there's only two charm types that matter: ones that give stats from wearing more class-specific armor from that expansion, and ones that give stats from completing quests from that expansion

as far as i'm aware, everyone just uses the class-specific armor one these days and it's essentially just another boring non-visible stat piece because nobody wants to gently caress around with their gear every time the zone population fluctuates or whatever but for a brief period of time you had these broken rear end poorly itemized gear slots as a back-of-the-box feature for an expansion nobody really gave a poo poo about

that expansion kinda sucked rear end

edit: also the mapping feature is just a computer literacy check because everyone who understands how directories work just downloads a map pack (these are all *.txt files containing raw map coordinates that becomes a lovely line-art of the zone you're in) and dumps it into the maps folder, most people don't even bother to edit them even though the full suite of editing tools is still available and now they're just another way for people to judge other players

blatman
May 10, 2009

14 inc dont mez


content: I would like to share a now-nerfed soloing strategy that I used to great effect like 8 years ago

My EQ main has been a Shadowknight for many years now, they're a tank that's necromancer-flavored, they get lifedrains and whatnot but more importantly they also used to get almost zero attention from the devs. I would solo by swarming until it got nerfed and here's how swarming worked:

Shadowknights have an innate chance to riposte attacks, think of it like a dodge that also performs a single melee swing on whatever hit you every time you successfully riposte, they wear plate armor and they also have access to two very important abilities: Lich Sting (this is what you get if you click your level 70 quested Epic 2.0, 2 minutes of lifedrains from autoattacks with a 5 minute cooldown based on how hard your autoattack hit) and Mortal Coil (this procs fairly regularly on killing blows to mobs that give exp, same deal as lich sting but lasts longer). What you'd do is equip your shield, go into a zone where the mobs JUST BARELY give decent exp, pull every single mob you can find, back into a corner with Deflection running (this makes you block every attack for a couple of server ticks), make sure you can hit everything in your pull, click your epic 2.0 and switch back to your 2hander

What happens next is that no single mob can outright one-shot you and you're riposting enough attacks that you completely heal every time the server updates your health bar despite the hundreds of mobs hitting you. Because the mobs aren't particularly challenging on their own, you'll rack up tons of killshots before your epic buff falls off resulting in Mortal Coil being applied and reapplied constantly for the rest of the fight. Don't cast anything, just stand there and let the magic happen. A combination of the damage dealt by riposte and your thorns effects results in ridiculously high outgoing DPS due to how many things you're hitting and you can never die once your pull is established because being hit causes you to counterattack which heals you. This owned bones.

This strategy got nerfed a few times because it turns out the servers weren't made for entire zones to be in active melee combat with a single player for extended periods of time, a couple shadowknights swarming in separate zones caused a shitload of lag for everyone else trying to play and contributed heavily to general server instability. Nowadays you can only lifedrain your primary target via ripostes but honestly I was glad to see this go, I'm just glad they waited until after I'd made an absolute fortune selling powerleveling first

Dizz
Feb 14, 2010


L :dva: L

Vinestalk posted:

A mapping function was added with LoY, the 5th expansion, which allowed players to chart zone lines and landmarks in game. People were able to share these maps by taking the file that was created and uploading them to websites. It didn't take long for there to be fully fleshed out maps of every zone, with and without notations.

Could there have been something the original developers provided to make the game easier to navigate? Maybe. But Brad had "The Vision," and the aftermath from the release of the mapping tool showed the community had mixed feelings about the whole thing. LoY in general was considered a small content expansion with a lot of QoL changes (Drogmors, Armor dyeing, Tradeskill Tool, revamps to alchemy/research/poison I think?, and obv. mapping) that split the community. Some people enjoyed the idea of not having information spoon fed to them while some enjoyed the idea that they didn't have to print out maps from eqatlas just to get to the new expansion content they bought.

Yeah but at that time, everything was already known unless it was a fresh new expansion. What i'm saying was something akin to a cartographer NPC that you can buy maps from that weren't super fleshed out.

Also when it comes to quality of life and such it seems just like a bunch of old boomers getting mad over things being made more easy for them RE: bazaar, tradeskills akin to "Back in *MY* day, you had to do crafts one by one! That's how I got my carpal tunnel :smug:"

E: also while i think a lot of the enhanced models were laughably bad, Vah Shir and Frogloks are cool as hell as is the idea of new classes and nothing is stopping people from just..... editing a lot of future expansion content to be good or at least better than what the community percieves it to be. also I think AAs are awesome as gently caress.

Dizz fucked around with this message at 15:44 on Sep 24, 2021

cmdrk
Jun 10, 2013

Dizz posted:

Yeah but at that time, everything was already known unless it was a fresh new expansion. What i'm saying was something akin to a cartographer NPC that you can buy maps from that weren't super fleshed out.

Also when it comes to quality of life and such it seems just like a bunch of old boomers getting mad over things being made more easy for them RE: bazaar, tradeskills akin to "Back in *MY* day, you had to do crafts one by one! That's how I got my carpal tunnel :smug:"

E: also while i think a lot of the enhanced models were laughably bad, Vah Shir and Frogloks are cool as hell as is the idea of new classes and nothing is stopping people from just..... editing a lot of future expansion content to be good or at least better than what the community percieves it to be. also I think AAs are awesome as gently caress.

I liked AAs personally. It was nice to have something to grind for after you hit cap. IMO all of the enhanced models were awful, but they did an OK job with Vah Shir. The biggest crime was disabling the Velious textures, though. You can force them on in the Titanium client but they're super jank. The old-style Vah Shir were alright but felt pretty low-effort since they wanted to move everyone to Luclin.

Frogloks were perfection.

The old model Vah Shir thing reminds me of some issues the devs surely must've run into. I would bet there are some war stories to tell from the folks trying to maintain client between people who bought the base game and nothing else, people who bought expansions only in bundles, and people who bought expansions as they came out. Like if you look at the release dates for the clients up to PoP, cribbed from a P1999 thread:

Original EverQuest (March 1999)
The Ruins of Kunark (April 2000)
The Scars of Velious (December 2000)
EverQuest Trilogy - Original, Kunark, Velious (September 17, 2001)
The Shadows of Luclin (December 2001)
The Planes of Power (October 2002)

I remember buying PoP and thinking it loving sucked because I didn't have a 46+ character to enter the planes, but I wanted Plane of Knowledge.

Dizz
Feb 14, 2010


L :dva: L
My only gripe with frogloks is that while the player model owned, so did the old frogloks at Guk. It was a lose/lose situation but i think if Frogs had Beastlord and they summoned a Guk frog as a pet then this world would have been the best timeline.

blatman
May 10, 2009

14 inc dont mez


I wish you could unclick the froglok new model option in the settings and run around as a guk frog, sadly the only option for weird pacman frog superiority is to chug those guk frog illusion potions or make friends with an enchanter

Groovelord Neato
Dec 6, 2014


blatman posted:

I wish you could unclick the froglok new model option in the settings and run around as a guk frog, sadly the only option for weird pacman frog superiority is to chug those guk frog illusion potions or make friends with an enchanter

I'm glad I was long gone by the time you could play them because I wanted a good monster race and the original models are of course superior.

AA was a good idea because it allowed them to fix what was then the worst class.

I never played SWG (and wish I had) but to get the thread back on track I had read some on the pre-CU golden age. It was pretty clear SOE hadn't done a lot of testing for certain things (as with EQ) so they didn't realize you could become a god via combat buffs and player-crafted armor and such. I think they even started balancing content around the idea you'd be a combat god with your armor and buffs all the time which eventually led to the Combat Upgrade. If I remember correctly the Rifleman skill tree even had a skill called Aimed Shot or something along those lines which allowed you to tackle even the hardest content solo way out of way of any danger.

Groovelord Neato fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Sep 24, 2021

Vermain
Sep 5, 2006



Groovelord Neato posted:

It was pretty clear SOE hadn't done a lot of testing for certain things (as with EQ) so they didn't realize you could become a god via combat buffs and player-crafted armor and such.

IIRC, the fundamental issue was that the crafting system was intended to be more organic than traditional crafting systems, in the sense that high quality materials would lead to a higher quality end product. They just... didn't really balance the quality bonuses at all, so the best crafted gear and medicines made you absurdly powerful compared to someone slumming around with generic equipment/meds.

Vinestalk
Jul 2, 2011

Dizz posted:

Yeah but at that time, everything was already known unless it was a fresh new expansion. What i'm saying was something akin to a cartographer NPC that you can buy maps from that weren't super fleshed out.

Also when it comes to quality of life and such it seems just like a bunch of old boomers getting mad over things being made more easy for them RE: bazaar, tradeskills akin to "Back in *MY* day, you had to do crafts one by one! That's how I got my carpal tunnel :smug:"

E: also while i think a lot of the enhanced models were laughably bad, Vah Shir and Frogloks are cool as hell as is the idea of new classes and nothing is stopping people from just..... editing a lot of future expansion content to be good or at least better than what the community percieves it to be. also I think AAs are awesome as gently caress.

While I agree that some QoL changes were just common sense or relatively benign, I can see both sides on a lot of this stuff. They offered people the chance to play the game the way they wanted to, but I do think each came with a cost. The fact that P99 is still popular and Al'Kabor was so popular does speak to the idea that the appreciation for the game prior to QoL changes is more than just nostalgia. Can lessons be learned by future developers from looking at these mechanics or has the genre/playerbase become too far separated from a point in time where this stuff was tolerable?

I don't know. All I know is that I enjoyed it back when I played and I'm 95% sure I couldn't go back and recreate that joy with anything available today. But it still is fun to look back and reflect on it.

cmdrk
Jun 10, 2013

Vermain posted:

IIRC, the fundamental issue was that the crafting system was intended to be more organic than traditional crafting systems, in the sense that high quality materials would lead to a higher quality end product. They just... didn't really balance the quality bonuses at all, so the best crafted gear and medicines made you absurdly powerful compared to someone slumming around with generic equipment/meds.

I still contend that SWG had some of the best crafting/trading/resource gathering mechanics ever, and hasn't been replicated since :colbert:

I bought Raph Koster's game design book because of SWG.

turns out I like his game but hate his book :saddowns:

Vinestalk
Jul 2, 2011
I'm stuck in an airport for awhile so no better time to talk about project 52.

Monks were a difficult to balance class in the early days of EQ. A large part of that was the game hadn't figured out how to itemize classes yet. The other part of it seemed like there was something inherently baked into the class that felt like the original design didn't know whether monks were tanks that utilized avoidance as opposed to mitigation or if monks were a DPS class. Regardless of all that speculation, the end result was still the same.

Monks in the early days of EQ, especially prior to Luclin and PoP, were causing an uproar in the community. They had access to tanking items and the weapons they could use were lightning quick. They had the highest dodge skill as well as other avoidance skills like riposte and block while also having access to damage skills unique to their class like kicks and strikes. So it was no surprise that to outside observers monks were able to have their cake and eat it. Well geared monks during certain early time periods were capable of tanking in groups and in some cases being picked over traditional tank classes because the monk could pull, tank, and dps better than a paladin/sk/warrior so why not add more casters to speed things up?

It didn't help that there was a very vocal portion of the warrior class who always liked to have a meltdown over the fact that they couldn't solo for poo poo unless they were geared to the teeth while most other classes, and especially monks, could get creative and solo without needing to be that well geared. Monks in particular benefited from wonky mechanics regarding out of combat regen for monsters and feign death. These would later be addressed with decreased rate of regen while a player was feigning death as well as almost instant health regen by most monsters when they were out of combat, but in the early days it was really good to be a monk. It became a running meme in EQ communities to say "nerf monks," cause it felt like they could walk on water while the rest of the melee classes were struggling to stay afloat in a kiddie pool.

So imagine how the community reacted when a guy twinked his monk alt enough to solo some dragons?

Nagafen and Lady Vox are probably some of the most well known encounters in the entire game. When EQ initially launched, the level cap was 50 and these two dragons were it as far as raid content. They had a special place in the community's heart because of this history but people eventually outleveled and overgeared the two, which meant less and less people were really needed for the fight. Verant took steps to preserve those encounters so people could enjoy them in a way that was as close to the original experience as was possible. Both Naggy and Vox were given the ability to banish any player on their agro list above level 52 from the zone they were in. And, to be honest, it was kind of cool that they did that. It became something you did while you were leveling to stop at 52 and sign up for open Naggy or Vox raids, just to experience it.

Intrepid people with more access to gear wanted to push the envelope, though. With Velious there was a huge bump in stat inflation which would only get worse with every expansion afterwards. As raiders are wont to do, they gorged on encounters to the point where their alts were picking up gear. And these alts were capable of killing Naggy and Vox in one or two groups where it used to take an army of idiots throwing themselves at these dragons before they died.

Luclin came around and the inflation issue got worse, but alts weren't able to eat full courses at the stat buffet anymore because items were getting recommended and required level parameters. This lowered stats or prevented people from wearing items unless they met the level specified by the item. In spite of this, there was still enough for those little alts to eat and there was plenty of gear to go around.

And this is where our protagonist, Quarken, enters the picture. Quarken's a guy that has a long roller coaster history in the EQ community, but this is probably his first splash that makes him a well known name across every server. In the unlikely event that you're reading this, bud, feel free to correct me or fill in the blanks.

During the drudgery of Luclin raiding, this guy is gearing up his monk alt Tecknoe. And by gearing up we're talking some unreal drops. He has gear from pre-wake Sleeper's, he has his epic, he has every drop you could want on a well geared raiding monk that hasn't gotten into VT yet. And he is keeping that monk at level 52.

Quarken's a number cruncher and there aren't many other mobs in the game that have been crunched more than Naggy and Vox. He knows their total HP, he knows their DPS, he knows the resist values required to prevent damage from their AEs, hell he knows what they have for breakfast and when they like to take a poo poo. He uses all this info to come up with a genuinely ingenious plan to solo both Nagafen and Vox with his level 52 monk.

Now, these two dragons don't gently caress around and it's not like the old FD/regen tricks work anymore. Quarken knows he can get a shitload of AC/HP on his monk, but not enough to survive without some kind of healing. Lucky for him, there's too much poo poo in this game for the developers to keep track of. Nagafen drops a shield called Bladestopper, which has 10 charges of a Rune spell on it which completely blocks a certain amount of damage when clicked. Vox drops something called Prayers of Life which is an item that has 5 charges of a group heal. There's also this old potion that shamans who practice the tradeskill alchemy can make called stinging wort which instantly heals for 300hp. The best part is these are all readily purchasable and relatively cheap to buy.

Sometime before or around LoY, Quarken with his level 52 twink monk using all these healing items is able to solo both Nagafen and Vox. It's an unreal accomplishment. I'm pretty sure he did it for awhile before he eventually posts it on graffe, monkly business, or the official EQ boards.

The community goes wild. All those half joking posts of "nerf monks," go all caps. People are outraged that an alt had all this gear they would have never seen on their main character and it was used to kill dragons that the server's newbies should have been enjoying. The devs are wondering how the gently caress this even happened.

The fallout is massive.

The stinging wort potion is removed. There is this massive rebalance to how much each class benefits from AC that hits monks so hard that any idea of them ever tanking anything is completely thrown out the window. How monks are itemized is completely readjusted going forwards. It was still possible to solo Naggy/Vox but it required a level of gearing that could only be described as opulent.

kirbysuperstar
Nov 11, 2012

Let the fools who stand before us be destroyed by the power you and I possess.

Frog Act posted:

Did anyone else play EQOA? It feels like it's really under remembered despite being like the second console MMO ever

I wanted to but online game support for PAL PS2s was, lacking because we never got the HDD. If you wanted to play FFXI you had to be on PC here. EQOA did have a disc release but it wasn't really supported too well. Most of my PS2 online time was Killzone and Phantasy Star Universe lol

Dizz posted:

EQOA had a keyboard in your lap? Why didn't they make a controller like the one for PSO

Frog Act posted:

I think it just wasn't popular enough, but iirc most people just used a regular USB keyboard plugged into their PS2. I did and I was only 12 at the time, so that was about as sophisticated as I got with peripherals.

Pretty much it was because you could just plug a USB keyboard/mouse in, rather than having to rely on proprietary ports as with on the GCN.

Ad by Khad
Jul 25, 2007

Human Garbage
Watch me try to laugh this title off like the dickbag I am.

I also hang out with racists.
here's an example of the easter egg type stuff the original plane of mischief has, my friend galaxy sells the flowers from there every TLP and it pays for his 4 accounts and would probably pay for about 10 more accounts if he had them. all the extra krono he pretty much just gives away, he is a very nice person

https://streamable.com/omh2f1

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Dizz
Feb 14, 2010


L :dva: L
I dont think that hand aggros you. it just taps you with a knockback spell. of course the pet doesn't give a poo poo though.

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