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Cithen posted:But, what if it did mean something... I think some of it was meant to be groundwork for plans particular developers had for future content that just never got realized, considering developers who were actively in the trenches at the time were only around for like 1 or two expansion cycles before leaving for other work. There's probably a whole bunch of poo poo that got started and never completed because of shifts in priorities, or shifts in staff where they just didn't know what the stumps were going to be used for.
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Oct 28, 2021 18:12
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Cithen posted:But, what if it did mean something... There are a lot of interesting ones like this. Another one is Opal Darkbriar who is a Dark Elf Necromancer guildmaster in East Freeport, whilst also being a High Elf Wizard guildmaster in West Freeport. This kind of seems like another half-finished dream, but did get some extended lore in the tabletop RPG where she's a baddy using some kind of magical device to maintain the illusion of a high elf elsewhere. I think so much of EQ's magic just comes from the loads of half-finished systems that come together in a way that surprisingly works. A lot of it, I think, is how game systems applied to NPCs and players alike. It was sort of symmetrical in that sense.
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Oct 28, 2021 19:47
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On that note I also remember that the devs of Everquest straight up LOST the tools to edit some of the old zone's geometry, which is why they had to do the complete remake of the city of Freeport at one point. It's been forever since I read the article on that though so I'm not sure where it was posted.
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Oct 28, 2021 21:01
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Vinestalk posted:bardpostin This stuff is amazing. I never knew about autocircle. Is there any emulated servers that I can level up a bard on and still get this experience? All the kiting I ever did was as a druid, so it was pretty cut and dry speed buff+dot kind of stuff. I really miss emergent mechanics like kiting. I cannot think of an MMO that allows for that kind of player creativity. Which is really what this thread is about. Thanks for the nostalgia!
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Oct 28, 2021 23:53
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Mercury_Storm posted:On that note I also remember that the devs of Everquest straight up LOST the tools to edit some of the old zone's geometry, which is why they had to do the complete remake of the city of Freeport at one point. It's been forever since I read the article on that though so I'm not sure where it was posted. I didn't know that, but it makes sense. there's been a lot of work by people in the eqemu community to make custom content, I guess they could use those tools  but at some point its probably easier to just make a new revamped zone and sell it as part of a major world update.
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Oct 29, 2021 01:04
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!amicable posted:Is there any emulated servers that I can level up a bard on and still get this experience? Project 1999. It's classic Everquest up through Velious, really well done, and populated with I think a little under 1k players at peak daily.
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Oct 29, 2021 02:45
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I started playing EQ when Kunark came out but before Velious. At one point, I played with another goon who told me about this exploit via the fletching tradeskill, where you could make a profit fletching and selling to an NPC vendor some type of arrow that y ou could buy the materials for from said NPC. I ended up running a macro and AFKing overnight in Akanon (since it was usually empty so less likely to get caught. The macro would also automatically stop if a guide or GM came into the zone) and would wake up to like 800 or so plat. I ended up twinking out my ranger with the best gear money could buy. My friend would sell his excess plat on ebay (or IGE or whatever) and I think he ended up paying off his car with the money he made. (he was like 19 and I was only 15 so I just spent the money in game). The fun came to an end though when I woke up one day and saw that all of my platinum was gone as well as most of the items I had bought with my dirty exploit money. Apparently a GM wised up to the scheme. Surprisingly, I wasn't banned, but I think I did receive a warning. The game may have disrespected most players' time, but if you had a high level benefactor or your character was an alt, you could make leveling up fairly trivial. Twinking and powerleveling had almost no limits since high level buffs could be cast on just about anybody and most powerful weapons and armor could be used at any level as well as traded. I remember having an alt who was a warrior I think who had FBSS (a haste item), and SSOY (Short Sword of Ykesha, one of the best swords one can buy) and going into a high level dungeon like lower Guk at like level 15 with my high level druid friend who buffed me and I tore through mobs. I remember getting like 15 levels in one night or something obscene like that.
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Oct 29, 2021 22:06
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FrostyPox posted: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 When Crimecraft first launched you could bring up the console with tilde and there were no roles preventing players from doing whatever they wanted. It was incredible
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Oct 29, 2021 22:45
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retpocileh posted:Project 1999. It's classic Everquest up through Velious, really well done, and populated with I think a little under 1k players at peak daily. Oh nice! I have played on EQEmu a billion years ago, but never came back once they really sorted stuff out for p1999. I sort of thought that the auto circle method of bard AE farming didnt work on that client tho? Either way I did end up setting up my project 1999 account, but logging in is just not working out, so I may not get to have my teeth kicked in by a grass snake. (e: managed to fix it! hoorah!) Regarding twinking: I also loved this aspect of early MMO design. I started playing EQ when Kunark launched, and I spend most of my time in the EC tunnel trading paper clips into jet planes. I managed to get TBC on my warrior before I hit level 20 by a mix of handouts and clever trades. Holy poo poo did leveling up a warrior suck tho. I stopped playing that character and made a druid, because I wanted to actually have fun things to do instead of auto attacking and praying that I did more damage over 60+ seconds than an orc. I did go back to live EQ briefly last year, and I found I missed the much much much slower combat pacing. Camping a spot and clearing it just feels somehow much more like and idle clicker game and fits pretty well with working from home. (I was playing a necro when I came back, fwiw). I think allowing characters to get artificially boosted by gear could come back in modern MMO design. Most modern MMOs have a pretty distinct "leveling up" and "max level" gameplay loop. Allowing twinking within the first seems pretty inconsequential? I cant think of any games that really support this tho. Phoix posted:When Crimecraft first launched you could bring up the console with tilde and there were no roles preventing players from doing whatever they wanted. It was incredible !amicable fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Oct 29, 2021 |
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Oct 29, 2021 23:00
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I think Anarchy Online allows for equipment-based twinking, via high quality level implants and such.
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Oct 29, 2021 23:50
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Padams posted:I started playing EQ when Kunark came out but before Velious. At one point, I played with another goon who told me about this exploit via the fletching tradeskill, where you could make a profit fletching and selling to an NPC vendor some type of arrow that y ou could buy the materials for from said NPC. I ended up running a macro and AFKing overnight in Akanon (since it was usually empty so less likely to get caught. The macro would also automatically stop if a guide or GM came into the zone) and would wake up to like 800 or so plat. I ended up twinking out my ranger with the best gear money could buy. My friend would sell his excess plat on ebay (or IGE or whatever) and I think he ended up paying off his car with the money he made. (he was like 19 and I was only 15 so I just spent the money in game). The fun came to an end though when I woke up one day and saw that all of my platinum was gone as well as most of the items I had bought with my dirty exploit money. Apparently a GM wised up to the scheme. Surprisingly, I wasn't banned, but I think I did receive a warning. oh man this reminds me of fish rolls there was a brief period of time where you could roll a high elf enchanter, dump every stat point into charisma, run to freeport, buy a cooking spit from a vendor, sit in the fishing shop next to the docks and just constantly crank out fish rolls via vendor components and sell them to the vendor for a profit (made better due to the increased vendor prices from high charisma), it got fixed fairly quickly but not until I had made enough plat to get some rad gear for my brand new necromancer, plus around this time players were realizing the benefits of having food that lasted a long time so I just transitioned from vendoring my fish rolls to selling them to players (mostly monks, they had to deal with strict weight limits on their inventory and the rolls were like 0.1 weight per stack of 20) also I too jumped on the druid powerleveling bandwagon, I would kite mobs for my druid friend while he smoked a ton of weed and occasionally dotted the mobs and in exchange he babysat my alts, just sorta hanging back, casting thorns and regen / sometimes a heal on me and making sure I didn't screw up too bad. if it wasn't for that druid, I never would have discovered my undying love for the shadowknight class because they sucked too much rear end to level back then (nothing like current EQ though, where shadowknights are one of the fastest solo levelers in the game if you're fine with dumping some plat into gear every 5-10 levels)
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Oct 30, 2021 03:21
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When I last talked about City of Heroes, I brought up "inherents" and how the hero versions felt tacked on because they were, in fact, tacked on. I am going to go into one of the dumber ideas of that game: Defiance. When City of Heroes first launched, it had the five hero archetypes: Tanker, Scrapper, Blaster, Controller, Defender. As you can guess from the names, "tank," "sturdy melee DPS," "fragile but potent ranged/AOE DPS," "crowd control," and "assorted buffs/debuffs NOT HEALERS YOU DIPSHIT SCRUBS." They eventually added the Kheldian archetypes of Peacebringer and Warshade, which I'll not get into detail about but will mention their inherents when I get to that point. Hero Inherents were added with Issue 5, but the villain archetypes introduced in Issue 6 each had their own. Brutes had Fury, or "the more you attack/get attacked, the more damage you do." Masterminds had Supremacy, or "your pets are better if you're actually anywhere in the area," with the later addition of "your pets can take some of the damage for you," since Masterminds were rather fragile. Dominators got the Domination thing I talked about, or "build meter by doing stuff, activate meter for SUPER MODE." Stalkers had Assassination, which basically revolved around "use your Hide power to turn invisible and then shank fuckers for BIG DAMAGE." (Stalkers had problems I will get to at some other date.) Corruptors had Scourge, which had an increasing chance to deal double damage to targets as the target's health dropped (nigh useless on Minions, could come in handy against beefy Archvillain/Hero class enemies). Now, that's the five villain classes, and their classes were designed and built around their inherent. Hero classes were built without that. Tanks got Gauntlet, which just formalized and pointed out that all of their attacks had a small AOE aggro built in. Scrappers got Critical Hit, which just formalized and pointed out that their attacks had a chance to deal double damage. Controllers got Containment, which let them deal extra damage to crowd controlled targets (only Sleep broke on damage; Immobilize, Stun, and Hold did not). Now, this leaves Defenders and Blasters, which require a bit more detail. Defenders were kind of rough to figure out an inherent for, because it had to be something that was effective no matter what primary set you took. Defenders had thirteen possible primaries, and something that boosted healing would have been completely useless to four or five of them, depending on how it would have theoretically interacted with the regeneration boosting power in the Traps set, and mostly useless to all but two, and even for those two, the real meat of things was their buffs (which dipshit scrubs overlooked; the most "healing focused" set of Empathy had three powers that directly restored health and the other six were pretty good buffs). What they eventually settled on for Defenders was "Vigilance," or as it was commonly called by players, "Negligence." As the party's average health drops, you get an increasing endurance discount for your powers. Kind of limp, I agree, but like I said, it had to be something useful no matter what primary power set you had. A functionality was eventually added so that it gave a damage bonus on small teams: +30% damage solo, +20% with one teammate, +10% with three, and zero after that, to help offset the fact that a Defender working alone or in small teams may not be able to do enough damage to put things down in a reasonable amount of time. So as you can see it was never really great, but the archetype as a whole had a lot going on. Any two given tanks functioned in broadly similar manners, but if you tried playing a Dark Miasma defender the way you played a Sonic Resonance defender, you were in for a bad time. Vigilance, as unimpressive as it was, was not nearly as bad as the lemon that Blasters got: Defiance. See, the big problem with Blasters is that they had zero defenses. All well and good, you traded in all of that for more damage, that's the bargain you took and so on and so forth. But the big problem that Blasters had for the longest time is that they didn't do enough damage to justify their absurd fragility, or the fact that if anybody on the team hosed up, the Blaster died. Defiance was meant to fix this because, as your health dropped, your accuracy and damage improved, and that was it. Suggestions such as "don't get healed by teammates so you can keep the bonus going" were put forth by the devs, and yes this was as stupid as it sounds, because blasters went from "fine" to "dead" really fast, because enemy damage was designed to be a credible threat to tough Tankers and Scrappers, not defenseless by design Blasters. And it also didn't fix one of the biggest problems for soloing Blasters, which is "an enemy hits you with a mez effect and then chips you to death and you can't do poo poo to stop it." So it gave Blasters more damage they couldn't use because they were often too dead to pull it off. While Vigilance was never really "fixed" because what the hell can you do to make something universally useful to such a grab-bag of an archetype, Defiance did eventually get completely overhauled into Defiance 2.0, or as it was sometimes called Defuriance after the Brute inherent it resembled: each attack gave a small, short, stacking buff to damage, so you'd get extra damage as long as you kept up your onslaught, and most importantly, you could use the first two powers of your primary and the first power of your secondary (in other words, powers you could've had at level one) even if you were mezzed, so being stunned was a problem but not a death sentence.
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Oct 30, 2021 05:36
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!amicable posted:I sort of thought that the auto circle method of bard AE farming didnt work on that client tho? Not sure about auto circle specifically, as I have admittedly never actually played Bard. I do know they're still the fastest levelers in the game by far and that's due to their mass AE kiting. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3SPHjvW2zM
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Oct 30, 2021 06:45
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MechaCrash posted:When I last talked about City of Heroes, I brought up "inherents" and how the hero versions felt tacked on because they were, in fact, tacked on. I am going to go into one of the dumber ideas of that game: Defiance. I actually found old Defiance somewhat useful as an Ice/Ice Blaster because I had a significant enough amount of CC that I could hover around low health in a fight and sometimes come out OK, but I was so happy when they changed it to make it.... you know, just actually good in all situations for all Blasters.
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Oct 30, 2021 16:27
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Inspired by recent discussions of bards and faction mechanics in EverQuest, I thought I'd share the bizarre, complicated way my bard friend and I figured out how to duo a whole lot of dragons and earn absurd amounts of platinum in doing so. In order to understand how this worked, you need to understand several of EQ's systems. 1. NPCs didn't just consider faction when deciding whether to attack players; they also used faction to decide whether to join a fight they witnessed and which side to help. This played out in some obvious ways in the open world, when for example a wandering wood elf NPC would kill some orcs. It was also the way city guards worked: when they saw a player attacking a mob, they would decide whom to assist based upon which entity had higher faction. In nearly all cases (particularly if the player was in their own race's starting city), this would mean they'd attack and kill the mob. In some cases, however, a player could have low enough faction that the guards wouldn't help them, and in rare cases it could happen that a guard would actually assist the mob and kill the player. 2. As far as NPCs were concerned, a charmed NPC had the same faction rating as the person who charmed it, but it was nonetheless considered an NPC and not a player. 3. In order to stop some really annoying bugs that could arise in raids, the devs made it so that any NPC above a certain level (51? 55? I forget the particular threshold) was guaranteed to leave behind a lootable corpse as long as any living player had done at least 1 point of damage to it. Previously, and for lower-level mobs, there would be no corpse, XP, or loot if an NPC was killed mostly or entirely by another NPC, to prevent players from leveling by tagging mobs and having guards finish them off. However, because EQ was quite buggy, it could happen sometimes in raids that a boss would poof upon death in a variety of circumstances, such as if the killing blow came from a damage shield (which were oddly not counted as coming from any player - they were treated as environmental damage) or if the group who had done the most damage all died before the boss did (which caused the NPC to forget that said damage had come from players and act as if it was from another NPC or the environment). Having explained these things, I can talk about One Weird Trick we figured out to duo dragons for fun and profit. There was a zone in the Velious expansion called Western Wastes, which was chock full of high-level dragons that dropped mostly tradeable loot. They ranged in power and were intended as low-tier raid content for 2-6 groups of players. The vast majority of these dragons were on a faction called Claws of Veeshan, which was one of the three main factions with whom players could ally in that expansion's content. Although everyone started out kill on sight with this faction, it could be raised easily enough by killing a bunch of giants. Also in Western Wastes was another roaming dragon, named Melalafen. Melalafen was a quest NPC who was accordingly indifferent to all (so that anyone could speak to him and complete his quest), and he had a different underlying assigned faction. He was also the second most powerful NPC in the entire zone; he was made to be extremely tough mostly so that players would leave him alone and he would remain available for his quest. So here's how our One Weird Trick worked: my dragon-allied bard friend would attack and aggro Melalafen as well as one of the random low-level animal NPCs that wandered the zone. Bards could run incredibly fast, so it was relatively safe and easy for him to kite them around. He would run both mobs through the spawn or roaming point of one of the many Western Wastes dragons. Then, while both were in close proximity to the other dragon, he would charm the animal NPC and have it attack Melalafen. The dragon would see this, perceive the animal as an ally it liked much better than Melalafen thanks to the bard's high dragon faction, and attack Melalafen. Because Melalafen was a stone-cold badass, Melalafen would win 100% of these fights. And because high-level NPCs always leave a corpse, the only action necessary to get loot from them was to do a single point of damage to the dragon before Melalafen killed it. It was difficult for the bard to remain near this fight to tag the dragon safely, because doing so would have made both sides of the fight want to kill him, and NPCs always preferred attacking players to NPCs if both were in fighting range. Also, if the bard had attacked the dragon he would have lost dragon faction and been forced to go farm giants to get it high enough for our trick to work again. This was where my mage came in; I would stand at maximum range and fling throwing daggers at the dragon until one hit. Then I would back off out of combat/AOE range and wait for Melalafen to win. I'd loot the dragon, we'd rinse and repeat, and we'd split an absolute fortune of loot at the end of each night. Not only did my mage taking dragon faction hits not matter, it was actually a boon, because the dragons dropped heads I could turn in to the giants (with whom I was allied) for additional tradeable loot. You might call this an exploit, and I would agree with you in principle. But my paranoid teenaged self was afraid of getting caught and banned, thereby losing all my profits, so I actually petitioned a GM to come watch us, asking whether it was allowed. The GM said, "Wow, that's really clever! Have fun guys." Nonetheless, our trick was patched out a month or two later.
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Oct 30, 2021 18:58
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When I was talking about how much Defiance sucked, I mentioned that Stalkers had problems. I will get into that now, but I will point out that this probably won't be a long story. The Stalker's entire thing is "go invisible, then shank a fucker for big damage." Going into the Hide state took a few seconds, and the shank had a wind-up time. If you moved or got hit during this wind-up time, your shank was interrupted. Which, okay, so far so good whatever, right? The problem is that if you were not using the shank, your damage was terrible, and because your entire thing was "sneak in and shank a fucker," your defenses weren't great either. If you were unable to get the shank, you were basically a Scrapper but lovely. Which leads to the other big problem of "using the shank requires you to get into the group, find a target actually worth shanking, and have enough time to actually use the shank." And that took a lot of time most groups simply didn't want to give you because, really, it wasn't necessary. So one of your powers, namely the one your entire archetype is built around, is functionally useless for most things. This did at least eventually get fixed, though. First it was little band-aids like "if a target is mezzed, you get a better critical chance on it," "the more teammates you have around, the better your critical chance," and "if you kill a dude with the shank you debuff the enemies around the dead guy," but eventually they added the Assassin's Focus to change how the shank worked. If you were in a Hide state, or using it on a target you'd hit with the Placate power (it basically forgets you're there, allowing you to use the shank), then in operated in the "wind up, KERBLAMMO" fashion it always had. If you were not hidden, then it had no cast time, and hit for big damage (but not as big), and if you had Assassin's Focus from hitting the target with your regular attacks, you had a 33.3 chance per stack of the shank being a critical hit. So if you were unable to hide and shank, you could at least still put out good damage by using the shank unhidden for big (but not "oops all your hit points are on the floor, and the walls, and some on the ceiling" level) damage. MechaCrash fucked around with this message at 09:57 on Nov 2, 2021 |
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Oct 31, 2021 15:03
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Apologies for any misremembering. My first mmo experience was Star Wars Galaxies. I bought it on release day, got all the way through installing and creating an SOE account, but the game would not launch. It needed a dedicated graphics card, which my Windows ME Gateway PC did not have. A friend happened to have a spare card he wasn't using, a Geforce 3. He brings it over and I open up a PC for the first time ever. As luck would have it the Gateway had an unused graphics card slot and it matched the card even! However when we went to put the computer back together, we discovered the Gateway’s case had its own custom form factor. The graphics card did not allow the case to close... So we took a hand saw to the graphics card and lopped off the metal plate normally used to secure the card to the case. With the Gateway's case now bulging out on one side, the card worked and the game loaded successfully! Being dropped into a giant open sandbox, my friend and I eventually decided to get off the sand planet and go somewhere more green. We were still very new to the game, almost no skills or ingame currency. We did delivery missions (Just walking from point A to point B for profit over and over) for a while till we had enough money for a one way ticket to a different planet... Endor, the planet with friendly Ewoks. This was not a destination meant for new players though and we soon learned that the Ewoks were vicious inhabitants, bloodthirsty murderers. Being unable to do any of the missions, we found ourselves marooned on Endor. We pleaded our case to the occasional passerby coming out of the starport asking for pocket change to get back to Tatooine. Except we couldn't understand anyone. SWG races all spoke their own galactic language, and if you didn't know that language it was all just gibberish. Eventually some kind wookie soul taught us all the languages and gave us each enough to go home to our shithole desert planet. As others have mentioned, SWG wasn’t quite ready for prime time. In this sci-fi future space setting, there were no forms of personal transportation at the time of the game’s release. You walked EVERYWHERE. No speeder bikes, no transports. If there wasn’t a shuttle or a spaceport, your rear end was taking a long walk at a gingerly pace. Eventually new content was added, MOUNTS! Not vehicles though, animal mounts bred and trained by players. A sci-fi setting where everyone rode around on tauntauns and similar creatures. Once speeder bikes were added, the running joke was to duel someone and then blow up their nearby speeder. On planets where there were deep crevices in the landscape, your speeder bike would get stuck pointing upwards as if you were doing a never ending wheelie until you got back to higher ground. This was never fixed. You had three health bars, “HAM” (Health, Action, and Mind). If any of your three health bars hit zero, you fainted. You could then be finished, or recover to faint a few more times and then die. If you didn’t pay to have your body cloned somewhere beforehand, you would spawn with a portion of your HAM blacked out, “wounded”. Wounds stacked, and some attacks even caused wound damage as they hit you. Often in the aftermath of pvp, you would see players with all three bars almost completely blacked out. If your Action or Health was wounded, you had to go to a hospital and a real player could heal your wounds. If your Mind was wounded… You go to the Cantina and watch player dancers and listen to the player Jizz bands. The Wookie expansion had a most awesome giant lizard mount. I loved that thing and its dumb bark it would sound every time you spawned it. Rode it everywhere even when there were better modes of transportation available. The last expansion for the game added an item with good stats for animal tamers / breeders. Then like two weeks later the NGE update dropped and deleted the profession from the game completely. At some point after SOE had changed or removed everything the players loved or cherished, they took the last thing they could. They updated the player models so you no longer looked like you anymore. A recent article for SWG: https://massivelyop.com/2021/07/23/gdc-2021-star-wars-galaxies-was-a-complex-game-of-corporate-greed-and-fan-love/
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Nov 2, 2021 09:52
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Little lull in the thread so I'll post about bard soloing in PoP era EQ. Exp grinds and cash camps were great, but they were just a means to an end when it came to playing a bard. Bards were legit one of the best classes to solo with, and I'm talking big targets. Yeah, enchanters could charm to do wild poo poo and rangers with elemental bows could gatling down certain old world raids, but bards pushed boundaries on such a wide variety of targets in unique ways. For me, it started with a nostalgia trip to solo Tantor at level 56. I read a story about a bard doing it during Luclin era and I wanted to see if I could pull it off. I'd never played a bard before and I had always wanted a Tantor's Tusk and Stronghorn's Horn when I played on PC servers, so I figured it'd be fun. Fast forward through the grind, I made sure to get all my defensive AAs and Mental Clarity 3, because I was sure as poo poo not excited to deal with the velium hounds who ran at SoW speed. But it turned out to be a fairly simple kite. No summoning, I could charm some of the wolves or highsun them back to oblivion, so I was way over prepared for it. There were a surprising amount of encounters like that where it's clear that a hard encounter was trivialized by the fact that they didn't add summoning. Classic example of this was Rallius Rattican in PoDisease, a favorite of the old AK bards. Run in, DA pull him out of the cave, fade off the trash, kite him with 4 dots and reap the rewards. But even summoning wasn't a big hurdle for bards. I mentioned earlier that bards could cast their songs while moving. When you couple this with the absurdly high movement speed buffs bards had, a summoning mob might swing one or two rounds before you were already gone and casting your next song. Great examples of this were the nameds in PoGrowth. You can only spend so much time getting gems and spells before you want to poke the bear. Grahl, Galiel, Farstride, Sarik, Ordro... low hanging fruit especially if you wanted to pick up some random armor pieces for alts. Ordro in particular had the interesting mechanic shared by many mobs with small models. If you got them low enough HP and they started fleeing, they could reach the distance required for out of combat regen much quicker than a normal sized model. So you could be kiting something for 10 minutes, get it below 10%, then it starts running and only gets a couple steps before it jumps back up to 30% and re-engages. Or, even worse, randomly pops back at their spawn point with near full HP. This was a huge problem with the stampeding piglet in PoTactics, who required a really tight kiting circle to make sure that he didn't depop from being outside of his pursuit range. But Ordro wasn't the only Velious mob with this odd quirk. For some reason, Lodizal, the giant rear end turtle in Iceclad, could very easily get out of combat regen. Lodizal was considered an entry level raid encounter that a geared out player could solo. He's not a particular hard creature. No AE, 32k HP so nothing special, just summons and hits hard. But if you could solo him it was like you graduated from group content to raid content. He was considered "Tier Zero," on the old raid progression tier list that's been floating around since Luclin. I fell prey to that out of combat regen during my first couple attempts. Kiting him forever with a Thunderous Drum of Karana, some lovely pre-raid gear at level 65, and enough AAs to get the class title. It was demoralizing after being on the cusp of victory and getting caught out by that short window of time between when he started running and when his HP shot back up. My first kill was a train wreck where I had like 15% HP left after kiting him on a super short leash. But, it was like riding a bike after that. You could get this real good feel for the distance and start anticipating when he would start fleeing. Phinigel, much like Lodi, was a Tier Zero target. For those that don't know, he's the "Last Knight of the Kedge." A fish person in a giant robe who likes to cast high level wizard spells. The interesting quirk about him is that he dispels all the buffs on his target within a couple swings of his fists. It used to be my favorite solo target because it was just straight burn. Buffs are pointless. Load up all the dots and melee him face to face while he unloads nukes and dispels. Before I was mostly EP geared it felt like it was always tense. Lodi and Phinny were chump change, though. Everyone and their mother had soloed them on AK. I didn't start turning heads until I soloed Terror. Terror was one of the 3 golems in PoFear and the only one that didn't death touch. Terror had his own poo poo though. He was nearly magic immune, resistant to just about everything else, and had some gnarly old world era procs. Frost Breath, the AE that deals 500 damage and strips buffs, and Spectre Lifetap, a 65hp life steal on melee. He summoned, he had 35k hp, he hits for 450, he does not gently caress around. Normally I wouldn't have even bothered, but some pre-Luclin encounters had slow out of combat regen. This meant you could turn the fight into a war of attrition if you could regen faster than he could. Soloing Terror was always a very long time investment because you gotta clear the entry to PoFear and the NW corner to give yourself a place to kite, and then you have to chip away at his health before you drop agro and heal yourself. The general strat was junk buff yourself to poo poo so levitate, Selo's, and Psalm of Veeshan were buried far from ever getting dispelled by frost breath. Next, split Terror from his amygdalan buddies and bring Terror to the NW corner for the kite. Then it was just twist and run. Two dots max, because you have to fit in Psalm of Veeshan to get resists high enough to potentially block Frost Breath and you had to keep Harmony of Sound on him to make sure you could land some dots. The most important piece of gear for this strat was Lute of the Flowing Waters. It was insta-click Wind of Marr (highest group regen) from inventory which was clutch for ameliorating the build up of damage after summons. Eventually, no matter what, Terror always summoned me and chunked away my HP or dropped a lucky frost breath. That's when you had to fade him off and pump your HP as much as you could. I would equip the lute and Singing Steel BP, click the lute to get insta regen song (at +240%!), click SS BP for the 100hp heal, sing Niv's Melody of Pres for the extra bit of modded regen, and just repeat the cycle. As that tubby metal fucker was trundling back to his ziggurat getting maybe 3% HP back, I was going from 20% HP back to 100% in no time. Re-pull and the kite starts again. The other clutch piece of gear that I needed for this was War Drums of the Rathe. The +240% damage increase on the two piddly dots I was landing were enough to mean my damage output was enough to overcome his regen between fades. The clicky dot on it meant I could free up an extra song slot, but I don't know how much I used it since HoS only lowered Fire/Cold/Magic. My first couple attempts ended in me getting flattened by underestimating his melee output and by not clearing enough trash before hand to prevent a cross zone DT from Fright or Dread. I want to say my 4th or 5th attempt I got him fleeing and he pathed directly through the fire wall into the amygdalan pyramid, which I never cleared, and trained myself with amys. After that, though, I got my first success. He dropped absolute poo poo (Blood Fire and Bone Razor) but I was ecstatic. It felt insanely good to pull that off and it made me think about what else I could kite now that I had the requisite stats to pull that off. I went to Umbral Plains and started testing stuff. First up was Radir Fireshower, a brainy little red alien in the caves way back in UP. Kill him and he pops Spirit of Radir which is the actual target. This fucker hits as hard as Terror but Flurries (several hits in one round of combat). No AEs but he's Luclin-era, which meant a shitload of HP and fast out of combat regen. Instead of fading Radir off for my own regen, I had to regen in between combat rounds and do so for a prolonged period of time until I felt like I could start dotting again. Total war of attrition. It took forever, and I probably could have sped it up by chain charming gantrus at him, but I really didn't like depending on charm for mobs that didn't stop to cast AEs. If they have high melee damage output, the pet gets chewed through and I have to spend mana to charm a new one. And I mentioned in my other bard post that mana is a premium for bards because mana regen is capped way lower than other classes. And fade was clutch against raid encounters that went awry. My first attempt I found out the hard way that after killing Radir, Spirit of Radir actually pops back up in the caves where Radir originally spawns. So I had to drag my rear end across the zone to pull him back to the Maiden's Eye zone tunnel. I was able to drop him on that attempt and pull off the same with Tawro/Spirit of Tawro, although I needed someone to kill the Netherbian Swarmlord before I could pull Tawro out. The fights were LONG and there were dicey moments where I felt compelled to push my regen threshold from 25% to 30%. There was a clear difference between the damage output of Radir and Tawro but I forget which was which. One was very consistent damage while the other was large spikes. The wins got me stoked to try other stuff, though which is when I started thinking about Zelnithak. Zelnithak was a speed bump in UP and drops garbage most of the time. A massive giraffe-horse hybrid (?) that most in era guilds skipped so they could kill rumblecrush to get inside VT. But he was interesting from a solo perspective. Flurries, 225k HP, hits as hard as Terror, two massive AEs. One is a 6sec stun recasted every 25secs with a huge radius that leaves you completely vulnerable if you don't resist it. The other was an AE disease DD for 350hp recasted every 30secs that had a larger radius. Resists were clutch. The AEs made the Radir/Tawro strat less desirable, because an unlucky stun and I'm toast. So I had to find something to charm. The gantrus in UP were these big troglodytes that, again, had Luclin era HP. The good news was that they were charmable with the max level bard charm. Since I couldn't easily lower their magic resistance long term, my charms didn't last super long, but their HP pool was big enough that I could still get back the mana I lost chain charming without them dying constantly. It was a gift and a curse because they needed that MR for the AE stun. By combining dots and gantru pets, I was able to tackle that big rear end giraffe on my first try. The AEs were trivialized by Psalm of Veeshan and some Flowers of Functionality from PoMischief. It was LONG, though. I could buff the gantrus to resist the DD but the stun meant they couldn't swing for long stretches. Rathe Drums again delivered when needed as the damage output of modded dots could speed up the process at least a little bit. Much like Terror and Tawro, he dropped trash on my first (and only) kill, but it was a fun accomplishment. But there was so much I left on the table and even more that I'm sure more talented bards had pulled off. It was a class that really let you be creative and do things no other class could. Here was my "To Do," List when I stopped playing regularly, and I was reasonably certain I could have pulled them off in PoP era: -I think I was gearing up to try Udongo Digolo at some point, but I got sidetracked by other targets before I gave it a real shot. I wanted to dive deeper into PoGrowth to see what else I could pull off because I was sure there was only a couple I couldn't pull off solo. -I had a plan in place to solo Trakanon and I was sure I could pull it off. Trak had the same slow regen mechanic as Terror, so I could easily outpace him provided I could manage everything else. Strathbone antivenoms were the last thing I was stocking up on. I probably had enough but I always wussed out on attempting it because I was depending on Toetwister to land the snare. It's such an unpredictable proc and it always felt like it lasted 5secs. I hated the prospect of doing all that work just to train myself with Myconids after Trak ran across the bridge. -Kunark era dragons, Sev/Gore/Talendor. I was knocking on the door. The challenging thing was they were belly casters on top of good dps and AEs. It was a lot to manage in close range without drawing the fight out into absurd lengths of time. I think I was a couple pieces of raid gear away from having the resistances and hp/ac to be more confident about it. I'm pretty sure I could have done Faydedar but we had the broken pathing spawn on AK that led Fay to his inevitable and very quick death at the hands of the shackle quest NPC in Timorous. -I was pretty confident I was a couple pieces of gear away from pulling off Venril, as well. Psalm of Veeshan was great at stopping the Deadly Lifetap, so it would have been a matter of dealing with the rest of his damage output and managing any adds I got in his little pit room area. I think I could have kited him between his two rooms and pulled off the Radir/Tawro strat, but with 100% uptime on PoV and maybe HoS to ensure dots landing. -Kelorek'Dar was one I was still trying to figure out the best approach for. The long distance stun made it so tricky to manage things on top of him being a belly caster. Finding a good place to kite him was also tough. Couldn't bring him on dry land unless I wanted wyvren adds and the water is so murky that I would get a good visual on his distance until he was already on top of me. -I had a good plan in place to try some dragons in WW that involved charming cragwyrms, but the dragons were so low on my priority list because I really didn't enjoy the prospect of burying charm under debuffs/buffs on pets that would last maybe 1/10th of the total fight. -Similarly, I tried Wuoshi a couple times and just got really unlucky with spawns. The corrupted animals used for the nature's defender quest were my ideal charm pets but they were tougher to track down than I thought, which meant I got stuck chain charming trash into him which didn't work. -On AK, we had the race-based loot version of Innoruuk and PoHate prior to the big revamp that added the gems and poo poo. I was working my way through the minis there and the last one I had to do was Maestro. I was sure I could have pulled it off but it just takes forever to clear Hate carefully enough to create the space needed for those kinds of fights.
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Nov 11, 2021 00:00
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A thing about EQ I'd like to add in that I don't think got brought up, or at least not specifically mentioned. That out of combat regen? You, the player, do not get that. If you were injured, the only way to get health back was to bandage yourself (only goes to half, unless you're a monk; then it goes to three quarters), use healing potions (lovely, bulky, expensive), use healing magic (gently caress you warriors), or just sit your rear end down and wait. Sitting increased your healing rate from one every six seconds to two every six seconds! When your level got high enough, you got an extra hit point per tick, so it was two HP per tick standing, three sitting. MP could regenerate while using the Meditate skill, which you activated by bringing up your spellbook and clicking the Meditate button, which meant you couldn't see poo poo until you got to the level where sitting down automatically activated the skill. On a similar note, City of Heroes also didn't have different regeneration and recovery rates for "in combat" or "out of combat." What it did have was the universal power Rest. When you activated it, you'd take a knee, and then after a few seconds, your HP and stamina would recover at an enormous rate, but your vulnerability to damage would skyrocket. This is fine so far, it encourages making sure you're safe before you use this power. The problem is that at launch, the refresh time for this power was ten minutes, rendering it effectively useless, because if you didn't take Stamina you weren't lasting ten minutes before needing to rest again, and if you did then you didn't need to rest. They did eventually severely reduce the recharge time, I think it was down to a single minute by the time of the game's closure, making it actually a useful resource to recover your health if you got too banged up.
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Nov 11, 2021 07:16
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djJO1XSOwuI The Star Wars Galaxy postmortem from GDC with Raph Koster (creative director) and Richard Vogel (executive producer) was uploaded to Youtube a few days ago.
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Nov 11, 2021 12:22
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Did we ever get any of the actual software from Ultima Online 2 or anything out of that whole project? I forget if they actually had a game done and were ready to release when it was shitcanned. You'd figure someone would have saved those files instead of throwing them in a literal bonfire.
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Nov 11, 2021 13:35
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Mercury_Storm posted:Did we ever get any of the actual software from Ultima Online 2 or anything out of that whole project? I forget if they actually had a game done and were ready to release when it was shitcanned. You'd figure someone would have saved those files instead of throwing them in a literal bonfire. if this is the real trailer then i'm very curious about this too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOXV_jB7LTM this has the best character animation ever lol
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Nov 11, 2021 14:40
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I remember being super excited for UO2 because it wasn't a generic fantasy world.
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Nov 11, 2021 15:30
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Mercury_Storm posted:Did we ever get any of the actual software from Ultima Online 2 or anything out of that whole project? I forget if they actually had a game done and were ready to release when it was shitcanned. You'd figure someone would have saved those files instead of throwing them in a literal bonfire. I know a bunch of the assets ended up in the normal UO 3D client, but I've never heard even a whisper of anything playable coming out of the project.
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Nov 11, 2021 15:57
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Loving all these stories, really brings me back. One event that really sticks out to me from my EQ days was the day a guild decided to break the rotation. Back in the Kunark era, a rotation was set up for the major bosses (notably VS and Trak, maybe others that I don't recall). Since there was no instancing back in those days, a system was worked out among the top guilds to rotate turns on the bosses, which spawned anywhere from every few days to just once a week. This system would allow each guild to have a "fair" shot at doing these raids and getting the loot. In order to be allowed into the rotation, you had to prove you could handle them by killing lesser bosses with consistency, and then at that point you would be allowed a trial run at these bosses. If you were able to kill the boss within some allotted time, you would be entered into the rotation regularly, otherwise you would have to wait for another turn. During Kunark EQ was definitely a growing game, and as such more and more guilds were forming and getting to the point where they could feasibly kill these bosses. It got to the point where your guild might get one shot a month at a boss like Trak. For the older guilds who had gotten far more kills of these bosses than the newer ones, it was fine. They were more interested in keying up and doing VP as they had geared up to a far higher extent than the newer guilds just breaking in. I'll never forget the day a guild (Stasis, for anyone who was on Prexus) made the decision to break the rotation. They killed a boss when it was not their turn, which sent a shockwave to all the message boards of the guilds and server, and from that moment on the rotation was gone and bosses went to a FCFS format. While I never participated to this extent, some of my friends on the server said their guilds had literal phone trees so that if a boss spawned they could get everyone online as quickly as possible to form up and get to the boss. Wild times. Would love to hear stories from people about if your server had a similar system or event, and especially if you were in the guild that broke the rotation.
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Nov 11, 2021 18:01
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Kemian posted:Raid rotations and FCFS Oh, probably time to share some fun poo poo from my server. I played EQ from 2000-2008 or so, I was on Xegony, and I did not get into raiding until Luclin. The Xegony server was an interesting beast, I feel like it was used as some sort of social experiment considering how other servers (seemed) to be managed. Our server essentially had no GM/Guide presence that I could tell, as such, rules were not enforced often/ever on our server. This lead to Xegony being one of the most drama filled servers, I'll try to find a link to the old forums becuase it was just a loving shitshow. Xegony was a FCFS, in fact I didn't even know that other servers did rotations until playing a bit on P1999, because that poo poo definitely didn't happen on our server. So, Xegony was typically a slower to progress type server because of FCFS and lack of GM/Guide intervention; guilds would train each other at raid mobs (i.e. a monk grabbing a shitload of mobs and feigning death on an opposing raid), until someone gave up or both raids gave up. Anyway, let's set the stage for how lovely a community Xegony was before we get into the real meat of the story. I believe someone earlier talked about Kerafyrm, aka The Sleeper, he was (kind of?) The Big Bad in Velious, except he was (basically) unkillable and dropped no loot. Once you woke the sleeper, the loot in Sleepers Tomb would change, and it was worse. A guild on another server woke the sleeper (maybe multiple guilds on multiple servers) and everyone found out about the loot changes and servers started agreeing to never wake the sleeper. Enter "Inner Circle" the top guild on Xegony, they farmed all their characters what they wanted out of Sleepers Tomb and then woke Kerafyrm to gently caress every other guild out of the good stuff. This never affected me but was a big deal to the other guilds that were raiding, massive forum drama blah blah blah. Next comes Luclin, I also believe someone talked about this before but there was an endzone called Vex Thal (VT), every character had to complete a key for the zone to enter it, this key required a few components, 10 lucid shards from various zones, some other groupable trash, some items that dropped from various raid mobs and then The Planes Rift, which only dropped after you killed Emperor Ssraeszha (technically they dropped off mobs that spawned after killing Emperor but whatever). At this point in time there is an alliance raiding that is the topend, 3 guilds raiding together (Illuminati Sancti, Shards of Avalon and I forget the 3rd guild), and then a couple other guilds on their heels, a few US guilds, a Euro guild and an Asian guild. I befriended a few guys in the alliance guilds and ended up joining them for raiding, once we finally beat Emperor we had access to VT, but there was still no instancing in Everquest and the alliance wanted to farm VT with impunity. Emperor Ssraeszha spawned on, I believe, a 7-day timer with a +/- 12 hour variance, so could spawn anywhere from 6.5 days to 7.5 days from last kill, the fight was also one of the hardest from a damage perspective and the hardest from a mechanics perspective to date, so it was not an easy raid mob to kill and was a big choke point. What also happened was that, when you triggered the emperor event, the room before it became impossible to enter, if you entered it, you would get immediately death touched. The alliance decided, in order to farm VT with impunity, we would block everyone else from completing this event in whatever way we could. So, there were folks that would camp out characters in emperor's room, we would also have monks/druids/wizards/SKs/necros ready to go to train raids as they attempted to get to Emperor's room (wizards/druids had an AA called exodus, 60 minute reuse time but would instantly teleport you to the entrance of the dungeon and drop all agro on you). For 3 months we would train every other raid at all hours of the day into oblivion until they gave up, if they were able to start the event, folks would log their characters in that were camped in the emperor's room and depending on the class do various things, clerics would Bestow Divine Aura (DA makes you invulnerable but also causes mobs to attack someone else since you weren't able to be hit) the main tanks, other classes would open trade windows with clerics so they would miss their heals, there were snakes that spawned with emperor that you would keep offtanked/mezzed, these mobs had mez broken and generally hosed around with etc. This resulted in an insane amount of drama on the forums and within game, but the alliance was able to farm VT without contest for roughly 3 months, maybe a bit longer.
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Nov 11, 2021 21:31
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The Sleeper was ultimately a strange and interesting group psychological experiment. There was no benefit of any kind for waking him. After the first few servers did so, there was no mystery as to what was going to happen and, as others have said, the loot in his tomb became permanently worse, for everyone, forever. Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure every server woke him, though on a wide variety of timelines. Sometimes it was a guild that openly hated the others and did it purely out of spite. Sometimes it was the server's top guild, which had spent months farming the good loot and wanted to stop it dropping to slow the gearing pace of its competitors. Then there were guilds that would argue it was necessary for the good of the server, by removing the motivation for farming Sleeper's Tomb and thereby pushing people toward other content. There were also guilds who decided after a certain point in the game's progression (usually an expansion or two post-Velious), that they and every other guild who had made it into Sleeper's Tomb by that point had "earned" the right to see and loot it in its original state, but any guild who might get there in the future (benefitting from later expansions' loot and character progression) didn't deserve the same rewards, and so waking the Sleeper was somehow necessary to preserve the integrity of the zone. The first two rationales were selfish and nasty, but they were also more honest. Simply put, there was no actual reason for awakening the Sleeper other than some version of "gently caress you, got mine." The psychological experiment part came in seeing how long any given server's raiding community could collectively resist the temptation to make that choice and what kind of moralizing window dressing they'd attempt to put on it afterwards. Hic Sunt Dracones fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Nov 12, 2021 |
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Nov 12, 2021 00:24
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poo poo they still wake him on P1999 despite it being even more meaningless than on live.
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Nov 12, 2021 00:43
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I have to imagine that at least a few guilds did it because they thought maybe they'd be the ones to beat him
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Nov 12, 2021 09:44
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blatman posted:I have to imagine that at least a few guilds did it because they thought maybe they'd be the ones to beat him Jokes on them, the one time a guild got close (IIRC on the Rallios Zek server, one of the last servers to wake it) GMs showed up and banned the raid for terrain exploits. Remember people talking about how raid mobs can deathtouch? Kerafyrm had a zonewide deathtouch. By the time the last couple servers got around to waking the sleeper, they figured out that Sleepers tomb had some spots that were somehow safe for some reason, so they camped a shitload of clerics who did noting but chain resurrect people. Everyone got banned for terrain exploits that only got overruled when most of the players game-wide started the MMO equivalent of a riot. The GMs unbanned everyone and they tried again two weeks later, and if I remember right they actually did kill Kerafyrm. It had no loot.
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Nov 17, 2021 01:44
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DeathSandwich posted:Jokes on them, the one time a guild got close (IIRC on the Rallios Zek server, one of the last servers to wake it) GMs showed up and banned the raid for terrain exploits The sleeper kill attempt and the guild that got banned for terrain exploits were separate events, though both of them did have GMs being weird. Raid progression in Velious was kind of a mess. Guilds pushed into Temple of Veeshan first because all you needed to do to get in was kill or sneak past the dragon guarding the entrance in Western Wastes. The lure for raiders was the northern wing, which had 15 named dragons to kill. But people bounced hard off the zone initially because the drops were absolute garbage, equivalent to mid level Kunark dungeon loot, and it was a big time investment to clear with awful trash. Getting into Sleeper's Tomb was a slower process. It required each player to loot a talisman from one of a handful of high ranking dragons scattered across the expansion. The dragons were easy for rival guilds to contest and were on 3+ day respawns. The earliest version of the zone had joke mobs with no abilities that dropped cloth caps and I think the script for waking the sleeper wasn't hooked up at all. It pretty quickly got revamped with harder fights and actual loot and was looking like the true end game zone for the expansion. Then, about the time when guilds were getting enough players keyed to kill the new fights, Verant buffed a lot of the loot in north ToV to 100+ hp/mana levels with good resists and weapon procs. The new loot caused everyone to u-turn out of Sleeper's and hit up the Temple of Veeshan loot pinata. Sleeper's became kind of an off-night, side progress activity. There were 7 bosses inside the zone. The first 3 were golem gatekeeper NPCs that basically only dropped spells and took maybe two groups to kill. Then there were 4 dragon warders keeping Kerafyrm asleep in his prison. There were a few different versions of these fights, some that were stupidly broken, and the first three warders fell over the course of a couple months. The fourth was Ventani, who combined two different annoying AoEs. One was a silence, the other was a huge attack speed slow. It was possible for the majority of the raid to dodge the AoEs, but the tank had no way to avoid the slow which would absolutely kill their aggro generation. In general, you could hold back dps for a while to allow the tank to build up aggro before fully engaging a mob but in this case tank aggro was low enough and the incoming damage was high enough that they couldn't keep ahead of the clerics healing them. Ventani would start summoning and eating clerics before any real damage could be done to the boss. The guild that got banned, Conquest, was searching for creative solutions to keep their clerics alive. I don't remember what all they tried, but what triggered GM intervention was keeping a resurrection debuff on the tank to block the slow AoE and casting levitate on their clerics and having them hide underneath the bridge where Ventani was being fought. Blocking or overwriting AoEs with buffs that used the same spell slot was a known and commonly used strat. The slow component of the debuff you got when you were resurrected shared the same slot as the dragon AoE slow and couldn't be overwritten. It also had a lower percent slow so tanks could in theory generate aggro better with it on. Hiding clerics under the bridge kept Ventani from pathing to them, but like all raid mobs he had the ability to summon the highest person on his aggro list every 10 seconds if they were out of range, which meant clerics would constantly get pulled to the boss and chomped on. In theory the clerics could try to run back off the side of the bridge and float back to the safe spot to resume healing, but it didn't work well enough. Clerics were still dying after getting summoned and on the failed pull leading to the ban Ventani never dropped below 60% hp. Back in the day the devs would track progress on raid guilds by loading into the game and hanging out in the zones using invisible, god-mode avatars. I believe there was a raid designer that was watching the pulls Conquest was doing or had watched them and was letting it fly. But there were also Senior GMs who could use the invisible god mode and enter high end zones and watch fights. One of these Senior GMs saw what Conquest was doing, didn't understand it, and tried to stop the fight out of panic. They used a command to spawn in a version of the sleeper that used a generic human model and it went around death-touching and killing everyone in the raid, including Ventani. The script for waking the sleeper triggered. Buggy events played out in a few other Velious zones, but there were few reports of what actually happened because it was 2 or 3 AM and no one was anticipating the death of the last warder. The players present in the zone got something like 2 or 3 week suspensions. Other players in the guild, who weren't around for the fight, got suspended for 3-7 days. A few players with previous suspensions caught full bans. There was a lot of bellyaching on the forums because not only was the GM reaction dumb but the script itself was broken and undermined the hype related to waking the sleeper. Conquest mostly quit the game to play Dark Age of Camelot. With more time to gear and pass out keys other guilds were able to take down Ventani about a month later and trigger the still buggy script, but credit for the world first awakening would remain either in the hands of a confused, trigger happy GM or the hands of a glitched version of the sleeper himself, depending on how you look at it. The actual attempt to kill the sleeper came 2+ years later. He'd been kept alive by the top guilds on Rallos Zek to farm warder loot. But with extra levels and loot from new expansions, smaller guilds were able to threaten killing the final warder which would put an end to the farming pact. Another server had also recently woken the sleeper and noticed that his hp was dropping while he was fighting the mobs in the zone, indicating that the sleeper was missing his crazy high hp regen. The 3 top Zek guilds responded by combining forces to both wake and attempt to kill the sleeper. The plan for the kill had zero subtlety, it was just to throw as many bodies at him as possible. He death touched frequently and his melee swings were able to one round anyone without auto-riposte disciplines running, so there was no way to tank him or fight him traditionally. Clerics, necros, and paladins stayed out of combat and chain resurrected the constant stream of dead players. Newly resurrected players would walk in, make a few attacks, die and repeat. As long as the sleeper was occupied the fight could continue and some classes like trueshot rangers and manaburn wizards were able to get off decent bursts of damage and keep his health going down. It was the biggest event in the game I can remember. There was no way to watch the fight, so players across the game resorted to jumping into serverwide chat channels to get updates on the sleeper's hp. The channels could only hold I think 255 people at once, so there were a ton of duplicates called like serverwide.sleeper4 with players from across the game shitposting and spamming updates for every percent of hp lost. After 3+ hours he was below 30% hp when he just up and despawned. At first players thought it was a bug or that the script had run out of time. But the devs made a post admitting they had despawned the sleeper for a bullshit reason (they incorrectly thought he was stuck attacking an invincible npc) and after review had decided reset the zone and let the Zek guilds make another attempt. Two days after the initial attempt, the sleeper went down for good. The same chat channels filled up. Much vitriol was thrown at the devs. And players all across the game basked in the anti-climax of the corpse poofing 30 seconds after it died, with no loot or rewards to commemorate the legendary kill.
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Nov 17, 2021 14:27
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gnoma posted:The sleeper kill attempt and the guild that got banned for terrain exploits were separate events, though both of them did have GMs being weird. A lot of the raid design in EverQuest seems like it was designed to make everyone involved as miserable and angry as humanly possible while generating as much conflict and strife as it can.
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Nov 17, 2021 14:41
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Reading these stories, I feel like I won Everquest by quitting around level 25.
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Nov 17, 2021 15:01
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MechaCrash posted:A lot of the raid design in EverQuest seems like it was designed to make everyone involved as miserable and angry as humanly possible while generating as much conflict and strife as it can. FFXI had it beat at least for the Sleeper equivalents.
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Nov 17, 2021 17:15
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MechaCrash posted:A lot of the raid design in EverQuest seems like it was designed to make everyone involved as miserable and angry as humanly possible while generating as much conflict and strife as it can. yeah it owned
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Nov 17, 2021 18:26
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gnoma posted:Raid progression in Velious was kind of a mess. Guilds pushed into Temple of Veeshan first because all you needed to do to get in was kill or sneak past the dragon guarding the entrance in Western Wastes. The lure for raiders was the northern wing, which had 15 named dragons to kill. But people bounced hard off the zone initially because the drops were absolute garbage, equivalent to mid level Kunark dungeon loot, and it was a big time investment to clear with awful trash. Are you sure it was because of the loot? I'm asking honestly cause I didn't raid Velious in era, but a lot of NToV loot was head and shoulders above anything in VP from what I remember. Like, Eashen's Fist of Lightning was arguably one of the best offhand items for monks until Ssra. The AC and HP on items jumped through the roof in NToV which was the only way tanks could even survive the long fights in Luclin. I had always heard the biggest frustrations with NToV was the time it took to clear and the unbearable difficulty of unlucky flurry drake spawns.
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Nov 17, 2021 20:18
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You can look here or here (if you don't mind Furor posts) and see some of the stats on the original drops. Stuff like this:  Going off this this, Fist of Lightning might not have even been added to the drop tables until 5 months after the first dragon kills. gnoma fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Nov 17, 2021 |
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Nov 17, 2021 21:05
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Well, speaking of misery, I am going to talk briefly about the City of Heroes Epic Archetype, the Kheldian. Kheldians were a setting-specific thing, the short version being "energy symbiotes who could merge with people to make superheroes." There was a group that did Evil Science on themselves and turned themselves into beings called Nictus, which were basically immortal but had to eat other Kheldians to survive, and the players could choose from Peacebringers ("we want to stop the Nictus") or Warshades ("we turned our back on our evil ways, let us make up for it"). They did different things that aren't relevant to this story, but you can read the Paragon Wiki article if you're interested. They were very versatile, having a human form, a "Nova" form (a flying squid thing; basically a blaster) and a "Dwarf" form (a big crabby-looking thing that functioned as a tank/scrapper, sort of), and you could swap between them more or less freely. Now here's where the problem comes in. Because they were called Epic Archetypes, and you unlocked them by getting to the cap of level 50, expectations for the power of Kheldians were pretty high! Unfortunately, they did not pass muster. This, in and of itself, would have been a mere letdown, but the big problem were the Void Hunters and Quantum Gunners. According to the lore, the Void Hunters were mercenaries that existed to hunt down Kheldians, and they also sold special guns that fired Kheldian-disrupting blasts to the random gangs of the city. What this meant in practical terms is that if you were a Kheldian, sometimes an enemy that had an anti-you gun would spawn. The reason this was so bad is that those guns dealt big chunks of damage, they usually had a stun attached, and this damage could not be resisted. Kheldians were not nearly powerful or cool enough to make up for having a specific "gently caress you" enemy type lying around, so adoption rate on them was not super great. The stun was especially bad because a Kheldian in human form relied on a lot of toggle-based powers for protection, and getting stunned would shut them all off, so not only were you defenseless, you had to spend time turning them all on again. This did, at least, get fixed: the level requirement to unlock Kheldians was lowered to 20 (trivial to get), Quantum weapons stopped being unresistable, and as a more general QOL feature, being stunned or held or slept or whatever just suppressed the effects of your toggles instead of turning them off entirely.
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Nov 17, 2021 21:48
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I really enjoyed these posts. Old school MMOs were pretty great in my opinion because of the intent to design immersive gameplay with very old technology. I miss a lot of the old quirks of those games that are lost nowadays because of streamlining and because times have changed and nobody has time to put in 16 hours for one drop anymore (well, some people certainly do). I didn't really play EQ when it came out but I did pick up the trial I think when Kunark came out. Got the CD for $3 or something at K-Mart and ran around outside Freeport (I think) for a couple hours dying to everything and never touched it again. I did however play a few different MUDs around the time and really dug the immersion those brought, even through text. Materia Magica was a big one, I also played Cosrin a bit but I think it had a monthly fee so I only played a couple months since I was young and didn't have an income. Aardwolf and Achaea I played a bit of as well. I was really into fantasy books at the time so being able to "play" a fantasy book was right up my alley. Some of the things in those games were pretty interesting and you wouldn't really see in graphical games because it just took too many resources, like being able to steal from any NPC and plant weapons on them and tell the guards on them, turn into animals and interact with animal NPCs, give yourself tattoos that granted abilities and buffs, build ships to get to new areas, and more. The first MMO that really got its hooks in me was FFXI. I remember having to buy a new graphics card just to run it on my crappy PC, but seeing this massive world with tons of people running around with "amazing graphics" was coke for my teenage brain. FFXI really had a time investment = reward philosophy, or waste your time philosophy, whichever you prefer. Just some random thoughts on FFXI (I might be slightly off on some of these, it's been over 15 years): You could have a subjob, or subclass, but of course you had to go get a bunch of items to be able to unlock the ability to do so. You had to get help unless for some reason you were a higher level and could go through these zones alone. Most didn't because it was frowned upon to not have a subjob equipped or to have an under-leveled subjob. People were pretty helpful in the game though. There was a real "we're in this together" mentality in the game that not many games have nowadays. Once you got to around level 14-16 or so you had to group. The exp per hour just wasn't feasible solo after a certain point. This meant, of course, running across 2 or 3 different zones that took about 10-15 minutes each to get across just to get to the Valkurm Dunes. Even more if you decided to start in Windurst, a city that was in a completely different area than the other two cities. If you got a whisper to group, your party was waiting for you for 20-30 minutes sometimes, especially if you were a necessary role like tank or healer. And of course the second you got there, someone had to leave and the whole waiting game started all over again. There were special jobs that you could unlock but you had to do a quest for it first. Usually they were fairly long quests and some of them relied on pure RNG. For instance, the Summoner. To unlock this job you had to farm a special ruby that only dropped off of certain leeches. I farmed this ruby for about 5 hours to get the drop, which is arguably not even that long compared to most of the things in the game. It was all random though. A friend of mine got it in about 5 minutes. White Mages (healers) could teleport people to about halfway through the zone in-between a main city and the Dunes, but of course that meant begging people for teleports and there was a culture around it, meaning you tipped, and you likely didn't have much to tip in the early levels either. White Mages made bank off teleports, but of course you had to be a White Mage. I think someone already mentioned Leaping Lizzy which had some of the best in slot boots for half the leveling experience. There were multiple mobs like this with great RNG drops that people would camp for hours. I never bothered myself. And it usually wasn't even a 100% drop even if the mob did spawn, you might get the downgraded version. My memory is kinda hazy on that part though. I stopped playing XI for a long time and went to WoW and other MMOs during the MMO craze, but I came back after the Wings of the Goddess expansion and did most of the content that came before that. Chains of Promathia was incredible and Treasures of Aht Urhgan has a special place in my heart. The first time I got to Whitegate (the ToAU main city) was pretty memorable because I was with a friend and we took a boat to get there. By the way, you waited for boats for like 15 minutes, and then you traveled ON the boat for that same 15 minutes while it headed to its destination. Fun and immersive. Oh, and of course the boat was attacked by monsters on our way there so we died and when the boat got to the city we were dead. You couldn't shout for a raise because you were dead, so we had to /tell people that got close enough for us to see their names, and it took us a good 20 minutes to get a raise. You were drat thankful to get a raise in XI. Anyway, that expansion also had the Blue Mage job which let you learn the skills of enemies just by seeing it performed was pretty great. I had a lot of fun collecting those abilities. That's all I can think of for Japanese Everquest for now. desudrive fucked around with this message at 04:22 on Nov 18, 2021 |
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Nov 18, 2021 04:20
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| # ? May 7, 2024 16:40 |
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Was City of Heroes the first MMO to do the "let high-level players level down to assist lowbies" thing? In the game, this was known as the Exemplar system, and it was a pretty fantastic idea. High level players could play along with newbies without absolutely destroying everything in their path. While I'm not sure how many other MMOs today can do that, I know that at least FF14 can, which helps immensely. The OTHER system in City of Heroes that I haven't seen implemented at ALL is Mentoring. Pretty much the reverse of the Exemplar, it allowed a low level player to temporarily level up to catch up with a high-level player, only a couple of levels behind them, so they could play as their sidekick and go on missions way beyond their level. Of course, the Sidekick was still limited in their power pools to their original level. As systems that let players of wildly different levels play together, I always thought they were pretty cool systems. I wonder what game could benefit from having something like Mentoring?
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Nov 18, 2021 16:00
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