All Posts by Samuraisword

For some reason communication is really lacking fron TCoS staff all around. It is piss poor marketing not to communicate with fans on forums like this.

Good deal. Maybe I won't need to buy a new dual core system this year after all.

I think it's smart for a developer to not push the limits and try include older machines to gain a wider audience. You can still produce a high quality game without demanding computers with max performance.

Originally posted by DragonOak

 

Originally posted by Samuraisword

 

Again, if the designers intended players to be able to control multiple characters at once, and receive the benefits of doing so, then the game design would allow every player to control multiple characters with a single account. You just want to use a cheat code by multiboxing and circumvent design. By doing so you negatively impact other players fun by introducing lifeless characters and bots into the game, and try to gain  an artificial advantage in a competitive environment and thus ruin that aspect of the game.

 

The same could be said that if they did NOT intend multiboxing they would have required only one account per person!  But alas the greed of the business should be the first rule in applying logic.

The game does only require one account to play it. I don't understand what you are saying.

If you are suggesting it's up to the developers to prevent someone from operating multiple accounts, I don't know how that's possible. It's not unusual for multiple persons in the same household and IP address to be playing the same game on their own accounts, so they wouldn't want to ban or limit by IP address.

Originally posted by cveselis

They are trying to get people to do it just for the mounts...especially since they are saying the larger sized mounts are going to be able to do more impressive things in combat...

It's kind of lame though for people who don't want to spend the extra money

I will not be playing AoC when the developers demonstrate this kind of mentality of creating an imbalanced level field from the start.

I would only consider resubscribing to an older game if the reasons I left originally had been addressed and fixed and had nothing to do with it's overall appeal. It would require a fresh server launch though, as joining an established server is not desirable. Horizons is a game I would try again if they provided a fresh server start by wiping one of the current ones or launching a new one.

I would love to play classic EQ, but it no longer exists. The progression server failed to deliver by not following a historical time frame release of expansions but instead created an ego trip for uber guilds to rush thru content.

Originally posted by Warthog099

Simple, I play a MMORPG to have fun.

In my own opinion death penalties are not fun if AoC has one I won't play it.

They should put in a switch, ie dificulty, IF you choose a death penalty the harsher the penalty the greater the exp. and rewards from the kill.

Simple

That's not a bad idea but probably harder to code than just offering a server with a fixed hardcore ruleset. It always amazes me when developers just don't offer a variety of different ruleset servers to satisfy casuals and veteran players alike.

Originally posted by dreamer05

It gives you a sense of ownership, a sense of reality.  To me it makes me understand that my actions have consequences.  I think it makes me feel like more a part of the world, and more immersed.   Sure of course it is going to make you angry when you die, but I think that after you get over it you've learned and experienced something.  Not to mention, call my crazy, but some corpse runs in EQ were just plain funny.

Sadly the kids(players) nowadays don't understand the concept and joy of earning your way and paying your dues. They want everything now without consequences or effort. There is just no explaining it to them.

Originally posted by Rouan

Originally posted by Samuraisword

 

I'll take your $5. I was one of the 10,000 who logged on that first day of release and played for over 4 years straight until SOE ruined the game after Brad left.

 

I also mostly soloed, and soloing is about playing one character and relying on that character's skills only. Multiboxers are cheaters, circumventing game design by artificially creating their own hybrids and using bots to accomplish solo what they were not intended to accomplish solo and benefiting from multiple class skills without grouping and sharing experience and loot. If the designers intended players to be able to play multiple characters at the same time, they would allow every player to do so with a single account.

Multiboxers ruin immersion, by filling the game with lifeless soulless characters and bots. Based on my experience multiboxers are rude, hog mobs and entire areas, to powerlevel a character or farm items for goldselling. That doesn't make me bigoted, it is fact based on my experience.

 

Why are you people trying to dictate how people ENJOY a game within' the rules?  WHY?! 

We aren't, we are respecting the intent of the designers and the spirit of the game and MMOGs in general. The designers make the rules.

You want the benefit of multiple class skills, being more powerful with numbers, leveling faster in a group, then group up with other real people and share the experience and loot and deal with the annoyances that sometimes come along with having to interact and organize with other real people. Trade offs, good and bad, exist between grouping versus soloing, as the designers intend, and are taken  into consideration when balancing the classes, skills of characters, and rewards for different playstyles in the game.

Again, if the designers intended players to be able to control multiple characters at once, and receive the benefits of doing so, then the game design would allow every player to control multiple characters with a single account. You just want to use a cheat code by multiboxing and circumvent design. By doing so you negatively impact other players fun by introducing lifeless characters and bots into the game, and try to gain  an artificial advantage in a competitive environment and thus ruin that aspect of the game.

Perhaps Curt Shilling will make a game similar to classic EQ pre Planes of Power of course.

Originally posted by Rouan

Originally posted by sebbonx

You obviously don't get it. The posters here, and myself are old school EQ players. We don't like five boxers or have any use for them. You would never have been allowed in a guild worth a crap in the old days. You would have been ridiculed and  ostracized till we forced you to quit. Social games don't have people five boxing, and you were simply hogging a spawn for your bot crew. We don't care what your Guild Leader says, he is just as wrong minded about gaming as you are.

Ostracized

$5 says I started playing EQ before you.  I've played EQ off and on for the last 8 years so I know the changing landscape.  Just because you, Mr. "Old School EQ Player", can't adjust to the way EQ is now played gives you NO right to attack it's current members for wanting to box to have fun in the game.  Your response is bigoted and ignorant and you should be ashamed of it.  To think, you want to dictate to other people how THEY should enjoy the game!?  What are you?  Abashi?  Are you old school enough to remember how he changed the game and infuriated people by basically telling them how to enjoy it?  Congratulations, you're so in tune with old EQ you now channel how Verant acted in it's early stages.

I also mostly soloed, and soloing is about playing one character and relying on that character's skills only. Multiboxers are cheaters, circumventing game design by artificially creating their own hybrids and using bots to accomplish solo what they were not intended to accomplish solo and benefiting from multiple class skills without grouping and sharing experience and loot. If the designers intended players to be able to play multiple characters at the same time, they would allow every player to do so with a single account.

Multiboxers ruin immersion, by filling the game with lifeless soulless characters and bots. Based on my experience multiboxers are rude, hog mobs and entire areas, to powerlevel a character or farm items for goldselling. That doesn't make me bigoted, it is fact based on my experience.

Yes voice chat ruins immersion unless all voices are synthesized to emulate the in game character.

Hearing a squeaky teenager's voice coming from a big monstrous orc or an old guy's voice coming from a sexy female elf ruins the game.

Originally posted by k11keeper

Originally posted by todeswulf

Voice chat dosen't ruin immersion.  Playing with a Night Elf Hunter named Didurmomhard does.

Lmao I have to totally agree with you there. The one I always see and always laugh about it a mithra in ffxi name shedontusejelly I mean c'mon thats funny but not very final fantasy esc. They are a pretty cool person just gotta laugh at that name though.

That is the fault of the server staff for not changing those names. Someone who picks a stupid out of character name like that on purpose is not cool, they're an ass for trying to ruin the immersion factor for everyone else.

A joke as in WoW, just a temporary loss of stats, something that most people don't fear and therefore don't care if they die and play the game like a zergfest because of that or a significant death penalty you want to avoid that keeps the excitement and intensity level high, makes you plan and use careful consideration when exploring and hunting?

Originally posted by sebbonx

You obviously don't get it. The posters here, and myself are old school EQ players. We don't like five boxers or have any use for them. You would never have been allowed in a guild worth a crap in the old days. You would have been ridiculed and  ostracized till we forced you to quit. Social games don't have people five boxing, and you were simply hogging a spawn for your bot crew. We don't care what your Guild Leader says, he is just as wrong minded about gaming as you are.

Ostracized

QFT

Originally posted by Sestun

You want perma-death in a game, easy just delete your toon when you die. Want to lose your items when you die, easy just destroy all your items when you die. If you want to lose exp when you die, easy just spend 2-20 hours killing no exp mobs. Any game can have harsh DP, all it takes is commitment on your part. Why make a game hit you on the head when you can do it to yourself.

I always see one of these idiotic posts in these types of discussions.

There is a competitive aspect in multiplayer games and there is no point in competing unless everyone has the same ruleset.

What Funcom should do is offer a hardcore ruleset server with a significant death penalty. That way players can choose the ruleset they want and everyone will be happy.

Originally posted by Onitora

     I see these types of threads all the time on a lot of forums for a lot of sites and the arguments are always the same.  There's the 'Why would you want a harsh Death Penalty?  That makes a game less fun!' crowd, and the 'Why would you want NOT want a harsh Death Penalty?  That makes the game less fun!' crowd.  My response is almost always as follows:

 

Think back to the classic console days, for example; Super Mario Bros.  Remember when you finally beat the game?  You didn't do it on the 1st try, (probably, ) and you probably started over quite a few times, not just a stage re-start, but a 'from the beginning' re-start.  You probably got pissed off a few times and went and did something else for a while from time to time, (or you broke controllers, and yelled at your TV, etc.  )  It's fairly likely that everyone who played the game had similar experiences, and the point is this;  You knew you only got 3 chances to get it right, before you would have to go back to the beginning and do it all over again, and when you got a little further than you had the time before, you probably got excited about reaching a new level and by the challenge of making it even further.  The excitement factor could easily be multiplied if you were on your last life at the time.

THAT is what a death penalty is supposed to accomplish.

Now, on the other side of that coin is good ol' 'God Mode' in Doom for example.  You had no reason to do anything the way the game was supposed to be played; infinite health, armor, and ammo?  Do what you want it doesn't matter.  Run through the whole game w/ the Chainsaw if you want.  Nothing to hold you back!  Sure it's fun for a while, but you know that because there was no drawback for anything you did or for how you approached your progress through the game, when you made it to the end you probably weren't impressed.

 

As it applies to an MMO, the philosophies implemented today don't tend to deviate far from 'Death Penalty = Pause to collect my stuff again.'  which is sad in my opinion.  That generates zero desire for me to figure out what I did wrong, or try a different approach to accomplishing a task; cause it won't matter if I fail.

So, to begin to close out this already overly-lengthy post, I can't throw my hat in w/ either philosophy in good conscience because I see merits and flaws on both sides.  Reward without Risk is not a reward worth gaining.  Penalty without Compassion is Punishment, with no lessons learned. (There is a difference between a Penalty and a Punishment.)

As to what I subscribe to as the best death penalty?  The original SWG was on the right track.  Whoever came up w/ the XP penalty / level loss penalty, (I blame Gygax personally, ) was just plain mean.  OG-SWG hit you where it really hurt; your stats.  That always made TONS more sense to me then 'I got hurt, and forgot a lot of stuff I did...'  OG-SWG you got your ass handed to you and you saw / felt it when you tried to just wade back in the the thick of things again:  You got your ass handed to you again because you were just beaten within an inch of your life moron; you're hurt! 

(The only point I would deviate from w/ OG-SWG would be to eventually hit the point of permanent attribute loss if injuries were ignored for a prolonged period of time.)

If you made it to the end of this; you get a 10% XP bonus for the next post you make that contributes to a conversation, instead of detracting from it. 

Excellent post.

Significant death penalties do make the game more challenging because it is an obstacle to avoid and thus overcome, which requires more planning and consideration of actions instead of just rushing into situations. As said eloquently by Onitora, the risk of death increases overall excitement and the reward of success intensifies because of the risk of death.

A  significant death penalty should also allow a gap to develop between players that die often and players that die less. This gap can be witnessed by all players and represented by gain of levels, gain of items, gain of knowledge, etc. This is an important aspect of a multiplayer game, the ability for some players to surpass other players competitively.

Now you could implement a system where you significantly reward players who die less without having to penalize players who die often, which would accomplish the competitive aspect, but this still would not satisfy the intensity and excitement that avoiding a significant death penalty provides.

I might be wrong but I have heard NCsoft is proactive about banning accounts they suspect are involved with botting, macroing, goldselling. I remember seeing articles about mass bannings.

I don't consider a large investment of time to accomplish goals to be grinding as long as there is some variety between mobs and geography. I actually prefer more experience to be earned from hunting than questing. The journey is what I enjoy so the longer it takes to max out, the better.

I hope solo play is equally rewarding as raid or group play. I don't expect the solo path to be easy though, I want it to be challenging and therefore most content should be designed for small group difficulty. As long as all items in-game are fully tradeable and not artificially restricted to benefit a certain playstyle such as raiding, then soloers will have the alternative to trade legitimately in-game for those items they can't acquire otherwise.

I like an emphasis on crafting, it's been a while since I have seen a true quality crafting game. It is imperative that all crafting ingredients for even the best recipes, can be acquired by soloers, albeit maxed out soloers for obtaining drop or harvested ingredients from the most dangerous mobs and locales. The best crafting ingredients will be horded by raiders if they drop or are harvested from raid mobs or in raid locales, with little chance of trading for them. I know this firsthand from classic EQ after Planes of Power was added, which ruined crafing as a pursuit for soloers and small group oriented players because they added an upper tier of new best crafted items which required ingredients from raid zones and mobs. No one pursues crafting just to make the lower 80% quality items, that would just be a waste of time and effort.

Originally posted by Torak

I find poking at my eyeballs with a cattleprod to be more entertaining then EQII, but hey, thats me.

 

True. Saying VG is better than EQ2 isn't a glowing endorsement.

Originally posted by altairzq

They nerfed it already?

Of course, it's what SOE does best. They did the same thing to classic EQ after consuming Verant.