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April 18, 2024, 10:19:16 AM

we're back, baby

I don't want to get involved in the discussion, but I kind of agree with El Gallo. Mudflation doesn't make content harder, it only makes the bleeding edge newly released zones harder.

Sheer need due to survival? I think not. The casual can survive just fine in the old world, where he is now, and he can keep his pace and get to the new zones eventually.

Now casuals that want to experience the powergamer content when the powergamers do, that's a different matter.

Quote from: El Gallo

My apologies for getting a little carried away on the ranting there. I see your point about mudflation, but I am still not seeing how it hurts the casuals. When the casual gets to orc1, he'll have a PGT instead of fine steel. When the casual gets to lower guk, he'll have a lammy instead of a pgt. When the casual gets to lower sebilis, he'll have a LSoEE rather than a lammy, etc. It's actually easier for the casual to master the content because of the mudflation.

Ahh but there are multiple ways of combatting mudflation, and Everquest switched tactics midstream, which is why we are even having this argument.

Back when I played, it was the days of The Vision (TM), and the de facto method of combating mudflation was increasing the difficulty of trivialized encounters. Each patch would bring a slew of changes intended to make the encounters more difficult (either via nerfs to players or buffs to "trivialized" mobs). This is the Everquest I remember.

Sometime after I quit the game, Sony fired (or otherwised forced out) everyone involved with The Vision (TM) and began to attack the problem from a different, and from the sound of it, a better angle. Instead of focusing on making the current content less "trivialized" they anticipated the constant need for game inflation by increasing the rate at which they created expansion packs. They began to combat the problem by adding more content at the same rate in which the old content became stale. I can only go by your review, since this trend started after I quit, but it sounds like a welcome change and a decent solution to the problem.

However, it sounds a bit like a ponzi scheme. It all works well when the developer can afford to constantly throw man hours at the problem by creating expansion after expansion to include new inflated difficulty content for the users to consume, but eventually you're going to hit a critical mass where you can no longer create the content fast enough. Probably that's why EQII is being developed, a "reset" point where the whole cycle can start again. If you really want to see an example of why mudflation is bad, wait until a year after EQII comes out and they stop all content creation on EQI. You'll see that everything in the game has been trivialized and there will be no future content on the horizon to anticipate.

Quote

As for paying, I have to pay for court time at the local tennis court and I still can't serve 100 MPH. Hell, I can't serve in bounds consistently. But I still pay to play, because it is fun to play, even at my noobler level.

Would you continue to play if tommorrow the court owner posts a sign that says: "We have 100 regular customers. Of these customers 10% feel that the game of tennis is too easy, thus it has been trivialized. In order to combat this growing problem we have made the following rule changes, all players will be required to observe these changes regardless of skill level. 1) All rackets will be reduced to 1/4 of the normal regulation size. This will ensure the advanced players will have a more difficult game while simultaneously giving the begining players the ability to drastically increase their skillset. 2) The first person to score twice in any game is considered the winner. We felt that there were not enough come from behind victories and thus the game was not appropriate balanced. This new rule will allow the overpowered player to win faster thus less time will be wasted. 3) We have retained the services of Andre Agassi. All games will now be played against Mr. Agassi, you will no longer be able to use our court to play any other opponents. Due to the workload, Mr. Agassi will of course be tired, so he will be allowed to use a full sized regulation racket. Mr. Agassi is only available for play from 3-4 PM on Wednesdays, so our court will be closed at all other times.

Thank you, we think you will find our new version of tennis a much more involving and challenging version of tennis than you are previously accustomed to. Enjoy!"

Quote from: El Gallo

Except the casuals are still forced out of certain encounters because they aren't trivial in terms of size of raid or timesink requirement if you're going to talk specificaly about EQ. I'm part of a 'casual' players guild that raids. Most of us play maybe 3 or 4 hours at our longest stretches. We're only JUST starting to get to the point we're thinking about doing some of the high-end Luclin stuff like Ssra Emperorer. (We had a 'guild first' of the Arch Lich of Ssra two days ago.) Even that stuff is a challenge to us because a wipe means 1/3 of the holy trinity class players are past their logoff time for work/kids/etc.

The casual players aren't in second or even third tier guilds. They're in the unranked "unnamed" guilds those first two tiers don't pay any attention to. I've seen people get excited over FT2 items because it's a big upgrade. Meanwhile the 'hardk0r3' folks I know(1) chuckle or say 'oh yeah, i've got those on my twinks.'

It begins to rub you the wrong way after a while. You've bought the last 3 expansions, but you may as well have bought nothing since 2001 because you're only providing content for other players. Sure there's a few tidbits to keep you interested, but when weighed against the price of admission (monthy & box.) you do begin to wonder if you'd be better off in a single player game. That's where the ire comes from. You love the game, but you hate the underlying pyramid scheme of content & the remnants of 'teh vision'(2).

1) None of the hardcore I know have jobs. They're all on welfare or SS because of some disability or another or in college/ HS. Sometimes it makes me wonder how much parody is actually within our jests about the EQ elite. But then there's always the dismissing argument of anecdotal evidence and a sample of 1 person's experience.

2) Plane of Air still took a "well-equipped casual'" guild (uberest equipment is AoW level of stuff.) raid of 32 players from Noon PST Saturday until 5PM, and then from 6AM - 11AM on Sunday just for a Mage epic.

Let me give an EQ anecdote to show you how the powergamers, the Furors of the world, helped fuck up EQ.

I played EQ started about 3 weeks after release. I was and am a slow leveler, as I tend to take a "it's the journey" approach and want to see lots of shit. I didn't start leveling in earnest past level 10 until almost 6-7 months into it. When Kunark was released, I was level 19.

Now, Kunark was designed with zones for all levels. But, in the time since release, two planar zones had opened up, dragons had been killed, and the powergamers had torn through all of that content and started bitching about challenges. So, McQuaid got in a pissing contest with the powergamer sect, embodied by Furor, trying to measure whether his l33t game design skills could bitchslap Furor and other loudmouth uber asswipes with tougher content. So, the EQ team adjusted the damage done by monsters, as well as their hitpoints. Adjusted upwards, mind you. Way upwards.

I felt it even at lowly level 19, because in Kunark and every zone released after Kunark, the new monsters were built on this paradigm of higher damage/higher hitpoints. These just normal, everyday encounters were balanced against twinks and alts who had planar gear, or at the very least had gear they wouldn't have gotten except for they got the hand-me downs of ubers who managed to get planar gear. They were balanced for a challenge and gear level that was above what most average people could muster.

So yes, when powergamers bitch and whine about challenge in a game whose balance is focused on the "endgame" everyone suffers. That's where mudflation comes in. It affects the whole goddamn game in a negative way.

Sometimes it is like some of you played a different game than me. When kunark came out I was about level 30. Not TOO much higher than haemish. We would play in small groups in lake of ill omen (before it becam lake of ill manners) and quickly moved to frontier mountains.

Guildnights would be kunark or oldworld dungeon depending on our mood. I never noticed oldworld mobs being easier or harder for their con than kunark mobs. And I sure as HELL did not have uber gear.

I remember at that time I had JUST paid what I considered a fortune at that time for an ebony longsword (1k plat). This was thankfully after the root/snare problem was fixed. This sword was my prized possession. And I could only afford one. And even for that I had to borrow some money. So my gear SUCKED. I was also a RANGER, and I was the the only melee character of my level in the guild. So I was the PRIMARY TANK. As a ranger with suckass gear. Kunark was NOT that hard for non-twinks. Heck, two of our clerics burned out of the game and quit around this timeframe (cleric in those level ranges was fucking awful, probably still is) so I often went with a druid or shaman as the only healer. So it could NOT have been that hard.

I really don't know what some of you are talking about. Interesting how perceptions can be so different in the same game at the same timeframe. I didn't feel things actually get harder until velius for normal non-boss content. And even then the changes were limited to the new continent where I made sure to have a real cleric because I took a spanking vs those giants.

This isn't me praising the game. I think back to what i used to do around velious and wonder where my head was at. We would sit outside of a giant fort and pull giant after giant one at a time. We would do that every night for a week or so, then do a guildnight somewhere new, then back to pulling giants. Jesus, how could I stand that? Tiny guild with really really close friends must have been enough. We did have a lot of fun bsing. But not really playing the game. I have blacked out the MONTHS I spent at the fucking aviak fort. All I remember are a few funny 'asleep at keyboard' stories and having fun leaping from the top to the first pedestal.

Maybe it was the people we were around. Nobody in our guild bothered reading the boards that much. I was the only one aware of the existance of Lums, nobody complained about minor changes that didn't really affect us.

Haem, even if they made Kunark zones impossibly difficult (which they didn't) and added no new Kunark zones aimed at your level (they did) you still had 80% of the original game content ahead of you that you had never even touched. AND it would be easier for you every step of the way through that content because of price deflation on gear and new character abilities, so you get to go through those zones with LESS catassery than your predecessors did.

Yes, it sucks for people who insist on skipping almost all of a game's content because they only care about being at the endgame, wherever that is. But the only plausible motive for such a desire is jealousy.

Perhaps they should build in mechanisms that make expansions available based on total worth or something. If you're a powergamer, you got the gear, here's the expansion. If you're a casual, sorry, you still have content that you haven't seen in the old world, no expansion for you, come back next year.

But then that's a system that "punishes" the casuals. I wonder what the talk on the boards would be. Probably the same uproar as the rest system, except everyone who hates that will love this, and viceversa.

Yes, yes they DID make the Kunark mobs harder in comparison to the old world mobs, and at every single level. The mobs did more damage, and had more hitpoints. No, it wasn't "impossibly" so, but it was a distinct difference. Everything in the Kunark expansion was balanced along the lines of people with twink gear, and with the idea that some of the better Old World gear would filter down through player-to-player trades and sales to the "average" player. That's the effects of mudflation, and it hit the entire game. The experience modifiers for the Kunark zones were higher than their Old World level-range counter parts, which is why places like Lake of Ill Omen became de facto hunting spots for certain levels.