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I lol'd.Quote:
Originally Posted by Torrid
I agree though. Grinding mobs is much more preferable than grinding quest to me. At least I'm playing my character and using my skills, spells, and other abilities.
Example:
Quest to kill 10 giant rats.
I kill 10 giant rats. (quest complete)
Turn in quest. (I get 1000 xp and 100 gold coins)
Is that suppose to make it less grindy? Why not just make the rats give more xp and drop more gold? Quests should be significant and not just be filler exp.
Torrid as I said you can argue that it isn't the multiplayer you desire but you can't call a multiplayer only facet of a game to be the death of multiplayer for that game. Second while your point may be relevant to a PuG it is hardly relevant to a raid crew, let alone a guild. I fully remember the early days of WoW when it was far more like you are talking about, maybe not as much like EQ but where most people still knew each other and the whole server kept tabs on each other.
Also Lons if anything LK did what you commented on as far as greens replacing purples. For the most part I ddin't find anything that beat my T2 equipment until well into my mid 60's and nothing replaced my T3 until I hit Netherstorm and SMV. Which isn't to say that I disagree that stat inflation is probably the biggest issue WoW has, I often wonder if they hadn't gone that route what the game would look like now. Then again if MC loot was still relevant now 6-7 years later I doubt I would still wanna play as much, what would the point be in playing a game where content hasn't really done much in 6-7 years beyond give new bosses to beat and new textures to cloth your toon in?
Granted from my understanding the EQ raid... "tiers" for lack of a better term since I don't think they acted in that way from my understanding, didn't drop a full set of gear for every spec/class. But how much would it suck to be 6 years later and for one reason or another still farming something that first came out 6 years ago for one drop for one person.
I really liked the old EQ models! i miss the flying jump kick, who's idea was it to turn it into a drop kick. and whats with all the puffy chests and the forward tilt!
This I mostly agree with. While I don't have a problem with simple fetch quests and simple kill quests, although they do generally cause a issue with Lore Coherence ex. why the hell is a guy who has killed the LK, DW, Rag, etc wasting his time getting simple stuff and killing a couple guys for a few gold pieces when he is sitting on a horde of money that would make most cities jealous. Each zone or hub should be tied down to an actual significant storyline, which Cata did a fairly decent job of and MoP seems to be doing an even better job of based on the limited exposure currently available. The part that you guys make me chuckle about is how you guys talk about grinding mobs is a more pure way to play as if you don't use your skills while questing.Quote:
Originally Posted by Syana
It wouldn't be anything like MC loot having value for 6-7 years, that would essentially have loot having no progression at all. The key is that each tier of raid loot should offer a *small* upgrade over the previous tier. So if you had a full set of MC level gear, and picked up a few upgrades in BWL and AQ before BC - that your remaining MC loot would mostly carry you through level 60 (though perhaps you might find some 5-man heroic blue/purple upgrades prior to raiding at level 60). You would then start upgrading your gear again in the starter Burning Crusade raids - likely replacing most (but maybe not all) of your MC gear before SSC/TK - though you may end up passing on minor upgrades that would bump your AQ gear up slightly in favor of powering up someone in your raid that would gain more from the upgrade.Quote:
Originally Posted by Valdis
In order for the game to do this successfully, the upgrades should be enough to warrant an upgrade - but small enough that a player can skip a tier (or two) in any slot without impacting their performance too greatly. Also, you can't have bosses dropping 5+ items per kill, generating 40+ items in a single instance clear. Bosses should drop 2-3 items tops (for 25 player raids), further slowing the influx of new shiny's.
What this ends up doing creates a need to run older content. Molten Core could still provide upgrades for people working towards raiding in SSC/TK (they might be able to do Gruul & Magtheridon - then they can roll through AQ, BWL, even MC, to fill out upgrades to make their raid force stronger).
The current WoW method pretty much discourages running *any* non-current tier content; with the current exception that running Firelands for additional legendary items is still a good thing - but convincing your raid to run this content to help out is like pulling teeth (since there is nothing in it for them).
See that makes a certain sense to me. However what kind of gear would quests give on the way from 60-70? If I remember T3 was ilvl 86. SMV/lvl70 dungeons is ilvl 110ish blues and the T4 is ilvl 120. Considering that the blues from UBRS and questing at 60 was ilvl 55-60 the quest gear of greens was 80ish in Hellfire but most of the stat budget goes to stamina so meh who cares. Overall the ilvl jump from Naxx 86 -> Outland dungeon blues 115-> Outland heroic 120(granted only one per heroic run) -> T4 120, isn't that bad, just more jarring then what an EQ player would be used to. The thing that really kills the curve is the BC (146 from Sunwell) ->LK (200 for 10m Naxx and 213 for 25m Naxx) and it got even worse from LK (264/277) -> quest greens in Cata (272) and first raid tier at 359.
So stat inflation from top of vanilla at 86 to top of BC at 146 isn't horrible but starting to get there. The BC to LK inflation is almost as much stat inflation as a grey item at lvl 1 compared to Naxx60 loot, which is out of control and the LK to Cata ilvl inflation is just out of control. For the record MoP keeps up with the inflation where the greens start off at the same ilvl as LFR Epic loot.
The approach is instead of jumping 70-100 iLevels with an expansion, you just keep the 13 iLevel curve going linearly. The EJ benefactor's bar has been endlessly debating these topics for years so I don't particularly want to rehash it all. Suffice to say there is a clean and elegant solution to the iLevel mudflation and it doesn't involve MC being useful as current content. There are all kinds of ways to set it up, pretty much all of them better than what has been happening since TBC and especially since badges were introduced.
WoW did start out like a watered-down EQ -- you couldn't technically quest 100% to level cap even -- but since then, it's become very dumbed down to the point of no return.
I'll give you a hint: Blizzard's second largest mistake was the Dungeon Finder.
Edit in response to Valdis: your purples from end-game Classic should not be invalidated by questing greens. Here's an example of what you could do (requires an EJBB subscription, and if you're interested in this topic, I'd recommend you get one and get caught up):
http://elitistjerks.com/f30/t125518-...6/#post2115222
Well badges are neither here nor there in regards to stat inflation. But yea I'm familiar with the alternate methods even some WoW devs have made some rather good long posts regarding how they regret the stat inflation.
Badges are a catch up mechanism that invalidates prior content.
Yea said that somewhere in one of my posts. I just really experienced this just recently. Guild on skullcrusher forced me to get rid of my DFO. Was a real wtf feeling. People were willing to slit your throat just to get that thing at one point and it was something i was happy to achieve. Instead some random thing is better. Blah.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lonskils
Well that's not entirely true or accurate. Blizzards stat inflation invalidates prior content, badges do allow skipping of said content but they could just as easily have been setup in such a way to not allow you to skip it, the mechanism isn't inherently a bad idea merely it's implementation. But we should probably stop talking about stat inflation since we all agree it's bad and getting nitpicky about it isn't really worth the time to write about how bad it is or where on the slippery slope to stop is a good point. Like you said EJ has a huge discussion on it.
No need to nitpick over word choice. "Badges as implemented are bad" is of course what I meant.
Anyway. I have fond memories in EQ of having to catch up through Kunark bosses, then Velious bosses, and so on. Camping stuff in Kunark so I could get my epic. Doing the frost giants for the first time. This was all while Planes of Power was current, but EQ didn't invalidate prior content to the extent that WoW does.
Well you know me Allara, I like being nitpicky about the words.
I personally blame my English teachers, and first girlfriend whose mother was a PhD with a doctorate that was literally about the proper use of written English and how modern spoken English is changing it. Between those two my poor teenage mind was corrupted beyond redemption. :sad:
Making previous tier gear obsolete is nothing more than a selling point for the new expansion. I know because we do it too. I'd love to do a content only expansion where we don't do a level cap change, and don't upgrade the gear significantly, but unfortunately that becomes harder to sell to the players, because ultimately (at least in EQ) nobody plays for cool content, they play for the item chase.
I actually asked the question at Fan Faire last year, that if players could go through an amazing quest/event series, and get no great rewards, but it was just the most amazing questing/story in the game, or had the option to grind something completely mindless and boring for the same amount of time, but it gave a nice reward, which they'd prefer to do. Sadly, most of the people who answered said they'd go for the mindless task because it gave them loot.
EQ Next is a black hole of info, even to the rest of the company. They're keeping it VERY secretive because they're trying to do something really innovative. No idea when there might be new info.
Everything should become obsolete at some point, there has to be progression or people *will* stop playing. I think what has been lost is the understanding that the level of progression doesn't have to be in the 20-25% range, but can be in the 3-5% range.
Also, as Lons said, replacing raid gear with random rewards earned while grinding experience is very deflating.
Most of us here realize that loot is the carrot, I think what needs to be taken into consideration is that the next carrot I chase doesn't have to have +100 more of every stat to be appealing to me.
For everyones sake lets hope innovative doesn't mean some horrid FB flash game. Talk about a coup de grace to the franchise.Quote:
Originally Posted by Elidroth
It's not a FB game. I don't know where that rumor started, and it couldn't be more wrong.
I figured it wasn't, I have just seen companies look at the people throwing money away at FB games and saying hey we can do that too, that I get worried nowadays. I didn't even know that was a rumor lol.
The gaps between the soloable gear, group gear, and raid gear also matter. If the ilevel gap between group gear and raid gear is 30, and expansions raise ilevel on all gear by 10, then raid gear from two previous expansions would still be superior to 5 man junk.Quote:
Originally Posted by Andaas
Of course every expansion having entire sets of armor that just have +X% more stats is terribly boring design to begin with. The 'hand crafted' items so to speak in EQ were much more interesting. You still had some useful stuff dropping off Velious mobs even in the PoP era. You saw people not replacing some fear and hate drops until SoV, because Kunark didn't have a superior item in every single slot for every single class. Everybody was MUCH more interested in what a mob's drops were when one of the famous guilds first downed a raid mob, because the drops weren't just a stupid token you hand to a vendor for a boring set item that is known on day 1 of beta.