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Frog Act posted:idk I mean not that this makes the FFXI/Everquest model inherently better but it wasn't about wallets so much as it was about capturing a market of people with a staggering amount of free time and willingness to do mind numbing things (that I love) without the opportunity to bypass them with fresh cash Yah because grinding is how you kept your transaction stream going by making everything take forever so people would continue paying month to month Grinding in subscription mmos is the genesis of the free to play model
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Nov 8, 2018 18:46
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I dont understand how a game that has content that takes a long time to get through and thus requires a subscription is the "genesis" of games that let you skip doing things by paying money directly. they're the opposite of each other
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Nov 8, 2018 22:03
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In the beginning, there was grinding.
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Nov 9, 2018 03:42
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There used to be a distinction between western MMOs and asian MMOs. Asian MMOs offered an early form of ftp, because it fit their internet cafe business model. The grind in those early ftp MMOs were really bad, like worse than EQ, but you could have a relatively faster grind if you bought their xp potions. It arguably costed more to play those games than to pay a monthly fee. It was something westerners abhorred for a long time. Even after world of warcraft changed everything, it still took a few years until someone realized you can do ftp without needing to force the grind.
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Nov 9, 2018 05:39
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Harrow posted:I thought that was just Gambit. That's pretty cool. I really had no idead what I was talking about. Forsaken is not available for the weekend Mr. Pickles fucked around with this message at 12:00 on Nov 10, 2018 |
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Nov 10, 2018 11:44
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I've been playing classic EQ on the Project 1999 server, and having a blast. There's no doubt a lot of things that have improved with newer MMOs, but some of those changes also dramatically changed the feel of those games. Instances (and the matchmaking systems for entering them) were a godsend because competing over spawns, waiting for groups for hours, and getting 'trained' all suck rear end. But ultimately my experience with instanced content usually consisted of the random matchmade groups either not communicating at all, or yelling and acting lovely because the Tank isnt pulling fast enough, the DPS isn't DPSing enough, the healer isn't blah blah you get the point. People just wanted to rush through the content ASAP. It's much easier to gently caress around and have fun in EQ, but also easier to make friends that you play with for the rest of the game (and join up again in other games). Players can still be assholes, no doubt, but there's a greater social consequence to it. Since P99 isn't progressing past Velious era, it won't ever get to the point where progression gating really started getting lovely. There's still a few zone keys, but nothing like the later expansions (Shissar weapons and Vex Thal keys in Luclin, then all of PoP, etc.). EQ was my first MMO so my nostalgia for it is much stronger than my nostalgia for WoW, but it doesn't help that the content I missed in WoW was endgame raiding with the godawful faction grind and additional poo poo necessary to raid Molten Core. I didn't raid in EQ either, and I can basically jump in as soon as I nab a little more magic resist gear. The greater consequences can suck, like exp loss on death is a huge deal compared to repair costs of modern MMOs. People will say that it makes the game more thrilling but that sounds a bit masochistic. I like that it allows you to feel so much more useful and helpful to others; one extremely generous goon gave some of us access to a cleric with the cleric epic, which gives a free 96% exp resurrection. He had the epic, but not the level necessary to equip or click it. So several of us worked together to rush it to 50, and now when a goon dies, we can save their rear end. And you can walk that cleric into any busy zone and basically save someone's night (or more) by rezzing them. At later levels, exp lost can take hours to recuperate. It feels good to send someone a tell and say "Rez Inc" and feel the gratitude that you seriously changed things for them. There's a lot more but this is a long-rear end post and I am embarrassed that I made it.
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Nov 11, 2018 04:54
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I read your post. I enjoyed your post. I would read more posts. I would probably enjoy those too.
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Nov 11, 2018 13:43
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I agree that it's nice to be able to have a meaningful impact on other players. Been playing FFXI for the same reason - a powerlevel or escort helping on missions can be all the difference re: exp loss and it encourages community interaction.
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Nov 11, 2018 14:35
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I can't speak to FFXI except that I heard it, too, was brutal and unforgiving, but another thing I like about classic EQ is how it still feels nostalgic while also feeling so different from before. Everyone just knows so much more about the game, both because resources are so comprehensive these days and also because Raid Guilds used to jealously guard their secrets, and now most if not all of it is out in the open. I play an enchanter, and my kit of tools let's me "skip content" or just accomplish things that weren't intended. I have so many tools to avoid mobs, split mobs, turn them against each other, make them forget about me, etc. Modern games don't (to my knowledge) have crowd control abilities to this extent. And things get even more wild at later level content; raid guilds pull boss mobs to the entrance and have pullers just run all the "trash" around the zone so it doesn't interfere while their team murders the dragon or whatever. Pulling was crazy in classic EQ due to the way feign death worked, but even with some nerfs to it, people are capable of amazing things. Another weird thing is that everyone does a quest for a paladin-only weapon because while they can't equip it, it allows them 5 charges of mana-free instant-cast Complete Heal from their inventory, which is extremely useful to say the least. I don't even remember "recharging" items being widespread back in the day, but now its common knowledge that you should get two of any charged item, and when charges run out on one you sell them both to a merchant, and buy them back fully charged. The server is supposedly "classic" so a lot of things that are seen as exploits are allowed because they were possible in this era of the game. But some things had to be made "non classic" because they were too insane. One item had an instant-cast DD (lifetap actually, so DD that heals you) with a few charges on it. On it's own, not too crazy. But lifetaps have a low resist modifier, and the item was easy to get. Apparently guilds were rolling up to end game bosses and having everyone click and insta-killing them  Another one is AoE limits. In everquest, targeted AoE's (i.e. they radiate from your target) have a 4 mob limit. Point-Blank AoE's have NO LIMIT. Casters with AoE DD's are very fragile... but enchanters get a point-blank AoE stun. You can see where this is going. Before my time, people would pull every trash mob in a zone to the entrance, enchanters would aoe stun, other casters would aoe nuke, and you'd fly through the levels (and probably get some nice loot as a bonus). Again, this game has no instances, so if you wanted to fight there, you better hope some rear end in a top hat isn't pulling literally EVERY MOB and mass slaughtering them. So this got nerfed, and now the limit is 25 mobs - plenty for powerleveling, but not enough to ruin zones or get people to max levels in 1/1000th the time. I'm sad I missed out on the fun, but I absolutely get why this was done. So the game is certainly fun for its nostalgia value, but its equally or more fun to see how people break the game over their knee and totally change the approach to different zones and fights.
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Nov 12, 2018 01:11
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I enjoyed that post as well. Please keep posting.
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Nov 12, 2018 01:17
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When I was young I loved the forced socialization and all the friendships I made. Now, I just want to run dungeons with those friends and I want that to be as frictionless as possible. Seems like there should be an MMO for making friend and a different one for playing with them.
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Nov 12, 2018 05:30
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Do we have a "tell stories and/or talk about classic MMOs" thread? I want to read more of that kind of stuff. And maybe post a bunch of stuff about Nexus: Kingdom of the Winds way back in the late 90s/early 2000s because that game was weird as poo poo. More on-topic, I really do love being able to meaningfully help other players in MMOs, and that's something that I think is sort of limited in modern MMOs, both because players tend not to be quite as powerful on their own, and because there just aren't as many situations where you really need someone to swoop in and save you. Nothing that bad can happen to you, after all. I have mixed feelings about that, but those are in large part informed by what modern MMOs are. You wouldn't want World of Warcraft to have as punishing a death system as classic EQ because, in WoW, the "real" game only starts when you're max level. That's not really as true of EQ or FFXI or other games of their era. So while it sounds like EQ wastes a ton of your time leveling, setting you back really far if you die, etc., I think that's unfair because we're looking at it through the lens of "endgame is the real game." I sometimes think that I would never want to play a game like EQ or FFXI again, with my relatively limited playtime these days, but maybe that's just because I'm not looking at it right. Harrow fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Nov 12, 2018 |
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Nov 12, 2018 17:10
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I just started on Sunwell which is a WoW private server running WOTLK. I'm playing with my brother and his wife. We rolled holy trinity and we're just doing a bunch of newb quests and we're having fun 
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Nov 12, 2018 22:40
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if the endgame is the "real game" then said game ought to just cut to the chase and either give you a max level character or bring the rest of the game in-line with the endgame. it's really, really prominent in WoW and i think that's where it spread to the rest of the MMOs out there, where leveling is pretty chill and you run around doing quests and getting better and maybe crafting or whatever, then you finish that and the game totally shifts so now it's about content-gating and collecting the 'best' gear and knowing the encounters and doing group content and whatever else, and formerly-relevant things (esp. crafting, questing) just aren't anymore unless they tie directly into one of the above. like, that's two separate styles of gameplay right there and its entirely possible (seems pretty common actually) to like one and not like the other. the future of instanced-pve (ex. raiding) mmos is probably something like a multiplayer dungeon grinder, with core gameplay that's just all that raiding stuff divorced of the ancient mmo "get to max level" journey because if that's the 'real' game then you might as well make it the actual game. Radio Free Kobold fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Nov 12, 2018 |
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Nov 12, 2018 23:02
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I have some short FFXI anecdotes and thoughts. You started your journey with one of the few base jobs: Warrior, Thief, Black Mage, White Mage, Red Mage, and Monk. You also picked a race: Boring rear end Hume (humans), lanky AF Elvaan (elves), jailbait Tarutaru, a female-only catgirl that only men played named Mithra, or a giant weird monster dude named Galka that rarely anyone played. You then entered one of the 3 starting cities with pretty much no clue what to do. I think there was an initial quest to get like 200 gil (currency) and that was it. No quest markers on NPCs, you just had to walk around and talk to people or look it up online. Walk outside the town and start killing stuff and most likely die over and over. You also lost experience when you died and could literally LEVEL DOWN. Once you hit level 12-15 or something it was off to a new zone to level but you couldn't solo anymore. Well, you could try but you'd most likely get your rear end kicked and experience was very bad solo. There was an experience boost if you partied so... you partied. To get from one of the main cities like Sandoria or Bastok to a leveling zone like the Valkurm Dunes would take you at least 20 minutes because you had to cross two rather large zones and at an incredibly slow speed and pray you didn't get aggroed by a beastman or other strong mob and get killed. Don't even get me started on the route from Windurst to the Dunes. Running through zones at night was even worse sometimes because the mobs that spawned at night were often quite strong. Unless you had a WHM friend or the money for a teleport to cut that down by 50% or so. Once you were there, you were there for a while because who wants to waste more time going back to the city. It took hours to get one level and you had to hope your puller didn't aggro more mobs on the way back to the party or else you'd all be wiped and be waiting for a while for a rez unless you set your bind point close-by. Those parties could be quite fun though because people would have conversations while leveling often, though you would sometimes get a Japanese player who stayed quiet aside from macro messages. If you got into a full JP party (which was sorta rare because they didn't seem to really like English-speaking players, at least in my experience) I swear that leveling went by much quicker. They were way better than most Americans at the game, but then again it came out a while before it came out in the US. You could also do special chain/burst attacks to do more damage but people didn't use them that much in the parties I was in. I remember there being a pretty big guide that showed what skills chained, like almost Wildstar attunement chart levels of big for this guide. I think this is one of them. Not that bad, really, but 13-14 years ago or whatever, it was a bit confusing:  I leveled a Warrior first and was pretty bored by it because they didn't have nearly as many skills as a magic-user. I think Black Mage had like 75 spells or something crazy number, though most of them were just higher level versions. Often times a party member's friend would be there as a WHM or PLD for heals and rezzes and to take out monsters that would overwhelm the party. Seeing a level 75 player in full artifact armor or "AF" was a sight to behold. Like, you HAD to be like that. You were most likely wearing a thong at low levels so really any piece of gear you got was something you looked forward to. Those artifact sets though were very sleek and tied the whole class fantasy for each of the jobs together. After seeing a PLD in AF I knew I had to be one. Eventually you'd out-level the Dunes at around 16-20? I can't remember the exact number, but it was then off to Qufim Island, a stark contrast from the desert of the Dunes into a frozen tundra where the aurora borealis would randomly show at times and just about blew everyone's minds when it did. To get to Qufim you had to get to Jeuno though, and that meant a good 45 minutes or so through high level areas and you had to HOPE TO GOD you didn't get aggroed or it was back to your bind point. The community was very helpful like in many other older MMORPGs and if you asked, a high level would most likely run you through to Jeuno. The pilgrimage to Jeuno will always stick out in my mind - once you walked up to the gates of this new city you'd be blown away with how big and multi-leveled it was. Seeing a brand new city that wasn't one of the starter cities was a big thing. It just made the game feel so much more epic, like you haven't even seen 5% of the game and there was so much more to see. I have more but I'll have to think about it.
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Nov 12, 2018 23:31
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My favorite part of an MMO is building a character up through quests and dungeon. I usually lose interest when I hit max level because all of that content takes too much time. I play casually for about 12 hours per week so I’ll get a lot of mileage out of building a character to max level.
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Nov 12, 2018 23:36
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Ehud posted:My favorite part of an MMO is building a character up through quests and dungeon. I usually lose interest when I hit max level because all of that content takes too much time. I play casually for about 12 hours per week so I’ll get a lot of mileage out of building a character to max level. i'm the same way. a lot of the time the leveling gameplay is really solid and decently varied. you can quest, you can grind, you can maybe do world pvp against people you come across, when you get bored you can do crafting or instanced pve/pvp to break it up. wrath of the lich king and cataclysm were really good for that. then you hit max level and half the poo poo you were used to doing just isn't rewarding anymore.
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Nov 13, 2018 00:14
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I've been going through this experience, basically, since I played ffxi when I was very young and never got past 30 or unlocked any subjobs and I have to say it still retains a lot of its luster even in the absence of real nostalgia filters if I could improve one thing about FFXI from this era it would be the overall difficulty of travelling but, as you noted, that makes an essential contribution to the maintaining a feeling that you've traveled a meaningful difference through dangerous places and more abstractly, that the world is a coherent and connected thing and not just a series of discrete playgrounds. What I really dig is the degree to which even the most basic gameplay (grinding in groups) requires a baseline of inter-class interaction in order to do things like get around, which is relatively straightforward (like the basic tanking and healing mechanics) but, beyond that, as illustrated by that picture, combat can be more or less as complicated as you're willing to let it be because there are a shitload of factors in play that dictate how every spell goes, including the time of day and the day of the week. So everyone has some kind of legitimate contribution to make to maximizing damage in some situation, even the much-maligned classes like DRG/THF, and typically they've got some important utility spells as well. I also like the aesthetic distinctiveness of the game and the variety in zones. Today I went from Qufim to a place I'd never heard of or visited before, Carpenter's Landing, which was a twisty cave full of spiderwebs and mushrooms that led to a neat little dock full of chopped down trees and woodworking tools. There was an obvious narrative (chopping down trees pissed off weird bugs), distinct but related areas in the zone, and in order to get there we had to have people with maps of the area and the sneak/invisible spells to make sure we could all get to the actual camp. I get that this is largely onerous nonsense for people who think the idea of spending like an hour just preparing to spend another three hours grinding to get experience flabbergasting and stupid, but it does make getting that camp and setting a good rotation / pace up feels very satisfying. Getting consistent EXP chains without dying owns and most mobs have actual strategies to them (to some degree or another) and require the mages to drop element resistance spells, anti-debuff spells, spot heal to drop special debuffs, silence mobs, and so on, which isnt necessary in the open world of modern MMOs (for good reason but still). There are definitely a lot of drawbacks to this style of game, but I find the reward - at least where I am right now with my gaming habits - feels worth the investment. I played hundreds of hours of FFXI when I was a young teenager but was too stupid and distractable to ever get past level 30 or 35 and thus never got to even see Vana'Diel (which is my favorite virtual world, in terms of aesthetics, presentation, size, and weirdly importantly, music), much less participate in end or late game content, so I really want to give some of this stuff a try as an adult. The critical thing seems to be having some friends or people to play with - I just got my Red Mage to level 30 today, which allows you to unlock "advanced jobs" which are many of the cooler classes in the game, and decided to unlock Bard. This requires me to go from Jeuno to a place called Bubumubiribu Peninsula, which is across an ocean from me. I can either go back to my home city ~45 minutes away, Bastok, and buy maps, then warp back to Jeuno (one warp scroll at a time, one spot you can warp to where you go when you die) and from there take a boat to an unfamiliar zone with some mountains in it, that connects to another even more dangerous zone I've never heard of 20 levels above me and then directly to the Peninsula. Or, in a less likely to kill me but considerably longer route, I can run another 30 minutes to Selbina from Jeuno. Then, in Selbina, I would have to take a boat to the town of Mhaura, which is another 10 minutes, with the catch that huge insta-murdering monsters spawn on the boat and can immediately kill you no matter where you are. In retail they could only get you if you were on the deck of the boat, but it is bugged on this private server. If I die on the boat, I'm sent back to Jeuno where this all started. So I need someone high level to take the boat with me and help me get to Mhaura. From Mhaura, I have to pass through two more zones full of monsters that will kill me to get to the Peninsula. From there, the spot I need to reach is hidden (past aggressive mobs) in the top part of the map, in a secret spot. I have to touch an item on the ground there, then return to Jeuno, and from Jeuno back to Valkurm, then from Valkurm back to Jeuno. I have no way to fast travel between any of these places except a one-way ticket back to Jeuno. So, basically, without help the prospect of doing that (even with the capacity to make myself invisible and sneak stopping monsters from aggroing my character's footstep sound) without help is very likely to lead to frustration, because if I die once, I end up in Jeuno and gotta start over, if I die twice, I not only have to start over but also have to find a group and level back up to level 30 in order to do the quest. Despite the borderline insanity of that required quest (it is also regarded as one of, if not the, easiest advanced subjob quests to unlock) I really enjoy the rhythm of FFXI's combat when it gets going, the class interplay, and more than anything, the world. The server is really populated right now and there are a few goons playing (five or six of us) so if anyone reading this post found it interesting, join us! Frog Act fucked around with this message at 01:57 on Nov 13, 2018 |
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Nov 13, 2018 01:52
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Harrow posted:Do we have a "tell stories and/or talk about classic MMOs" thread? I want to read more of that kind of stuff. And maybe post a bunch of stuff about Nexus: Kingdom of the Winds way back in the late 90s/early 2000s because that game was weird as poo poo.  gonna repost something I wrote for the "will there ever be a good mmo again" thread a few months ago Frog Act posted:EQOA was really good because it was like an EQ lite that I found extremely graphically pleasing on account of its use of bright primary colors (presumably to accomodate the slowness of the PS2). It had a lot of stuff that was just taken directly out of EQ classic, like the general zone of Norrath, the classes, the cities, and many of the abilities, but the gameplay was fundamentally different. It was made to be played with a controller so you had a tight rotation of spells that functioned like the regular spellbook, but both physical and caster classes had a nice array of them. Every class had a unique and useful role like in regular EQ and they were mirror versions slightly tweaked - like Shaman had better debuffs and a set of very cool pets (bears and wolves instead of just one wolf) and they had both SoW and a spirit wolf travel form.
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Nov 13, 2018 02:03
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Ehud posted:My favorite part of an MMO is building a character up through quests and dungeon. I usually lose interest when I hit max level because all of that content takes too much time. I play casually for about 12 hours per week so I’ll get a lot of mileage out of building a character to max level. I'm the opposite, I hate questing and leveling with such an intense passion that that's what basically ended my interest in MMOs. Oh new MMO is out? Cool, let's try it. *15 minutes later after receiving a kill quest* Nope!
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Nov 13, 2018 07:08
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Orv posted:I'm the opposite, I hate questing and leveling with such an intense passion that that's what basically ended my interest in MMOs. Oh new MMO is out? Cool, let's try it. *15 minutes later after receiving a kill quest* Nope! Yeah. The standard fare MMO content just isn’t engaging. Kill quests and level specific zones of roaming mobs and +1 +2 +3 style advancement is just boring as gently caress. I enjoy a skinner box as much as the next nerd but at least put a nice tablecloth over it before serving me the same old dogshit. What I’ve always enjoyed about MMOs has been pretty much been written out of modern day games. Slow travel gave worlds depth and made cities feel distinct and distant. You felt tethered to the area you were in and subsequently developed roots and connections. Harsh death penalties gave worlds a sense of danger and through the risk brought forth all sorts of positive side effects. Mixed level content forced players to use a sense of judgement. Like many others in this thread have said, I doubt I even have enough time to play that sort of game anymore. I’m lucky to get an hour a night to play games these days. But that’s the sort of game I miss when I reminisce... rose tinted glasses and all that.
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Nov 13, 2018 07:47
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Orv posted:I'm the opposite, I hate questing and leveling with such an intense passion that that's what basically ended my interest in MMOs. Oh new MMO is out? Cool, let's try it. *15 minutes later after receiving a kill quest* Nope! I agree with you if I'm playing solo. It's fun in a group of people I know though. Actually, that's the only way MMO's are fun for me.
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Nov 13, 2018 13:53
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Ruggan posted:Yeah. The standard fare MMO content just isn’t engaging. Kill quests and level specific zones of roaming mobs and +1 +2 +3 style advancement is just boring as gently caress. I enjoy a skinner box as much as the next nerd but at least put a nice tablecloth over it before serving me the same old dogshit. For me it's not really even that, it's sort of a petty resentment at this point. It's like, man, I've raided, I've PvPed, I've leveled umpteen characters at this point across dozens of MMOs, I'm here to experience your end game and at its most basic I am here to experience your gear treadmill, I really could not care less about what is in front of that. If WoW and Guild Wars 2's ability to buy a max level character had become a standard thing before the genre started to mostly die I would have greatly rejoiced, though WoW's could stand to be a bit cheaper, leveling a character in GW2 with money cost around $10 a pop when I did it near the launch of the game. To be fair I'm also a psychopath who kept playing WoW well past my raiding days for open world PvP so I'm not exactly the most standard user base here, but I just can't see myself ever going out and getting boar asses or finding someone's wife ever again, even if I do like what a game is selling at the end of that. Like you said, and like people always think they're being clever when they point it out, it's a Skinner box. Just put me in front of the button and give me a challenge there, the maze you built in front of it is long, not interesting or hard.
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Nov 13, 2018 15:22
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Radio Free Kobold posted:i'm the same way. a lot of the time the leveling gameplay is really solid and decently varied. you can quest, you can grind, you can maybe do world pvp against people you come across, when you get bored you can do crafting or instanced pve/pvp to break it up. wrath of the lich king and cataclysm were really good for that. then you hit max level and half the poo poo you were used to doing just isn't rewarding anymore. I agree with you. Once I get max level I hear about the poo poo I have to do and I tend to just drop it then and there.
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Nov 14, 2018 01:58
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Nexus: Kingdom of the Winds is, somehow, still running. I'm going to use the past tense in this whole thing, though, because I don't think its current state is anything like it was when I played it. It was a Nexon game way back when, one of the first Korean MMOs to come to the West, and really one of the earliest graphical MMOs. It predates even Ultima Online, though it came to North America a year after UO released, in 1998. I played a bit during that time until I got myself banned because I was 12 years old and tried to scam someone. I came back in 2001 or so with a new account and got way into it. Nexus is loosely based on Korean mythology and has kind of a unique aesthetic as a result, which I enjoyed a lot at the time. It's this top-down pseudo-action RPG with tile-based movement and (pretty much) real-time combat. I likened it to 2D Zelda at the time, though being totally tile-based made it not quite like that. But you'd press a button to swing your weapon in real time, that kind of thing. I liked that a lot, especially after I tried EverQuest and was kind of underwhelmed by the autoattacking. Nexus had kind of a unique leveling system. Your level would max out at 99, but at that point, you could start spending experience points directly on your stats to keep increasing them, with no apparent cap but an ever-increasing experience cost for each increase. Because of this, and because the game had a ton of player-driven community stuff, your level sort of didn't matter. There wasn't really an attitude that the real game began when you hit level 99, because the kinds of things you'd do to reach 99 were pretty much the same as what you'd do after, and even if you never hit 99 at all, you could still do all the roleplaying and community stuff, and there was plenty of that to do. Leveling in groups in Nexus was called "hunting" and you'd do so in "Mythic caves," of which there were twelve, each one representing one of the signs of the Eastern zodiac. That could mean you'd join up to hunt Mythic Rabbits and it would be actually pretty challenging and was also never not funny. Each of the four classes, or "paths," had a unique role:
 Where Nexus really got weird, though, was just how player-driven things could be. It actually led to a pretty fun sense of community, even if things were really political behind the scenes. Here are some examples:
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Nov 14, 2018 17:27
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Yeah I'm gonna need all three of those posts.
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Nov 14, 2018 18:00
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Storytime is the best time.
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Nov 14, 2018 21:17
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Harrow posted:Nexus: TK I was also overly active in Nexus around 2001 as a rogue who tried pretty hard to get into the shadow sub-path. I'm pretty sure the master just let his real life friends/family into the path which is why it was so selective. I'd enjoy more stories as well, that game had such a good mix of community driven things that I still pine for these days.
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Nov 14, 2018 21:37
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I read this thread and now I have a level 3 necro in project 1999. gently caress you op! I would be level 4 but I kept dying when I tried to beg from the wrong NPCs.
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Nov 15, 2018 04:20
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fishhooked posted:I was also overly active in Nexus around 2001 as a rogue who tried pretty hard to get into the shadow sub-path. I'm pretty sure the master just let his real life friends/family into the path which is why it was so selective. I'd enjoy more stories as well, that game had such a good mix of community driven things that I still pine for these days. That is almost exactly what happened, yes. Here's what I remember from the Shadow subpath when I played. Almost all of this comes from me watching my friend try to join. I'll start by talking about the process I went through to join the Diviners, which seemed pretty typical for a NexusTK roleplay subpath: First, I needed to contact a "guide" of the subpath, basically the equivalent of an officer in a modern MMO guild except, y'know, for an actual, in-game subclass with its own mechanics. The guide would then talk to you about joining (all in-character, of course), try to figure out if you were sincere or would be a good addition to the group, that kind of thing. I remember the Diviners' whole thing was about the I Ching, which they sent me materials on so I could read up on Chinese divination (which was also popular in Korea around the time that the game was supposed to be set, so it wasn't totally out of place). I read all about hexagrams and divination with yarrow twigs and all that kind of stuff so that I could effectively roleplay it. If I remember correctly, I also needed to do a little bit of writing to get in--I don't remember if it was a short essay on the I Ching, to prove I knew what I was talking about, or if it was a short story about my character's life as a Diviner, but either way, I was always *super* into writing so that was the fun part for me. (Side note: players would often run short story contests in-game and I made a pretty good chunk of coins winning those for a while, because it turns out most of the 13-year-olds who played that game couldn't write for poo poo and I had at least read a few books in my day.) After that, they let me in. The whole process took a few weeks overall but, in the end, it ensured that I knew what the subpath was about, met a bunch of people in the subpath, and was ready to roleplay as a Diviner. Once I was in, I held a lot of events in the Diviners' little public zone, including roleplayed magic duels that people seemed to have fun with. I also had fun hanging out in the Diviners' private zone--every subpath had one--and just chilling with other Diviner players. I'll have more stories about the Diviners later--including the special divinations that guides could do that had some really strong potential rewards if you got super lucky--but for now, I'll move on to the Shadows. So that whole process above? Maybe a little drawn out but ultimately harmless and kind of fun, if you're into RP? Well, throw all that poo poo out. You don't come to the Shadows. They come to you. The general impression they wanted to give off was that Shadows aren't made, but born. That if you roleplayed a character who was perfect for the Shadows, they'd find you and you'd get in. (As fishhooked pointed out above, it was actually more like "you made friends with Shadow players and also didn't piss off the Elder along the way" if you wanted to get in.) Here are some things that would almost certainly disqualify you:
Basically it was Fight Club, but somehow even more lame? My friend badly wanted to join the Shadows, because he was 13 and it was Fight Club but even more lame. So he tried. He tried so hard to be dark and edgy, to buddy up with the small handful of Shadows that he could come into contact with, but he just never got any bites. I think eventually a Shadow guide told him that he knew my friend wanted to join and it wasn't going to happen. In the end, my friend shrugged, moved on, and just kind of waltzed into the Merchant subpath instead. I got to see some of their secrets because, again, we often played at side-by-side computers at my house. The Merchants were super into market manipulation. They'd buy up and stockpile rare items to increase the price, for example. They had makeshift charts and spreadsheets on their private in-game message board to track the prices of things. It was all hilarious to me. The Diviners didn't do any of that poo poo. Hell, we didn't do much of anything but run divination-themed events and sometimes the guides would do special fortune readings for people. The thing that eventually drove my friend to quit was that market change I mentioned in my last post. He loved hanging out in the markets, bartering with people, setting up shop in the stalls, things like that. When Nexon made the Buy/Sell boards accessible from anywhere, that killed traffic to the in-game markets, and kind of killed his interest in the game, too. See, Warriors and Rogues had a pretty big downside to their roleplaying subpaths: the NPC subpaths (which were themed after the Chinese four symbol animals--the blue dragon, black turtle, red phoenix, and white tiger) gave huge damage boosts to Warriors and Rogues that the roleplaying subpaths didn't have access to. If you wanted to be a Merchant, you were sort of giving up the ability to be a desirable Rogue for hunting groups in the process. So if being a Merchant stopped being fun and you didn't want to leave that subpath, eventually you'd just run out of things to do. Mages and Poets didn't have that problem--their NPC subpaths were good, sure, but the most important abilities a Mage or Poet would bring were core Mage or Poet spells, so you didn't really need a subpath at all to be useful at endgame. So my friend, as a Merchant, just didn't really have a place in the gameplay side of things, and the fun part of merchanting got killed off, so he just stopped playing. Eventually I followed suit because it wasn't really as fun without a real-life buddy to talk about the game with. Next time, I'll talk about Diviners' special divination spell and how having my fortune told by a Diviner guide made me filthy loving rich.
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Nov 15, 2018 15:39
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Since I'm talking about Nexus subpaths, I might as well give you a list of them, as well as what I know/can remember about them. Quick background: every player had a "legend" page you could see if you clicked on them that would essentially just be a list of milestones or achievements you could scroll through, including when their character was created. All of this used an in-game calendar, too, not the real life date/time. Players who made their characters in the game's beta test even had a special thing right at the beginning of their legend to denote that. But you could also have penalties on your legend for breaking the rules of the game, or getting a bad fortune telling, or anything like that. For some players it was basically an SA rap sheet. Every subpath also gets a handful of unique items, both accessories and a special subpath weapon. For Warrior and Rogue subpaths, these weapons weren't super useful, because if you joined an RP subpath, you're already giving up a ton of gameplay power. They were pretty good for the Mages and Poets, though. I should also note that, while I can tell you the special spells that NPC subpaths get, I can only find scattered information on what the RP subpaths got. In an effort to prevent this list from getting too crowded, I'm only going to mention some that seem really cool. If I don't mention any spells, it's because I can't find any info. Warrior Subpaths:
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Nov 15, 2018 16:51
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gently caress dude. MMOs were weird before WoW. Still intriguing. I wish I had hosed with that instead of WoW at 14. Seems 14-year-old me would have enjoyed that system a whole lot more than WoW raiding.
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Nov 15, 2018 17:34
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Something it occurs to me that people probably don't get if they didn't play: spells in NexusTK never had casting times. They were all completely instant and would cast roughly as quickly as you could spam the hotkeys and target enemies with the arrow keys. Mages using Paralyze to lock down groups of enemies would be constantly spamming their Paralyze hotkey and moving their targeting cursor around the room with the arrow keys. Even a weak healing spell could heal you up reasonably quickly because you could spam it on yourself just by hitting the hotkey and enter key (or just the hotkey if it's specifically a self-heal). Things got pretty frantic, in other words. PvP was really weird because it was mostly based around gigantic one-shot attacks that would leave you wide open (mostly because they consumed a ton of vitality to use them, or because they ate up all your mana which you'd then need to sacrifice vitality to restore). You'd kind of try to dance around outside of people's one-shot attack ranges to try to bait them into using it, then blow them up before they could be healed to full or retaliate. I was never very good at it. Here's a relatively recent video so you can see what PvP looks like in this game. Note that the graphics were updated a few years after I quit--they were somewhat lower-res and less colorful back when I played. What I love is that the game’s sound effects haven’t really changed since I played, though, and so many of them remain seared into my brain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icBJvbYcgW4 Harrow fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Nov 15, 2018 |
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Nov 15, 2018 17:50
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Lemming posted:I read this thread and now I have a level 3 necro in project 1999. gently caress you op! I would be level 4 but I kept dying when I tried to beg from the wrong NPCs. Please join the p99 goon discord ASAP, the game is much better with friends, either for help or for people to talk to. Also the community is generally friendly outside of the end-game raiding drama/politics so feel free to talk to people and say you're new and have no idea wtf you're doing. There's assholes in every game ever, but more likely than not on p99 you'll meet someone helpful.
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Nov 16, 2018 00:41
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I've come to the conclusion that my nostalgia for EQ and WoW has everything to do with being young with tons of free time and limited responsibility and less to do with those games in particular. Still doesn't stop me from keeping up with MMO's in development, hoping something will scratch that itch, but nothing ever does of course. Most fun I've had in an MMO recently was like 4 years ago near the end of Vanguard's life- i tried the game out of the blue after abandoning it at launch and was pleasantly surprised at how much fun it was. Its too bad, I think the clusterfuck launch of that game doomed it from ever being viable.
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Nov 16, 2018 02:17
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There’s an AC emulator up (Reefcull) that is pretty good if that gets your nostalgia going. It’s currently pre ToD (they’re recreating content and releasing it as it goes, so slow progression).
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Nov 16, 2018 15:18
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Thought up some more FFXI stuff. Older MMOs in general had some unusual mechanics which I miss in newer games. There are a few in FFXI that stand out for me. Enemies had a line of sight instead of just a range, so you could actually run behind an enemy to avoid them. Some enemies were also able to hear and even smell you, so there were skills and spells to make you invisible, silence your footsteps by floating, and even deodorize your scent. White Mages were absolutely crucial for getting into some of the higher level areas that quests would take you through. Some enemies had "true sight" or "true hearing" which meant being invisible or floating did nothing to hide your presence. It's interesting to note that FFXIV has this mechanic, but they barely make use of it, sadly. Speaking of quests, most of them were more like long adventures that would make you actually read the text or get help from someone who had done it before and knew what to do. Many of them you needed a group or high level player to help kill mobs just to get from one place to the next. There were no WoW-style quests where you kill 10 boars and get a reward, though a few years ago they added something like that. I remember one quest where you had to walk slowly along the side of a cliff wall to get to the top and it was a huge pain in the rear end if you dropped down. There was no jumping in this game either. For the longest time the level cap stayed the same (75) which meant some gear never really went out of style and you'd still use some of it in later expansions, unless there was just a better piece in general. If you got lucky and found a rare mob and it actually dropped a special piece of gear, you were likely using that for many different jobs for many levels. There was even a system of getting more stat points/skills once you hit 75 so you still felt like you were progressing your character at endgame. It's a shame most MMORPGs have a gear-based endgame now. Eventually they started to raise the level cap and it killed a lot of those coveted pieces of equipment. I think they may have made it so artifact weapons can level up to 99 now though at least. It had some really unique jobs as well. A Bard that played songs to help the party in a support role instead of the trinity which you don't really see anymore. A Blue Mage that could learn enemy skills (of which there are seriously like 200 of them according to the current wiki: https://www.bg-wiki.com/bg/Blue_Mage). There's a Samurai and a Ninja which I've heard originally were supposed to be a tank and DPS respectively but it turned out SAM was better at DPS and NIN could tank because it had "shadows" and was more like an evasion tank. Square Enix just went with it instead of fixing it. There's also a Summoner which had to complete special trials to kill the summon in order to gain its power. They had this sweet glow effect around them and whenever you saw a Summoner whip one of the avatars out it was a pretty amazing sight. The quest to unlock Summoner was especially notorious for being a huge pain in the rear end. You had to get a special ruby that dropped off of a few leeches on a beach. It took me almost 3 hours but I've heard some people either got it pretty quickly or it took them days. Some others of note were Puppetmaster which had a puppet companion you could outfit with special puppet gear and a Corsair who rolled dice to get different bonuses. I didn't craft much but there were some weird quirks to crafting like facing a certain direction and crafting on a certain day/weather to increase your chance of crafting the item. Come to think of it, I think some quests you could only do on certain days and weather as well which was a pretty interesting mechanic. You could also go "clamming" and... dig for clams. Also, random fun fact, the term "mob" stands for "mobile", as in something that walks around. I believe it was coined for MUDs but it could pre-date that with D&D, I'm not sure. desudrive fucked around with this message at 11:30 on Nov 18, 2018 |
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Nov 18, 2018 11:28
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Harrow posted:Something it occurs to me that people probably don't get if they didn't play: spells in NexusTK never had casting times. They were all completely instant and would cast roughly as quickly as you could spam the hotkeys and target enemies with the arrow keys. Mages using Paralyze to lock down groups of enemies would be constantly spamming their Paralyze hotkey and moving their targeting cursor around the room with the arrow keys. Even a weak healing spell could heal you up reasonably quickly because you could spam it on yourself just by hitting the hotkey and enter key (or just the hotkey if it's specifically a self-heal). I loved this fuckin game and resubbed recently for a brief period. Don't bother going back (if you haven't already)
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Nov 18, 2018 12:32
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Twyst posted:I loved this fuckin game and resubbed recently for a brief period. Yeah, I'm for sure not going back. Honestly even if it was exactly like I remember, I probably wouldn't enjoy it like I did when I was 14. It was the right game for the time, though, and it's really fun to reminisce about its weirdness. It really was a wild time for MMOs with so many weird games trying weird things.
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Nov 19, 2018 01:39
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Harrow posted:Yeah, I'm for sure not going back. Honestly even if it was exactly like I remember, I probably wouldn't enjoy it like I did when I was 14. It was the right game for the time, though, and it's really fun to reminisce about its weirdness. It really was a wild time for MMOs with so many weird games trying weird things. I think it would be enjoyable if the community was still there, it's effectively a ghost town in most places now.
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Nov 19, 2018 15:17
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