On Tue, 10 Aug 1999, Roop Dirump wrote:
>
> * It runs deep, I think. There is no wandering. Everyone stays put.
> Camping is a problem, everyone says, and we have all these solutions
> suggested and implemented. But, mmmm, none will work! Camping is central
> to EverQuest! Everyone camps! Everywhere! Been to Unrest? How else do
> you survive there but "camp the wall?" These people aren't camping for
Unrest is too crowded (and buggy) to do anything but camp at
the wall and pull). The most fun I had there is when my group
insisted on camping the hand room. I was bored to tears (and
I think everyone else was too) so I went out onto the balcony
and started pulling other people's trains up to us.
> items, but just to play. Folks camp every dungeon, every outdoor zone.
> I've been to West Karanas and watched folks pulling lions to the wall. And
> it's the same everywhere else. Was suggested by a friend, since I so
> loathed camping, to play the south Karanas. I am currently "camped" there
> now, because that's all anyone does in such an outdoor zone as well!
Part of the problem is that it's so difficult to stick with
your group since your vision is limited to about 60 degrees
forward and resolution of distant objects in the horizon is
poor. Running with my drum, I've lost track of someone in my
group I was following when one of the sparkles from the song
overlapped with their position. By the time the sparkle
disappeared, I'd lost them. It would help tremendously if
everyone were given some rudimentary form of tracking that
worked on group members only. The range does not have to be
huge, but it should be enough for group members to stay
together while moving outdoors. The /follow command just does
not cut it because of packet loss and dead reckoning glitches
that cause people's avatars on your screen to run in circles.
> I remember Brad McQuaid discussing this, and saying it's the path of least
> resistance. How he and his buddies would group up, and move through
> permafrost together, eventually reaching some deep section, then heading
> back to quit for the evening. This is an ideal, I wish I could be in THAT
> group, because I have NEVER ever ever ever been in a group like that. GOD
> YES I wish that was how Everquest REALLY worked the WAY he said!!! Seeing
> such a dungeon, I think he's bullshitting because it seems impossible!
This is just about the only way I play. I was fortunate to
find a group of people early on who liked to mostly do this
(well except for Dervish camps since they don't move, Oasis
orcs since the place was crawling with sand giants in my
youth, and Unrest for the reasons I've stated above). It is a
lot of fun, but the problem is you *still* never get any of
the good items. You will sweep through the dungeon, and all
the spots where a named mob drops a nice item are camped. You
basically just end up making things safer for the campers -
they essentially hog the cream while you're left with the
rest. :-(
> So folks camp. They find the area where things give them experience, sit
> there for a few hours, and let one person bring the nasties to them. And
> the warriors are always healing, and the mages are always meditating anyway.
> So the game -requires- camping in this respect. We aren't choosing the
> "path of least resistance" because I, for one, do not know what the hell
> McQuaid is talking about. I'd love to see him and his group play. Either
It's a classic case of a phenomenon called the tragedy of the
commons. People tend to abuse shared resources to a greater
extent than if they actually owned a piece of it. That's why
people litter in parks but not on their lawns - because one
piece of litter on a 100 acre park used by 100 people seems
meaningless even though the situation is the same as owning a
house on 1 acre. That's why people overfish - the negative
consequences for it are amortized over all fishermen, whereas
the benefits are concentrated on yourself. This depletes the
fishery, but instead of trying to conserve it, people's first
reactions are to try to "get their share" before "it runs
out."
So the optimal way to play the game would be for everyone to
sweep through dungeons, killing the occasional named mob if
they see it. Unfortunately, all it takes is *one* camper to
disrupt this, which drives everyone else to camp to remain
competetive, which causes the downard spiral of this game into
Evercamp.
All this is so obvious to me I don't know why the folks at
Verant can't see it. Camping is *not* just a different way to
play the game, it is *harmful* to the game. I think the folks
at Verant concentrated too much on graphics, networking, AI,
and game balance, which was the formula for making single-
player RPGs. They should've hired at least one sociologist
for input on the intersocial reactions people would have
towards each other once locked together in their gameworld.
> If McQuaid would like bands of adventurers to be heroically moving about and
> adventuring, rather than sitting around like white trash in a JellyStone
> Park, why is it like this? O, fighters need time to sit and heal, and mages
> need time to replenish mana. The game encourages camping by all it's
> downtime.
The game is actually well-tuned for a group sweeping through a
dungeon. The spawns are spaced out enough that after a hard
fight, you can all sit and heal/med in the area you just
cleared, and still have a few minutes to move on before the
things you just killed respawn. This is also why just
cranking up the spawn rate is not the solution. Either the
world needs to be larger, or the servers need to be
depopulated to around 1000/server.
> * AI lacking. In a massively multiplayer game it should be better,
> especially one that is so Player vs. Environment based. This is AI that
> was seen in Doom, if that. The wonder of AI that some folks are impressed
> by how it acts, when it's actions are not that complex. MUST be improved.
> When I fight this AI, it makes me bored.
In the current paradigm most companies seem to be using for
MMRPGs, AI resources = server resources. This needs to be
separated so AI can be processed independently of other server
functions. That is the way the DoD networked sims work (which
is the field I'm currently working in).
I'll add that when I commented to a UO friend that Verant had
beefed up Cazic Thule because he was too easy to kill, his
tongue-in-cheek reply was "What if they drop bales of hay
around him and shoot him with arrows." :-)
> * Death. There is no death. I want to die. I cannot die. Who were the
> generation before this, the immortal generation? Totally ignored by the
> story of the game.
Permanent death makes for a *very* different game. Moria and
Rogue/NetHack worked this way. Of course those games were
also single-player so there was no need to worry about
"keeping pace" with your group. There was literally a "top
ten" chart of the highest levels players had managed to
achieve before dying.
> * The story is too static. One of Brad McQuaid's problems with adding
> monsters that offer random cool items was that it wouldn't work in the
> story. I can understand this point perfectly, yet people would always be
> camping anyway because that's all they ever do. But back to the story.
EQ is a highly structured and highly static game. IMHO the
level system pretty much requires that in order to keep the
player/monster balance steady. DD (former lead designer of
UO) has commented on this as something he tried to avoid in
UO, and despite the problems UO has, I think most would agree
the world there is a lot more dynamic and fosters developing
communities than the EQ world.
> It is like a moment locked in time, it never changes. No matter what anyone
> does, the NPCs will always be locked in that moment, regardless what level
> the real folk have gotten to. The "plot" is unchanging. Join a massively
> online rolplaying game with an ongoing plot! There is no ongoing plot.
> Everything is the same. It always has been, always will. McQuaid wants
> people to appreciate where items come from plotwise, when they buy them or
> find them. Yet I'm afraid those subtlties are lost when it's always that
> same NPC in that same place, and they never change.
Which is why I advocate being able to loot each special item
only once. After you do, that plotline is essentially over
for you, and you have to move on. The unchanging plot does
not bother me so much as the campers who exploit it to harvest
items for sale or twink (thus interfering with other people's
ability to complete the plotline).
--
John H. Kim
kim@...