FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1096135596[/unixtime]]
Because a big part of the game for many people is the facet where you craft shit and build your own little house and basically play The Sims. The fact that you could (and did) run around engaging in "PvP" against people who were busy farming and blacksmithing and shit is what ruined the game.
But they could just play The Sims if they wanted to do that in peace. If you want to set up your own farm or whatever in an ongoing world of many people you have to expect someone is going to see your farm and try to take it for themselves.
And the game should provide you ways to defend it too, but you should have to defend it. You should be able to hire guards and set traps and stuff to defend your shit. But you should have to defend it.
Because you couldn't successfully do any of the crap you were supposed to do what with all the fvck heads running around stabbing people who bothered to try to do productive things, the game descended into a Mad Max style shoot-fest.
Huh? Productive? Wtf... who says anything is more productive than anything else. The purpose of the game is to have fun. If I have fun with PvP and looting other people's houses then I should be able to try to do that. Doesn't mean I should always succeed, but that should be an option.
Everquest basically left only the "productive" crap in the game, like monster farming and shit, and lemme tell you, it was boring as hell. The other players might as well not even have been there, except as an annoyance later on where you required groups to do anything and had to wait for people to join your party so you could kill more monsters without dying.
And if I wanted that, I could just play Space Invaders on an Atari 2600. Seriously, if the only purpose of the other players is to sporadically kill your character by jumping you in packs of eight while you're busily collecting nightshade - why not skip the fvcking middle man and just have periodic server outages?
See you don't get it. I don't want to play AI opponents. I don't want stupid monsters that act predictably and show up in predefined spots and everything fits neatly in the box. I want to be walking down a nice forest trail and all of a sudden *BAM* a lightning bolt crashes down on my character. I want to be paranoid and I want that rush of adrenaline when I'm playing. You don't get that playing AI opponents, because ultimately a loss just means you reset the game and try again, and that's all EQ was. you play till you die, then you reset and get your body again, and start over... and that sucked hard. No risk at all. Just boring never ending tedium.
PvP can be fun, if it's organized in some way and actually a test of your skills. People getting into packs and hunting down herbalists is just bullshit.
Right organization is good. And what you need then is people who hunt those guys who hunt herbalists, that's what makes the game fun.
Ultima online certainly needed a lot of refinements to get it right, but it was on the right track. Where as no amount of changes is going to make EQ a fun game. Because the whole concept of a game based around spawn camping just blows.
It'd be cool if herbalists have some kind of bat signal they could send out and alert people that they're being attacked, then you might get helpful people teleporting in to aid them.
That's fun and makes the game more interesting.
See you need some easy way to make money like herbalism, then that in turn attracts people who want to rob the herbalists. Though the herbalists should also have some kind of way to contact people who can protect them. The one flaw UO had was that it had little way for people to call for help. If they added that feature, then the game would have improved immensely.
So you have the villager, villain, hero archetypes and all of them are playable by a PC. The villagers are the honest people who want to make a living crafting stuff and building their own farms, the villains are the guys looking for easy money by pillaging the villagers, and the heroes are the guys who save the villagers and take a lot of the gear the villains stole.
That's how real RPGs work and that's what MMORPGs should be about.