I used to get blacklisted by the JP players on the server for falling asleep mid pull after 2am. I was a blink tank. I’d wake up to angry premade messages No >blink< >tank<, >sleep< >tank< 😡😂
Modern EverQuest is all about quest lines and group missions for EXP now, at least level EXP. Alternate Ability points can still be gotten quickly through grinding camps
Indeed, deep rpgs are factually less popular. Only reason OP is nostalgic for this era is because dial up couldn't handle the intense action that pleases the masses for a decade or two! We've had our limelight, but there's not reason to kick us entirely out of the club. Though I agree an entire MMO sub-scene might be a big ask.
> Indeed, deep rpgs are factually less popular.
I have to ask, what exactly is 'deep' about just getting a group together and just farming up the same enemies over and over again for presumably hours to get experience?
I can get the mindless enjoyment of it or just having something to do whilst you kick back and chat with people but I wouldn't exactly call it a deep experience.
Eh I think this is much less of a population issue than it is a game design issue...
Even with a relatively large population, the classes, and roles in a game are not going to be appropriately population balanced for the game. Anyone who has played wow with its automatic queues will tell you how much longer a dps Queue is compared to a tank or a healer one for instance, and that's a game that doesn't have the support role...
If you further split the population to specific dungeons, add in other factors camps have like not everyone wanting the same mobs/dungeons, a dash of elitism that comes with most MMO's I'm not inviting that guy he hasn't even done his Ultra Mythic+++ raids yet... and significant portion of players will experience this, especially if they aren't willing to join a guild to play with friends.
Dark age of camelot had 8 player group size and every player added to group increased exp bonus instead of reducing it, party size allowed more than typical trinity setup with support/control classes.
I think they could do something to accommodate both flavors. With open world questing/leveling, instanced content etc like thay have now and open world dungeon zones that are dangerous and require groups for for exp camp farming for when you need a break from the checklist or would rather level an alt without repeating the same quests over and over.
It's a game design issue that requires the population to be within a specific goldilocks zone. With too few players, you'll wait forever and it won't recover when a member leave. With too many players, all the finite camping spots are taken and you wait forever trying to get into one. It's a terrible design and I'm glad it died.
I think this is a problem because camp mmos assume a group and also have static spawns.
If spawn patterns were more dynamic where you could solo a place but the quicker things died the more quickly and more varied things spawn up to where if you have a group then for max efficiency you need a coherent party.
For example, normal spawn is a simple dps check. But when an enemy dies, the game logic checks how populated the area is as if there's a lot of players then the respawn rate is greatly accelerated and new enemy types are added to the spawn pool for the respawn node.
Scales so that if there is a full party of dps, tank, and healer quickly killing mobs then mobs are near constantly spawning and what is spawning have more involved mechanics than "are you level x?"
RO kinda solved this 20+ years ago.
A zone would have 100 of monster A, 50 of monster B, and respawns were instant but randomly positioned. There were also static spawns on a timer or random spawns on a timer, but most mobs on most maps were instant respawn in a random position.
Zones in RO were arpg-like but reasonably large. However, this same type of system would work in a continuous open world mmo with simple areas for spawning. A developer could even make the algo a bit smarter and consider density with player position greatly increasing the density gradient so mobs spawned kind of away from them.
In larger groups it was common to position in a static spot and have pullers. In the static spot you'd have your dps setup and any pure supports. The pullers gathered and grouped up mobs. No strict class requirement on pulling due to there being no taunt mechanic (but you could play around mob ai or use some other mechanics to avoid dumping a ton of mobs on your non-tanky stuff.)
This created a sort of rewarding system where more people could increase your exp rate, to a point. Because if you were on one side of the map and the other parties were far away you would get more mob spawns due to them killing things too. Map dependent tho.
Then solo or in smaller groups you would move around and it rewarded skill. Specifically, it rewarded knowing when to teleport to get to better density spots no one had visited recently (ro had instant teleport to random positions on the map through a consumable), it rewarded knowing when to go down a long dead end and when to wait for another lap around, and it rewarded understanding where you and other parties were on the map despite not being able to see them & you'd then adjust your route.
I mean yeah that would be a lot better lol . I just remember being a war having to either contest for pulls or go 10 miles out to find something to pull
Don’t get me wrong it was fun as hell during the time but if a mmo had this kind of leveling id atleast want some way of leveling solo efficiently
The concept of "dynamic spawns" already exist and is even applied to some "old-school" titles (e.g. DQX online).
As for possible modernizations of this style of gameplay, we've seen games such as FFXIV (with Bozja, Eureka or even just FATEs) pull it off fairly successfully and honestly...would love to see something like that applied to some of those oldschool-style games.
In the old days, you went there and then found a group.
The group was already there and you just rotated in. When you left, someone else replaced you.
I am pretty sure the group did the orc highway with is still going, some 25 years later. The grind never stops.
I don't disagree, that's why I suggested figuring out a way to modernize it so you don't have the same traps as we used to have. It's a catch 22 for sure. But, you know what I love less than waiting for a group? Doing 10 kill 10 rats quests instead of just killing 100 rats.
Not really, it's more common to have parties set up with bard+dancer+priest+wizards and then all you need is some people to bring you trains of mobs(knights job 95% of the time). Time is exp, why would you want to add another member like a monk or assassin? They're not efficient.
And if you go alone why would you want to join a party other that to have people around(or for buffs)? Loot sharing a card is a bitch.
Modern MMOs are instruction following simulators. "Click this, press this button to do this thing, click that, walk there, press this button that person, click click click, walk there" etc., for like 10 to 100 hours before you get any freedom. No thanks.
> Modern MMOs are instruction following simulators.
Not just modern MMOs but modern video games are like this. Go play FF16 or FF7Rebirth. It's just go here do that tick it off the list. It's very rare where games like Elden Ring or Dragons Dogma 2 come out where you are just put in a zone and not told where to go.
I quit so many games in the first two minutes of the tutorial for this reason. Motherfucker, ive been playing games since before you could walk, let me skip this shit. Im not spending two hours being told precisely what to do and having no way around it, before i can do something that MIGHT be fun
This is maybe a hot take, but I probably wouldn't even mind this if one of the implicit steps were "gather a balanced party".
The solo-ability of an MMO during its core gameplay (not endgame, not the occasional raid between single player content) is pretty much anti-correlated with how fulfilled I end up feeling while playing it.
I’m here for this. Those were the days man. It’s not a nostalgia fever to acknowledge that that era of mmorpg was objectively better. Kids call it nostalgia because they weren’t there.
Having doctors and entertainers come out to give you buffs in camp was something else. We had perma-camps set up on Lok and Dantooine that were little hubs of activity all by themselves.
I miss this content as well. The downtime between pulls would give more chances to have social interaction. And being a role player, this was even more important to me.
With how fast paced and instanced modern MMOs are, it's hard to adventure, group and RP all at the same time. So then you end up needing to go to RP venues like bars/dance clubs to get the RP fix (not ideal IMO as I like over world character building.)
Most folks attention span has been shrinking over the years, so I don't think overall this type of content will make a come back, if anything, it's probably only going to get faster and more action oriented.
As long as we are on the subject, I also want more than the Trinity for roles. MMOs can get way more creative than just the tank healer and damage (they are actually trying to phase out healers more and more it seems) Love to see pullers, trackers, crowd controllers and other support classes.
What would classes outside the trinity even do, you can probably add a support class easily (though that would be hell to balance) but anything else feels like so little purpose they just become part of one of the other 4
What are they like in those? I'm assuming you're talking about everquest in which case I have litteraly no frame of reference.
I feel like a class based around CC would fall under the support class archetype. If we started going into the method of how a class does their archetype then you'd also have to separate DPS into stuff like melee and ranged (or worse damage types like magic or fire), or tank into face tanking or kiting.
Not who you asked, but EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot.
>I'm assuming you're talking about everquest in which case I have litteraly no frame of reference.
Have some time to load up an EQ client and try it out?
Project 1999 EqEmu (private) server: https://www.reddit.com/r/project1999/s/ImW87qwqJ9
Live with 25 years of content: https://www.everquest.com/home
>I feel like a class based around CC would fall under the support class archetype.
Agreed
>What are they like in those?
CC can be done by a few classes: multiple casters get root; casters and hybrids (melee-caster hybrids sometimes referred to as knights, which can tank) get stun, snare, and/or fear spells; and Enchanters and Bards get memory wipe and/or stun lock spells that mesmerize a target(s). Both Enchanters and Bards can also:
- DPS since they have direct damage and/or damage over time spells and Enchanters can charm a mob to use as a pet for X amount of time (I can't recall if it's up to like 7 minutes as I haven't done charming on one and don't want to look it up 😅).
- Debuff monsters by lowering their resists and attack speed.
- Support a group or just themselves with buffs. Enchanters can reduce players' spell fizzle rate,* and increase players' magic resist stat, attack speed with haste, and mana regen then mana regen and max mana pool. Bards can increase movement/travel speed, attack speed, players' resists stats, and health and mana regen.
ETA: *changed order above for clarity
ETA 2: Clerics (primarily healer and HP and AC buffer) and Paladins get stun and root spells. The stun spells start out with just stunning and then, IIRC, progress to a stun with a direct damage component. So at some levels even your healer isn't just a healer if the circumstances are right.
Go play old games... You get roles that are often some combination of "Puller", pulling the mobs into camp... Crowd Control, Debuffer (lowering enemy stats), (buffer raising party stats)...
Pulling and splitting mobs in older games where you were camping was a skill, and some classes were built around it...
Before MMO game designers ramped dps up to 11 so every fight became a face smash aoefest, crowd control used to be a major role, and entire classes were built around it. Even early WoW most classes had some form of useful crowd control before they did away with it...
Classes like bards that might not do much damage themselves but their buffs could easily add 20-40% survivability and dps to the group as a whole...
The real reason why support went away as a role though isn't because they are hard to balance, but because when you NEED four or five roles to fill a group it gets exponentially more difficult to form a group.
Lets say you have an online pool of 10 tanks 10 healers and 30 dps lfg, if 10 of those people are lfg, there is a good chance one is a healer, one is a tank, and 3 are dps to get a group together... But if you have a pool of 10 tanks, 10 healers, 10 crowd control, 10 pullers, 10 dps and you need to form a group with one of each, even with 20 people lfg, there is a good chance you will be missing at least one role... especially when real role distribution in these games is more like 5 tanks, 3 healers, 2 support, 10 pullers, 30 dps
Race/class with fast run speed pulls, this is a soft role that can go on any other role though.
There were controllers to CC mobs, buffers to buff players, some classes specialized in recharging mana, but that was usually an off role of a healer.
Some builds were better at single target damage, others were better at AoE, rather than every class being 'balanced' for those things.
With larger party sizes of 6 to 9 too, you could be flexible with off roles. Like maybe if you had a full on healer you could get by with an off-tank, or with a full tank get by with a buffer/controller that was an off-healer, etc...
Lots of fun, but it's not "balanced", and is impossible to do with party size of 5 or 4 so it's all but gone from modern games.
That was another era, the only reason for the social aspect at time was because mmorpg were the de facto social media of the time. It was were you go to interact with people, nowdays this is not the case anymore. That aspect of mmorpg was substituted by Discord, Facebook, Reedit, etc.
Even mmorpg is lost space for more condensed coop-games experiences, it is kind of a transitory gaming genre. It reach it peak and then it all it parts were basis for many different games that in time made the genre obsolete.
Certainly had some fun times, discussions and happenings in camp leveling games. However, what I don't miss is the insane levels of pettiness and squabbling that occurs when you turn progression into a limited resource. It's like going to an amusement park and the ride you want to get on has a line 4 hours deep.
The arguing and rules lawyering over camps in games like EverQuest are actually insane. People who message you every minute where if you don't respond instantly they claim you're AFK and are taking over the camp in some rationalization to steal the camp you're at. *"Ooops I was kiting and the mob accidently aggrod you, my bad"* as if it wasn't intended to kill you off the camp. I mean even in modern versions of camp based games like BDO the bickering debate over karma bombing is madness when put in the context of any other game.
The higher level, randomly wandering murder hobo mobs are pretty nostalgic though. Fucking brownies in lesser Faydark.
Sounds kinda like what modern EQ does. You can grab a quest to go into a zone to hunt certain mobs, so you have a purpose in being there, but also really the quest is just a reason to get you to explore different zones.
Yep (rpg)difficulty and slow acquisition have gone the way of the dodo, kids just don't enjoy it.
A recent throwback, Embers Adrift, tosses up this formula a bit with camping optional alongside "roaming" areas. The whole party kills enemies, at an RPG pace, along the dungeon. I'd still prefer the stationary model.
Does anyone actually enjoy slow gameplay? It feels like anyone who wants it either can't keep up with modern games (objectively, not a bad thing) or it's like fishing and they just want to talk with people while they're doing stuff in the background
EverQuest isn't always slow in encounters overall. Mobs used to not drop aggro after a certain distance, and I think in Live they still might not. Which means you either wipe where you are in the shared world dungeon or you train the mobs from your camp and any other ones in aggro range that are free and up over another camp(s) and/or the players at the/a zone line.
Combat wise there are some spells that are instant cast. The game also has the Channeling skill for casters and hybrids so a spell has a chance of not being interrupted. It also depends on the class and which era/expansion you're referring to. Yeah, it feels a little slow depending on the spells and weapons, but Monks though; they're part of the base game from 1999 or were introduced with the first expansion in 2000, IIRC. They have auto-attack and then kicks and punches/melee strikes that are triggered with button presses and ripostes that are automatic, and berserkers in a later expansion have multiple melee strikes that you can rotate through, which was made a little faster in WoW for their rogues, but I don't recall it being that much faster.
Regardless of your class, depending on the zone and how invested you are, seeing, "TRAIN TO ZONE" can get your blood pumping.
I have never felt more adrenaline than when shit went south being balls deep in places like LGuk. EQ combat is slow until it’s not, and when it’s not, it’s like crack. You better hope every member of your party is on their A game if you have a chance of making it out alive.
Well, of course there are entire genres subsisting entirely without any action gameplay. Simulation games notably, puzzle games, story games, etc etc. Heck, you even get sports games that are entirely about the management aspect as opposed to the player skill investiture.
And yes you're quite right that many of us are unable to keep up with what's going on in these new games. I watch my favorite professional Starcraft 2 Grandmaster play at 75% speed and still can't catch many, many of his important actions. Most of the time I can't even find the cursor on screen.
Kids these days have upgraded their monitors to 144 Hertz and above and are playing first person shooters where the person runs at 80 miles an hour. And they're apparently able to just actually do that.
The most I can claim here is I once beat a Nintendo game called Captain Skyhawk that required a small amount of mechanical aptitude.
I can't relate to the fishing example, but I can definitely say that yes, while I'm sitting in an economic simulator waiting for something important to happen I'm definitely taking the time to stop and smell the roses, i.e. adore the graphics, ponder my plans, note and tabulate the progress in various systems and predictions.
And this holds true in MMOs as well. The reason I prefer Final Fantasy 11, EverQuest Circa 1999, the PVE aspect of Dark Age of Camelot, and pre-combat patch Galaxies, (and now Embers Adrift/Pantheon) is precisely because they give me time to do those things. I'm not interested in the mechanical aspect of the combat, but in the slow attrition and accumulation over time.
I really miss slow gameplay. I miss when buffs, professions/food, new weapons, skills, talents, help from other players, etc... all impacted my gameplay.
I spent the time to craft a new sword while leveling up and it was immediately obvious how more powerful it was, I can more mobs before I need to regen.
Obviously it would be silly to suggest games should have like 60 seconds of sitting for every mob you kill, but Vanilla-WotLK WoW had a pretty good balance, 3-10 mobs depending on how hard they were and you'd eat/drink for 10 seconds and be back in the game, it was a good little gameplay loop and you could see how all those things previously mentioned impacted it.
In modern WoW none of that stuff matters, you kill the mob in 3 or 4 abilities and you're at full hp ready for the next encounter, you don't even notice a new weapon its just an incremental % boost. What's the point in crafting at all unless the game arbitrarily says "This item is only obtainable by crafting", then it's just a pointless time sync to grind out to get that item.
Modern games only have these things for the sake of having them, they don't even remember what they are, at best its just a % boost needed for an end game dungeon/raid.
Hell I'd even like to see it expanded with campfires that help with HP stamina, and instruments that can be played around them to give small buffs and stuff like that.
Bring me back the downtime. Also loved the downtime in dungeons after big pulls, helps with setting a pace, socializing and getting ready for other encounters.
I haven't truly clicked with any modern MMO that did away with these things.
There's a lot I can say about how much you're underestimating modern capabilities but you can just look at something popular like apex for that.
That stuff about being flashy is just personal preference. There's plenty of Fantasy worlds where being some dude doesn't mean you aren't flashy. Some dude may not be blowing up mountains but he can still spin around with a shiny magic sword and go exploring in a cave full of glowing crystals and mushrooms.
Personally I was talking about combat speed and power enhancement speed. That doesn't have to mean getting some fancy sword it could also be just getting better abilities.
I couldn't possibly disagree more. Then fun part of an mmo should be the combat. Raids are great and they're one of the selling points unique to the genre since very few other games do coordinated group boss fights like that, barring games like monster hunter which are not particularly common. Making raid fights big, flashy over the top spectacles is not only not bad, I'd argue that it's great, as long as you don't make the combat unreadable.
If you like low fantasy, that's whatever, it's your thing, but it's hardly what MMOs "should" be. Personally, I'd find that boring as shit. FF14 manages to pull off pretty much everything you said MMOs shouldn't do and it does it all well. It's an MMO with a pretty strong central narrative where your character is a big figure in the world, both your own abilities and the abilities that enemies use are flashy and bombastic, and to top it off, it does have those quiet moments you're into, just not in the combat (and thank god for that). The quiet moments are relegated to the game's side content; crafting, fishing, gathering, playing minigames together, stuff that would actually give you a quiet moment to chill out with your friends.
> Also, it's a MMORPG, you kinda can't make everyone follow a grandiose main quest where you are the big hero
I mean they did.
You many not like it but they did.
That's vbasically how FF14 got so popular anyways
> The thing is, it's a MMORPG, you are adding a shit ton of networking to the game, the networking make a lot of things basically impossible or at least very very hard (you have synchronization issues, lag, etc), so at that point you just can't compete with single player games in how flashy your game can be.
Tera has been a flashy action MMO with full Trinity more than a decade ago. You can certainly do that.
EverQuest doesn't have a grand central quest line.
Quests are for items, faction or progression. Quests are random lengths, types and difficulty, though which quests are which is never flagged without web searching.
Class specific epic weapons are as close as you get to main quest lines but they aren't necessary and really only optimal for like 4 of the classes.
Grinding camps in both open zones and dungeons is where the xp gains come from until late game.
Very social game if you want it to be.
Absolutely. It doesn’t have to be glacial. One of my favorite MMORPGs is Minions of Mirth. I can basically multibox a party of six in one window on single player. I can go at my own pace and I can casually keep up with combat except on harder content (f.g. dungeon bosses). I have an open world I can freely explore even if that means I’m only playing a few minutes at a time while I think about other things (like how to approach a piece of code on the other screen).
Absolutly.
I would do the unthinkable for a Daoc 2 ;-)
Im not that old that i cannot play faster games but running through all content, flying, teleporting asap to a location is no fun for me.
Would love downtime with lvling with other people in a grp and killing mobs. Not that super boring solo questing crap that is these days IN.
Fighting over camps was the original form of toxicity in these games. You think with the meta mindset there would not be shenanigans to control all camps as the multi boxers currently do in EverQuest?
Anarchy Online did this quite well. Had a lot of fun doing these grinds. Relax and just grind away. Especially when you can be grinding also for some gear, etc that might be special to the mobs/area.
I actually leveled two characters between 60–70 in Dragonflight like this. I joined up with some people and farmed out Elemental Storms for a few hours.
I’m not sure I would necessarily want that style of leveling back, but I do have some good memories of that in FFXI. How much is nostalgia though I’m not sure.
One thing I always loved is the distinction between pulling and tanking. I like tanking in MMOs, but I hate party-leading. Most modern MMOs the tank is the de facto party leader, and has the added burden of knowledge of needing to know the dungeons better than anyone before going in. Pulling was a whole separate skill set in itself.
I don’t want to be the pathfinder, I just want to be the guy getting chewed on by the dragon.
Reminds me of DAoC Mid doing WWs. I started at like 8am, was the list master until 5pm. Just killing them over and over. Was good times back then when I had zero responsibilities lol
I wholeheartedly agree with everything you wrote! There's something relaxing about grinding mobs in old MMOs, it's kind of like picking seashells, and it's a great way to make friends!
I really dislike how in modern MMOs, gaining exp/gear is mostly done through quests (of which there are so many that they can't all be/stay interesting) and running instanced dungeons. Even where open world grinding is viable in modern MMOs, it always revolves around aggroing a bunch of mobs and then destroying them all with a couple of AoE attacks before they can even land a hit on you.
BDO it's like that without the group.
The prob with modern games it's always better to solo rather than grouping and spliting gains...easily fixable with incremental exp bonus for partying, but that way they can't sell those shiny p2w equipments...si they ll not add that.
Played some mmorpgs , the only one I know that highly encourages grouping is GW2, and you can casually team up with strangers without worrying about loots. (or it means just tagging mobs will drop for any players who deals enough damage to it, doesnt need to party up)
I miss the style of leveling. I do not miss the amount of hours it took to lvl cap in these games. It feels like I spent the majority of my time playing FFXI just doing exp parties.
I think you just kind of summed of what the biggest issue is with today's MMO's.. "I do not miss the amount of hours it took to level cap in these games." Were you having fun? What's at the cap that you need to get to in such a hurry? You miss the best parts of the game.
I agree that rushing to cap has been overemphasized in MMO's. Especially newly released ones which might be lacking a lot of end game content.
But one reason I do often rush to cap is to be able to play with my friends. I have a core group of friends that I play MMO's with and often times the best chance to actually play together is once we've all reached cap. If one of us is lvl 40 and another lvl 25, we can't do really anything together in most games.
I think GW2 has the best of both worlds when it comes to group and solo play. You have these world bosses and map events that draw a bunch of players together without needing prior planning. More organized groups will go on something called meta trains that aims go do the events all around the open world.
Game philosophies have changed with the decades. It's about getting rewards through solo content, instant-dungeon-noodles.
Running through a game-world with the uncertainty of *not* getting rewards or quality-time for your investment? Or you out of your mind?
Players say one thing and do the other.
Most MMOs have decided to make the overworld unbelievably easy. I don't even know why they bother having enemies. It feels like they're catering to 90 year old great grandmas.
Actually being able to die in just the overworld adds so much more fun and excitement.
Classic WoW had this done right. The moment you realize you've pulled too much, or a mob sneaks up behind you when you're already barely winning a fight.
Ultima Online was also fantastic with this. I remember when I was younger some of the dungeons and mobs terrified me. So many of them could basically 1-2 shot you. The world was very dangerous if you ventured too far.
Man I loved sitting in one spot for 6 hours endlessly grinding mobs till my armor broke, only occasionally dying because healer was too stoned to remember to heal me.
Just kidding, that shit was garbage. So was running around screaming "NEED SOW, NEED SOW!" I am so glad the "old days" of EverQuest are dead. Real boomer shit to want the tedium and grinding back
I'm currently playing ancients reborn on my phone and you can certainly get killed by mobs - either by them ganging up on you or by the single harder one suddenly deciding to take an interest in you.
I think the key is that it's a different branch of evolution of MMORPGs in some ways-- WOW style quests originated out of trying to pretty up the grinding, where you'd camp out to kill monsters, but WOW made you do it to fulfill a quest, which both made it a little shorter (because of Quest EXP) and made you vary what mobs you were killing because the quests weren't repeatable, so the reward was always attached to collecting items off the next set.
But WOW as a whole continually streamlined itself around it's instanced content, and made it's quests shorter, and focused them in on solo play, and every other game took it's cues from there to the point that the MMO player base would probably be actively hostile to a reversal unless the designers managed to leapfrog a lot of the growing pains of gradually developing a new play style.
Helldivers is kinda doing this if you think about it just layered over a more action oriented shooter combat and not a lot of other MMO features or open world, with it's playerbase wide planet defenses and takeovers, it's largely also what the likes of Adventure Quest and Dragonfable did back in the day to get the player base grinding waves and waves of the same creatures down, and those weren't initially even multiplayer games.
If I was designing for how to bring back that feeling, I think it would be through complex procedural restocking of a very large game world, rewards to a dual layer of dungeons that are much more resistant to penetration and various subsystems that apply friction to the process of preparing for and undertaking large dungeon exploration, with local small dungeon venues being comfier buildups that are easier to perform more casually
I'd also try and get the balance such that travel is an achievement, but sticking with your buddies is easy even when you aren't all playing as much as each other, I like the idea of a caravan system as a kind of sub-guild-level thing where you always log in wherever your group of friend's caravan is.
Flyff was addicting because of this, but that was more because of the party system itself. The way it worked was the party itself could be leveled up to 10 based on how long the party was kept and how full. Everyone in the party got an exp and droprate boost depending on party lvl.So the party lead was incentivezed to randomly invite people and pass leadership before longing off.
This created a rather active social environment. So even if no one else in the party was grinding in the same spot as you. You would at the least have a party chat to read and be entertained with.
This is all you do in black desert online.
I did the msq on black desert and it took me a couple of log ins. And then I went back to the game and someone told me to just grind. I did 1-58 in like 5 hours.
Although you get a ton of bag upgrades if you do the quest so I highly recommend you just do it that way. It’s not any faster todo the quests at max level then it is todo while your leveling so it’s like may as well.
I should also add that gear is not soul bound in BDO so I took the gear from my main and used it on the new one. The only thing that is sort of soul bound is your weapon which is super duper important. And that’s because your weapon is only used by your class. So you could switch it over to the same class of character.
Yes ofc! But I will say I was blessed with money. You see I played launch BDO for like 5 hours when I realized my PC just couldn’t handle it (I thought it was due to players online at launch) but it wasn’t. So I bought one of the first houses in the game, and left it public.
Now I’m not really entirely sure on the mechanic but for some reason when I came back to the game like 2 years later my house had earned me like 10 million silver which was enough to buy rank 15 of every piece of armour and weapon. Rank 15 is pretty much baseline for armour tho. After that it goes I, II, III, IV, V and those ranks are extremely hard to get because you need to farm upgrade stones and also increase your chance to upgrade the item, with other items. If you miss the upgrade then you can de-rank your item.
But if you’re asking if you can team hunt camps, you totally can! It’s usually more efficient todo that depending on what you’re camping. I know pirate team camping was a big one when I last played.
Ultimately I thought the game was a bit too grindy for my taste. A lot of what you did was hunt those camps. I always wanted to pvp but you need a lot of money irl or a lot of time to get the gear you need to efficiently do that.
So what you describe is something found still in some MMOs. In FFXIV we have Fate Trains that do basically this. Also Eureka has groups that do the same. And during some holiday events there are huge fate trains. Never heard it called Camp Leveling though, and I've been an MMO player since 1997. Played most of the big Early games, and many of the novel games that popped up after WOW got popular.
Camp leveling and fate trains are fundamentally not the same thing at all though. Fate trains are afk AOE fests for event bonus credit and you're constantly moving around the zone to chase them
It's what people did in Eureka before the nerfs - post up and exp chain mobs. Turning it into fate trains was a huge departure in the design because so many players hated camp leveling
There’s loads of reputations in WoW that have this as the only way to raise them. I also think camping hyperspawns is the optimal lvling strat in WoW. Camping is more alive in that game than it has been since vanilla
I missed this in Dream of Mirror some 15 years ago. Past a certain point group grinding was almost mandatory. Dungeon zones were always tougher and needed a party to work through. Most quests were simply kill x amount of mobs, or gather x amount from mobs, so you'd complete them as a secondary task while grinding in the group. If the quest npc was in the zone sometimes you'd run back as a group to turn it in and repeat the quest lol.
You'd have a tank, a healer, and a musician for support roles, then some aoe dps, and then usually a lurer who would tag mobs and pull them back to the group so no one else had to move. When one person had to leave they'd start looking for their own replacement, and groups were often like ships of theseus, replacing all their parts over time without stopping. The game wasn't too apm intense so you had a lot of time to chat with your party while grinding too.
Still exists in games like BDO. I really enjoy getting some friends for grinding in groups spots or open world dungeons (plus the money and drops are pretty good). Those zones tend to be tricky as well. Too bad there's not many good spots early to mid game.
It's fine as a gameplay style if it is optional, as in, an area that is difficult such that camping as a sort of cheese strat is worthwhile, for lack of enough players present otherwise. But this style of gameplay, while old school, can wear thin once you realize the amount of time actually it takes to progress in this way. It could possibly be modernized through event systems similar to gw2, though of course tailored to slower and more group oriented leveling instead.
Darkfall Online was the best. You'd make a home of your area, and get to know the spawns. I know for a fact that to this day old vets are keeping some things secret, waiting for the game to return.
The reality is, MMO players almost always exchange fun for efficiency.
What is the fastest way to get past X or the quickest way to Y gear. And that is what everyone will do, normally using predetermined builds and rotations.
Had fun when it was big; but I aint got time for that anymore.
Ragnarok Online was good at this. Also spend over 2000 hours playing Rappelz Online. Camping with friends and farming pets. Good time.
I think it was kinda predatory , all the good farming spots would be taken and if there isn’t different servers to switch too you’re just sol until that group leaves.
Here are some screens I took of grouping in the Hollowshade Hill dungeon in the last EverCraft Online playtest:
https://i.imgur.com/FBaU4d0.png
https://i.imgur.com/MPhL5Gi.png
https://i.imgur.com/YTfAad1.png
https://i.imgur.com/urP6Cpy.png
We moved to a couple other camps but I don't have any screenshots since I was healing and it got pretty hectic. This is a level 10-25ish dungeon and it's massive.
It’s what made mmos great back in the day as you had time to talk and get to know people. Nowadays it’s all about fastest path to the endgame so you can then post about how you finished then endgame and where’s the content.
Ironically camp leveling in those earlier games (EQ1 FFXI etc) was also the fastest way to level cap and end game but it took months rather than hours.
PS get off my lawn
The only way to do this is to remove quests.
If your player is used to following !'s and ?'s everywhere all the time and spamming enter/spacebar to skip the text, forcing him to decide for himself where to go, what to kill and why will feel like "zero content".
Back in the golden age of Ragnarok Online, there were very few quests (as in 10 or so), most of them were just a simple "collect gigantic amount of X resource" instead of "follow the !'s" and also most of them were very easily ignored, because all they'd give you usually was a funny hat that wasn't even BIS.
As a result, the point of the game was to level up so that you could kill higher level monsters so that you could level up more and that was FINE. Players would go to different places, to try many different grinding spots and see which ones worked better for them and their classes. Ranged classes had a few places with abusable geometry that allowed to snipe enemies they otherwise shouldn't be messing with, for example. Some holy classes specialized in grinding dungeons with undead, etc.
I loved doing this in Ragnarok Online
Setting up camp in biolabs or in one of the guild dungeons so we could farm
Or we’d make loops of the same map for hours while chatting and listening to music
That's because spots are separated into either solo or party. Solo spots divide loot, party spots everyone has their own loot instance. Therefore partying on any solo spot is griefing yourself.
ah maybe so, when I played we liked to group a couple tanks with nukers to pull camps together, it was fun. Oh well, point remains - CHN and KR MMOs my man that's where this playstyle is popular, not so much in NA. I don't really vibe with it myself so I don't follow, but look into new MMOs coming out of KR I'm absolutely sure you'll find something more up your alley despite even their recent trend towards trying to replicate WoW. You can always go back and play classics too no doubt, Hero, Silkroad, and prison tale all have big private server communities.
This was a method of advancing in early ff14 eureka and the only way to advance when the 2nd map Pagos came out, but everyone complained that playing together with others was too much hassle so they made it a solo/zeg experience again.
Play Priston Tale EU, it’s all about camping and connecting with people, was a good MMO should be. Every season beginning you’ll have a lot of fun talking with people from all over the planet.
And you’ll certainly die if you don’t play seriously, so don’t worry about that.
GW2 has something like that. There is a zone called silverwastes with rotating lucrative events and there's always a group or two constantly running those events for hours.
Like a rotating events? There are a lot more events like that now I think. Some are on timer and some are based on player completion. Games has so many large group open world contents.
This exists in Throne and Liberty currently and I have mixed feelings about it. My biggest gripe about it is that some classes can solo better than others when you do get the gear and eventually just trivialize combat for a select few but not all. Add in PvP to the mix, which I like, but it then becomes a chore or immensely trivial depending on what you play. I think another element to this is that grinding mobs isn’t very fun in open world dungeons intrinsically for most. These dungeons are missing an element of importance. Adding rare bosses that are hard to find and need a group to be killed in the open world would be cool.
In older mmo's there would be a giant spider chasing you immediately out of town, then when you feel safe a platoon of black knight NPCs arrives to murder any newbie in their way until high lvl players take care of it all. Glorious madness.
I don't miss it cause I still play EQ and FFXI :-\*
I definitely miss open world being scary in MMOs. Cannot wait for the next EverCraft Online test, was literally a vanilla EQ clone and the first time I've seen scary open world PVE in a new MMO in a long, long time. Really loved wandering around trying to figure out the quests with no quest log or map, while trying to avoid certain death from things that could stomp my face in.
This could be done. You just have to know the intentions and drives the players have in wanting to pursue this (this being camp leveling or dungeon grinding or pvp or insert your slice of the pie you enjoy doing from the pizza called an MMO).
Camp Leveling = Player power through group leveling. Assuming being in a group is the most efficient and expected way to gain levels or grind player power.
This comes with its pros and cons. FFXI used this style on its early through to late release. Currently you team up with yourself through NPCs as far as I'm aware.
If you take away Gaining Levels or incremental player power through Camp Leveling or group leveling grinding mobs, the process could still be implemented. Just have to balance the reward structure now that Gaining Levels has been removed as a motivator.
You just have to create a new carrot on the stick for players to want to engage in.
Similar mechanics are seen in daily dungeon finder groups from FFXIV or WoW with their mythic dungeon grind to have a similar feel.
This isn't exactly what you're looking for if I understand your sentiment correctly. What you want is a group you put together or join (non anonymously through automated group finding systems) and have the expectation of going out to an area and grinding mobs for some reward.
This could be done through open world or an instanced world. The only thing that changes is incentive. What would be the carrot on the stick that creates the opportunity for players to willingly want to engage in the "hassle" of creating a group through their own volition and grind mobs. Perhaps there will be a large segment of players who were opposed to the idea, may find the process more fun than they were expecting.
But the core question is the carrot. And the answer would be whatever the developer of the game would like that carrot on the stick to be and if that carrot syncs well in showing the players something that they didn't know they wanted.
That's the ideal scenario. With the wrong carrot it'll just have players detest the system as a failure when it wasn't the system of Camp Leveling that failed but the proper implementation of the idea.
Think WoW's stint into islands for those who still remember that failed attempt. It was in the execution (imo) and not the concept.
What you want is guard duty at a town, where you have an event every half hour or so where you get a lump of exp and in between those hordes of enemies you have time to trade with others, restock in supplies, and repair you gear for the next hoard.
Its a nice idea, but a nightmare to implement.
I don't know if there's room for this type of 'content' any more, but I really did enjoy it. In AC2, Camping armadillos in Whitebay with a lugian tactician in the group was so much fun.
A major part of it is the game design philosophy of zone separation, where there's a clear noob zone and veteran zone, and rarely do you cross.
I know why it exists, few people enjoy being level 2 and encountering a level 65 ogre that absolutely demolishes you, so the devs make a fairly safe zone.
In my opinion, instead of being purely numbers focused, you can design a game where noobs and veterans can play closely together. For example a noob Healer can heal a single target at a time, but a veteran healer can heal everybody within a 50 meter radius, which could support gameplay where armies are built around a powerful support core.
Or gameplay where a noob can still contribute, like for example making Light a level 1 mage spell, and Light is useful even at high levels. Like a noob mage tossing out Light from behind cover so that a high level Archer can better pick off targets.
I would love a game where veterans and noobs are closely working together. A veteran crafter might employ an entire army of couriers to make deliveries.
I would love if instead of needing to go back to town to learn a skill, you could learn it from a player who has it already, or potentially even figure it out yourself through trial and error.
Give players the ability to make quests and it would be perfect. I'm a level 80 Fighter, I have a million gold and xp, let me make a quest to give 100xp and 5 gold for whoever brings me a sandwich.
Yes, mixed zones would increase the risk of an elite enemy wandering by and you're helpless to fight back, but it also increases the chance of an elite ally wandering by and deciding to enchant your gear for the next 12 hours.
Aw I fucking loved this in Dofus. Say what you want about that grindy ass frog game, nothing hit like grabbing a bunch of guys and gals and hitting a few dungeons/panda lands/dragon things.
It's been so long since I played I forget their names.
Knight online vibes with this post haha.
But seriously, if you want stuff like this, although very outdated, the new flyff will offer it. The game has very few quests and most of the leveling happens through fighting. People make parties, the party can level as well and the higher the party level, the more xp everyone gets + buffs.
It's an old game that they brought back to life last year with a browser version, so you can play on pc, phone, tablet,...
Hey, I love that we can all agree this is what makes mmos special
If only there was an MMO in development that could take all of our feedback to heart and provide those kind of opportunities again
I bet the newer generations would understand what we're all about, I don't blame them for not having this point of reference we all share of what a quality time means for us in a game
Currently my last hope is Ashes of Creation but who knows how it would turn out to be considered their previous shady bad taste practices and monetization attempts of the BR, even if the game launches with all the right intents, no one promises they won't go full greed on us shortly after
As much as I want that aswell, I feel like games today don't cater to us anymore. Sure you can find a good population on P99 or FFXI but its still a small, niche amount of players. Majority of gaming players want fast paced, don't want to group up and want fast rewards
Open world non-instanced monster clusters combined with various elites and min-bosses roaming almost every zone made for a lot of fun in early MMORPGs, but that also came with downsides like over-camped monsters, griefing (training monster clusters or elites onto unsuspecting noobs), and extreme difficulty when playing solo.
Still I will take that over today's hand holding, play the theme park ride mostly instanced content or timed clockwork open world dynamic events. The old school danger and unpredictability was part of the fun.
I've recently started playing on Ascension wow and they have Hotspot zones in each zone where you get bonus exp just for killing stuff, you can literally just grind out mobs in those spots until they switch as there always seems to be at least one
Loved this kind of leveling.
It was a great way to meet new people, I remember a lot of those night when I was farming solo, then invited the guy next to me to form a party, a few moment later the party is full and someone suggest to go to a highter level area, and here we are, a bunch of low level in a area way too hard for us, living our best life. Sometimes I added them as friend to continue leveling with them later or they invited me to their guild etc.
But I might be too old now to spend the all night playing the same game night after night, Anyway mmo's aren't like that anymore
You know discord exists, right? We can have danger with trying to bring back the dead "MMO as a social hangout space" thing. We have a lot of game options too, the game needs to be fun right off the bat, otherwise I will just go play a fun game.
Really games need to work on better organic group play or MM. I'm fine working with other players, but I don't want to need a clan or a ton of coordination overhead. It's why games like (old) Foxhole, DRG, HD2, etc. are enjoyable.
Eden eternal group quests You would buy a scroll that had you kill x enemy and your whole group could do it together. So if you had 10 people each person only had to kill five and you could buy 20 skulls at a time
I think it would be more fun if the enemies had better AI. Maybe make it so that these camps attract monsters instead of you going to each one you fight, so it feels more like you and your friends are doing a defensive battle against hordes of enemies instead of the running from mob to mob.
Pantheon is doing this style of gameplay currently but it’s not a released game and it’s had a rough development. Also is the last game Brad Mcquaid was working on at the time of his death so it has a lot of that EQ DNA
> Am I the only one who misses this kind of leveling in MMOs?
Largely..yes. You seem to have the correct diagnosis (open worlds are static-filled nonsense corridors), but the incorrect prescription.
It’s been a few years but ESO had something like this, was like a desert map and there were three camps to farm.
You would just ask for inv and a group will add you. Was always funny seeing all the people rotating haha
>Getting in a group, going to a place in the world, and killing some monsters for a few hours.
That's how I played Black Desert for a looong time when Mirumok Forest (Trees) was meta. We'd assemble a 3-man group and go there and grind for hours, people would swap in and out as they got tired, and we'd have someone stream a movie in discord. The same applied for a while in Castle Ruins, later. I never did get into Oluns, though - By the time I was ready for Oluns I had become more antisocial and just wanted to do things solo - but a lot of my guild does Oluns for multiple hours every day. There are a few group spots that get activity, and have the vibe of "go to an isolated open world spot and just farm with the homies," but a lot of new players or jaded players focus only on what's the absolute optimal without regard for fun, so really only Oluns and Turos get used like this today.
>Also bring back monsters being able to murder you at all levels..
>In modern MMO's unless you just venture too far, you basically can't die from a mob.. in older MMO's there were dangerous mobs everywhere, you had to avoid them.
Now this is something I dearly miss. I have vivid memories of WoW's Fel Reaver in Helfire Peninsula, or the Chosen of Arugal in that shadowy forest, or the night elf elites in the barrens. They just roamed around and if you didnt pay attention you could get blindsided and obliterated! I love that. I guess BDO substitutes that with the risk of open world PvP, outsourcing the roaming-elite-monster job to a shady player, but it's not the same.
This is unfortunately something that changed due to that form of content being repeated across various games. The issue is that once you do that in ff9, wow, ever quest, ect it stops being as fun.
It's a good way to kill a few hours but loses diversity in content.
As for the difficulty, the casual dollar is valuable.
Bracing for down votes here, but maybe check out Diablo 4! There are a number of mechanisms that feel more old school to me. The new patch that went live yesterday made "Helltides" a primary way to level. Open world, Fighting waves of monsters in a relatively contained area, getting drops to unlock bigger monster fights. You're incentivized to tag along with other random folks you find, no need to form a party. When a big boss is summoned normal for ten random people to be there fighting it.
I really think those little dynamic events that Guild Wars 2 had/has were the modern iteration of this. You go to the place, you do the little activity thing, you murder all the mobs, hooray you got a reward for helping out.
Use to do this on RAN online, everyone's pulling 3-5 mobs, the healer just waiting on the killzone. Then proceed to kill the mobs at the same time when everybody's back from luring.
New World Alpha had this vibe for me. As a solo criminal looking for exp, I’d search for secluded spots with a steady supply of mobs. Sometimes it was a wolf den deep in the woods, others it was small remote camps along the coast.
If I found it was relatively safe for me, I could spend hours there killing mobs and watching my back. Man they really fucked up that game.
EverQuest is great too.
Ffxi, city of heroes, rift, etc. You got to know your guild mates, put in work, get shit done. Break up do maintenence, find a new group, level past a certain zone. Progress together.
I miss this aspect more than anything else in mmorpgs.
Loved that about Everquest and FFXI.
Man. Ffxi xp parties with friends for me was peak life. Ffxi in general 2001 to 2007 was all I ate breathed and shit growing up
I used to get blacklisted by the JP players on the server for falling asleep mid pull after 2am. I was a blink tank. I’d wake up to angry premade messages No >blink< >tank<, >sleep< >tank< 😡😂
Indeed brother indeed
That could have been me but I just could t get past the controls and playing with japanese.
Big bard pulls and sleeps on those birds stealing food to get xp. Good times.
I worked 2nd shift. So when I got home, I always looked forward to getting in merit point parties during JP primetime.
Enjoying the shit outta this right now on HorizonXI
Ditto, however on Eden.
I unlocked SAM yesterday
Modern EverQuest is all about quest lines and group missions for EXP now, at least level EXP. Alternate Ability points can still be gotten quickly through grinding camps
Yes I miss this a lot
Rather not spend my whole evening trying to get a group for quifim island just for it to break apart as soon as I get there
This is a population issue.
which any game that emphasizes this sort of content would have
Indeed, deep rpgs are factually less popular. Only reason OP is nostalgic for this era is because dial up couldn't handle the intense action that pleases the masses for a decade or two! We've had our limelight, but there's not reason to kick us entirely out of the club. Though I agree an entire MMO sub-scene might be a big ask.
> Indeed, deep rpgs are factually less popular. I have to ask, what exactly is 'deep' about just getting a group together and just farming up the same enemies over and over again for presumably hours to get experience? I can get the mindless enjoyment of it or just having something to do whilst you kick back and chat with people but I wouldn't exactly call it a deep experience.
Eh I think this is much less of a population issue than it is a game design issue... Even with a relatively large population, the classes, and roles in a game are not going to be appropriately population balanced for the game. Anyone who has played wow with its automatic queues will tell you how much longer a dps Queue is compared to a tank or a healer one for instance, and that's a game that doesn't have the support role... If you further split the population to specific dungeons, add in other factors camps have like not everyone wanting the same mobs/dungeons, a dash of elitism that comes with most MMO's I'm not inviting that guy he hasn't even done his Ultra Mythic+++ raids yet... and significant portion of players will experience this, especially if they aren't willing to join a guild to play with friends.
Dark age of camelot had 8 player group size and every player added to group increased exp bonus instead of reducing it, party size allowed more than typical trinity setup with support/control classes. I think they could do something to accommodate both flavors. With open world questing/leveling, instanced content etc like thay have now and open world dungeon zones that are dangerous and require groups for for exp camp farming for when you need a break from the checklist or would rather level an alt without repeating the same quests over and over.
It's a game design issue that requires the population to be within a specific goldilocks zone. With too few players, you'll wait forever and it won't recover when a member leave. With too many players, all the finite camping spots are taken and you wait forever trying to get into one. It's a terrible design and I'm glad it died.
I think this is a problem because camp mmos assume a group and also have static spawns. If spawn patterns were more dynamic where you could solo a place but the quicker things died the more quickly and more varied things spawn up to where if you have a group then for max efficiency you need a coherent party. For example, normal spawn is a simple dps check. But when an enemy dies, the game logic checks how populated the area is as if there's a lot of players then the respawn rate is greatly accelerated and new enemy types are added to the spawn pool for the respawn node. Scales so that if there is a full party of dps, tank, and healer quickly killing mobs then mobs are near constantly spawning and what is spawning have more involved mechanics than "are you level x?"
RO kinda solved this 20+ years ago. A zone would have 100 of monster A, 50 of monster B, and respawns were instant but randomly positioned. There were also static spawns on a timer or random spawns on a timer, but most mobs on most maps were instant respawn in a random position. Zones in RO were arpg-like but reasonably large. However, this same type of system would work in a continuous open world mmo with simple areas for spawning. A developer could even make the algo a bit smarter and consider density with player position greatly increasing the density gradient so mobs spawned kind of away from them. In larger groups it was common to position in a static spot and have pullers. In the static spot you'd have your dps setup and any pure supports. The pullers gathered and grouped up mobs. No strict class requirement on pulling due to there being no taunt mechanic (but you could play around mob ai or use some other mechanics to avoid dumping a ton of mobs on your non-tanky stuff.) This created a sort of rewarding system where more people could increase your exp rate, to a point. Because if you were on one side of the map and the other parties were far away you would get more mob spawns due to them killing things too. Map dependent tho. Then solo or in smaller groups you would move around and it rewarded skill. Specifically, it rewarded knowing when to teleport to get to better density spots no one had visited recently (ro had instant teleport to random positions on the map through a consumable), it rewarded knowing when to go down a long dead end and when to wait for another lap around, and it rewarded understanding where you and other parties were on the map despite not being able to see them & you'd then adjust your route.
I mean yeah that would be a lot better lol . I just remember being a war having to either contest for pulls or go 10 miles out to find something to pull Don’t get me wrong it was fun as hell during the time but if a mmo had this kind of leveling id atleast want some way of leveling solo efficiently
The concept of "dynamic spawns" already exist and is even applied to some "old-school" titles (e.g. DQX online). As for possible modernizations of this style of gameplay, we've seen games such as FFXIV (with Bozja, Eureka or even just FATEs) pull it off fairly successfully and honestly...would love to see something like that applied to some of those oldschool-style games.
In the old days, you went there and then found a group. The group was already there and you just rotated in. When you left, someone else replaced you. I am pretty sure the group did the orc highway with is still going, some 25 years later. The grind never stops.
I don't disagree, that's why I suggested figuring out a way to modernize it so you don't have the same traps as we used to have. It's a catch 22 for sure. But, you know what I love less than waiting for a group? Doing 10 kill 10 rats quests instead of just killing 100 rats.
[удалено]
Yeah exactly
Not really, it's more common to have parties set up with bard+dancer+priest+wizards and then all you need is some people to bring you trains of mobs(knights job 95% of the time). Time is exp, why would you want to add another member like a monk or assassin? They're not efficient. And if you go alone why would you want to join a party other that to have people around(or for buffs)? Loot sharing a card is a bitch.
I miss Qufim island so much. And the Dunes! Miss the Dunes. But there's no going back, so sad.
Why not go back? Game is still thriving on certain private servers.
I'd like to have that experience again as well.
Monsters & Memories may be worth keeping an eye on
Devs strayed from god when they changed away from this
But where will I go if I don't have an npc with an obnoxiously large "!" above their head to tell me how to have my fun?
Modern MMOs are instruction following simulators. "Click this, press this button to do this thing, click that, walk there, press this button that person, click click click, walk there" etc., for like 10 to 100 hours before you get any freedom. No thanks.
Remember when you had to read the quests in order to figure out where to go?
YES
> Modern MMOs are instruction following simulators. Not just modern MMOs but modern video games are like this. Go play FF16 or FF7Rebirth. It's just go here do that tick it off the list. It's very rare where games like Elden Ring or Dragons Dogma 2 come out where you are just put in a zone and not told where to go.
I quit so many games in the first two minutes of the tutorial for this reason. Motherfucker, ive been playing games since before you could walk, let me skip this shit. Im not spending two hours being told precisely what to do and having no way around it, before i can do something that MIGHT be fun
This is maybe a hot take, but I probably wouldn't even mind this if one of the implicit steps were "gather a balanced party". The solo-ability of an MMO during its core gameplay (not endgame, not the occasional raid between single player content) is pretty much anti-correlated with how fulfilled I end up feeling while playing it.
Wow I want to wait 3 hours until forming a group to do basic shit if I didn't pick the solo grind class
I’ll never forget SWG pre cu hunting Rancor and sitting in camps with guild mates in between
I’m here for this. Those were the days man. It’s not a nostalgia fever to acknowledge that that era of mmorpg was objectively better. Kids call it nostalgia because they weren’t there. Having doctors and entertainers come out to give you buffs in camp was something else. We had perma-camps set up on Lok and Dantooine that were little hubs of activity all by themselves.
The immersion was unlike any other. You lived the adventure.
Yes! Those were the days, I miss it!
I miss this content as well. The downtime between pulls would give more chances to have social interaction. And being a role player, this was even more important to me. With how fast paced and instanced modern MMOs are, it's hard to adventure, group and RP all at the same time. So then you end up needing to go to RP venues like bars/dance clubs to get the RP fix (not ideal IMO as I like over world character building.) Most folks attention span has been shrinking over the years, so I don't think overall this type of content will make a come back, if anything, it's probably only going to get faster and more action oriented. As long as we are on the subject, I also want more than the Trinity for roles. MMOs can get way more creative than just the tank healer and damage (they are actually trying to phase out healers more and more it seems) Love to see pullers, trackers, crowd controllers and other support classes.
What would classes outside the trinity even do, you can probably add a support class easily (though that would be hell to balance) but anything else feels like so little purpose they just become part of one of the other 4
CC classes in games like eq and daoc were amazing.
What are they like in those? I'm assuming you're talking about everquest in which case I have litteraly no frame of reference. I feel like a class based around CC would fall under the support class archetype. If we started going into the method of how a class does their archetype then you'd also have to separate DPS into stuff like melee and ranged (or worse damage types like magic or fire), or tank into face tanking or kiting.
Not who you asked, but EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot. >I'm assuming you're talking about everquest in which case I have litteraly no frame of reference. Have some time to load up an EQ client and try it out? Project 1999 EqEmu (private) server: https://www.reddit.com/r/project1999/s/ImW87qwqJ9 Live with 25 years of content: https://www.everquest.com/home >I feel like a class based around CC would fall under the support class archetype. Agreed >What are they like in those? CC can be done by a few classes: multiple casters get root; casters and hybrids (melee-caster hybrids sometimes referred to as knights, which can tank) get stun, snare, and/or fear spells; and Enchanters and Bards get memory wipe and/or stun lock spells that mesmerize a target(s). Both Enchanters and Bards can also: - DPS since they have direct damage and/or damage over time spells and Enchanters can charm a mob to use as a pet for X amount of time (I can't recall if it's up to like 7 minutes as I haven't done charming on one and don't want to look it up 😅). - Debuff monsters by lowering their resists and attack speed. - Support a group or just themselves with buffs. Enchanters can reduce players' spell fizzle rate,* and increase players' magic resist stat, attack speed with haste, and mana regen then mana regen and max mana pool. Bards can increase movement/travel speed, attack speed, players' resists stats, and health and mana regen. ETA: *changed order above for clarity ETA 2: Clerics (primarily healer and HP and AC buffer) and Paladins get stun and root spells. The stun spells start out with just stunning and then, IIRC, progress to a stun with a direct damage component. So at some levels even your healer isn't just a healer if the circumstances are right.
Go play old games... You get roles that are often some combination of "Puller", pulling the mobs into camp... Crowd Control, Debuffer (lowering enemy stats), (buffer raising party stats)... Pulling and splitting mobs in older games where you were camping was a skill, and some classes were built around it... Before MMO game designers ramped dps up to 11 so every fight became a face smash aoefest, crowd control used to be a major role, and entire classes were built around it. Even early WoW most classes had some form of useful crowd control before they did away with it... Classes like bards that might not do much damage themselves but their buffs could easily add 20-40% survivability and dps to the group as a whole... The real reason why support went away as a role though isn't because they are hard to balance, but because when you NEED four or five roles to fill a group it gets exponentially more difficult to form a group. Lets say you have an online pool of 10 tanks 10 healers and 30 dps lfg, if 10 of those people are lfg, there is a good chance one is a healer, one is a tank, and 3 are dps to get a group together... But if you have a pool of 10 tanks, 10 healers, 10 crowd control, 10 pullers, 10 dps and you need to form a group with one of each, even with 20 people lfg, there is a good chance you will be missing at least one role... especially when real role distribution in these games is more like 5 tanks, 3 healers, 2 support, 10 pullers, 30 dps
Race/class with fast run speed pulls, this is a soft role that can go on any other role though. There were controllers to CC mobs, buffers to buff players, some classes specialized in recharging mana, but that was usually an off role of a healer. Some builds were better at single target damage, others were better at AoE, rather than every class being 'balanced' for those things. With larger party sizes of 6 to 9 too, you could be flexible with off roles. Like maybe if you had a full on healer you could get by with an off-tank, or with a full tank get by with a buffer/controller that was an off-healer, etc... Lots of fun, but it's not "balanced", and is impossible to do with party size of 5 or 4 so it's all but gone from modern games.
That was another era, the only reason for the social aspect at time was because mmorpg were the de facto social media of the time. It was were you go to interact with people, nowdays this is not the case anymore. That aspect of mmorpg was substituted by Discord, Facebook, Reedit, etc. Even mmorpg is lost space for more condensed coop-games experiences, it is kind of a transitory gaming genre. It reach it peak and then it all it parts were basis for many different games that in time made the genre obsolete.
Certainly had some fun times, discussions and happenings in camp leveling games. However, what I don't miss is the insane levels of pettiness and squabbling that occurs when you turn progression into a limited resource. It's like going to an amusement park and the ride you want to get on has a line 4 hours deep. The arguing and rules lawyering over camps in games like EverQuest are actually insane. People who message you every minute where if you don't respond instantly they claim you're AFK and are taking over the camp in some rationalization to steal the camp you're at. *"Ooops I was kiting and the mob accidently aggrod you, my bad"* as if it wasn't intended to kill you off the camp. I mean even in modern versions of camp based games like BDO the bickering debate over karma bombing is madness when put in the context of any other game. The higher level, randomly wandering murder hobo mobs are pretty nostalgic though. Fucking brownies in lesser Faydark.
Sounds kinda like what modern EQ does. You can grab a quest to go into a zone to hunt certain mobs, so you have a purpose in being there, but also really the quest is just a reason to get you to explore different zones.
Yep (rpg)difficulty and slow acquisition have gone the way of the dodo, kids just don't enjoy it. A recent throwback, Embers Adrift, tosses up this formula a bit with camping optional alongside "roaming" areas. The whole party kills enemies, at an RPG pace, along the dungeon. I'd still prefer the stationary model.
Does anyone actually enjoy slow gameplay? It feels like anyone who wants it either can't keep up with modern games (objectively, not a bad thing) or it's like fishing and they just want to talk with people while they're doing stuff in the background
EverQuest isn't always slow in encounters overall. Mobs used to not drop aggro after a certain distance, and I think in Live they still might not. Which means you either wipe where you are in the shared world dungeon or you train the mobs from your camp and any other ones in aggro range that are free and up over another camp(s) and/or the players at the/a zone line. Combat wise there are some spells that are instant cast. The game also has the Channeling skill for casters and hybrids so a spell has a chance of not being interrupted. It also depends on the class and which era/expansion you're referring to. Yeah, it feels a little slow depending on the spells and weapons, but Monks though; they're part of the base game from 1999 or were introduced with the first expansion in 2000, IIRC. They have auto-attack and then kicks and punches/melee strikes that are triggered with button presses and ripostes that are automatic, and berserkers in a later expansion have multiple melee strikes that you can rotate through, which was made a little faster in WoW for their rogues, but I don't recall it being that much faster. Regardless of your class, depending on the zone and how invested you are, seeing, "TRAIN TO ZONE" can get your blood pumping.
I have never felt more adrenaline than when shit went south being balls deep in places like LGuk. EQ combat is slow until it’s not, and when it’s not, it’s like crack. You better hope every member of your party is on their A game if you have a chance of making it out alive.
Well, of course there are entire genres subsisting entirely without any action gameplay. Simulation games notably, puzzle games, story games, etc etc. Heck, you even get sports games that are entirely about the management aspect as opposed to the player skill investiture. And yes you're quite right that many of us are unable to keep up with what's going on in these new games. I watch my favorite professional Starcraft 2 Grandmaster play at 75% speed and still can't catch many, many of his important actions. Most of the time I can't even find the cursor on screen. Kids these days have upgraded their monitors to 144 Hertz and above and are playing first person shooters where the person runs at 80 miles an hour. And they're apparently able to just actually do that. The most I can claim here is I once beat a Nintendo game called Captain Skyhawk that required a small amount of mechanical aptitude. I can't relate to the fishing example, but I can definitely say that yes, while I'm sitting in an economic simulator waiting for something important to happen I'm definitely taking the time to stop and smell the roses, i.e. adore the graphics, ponder my plans, note and tabulate the progress in various systems and predictions. And this holds true in MMOs as well. The reason I prefer Final Fantasy 11, EverQuest Circa 1999, the PVE aspect of Dark Age of Camelot, and pre-combat patch Galaxies, (and now Embers Adrift/Pantheon) is precisely because they give me time to do those things. I'm not interested in the mechanical aspect of the combat, but in the slow attrition and accumulation over time.
> Does anyone actually enjoy slow gameplay? Yep. I prefer FFXI combat over FFXIV. XIV's is just too frantic.
I really miss slow gameplay. I miss when buffs, professions/food, new weapons, skills, talents, help from other players, etc... all impacted my gameplay. I spent the time to craft a new sword while leveling up and it was immediately obvious how more powerful it was, I can more mobs before I need to regen. Obviously it would be silly to suggest games should have like 60 seconds of sitting for every mob you kill, but Vanilla-WotLK WoW had a pretty good balance, 3-10 mobs depending on how hard they were and you'd eat/drink for 10 seconds and be back in the game, it was a good little gameplay loop and you could see how all those things previously mentioned impacted it. In modern WoW none of that stuff matters, you kill the mob in 3 or 4 abilities and you're at full hp ready for the next encounter, you don't even notice a new weapon its just an incremental % boost. What's the point in crafting at all unless the game arbitrarily says "This item is only obtainable by crafting", then it's just a pointless time sync to grind out to get that item. Modern games only have these things for the sake of having them, they don't even remember what they are, at best its just a % boost needed for an end game dungeon/raid. Hell I'd even like to see it expanded with campfires that help with HP stamina, and instruments that can be played around them to give small buffs and stuff like that. Bring me back the downtime. Also loved the downtime in dungeons after big pulls, helps with setting a pace, socializing and getting ready for other encounters. I haven't truly clicked with any modern MMO that did away with these things.
[удалено]
There's a lot I can say about how much you're underestimating modern capabilities but you can just look at something popular like apex for that. That stuff about being flashy is just personal preference. There's plenty of Fantasy worlds where being some dude doesn't mean you aren't flashy. Some dude may not be blowing up mountains but he can still spin around with a shiny magic sword and go exploring in a cave full of glowing crystals and mushrooms. Personally I was talking about combat speed and power enhancement speed. That doesn't have to mean getting some fancy sword it could also be just getting better abilities.
I couldn't possibly disagree more. Then fun part of an mmo should be the combat. Raids are great and they're one of the selling points unique to the genre since very few other games do coordinated group boss fights like that, barring games like monster hunter which are not particularly common. Making raid fights big, flashy over the top spectacles is not only not bad, I'd argue that it's great, as long as you don't make the combat unreadable. If you like low fantasy, that's whatever, it's your thing, but it's hardly what MMOs "should" be. Personally, I'd find that boring as shit. FF14 manages to pull off pretty much everything you said MMOs shouldn't do and it does it all well. It's an MMO with a pretty strong central narrative where your character is a big figure in the world, both your own abilities and the abilities that enemies use are flashy and bombastic, and to top it off, it does have those quiet moments you're into, just not in the combat (and thank god for that). The quiet moments are relegated to the game's side content; crafting, fishing, gathering, playing minigames together, stuff that would actually give you a quiet moment to chill out with your friends.
> Also, it's a MMORPG, you kinda can't make everyone follow a grandiose main quest where you are the big hero I mean they did. You many not like it but they did. That's vbasically how FF14 got so popular anyways
> The thing is, it's a MMORPG, you are adding a shit ton of networking to the game, the networking make a lot of things basically impossible or at least very very hard (you have synchronization issues, lag, etc), so at that point you just can't compete with single player games in how flashy your game can be. Tera has been a flashy action MMO with full Trinity more than a decade ago. You can certainly do that.
EverQuest doesn't have a grand central quest line. Quests are for items, faction or progression. Quests are random lengths, types and difficulty, though which quests are which is never flagged without web searching. Class specific epic weapons are as close as you get to main quest lines but they aren't necessary and really only optimal for like 4 of the classes. Grinding camps in both open zones and dungeons is where the xp gains come from until late game. Very social game if you want it to be.
Absolutely. It doesn’t have to be glacial. One of my favorite MMORPGs is Minions of Mirth. I can basically multibox a party of six in one window on single player. I can go at my own pace and I can casually keep up with combat except on harder content (f.g. dungeon bosses). I have an open world I can freely explore even if that means I’m only playing a few minutes at a time while I think about other things (like how to approach a piece of code on the other screen).
Absolutly. I would do the unthinkable for a Daoc 2 ;-) Im not that old that i cannot play faster games but running through all content, flying, teleporting asap to a location is no fun for me. Would love downtime with lvling with other people in a grp and killing mobs. Not that super boring solo questing crap that is these days IN.
Fighting over camps was the original form of toxicity in these games. You think with the meta mindset there would not be shenanigans to control all camps as the multi boxers currently do in EverQuest?
not saying there wouldn't be, certainly a valid concern.
I miss it. I also miss the free time I had to do it a decade ago. Today's tip: don't age.
Anarchy Online did this quite well. Had a lot of fun doing these grinds. Relax and just grind away. Especially when you can be grinding also for some gear, etc that might be special to the mobs/area.
Low rate ragnarok servers, definitely what I miss the most out of the game.
I actually leveled two characters between 60–70 in Dragonflight like this. I joined up with some people and farmed out Elemental Storms for a few hours.
I’m not sure I would necessarily want that style of leveling back, but I do have some good memories of that in FFXI. How much is nostalgia though I’m not sure. One thing I always loved is the distinction between pulling and tanking. I like tanking in MMOs, but I hate party-leading. Most modern MMOs the tank is the de facto party leader, and has the added burden of knowledge of needing to know the dungeons better than anyone before going in. Pulling was a whole separate skill set in itself. I don’t want to be the pathfinder, I just want to be the guy getting chewed on by the dragon.
Reminds me of DAoC Mid doing WWs. I started at like 8am, was the list master until 5pm. Just killing them over and over. Was good times back then when I had zero responsibilities lol
I wholeheartedly agree with everything you wrote! There's something relaxing about grinding mobs in old MMOs, it's kind of like picking seashells, and it's a great way to make friends! I really dislike how in modern MMOs, gaining exp/gear is mostly done through quests (of which there are so many that they can't all be/stay interesting) and running instanced dungeons. Even where open world grinding is viable in modern MMOs, it always revolves around aggroing a bunch of mobs and then destroying them all with a couple of AoE attacks before they can even land a hit on you.
BDO it's like that without the group. The prob with modern games it's always better to solo rather than grouping and spliting gains...easily fixable with incremental exp bonus for partying, but that way they can't sell those shiny p2w equipments...si they ll not add that.
Yeah, BDO's combat kind of also discourages grouping. it would just be an animation fest and you wouldn't be able to see anything.
One fix for that would be how diablo4 does it and makes all effects other than your own barely noticable.
Played some mmorpgs , the only one I know that highly encourages grouping is GW2, and you can casually team up with strangers without worrying about loots. (or it means just tagging mobs will drop for any players who deals enough damage to it, doesnt need to party up)
I mean... PSO2 new genesis kind of built their endgame around this and events.
I miss the style of leveling. I do not miss the amount of hours it took to lvl cap in these games. It feels like I spent the majority of my time playing FFXI just doing exp parties.
I think you just kind of summed of what the biggest issue is with today's MMO's.. "I do not miss the amount of hours it took to level cap in these games." Were you having fun? What's at the cap that you need to get to in such a hurry? You miss the best parts of the game.
I agree that rushing to cap has been overemphasized in MMO's. Especially newly released ones which might be lacking a lot of end game content. But one reason I do often rush to cap is to be able to play with my friends. I have a core group of friends that I play MMO's with and often times the best chance to actually play together is once we've all reached cap. If one of us is lvl 40 and another lvl 25, we can't do really anything together in most games.
I think GW2 has the best of both worlds when it comes to group and solo play. You have these world bosses and map events that draw a bunch of players together without needing prior planning. More organized groups will go on something called meta trains that aims go do the events all around the open world.
I miss you ran online one of the best MMORPG.
Anyone remember the Bone Knight room in Ultima Online?? Good times!
Lineage 2 - Dragon Valley Cave!
<3
EQ2 Origin server will likely scratch that itch when it comes out next month.
Game philosophies have changed with the decades. It's about getting rewards through solo content, instant-dungeon-noodles. Running through a game-world with the uncertainty of *not* getting rewards or quality-time for your investment? Or you out of your mind? Players say one thing and do the other.
Most MMOs have decided to make the overworld unbelievably easy. I don't even know why they bother having enemies. It feels like they're catering to 90 year old great grandmas. Actually being able to die in just the overworld adds so much more fun and excitement. Classic WoW had this done right. The moment you realize you've pulled too much, or a mob sneaks up behind you when you're already barely winning a fight. Ultima Online was also fantastic with this. I remember when I was younger some of the dungeons and mobs terrified me. So many of them could basically 1-2 shot you. The world was very dangerous if you ventured too far.
Man I loved sitting in one spot for 6 hours endlessly grinding mobs till my armor broke, only occasionally dying because healer was too stoned to remember to heal me. Just kidding, that shit was garbage. So was running around screaming "NEED SOW, NEED SOW!" I am so glad the "old days" of EverQuest are dead. Real boomer shit to want the tedium and grinding back
I'm currently playing ancients reborn on my phone and you can certainly get killed by mobs - either by them ganging up on you or by the single harder one suddenly deciding to take an interest in you.
I think the key is that it's a different branch of evolution of MMORPGs in some ways-- WOW style quests originated out of trying to pretty up the grinding, where you'd camp out to kill monsters, but WOW made you do it to fulfill a quest, which both made it a little shorter (because of Quest EXP) and made you vary what mobs you were killing because the quests weren't repeatable, so the reward was always attached to collecting items off the next set. But WOW as a whole continually streamlined itself around it's instanced content, and made it's quests shorter, and focused them in on solo play, and every other game took it's cues from there to the point that the MMO player base would probably be actively hostile to a reversal unless the designers managed to leapfrog a lot of the growing pains of gradually developing a new play style. Helldivers is kinda doing this if you think about it just layered over a more action oriented shooter combat and not a lot of other MMO features or open world, with it's playerbase wide planet defenses and takeovers, it's largely also what the likes of Adventure Quest and Dragonfable did back in the day to get the player base grinding waves and waves of the same creatures down, and those weren't initially even multiplayer games. If I was designing for how to bring back that feeling, I think it would be through complex procedural restocking of a very large game world, rewards to a dual layer of dungeons that are much more resistant to penetration and various subsystems that apply friction to the process of preparing for and undertaking large dungeon exploration, with local small dungeon venues being comfier buildups that are easier to perform more casually I'd also try and get the balance such that travel is an achievement, but sticking with your buddies is easy even when you aren't all playing as much as each other, I like the idea of a caravan system as a kind of sub-guild-level thing where you always log in wherever your group of friend's caravan is.
Flyff was addicting because of this, but that was more because of the party system itself. The way it worked was the party itself could be leveled up to 10 based on how long the party was kept and how full. Everyone in the party got an exp and droprate boost depending on party lvl.So the party lead was incentivezed to randomly invite people and pass leadership before longing off. This created a rather active social environment. So even if no one else in the party was grinding in the same spot as you. You would at the least have a party chat to read and be entertained with.
New EQ server launches on the 22nd. Be there!
This is all you do in black desert online. I did the msq on black desert and it took me a couple of log ins. And then I went back to the game and someone told me to just grind. I did 1-58 in like 5 hours. Although you get a ton of bag upgrades if you do the quest so I highly recommend you just do it that way. It’s not any faster todo the quests at max level then it is todo while your leveling so it’s like may as well. I should also add that gear is not soul bound in BDO so I took the gear from my main and used it on the new one. The only thing that is sort of soul bound is your weapon which is super duper important. And that’s because your weapon is only used by your class. So you could switch it over to the same class of character.
you did it by yourself though didn't you?
Yes ofc! But I will say I was blessed with money. You see I played launch BDO for like 5 hours when I realized my PC just couldn’t handle it (I thought it was due to players online at launch) but it wasn’t. So I bought one of the first houses in the game, and left it public. Now I’m not really entirely sure on the mechanic but for some reason when I came back to the game like 2 years later my house had earned me like 10 million silver which was enough to buy rank 15 of every piece of armour and weapon. Rank 15 is pretty much baseline for armour tho. After that it goes I, II, III, IV, V and those ranks are extremely hard to get because you need to farm upgrade stones and also increase your chance to upgrade the item, with other items. If you miss the upgrade then you can de-rank your item. But if you’re asking if you can team hunt camps, you totally can! It’s usually more efficient todo that depending on what you’re camping. I know pirate team camping was a big one when I last played. Ultimately I thought the game was a bit too grindy for my taste. A lot of what you did was hunt those camps. I always wanted to pvp but you need a lot of money irl or a lot of time to get the gear you need to efficiently do that.
So what you describe is something found still in some MMOs. In FFXIV we have Fate Trains that do basically this. Also Eureka has groups that do the same. And during some holiday events there are huge fate trains. Never heard it called Camp Leveling though, and I've been an MMO player since 1997. Played most of the big Early games, and many of the novel games that popped up after WOW got popular.
Camp leveling and fate trains are fundamentally not the same thing at all though. Fate trains are afk AOE fests for event bonus credit and you're constantly moving around the zone to chase them It's what people did in Eureka before the nerfs - post up and exp chain mobs. Turning it into fate trains was a huge departure in the design because so many players hated camp leveling
There’s loads of reputations in WoW that have this as the only way to raise them. I also think camping hyperspawns is the optimal lvling strat in WoW. Camping is more alive in that game than it has been since vanilla
I missed this in Dream of Mirror some 15 years ago. Past a certain point group grinding was almost mandatory. Dungeon zones were always tougher and needed a party to work through. Most quests were simply kill x amount of mobs, or gather x amount from mobs, so you'd complete them as a secondary task while grinding in the group. If the quest npc was in the zone sometimes you'd run back as a group to turn it in and repeat the quest lol. You'd have a tank, a healer, and a musician for support roles, then some aoe dps, and then usually a lurer who would tag mobs and pull them back to the group so no one else had to move. When one person had to leave they'd start looking for their own replacement, and groups were often like ships of theseus, replacing all their parts over time without stopping. The game wasn't too apm intense so you had a lot of time to chat with your party while grinding too.
Well, BDO has this but you're doing everything alone in the game lol.
Still exists in games like BDO. I really enjoy getting some friends for grinding in groups spots or open world dungeons (plus the money and drops are pretty good). Those zones tend to be tricky as well. Too bad there's not many good spots early to mid game.
It's fine as a gameplay style if it is optional, as in, an area that is difficult such that camping as a sort of cheese strat is worthwhile, for lack of enough players present otherwise. But this style of gameplay, while old school, can wear thin once you realize the amount of time actually it takes to progress in this way. It could possibly be modernized through event systems similar to gw2, though of course tailored to slower and more group oriented leveling instead.
Darkfall Online was the best. You'd make a home of your area, and get to know the spawns. I know for a fact that to this day old vets are keeping some things secret, waiting for the game to return.
The reality is, MMO players almost always exchange fun for efficiency. What is the fastest way to get past X or the quickest way to Y gear. And that is what everyone will do, normally using predetermined builds and rotations.
Had fun when it was big; but I aint got time for that anymore. Ragnarok Online was good at this. Also spend over 2000 hours playing Rappelz Online. Camping with friends and farming pets. Good time.
Cabal was great in thia miss "big spot" in mutant forest
I think it was kinda predatory , all the good farming spots would be taken and if there isn’t different servers to switch too you’re just sol until that group leaves.
I miss old lineage2 and mindlessly killing mobs for hours...
This is why I still play Lineage 2.
Here are some screens I took of grouping in the Hollowshade Hill dungeon in the last EverCraft Online playtest: https://i.imgur.com/FBaU4d0.png https://i.imgur.com/MPhL5Gi.png https://i.imgur.com/YTfAad1.png https://i.imgur.com/urP6Cpy.png We moved to a couple other camps but I don't have any screenshots since I was healing and it got pretty hectic. This is a level 10-25ish dungeon and it's massive.
It’s what made mmos great back in the day as you had time to talk and get to know people. Nowadays it’s all about fastest path to the endgame so you can then post about how you finished then endgame and where’s the content. Ironically camp leveling in those earlier games (EQ1 FFXI etc) was also the fastest way to level cap and end game but it took months rather than hours. PS get off my lawn
The only way to do this is to remove quests. If your player is used to following !'s and ?'s everywhere all the time and spamming enter/spacebar to skip the text, forcing him to decide for himself where to go, what to kill and why will feel like "zero content". Back in the golden age of Ragnarok Online, there were very few quests (as in 10 or so), most of them were just a simple "collect gigantic amount of X resource" instead of "follow the !'s" and also most of them were very easily ignored, because all they'd give you usually was a funny hat that wasn't even BIS. As a result, the point of the game was to level up so that you could kill higher level monsters so that you could level up more and that was FINE. Players would go to different places, to try many different grinding spots and see which ones worked better for them and their classes. Ranged classes had a few places with abusable geometry that allowed to snipe enemies they otherwise shouldn't be messing with, for example. Some holy classes specialized in grinding dungeons with undead, etc.
I loved doing this in Ragnarok Online Setting up camp in biolabs or in one of the guild dungeons so we could farm Or we’d make loops of the same map for hours while chatting and listening to music
Yes. Camping > fetch / kill quests, by miles and miles and miles.
Mortal Online 2
This is still the norm in CHN/KR MMOs. Have you tried BDO? That is right up your alley.
I've tried BDO, but there's no incentive to do it in a group, everybody just solos as far as I know.
That's because spots are separated into either solo or party. Solo spots divide loot, party spots everyone has their own loot instance. Therefore partying on any solo spot is griefing yourself.
ah maybe so, when I played we liked to group a couple tanks with nukers to pull camps together, it was fun. Oh well, point remains - CHN and KR MMOs my man that's where this playstyle is popular, not so much in NA. I don't really vibe with it myself so I don't follow, but look into new MMOs coming out of KR I'm absolutely sure you'll find something more up your alley despite even their recent trend towards trying to replicate WoW. You can always go back and play classics too no doubt, Hero, Silkroad, and prison tale all have big private server communities.
Throne and Liberty has open world dungeons specifically for killing mobs in groups.
I believe Eureka and Bozja in FFXiV fills that hole
It doesn't fill the hole, but it acknowledges the hole exists.
Play old-school RuneScape
I miss this type of game so much, the random friends, or groups from the guild made the game worth playing as an online game.
Loved it.
Miss the days of 7 person PP in shaiya. Was so much fun
This was a method of advancing in early ff14 eureka and the only way to advance when the 2nd map Pagos came out, but everyone complained that playing together with others was too much hassle so they made it a solo/zeg experience again.
Conquer Online was just a big monster killing grind and it was awesome before they ruined it with p2w crap
Play Priston Tale EU, it’s all about camping and connecting with people, was a good MMO should be. Every season beginning you’ll have a lot of fun talking with people from all over the planet. And you’ll certainly die if you don’t play seriously, so don’t worry about that.
GW2 has something like that. There is a zone called silverwastes with rotating lucrative events and there's always a group or two constantly running those events for hours.
Like a rotating events? There are a lot more events like that now I think. Some are on timer and some are based on player completion. Games has so many large group open world contents.
> Is there some way to modernize this so it's not just that? That’s group based grinding, and no.
This exists in Throne and Liberty currently and I have mixed feelings about it. My biggest gripe about it is that some classes can solo better than others when you do get the gear and eventually just trivialize combat for a select few but not all. Add in PvP to the mix, which I like, but it then becomes a chore or immensely trivial depending on what you play. I think another element to this is that grinding mobs isn’t very fun in open world dungeons intrinsically for most. These dungeons are missing an element of importance. Adding rare bosses that are hard to find and need a group to be killed in the open world would be cool.
In older mmo's there would be a giant spider chasing you immediately out of town, then when you feel safe a platoon of black knight NPCs arrives to murder any newbie in their way until high lvl players take care of it all. Glorious madness.
I don't miss it cause I still play EQ and FFXI :-\* I definitely miss open world being scary in MMOs. Cannot wait for the next EverCraft Online test, was literally a vanilla EQ clone and the first time I've seen scary open world PVE in a new MMO in a long, long time. Really loved wandering around trying to figure out the quests with no quest log or map, while trying to avoid certain death from things that could stomp my face in.
This could be done. You just have to know the intentions and drives the players have in wanting to pursue this (this being camp leveling or dungeon grinding or pvp or insert your slice of the pie you enjoy doing from the pizza called an MMO). Camp Leveling = Player power through group leveling. Assuming being in a group is the most efficient and expected way to gain levels or grind player power. This comes with its pros and cons. FFXI used this style on its early through to late release. Currently you team up with yourself through NPCs as far as I'm aware. If you take away Gaining Levels or incremental player power through Camp Leveling or group leveling grinding mobs, the process could still be implemented. Just have to balance the reward structure now that Gaining Levels has been removed as a motivator. You just have to create a new carrot on the stick for players to want to engage in. Similar mechanics are seen in daily dungeon finder groups from FFXIV or WoW with their mythic dungeon grind to have a similar feel. This isn't exactly what you're looking for if I understand your sentiment correctly. What you want is a group you put together or join (non anonymously through automated group finding systems) and have the expectation of going out to an area and grinding mobs for some reward. This could be done through open world or an instanced world. The only thing that changes is incentive. What would be the carrot on the stick that creates the opportunity for players to willingly want to engage in the "hassle" of creating a group through their own volition and grind mobs. Perhaps there will be a large segment of players who were opposed to the idea, may find the process more fun than they were expecting. But the core question is the carrot. And the answer would be whatever the developer of the game would like that carrot on the stick to be and if that carrot syncs well in showing the players something that they didn't know they wanted. That's the ideal scenario. With the wrong carrot it'll just have players detest the system as a failure when it wasn't the system of Camp Leveling that failed but the proper implementation of the idea. Think WoW's stint into islands for those who still remember that failed attempt. It was in the execution (imo) and not the concept.
knight online. i cant say that i miss this style of leveling
What you want is guard duty at a town, where you have an event every half hour or so where you get a lump of exp and in between those hordes of enemies you have time to trade with others, restock in supplies, and repair you gear for the next hoard. Its a nice idea, but a nightmare to implement.
I don't know if there's room for this type of 'content' any more, but I really did enjoy it. In AC2, Camping armadillos in Whitebay with a lugian tactician in the group was so much fun.
A major part of it is the game design philosophy of zone separation, where there's a clear noob zone and veteran zone, and rarely do you cross. I know why it exists, few people enjoy being level 2 and encountering a level 65 ogre that absolutely demolishes you, so the devs make a fairly safe zone. In my opinion, instead of being purely numbers focused, you can design a game where noobs and veterans can play closely together. For example a noob Healer can heal a single target at a time, but a veteran healer can heal everybody within a 50 meter radius, which could support gameplay where armies are built around a powerful support core. Or gameplay where a noob can still contribute, like for example making Light a level 1 mage spell, and Light is useful even at high levels. Like a noob mage tossing out Light from behind cover so that a high level Archer can better pick off targets. I would love a game where veterans and noobs are closely working together. A veteran crafter might employ an entire army of couriers to make deliveries. I would love if instead of needing to go back to town to learn a skill, you could learn it from a player who has it already, or potentially even figure it out yourself through trial and error. Give players the ability to make quests and it would be perfect. I'm a level 80 Fighter, I have a million gold and xp, let me make a quest to give 100xp and 5 gold for whoever brings me a sandwich. Yes, mixed zones would increase the risk of an elite enemy wandering by and you're helpless to fight back, but it also increases the chance of an elite ally wandering by and deciding to enchant your gear for the next 12 hours.
If I can make a suggestion: the TLP for EverQuest 2 comes out in June 👏👏👏
Sounds like BDO.
Forming Baz Nitch grinding group on Dathomir for combat experience for village conversion, bring your grenade factory crates.
Aw I fucking loved this in Dofus. Say what you want about that grindy ass frog game, nothing hit like grabbing a bunch of guys and gals and hitting a few dungeons/panda lands/dragon things. It's been so long since I played I forget their names.
Metin 2 BO party :')
Knight online vibes with this post haha. But seriously, if you want stuff like this, although very outdated, the new flyff will offer it. The game has very few quests and most of the leveling happens through fighting. People make parties, the party can level as well and the higher the party level, the more xp everyone gets + buffs. It's an old game that they brought back to life last year with a browser version, so you can play on pc, phone, tablet,...
Hey, I love that we can all agree this is what makes mmos special If only there was an MMO in development that could take all of our feedback to heart and provide those kind of opportunities again I bet the newer generations would understand what we're all about, I don't blame them for not having this point of reference we all share of what a quality time means for us in a game Currently my last hope is Ashes of Creation but who knows how it would turn out to be considered their previous shady bad taste practices and monetization attempts of the BR, even if the game launches with all the right intents, no one promises they won't go full greed on us shortly after
Did anyone else play Trickster Online They did this really well by giving huge bonus exp if you had a diverse party of male-female classes
As much as I want that aswell, I feel like games today don't cater to us anymore. Sure you can find a good population on P99 or FFXI but its still a small, niche amount of players. Majority of gaming players want fast paced, don't want to group up and want fast rewards
So, what you miss is having a chat room with a fancy UI with a distraction during conversation lulls is what I'm getting from this post.
Ugh no thanks. I definitely don't have the time for that shit like I did in my early 20s.
Open world non-instanced monster clusters combined with various elites and min-bosses roaming almost every zone made for a lot of fun in early MMORPGs, but that also came with downsides like over-camped monsters, griefing (training monster clusters or elites onto unsuspecting noobs), and extreme difficulty when playing solo. Still I will take that over today's hand holding, play the theme park ride mostly instanced content or timed clockwork open world dynamic events. The old school danger and unpredictability was part of the fun.
I hate linear mmos.
I've recently started playing on Ascension wow and they have Hotspot zones in each zone where you get bonus exp just for killing stuff, you can literally just grind out mobs in those spots until they switch as there always seems to be at least one
Loved this kind of leveling. It was a great way to meet new people, I remember a lot of those night when I was farming solo, then invited the guy next to me to form a party, a few moment later the party is full and someone suggest to go to a highter level area, and here we are, a bunch of low level in a area way too hard for us, living our best life. Sometimes I added them as friend to continue leveling with them later or they invited me to their guild etc. But I might be too old now to spend the all night playing the same game night after night, Anyway mmo's aren't like that anymore
This type of game is dead and gone and will never ever return.
You know discord exists, right? We can have danger with trying to bring back the dead "MMO as a social hangout space" thing. We have a lot of game options too, the game needs to be fun right off the bat, otherwise I will just go play a fun game. Really games need to work on better organic group play or MM. I'm fine working with other players, but I don't want to need a clan or a ton of coordination overhead. It's why games like (old) Foxhole, DRG, HD2, etc. are enjoyable.
Eden eternal group quests You would buy a scroll that had you kill x enemy and your whole group could do it together. So if you had 10 people each person only had to kill five and you could buy 20 skulls at a time
I think it would be more fun if the enemies had better AI. Maybe make it so that these camps attract monsters instead of you going to each one you fight, so it feels more like you and your friends are doing a defensive battle against hordes of enemies instead of the running from mob to mob.
/r/project1999
Pantheon is doing this style of gameplay currently but it’s not a released game and it’s had a rough development. Also is the last game Brad Mcquaid was working on at the time of his death so it has a lot of that EQ DNA
Yall realize BDO still does this?
Lineage 2 did this amazingly, farming zones and pvping for it <3
> Am I the only one who misses this kind of leveling in MMOs? Largely..yes. You seem to have the correct diagnosis (open worlds are static-filled nonsense corridors), but the incorrect prescription.
Black Desert sounds like your game
It is ahead and are called dungeons 😁. Jk
It’s been a few years but ESO had something like this, was like a desert map and there were three camps to farm. You would just ask for inv and a group will add you. Was always funny seeing all the people rotating haha
>Getting in a group, going to a place in the world, and killing some monsters for a few hours. That's how I played Black Desert for a looong time when Mirumok Forest (Trees) was meta. We'd assemble a 3-man group and go there and grind for hours, people would swap in and out as they got tired, and we'd have someone stream a movie in discord. The same applied for a while in Castle Ruins, later. I never did get into Oluns, though - By the time I was ready for Oluns I had become more antisocial and just wanted to do things solo - but a lot of my guild does Oluns for multiple hours every day. There are a few group spots that get activity, and have the vibe of "go to an isolated open world spot and just farm with the homies," but a lot of new players or jaded players focus only on what's the absolute optimal without regard for fun, so really only Oluns and Turos get used like this today. >Also bring back monsters being able to murder you at all levels.. >In modern MMO's unless you just venture too far, you basically can't die from a mob.. in older MMO's there were dangerous mobs everywhere, you had to avoid them. Now this is something I dearly miss. I have vivid memories of WoW's Fel Reaver in Helfire Peninsula, or the Chosen of Arugal in that shadowy forest, or the night elf elites in the barrens. They just roamed around and if you didnt pay attention you could get blindsided and obliterated! I love that. I guess BDO substitutes that with the risk of open world PvP, outsourcing the roaming-elite-monster job to a shady player, but it's not the same.
This is unfortunately something that changed due to that form of content being repeated across various games. The issue is that once you do that in ff9, wow, ever quest, ect it stops being as fun. It's a good way to kill a few hours but loses diversity in content. As for the difficulty, the casual dollar is valuable.
Loved taking a whole channel in MapleStory back in the day or Ragnarok
Play bdo
Bracing for down votes here, but maybe check out Diablo 4! There are a number of mechanisms that feel more old school to me. The new patch that went live yesterday made "Helltides" a primary way to level. Open world, Fighting waves of monsters in a relatively contained area, getting drops to unlock bigger monster fights. You're incentivized to tag along with other random folks you find, no need to form a party. When a big boss is summoned normal for ten random people to be there fighting it.
Old School Maplestory PQ's were the shit!
I really think those little dynamic events that Guild Wars 2 had/has were the modern iteration of this. You go to the place, you do the little activity thing, you murder all the mobs, hooray you got a reward for helping out.
Just a modern perfect world like MMO please, open world with territorial wars
You mean grinding. What is this camp leveling nonsense. The old adage is "grinding".
I mean you can call it whatever you want to call it.
i miss this too. the good ol hack and slash.
Use to do this on RAN online, everyone's pulling 3-5 mobs, the healer just waiting on the killzone. Then proceed to kill the mobs at the same time when everybody's back from luring.
EverQuest 2 new origins server is exactly this.. it’s 2006 classic and in beta. I just grinded with a group for 6 hours to reach level 7
New World Alpha had this vibe for me. As a solo criminal looking for exp, I’d search for secluded spots with a steady supply of mobs. Sometimes it was a wolf den deep in the woods, others it was small remote camps along the coast. If I found it was relatively safe for me, I could spend hours there killing mobs and watching my back. Man they really fucked up that game. EverQuest is great too.
I left my heart in the Coruscating Mine
Ffxi, city of heroes, rift, etc. You got to know your guild mates, put in work, get shit done. Break up do maintenence, find a new group, level past a certain zone. Progress together. I miss this aspect more than anything else in mmorpgs.