LFG

I personally could never declare war on a noun.

A dangling participle, Yoda-speak, would be something I'd much rather go full contact Rambo on myself.

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Calthine

Freeking Epic participles....

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Calthine

EQ2 Allakhazam Senior Community Manager

Taelana

They always come back when the lights are off whether you feed them or not...

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Taelana the lvl 70 sexy Rangeress
Taezya the lvl 60 jammy sportin' Monk-princess
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Ever optomistic cuz I dont raid...

Illuminator

Hey I'll prosecute this war on any front, even if I have to stare down a sentence written in error on a birthday card.

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Bow down before the one you serve. You're going to get what you deserve.

Tokamak

Err

Im a little concerned that mekatokka is almost the same name as me. O o have I been farming in my sleep again?

/hide

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LFG

I just don't understand this, they won't take no for an answer. This one guy doesn't seem like a bad guy, but he thinks this is all like a normal business lol. I've now clearly told him no over a half dozen times.

I'm completely blocking all names, emails, site names etc from this based on the negative community reaction I got last time when I left some information in to make fun of them. My purpose in posting this isn't to brag, it's to shake my head in wonder at why he keeps coming back and asking to advertise when I insult him and say no.

If you remember the past drama when I posted this, this was the "brogame" dude:

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Iryssinia

I've gotten in the same argument with a friend of mine who's going through law school and working full time, and plays EQ2 on the side for relaxation. He makes relatively good money, and he used the same rationale.

"I get a day off a week. If were to use that day farming plat, I'd probably come up with 10-15. If I spend what I make in a day on plat, I come away with over 100, and enjoy my game more."

The problem is, a lot of people like my friend think it's pretty harmless buying plat, because we were both old school EQ1 players, pre-farming market, where IGE and the like bought plat from regular players and resold at a higher price, before Chinese farm teams and the like. Buying/selling may have been frowned upon then, but it wasn't game affecting, because there were very few people who were farming just for platinum, and really, it was difficult until the later expansions to solo anything that dropped anything worthwhile that was droppable (outside of FV).

I did sell platinum in EQ1...I had made over 7 million on Velium Gemmed weapons (gg being the only smith/jeweler on the server with the skills high enough to make them and having KodTaz access), and someone offered me $315/million pp. I sold 2 million, and bought books for my first semester of college. I don't feel bad about it, because I didn't interfere with anyone's gameplay with how I got my platinum.

But here and in WoW, the methods corporate farm teams (face it, that's what they are, peons for a business) use highly disrupt the average player's playtime.

For EQ2, this is partially due to game design -- Wizards with half-shit gear can solo named mobs that drop loot in outdoor areas. Lower level groups of 6 (who knows how many players are actually behind the six) can make some zones like Obelisk of Lost Souls nearly unusable because they kill the access quest nameds in hope of a master, and have them perfectly timed. Namely, the ease of the casual part of the game itself fosters the ability to farm platinum.

The question is: How do you handle it? EQ1 had a built in failsafe -- the content of the game was difficult and very gear dependent. So making content more difficult is an option...but that leads to the forced grouping and stuff that people dislike in EQ2, since the prevailing attitude in EQ2 seems to be doing the most with the least people possible, including soloing if possible.

The second: Ban the sales accounts. That's the current method being used by SOE, but it's not having much success, as admitted by Gallenite. With an obviously thriving market, buying a box to spread advertising is worth it, and it takes more documentation than a player is willing to put together to successfully report and have a bot group/farm wizard banned.

The third: Ban the buyers. Obviously, this could work, but I'm wondering about the amount of people that would get banned over it. Again, obviously there is a thriving market, and unlike WoW, EQ2 can't just up and ban 10k player accounts over something like this...that's a good 3-5% of the playerbase, and I have a suspicion that more than actually uses these services.

The fourth: Design around the farmers. The reason most people get pissed at farmers is for two reasons: The spam, and the fact that they camp nameds needed for quests. This is pretty much an admission of defeat, but it does solve the biggest gripe that most people have about the farm teams -- the fact that their business of killing nameds for metal chests has the side effect of cockblocking a number of quests. Use triggered spawns instead of static spawns, etc (see young dragon for the bag HQ as an example, or Opalla for the BBC).

I'm not sure which is best, but it's fairly obvious that the farmers are here to stay, and that the focus should be on minimizing their impact on others in the game.

Illuminator

One reason I am picky about who I group with (and lethargic about running instances) is the complete randomness of the loot that drops. The Nizara farm for the sash and the Akhet Aten farm for the proc necklace are two glaring examples. I hate the fucking politics about who will get what, and I hate spending hours per night only to have everything reduced to a dice roll. That is a very big reason why I prefer to get my gear from raids: structured and fair looting decisions.

If named mobs were an order of magnitude more difficult but guaranteed certain loot, I think that would be an enormous step in the right direction.

I very much like the triggered spawn idea, especially the way Vanguard described their implementation.

I don't surrender to that viewpoint. I have the opinion that the right rebalancing can make this game unfeasible for them to make much money off of while still being a blast for legit gamers.

I remember my old RPG bliss on console games; gear was a means of being able to move the story forward, and I didn't give a shit what the gear was as long as it helped me kill the boss to uncover the plot surprise that followed. This whole loot-centricism is an anomaly in RPG's, we need to get away from it and return to our story-telling roots.

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Bow down before the one you serve. You're going to get what you deserve.

Iryssinia

This is very true. But at that point, a design team has to ask themselves how much of a rebalance to do, and how this will effect the population that enjoys the current balance but just dislikes the interference farmers provide. People like you and I (or most of the posting population on this board, for that matter) won't mind a harder game, but a lot of others will.

That gets into a whole other barrel of monkeys -- you can't design an MMO around the same factors that make console RPGs (movies you play through, at their simplest) because you can't have 300,000 (or in WoW's case, 7 million) heroes. There has to be a hook for the game, and so far the best ones in the MMO have been three things -- power progression (EQ. EQ2. VSoH, Horizons, Lineage. etc.) a focus on PvP (Shadowbane, Guild Wars, DAoC), and socializing tied in with real world assets (Second Life).

Illuminator

What value is the trophy without the struggle? Do you think someone who wins $10 million from a lottery has as riveting a story to tell as the person who worked up to it from clever business deals? When people get exactly what they think they want, they get complacent and bored and whiny and less motivated to do great things that will be vividly described in later tales.

When the game prods people to try a little harder to achieve the objective, I think they are more appreciative of the time spent when they experience a win.

Nobody reminisces about mundane or easy shit! They always like to talk about the amazing things (even collosal failures!) that happened on the hard stuff. There's something to be said for that. This isn't to say that everything in the game should make a player sweat. But an "easy game" just isn't a game.

As far as I can tell, I kept Nagafen's prismatic egg from remaining in Darathar's grasp, I interrupted the meeting of powerful eye monsters in Feerrott, I destroyed the Ewer so it couldn't give sustenance to evil undead forces, and I cleared out Court of Al Afaz to help the little man in the turban find out whatever information he was seeking. I think I'm the hero here after all.

None of what I said eliminates the "hook". You still have the power progression.

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Bow down before the one you serve. You're going to get what you deserve.