How did we get from "some of the top end encounters in the game having a number of abilities that are not automatically communicated to players" to the above? I hate to say it, but that is on Dygz level cor making connections that dont exist.
Was lurking in the thread. Your ideas of "Good" raid design always comes from your EQ2 prospective. I just can't get that "Raids keeping secrets" crap out of my head since you brought in up in other threads. I know here you are talking about how you think ability's should be communicated, but every time you talk about raids now. All I can think about is how stupid it would be to have end game content no one knows about.
It is a bit of a leap to bring it up here, but I just can't get it out of my mind lol.
Lets have hard raids, and no evidence of hard raids... There are 8 people playing EQ2 on twitch right now. Imagine if there were raids to watch? It could not hurt the health of the game.
I could have brought this up in another thread, but I thought YOLO.
There are 8 people playing EQ2 on twitch right now.
That is more than I would have thought for a game based on actual 20 year old technology. Most of the people watching it on twitch wouldn't even be that old.
Fun fact, EQ2 was originally optimised for a 6ghz singe core CPU, because multi-core chips weren't popular when it was being developed, and the speed of chips was constantly increasing.
There are 8 people playing EQ2 on twitch right now.
That is more than I would have thought for a game based on actual 20 year old technology. Most of the people watching it on twitch wouldn't even be that old.
There are 8 people playing EQ2 on twitch right now.
That is more than I would have thought for a game based on actual 20 year old technology. Most of the people watching it on twitch wouldn't even be that old.
I mean, if we are going to use twitch players as a metric for determining which games are good and which aren't...
I've said many times that EQ2 has its issues. There are reasons why I never went back to it, even if the cash shop was the reason I left.
However, those issues are not in the raiding aspect of the game, nor in the games success as an MMORPG in general.
If indeed it is true that recent WoW raids are copying the way EQ2 has done things for a very long time, as another poster suggested, then taking in to account the generally positive comments I have heard about WoW raiding recently, I don't see how you could look at that aspect of EQ2 as anything other than positive - even if it is one you do not understand.
I mean, if we are going to use twitch players as a metric for determining which games are good and which aren't...
I've said many times that EQ2 has its issues. There are reasons why I never went back to it, even if the cash shop was the reason I left.
However, those issues are not in the raiding aspect of the game, nor in the games success as an MMORPG in general.
If indeed it is true that recent WoW raids are copying the way EQ2 has done things for a very long time, as another poster suggested, then taking in to account the generally positive comments I have heard about WoW raiding recently, I don't see how you could look at that aspect of EQ2 as anything other than positive - even if it is one you do not understand.
Was using twitch as a metric for what is still active.
Like I said, my main problem is EQ2 was the culture you talked about where everyone wants to keep the content secret. That has to be part of the reason they went to a cash shop model. When subs wont keep your game alive you have to pivot to a more lucrative method of funding your game.
I don't know how or why people came up with the idea that keeping raids secret was a good idea, but it seems like it has to be related to why the game failed.
I will admit that a major part of why Wildstar failed was the failed raid scene. Brought on by massive difficulty spikes and annoying flagging quests.
End game content can be 20/10, but if no one knows about it or can access it than it might as well not exist.
I hope that I will be known for my personal reputation...a good party member, responsible guild~mate, creative role-player, and the best healer on the server.
That has to be part of the reason they went to a cash shop model.
They went to the cash shop model because that was what all the MMO's were doing at the time. Like any business, they researched it and thought they were able to make more money. It wasn't about keeping the game alive or letting it die, it was about making $10,000,000 profit a year vs making $15,000,000 profit (made up numbers, I have no idea).
As I am sure you know, that is how business operates - maximize profits.
Lets imagine you are a competitive e-sports player. The title doesn't matter, but maybe there are competitions with prize money. You come across an idea that will destroy anyone attempting to play the game based on the current meta.
According to your thoughts on how EQ2 raiding worked, the first thing you should then do with this new meta-breaking idea is make a video and let everyone know.
Obviously that isn't what you are going to do. You are going to keep this idea to yourself, and make use of it at the most opportune time - the final of a competition or some such.
That is EQ2 raiding. Raids come up with ideas, and they keep them so that they can be more competitive. While the game didn't have the websites to log kills and such that WoW has, the game was far more competitive between guilds early on than WoW was - with the developers occasionally interviewing leaders of guilds getting world firsts. The biggest difference is that since there were no cash prizes, since your meta-breaking idea wasn't being used on other players, and since new content was always being added, there was never a point where that idea had to leave the confines of your guild.
The game is not that competitive now, but that aspect of the game is still present.
The idea that in a competitive setting, people should share their secrets for success is just odd to me - especially when that secret could have taken weeks or months to work out.
I understand it with WoW raids, because for the most part there is only one way to tackle them. With the way websites work with WoW's API, there is no possible way to keep a strategy secret even if you did come up with a novel method for killing an encounter. As such, you may as well just publish videos of your kills - there is no reason not to.
I still have my money on: "If the subs were high, they would not have switched to F2P". No reason to dramatically shift your business model if it is working. I mean they could have just been naive in time before it was obvious that going F2P is sign to the MMO community to never take the game seriously again.
The problem with your example is that in every competitive format I am aware of. Everyone knows what everyone is doing after the first competition. People have to see you dominating to verify success. This is true with raiding. Both the WOW and FFXIV world first races are streamed on twitch. Not only do they both generate a ton of positive attention for the game, but they are needed to that people can know who actually won. During this process everyone can see everyone's strategies, believe it or not there is multiple strategies in most WOW and FFXIV boss fights.
There is also the factor where its like: "Why would you care if other guilds knew your giga brain strategy for executing a raid boss?". Other groups using your strategy does not take loot from you. After the race to world first the only thing left to compete for is better parses. It becomes about execution. Seeing other groups strategies might give your raid ideas for how they can improve some phases of a fight, but it is not going to magically execute the strategies well.
Still you are telling me there is no "EQ2 logs" site. So where is all of this "Competition" happening? Are people just sending logs at each other via e-mail with no video proof that the parses are valid?
It still makes zero sense to me in the context of PvE raiding. If this was a PvP tournament we are talking about and you had a team comp that no one had seen, sure keep it secret until the tournament, but after you use it everyone is going to see your strategy, and use it or improve on it.
Again it is like: "What is the point in competing if no one can see you win?"
they are needed to that people can know who actually won.
We just posted a screenshot of the raid next to the corpse.
Since it was usually a case of days before the second kill of an encounter, there was no need for any more than this.
Why would you care if other guilds knew your giga brain strategy for executing a raid boss?
Competition. Aspects of our execution on one encounter would often inform our attmpts on a future encounter.
Still you are telling me there is no "EQ2 logs" site.
Mostly on the now defunct EQ2flames website - which was just a forum.
If this was a PvP tournament we are talking about and you had a team comp that no one had seen, sure keep it secret until the tournament, but after you use it everyone is going to see your strategy, and use it or improve on it.
I don't see why this would be different in a PvP setting over a PvE setting.
If you have something you think gives you an edge over others, you hold on to it. Where there is that difference is that if you use something that gives you that edge in a PvP setting, everyone then knows about the thing you have. In a PvE setting, they don't know about it, which means there is MORE value in keeping it a secret, not less value, since you can use it many times.
We just posted a screenshot of the raid next to the corpse.
Idk if that would work in WOW/FFXIV. People can fake that shit. Thanks to data mining and pulling models from the client files, people can make anything they want look real. That shit has to be done, live.
There was a issue last Ultimate World First Race in FFXIV where a raid cleared a few days before anyone else, and people thought the raid had some sort of "Hack Private Server" to practice the encounter on before clearing it on live. If they would have posted some ACT Logs and a screen shot of the boss it would not have been good enough for anyone.
Considering people were crying foul when they just came out of know where with a clear.
I am also not saying that guilds having guild secrets does not sound cool as hell. I just don't think that type of play is good for the long term health of a game because it does not inspire new players, but also in todays world it would not be enough to verify success. See the millions of streamers/speed runners getting caught cheating videos on YouTube. I have no doubt in my mind a whole raid would cheat.
We just posted a screenshot of the raid next to the corpse.
Idk if that would work in WOW/FFXIV. People can fake that shit. Thanks to data mining and pulling models from the client files, people can make anything they want look real. That shit has to be done, live.
It may not have worked in other games, but it worked in EQ2 just fine.
There were all sorts of accusations in EQ2 of guilds having earlier access to content in order to test it, giving them a head start on it. This has also happened in WoW though, so I don't see it being a point worth discussing - it's just a part of regular raid level drama.
Perhaps the interesting thing about attempting to cheat in EQ2 - one of the few things that were always (and I do mean always) shared with everyone in the game was what loot mobs dropped.
While it was never looked at as proof of a kill, if a guild killed an encounter for the first time, they would post the loot they got, along with who in the raid actually got the item in question.
This is something that was never really questioned. Even guilds that were in the double digits in terms of kills on an encounter would usually post the loot they recieved. Even new guilds working on older content would do this for significant encounters from the previous expansion (along with general congratulatory posts, and encouragement that they will catch up to the current content before long - the raiding scene in EQ2 was very odd).
Even without this, there is no real point to guilds cheating. With the way the developers were, how close many of them were with the games community (for better or worse), if a guild attempted to fake a world first, I have no doubt a developer would have jumped in and said that as far as they can see, the encounter remains undefeated. Even though it was a fan site, EQ2flames did have regular posts from developers for many years.
I'm fairly sure most guilds would have known they wouldn't be able to get away with attempting to fake a kill, and being caught out would likely have been the end of that guild.
There were a number of fairly good players in that game that did stupid things, and as a result would be refused by any guild they attempted to join. With how ubiquitious the use of Teamspeak, Ventrillo and Mumble were back in the day, even with players from different guilds (and different servers), a player that is shunned as above wouldn't even be able to change their character name to join another guild - they would be found out within hours.
Again, EQ2's raiding scene was odd. It was much smaller than WoW's, and most of the top end raiders knew players from every other top end raid guild.
@Noaani
(Would have responded sooner, had to dig to find this conversation.)
Loot is proof of clear, but not good proof of who did it first or hardest. The assumption with modern raids is that the content will be cleared eventually so long as the guild is patient, competent, and dedicated. Be it 120-200 hours progging a 20min long Ultimate fight in FFXIV or a few days progging Mythic(WOW) or Savage(FFXIV) raid tiers.
So it just becomes about who did it first, and who is doing it the hardest. It is in that pursuit that people would be tempted to cheat if given the opportunity. Which is why I think streaming progression is important, but what is more important is that MMORPG fans see that hard content exists that top players are struggling with. To inspire them to want to go after that content. Which brings in new players and money to the game. My whole point is that the secrets don't do that.
I still think there is some solid merit to my theory that having raids be "secret" had something to do with EQ2 decline and transition to f2p.
but what is more important is that MMORPG fans see that hard content exists that top players are struggling with.
And that is where EQ2's contested raid encounters come in to play. Rather than having to watch raid guilds stream or what ever, people could (and did) just watch raid guilds raid.
but what is more important is that MMORPG fans see that hard content exists that top players are struggling with.
And that is where EQ2's contested raid encounters come in to play. Rather than having to watch raid guilds stream or what ever, people could (and did) just watch raid guilds raid.
A hand full of active players watching another hand full of active players take on a boss is not going to bring in new players to the game. Love or hate twitch (I tend to hate it for its crazy rules), streaming raids does do well to bring in new subs for MMORPGs. It is just good for the health of MMORPGs.
Love or hate twitch (I tend to hate it for its crazy rules), streaming raids does do well to bring in new subs for MMORPGs. It is just good for the health of MMORPGs.
This is obviously subjective.
It is worth pointing out that EQ2 began its transition to free-to-play before twitch was around.
Back then, the idea of watching other people play games was as foreign to everyone as it still is to me.
Again, EQ2 is old. When it launched, people didnt have a portable device that they could connect to the internet with and watch videos when ever they wanted. If they were watching a video of someone playing a game, they were sitting at their computer. If they were sitting at their computer, they were playing the game, rather than watching others play it.
Hell, when I started raiding in EQ2, even YouTube hadn't been launched yet.
It would seem that you have forgotten that we are talking about a different time, with a different player mentality.
I have no doubt that if EQ2 were more twitch friendly now, the game would have a bigger population. That wasnt the case 10 years ago, let alone 17 years ago. Back then, people didnt look for videos of games to decide if they wanted to play them or not.
Back then, we found the fact that a few hundred players would gather around to watch us kill a contested encounter for an hour or so to be really odd - let alone the idea of people watching a stream of us doing that.
@noaani, Ashes is not EQ2. Why are you talking about EQ2? Why do you keep taking examples from this semi-dead game? All of your arguments where you mention EQ2 or systems from that game are invalid.
See what I did there
/sarcasm off
On this one I agree with @Vhaeyne. Streaming the game is good for it long term. Including aspects of raids.
Hell, when I started raiding in EQ2, even YouTube hadn't been launched yet.
That makes sense for back in the day, but still there are videos of people raiding in other games from the time period. With unregistered hypercam watermarks so you know they are from the mid to early 2000s. That Leeroy Jenkins video is from that era. EQ2 came out only a year before YouTube. I remember watching YouTube in that era. It was not great, but people we putting up videos of MMO gameplay then.
Still even now no effort has been made for EQ2 to have a race for world first publicly available for viewing (not to my knowledge). Even with the F2P model people would give EQ2 another look if they knew there was something worth seeing.
@noaani, Ashes is not EQ2. Why are you talking about EQ2? Why do you keep taking examples from this semi-dead game? All of your arguments where you mention EQ2 or systems from that game are invalid.
I actually shifted the subject to the off topic subject of "Secret raid strategies in EQ2". Yes, he was talking a lot about EQ2's raids which made me want to bring it up, but assuming that EQ2 was all he says it was, the perspective is valid. I am quite interested in EQ2s raids because their is such little information about them online. As someone who is a fan of raiding I would like to better understand if skipping EQ2 in the mid 2002s was the right move.
Hell, when I started raiding in EQ2, even YouTube hadn't been launched yet.
That makes sense for back in the day, but still there are videos of people raiding in other games from the time period. With unregistered hypercam watermarks so you know they are from the mid to early 2000s. That Leeroy Jenkins video is from that era. EQ2 came out only a year before YouTube. I remember watching YouTube in that era. It was not great, but people we putting up videos of MMO gameplay then.
Still even now no effort has been made for EQ2 to have a race for world first publicly available for viewing (not to my knowledge). Even with the F2P model people would give EQ2 another look if they knew there was something worth seeing.
Yeah, people were putting up videos, but they were for entertainment purposes (like the Leeroy Jenkins video), not as a showcase of the game, or a means to get people to try and play one game over another.
No effort has been made to expand EQ2's playerbase for many years.
Even before the Russian oligarch situation in 2018 when the US government sanctioned the company that owned the developers of EQ2, they made a point of keeping out of the spotlight. Keeping out of the spotlight means not attempting to attract new players to the game.
To me, this seems to have started around 2012, when the development of EQN was in full swing, and the game looked to have real promise (but only because no one tried to actually run it). At the time, it seemed to me that they were getting ready to wind down both EQ games in order to try and funnel the population from both to EQN when it was ready - they had already moved most of the developers from those games over. When that game was cancelled, they just never bothered putting the attention back in to the other games.
The fact that both games have grown in population since then is a testament to the quality of the games, imo.
Yeah, people were putting up videos, but they were for entertainment purposes (like the Leeroy Jenkins video), not as a showcase of the game, or a means to get people to try and play one game over another.
Yes that is a shit tier boss, and the video is not enjoyable, but their is evidence of the WOW raiding scene from that era. You can't say EQ2s raiding scene only lasted from 2004 to 2005, and YouTube would not have helped EQ2 gain traction. Videos like that from that era helped WOW be what it was. I did not even play wow much back then and I remember friends linking me the occasional video like that trying to get me to quit L2 and come join their guild in WOW. Again its just good for the game for raids to not be kept secret.
No effort has been made to expand EQ2's playerbase for many years.
Even before the Russian oligarch situation in 2018 when the US government sanctioned the company that owned the developers of EQ2, they made a point of keeping out of the spotlight. Keeping out of the spotlight means not attempting to attract new players to the game.
To me, this seems to have started around 2012, when the development of EQN was in full swing, and the game looked to have real promise (but only because no one tried to actually run it). At the time, it seemed to me that they were getting ready to wind down both EQ games in order to try and funnel the population from both to EQN when it was ready - they had already moved most of the developers from those games over. When that game was cancelled, they just never bothered putting the attention back in to the other games.
The fact that both games have grown in population since then is a testament to the quality of the games, imo.
The EQN point is the best point you have come up with out of this whole discussion. It really is the best evidence to me for EQ2s failure apart from people just not knowing that their was content worth doing.
The same thing happened with SWG and Darkfall 1, both games were shoved under the rug for their "successors" to come along and be massive failures.
Still there was plenty of opportunities before and after EQN for the player base or developers to try and get eyes on this great game they were all putting their time and energy into.
Again, for all of it's faults, EQ2 is still live after almost 17 years, still getting yearly expansions, and still making a profit.
This is not a failed MMO.
Steven will be lucky if Ashes is as successful as EQ2, all told. Assuming this game releases in 2024 (my current best guess - but this changes often for me), EQ2 level of success would mean that this game is still getting regular content additions in 2041.
Again, for all of it's faults, EQ2 is still live after almost 17 years, still getting yearly expansions, and still making a profit.
This is not a failed MMO.
Steven will be lucky if Ashes is as successful as EQ2, all told.
"Relative failure" might be the better word then.
I will say that any game that lasts longer than 10 years in the MMO genre is a mild success at minimum(IMO). Still I remember back in then people thought EQ2 was going to dominate the MMO landscape like EQ1 did. I think most people would agree that EQ2 did not live up to expectations in terms of popularly.
From the way you describe EQ2 the better timeline for MMORPGs may be the alternate timeline where EQ2 and WOW trade places in popularity. Something I feel may be true (considering how much damage WOW has done by spoiling players). Even in that hypothetical alternate timeline, I am sure people would have been watching and making EQ2 videos, and WOWs raids would be something with next to no evidence of existing.
Again, for all of it's faults, EQ2 is still live after almost 17 years, still getting yearly expansions, and still making a profit.
This is not a failed MMO.
Steven will be lucky if Ashes is as successful as EQ2, all told.
"Relative failure" might be the better word then.
I will say that any game that lasts longer than 10 years in the MMO genre is a mild success at minimum(IMO). Still I remember back in then people thought EQ2 was going to dominate the MMO landscape like EQ1 did. I think most people would agree that EQ2 did not live up to expectations in terms of popularly.
From the way you describe EQ2 the better timeline for MMORPGs may be the alternate timeline where EQ2 and WOW trade places in popularity. Something I feel may be true (considering how much damage WOW has done by spoiling players). Even in that hypothetical alternate timeline, I am sure people would have been watching and making EQ2 videos, and WOWs raids would be something with next to no evidence of existing.
Maybe.
It is probably also worth restating that since the top end in EQ2 was small (relatively speaking), and since most players in top end guilds knew players from other top end guilds, making a video like many in WoW did would have just been odd. Sure, people in WoW did put out some videos of gameplay in 2006 (not a lot from 2005 though). Thing is, that was often the only real connection people from different guilds had in that game - other than forums.
In EQ2, you didn't need to put out a video, you just logged in to that guilds vent or TS server to say hi.
What I will say though, is that the history of EQ2 is odd, it is full of actual drama (not just internet drama), and trying to reduce anything in that game down to one point is impossible.
Would it have helped the game early on if guilds produced videos of the games content? I doubt it as back then that was not how people looked for new games.
Would it help now? Almost without a doubt, as that is one way some people do look for new games now.
Am I 100% sure about either of these answers? No, because the game and it's community were too damn complicated.
Would the MMO genre be better off if EQ2 had WoW's level of success and WoW didn't? Yes, without a doubt.
One of the things I distinctly remember from about 2008 was a developer posting that they applied for a job at Blizzard. The same position he had, just working on WoW rather than EQ2. He specifically said that there is no way in hell he would touch that piece of shit game, he just wanted to see how much they were paying (turns out, he was earning more). Basically, the developers of EQ2 knew their game was better, but knew WoW was more popular and would remain so - to the point where it was basically it's own meme.
So here's a very brief story of how I learned I was a terrible Black Mage in FFXIV...
I played Black Mage since 1.0, all the way through 1.0, ARR, (skipping Heavensward) and throughout my return for Stormblood to Omega Savage raids. Then it was pointed out to me very politely that as the potential highest DPS of casters, I was putting out less damage than tanks.
Big oof. The party continued to raid with me offering tips and suggestions without being elitist, however I decided for myself that I was better off playing an 'easier' caster (Red Mage) until I relearned how to play Black Mage more effectively.
Combat trackers / DPS meters can be used for good. I curently use one solely as a tool for self-improvement without ever commenting about anyone else's damage output. For all I know there might be valid reasons for it; maybe they're brand new, perhaps distracted, unfamiliar with the fight, unaware they've recently acquired or must quest for new skills - but if they don't ask it's their lesson to learn. If the PvE content is cleared I'm content enough with my own improvement. If we cannot clear I'll merely ask if there's any trouble or confusion. The only people I would even attempt to coach on how to play their role are those in my static raid group if their performance were sub-par, but I'm at least now doing equal if not marginally better DPS than our lowest performer and still striving to be better as my favorite job.
Another thread remarks upon "DPS check" (mechanic or gimmick) which - I don't think is very logical to have one without a visible measure of one's own performance, but that's neither here nor there.
The bottom line is now that I'm playing as my favorite job again I'm enjoying the game far more than I ever did being oblivous and wondering why I could never manage to clear certain things. It made me research the job more thoroughly and led me to discover several things I was doing wrong or just inefficiently.
Combat trackers / DPS meters aren't inherently bad, but I have seen them invite/encourage elitist behavior. They ARE somewhat misleading by tallying sustained, literal "Damage Per Second" as opposed to spike damage contributions limited to active pulls rather than the sustained damage in-between... but that's another irksome topic altogether.
Someone will inevitably create a third-party combat log parsing tool, and those who aim to play better will find ways to utilize it quietly without harassing or shunning from cooperation with others.
My favorite part of that story is where someone politely mentioned that you were not reaching your potential as BLM, and you did not try to report them for it. Which is something I have seen lead to people getting "vacations" for in FFXIV.
Agreeing with the general sentiment of your post that DPS can be used for both good and self improvement. I can't help but imagine that FFXIVs "Great" community would not be possible if square just allowed people to talk about DPS meters more freely? I also wonder if Ashes will enforce the same level of strict punishments for people DPS shaming that I have seen in FFXIV, if a parser is made?
It was discouraging news to hear I was doing so poorly to be sure, however I personally could not fault a group of players who had been kind to me while simultaneously being someone who was holding them back.
I think there are equal parts of DPS-shamers and "Oh yeah well TAKE THAT!" retaliatory reporters - even reporting kind and well-meaning players who only aimed to help. However both of these are spawned from the open knowledge and adoption of these third-party tools which are unsupported at best, or violate ToS and punishable at worst.
No one wants to be forced to side with the retaliator punishing perfectly amicable people unjustly, nor be the person to tell that player "Yo, they're right dawg, you trash. Here's the log..." and then ban them for false reporting only to have it blasted all over Reddit or w/e.
The easiest solution from a developer standpoint is to prohibit the stuff altogether.
Final Fantasy XIV's only true "DPS test" takes the form of practice dummies with a timer and health pool which reflects the relative damage a job should be doing for the test they're taking (minus mechanics). If they can reduce its health to zero before the timer runs out through proper rotation, they're ready to attempt that raid.
This is very vague and not something I feel is adequately explained by the game itself, but arguably the best "DPS measure" I've seen integreated within a game (though ironically, rarely if ever is there inquiry as to whether or not party members passed the training dummy for a fight before forming practice / progression parties).
Comments
Was lurking in the thread. Your ideas of "Good" raid design always comes from your EQ2 prospective. I just can't get that "Raids keeping secrets" crap out of my head since you brought in up in other threads. I know here you are talking about how you think ability's should be communicated, but every time you talk about raids now. All I can think about is how stupid it would be to have end game content no one knows about.
It is a bit of a leap to bring it up here, but I just can't get it out of my mind lol.
Lets have hard raids, and no evidence of hard raids... There are 8 people playing EQ2 on twitch right now. Imagine if there were raids to watch? It could not hurt the health of the game.
I could have brought this up in another thread, but I thought YOLO.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
That is more than I would have thought for a game based on actual 20 year old technology. Most of the people watching it on twitch wouldn't even be that old.
Fun fact, EQ2 was originally optimised for a 6ghz singe core CPU, because multi-core chips weren't popular when it was being developed, and the speed of chips was constantly increasing.
DDO is about the same age, has 91.
EQ1 has 249 atm...
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
How many does Wildstar have?
1... broken heart.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
I mean, if we are going to use twitch players as a metric for determining which games are good and which aren't...
I've said many times that EQ2 has its issues. There are reasons why I never went back to it, even if the cash shop was the reason I left.
However, those issues are not in the raiding aspect of the game, nor in the games success as an MMORPG in general.
If indeed it is true that recent WoW raids are copying the way EQ2 has done things for a very long time, as another poster suggested, then taking in to account the generally positive comments I have heard about WoW raiding recently, I don't see how you could look at that aspect of EQ2 as anything other than positive - even if it is one you do not understand.
Was using twitch as a metric for what is still active.
Like I said, my main problem is EQ2 was the culture you talked about where everyone wants to keep the content secret. That has to be part of the reason they went to a cash shop model. When subs wont keep your game alive you have to pivot to a more lucrative method of funding your game.
I don't know how or why people came up with the idea that keeping raids secret was a good idea, but it seems like it has to be related to why the game failed.
I will admit that a major part of why Wildstar failed was the failed raid scene. Brought on by massive difficulty spikes and annoying flagging quests.
End game content can be 20/10, but if no one knows about it or can access it than it might as well not exist.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
DPS is a very shallow measure of player quality.
As I am sure you know, that is how business operates - maximize profits.
Lets imagine you are a competitive e-sports player. The title doesn't matter, but maybe there are competitions with prize money. You come across an idea that will destroy anyone attempting to play the game based on the current meta.
According to your thoughts on how EQ2 raiding worked, the first thing you should then do with this new meta-breaking idea is make a video and let everyone know.
Obviously that isn't what you are going to do. You are going to keep this idea to yourself, and make use of it at the most opportune time - the final of a competition or some such.
That is EQ2 raiding. Raids come up with ideas, and they keep them so that they can be more competitive. While the game didn't have the websites to log kills and such that WoW has, the game was far more competitive between guilds early on than WoW was - with the developers occasionally interviewing leaders of guilds getting world firsts. The biggest difference is that since there were no cash prizes, since your meta-breaking idea wasn't being used on other players, and since new content was always being added, there was never a point where that idea had to leave the confines of your guild.
The game is not that competitive now, but that aspect of the game is still present.
The idea that in a competitive setting, people should share their secrets for success is just odd to me - especially when that secret could have taken weeks or months to work out.
I understand it with WoW raids, because for the most part there is only one way to tackle them. With the way websites work with WoW's API, there is no possible way to keep a strategy secret even if you did come up with a novel method for killing an encounter. As such, you may as well just publish videos of your kills - there is no reason not to.
I still have my money on: "If the subs were high, they would not have switched to F2P". No reason to dramatically shift your business model if it is working. I mean they could have just been naive in time before it was obvious that going F2P is sign to the MMO community to never take the game seriously again.
The problem with your example is that in every competitive format I am aware of. Everyone knows what everyone is doing after the first competition. People have to see you dominating to verify success. This is true with raiding. Both the WOW and FFXIV world first races are streamed on twitch. Not only do they both generate a ton of positive attention for the game, but they are needed to that people can know who actually won. During this process everyone can see everyone's strategies, believe it or not there is multiple strategies in most WOW and FFXIV boss fights.
There is also the factor where its like: "Why would you care if other guilds knew your giga brain strategy for executing a raid boss?". Other groups using your strategy does not take loot from you. After the race to world first the only thing left to compete for is better parses. It becomes about execution. Seeing other groups strategies might give your raid ideas for how they can improve some phases of a fight, but it is not going to magically execute the strategies well.
Still you are telling me there is no "EQ2 logs" site. So where is all of this "Competition" happening? Are people just sending logs at each other via e-mail with no video proof that the parses are valid?
It still makes zero sense to me in the context of PvE raiding. If this was a PvP tournament we are talking about and you had a team comp that no one had seen, sure keep it secret until the tournament, but after you use it everyone is going to see your strategy, and use it or improve on it.
Again it is like: "What is the point in competing if no one can see you win?"
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
Since it was usually a case of days before the second kill of an encounter, there was no need for any more than this. Competition. Aspects of our execution on one encounter would often inform our attmpts on a future encounter. Mostly on the now defunct EQ2flames website - which was just a forum. I don't see why this would be different in a PvP setting over a PvE setting.
If you have something you think gives you an edge over others, you hold on to it. Where there is that difference is that if you use something that gives you that edge in a PvP setting, everyone then knows about the thing you have. In a PvE setting, they don't know about it, which means there is MORE value in keeping it a secret, not less value, since you can use it many times.
Idk if that would work in WOW/FFXIV. People can fake that shit. Thanks to data mining and pulling models from the client files, people can make anything they want look real. That shit has to be done, live.
There was a issue last Ultimate World First Race in FFXIV where a raid cleared a few days before anyone else, and people thought the raid had some sort of "Hack Private Server" to practice the encounter on before clearing it on live. If they would have posted some ACT Logs and a screen shot of the boss it would not have been good enough for anyone.
Considering people were crying foul when they just came out of know where with a clear.
I am also not saying that guilds having guild secrets does not sound cool as hell. I just don't think that type of play is good for the long term health of a game because it does not inspire new players, but also in todays world it would not be enough to verify success. See the millions of streamers/speed runners getting caught cheating videos on YouTube. I have no doubt in my mind a whole raid would cheat.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
There were all sorts of accusations in EQ2 of guilds having earlier access to content in order to test it, giving them a head start on it. This has also happened in WoW though, so I don't see it being a point worth discussing - it's just a part of regular raid level drama.
Perhaps the interesting thing about attempting to cheat in EQ2 - one of the few things that were always (and I do mean always) shared with everyone in the game was what loot mobs dropped.
While it was never looked at as proof of a kill, if a guild killed an encounter for the first time, they would post the loot they got, along with who in the raid actually got the item in question.
This is something that was never really questioned. Even guilds that were in the double digits in terms of kills on an encounter would usually post the loot they recieved. Even new guilds working on older content would do this for significant encounters from the previous expansion (along with general congratulatory posts, and encouragement that they will catch up to the current content before long - the raiding scene in EQ2 was very odd).
Even without this, there is no real point to guilds cheating. With the way the developers were, how close many of them were with the games community (for better or worse), if a guild attempted to fake a world first, I have no doubt a developer would have jumped in and said that as far as they can see, the encounter remains undefeated. Even though it was a fan site, EQ2flames did have regular posts from developers for many years.
I'm fairly sure most guilds would have known they wouldn't be able to get away with attempting to fake a kill, and being caught out would likely have been the end of that guild.
There were a number of fairly good players in that game that did stupid things, and as a result would be refused by any guild they attempted to join. With how ubiquitious the use of Teamspeak, Ventrillo and Mumble were back in the day, even with players from different guilds (and different servers), a player that is shunned as above wouldn't even be able to change their character name to join another guild - they would be found out within hours.
Again, EQ2's raiding scene was odd. It was much smaller than WoW's, and most of the top end raiders knew players from every other top end raid guild.
(Would have responded sooner, had to dig to find this conversation.)
Loot is proof of clear, but not good proof of who did it first or hardest. The assumption with modern raids is that the content will be cleared eventually so long as the guild is patient, competent, and dedicated. Be it 120-200 hours progging a 20min long Ultimate fight in FFXIV or a few days progging Mythic(WOW) or Savage(FFXIV) raid tiers.
So it just becomes about who did it first, and who is doing it the hardest. It is in that pursuit that people would be tempted to cheat if given the opportunity. Which is why I think streaming progression is important, but what is more important is that MMORPG fans see that hard content exists that top players are struggling with. To inspire them to want to go after that content. Which brings in new players and money to the game. My whole point is that the secrets don't do that.
I still think there is some solid merit to my theory that having raids be "secret" had something to do with EQ2 decline and transition to f2p.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
A hand full of active players watching another hand full of active players take on a boss is not going to bring in new players to the game. Love or hate twitch (I tend to hate it for its crazy rules), streaming raids does do well to bring in new subs for MMORPGs. It is just good for the health of MMORPGs.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
This is obviously subjective.
It is worth pointing out that EQ2 began its transition to free-to-play before twitch was around.
Back then, the idea of watching other people play games was as foreign to everyone as it still is to me.
Again, EQ2 is old. When it launched, people didnt have a portable device that they could connect to the internet with and watch videos when ever they wanted. If they were watching a video of someone playing a game, they were sitting at their computer. If they were sitting at their computer, they were playing the game, rather than watching others play it.
Hell, when I started raiding in EQ2, even YouTube hadn't been launched yet.
It would seem that you have forgotten that we are talking about a different time, with a different player mentality.
I have no doubt that if EQ2 were more twitch friendly now, the game would have a bigger population. That wasnt the case 10 years ago, let alone 17 years ago. Back then, people didnt look for videos of games to decide if they wanted to play them or not.
Back then, we found the fact that a few hundred players would gather around to watch us kill a contested encounter for an hour or so to be really odd - let alone the idea of people watching a stream of us doing that.
See what I did there
/sarcasm off
On this one I agree with @Vhaeyne. Streaming the game is good for it long term. Including aspects of raids.
Oh and WoW > EQ2
That makes sense for back in the day, but still there are videos of people raiding in other games from the time period. With unregistered hypercam watermarks so you know they are from the mid to early 2000s. That Leeroy Jenkins video is from that era. EQ2 came out only a year before YouTube. I remember watching YouTube in that era. It was not great, but people we putting up videos of MMO gameplay then.
Still even now no effort has been made for EQ2 to have a race for world first publicly available for viewing (not to my knowledge). Even with the F2P model people would give EQ2 another look if they knew there was something worth seeing.
I actually shifted the subject to the off topic subject of "Secret raid strategies in EQ2". Yes, he was talking a lot about EQ2's raids which made me want to bring it up, but assuming that EQ2 was all he says it was, the perspective is valid. I am quite interested in EQ2s raids because their is such little information about them online. As someone who is a fan of raiding I would like to better understand if skipping EQ2 in the mid 2002s was the right move.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
Intrepid proudly stated as much as far back as the original kickstarter, that games logo is on their kickstarter page (among other games logos).
They have not publically acknowledged that they have any WoW developers on staff.
No effort has been made to expand EQ2's playerbase for many years.
Even before the Russian oligarch situation in 2018 when the US government sanctioned the company that owned the developers of EQ2, they made a point of keeping out of the spotlight. Keeping out of the spotlight means not attempting to attract new players to the game.
To me, this seems to have started around 2012, when the development of EQN was in full swing, and the game looked to have real promise (but only because no one tried to actually run it). At the time, it seemed to me that they were getting ready to wind down both EQ games in order to try and funnel the population from both to EQN when it was ready - they had already moved most of the developers from those games over. When that game was cancelled, they just never bothered putting the attention back in to the other games.
The fact that both games have grown in population since then is a testament to the quality of the games, imo.
Yes that is a shit tier boss, and the video is not enjoyable, but their is evidence of the WOW raiding scene from that era. You can't say EQ2s raiding scene only lasted from 2004 to 2005, and YouTube would not have helped EQ2 gain traction. Videos like that from that era helped WOW be what it was. I did not even play wow much back then and I remember friends linking me the occasional video like that trying to get me to quit L2 and come join their guild in WOW. Again its just good for the game for raids to not be kept secret.
The EQN point is the best point you have come up with out of this whole discussion. It really is the best evidence to me for EQ2s failure apart from people just not knowing that their was content worth doing.
The same thing happened with SWG and Darkfall 1, both games were shoved under the rug for their "successors" to come along and be massive failures.
Still there was plenty of opportunities before and after EQN for the player base or developers to try and get eyes on this great game they were all putting their time and energy into.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
This is not a failed MMO.
Steven will be lucky if Ashes is as successful as EQ2, all told. Assuming this game releases in 2024 (my current best guess - but this changes often for me), EQ2 level of success would mean that this game is still getting regular content additions in 2041.
"Relative failure" might be the better word then.
I will say that any game that lasts longer than 10 years in the MMO genre is a mild success at minimum(IMO). Still I remember back in then people thought EQ2 was going to dominate the MMO landscape like EQ1 did. I think most people would agree that EQ2 did not live up to expectations in terms of popularly.
From the way you describe EQ2 the better timeline for MMORPGs may be the alternate timeline where EQ2 and WOW trade places in popularity. Something I feel may be true (considering how much damage WOW has done by spoiling players). Even in that hypothetical alternate timeline, I am sure people would have been watching and making EQ2 videos, and WOWs raids would be something with next to no evidence of existing.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
Maybe.
It is probably also worth restating that since the top end in EQ2 was small (relatively speaking), and since most players in top end guilds knew players from other top end guilds, making a video like many in WoW did would have just been odd. Sure, people in WoW did put out some videos of gameplay in 2006 (not a lot from 2005 though). Thing is, that was often the only real connection people from different guilds had in that game - other than forums.
In EQ2, you didn't need to put out a video, you just logged in to that guilds vent or TS server to say hi.
What I will say though, is that the history of EQ2 is odd, it is full of actual drama (not just internet drama), and trying to reduce anything in that game down to one point is impossible.
Would it have helped the game early on if guilds produced videos of the games content? I doubt it as back then that was not how people looked for new games.
Would it help now? Almost without a doubt, as that is one way some people do look for new games now.
Am I 100% sure about either of these answers? No, because the game and it's community were too damn complicated.
Would the MMO genre be better off if EQ2 had WoW's level of success and WoW didn't? Yes, without a doubt.
One of the things I distinctly remember from about 2008 was a developer posting that they applied for a job at Blizzard. The same position he had, just working on WoW rather than EQ2. He specifically said that there is no way in hell he would touch that piece of shit game, he just wanted to see how much they were paying (turns out, he was earning more). Basically, the developers of EQ2 knew their game was better, but knew WoW was more popular and would remain so - to the point where it was basically it's own meme.
I played Black Mage since 1.0, all the way through 1.0, ARR, (skipping Heavensward) and throughout my return for Stormblood to Omega Savage raids. Then it was pointed out to me very politely that as the potential highest DPS of casters, I was putting out less damage than tanks.
Big oof. The party continued to raid with me offering tips and suggestions without being elitist, however I decided for myself that I was better off playing an 'easier' caster (Red Mage) until I relearned how to play Black Mage more effectively.
Combat trackers / DPS meters can be used for good. I curently use one solely as a tool for self-improvement without ever commenting about anyone else's damage output. For all I know there might be valid reasons for it; maybe they're brand new, perhaps distracted, unfamiliar with the fight, unaware they've recently acquired or must quest for new skills - but if they don't ask it's their lesson to learn. If the PvE content is cleared I'm content enough with my own improvement. If we cannot clear I'll merely ask if there's any trouble or confusion. The only people I would even attempt to coach on how to play their role are those in my static raid group if their performance were sub-par, but I'm at least now doing equal if not marginally better DPS than our lowest performer and still striving to be better as my favorite job.
Another thread remarks upon "DPS check" (mechanic or gimmick) which - I don't think is very logical to have one without a visible measure of one's own performance, but that's neither here nor there.
The bottom line is now that I'm playing as my favorite job again I'm enjoying the game far more than I ever did being oblivous and wondering why I could never manage to clear certain things. It made me research the job more thoroughly and led me to discover several things I was doing wrong or just inefficiently.
Combat trackers / DPS meters aren't inherently bad, but I have seen them invite/encourage elitist behavior. They ARE somewhat misleading by tallying sustained, literal "Damage Per Second" as opposed to spike damage contributions limited to active pulls rather than the sustained damage in-between... but that's another irksome topic altogether.
Someone will inevitably create a third-party combat log parsing tool, and those who aim to play better will find ways to utilize it quietly without harassing or shunning from cooperation with others.
My favorite part of that story is where someone politely mentioned that you were not reaching your potential as BLM, and you did not try to report them for it. Which is something I have seen lead to people getting "vacations" for in FFXIV.
Agreeing with the general sentiment of your post that DPS can be used for both good and self improvement. I can't help but imagine that FFXIVs "Great" community would not be possible if square just allowed people to talk about DPS meters more freely? I also wonder if Ashes will enforce the same level of strict punishments for people DPS shaming that I have seen in FFXIV, if a parser is made?
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
I think there are equal parts of DPS-shamers and "Oh yeah well TAKE THAT!" retaliatory reporters - even reporting kind and well-meaning players who only aimed to help. However both of these are spawned from the open knowledge and adoption of these third-party tools which are unsupported at best, or violate ToS and punishable at worst.
No one wants to be forced to side with the retaliator punishing perfectly amicable people unjustly, nor be the person to tell that player "Yo, they're right dawg, you trash. Here's the log..." and then ban them for false reporting only to have it blasted all over Reddit or w/e.
The easiest solution from a developer standpoint is to prohibit the stuff altogether.
Final Fantasy XIV's only true "DPS test" takes the form of practice dummies with a timer and health pool which reflects the relative damage a job should be doing for the test they're taking (minus mechanics). If they can reduce its health to zero before the timer runs out through proper rotation, they're ready to attempt that raid.
This is very vague and not something I feel is adequately explained by the game itself, but arguably the best "DPS measure" I've seen integreated within a game (though ironically, rarely if ever is there inquiry as to whether or not party members passed the training dummy for a fight before forming practice / progression parties).