🚀 go-pugleaf

Justisaur <just...@gmail.com> looked up from reading the entrails of
the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs say:

>On Wednesday, July 31, 2013 9:21:21 AM UTC-7, Xocyll wrote:
>> David Lamb <dal...@cs.queensu.ca> looked up from reading the entrails of
>
> 
>> Loads of people left the game fairly early because of all the excess
>> travel.  You could spend 10+ minutes running to an instanced mission
>> that took you 5 minutes to complete, then 10 minutes getting back, then
>> get sent right back to the same location.
>> Example: A contact in Founder's Falls sends you to Crey's Folly for a
>> mission, you ...
>
>You didn't have to do missions, though fighting in the streets was usually really really crowded, at least at low level.  Lets not forget the newbie zones crashing because of the number of people there regularly.

Yeah but the missions were the actual content - the only people who only
street hunted were the power levelers in a rush to reach max level and
have nothing to do.

I don't really remember the zones crashing although I do remember
entering atlas park and the sheer number of AFK idlers onscreen dropped
my into seconds per frame mode.

>The missions were more fun though.
>
>Still no where near as bad as EQ, where you literally had to wait a half-hour for a boat, then spend about the same amount of time on the boat to get from one continent to the next.

Never played EQ, heard about the moronic wait times and never wanted to.

>> Go raiding to get the special stuff only available through raiding to
>> make you marginally stronger for ... raiding.
>
>Or PvP, which in most MMOs is done poorly.

I have zero interest in PVP so ...

>> Can you think of another MMO where people might (and some people did)
>> have 50 or 60 or more characters?
>> There were people at the end who had dozens of max level characters.
>> I made _hundreds_ of characters over the years and had dozens when CoH
>> shut down.
>> 
>Yeah, I made hundreds too, I only had 4 max level, one CoH side, and 3 COV side.

I had one each side, a level 50 hero that reached 50 shortly before the
issue that introduced Kheldians and one level 50 villain.
Several in the high 40s, and several in the low 40s,  lots in the 30s
and 20s.
I tended to get bored, get a new character concept/costume idea and make
a new character.

>Heh, funny that though, if you said you had that many max level in another game like WoW or EQ, people would think you extremely hard-core.

I know there were people with 50 or 60 level 50 characters.

>> I used to play D&D back in the day, and actually roleplaying travel was
>> boring as hell if there were no random encounters (which since they were
>> random sometimes you got none - you could play for a couple hours and
>> have NOTHING HAPPEN.)
>> Hardcore players who followed every rule could have entire play sessions
>> where nothing happened.  
>> 
>> My High School actually had a very short lived D&D club that did this -
>> the first session was people making characters since a lot of them had
>> no exposure whatsoever to the game, the second session was travelling to
>> the destination...we didn't get there and nothing happened;  Walk, roll
>> 
>> for random encounter - nothing, set up camp, set watches, roll for
>> encounters - nothing happens, walk some more roll for encounter -
>> nothing happens... for 2 hours.
>
>WTF?!  Inexperienced DM I guess, but I always just rolled a whole bunch of encounter checks at once, shouldn't take more than a minute or two to figure out if you had an encounter.  When I had enough free time, I'd roll and prepare 'random encounters' in advance for where I thought the PCs might be going.

Actually he was experienced, but you have to consider 2 things:
1. the Group was mostly new players and something like 20 people strong
- it was a High School, anyone-can-join, club.
2. he was following the rules _exactly_ as written.  ALL the rules,
encumbrance, food usage, max mileage for the terrain, max travel before
camping, etc.
We never actually got to the mission in that session - the distance to
it was something like 3-4 weeks of travel through the forest to get to
the mission, so all we did was travel, camp, mark off a days rations,
stand watch, travel, repeat.  I think we had one random encounter, of
something like 2 foxes, which got squashed quickly considering the size
of the group.

This was around 1983 and I think it was Basic D&D not even AD&D.
I think the club was formed to teach people what the game actually was -
this was shortly after the hysteria enflamed by Rona Jaffe's "Mazes and
Monsters" movie on TV.

I think the DM was also a war gamer - he liked all the fiddly little
rules.

It probably succeeded in convincing the people who came out that it had
nothing to do with Satanism, but failed in that it showed the game as
Just. Plain. Boring.

When I was introduced to the game again in fall of 1986, that DM
streamlined things considerably - if it didn't help the story and/or
increase the fun, out the fuck it went.
So no food, no counting out the miles or anything else - if the distance
would involve potentially 20 random encounters he'd roll the dice 20
times - if nothing happened, we were there.
We didn't bother with maps either unless absolutely necessary.  So we'd
do whole adventures in one afternoon/evening, not the several months of
weekends it would take following every rule to the letter.

>That's why I really preferred the old fallout/gold box way of doing it in games, just shows you going on the overland map like an old movie with the airplane leaving a line behind it, then if you did encounter something you'd pop into a local area.
>
>Also one of the main reasons I hated Baldur's Gate, even after hacking me up boots of speed for my entire party.

At least you could scroll to the other side of the map and click there
and the party would run there.
Remember Pools of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor, where you couldn't
click to move unless all the characters were visible onscreen?
(It also had huge levels that once cleared you would visit again and
again clicking dozens of times to cross each time.)

The same game where the whole party had to stand near a trap the thief
was trying to disarm, so everyone would get hit.

God that game was shite.

>> This got translated into CRPGs and then MMOs and thankfully is going the
>> fuck away, because pointless travel IS. NOT. FUN.
>
>I agree completely.  You may want to do some travel the first time somewhere to take in the scenery, but only very shortly, and probably never again with another character.

I rather like the way they did it in Skyrim - walk there to "discover"
the city, thereafter you can fast travel there if you wish (assuming you
aren't encumbered.)   I just wish the actual landscape of Skyrim was at
least a dozen times larger, not the province stuffed in a large backyard
they implemented.

Daggerfall I had it down to a science - I'd play the mage guild up until
I had access to the guild teleporter, plant a mark in front of him (that
I could teleport to,)  get a mission, recall to him, have him teleport
me to the mission, do mission, recall to him, have him teleport me tot
he city/town/whatever where the mission giver was, hand in mission.
I sometimes cleared out multiple dungeons all over the play area all in
a single day.

Since that play area was the size of Britain, the effect was rather like
getting a mission in Leeds, recalling to London, getting teleported to
the mission in Kirkwall, doing the mission, recalling to London, then
getting teleported to Leeds.
Actual game time used was really only the time in the mission itself -
hours at most.
Going there without teleporting would have been _weeks_ of in-game time.

Rather like traveling in EQ riding on an arthritic Turtle I should
imagine.  I picked a Turtle since it could act as both a mount and a
boat. :)

Xocyll