Something to speed up playing

C

Clammie

Dalayan Adventurer
I know this always gets brought up but I feel this game needs something to speed up the action. Lets face if you know you have leave the house in an hour chances are you not going to log into this game other then to chat.. By the time you log in your people all buffed up and actually get to a spot it is almost time to log off.

I am not saying something quite like LDoNs but something in the ways that everyone no matter tier can do and not take 30 mins just to get started.
 
It seems like tmaps and bounties are good at providing content that doesn't (usually) involve long clears or grinds, but not everyone needs gear from them. So expanding them a bit would help.

Buffing definitely takes a decent chunk of time, and I know there's been ideas before to address it such as NPCs that can buff in cities for example, or even doing away with buffs completely and rolling them into charms or base stats or something. You could also have content that is balanced around no buffs and strip them when players enter, or scripts that automatically give everyone certain buffs for a given zone/wing/boss. I'm sure people can come up with many other ideas too. But inevitably you run into things like certain classes not being that important aside from their buffs, or discouraging players from grouping because they're so self-sufficient. I agree that it's hard to accomplish much if you can only log on for 30 minutes but I don't know the best way to address that, or even if it should be.
 
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Could give XP to tradeskilling - once you've maxed it, for every item produced you receive a small amount of experience points? This would allow players to work on advancing their toons in a very limited amount of time.
 
Buffing only takes 30 minutes if you're full raid buffing. and if you need full raid buffs to exp you should find a new exp zone or are probably going to exp for longer than 30 minutes.

This is everquest. I'm not saying that everything should take 3 hours to do but this is a game w/ time sinks and time sinks are apart of this game.
 
Dinadass said:
It seems like tmaps and bounties are good at providing content that doesn't (usually) involve long clears or grinds, but not everyone needs gear from them.
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This would be the main issue I think. No matter how quick content is made to be, you'd still have to get a group of people together who actually want to do it. Making something that is worth doing regardless of tier--to the extent of people grouping up in spite of extreme differences in their gear, which I think was implied--borders on impossible because of the issue of reward. Nadox is a good example. It minimizes gear differences, but basically no one has ever gone there because there's no specific rewards in it that appeal to the tier 8+ crowd. Making fair item rewards for something like that is hopeless. If the exp or money is good even for a crazy tier 11+ farmer then no one will go anywhere else, it'd be the best place hands down if a group of tmap-geared 65s can do it just as well.

Being fast and even fun is not enough.
 
Dinadass said:
or even doing away with buffs completely and rolling them into charms or base stats or something.
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I can remember this idea being pretty roundly hated when I brought it up a few years back. People prefer loading a ton of bots to the thought of any radical change for the better.
 
I'd love it if I could just log in and immediately head off to farm or join a group or whatever. 30 minutes to buff is extreme like Deein said, but I'd say it usually takes almost 15 minutes to buff myself and healbot of choice which is annoying. Plus if standard buffs were incorporated into our stats in a different way, the 15 buffslot limit wouldn't be an issue any more. As long as class balance/power/desirability can be maintained I don't see a down side.

Radaere said:
Buff before logging off and then you have hours of buff-boosted play time to look forward to
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I log you in and afk in sadri for hours just to counteract this.
 
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Dinadass said:
Plus if standard buffs were incorporated into our stats in a different way, the 15 buffslot limit wouldn't be an issue any more. As long as class balance/power/desirability can be maintained I don't see a down side.
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Actually I remembered what the problem was now: where to put the limits. My original thought I think had been to preserve the class-buff-usefulness factor for shamans and enchanters by turning buffs into auras that automatically grant their effects (except for stuff you'd want to be able to click obv, like damage shields and levitate) to group/raid members... but then there was the issue of 6-man. Even if things had their difficulties rebalanced around not having all raid buffs all the time, people still wouldn't want to have to bring a shaman or enchanter just to have haste, much less have to rely on dirty bard haste, much less have to actually consider novel/strategic group compositions like maybe just not taking melee dps if you won't a have haste source etc etc.

If instead the effects of all relic shaman buffs were permanently added to you as soon as you grouped up with a shaman for the first time and so on, then in some sense we'd just have an overly complicated version of not having buffs at all; the entire concept would just be there to save us from having to rebalance things. Or rather, to save us from the damning people with lower numbers, even if those numbers would mean different things in the end.

And of course any kind of time limit or anything like that would just go back to buff bots.

tl;dr another "too late to try something different now, we're stuck with this forever" issue.

Now maybe back to the original issue of the thread!
 
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It sounds like a lot of effort for something that is pretty minor.

Really if someones group is taking 30 minutes to buff and get to a zone, its a player problem, not an issue with the game.
 
Another horrible thread about how to change SoD/EQ in a counter strike clone for the fast food
generation.
 
yo if you do not have enough time to X then you are not Y kind of gamer just go on with your life it is okay if you are not The Best at Shards Of Dalia
 
Don't need full raid buffs and a full group to be productive for those very short play periods. Forethought and planning go a long way.
 
Shouki said:
Don't need full raid buffs and a full group to be productive for those very short play periods. Forethought and planning go a long way.
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With how long some buffs last you could get them cast on you and be set for like four to five thirty-minute play sessions.
 
Make a zone with multiple access points via NPCs in cities or whatever the premise being you are reliving a battle, maybe when kaezul came and wrecked shit somewhere. Something contrived like that. When you zone in you are auto-joined to a raid (with a cap higher than 18 obviously) which encompasses every player in the zone and it's a wave/survival type fight. Add in some kind of buffs/debuffs to level the playing field so you don't have retards complaining about fresh 65s (possibly this would also compensate for lower numbers), come up with a mechanic that stops people from just sitting around soaking up exp without doing anything, give incentive for being active by some sort of point or token accruement which is used post battle to handle obtaining individual loot from a pool (thus removing the drama and difficult of mid-battle looting like you experience in wars) or don't have loot at all, who cares. There you go.
 
Oh yeah also have the NPCs you hail to zone in announce when a slot in the zone is open, maybe put a timer to how long you can be in there at a time or per day, and with them being in each major city give them each a max (like 5 players per npc) that can be in there so like 5 player slots from halas, 5 from athica, 5 from etc etc so there you go more reason for players to be parked in other cities (I know there has been an agenda to get people out of athica).
 
Rorne said:
Make a zone with multiple access points via NPCs in cities or whatever the premise being you are reliving a battle, maybe when kaezul came and wrecked shit somewhere. Something contrived like that. When you zone in you are auto-joined to a raid (with a cap higher than 18 obviously) which encompasses every player in the zone and it's a wave/survival type fight. Add in some kind of buffs/debuffs to level the playing field so you don't have retards complaining about fresh 65s (possibly this would also compensate for lower numbers), come up with a mechanic that stops people from just sitting around soaking up exp without doing anything, give incentive for being active by some sort of point or token accruement which is used post battle to handle obtaining individual loot from a pool (thus removing the drama and difficult of mid-battle looting like you experience in wars) or don't have loot at all, who cares. There you go.
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I'd been wanting to use our new scripting system to make a zone where you fight against smart npcs with coordinated "group" ai, capturing territory and fighting off npc counterattacks etc, and that actually sounds like it might fit well with this idea. I could see how to pull off most of it, though the content itself would need tons of work.

There's still the question of what the rewards would be. I could see lots of cheap lower tier gear to help out new players, but again idk about being able to save up for a piece of tier 10 gear or anything like that if everyone is scaled to around the same power. Maybe a new charm slot augment with its own slot, with upgrades..? Seems kind of lame though.

Also I bet I could make standard spellsets for casters and hybrids who enter the event, automatically having them memorized when you zone in, preventing them from being removed while you're in the zone and automatically losing them when you leave. Would solve the nadox issue of relic spells still being a big advantage, and allow different classes to feel equally useful there and simplify some balance and design concerns blah blah blah.
 
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In addition to gear aimed at low/mid tiers you could have clickies, potions, etc. that higher tier people would want. Or something like the bounty hunting bane damage belt (though I think bane damage on armor is a bad mechanic that isn't balanced properly).

Hell roll the whole thing into one idea and offer potions that cast raego, rfocus, jb, etc. I'd love to have the ability to GOE myself while grinding instead of using Emp.
 
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