The Unique Mob/Rare item system is...

[Cambist]

The Unique Mob/Rare item system is one of the most worthless frustrating piece of crap systems ever designed by ANY game company EVER! Rare drop items that drop 1 in 40 every 18 hours by named mobs. What genious thought of that system?

Yeah, we'll make customers stick around by making 10 of them get an item they want this year. If they're not in a huge guild, they won't ever even see the Uniques that have them because they won't know the timers. Perfect!

High level content gets to be enjoyed by about a dozen people a month. Most of whom don't even need the items, they just want every item in the game for the sake of collecting them. That or making money on Ebay off of the ridiculous rarity.

edit: anger makes for spelling errors..

[Jynne]

It beats the mobs on evercrack that are on 3 day timers, 5 day timers, and 7 day timers...

[Tetra]

Originally posted by Jynne
It beats the mobs on evercrack that are on 3 day timers, 5 day timers, and 7 day timers...

"not as bad as someone else's bad thing"

such a lofty goal for funcom to aspire to

[Bionitrous]

"We don't suck as much as EverQuest"®

Such a lofty goal to aspire to.

[_____________Abunari]

No item should be rare in AO. Let skills decide the game not Camping Online.

But sadly, it is all FC can do to make it camping:

1) rare/uber loot on timed mobs;
2) timed mobs don't drop it all the time;
3) some timed mobs in 25% zones; and coming soon:
4) camping your mining towers out in 25% or 0% zones.

Camp camp camp camp camp and when tired of camping or in need of levels: go do missions.

And just putting in some high level hunting that has been missing for over a year (since Medusa nerf), isn't going to fix this.

[Cambist]

A lot of us never played Everquest for a reason...

The difficulty of most of the named uniques requires you to be in a mid-high level team or bring a whole guild of lower levels to survive. I don't understand why this isn't enough. That would be high level content if the timers were significantly shorter (eg. Trash King or Neleb).

The current "uber item" rarity only makes the game more imbalanced towards those with hundreds of hours to spend online, or huge guilds that take over spawn completely to try and get their guildmates items they need/want.

It's not fun... Everyone has complained about the camping and Funcom said they would eliminate it. Why haven't they?

[_____________Abunari]

Originally posted by Cambist
It's not fun... Everyone has complained about the camping and Funcom said they would eliminate it. Why haven't they?

They lied when they said they didn't like it and would eliminate it. The writing is on the wall: booster pack - camp the towers for marginal bonuses.

Maybe FC thinks that if they put enough camping places in the game then it won't feel like camping. Flawed logic there.

Oh well, not like they'll ever change.

[Bionitrous]

I honestly wonder what the percentage of of never-EverQuesters is in AO. I bet FunCom would be surprised. That filth never touched my PC and 90% of my guild never even tried it.

I think AO lost 50% of the EverQuesters who bought Anarchy by the end of last July and another hefty chunk when DAoC came out. They aren't coming back. Ever. SW: G and EQ:2 will make sure of that.

Problem is that the AO game designers are not capitalizing on what kept us ex-UO'ers and AC'ers in the game.

For me, it was the thinking and planning that creating a strong character entailed. It was the ability to solo and get a sense of satisfaction from every play session even if the guild didn't happen to be on a particular night.

Things like the Black Shirt, Crat Suit, and the entire Tarasque fiasco made a lot of people in my guild up and quit the game.

They'd rather watch a baseball game on TV.

[Turin]

Camping suckls, ill say that. But I have done it, and I have EVERYTHING rare in the game that I want except for one thing. The gaily painted hood. And I WILL have it eventually. Anyway, I have shades of lucubration, prof jones vest, virall egg, TIM scope. All of it. I put ALOT ALOT of time into this, and effort. I camped TIM for over a week to get that damn scope.

And you know what? I was getting SUPER pissed about TIM, but finally, he dropped his scope and I was happy.

Guess what, I felt VERY accomplished though, and some pride in my efforts to procure therse items. That first day I got my Prf vest on, i was just like "WOO HO!!!!!! WHOOT!!!! I ROCK!!!!" And all that.

The REAL problem, IMHO, is that the mobs dont always drop the loot when you kill them. At 18 hours a spawn, these guys only come around 9.3 times a week. They should ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS drop the loot. As it is though, right now,. they drop the like 1 in 3 kills. THIS SUCKS. Mobs should ALWAYS srop the rare uber ittems so that the person who killed him feels rewarded, in some fashion, not the total frustrastion of FINALLY winning a rare mob and then getting nothing.

[Jynne]

My point about EQ was a sarcastic one. EQ has long spawn timers on many mobs. Guilds have waiting lists and rotations for who gets to kill many of them. The vast, crushing majority of players will never even see those mobs outside of screenshots, let alone fight them. With every expansion to EQ, the spawn timers have gotten longer and the drop rates for the best items rarer, while new 'normally gettable' items are injected into the game that make the best previous items obsolete.

FC is already moving in the same direction with 'loot creep.' Many of the items you can now find in team missions are as good as or better than some of the 'uber mob' drops. Ie, webcloaks and albrecht armor vs heavily padded coat or aura magnifier. Probably in the next few patches/expansions the spawn timer on new ubermobs will be even longer, to compensate for the even-better drops (since they have to beat the team mission loot creep in order to be worth camping), and so on.

[Bionitrous]

I am 100% behind the recent move towards 'normally gettable' items being just as good (or damn close to) as the junk on them unique mobs. I'd rather do a million missions and perhaps get an Albrecht tank armor than sit for even 15 minutes doing absolutely nothing in the game trying to get something else.

I endorse the way they implemented both Carbonum and Bronto Hide armor.

Show me a better rifle than the X-3 that 'drops' off some unique horse crap 18-hr uber-guild spawn-timed waste of server space MOB. You actually have fun trying to get an X-3. Likewise if it shows on the exchange board, normal human beings have a chance to buy one.

The nonsense with the Dragon Armor led to bannings, hurt feelings, broken friendships, and more. That Dragon is another waste of server cycles that provides entertainment for what? 40 people at a time every 18 hours. How about having 200 of them dragons so that 8000 people could have fun when they wanted to have fun?

Tell ya what FunCom, I'll send ya 20 bucks on top of the 20 for the Booster pack if I can show my guild a good time by getting keys to Smuggler's Den, Biomere, and Camelot. You simply don't understand the camaraderie that a good dungeon crawl can instill in a group of adventurers.

[Jynne]

Bio, my point is that the pattern for MMORPG expansion as laid out in EQ is thus: as non-camp items become close to/better than camp items, future camp items will be made even better... but will drop from mobs on even longer spawn timers at even lower rates.

So when FC decides to add a new ubermob, it might spawn not in 18 hours, but 36 hours. Its uber loot might drop, say, 10% of the time instead of 20% of the time. Why? Because it's uber loot will have to be a lot better than the mission boss loot, but since mission boss loot is already comparable in several areas to Tarasque's loot, FC can't justify making the new mob drop things as frequently as Tara does since the argument for long-spawn camp items is "rarity balances uberness."

[Bionitrous]

So basically what you are saying is they put a carrot out for Storm to grab to attempt to stop them from cancelling. Normal people realize they can never enjoy it but suck it up for a month or two. Then they put stuff in that normal people can enjoy that obsoletes the stuff the Stormers were hording. And repeat the process with something better but harder to get in order to keep Storm interested.

Something like that?

Insidious yet intriguing.

I guess that explains why my alternate characters have a blast each and every time through the Steppes of Madness since Storm has moved on. It's always a fun adventure. And then on to the Cyborg dungeon. That's always a blast. Even Biomere for a Gamma Ejector if needed.

Then the game starts to suck. Uber guilds camping everything.

According to your theorem, it's because the bar has not been raised to get the (IMHO) wastes of oxygen out of Smugglers or Camelot or have them change their alarm clocks so a 'norrmal' guild could go out and hunt a unique monster.

We get to lick rump because of lack of bigger and better carrots for the large organs to quibble over.

If that's the case, then I wish they would hurry up and add some carrots. Because I'm getting bored and certainly would like to enjoy tracking down the Ancient Gargantula and taking him out just like I enjoy that bastard Neleb each time a character turns 40'ish or so.

[Cambist]

*Scratches head wondering how my post about camping turned into a complaint about my own guild*

Ah well, I don't care and I understand where you're coming from despite supposedly being a waste of space. I'm generally a fairly forgiving waste of space.

Everyone should realize it's a huge pain no matter what guild you're in. I've been in the small guild that had no chance in hell and I've been in the large guild that has a decent chance. Either way it's a horrible system that's almost universally hated.

Some people have every rare item in the game, but a much larger portion of the players have none because they won't deal with the grief or don't have hundreds of hours to put into getting them.

Make all the items No-Drop and shorten the spawn timers to 30 minutes. Give a team keys to a dungeon. Set a timer once you've gotten an item to prevent you from getting another for a week. I don't care... The designers should do SOMETHING to fix the problem besides 18 hour timers.

[Jynne]

I am merely making the point that the rationale behind the long spawn timers is that the equipment mobs like Tarasque drop is too powerful to be introduced into the game en masse without making general PVM trivial. Well, more trivial

But all games experience 'item creep' as they expand and new areas/dungeons are added. The next "uber mob" will have to have items that top Tarasque's and top the team mission boss loots and top carbonum/MK2 armor, at least if FC wants people to adopt that new gear. But because the new items will be even more powerful than what we have now, FC will want to limit its introduction into the game further still.

The real solution to item creep is not to have uber items. But that's when we go back to having no real content in the game. A 'middle solution' could be to make static dungeons like Biomere, Camelot, and Steps of Madness have 'mission keys' as you describe - but that would introduce uber gear into the game at an incredible rate, and future gear would have to be kept well in check to keep every new dungeon from overrunning the game with better and better stuff.

[Bionitrous]

I guess the real solution in my personal opinion is to yes, allow every single character the opportunity to be part of a team that takes down the Tarasque.

At the same time, require 3 dozen killings or so of the Tarasque to get a single full suit of his armor along with assorted trinkets and toys.

But at the same time, you must have a huge mechanized Battle Bot in some Omni Research facility that drops equally good armor and requires at least 3 dozen kills for a single full set.

And also some sort of Nokken Armor that drops at a rate about equal to MKI in Smuggler's.

And a few more quests similar to the Living Cyber Armor that require a day to get each piece.

And the kicker is that none of this armor should be that much better than the other. Each should have it's strengths and weaknesses.


The failure of the system is that Dragon Flesh armor is far and away better than anything else. There's no choice at all. No hard decisions as to how to outfit your character. That should be the fun of the game. Deciding how you want to look at 200 and coming up with too many options to choose from but deciding on one that really floats your boat.

Then you got 200 levels to set forth on your quest.

The problem with the current setup is that for most of anything that 'matters' your first step looks like this:

1.) Join Storm

or

1a.) Join The Council or MoK

That's why the resentment. And the above guild names are not put forth in such a way as to represent ill will towards them. They could simply be GuildX and ClanY. It's the system that is failing the players.

You simply can't really work to better your character. You gotta get lucky or you gotta suck rump. Neither gives you a sense of satisfaction at day's end. Neither makes you think your money spent that month was worth it.

[Cambist]

Bio, Clan still raffles for items and Storm has no direct hand in the raffle atm. Misdirected resentment, in my opinion.

RULES FOR TARASQUE RAIDS

I still agree with you for the most part... It's pretty much crap. I hate that dragon and all the backbiting it has caused.

-------------------------------

Jynne, you're posting pure speculation. I don't want to create a conspiracy theory. I think the new items are Funcom wanting incentives for people to get involved with their new systems (team missions and dynamic spawn camps). I don't think they're going to be an excuse to further break an already broken Unique mob system.

The likelyhood of them making the already fairly crappy items have even more insane timers is a bit off the wall, IMO. The Static Mobs are heavily camped, so they probably see that as a positive and don't fix it.

And to a certain extent it is a positive indication... People want that achievement of killing the Unique mob and getting a trinket. I'm not sure they realize our anger about camping is mostly related to the static outdoor boss mobs and static dungeon bosses they introduced. We've dealt with it for 6 months now. No one likes it. Please someone fix it!

I can see the balance problems with Dragon Armor, but most of the items are not very powerful. There's one or two useful ones, but nothing justifying 18 hours off of the dragon that I know of..

[Bionitrous]

You know how you use a Xerox machine to copy documents and blow yer nose with a Kleenex? That's the only connotation that I use particular guild names in this discussion.

"Man, I been sitting here for eight hours. Just my luck he'll pop and six Stormers will log in and take the kill"

[Cambist]

Heh. Fair enough.

[Jynne]

It's not really speculation, Cambist, it's applying the game design philosophy that drives Everquest's content additions to AO. Every time content has been added to Everquest, the 'top' of the game has been put farther out of the reach of the average player, while the new 'common standard' items far and away eclipsed the 'top end' items of the previous world, and the new top end items were even rarer and dropped from harder mobs than the old ones.

For example, after EQ added the Kunark expansion, the relatively easy-to-get Lamentation sword phased out the Ykesha sword that had been perhaps the most popular in the original game, because of the Lamentation's superior stats. Other weapons and armors that had been prized by high level characters, were instead given to 'twinks' or sold at prices low enough for mid-level characters. Two more expansions later, the Ykesha swords are considered worthless even as 'twink' weapons - more common and easier to get weapons now are better. The Lamentations themselves are twink weapons now.

The point? When a game adds content, the game's "balance point" shifts upward because of the new (and generally better) items. When AO added new armor types, for example, waitt cyber almost disappeared from everyone. Previously, it was one of the most popular armors in the world. After webcloaks were added, and tank armors changed, senpai coats and nano and biomech coats started disappearing - nano and biomech are almost entirely gone.

That's what I'm describing, when I talk about item creep. The items added in the future will be better, and will replace the items we have now as the standard.

How does longer spawn timers and lower drop rates factor in? Simple - because the new items are better, it should be more of an ordeal to get them, right? I mean, since you already get good stuff from a dragon... better stuff should drop from a tougher/rarer dragon - it's logical, in its own way. Better stuff is harder to get. Future better stuff will be even harder to get than current better stuff.