I nominate Summoning for the Worst of Everquest Award. Lets not get in to why it is needed. We all know or should know. Something to do with limitations of AI, the game engine and need for challenge. It is here to stay and that isn't the point. For all that it is the worst, the most jarring, immersion breaking, unreasonable feature to be found in Everquest. Or is it? Can you think of anything to knock Summoning from its perch atop the EQ hill of stupid? I can think of some also rans. Feign Death which fools gods again and again is certainly out there. Even if the hungry bear were fooled it wants a meal anyway, dead is good. Have to give it credit for dumb but it isn't all that hard to get used to it and forgive. OK, the monks and necrophiliacs can drop aggro. Is it all that much worse than fade? Close but no cigar. Aggro Control rates. Why is it the mobs don't go hit the obvious easy targets first? How could they be that dumb? See FD above? Of course we know it is computer AI limitations. A proper job of making the mobs choose actions well would also require the geometry and player formations to block them from their desired path. Mobs have a hard enough time moving at all. Anyone know of a game in this genre that doesn't depend on aggro control? Kind of have to forgive it and move on. Healing! Yes, healing in Everquest really is out there. Player harmonic frequency is about one cycle per 4 seconds going from full health to almost dead to full health again. It comes with an overtone for individual hits and heals and an undertone of death and resurrection. Fruit flies have nothing on Everquest characters. Not even Looney Toons characters put their beaks back on so fast or so often. They are merely also rans. Summoning reigns suppreme, king of the immersion killing stupid. A rat_model_06 says you will not evade me Player and there you are right where it wants to hit you. Amazing how much stupid Everquest can endure and still be fun. We deal with it controlling pulls, controlling which mobs we damage when so we can play the rest of the game despite this bucket of computer stupid dumped on our heads. The game endures even this. Or is there something worse? Do tell.
/tells ruin immersion the most for me. and guild chat. and group chat. and basically any chat that isn't /say. No way I'd be able to hear all these different people from all over, all at once!
Gingerbread mercs and helicopter mounts are far worse for breaking immersion than a mechanic that has been in the game since day 1.
The biggest immersion game breaker for me is peripheral vision. Damn you. It forces me to see a 37 ear old man in spiderman underpants playing a video game all day long in his grandfathers double wide with a desk covered in empty waffle taco wrappers and cheetos bags.
threads like this! its a fantasy game, strong or powerfull mobs though the use of mana have the ability to pull you directly to them, hence summoning. Players can do it, why wouldn't mobs be able to? That being said, Nerfs are what I would nominate. Think about it, here you are driving your car getting 30 MPG, then all of a sudden some one some were decides that that is to over powered and now you get 15MPG. no change to the car, no change to the input just WHAM, you no longer know how to use that ability, weapon, item, or what have you as effectivly as you used to. Screams frontal lobotomy to me but eh.
To be fair, players summoning mobs is fairly new to the game compared to mobs summoning players, also mobs with no mana can still summon from what I remember and at least as a SK I can't do it every few seconds.
Isnt this the same as the ping pong thread at https://forums.station.sony.com/eq/index.php?threads/ping-pong.211149/#post-3093322
I can top summoning three times: instancing, achievement system, marketplace. The rampant use of all three has taken EQ from an amazing mmorpg to a linear box-to-win EQ-skinned version of Free-Realms.
Talking corpses and dying inanimate objects. Long time ago, when I started playing EQ, mobs were saying stuff just before dying: mob01 says, 'Argh!' Then at some point it changed to saying stuff right after dying: mob01's corpse says, 'Argh!' Some mobs emote instead of saying stuff, and it makes them look even more ridiculous: mob02's corpse dies. And it reaches a total nonsense with 'killable' inanimate objects used in quests: untilled rocky soil died. It's been like this for over a decade now, and nobody cares to fix it.
A bit class specific, but the aggro granted by the rogue snare trap (good job it's virtually never used). Plonk a trap down somewhere, run away, watch from a safe distance. Roamer triggers it, probably doesn't get hit due to rubbish resist rate, but it KNOWS it was me out of a large crowd and charges. How? Did I stupidly forget to remove the "Property of Brogett" label? With a photo ID just to be sure incase it doesn't know which player is that? But overall the number 1 has to be... instancing. I can see why it's there, but I'd like less of it. Include instancing only for certain key progression activities and have some others take place in the main zone. (Yes devs this means you can't fluff the zone count by including the same one 10x over, but none of us fall for that these days anyway.) I liked the race, even when I lost! We just didn't like it when we could be c^$%kblocked on progression.
What grinds my gears is all the 'A's and 'An' in front of mob names. just blanket search/replace them all out.
Quests that just dump their rewards straight into your inventory harm immersion for me Not even a message that says 'Franklin teleports your reward to you' or something. Just select and dump...
Feign Death. No monster is going to stop and walk away if you flop to the ground, especially if you flop when untouched. Also, the Mend skill. Ranged healing, and healing through walls. The ability to hit a mob 4-10 times within 1 second. The inability for anyone to find a stone off the ground and throw it to pull something. Newbs back in the day had to run up, whack something, turn and run the other way. And the mob just blindly goes after said person, instead of enlisting their nearby friends. Mobs respawning. Like it just magically appeared where I was sitting, instead of roaming into my area. Zones. I realized this flaw back in the Karnor's Castle days. All those drolvargs chasing me suddenly vanish when I go through either zone area. The fact that priests of all dieties have the exact same spells. Sorry but no - Innoruuk Clerics should not receive Rodcet Nife based healing spells, Paladins of Karana wouldn't normally have a Marr's healing or Brell's hitpoint buff spells.
