MMORPGs How they have changed for the better? or worse?

[Barraind]

You can blame players for ilvl actually.

No, I'm speaking of Ilvl.

Gearscore was a way to see what your Ilvl is.

Ilvl is (albeit 14's way of representing this) the driving mechanic behind the specific allocation of stats on gear. for the longest time in wow it was a set function of ilvl*statpoints allocated to a single stat, which was then decremented by a specific value to have a secondary stat added, so that at lower levels, the stat points of 2 stats added up to the same amount as one stat (level 39) to where it was spread across 3-4 different stats and added up to 1.5-1.75x the value of a single stat (I think 1.73% was Icecrown, but its been a long time and i cant find the old values for gear, but it was a simple exponential scaling of ilvl*base).


I lvl and resulting formulas are drag and drop "heres the ilvl, the stats will ALWAYS be: X or Y/Z or A/B/C or E/F/G/H" and you can determine exactly what the total stat value will be of any given piece of gear at that ilvl (and sometimes varying by rarity, but thats not even a thing in 14 anymore) if you know the formula, but there will NEVER be a difference across pieces of the same ilvl.


Comparatively, you have EQ which treats AC, HP and Mana, Base stats, secondary stats, tertiary stats, and resists as different values with different weights and has a range of allowable weights per zone.

People rush through the game to get that "beat it first!" pat on the back and then we get flooded with "Where all the endgame content?" complaints.

Thats a symptom of todays design.

I had world firsts in EQ in 2 different guilds for 8 or 9 expansions. We killed stuff and then we... killed days worth of other stuff. Beating the last boss of a raid zone in an expansion meant we still had 2-3 FULL RAID ZONES of relevant content to do (and then it started meaning we had 6 one-off dragons, a couple 36 man zones, a couple 24 man augment farms, a couple raid zones, epic 2.0 fights, and a raid zone for trash farming for augments) on our other raid nights. We had aa farms, or involved tradeskilling, or epic quests that took weeks or months of doing stuff. We could farm old content for fun toys to play with (clicky illusions, clicky shrinks, clicky levitate, clicky haste, clicky shoot a fireball pewpew)

We didnt kill 4 trial bosses in a day and have nothing meaningful to do until reset because you maxxed your tradeskills FOR THE NEXT TWO YEARS in 100 leves, 2 weeks of custom deliveries and crystarium quests.

Back in the day, everyone knew everyone - If you screwed someone / a guild over, you bet your ass your name would be on a forum and everyone would know what happened and who to ignore. Now? Not so much

Now its harassing, bullying and naming and shaming.

Which are three things you SHOULD ABSOLUTELY DO to people who act in that way. The only people who benefit from the prevailing mindset of "now now, we cant shame them for instigating BS" are the people instigating the BS.