Quote:
Originally Posted by Drajor
Heyas. I have had this idea rolling around in my head for a while now and wanted to share it to get other player/designer opinions.
The idea is this, epic weapons on custom servers are a poor and lazy design choice.
I guess a good place to start is to try and describe what is an epic weapon, what makes it epic? If you played during Kunark/Velious you will probably know that epic weapons were rare/uncommon. The players that had them were in a guild that raided at least weekly, the quests were long and the rewards were great.
So an epic weapon in my opinion must be both rare and powerful. Think of your favourite custom server, would you consider an epic weapon to be rare? Chances are no, everyone has them. They are common and mandatory. They are certainly powerful, but they are not epic.
Ok, so with a definition of what is an epic established. Lets look at some of the side effects of having these non-epic epic weapons in the server design.
The first side effect is the impact it has on diversity. Log into your favourite custom server, 9 out of 10 warriors are all using the same weapons. For good reason too, these weapons are generally the most powerful, of course everyone is going to have one or is in the process of getting one.
This is a shame because there are hundreds of really cool weapon graphics available to designers but instead we see 10-20. Boring.
The second side effect is the devaluation of the designers work by channelling all players into epic weapons. The designer probably spent a lot of time making all kinds of other weapons available as loot or through crafting but chances are no one will really consider using them, because they are not 'epic'. So all that work is essentially wasted. There is still an illusion of choice for the player, but really there is no choice, you need to get your epic.
I will leave it at that for now and wait for some feedback!
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Varlyndria: Ascension has over 100 epic models. (Some paths get 2 or 3 items, main hand/off-hand etc) 64 sub-classes (paths) all with their own epic to fit the theme. These epics are not easy to get either. The point of this post is to tell you that not all custom servers are the same and there are developers like myself who understand what you're saying and ultimately what players want.
In my opinion there has to be a place where you STOP adding weapons to the current tier during a certain epic period for content, but than have a couple tiers where players can use some new non-epic weapons that are better than their older epic to mix things up a bit but than get a bigger and badder version of their epic later on. (I will be using the same model for my epics because they are themed to fit the path and pretty much anything that has a glow effect is used on my server due to the high volume of class choices.)
With that said, you're probably right with a lot of epic choices for servers who just do the 16 base classes since that's all you got to play with.
However, their aren't as many epic choices as some make it out to be. Even a few of my own path epics don't have a glow effect because there wasn't any choices with particles to fit the theme, so I had to use a non particle model but it at least fit the theme of the path.
Here is an Example of a timeline for epics that I will be using in Ascension:
• Epic 1.0 Quest: Good for a few raid tiers of progression. These tiers won't drop weapons.
• 3 Tiers above Epic 1.0 Quest: Weapons stronger than Epic 1.0 dropped.
• Epic 2.0 Quest: Good for a few tiers of progression. These tiers won't drop weapons. (Rinse and Repeat with new tiers and epic versions)