Building a zone is like painting a picture; at one time, when my dad was in the military, we lived in Spain, and, my dad used to oil paint for a hobby. Not because he's my dad, but he did beautiful landscape paintings - he never went to no "art school", just had the talent. My dad also has a fearful temper (and the muscle to back it up), and when he had a tantrum - everyone stayed clear else you loose your head. I preferred to hide under the bed, and watch him stomp by breaking things. Needless to say, one day all the hundreds of oil-paintings got torn up and trashed, during a temper-tantrum - they were all lost.
Anyways, when my dad used to paint , he always carried around some kind of "charcoal pencil" and a sketch-pad. He would pull up to a view, decide what he wanted to paint, and make a sketch of it with his pad. His sketches were incredibly nice too ( I would have settled for those even). Then he'd go home and start painting the final version, with the sketch as a sort of outline.
What I'm getting at is, the zones here are really a piece of modern-day artwork. We have all the pieces ( packets collected), and a "sketch" of it. But it is all unfinished; the detail is incomplete.
I'm not talking about AA's, or haste, or skill points and what not. I mean the true, picture" of the zone with all of its detail.
When I take my character to a zone, I look for all the detailed mechanics that make this zone; Drops, spawns, rare spawns, ultra-rare spawns, grids, quests, objects, etc. I want the zone to "feel" like the real Everquest. If a Hill giant drops 30pp on live, then i want him to drop that too in my zone - and if an orc drops 2sp, then that's what he should drop. Some mobs like Quilmane and Bilge, are "legendary" rare spawns. And to me, if you have stuff like Quilmane flopping around the zone all the time - you just ruined a major part of South Karana. In Butcher; Corflunk - he's not supposed to be just standing there like some big "dork" (scratching his ass) and even less the Fabled version. He was a sought out spawn and had a path. Fabled versions of spawns are supposed to be some of the rarest spawns in the game. How is ToFS like with no working keys?
We need to attract people that really want to play, we need to make a game out of this. We need to make the zones "playable". You have to ask yourself, will I want to play in this zone too?, does everything look/feel right?
To be honest with you, I think the custom zones are not helping this situation, but thats another debate. When I first saw the log-in server, I expected to see a string of servers that had a plan; all the same zones with all the same content.
There probably should be rules; no cheating, no this, no that, etc. New zones should be opened in all servers at the same time. Maybe, we should have two areas (at the login) for EQ, one labled "custom", where everything goes - then the real servers where things are working towards a goal. Blizzard has "free-for-all servers like this, then they have the servers where there is rules.
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