[Megahertz]

> The crappy part about it IS the randomness and sparseness.

Fair enough.

Heheh think about it.

You get a quest. "Kill XYZ in the temple of ABC, Bring his head to me"

So as a valliant character, you travel to the depths of ABC and seek out XYZ. You slay him, but he doesn't have a head?!

Agree.

> Yea that's realistic. Looks like you'll have to kill him again.. but he's already dead. Hey, no worries, this is a game that doesn't even attempt to hide that fact, so he'll be back!

Well games are not meant to be realistic. They can be, but sometimes this detracts from gameplay. If this game were "realistic" there wouldnt be dragons in it. Forging a weapon wouldn't be as simple as click click, wow i made a sword. You'd have to spend hours heating a block of steel to high temperatures and folding it over and over to strengthen it, all the while banging on it with a hammer. Joy =)

Or take quake, if it were realistic, youd log on a server and once you died, oops that's it, your out of the game, or possibly out of it for good cause the game just deleted itself. =)

I do understand your point. But realism does not usually equate to fun. Unless its a simulation type game. In any event in this case I agree, if you slay a monster, you should have his head as a prize.

> And it's pointless. The ONLY reason I can think of to have quest items not drop every time is to make it more difficult to complete your quests. It's infuriating. They should have made it difficult in other ways, like more parts to the quests or something, not this game stopper rare drop nonsense.

That only reason IS the reason. There has to be some sort of throttle for letting items into the economy. Especially the uber ones. It would be extremly bad if every cleric had a rez stick or every magician had his epic pets. Or how about those cheal breastplates that dropped. Can you imagine how easy it would be to kill anything in the game given 8+ clerics with those BP's. Even then they had to "nerf" it. And i can understand why. They were simply just too powerful.

Now you make the suggestion that the quests be lengthend and have more steps in them, but I have to say, I dont think thats enough. Even a quest that had 30 steps in it, could prolly be done fairly quickly, given a decent sized guild.

Verant has stated that the Ragefire camp was only a bottleneck because of the demand for the Epic. This I disagree on. Given only 2 clerics vying for the Epic, 1 is going to have to wait because there is another person "in front" of them in line to do the quest. Why couldnt they both do the quest at the same time? They've both put in their time up to this point on the quest. Seems only fair.

Now given this thinking what happens if 50 clerics are at this point. Bam! In an instant, 50 clerics all get their Epics or all the Warriors get their uber sword of llama slaying. Now replicate this to all the other decent items in the game and the items become worthless because theyre so easy to get. Everybody could do the quest at the same time. Items flow in , economy falls in the gutter.

There has to be some way to limit the flow of items into the game, but at the same time not restrict anybody in doing their quest because somebody else is a one step ahead. Its a tough problem to solve.

I agree its a bottle neck. One that needs to be solved, but how?
I see a lot of people complain, but nobody offers any solid solutions.

> Ohh, like traveling to most of the places for the Epic quests and other high level quests is easy, right?

Disagree. If youre of level to be worthy of an Epic item, you should have no problem in doing the quest. Yes it takes sometimes up to a full guild for some parts of the quest, but if didnt, i dont feel it would be very Epic.

As a monk i had one of the hardest spawn camps in the game for my Epic, Mr. Raster of Guk. I spent a good week straight camping him. Did it suck? Slightly. Was it worth it? Fuck yeah! I wouldnt change it at all. The quest was meant to be long and tough and the reward was well worth the cost of the journey.

> So yea, I think Verrant's random drop generator sucks. It sucks because it's there in the first place =)

Well, the way its used does suck, but its a methodology thats prolly been too long in the making to change now. Not without redesigning the game from scratch. Maybe thats what Verant has planned for the other games.

Everquest was the first of its kind. It may not be perfect, and may have some flaws, but all in all, i think its a well rounded game. I played it for almost 2 years, and while i did my share of bitching and moaning about it, I still enjoyed it.


-=[ Megahertz ]=-