Just a vent about camps

[Kutch]

For those of you that played EQ back then, you know what I'm talking about, for the rest - read and observe:

In Everquest, there has always, without exception, been a respect for other players and where they're doing exp. This was called "Camping" - you brought your group (PT) to a spot in a zone, and claimed that spot. Other players would then respect that camp, and stay away from it. Over time, the best spots in an area would get their own names, much like we use "Secret room" for that particular area in CN. All areas had at least 2-3 good camps, like we do, and all of them had names.

Now, the big difference is that upon entering an area, a player would only have to shout "Is Effy taken?" or, translated into FFXI "Is the Secret Room taken?" and if someone responded yes, they'd go about and find another spot to exp on.

If you were on a quest, and had to wait for some key NPC to spawn, you could still claim this unspawned NPC, and other players would leave you to it. The most popular places used playermade lists, such as the "Frenzy Camp" in an area named "Lower Guk" where a particular NM could have a chance of popping. That area was so popular that players organized waiting lists for the PT's down there, making sure that everyone would be allowed to enter that camp once a PT member had to go. If I look around, I bet I can still find some old paper copies with ramblings of player names on them, together with their jobs, and their spot in the waiting list.

Even though Verant / Sony never recognized "Camps", they soon found that it was the best way to avoid quarrels and hassle, and thus they had it adopted as an unofficial addition to their "Play nice policy", which was enforced by the GMs and assisting GMs of the game.

Fast forward to FFXI
- No camp is EVER respected by anyone. If a player is looking for an AF coffer, and there's a thief about, you can almost bet that the thief will take the coffer as soon as he finds it. EXP camps are worse - how often have I seen multiple PT's in the stairs of Garlaige citadel, or the secret room, or bibiki bay, filling up and making the amount of mobs miserable so nobody gets decent exp..

The high ranking LS's compete for the more rewarding NM's, causing accusations, and bad mouthing eachother, instead of agreeing on a rotation of the NM's so that everyone can have their go at them. Each server has what - 4-5 LS's that are capable of taking down the highest ranking NM's. How hard can it be to organize a rotation, so that everyone gets their go in turns? In FFXI, it seems impossible, in EQ, it was never a problem.

In cases where parties were close to eachother, it would be normal for the pullers of each party to agree between themselves how and what to pull, so that each PT would have a nice, steady income of fights (Karnor's is a great example of this)

In these regards, FFXI is a game that examplifies stupidity. It would be easy to blame the language barriers, but the problem here, see, is that in EQ, there have always been japanese guilds (LS'es) too, and the respect for eachother has always been there.

I am not saying that EQ was perfect tho, there has always been boneheads that didn't want to respect camps and rotations, but they were collectively frozen out of the game fairly soon, and would soon learn to behave themselves.

I don't believe anything can be done about this. The GM's in FFXI are never present, they do not enforce any kind of Play nice Policy, and are never around for resolving player vs player conflicts other than extreme cases.

I find this curious, and saddening, and just wanted to vent a little about it. I doubt that anything at all can be done. EQ was a community of players, FFXI seems more like a community of individuals.

[Matera]

Re: Just a vent about camps

As previously mentioned, GMs don't solve crap. See: Gilsellers.

But the playerbase is capable of basic organization. Like the NPC quest pop NM. There were lines out of the bloody Necropolis.

[Kutch]

Re: Just a vent about camps

-HNMs appear only once a day, there's no room to bargain taking turns for a fair chance when it doesn't guarantee dropping the items wanted. Other cases like triggered pops, people are usually more willing to work with if they know how long the prior group plans on staying there in the case of multiple triggers.

Try once every 4 days in EQ, and players still managed to keep a respectful and balanced tone between LS'es - even tho drops were not guaranteed (are they ever?)

I do agree, it is a people problem as you say, but for the life of me, I can't really figure out why in one game, people are acting stupid, and in another, similar game, people are fair and respectful.

[Aeni]

Re: Just a vent about camps

Try once every 4 days in EQ, and players still managed to keep a respectful and balanced tone between LS'es - even tho drops were not guaranteed (are they ever?)

I do agree, it is a people problem as you say, but for the life of me, I can't really figure out why in one game, people are acting stupid, and in another, similar game, people are fair and respectful.

Simple enough, the player base for FFXI seems to skew towards the younger population, whereas in EQ, IIRC, you got a wide range of playerbase, but in the beginning, there were more "older" people then.

If FFXI started off as PC ONRY and then stayed that way, the people then would generally fall in line with what you expect them to be like after playing EQ. However, since the game was primarily based on the PS2 console, the userbase started off were young, "hip" and "trendy" people.

[GangsterMan]

Re: Just a vent about camps

wow i must be lucky, ive never had to fight for my camp =/

[Faulsey]

Re: Just a vent about camps

Also, people need to make better use of campsite resources like campsitarus or one of the (Shock horror :p) Allakhazam threads. Then a player can do a /sea for the area they want to camp in, if there are people of the right level range there, they can plan another camp.

The problem is that people are too lazy to do that, and thats why we have so many cookie cutter areas and why some places get so crowded; people are too lazy to plan beforehand, and when they get there and find things aren't to their liking, they're too lazy to go elsewhere.

[little ninja]

Re: Just a vent about camps

HNM is a cut throut part of the game. an what makes it worse is it rarely drops an item wanted by millions. take king artho for example. he drops a speed belt that goes for 60mil on my server. thats if you or nobody in your ls wants it ore needs it. now add in the fact it may drop once out of 10 kills, thus why HNM camping is so rough,

Camps still stink now. but i remember when it first came out in the us. camps were freakin horrid. we would be in a room that only supported 1 group, an you would have 3-4 show up an cram in there. nowadays they arent as bad as long ago.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Just a vent about camps

If FFXI started off as PC ONRY and then stayed that way, the people then would generally fall in line with what you expect them to be like after playing EQ. However, since the game was primarily based on the PS2 console, the userbase started off were young, "hip" and "trendy" people.

Have to disagree with you here, it has nothing to do with platform. Its the popularity of the franchise itself because World of Warcraft also suffers from a load of greedy, selfish children playing the game because its a popular franchise.

I played Everquest Online Adventures, which was a PS2 offshoot of the PC MMO series and my first MMO experience. It was very much like the PC EQ experience Kutch described. People respected EXP camps and the majority of the time, respected their fellow players. "Need before greed" wasn't some lofty ideal, it was actively practiced in the community. Very, very rarely did I ever deal with drama. MMO endgames are always going to run some risk of drama, but it seems rather high in FFXI and WoW.

Now, granted, EQOA never really got a fair shake from the PS2 playerbase or even Sony themselves and it never got the population numbers FFXI or WoW enjoy, but the audience of players were just radically more mature than newer MMOs.

And it can't be denied there's a generation gap in the gaming community now. While I mean no offense to younger gamers (I'm 28, which is still young, but I've pretty much been a gamer since the rise of arcades, wheras a lot of "gamers" today never set foot in an arcade), but for a lot of younger gamers (and newer, older gamers) its not about skill, not about principle - its just about image and how image is obtained is not important to them. Its not so much about being part of a team is it is about feeling "included" in the experience and feeling cool. Its not about getting things done right, just getting them done.

I mean, how many people honestly picked up COR because it was Gambler? How many picked it up for "zomgitsapirate?" How many people picked up RNG pre-update or BRD because they genuinely loved the job? And how many people just levelled it to get into endgame.

There's the divide. Again, I'm not saying its all the younger gamer's fault, but for some gaming is about challenge and accomplishment and for others (the majority, it seems) its all about image and little else. Both are arguably after image, but one is genuinely working for it and the others are just going through the motions, halfassing it, buying gil to get there or whatever. The wannabe hardcore players outnumber the real hardcore.

Anyway, again, its nothing to do with a platform - to assume that PC gamers are somehow more erudite than the rest of the gaming community... well... you go to an internet cafe and watch some rounds of Counterstrike or Warcraft III.

[Macht]

Re: Just a vent about camps

Problem with FFXI vs. EQ is that it's a larger playerbase. From almost start it's playerbase has been larger then EQ in all it's years. Also the speed at which the playerbase boomed, and add in that most of the people in this boom had likely never played MMORPGs (or came from Star Wars Online) and never played MUDs or MOOs.

So you have a huge playerbase were the likelyhood of people that had played MMORPGs before being around 15%-25%. With such a huge difference of course a lot of the standard etiquette that has always been administered before would get lost. Before the Christmas boom back in 2003, you could see testimants of people that never before played with a foreigner's etiquette and rules of fair play.

So the current state of the game is basically a result of a large mass of players that never before played MMORPGs and so had no pre-existing knoweldge of a good behavior to administer in the game along with a lacking number of players that could help to influence that good behavior.

See WoW, Lineage, or Lineage II carring for other player's enjoyment of the game is rock bottom. These 3 had a much more massive population boom, and the downside is very apparent. You almost feel like you're in hell playing on them because players have little respect for eachother and less order.

Due to the huge population boom of players lacking such knowledge of respecting eachother is why those that do know have to try and express it and encourage it's growth.

It's one of the reason that I love that FFXI isn't a pure PvP design, you could imagine the chaos that would of happened then if it was. At least in it's current state the chaos is a little more controlled.