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Originally Posted by Crono
No, many of my statements are flawless yet people still manage to think so
otherwise.
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Arrogance is not a persuasive argument.
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Originally Posted by Crono
My very first response was poking fun at the fact that I don't consider forced storyline + questing as a positive point for Classic over Era.
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See, by inserting the phrase "I don't consider", that is distinguishing the belief as an individual opinion, as opposed to stating it as a matter of fact like with the original post. I can't argue against questing not being a positive point for yourself, nor do I hold it against you personally, I can however argue against that being the same for many of those who considered Classic as their home server in the past, as well as many of those who have played through the existing quests.
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Originally Posted by Crono
My arguement is that the server's appeal would be narrowed down (a view which even you acknowledged) with the presence of such a feature.
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I didn't acknowledge that in the way you are insinuating though, you're twisting my words entirely out of context, and picking and choosing different parts to suit your argument. I acknowledged that in the context of an existing purely casual player, and alluded to the fact that questing is primarily targeted at legitimately new Graal players.
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Originally Posted by Crono
Wasn't a problem for UN, Delteria, Babylon, etc that also had initial quests. In Classic's defense, it had a really awkward time when the NPC Serv was introduced.
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These servers did not have a long chain of questing to the extent Tyhm's Classic did. In UN's case obtaining all the hearts and equipment, while still a chore, could be done in a much less relative amount of time compared to Classic. Babylon is a bad example, for whatever reasons it may have been it had problems which caused it to fade out within this time period.
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Originally Posted by Crono
You referred to it as a lost art, as if there was a strong questing presence within the development community.
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Not necessarily a strong presence, by referring to quest development as a lost art I was emphasising the higher frequency that occurred back then when compared to the very low frequency of it that occurs now.
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Originally Posted by Crono
Yes, I obviously know the purpose of a quest but to have long drawn out quests and then claim it's there to initally hook players in is rather...strange.
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To have a set direction and objective pointed out to a first time player is more likely -in general- to keep them online and interested for longer, compared to leaving them to wander around aimlessly with no given direction or objective. At the same time however, once the sword is obtained at the very start players are not prevented from wandering around aimlessly according to their free will. So even if you refuse to believe it can have a positive effect on long term playercount, it's only to a very small extent it could possibly have a negative effect.
Only if there was a server filled to the brim with playable content almost everywhere that can be explored might it then be sufficient to leave the game entirely down to exploration, Graal just doesn't have servers which come close to offering this. If most of the levels are waste levels which offer no incentive, exploring them is less likely to be interesting. With what we have on Classic though, there's a stable foundation of linear questing that can branch out and gradually become more flexible.
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Originally Posted by Crono
Again, I'm not saying you shouldn't have a storyline or that you shouldn't have quests, but I disagree with forcing both together. Post NPC-Server Classic (someone correct me if I'm wrong) broke a lot of the NPCs/systems so they had to be re-done from scratch. Classic had a large playercount of players who had already completed all the quests, so if a lot of the trials had left then the only people left didn't have any quests to re-complete, so there would be no fuss from them would there? Perhaps the server was reset and everything was still broken, who knows.
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I'm not sure what time era you're referring to here, post NPC-Server Classic began as a complete wipe around January 2005. There were no quests other than a simplistic maze and a pushblock hell hole until the Castle quest around a third of the way through 2006. By the time the next quests were released playercount had already dropped much lower, a lot of the pre NPC-Server players had left, and v5 had been implemented.