So, every game seems to think that powerleveling is somehow bad and sad and god kills a kitten whenever a twink dings without suffering. Therefore, there’s always some code to prevent a low level guy from getting all the experience if a high level guy does any damage to the mob at all. (Side note: Why was City of Heroes’ sidekick mechanism not widely stolen emulated? Anyone? Bueller?)
In practice, of course, this means that if I’m soloing a monster in LOTRO, and about to win because, dude, I’m level 34 in full crafted gear and the mob is level 28 yard trash, and some punk ass comes up and plinks it with an arrow for seven points, I get a fraction of the experience I would have gotten without any “help.”
I just told someone that in my day we’d have trained frogloks on him for that stunt.
In. My. Day.
Excuse me, I’m going to go drink some Metamucil and fetch a donut shaped pillow for my scooter.
Welcome to the ‘other side of the hill’. The view is still pretty nice from up here though!
Here’s another good one when you’re feeling old and crotchety:
“If I had my druthers .”
Jason (resident drunken idiot of Channel Massive)
What’s most annoying about that is, the other person might honestly believe they’re “helping”.
I agree. I keep waiting for WoW to emulate the sidekick program. They sort have with recruit a friend I suppose, but they seem to not want their Azeroth content passed over, which would preclude a true sidekick like program.
That’s lame that someone can hit the MOB you are fighting at any point in the battle and frak up your exp. Poor design, for sure.
As to the punk ass, a froglock train might do him some good. Or tie him up and drag the contents of Castle Mistmoore on his ass.
The mechanism in question is in place to encourage grouping. But, /meh … move on and don’t whine about the paltry tidbits of xp you lost (since you said you were killing trash mobs below your level anyway). LOTRO rewards quest completion far greater than grinding mobs for xp. I played DAoC from release, and took many characters to level 50 while solo grinding mobs. I can attest that, in comparison, the miniscule xp rewards for killing mobs in LOTRO caused me to quit that game … twice. On my third try and I have since learned to slow down and not worry about the rewards. The pleasure is in the journey (say it often enough and it becomes true). I have actually earned many character levels on my latest character by just grinding mobs … not with the goal of gaining a level, but with the goal of exploring an area and am thus forced to eliminate the nuisance mobs attacking me while I do it. Granted, some of them con orange … but the point is they’re not the point.
IF the subtext of this blog post was to harken back to the whistful years of youth and time spent, I remember 25+ years back when MMORPG meant having a few nerdly friends over so that we could huddle around the only Apple ][+ in the neighborhood to collectively play Wizardy (each person calling out the action for their specific character in the party). pshaw … Frogloks … that’s recent history (i.e., less than 10 years).
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Elovia – I know
Normally I’m totally in your camp – this game is worth doing even gray quests in the other starting areas. I have four alts, for cry yi yi.
I was really only pissy because I was THISCLOSE to 35 and finally getting my horse. I’d gotten THISCLOSE by quests, of course, and just had to kill a handful of things. I defy the calmest rose smeller to keep his cool when the math said “nine of these and you get your horsie” and you wind up short because of help you didn’t need.
Oh how i miss the mob grinding days of DAoC.
Haven’t played LOTRO myself, but that sounds like a bummer experience right there.
An amazing number of folks don’t know that it works this way, and will argue with you about it. Also, healing (and probably buffing) a person in combat will have the same effect. It used to upset me, but then I realized that outside of instances, quests > mobs. Once I got to that point, leveling actually started to catch me by surprise.
[...] Great post today over at Eating Bees: So, every game seems to think that powerleveling is somehow bad and sad and god kills a kitten whenever a twink dings without suffering. Therefore, there’s always some code to prevent a low level guy from getting all the experience if a high level guy does any damage to the mob at all. [...]
I actually got a lot of levels in LoTRO grinding mobs while gathering. The proposition of gathering enough tier 4 materials ( or whatever tier the lvl 30-40 gear was ) to grind crafting through another tier, combined with the fact that my two cousins and I couldn’t finish a light blue group quest together pretty much ended that games appeal for me. I loved the world. They nailed it directly on the head. Getting decent gear though required grouping for quests and even on a Saturday night which is when we played, getting a second tank and a minstrel( I think that’s the healbot class ) to join us was a very hit or miss ( mostly miss ) proposition.
CoH’s sidekicking is the best thing ever to happen to a game, but as you said no one else has been bright enough to implement it. The thing most bothering me about WAR right now is that my friends and family ( about 15 people in all ) are all leveling at different speeds. It requires me to pick and choose who I’m going to be playing with that night when we’d all really like to be playing together. I think in a couple months we’ll all have a character in the mid 30′s or higher and this will become moot. Except that the game from 1-30 is MUCH better than it is from 32-40
The week or two my friends and I spent avoiding trains to zone, then leading trains to zone at the Estate of Unrest in EQ( my first MMO) are some of my fondest game memories. I really wish sometimes that someone would implement that sort of agro somewhere sometime again. I also sort of enjoyed running the Karanas, which is something I’d never ever put up with again!
I play LotRO too. I’m not sure why some people are inclined to “help” like that. They usually jump in when it’s obvious I’ll win. Yet they never seem to be there for me when it’s a signature or elite I’m fighting. /shrug
It’s all journey, imho. Even the “end game” isn’t really the end, it’s just another treadmill inside a larger treadmill and it will be replaced by another “end game” some time in the future (via another paid expansion). LotRO is one of those games I enjoy at any level (though I wish all classes had some kind of lowbie run speed buff ala EQ2 – thirty-five levels is a long time to walk everywhere).
And I’ll second (third? fourth?) what was said about the CoH side-kick system. Any system that lets friends play together regardless of level is a good thing.
Anyway, gratz on the horsie!
What I’ve done in DAOC. WoW, LOTRO and Warhammer when I find someone that I think might be in over their head with mobs is to stop and watch. If it’s obvious and I do mean really obvious that they’ll die w/o help I’ll either clobber the mob, draw the add’s off or toss a heal. I hate it when people siphon off my xp when I know things will work out fine, so i won’t do it to others.
Otherwise I just leave them be.
But that’s just me, I’ve been known to be wrong.
I really disliked the sidekick system. It seemed to me that it fed into the fears people who were focused on getting to the top level (i.e. the game is the destination, not the journey) and encouraged them to skip content. A few people that I knew seemed to not play unless there was a guild member to sidekick them up to a higher level. Maybe they wouldn’t have played at all, if not, but it didn’t sit right. I much prefer mentoring system for high level characters to step down – redoing content that they enjoyed or taking the chance to experience content that they missed.
@ Gehn
I do pretty much the same thing. Although I enjoy doing this the most when the person that might be needing the help is a low level horde. (I’m Alliance)
I’m not much of a ganker, I prefer the challenge of PvP. If I see a gray horde I usually just pat them on the head and move on. But they don’t know that, so I let them sweat it out a minute before saving them if they need it.
Of course, if a horde any level messes with a guildy or friend of mine it is on like Donkey Kong, I don’t care what they con to me.
@ Taymar
Sidekicking is certainly used as you describe, but for me and my friends it has always allowed us to play together regardless of what levels the characters we were playing was. We’re all altaholics, so we tend to be playing guys at any level from 3-50. Sidekicing lets us put together a team without everyone having to get on their lvl 50s to actually play together. Since I don’t tend to skip to the end, begging for sk from farm teams, I for the most part saw it used to let friends play with friends. That it’s used by people who play differently to avoid playing the game doesn’t mean it hasn’t been absolute blessing to me and the people I play with. Since I don’t have to play with those people, and since what they decide to do in their missions has no real effect on me I don’t see the downside. There is however a substantial upside for me – which is working as intended.
Not so much in the regular zones but running around the lower areas of Moria like Stone Foundations if I run into someone being swarmed I’ll take a sec to check the class see the health if it looks iffy wait there a sec if it looks hopeless jump in and try to help or pull a few adds off.I seem to average 9 Thanks to 1 WTF!?!?!?!?! so I must be doing something right.
Hill? What hill? I don’t remember there being any hill.
It’s been so long, I can’t remember the EQ dungeon name, but it was the one with the lizard people (NOT Iksars) that looked like a crumbling Aztec courtyard. The trains in there were unbelievable. One wrong pull, and you had 40 mobs chasing you all the way to the zone entrance, wiping out everyone who didn’t clear out of your way. “CHOO CHOO! HERE COMES THE TRAIN!”
Ahh, the good old days…never seem to die actually.
You can almost always count on getting ‘help’ from someone. Whether they’re in your group or not…Newb healers that think anyone that gets hit, needs a heal and then moan because you couldn’t pull the aggro back off their biggest heal casting self.
Or, the tanks that always seem to feel that if you’re running ‘from’ a mob you’re surely only running because you want to share the xp for killing them, as they pull out that purdy glowy sword they just found…and my oh my, isn’t that a lovely shade of purple that mobs name is???
It’s true what P.T. said…
“Back in my day, we had to pray at our graves after dying to regain experiance. And if you were an atheist, you got nothing!”
Holy cow! A Wizardy reference. I’ve never posted on any gaming board, or any blog anywhere for that matter… but I just had to break out the props for an Apple ][ user. I no longer have my Apple computer, but I very will might still have a Wizardry diskette. LOL! I’ll have to look when I get home.
Tom
I was rummaging through my titles in LotRO last night and noticed one called “The Helpful” which I got for helping other players out of jams. It could also be that the person tapping the mob was trying to be a completist and get their title. /shrug
City of Heroes got an awful lot right. Low downtime, high character customization, sidekick and reverse sidekick mechanics, and eliminating gear. It is the only modern MMOG to not trigger my ’10 minute rule’, where if I walk/run/do nothing for 10 minutes in a row I uninstall the game and throw it away.
More compelling content is all it needed to keep me playing for a longer. Looking forward to Champions Online.
Don’t sit on one of those pillows. It actually is one of the worst things you can do for problems in that region. Ask any other colon specialist.
Haha, in WoW my guild tag says “EQ is the bestest” because I always end up referring to for some reason or another.
I identify strongly with this blog post because I played a monk in everquest and was quite often the one who did the “dropping” of said mobs.
I remember rounding a corner in Sol A and dropping some mobs only to come face to face with a paladin and a warrior who had not been there previously.
It was an awkward conversation after that.