Limiting rewards was RE: [MUD-Dev] Interesting EQ rant (very long quote)

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

On 10 March 2000 18:14 S. Patrick Gallaty wrote :

> The 'fair' players in eq are amazingly penalized by the adjustments
> verant makes to the system to hinder the 'power' players.  The
> failing of this, is that the power players are in fact the tiny
> minority.  The truth is, for people who are peak players, none of
> the design hinderances affect them. The three great hinderances in
> eq are - camp time for items, downtime, death penalties.

> ...

> An exploitive player knows that assistance from high level players
> eliminates camp time, and can eliminate all downtime (teleporting,
> healing, using high level players to heal and cast augmentation
> spells on the player), and the high level player can cast spells
> that restore 96% of lost exp from death, making death trivial for
> the low level player.  In this way, the player with high level
> friends, or the secondary characters of high level people play a
> totally different game than the 'fair players' who while spending
> 10x the time investment, bear most of the burden from the tuning
> changes which fail to penalize the peak players.

I don't really understand your point. It seems perfectly natural to me
to take advantage of the network of contacts you built in the
game. I'd imagine that 98% of the people who have access to high level
help have a high level character themselves. A character that they
leveled the fair way. I'd also love to know how high level allies has
any affect on camp time, and if you think that high level players want
to chase all their friends around power leveling them, then you are
probably mistaken.

Frankly whats exploitative about this? I feel that artificially
limiting higher level aid is far more ridiculous. Item limits can be
justified, but preventing a high level player from casting a high
level spell on a low level player strikes me as ridiculous. In the end
some people level faster than others and some people have better gear
than others. It doesn't really affect your game unless you are a
frustrated GoP who doesn't like being behind in any manner.

I'm reluctant to follow the EQ specific nature of this, but I'd love
to know what patches you think have made life harder for the lower
level players.  Almost every single one seems to make it easier,
diluting the achievements of those who reached a high level. The place
where they add difficulty is in the high levels making some of the
encounters such that one needs to use some pretty ridiculous tactics
to beat a given mob.
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