Ok, we're allowed ONE thread about 200 Sense Heading.

[Lilosh]

And this is it, I suppose.


I had an argument typed up, elaborating why I wasn't happy, But Ngreth's other post scared the feathers off of me, So I'll just say I completely disagree with giving everyone 200 Sense Heading.


Discuss?

-Lilosh

[Kronepsis]

My only thought is, who really cares?

If you want to know what direction you're going, you can just pull up the map for two seconds and see which direction the cross hair is moving. This would work for pretty much 90% of the places a casual player would want to go to (with the old planes and ToV being those special places where it doesn't work).

[Itzena]

And I think it is a totally irrelevant thing to get worked up over when there's so many other broken and/or missing things we should be yelling...er politely and courtiously raising with SOE through the proper channels.

This whole thing will be almost forgotten about in a couple of weeks, only to be brought up again when grumbling about some other change to the game made not to the grumblers taste at some unspecified point in the future.

[Grenoble]

Not particularly happy with that change, I guess, although I'm certainly not worked up about it. I liked having that extra little hotkey to work on while medding/fishing/whatever. Heh, last nite I still kept smacking the key on a regular basis...I need to learn to look at the compass!

I really disliked the target circle too. Some of Sony's landscapes are pretty and fairly realistically rendered, and the circle is a jarring contrast to that.

On the plus side, I absolutely love having the con color on the target window. And I'm loving the new shade for dark blue, also.

[Balkin]

I love the /con color in the target window.

The ring kinda sucks. Gotta figure out how to turn it off.

Sense heading? Well, I think we should learn as we go. One of the neat things about reaching 200 was that you have an arrow on the maps now instead of a crosshair, and I found that very cool. Now everyone gets it immediately.

*shrug* whatever.

[Iannyen]

Who cares? Now the idiots have no excuse for not beign able to follow directions.

/shrug

I dont' see why everyone gets bent out of shape.

[Grenoble]

Balkin,

I'm at work so I don't remember the wording offhand, but under options there's a way to turn the target ring off. It was one of the first things I did last night

[Ngreth Thergn]

I personally think that "dropping" sense heading (and that is basically what automatically making it 200 does... without having to dismantal HUGE GARGANTUINE amounts of code that could harm MUCH MUCH More than just automatically making it 200) was a good idea.

#1 to me it was just a great anoyance to have to deal with sense heading... ESPECIALLY since I use FPS keys to move, not the arrows... and at least at one point... I could not bind an action key to any of the "awsd" keys. (this may have changed and could now be done... but was not able to be done for a long time...)

#2 it does remove a barier to entry. Any game must continue to compete. No other games requires you to spend months learning how to find where you are going. EQ must compete with this. I personally have a very good VISUALL sense of direction... and after being in an area for a while I could find where to go no map no compas no sense heading. Niami on the other hand needed help from the compas (or just sense heading before the compas)... and being forced to grind a character to level 39 in order to just be able to tell where she is going was a royal PITA.

#3 the map, and to an extent the compas made Sense heading unimportant. The map more than the compas... having the "wavering compas" was just weird and the in game map made it pointless.

#4 SOE cannot always do "what the public wants" The public wants no death penalty... but no death penalty would kill the game. It is showing in SWG (yes there are other problems there but this is also an isssue) where the death penalty is totally trivial. Now I do not know if SH here fits in that... but I also do not see where getting 200 SH HARMED anyone. It is the same complaint as making it easier to get to 250 smithing. People who got there the hard way just don't want to see someone have it easier than them.

I am not the end all be all on this topic... it is just my opinion

[Grenoble]

Ngreth, you still scare me!

[Ngreth Thergn]

Ngreth Stink?

[Lothay]

Originally posted by Ngreth Thergn
Ngreth Stink?

Well Ngreth does swim in Swamp Water and then calls that a bath.

And as for the whole Sense Heading thing, I'll repeat what I said before.

Lowering the difficulty of learning to play is important. EQ is over 4 years old, and lives in a highly competitive marketplace. Any change which increases the likelyhood of a new player renewing his subscription is a good thing.

When you first make a character, it's hard to navigate. Period. My first new character (in Apirl of 1999, thank you for asking) got lost so frequently that is now part of our guild lore. Funny now, but nearly caused me to quit playing then. Having to use /ooc or /shout to get directions wasn't very immersive, it was frustrating.

The compass was a wonderful addtion to the game. It's tied to the Sense Heading skill. When you have a Sense Heading skill of 0 or 5, it spins around like a top and is essentially useless. In fact, the compass doesn't really become useful until your Sense Heading skill is at or near 200.

So, imagine if you will, that you've just bought this new game. You get everything installed, you login (after deciding it really is OK to give Sony your credit card number), and you head out into the great wide open. It doesn't take long, you get lost. And sitting there, on your screen is this compass, and it doesn't do anything useful.

You don't have any hot keys, you don't know about them, or haven't read the manual. You don't have any Sense Heading skill, you're a fresh-out-of-the-vat warrior-clone. You have a map, but all you have on it is a litte + symbol to show where you are.

Doesn't take long for you to decide that a) something is broken, and b) you're not having any fun.

Automatically giving every new character a Sense Heading skill of 200 makes the compass work. It makes the map work better because you have the arrow now. It saves you having to learn about the Sense Heading skill and having to mash a single button a zillion times in hopes of a skill up. In short, it improves the play-experience of the new player.

Granted, some of the memories from getting lost make for good funny stories with old EQ-friends. And despite the frustrations, I stuck with EQ. But how many people don't? When I started playing EQ, there were only 2 MMORPGs out, EQ and UO. Now there are many. Sony wants your dollars, and they're going to make getting excited about EQ as simple as possible.

What's lost by making Sense Heading 200 at the outset? Nothing worth saving if you ask me.

And they didn't just give it to new toons. They gave it to everyone. This means you don't have to worry about learning to navigate by /loc, you don't have to have a map, and you can give people compass directions and have them mean something.

On the whole, I believe this to be a positive change. Removing some of the minor frustrations from EQ means that the game is less tedious to play.

That can't help but improve things overall.

[Krazick]

A Simple thought on "Dumbing down the game" (as people have called it)


If you go out hiking... in rough country. You find the trail rough... and no bridges over the streams. But you strive and make the journey. You enjoy the trip. And you then tell folks about it. A Year later you go back to the same trail... and find it has been made easier.. bridges have been built... And you have a much easier hike.

Does this make your first trip "worthless"? Does it make you resent the new hikers who don't have to work as hard as you did? Do you resent the people who made it an easier trail, and built the bridges?

Enjoy the achievements you have made. Enjoy the Journeys you make as you make them.

[Sanna]

In a very humourous-to-me twist of fate, my BF (remember, the one who generally hated EQ for a year and then one day said, 'let me play on your second account' and has a warrior and loves it?) completely agrees with Ngreth.



I have begun to question my sanity.


As melodramatic as that sounds, it is the honest-to-God truth. Aside from the reasons that the handful of people know of why the auto 200SH bothers me so much.... I can't find any others. Thus, I really think I should go away until a bit more of my head straightens itself out....

So in other words, I either am/was very right in my anger/opinion (*smiley*), or very certifiable.

It still bothers me, always will. It's like a rite of passage. 200 in something should be an accomplishment, not a given. (As a humourous joke, my BF now tells me to quote him as saying, "They should give human warriors an automatic 200 1hs skill!")

I still think there were better options that could have been taken that would have fixed what ain't broke while not handing everyone what so many will see as a Silver Spoon.

However, the BF, a comp-engineer senior, says that what they did was probably the most feasable.

I say, if EQ/SOE is worried about feasability now, it's about 4 years too late ^_^ (<-- comment in jest! who remembers the line about 'why would EQ make sense')


In other words, this is probably the last non-data-reporting post from me for a very very very long time.

-- Sanna
anyone want to write my papers for me? Still just as many as before.... heh.

[Saleani]

I am not sad to see (the requirement to practice) sense heading "go away." Pretty much all of my characters maxxed it out around level 41. I agree with some of the above posters that it is makes it harder for the directionally challenged to get lost. Please don't get me started about having to look across the room and guide she-who-must-be-obeyed around in whatever zone she is currently lost in. Sense heading of 20k won't help her.

At first I thought the targetting ring was annoying, but after about 15 min in zones where the mobs are ginormous (like kael, where if you are in melee range, and there are 6 or so of them, you cannot see the tops of the mobs without looking up, eww gross, I'm looking up a he-skirt) or unlabled (like the shrooms in the deep), I totally changed my mind. I like it. A lot. I think that the size of the ring is related to the size of the melee range you need to be in to hit the mob.

Now that yellow spam about you have targetted blah, right click to whatever. That drove me nuts, and I should have made several hot keys on how to disable it (one for /gu and one for /ooc), because I was telling folks who asked all night long how to turn it off. I can see how it would be helpful for a beginner.

If you do not like the target ring, here is how to turn it off:
1 - go to the options window (alt o)
2 - click on the display tab
3 - the 3rd button from the top is labeled "show 3d target ring"
4 - press it and the ring goes away.

If you do not like the target spam, here is how to turn it off:
1 - go to the options window (alt o)
2 - click on the general tab
3 - near the bottom on the left is a button labeled "target click shows help"
4 - press it to turn it off.
5 - say "WOOT"

[Woodeckt]

I havenot posted here for a long time but was trolling today and caught this statement and I love it.

Enjoy the achievements you have made. Enjoy the Journeys you make as you make them.

I have printed this out and am going to keep it around I think this is one of the things most of us forget. The other is it is a game and if you really are that upset about a change you can always not play. You can use EQIM for free to keep in social contact with your friends but no longer give your money to the company if you are that upset.

In short life is much too short to waste on being upset and frustrated.