mmorchive

November 16, 1999 wtfman.com

Ron:

Not sure if you read Azile’s take on what she feels the game needs, but I have to add a thing I feel is wrong with the game, though it’s not a bug.

In EverQuest, when you form a group, regardless if you’re grouping for PvP or what not, it places your group members’ lifebars in a small little convenient panel in the game window. The cool thing about them is that you can actually target your group members by clicking on their bars, rather than having the absolutely frustrating time of trying to click on one of 6 people in your group that’s running on and off of your screen in front of 13 other people that look the exact same as he. It comes quite in handy when you are in a big fight and can’t target your friends in the midst of the fray due to misclicks, lag, and other things on your screen.

In AC you have no idea how your friends are on life without targeting them, and when you are in the middle of a big ass fight, whether it’s against people or monsters, you can’t really take the time to click them (if you are even able to get a mouseclick on them anyway) to see if they are need of a heal or not.

Even if they say “heal me” you only see that in a chat window, and you have no idea which person’s graphic on screen says it. In UO people would say that and it appears over their heads, so you know who needs the heal(on top of being able to pull-up lifebars and keep them out), in EQ you always have a view of everyone’s life and can see it (and target that person by clicking it), but in AC it’s absolute chaos trying to assist people in your group. Even with the handy-dandy radar, all you see is a wide assortment of green and red dots flying around like gnats, and targeting the person there is just as hard if not harder than targeting them in the main window, because either the dots are in one big blob, or you don’t know which dot is which person.

AC needs a group lifebar window such as EQ has, and bad. If it had something of the sort, PvP would be almost perfect for AC, and grouping deep in a dungeon or practically anywhere for the non PvP types would one hell of a lot easier as well. If you’re in agreement (to those of you who are ACing), why not help your favorite clown get this point to some of the AC developers, I don’t think it would be too hard for them to add.