Old MMO Mechanics I Love and You Probably Hate (Part 2)

Continueing on from Part 1, this is a post about mechanics and features from old MMO’s that I love and wish would return in the future.  These are probably mechanics that, unless you were enjoying yourself back in the day, you probably hate.  Nevertheless, these are mechanics that I feel made the MMO’s like EQ special and unique.

Stay on the Path or Die!

The worlds were dangerous back in the day!  Staying on the path was not just a way to avoid getting lost (no maps) but it was a way to stay alive and a benefit to the game world and immersion.  If you didn’t stay on the path when adventuring or traveling then chances are you were either stupid, brave, or in a group and wanting to pick a fight.  Monsters were far more dangerous to players than they are now.  Even at lower levels, players would stick together in common resting areas where they could protect one another.  This type of mechanic was present from the start and could be seen with lowbies crowding together in Greater Faydark (EverQuest) while hunting orcs.

Sometimes the actual path itself was the dangerous part and players would actually benefit from hugging zone walls.  In fact, the higher level you got the more dangerous it was to go anywhere but on the outskirts.  This created a sense of depth to the zones and created this ‘the deeper you go inside the harder it gets’ concept.  You might be able to solo on the outskirts of a zone but if you wanted to go inside it meant finding a group or being very careful.

This sense of danger about the world increased the community’s interaction and fostered a very group-centric mindset.  Players benefited from grouping with others and benefited from being a type of player that attracted groups rather than scaring them away.  Even though the zones were quite large compared to the ones we play in today, the world was given an artificial sense that it was even bigger and more massive because of what players were unable to see.  If all that you could see was a scary forest all around you and you never left the path then you were always wondering what was just a few more feet in ‘that’ direction.

Fast and Dynamic Crowd Control

Really, really popular in EverQuest, DAoC, and even the very beginning of WoW to a lesser extent, crowd controlling is a mechanic that has disappeared very fast.  This goes back to monsters being very dangerous and games being about teamwork.  The original holy trinity was actually Tank, Healer, and CC.  Today it’s Tank, Heals, and DPS.  I preferred the CC.  Crowd Control was a really dynamic way of creating a challenge for groups to overcome.  One class’ role was entirely about making sure that the group was fighting only what it could handle.  A skilled enchanter could CC 4-5 monsters at once and control a fight like a conductor leading an orchestra.

Players were also forced to play better because of CC.  If you were not paying attention and just facerolling your keyboard like the current generation actually promotes then you were going to break mez and wipe your group.  It was harder and fights lasted longer, but it was a really unique way of fighting in groups.

Kiting

This little mechanic is now considered more of a negative than a positive.  There was a time when people envied a class’ ability to kite mobs around.  Druids from EQ were my favorite kiters with Necromancer reverse kiting coming in second.  Snaring, fearing, rooting, and DoT’s were usually the bread and butter kiting mechanics.   Now it’s considered an exploit if you kite and most games will code it so that mobs “leash” and prevent you from kiting them.  This also ties back in to the challenge that mobs presented and how you really could not let things hit you.  It was a legitimate technique to kill things and it was fun.

Those Pesky NPC’s that Ruined Your Day

There is no NPC/Mob that I love to hate more than Sergeant Slate!  Dorn comes in a close second.  *shakes fist*  You don’t see too many of these as developers have shied away from creating these dangerous and often frustrating mechanics.  Funny enough, these are the ones I remember with a smile on my face.

Part 3 will be coming this weekend and will conclude this little series.  Feel free to share any of your favorite old MMO mechanics that would probably be really unpopular in today’s MMO’s.

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  • I’m with you on everything but kiting. To me, immersion takes a hit when everything you fight just chases you without avail until death.

  • I think the thing no one realized back then is that ‘encourages grouping’ also implies ‘drives off people who don’t want to group’. I don’t doubt there were some people who learned to group because they were more or less forced, but history has shown that there are hordes of people out there who just aren’t interested in it.

    Without saying whether it’s good, bad, fun, or unfun, the fact is it’s Less Money. And businesses exist to make money. Hence grouping is now pretty downplayed.

  • While I agree mostly with Jezebeau’s point, I was unaware that kiting is considered an old tactic; the same to be said for CC. Both are still very important ways I play the game, but then again I tended to primarily solo outside of raids as a frost mage or warlock…

    I have a bigger conceptual problem with seeing a large field full of ogres, of which I long range cherry pick the lower level ones, CC’ing, reverse kiting, and blasting them to zero, while their closer comrades are oblivious to the whole event (until it is their turn that is…)

  • @moonmonster: Probably true, but I can see no reason why some areas in a zone should be more difficult than others and require grouping at an appropriate level; many games do just that with elite versions of the same mob, such as was the case in Allods (although they were still soloable by mages with that freeze ability)

  • WoW does the road thing, and does it better. EQ’s roads were bizarre, twisty things, and they often only offered an illusion of safety; hence the “stick to the zone wall” bit (and really, how is that a positive? It’s pretty much a design flaw that forces you up against the artificial limits of the zone map). WoW roads, on the other hand, generally represent the optimal way to traverse a zone. Obviously, this is only relevant if you’re at or below the recommended level for a zone.

    I think the issue here is that EQ’s layout forced players to traverse higher level zones just to get from point A to point B, which is where your sense of danger really comes from. If you try and meander through higher level WoW zones, you’ll suffer a similar fate (although, you won’t risk losing your corpse).

    Powerful crowd control is difficult to balance in PvE and impossible to balance in PvP. WoW’s limited approach works much better than, say, classic Everquest, where an Enchanter could lock down a whole room full of mobs. Sure, that’s fun for the Enchanter, but how the hell can you design encounters around that kind of power?

    Kiting… eh. In EQ this was a workaround for very penal mob difficulty levels. This is not really needed if a combat systems gives you other ways to properly deal with creatures (which EQ mostly didn’t, at least originally), although you could certainly design a system where it’s included. Seems like a rather lame combat mechanic to me, but whatever floats your boat; note that in PvP this sort of think can create all kinds of balance issues too.

    Slate et. al. from EQ were part of its nutso faction system. WoW has similar wandering NPCs for alliance and horde, of course, although they’re not usually placed in areas where they simply pick on lowbies (as in EQ). WoW has added to its faction system over time, but only at the very high levels; in EQ your race and religion dictated where you could even go, and that’s actually kind of neat to me. What’s not so neat is modifying faction by grinding, which seems to be all the rage these days.

  • Yeah, really needing a group made things feel much more like a game world. Just like in real life if you want to do something difficult, you are going to need to find help/like minded people. Then again, thats the difference. Those earlier games really were trying to create big worlds for people to play in. Nowadays the focus is on gaming. The latter of course sells much better, but it just doesn’t “feel” the same.

  • Stay on the path or die. That brings back memories of AC.

    By the sounds of it, its not so extreme as in EQ but still it wasn’t something you forgot. What I loved about AC is that there was no zones. The world was seamless which meant you could run in one direction for a long time. Made for some of my favorite exploring adventures in any game.

  • Now these are things I do miss. I liked the idea that venturing off the path meant death until you leveled high enough. I even miss kiting on my Shaman in EQ.

    But the one thing that I miss more then any other is good meaningful crowd control. From EQ to DAoC and lastly in Anarchy Online as a ‘Crat I loved my CC classes. I can’t recall how many times myself and the other CC’rs saved the day when a pull went bad or a train threatened to derail a groups plans.

    PvP ruined CC in most games because most devs are morons. I say that even though I am a developer. I just wouldn’t have tried to “fix” the issues CC has in PvP the way most of them did.

  • Once again a beautiful list, Sergeant Slate is the same reason people like things like the sons of arugal and the fel reaver.

  • I loved these concepts too.

    Hated the EQ mega raids but the environment, though punishing, did add character to the world. Balance was secondary to depth.

    I’d like to see a game mechanic that obviates internet databases for item selection. Give players incentives to keep secrets rather than publish them in a massive db.

  • Kiting I can live without as it was really just an advantage for certain classes and allowed them to solo whilst others could not. Crowd Control though I’m totally with you on.

    The tricky thing about CC is finding the balance because if it’s necessary for every dungeon then it just becomes another aspect of the Holy Quadrinity and makes forming groups even harder. I remember spending at least a good hour trying to put groups together in EQ becuase you needed a tank, healer, DPS AND a CC class to be effective. It was a major hassle.

    However, CC did add a lot of strategy to the game and I loved playing my Enc. The ability to mez, charm and boast people’s mana regen was priceless and really gave the class a strong sense of purpose.

  • What I would like to see is a move from “Crowd Control” to something more akin to “Battlefield Control.” You can still have direct Mezes and stuns, but tanks should be able to stop other from getting pass them easily. Areas of slowness or explosive knock back from other attacks would be nice.

    I never liked kiting. I thought it was a very slow way of doing things. But I would not remove it completely as a strategy. When it is the only way that you could progress on your own then it is limited to certain classes, that is when I have an issue with it.

  • I absolutely love kiting. I always found it the most enjoyable, absorbing way of fighting monsters. I’ve never really enjoyed having my character duke it out face to face with a mob but having one, especially one that’s MUCH more powerful than you are, on the end of an invisible piece of string is endlessly entertaining.

    I often used to kite mobs for 10, 15, 20 minutes at a time just for the fun of it. The best times were when something jumped you unexpectedly when you were low mana and you managed to get it snared and under some kind of control, or when you pulled something that turned out to be much harder to kill than you were expecting. Then bagan the game of trying to keep it at distance, not get any more adds, manage your mana, sneak a dot on as and when you could afford it and snatch a quick 6 or 12 second sit-and-med before the thing caught up.

    Some of those kites-gone-bad lasted 30 minutes or more. I remember kiting Shardtooth around Great Divide for over an hour once, barely able to raise enough mana to keep him snared with one small dot wearing him down.

    Kiting was always controversial, though. Lots of mechanical changes were made to limit it’s effectiveness and discourage people from doing it, but eventually it was accepted as part of the culture and some of those changes were rescinded.

    I’d love to play an MMO which was primarily designed around kiting, with huge, open zones and an expectation that you’d mostly be fighting creatures very much more powerful than you, against which you would die very quickly indeed if they could get their claws on you.

    Crowd control was also a wonderful thing. Being the guy in charge of locking everything down was more of a challenge than most wanted to take on full-time, so really good CCers were much sought after. They were also mostly unbearably smug or arrogant individuals too, or maybe that was just the ones I knew…

    Again, I totally agree that CC is much missed and would be great to see come back into fashion.

    Paths/edging round zone walls I can happily consign to the past. Don’t want to see that return in any game I play.

    And I must say I hadn’t noticed that big, tough, named mobs that make your life a misery in a particular zone had ever gone away. Aren’t those still a feature of many MMOs, even new ones?

  • @Bhagpuss: There are the occasional mean ones but they aren’t as prolific and ‘in your face’ as they once were. Sgt. Slate literally sought people out to kill them if they went anywhere near his area. Dorn was always right in the way of the Cutthroat camps — same with Madmen (remember those anyone?)

    In most games of today there’s a scary mob but it sits by itself or wanders an avoidable path. Certainly they don’t exist to be a very bad thing for players like they once were, but instead just a challenge.

  • I doubt those old techniques would have any kind of subscriber base. I broke my teeth on UO & EQ & while memory makes me fond of them, memories can easily be slanted. Sort of like being fond of an ex girlfriend but then getting back together and remembering why you hated her and broke up.

    I did enjoy the back way into town when the guards hated you & guided several people that way for a few coin when I was a lowbie. However going back to relying on other people to play an MMO or I cannot do anything…no thanks, and that is what EQ was. Seriously did you enjoy getting jumped solo by a mob 8lvs lower than you and not being able to win? Or going into LGuk only to have the room controlled by 1 CC farming for belt drops? That game was all kinds of broken & only peoples distant memories make it seem like it was a great time. What about despawning in a raid if you could not recover your body and losing all your stuff?

    And kiting LOL, yea watching fools kite giants all over the place for half an hour, that was pretty dumb

  • Love the list (again) and agree totally. Those who (moonmonster) say about driving off people who don’t want to group … sorry to say but the game was about grouping, it’s a massively multi-player on line game, the whole point of playing something like that is to group with others and be part of something more of a challenge than a single player game. Might as well go play diablo or something if you are not interested in grouping.

    But there are some things I wont miss in EQ, like the brutal levelling speed, I went back recently (p1999) and I just couldn’t really cope with the lethargic levelling pace at the beginning of the game, EQ didn’t do everything right but I fondly remember it as the best MMO out there still, but I’m sure the rose tinted specs have something to do with it.

  • I agree with a lot of this, zones in games today are too static, obvious and prescriptive. Can’t agree about kiting though. The moment you start kiting a mob is the moment the game loses any immersion and it feels like you’re just cheating bad AI and/or dodgy pathing, rather than enjoying battling in an online world.

    That said I’d like more of a return to UO style worlds than EQ, never been a fan of the level based system and the restrictions it imposes.

  • Well I would hope the AI would improve by this day and age so that the mob would try to counter your kiting, making a successful kite all that more fun. Darkfall took a shot at improving AI and did a fair job at it, you can’t tell me that a bigger studio couldn’t do an even bigger dedicated change to it.

  • “Now it’s considered an exploit if you kite and most games will code it so that mobs “leash” and prevent you from kiting them. This also ties back in to the challenge that mobs presented and how you really could not let things hit you. It was a legitimate technique to kill things and it was fun.”

    Was never a real fan of kiting and the reason it is mostly gone is the fact that developers have taken the mindset of it breaks the game world. I played AO for a number of years and the unquestioned king of kiters was a Nanotech-Technician. So much so that they would sell their services to a group and power level them while everyone else sat around and leeched. Where every other class could handle one, maybe two mobs they were rounding up 6 or more and nuking them down while they were kited.

    I do miss elite mobs though

  • I’m always torn about being forced to group with others. My first MMO was FFXI, and there were some good times to be had if you were in a good group. Most people on your friend list tended to be those people, and if you proved to be good at your job and a nice person, you would continue to get good groups. You really only noticed the downside to grouping when these fun people weren’t online and you were standing out in the desert waiting for a group to form.

    Vanilla WoW was the same way, really. My longest lasting friendships were from forced grouping. In fact, one of my most fond and tense moments in WoW was when Stormwind was being raided for the first time on our server. I was a Priest, and healing any injured Alliance that I saw nearby, which of course activated my own PvP flag. After being steamrolled several times on my own, I took refuge in one of those completely empty houses in the Canals. In that house were four other people that I still remain in contact with to this day. We partied up and planned our escape route from the canals, surprised and killed a group of Horde who had gotten separated from the raid, and ended up in the same raid group formed to drive the Horde back out! I get excited just remembering that adventure.

  • Ah, whatever happened to panicky shouts of “D’Vinn loose” ….

    Oh,and Aradune is stinky 🙂

  • A lot of these thing sound interesting to me, but I´ve only been around MMOs for about five years so most of them are a bit too hardcore for me 🙂

    Also I dont like to be forced to group up, very often I prefer to go solo which lets me log out at any time and without any drama. But my greatest “MMO memories” still comes from playing in a group. I even love PUGs and all the totally random stuff that can result in 🙂

    Back to the subject, those that miss and would like to see these things (also from part 1) back in MMOs, are you sure thats not nostalgia speaking? I can look back on really boring stuff (like grinding for my first mount like an idiot because I sucked at making gold) and today remember those things as fun. Because that first period in my first MMO, everything was fun!

  • Unlike your 1st part, these are more design decisions than mechanics. They all have a counterpart in modern MMOs whereas your previous set of item weight, vision impairment (darkness, you could have talked about being drunk too ^^), and the boats were better examples of “mechanics”.

    CC for instance is still more or less the same in most games, it’s just far less essential due to how easy and forgiving the fights have become.

    In regards to kiting I might add that in modern MMOs there is little reason to kite, period. In EQ for example if you could solo anything past level 5 or so it was a BIG deal, regardless of how you did it (since you were normally completely group dependent). Now a days you might look to kite some raid boss or something meant for a large group but other than that there is no reason to put in the effort, just hack and slash til it drops its loot.

    Stay on the path or die is my favourite of the lot since that is exactly how it was! 🙂

    Looking forward to part 3.

  • I happen to agree with pretty much everything you said (i was never a fan of weight limits)
    Although my main in eq was a cleric (plate armour, shield, big mace *grin*) who was as much a tank as a healer, i very much enjoyed playing an enchanter and micromanaging the battle with mezzes, it really set appart the good groups from the bad.
    My ability to memorise game worlds was also a big plus, I could run the map off the path and end up where I wanted, knowing what parts where safe to cross and what parts where full of mobs that would eat you alive was a tradeskill of equil value to any crafting. I could sell myself as a guide or teach people to be able to do it themselfs.

    and ofcourse, mob leashes that you touched on in kiting. i HATE leashes, if i had my way mobs would stay on you till they died, you died, you zoned or you found them a tastier meal, it made you have to think about your suroundings more “Do i engage here, wil lthat patroler pass by within agro range” you sometimes had to wait and watch the mobs around to see their patrol pattern and it was great.

    unfortunatly a game like EQ1 wont survive in this current market (yes i know eq1 is still running but its a shell of its former self)

    ah well, end rant, thanks for rea…. uh oh /shout Train to zone!!

  • Kizdean Gix, the dark elf in EC i think it was? He was the mob I loved to hate. He was just standing around the human area, he punched for way too hard and could harmtouch. When I learned Manaburn he was my first target to ever be hit by it, and man did it feel good.

  • Not everything in EQ and UO and Meridian etc was good. far from it.

    But some of it was good. And some of the good things were lost. I want to be able to solo. Yes. I don’t want to be able to solo everything. No. And I do want dangerous travel. Yes, I do!

  • Kiting was one of the mechanics that really served as coutner grouping. With many kiter classes you were better off never grouping while leveling at all (unless you had a preset daily group).

  • Just a couple of points, although I know both of them are just shouting into the wind.

    Everquest was always a GREAT solo game and remains my favorite game to solo in to this day. I started playing in November 1999 and for the first six months I pretty much only soloed. I did some grouping after Kunark came out and I finally got a character high enough to get groups at the Sarnak Fort in lake of Ill Omen, but it really wasn’t until I came back to EQ after going to DAOC at launch that I really grouped regularly.

    I was able to solo enjoyably as a Druid, Ranger, Necromancer, Magician, Shadowknight and Enchanter. I personally don’t get on with Bards, but they were very soloable too. When Beastlords were added, I found that to be one of the most enjoyable solo classes I’ve played in any MMO.

    Of course, enjoying soloing in EQ was predicated on actually enjoying grinding, which I do. And on liking a lot of downtime, which I also do. Back when you couldn’t even tab out of EQ without using an EULA-breaking 3rd party add-on, I used to play with a book open on the desk and read a few pages between each pull while camping a single static spawn. I felt, and still do feel, that I was getting more value playing that way than in today’s never-stop-fighting mode.

    Soloing often consisted of camping one six-minute static spawn, in fact. The treant in West Karana was one of my favorites. Start on him when you could just barely kill him and remed to full health in the 6-minute spawn cycle and stay there until he gave so little xp he was no longer worth bothering with. I think my Mage camped him for about three consecutive weekends once.

    I was a bit of a roleplayer back then and I wouldn’t let my good characters kill good or neutral NPCs, so I never camped Vhalen Nostrolo or the Gnome Guards in Steamfont. I did kite those traitorous Qeynos guards along the long riverbank of West Karana many times though.

    Anyway, the myth of EQ not being a solo-friendly game back in the day is one that will never be put to rest. It was fantastically solo-friendly for peiople who REALLY like soloing. For people who only solo to get levels, but who’d really rather be grouping, well yes for them EQ wasn’t solo-friendly.

    The other myth is that EQ is a shadow of its former self. I’m someone who’s never stopped playing the game in a decade (albeit with some substantial breaks along the way), who loved it from the day he installed it and thinks it’s by far the best MMO he has ever played or, sadly, probably ever will play. And I played it for several hours this weekend and I confirm that, for me at least, it is every bit as good as it ever was.

    The addition of mercenaries was the single best change I’ve seen to any MMO I’ve played. The game is still fun at every level I play at, which is anything short of raiding. I hope it goes on forever.

  • I miss most of those mechanics as well, but mainly I miss the CC classes! I LOVED being the best at CC/debuffing and in nearly every mmo I’ve played this was my class of choice from day 1. I really enjoyed the days in FFXI (circa 2004 or so) when you really needed a good debuffer/cc’er to camp in certain areas.

  • Man some of my best experience was exploring dangerous areas in Asheron’s Call ( my first MMO). just roaming in the wilderness was dangerous and I remember running for my life after falling off the cliff into the area populated by shadow mobs only to run into even more dangerous ones, one of the most genuine gaming experiences

  • I more or less consider your opinions outdated and silly and more based on nostalgia than practical reality….

    But I really agree with kiting and CC. CC especially I think could still be a great, valuable mechanic going into the future from now as long as a few things are payed attention to. If I had to design a game I would definitely try something like, say, 6 member parties with the ideal party being tank, healer, CC, buffer/debuffer, and 2 pure DPS. Or maybe combining buffs, debuffs, and CC to make the role more fulfilling. Something like that. I think where WoW really lost it’s chance was in focusing too much on making AoE viable instead of just a novelty most of the time (so people feel entitled to use their AoE and it starts to really suck when you can’t due to CC) as well as instead of making CC the focus of a class, just slapping the best CC on the two best damage dealers and calling it a day (Poly and sap were the best, with fear-bouncing being an incredible advanced and not always doable version too).

    The way they set that up, I can understand why they eventually caved and made CC less valuable and tried to give it to everyone. I never remember it being too huge a worry in classic, although maybe it was worse than I remember, but I know in heroics in TBC it was a pain in the ass being a class without CC. It was more or less unplayable. I think it could easily work if you made it a dedicated role though, and made it so you want to invite both CCers and non-CCers to every party, not just trying to load your party with as much CC as possible.

  • @Gankatron: “…long range cherry pick the lower level ones… while their closer comrades are oblivious to the whole event…

    Completely agree! I’m really tired of this. NPCs should react in a semi-realistic manner, e.g. if someone just shot my friend Bob in the face, I’m gonna be pissed! I expect the inhabitants of virtual worlds to react the same way, even if they are ogres. I also expect that, if I’m going to invade some camp full of creatures hell-bent on killing me, I should probably bring some friends along.

    This is just another design that panders to the lowest common denominator; designers of modern MMOs want everything to be easy and available to every dullard that comes along.

  • @Gringar: Kizdean Gix… yeah, I remember that guy! There were a whole bunch of characters in EQ like him that are still so memorable! I was like, “Grr, when I get a few more levels I’ll be back and you’re gonna pay! Oh yes, you’re gonna pay…” It became almost an obsession — a personal quest — to get strong enough to be able to return and exact revenge.

    I think there is something key in that — the reason many of us are still so fond of older MMOs like UO and EQ: We were mostly creating our own quests and stories, rather than having them handed to us as modern MMOs typically do.

  • As a necro who made it to 72 (and was something like 3rd nec on his server at one point) I loved EQ, I loved it from the first time I played it with the comment to my best mate “This is crap, dodgy graphics and what are you meant to do?” To Soddof Baldric Dwarf Warrior finding at level 10 that there were OTHER zones than BB Mountains 😮 to Mallakith spending 2 hours getting out of Neriak.

    Kiting I always saw as a tactics thing, fear kiting – yeah it was a little too easy once you know every mob fears along the same path from… HERE. But what most folk never realised with a necro was I may be killing a sentry in the Plane of Fire solo but if I fail ONE snare and he reaches me Im SO dead its not even going to hurt.

    The amount of punishment for dying is what made EQ the game it was, players new that death was a terrible thing so not only avoided their own if at all possible but would help others in trouble – now all MMO’s (even my current game Vanguard) have minor penalties which are generally overcome quickly.

    Nothing beats for suckiness getting level 60 and dying immediately afterwards…

  • I’m going to have to agree with CCing and Kiting making for great imbalance in PvE and PvP (I only read the first 5 comments, sorry if this was addressed).

    Certain classes in EQ had rediculous soloing capabilities, either requiring a lot of work (Bard) or requiring no work (Ench). Then you had classes that couldn’t solo anything that gave xp past lvl 60 (Warrior).

    Abilities like Charm, Mez, Snare and Fear made this imbalance possible, and while part of me is glad they are mostly gone, another part is disappointed that an equally fun/challenging alternative has not yet been found (my opinion). Adding cooldowns and diminishing returns was a good start.

  • I read some more comments and I’m going to agree with people above about the death penalty. It was definitely the crippling penalty of dieing that made the game more thrilling, especially when travelling to a new territory.

    OK sure, losing your corpse and all the items you worked so hard for because you zoned into Veeshan’s Peak and didn’t realise you couldn’t port out was retarded, but the idea of a stiff penalty was still good.

    Cause the player to forfeit all gold they were carrying to the mob that killed them. Make them either run naked back to their corpse or pay a stiff summoning fee.

    This gives me a chance to harp on WoW’s death penalty. Making the player wait 15min while overcoming Spirit Res sickness is not fun or productive. At least running back to your corpse was keeping you occupied.