What people fail to realise is that downtime moments such as long travel times is yes boring but it's also where you meet people and start chatting. It's where the interaction takes place and etc...
Take the old SWG for example:
I would log in my house and check my mails.... then leave for Coronet (2 minute drive) to catch the next transport ship. The waiting time was about 10 minutes at that time. So I would hang out around the city and just wait. Most of the time, I would meet a bunch of friends passing by for some buffs while others were here to sell some junk. I would see the occassional Imps and Rebels fighting each other or that silly jedi running around with a lightsaber while a bunch of bounty hunters are trying to find his name on the terminal.
I was a master doctor and my buffs were seriously sick, so often a bunch of people that knew me would start talking to me in order to get some buffs. Then I would hear the sound of the transport ship landing and it was then time to run off... That simple 10 minute of waiting made me tons of friends during all my years playing.
Take an example of WOW...
Ironforge was filled with spam for groups and loots... Yes, you had the occasional friendly chat but compared to SWG, it was below good. Sure the griffon ride was fun but you were half the time alone... not alot of people to talk too heh? You had no reason to wait anywhere so you didn't actually had downtimes that allowed you to socialize...
I have to thoroughly disagree with you gestalt travel time is a very immersive factor in MMOs. Without it there's no exploration or random personal adventures just the designed poo doo that games have like 'go here kill 10 wolves" bs. While I'll agree that travel times in the Original EQ were Obsessive they did still add a very immersive factor for people who were into Role Playing. After all it is an MMORPG. I'm all for cutting down obsessive travel times but removing them completely just destroys immersion.
I still remember the days of sitting around on the docks meeting people while we all waited for the boats. Laughing and drinking on the boats while we watched people get pummeled on the islands by Cyclopes or just having a merry old time. Some of the coolest peeps I met were during travel like the terrifying attempts at night runs through Kithicor Forest. You say things like that don't add anything of value to the game but it did. It added a really important social factor to the game. Nothing beats getting through a dangerous area with a group of strangers and everyone cheering about making it out alive.
Games that are fully instanced like DDO & Guildwars are perfect for leaving out travel but when you have a true massive world travel should be important otherwise how are you going to explore and adventure outside of just the standard quests? I guess in the end it just comes down to the type of player you are. If your an RPer (or atleast someone into exploration and enjoying all the world has to offer besides XP) or and old school MMOer then full immersion including having travel times (hopefully not completely obsessive ones) is part of the immersive factor. If your in it just to level and grind then you want less travel because immersiveness obviously has a completely different meaning to you.
To me Immersion isn't dead....but if you group with the wrong people it can be injured.
The problem is not the travel is not immersive. The problem is these things DO NOT EXIST IN ISOLATION.
When a feature that might otherwise be immersive becomes a burden that is at odds with other parts of the game then it BREAKS the immersion. It is also frustrating.
Given the character of EQ1 there is simply no doubt that travel times very much interfered with other KEY aspects of the game. You couldn't do jack in EQ1 without a group large travel times are a huge imposition on making a group. You had static, known places to visit and grind and sometimes were required to visit. And if you were far away from that place for some reason you were therefore punished FOR ABSOLUTELY NO REASON AND FOR NO COMMENSURATE REWARD.
Travel time is a burden. This is a fact. Anyone disagrees with this is a fool. Flat out fool. Go to Los Angeles and drive in rush hour traffic and tell me its not a burden and a barrier.
Burden's and Barriers in MMO are good when used well and are horrible when used wrong.
There must be something that alleviates this burden if you wish to keep it in to accomplish its goal. In the case of Eve travel times do a number of things but the biggest thing is they KEEP THINGS LOCAL. Therefore the entire game MUST MUST give people things to do LOCALLY. If they ever deviate from this people will inuitively understand that their design is stupid and it will manifest itself in anger and despair at the state of the game.
This is exactly what happened in EQ1. They created Eve-like travel times but did not make the game LOCAL. The game is GLOBAL; everyone must go everywhere to achieve most goals in EQ1. In Eve I could become a multi Billionaire and have tons of tech 2 stuff and never visit more than a few systems except for the once a month long trip somewhere for a special reason. I could setup my own small two system owning corporation and be virtually self-sufficient except for the occaionsal run to buy something special.
The very foundation of EQ1 makes travel time STUPID. People get thrown some requirement and then groan and say "Oh crap I can't get my spell without taking some stupid ass 1 hour long trip that might get me killed and in debt". And guess what they, correctly, blame? The stupid travel times.
Does travel have value? YES. Its huge, its an incredibly powerful and elegant mechanic. Does it always play nice with other design decision. NO. In fact it can completely ruin a game when paired with other mechanics.
I responded to another poster above about 10 minute long warp trips in Eve. He would be right if it were EQ1 because in EQ1 you will be virtually forced to do that often and that 10 minute trip will be POINTLESS. All you wanted was to meet some friends and run a dungeon, BUT NO the PUNISHES and forces you to run the same old road you have run 100 times before and avoid the same static spawns "Oh no sacry!!!!". Its BS and people know it and they feel. Its good once and never again. And if all you wanted to do was meet your friends its not even good the first time.
But as I responded before this is not the case in Eve. Because you never have to do this. Eve is LOCAL. You are never forced to regularly run ten minute long trips. You can choose to do so, but its not necessary.
Like that guy I also do not like 10 minute long snooze fests just to get some goal done. I avoid them. In Eve I CAN AVOID THEM. In EQ1 you originally COULD NOT AVOID THEM.
In EQ1 they wanted the advantages of having travel time, but they did not look at the whole picture. That is why for the most part EQ1 is a poorly designed piece of crap. Travel time is a powerful powerful mechanics you MUST take a long hard look at the advantage AND the disadvantages because if you do not properly account for both they are powerful enough to seriously hurt your game.
The Travel times of EQ1 are a classic exampe of overly greedy design and I am not talking about making change for you computer programmers out there. They tried to have their cake and eat too. Well you can't.
What people fail to realise is that downtime moments such as long travel times is yes boring but it's also where you meet people and start chatting. It's where the interaction takes place and etc...
Take the old SWG for example: I would log in my house and check my mails.... then leave for Coronet (2 minute drive) to catch the next transport ship. The waiting time was about 10 minutes at that time. So I would hang out around the city and just wait. Most of the time, I would meet a bunch of friends passing by for some buffs while others were here to sell some junk. I would see the occassional Imps and Rebels fighting each other or that silly jedi running around with a lightsaber while a bunch of bounty hunters are trying to find his name on the terminal. I was a master doctor and my buffs were seriously sick, so often a bunch of people that knew me would start talking to me in order to get some buffs. Then I would hear the sound of the transport ship landing and it was then time to run off... That simple 10 minute of waiting made me tons of friends during all my years playing. Take an example of WOW... Ironforge was filled with spam for groups and loots... Yes, you had the occasional friendly chat but compared to SWG, it was below good. Sure the griffon ride was fun but you were half the time alone... not alot of people to talk too heh? You had no reason to wait anywhere so you didn't actually had downtimes that allowed you to socialize...
I don't fail to realize this.
In fact I realize something more profound. I meet people from active things not downtime. So do other people. I also realize that people like you meet people during downtime.
The reason this is profound is your rule is not a rule, its just the way you do things. Therefore enforcing your way on me would cause me to meet less people not more.
So your design would cause you to meet more people and me to meet less, but of course have the ancillary effect of causing me to cancel my sub. And most likely be a net loss for the game in total.
The universality of the benefit of forced downtime is incorrect. This is easy to prove because you only need one instance to prove a universal statement wrong. So I am not stating an opinion. It is pretty darn objectively solid.
Now my opinion is that statistics wise easily 30% and posssibly as high as 60% of a population hates and finds enforced downtime counter productive to the way the do things.
This is enough to make it a bad idea, but conversely enough on the other end to somehow incorporate or encourage people to "hang out".
Recently- I am seeing less immersion in MMO's. Travel times are cut in half by loading screens. Players complain about quest times taking to long. Players seem to be wanting more for less time involved. There seems to be "I want it now" mentality in MMO's these days. I find this a process that will only hinder new ideas for virtual worlds. Has anyone else noticed this trend over the last 4 years?
I do think that the OP poster has a vaild point. However, immersion in MMOs cannot be generically defined for all players. What makes games immersive or gives players the feeling of being brought into the game varies greatly from player to player.
I do not think long wait times are vey immersive, however they do provide a means to meet people you would not normally meet and make new friends. To me there are many key components to make an MMO immersive.
1.) Character diversity needs to be expanded greatly. The most immersive game I ever played was SWG. To this date, I do not think an MMO has been as successful in creating a game that had as many professions and races. The reason this helps immersion for me is because it makes the world seem more real. In other words, everyone isn't walking around looking like the terminator or conan. If I wanted to go into the cantina and listen to musicians or watch dancers for a break I could and it was a great place to meet friends. Just my opininion though......
2.) The worlds, for the most part, need to be seamless and massive. The one thing I did not like about EQ2 and GW was all of the zoning and load screens. Also, the worlds also need to be less static in nature and more dynamic by adding weather elements and player developed cities.
3.) A big killer for me that breaks immersion is LAG. Guild Wars performed very well, but like I said ealier, I hated all the zoning. If a world could be developed that was seamless and virtually lag free, then to me that would be a key component. This is probably just wishful thinking.....
4.) Last but not least, and I saw this posted earlier......DANGER. With the majority of MMOs being made more solo-friendly, it takes away from alot of the danger and challenge. I think in my ideal MMO, even if I were the most powerful character on the server.....I would still want their to be creatures in the wild that could rip my head off in 5 seconds flat. If their is no fear.......there is no fun. Just my opinion though.
I think what this thread boils down to is that immersion, whether it is in a game or not, is what you make of it. A game that is totally immersive for one person maybe very shallow to another, you find your own immersion and if you can't you move on to something else. Sometimes it works for you and sometimes it don't.
One key part of immersion is simulated-reality. You want to feel as if you are really there, experiencing what the character in that world is experiencing, as if it were their "real life".
One problem is in RL, there is a lot of tedium. I do not want to watch my character take a few minutes several times a day to go to the bathroom, for instance. That's real, and technically contributes to immersion, but it's not fun.
Here's an example: in Wow, if you are crafting something as a blacksmith, you will see the character standing by the anvil dutifully pounding away to shape the item, for 10 to 60 seconds. The first time I saw this, I thought it was cool and immersive. But in RL, such an item would probably take several hours or days of work to create. That is certainly not something I want to watch my character do while I twiddle my fingers. Even that 60 seconds is way too long, when the character has to make dozens of them.
This also applies to travel times. I remember my first griffon ride, from Westfall to Stormwind. I thought this was very cool and again, immersive, in keeping with the theme of the gameworld.
However, watching my character take 10-20 minutes of real time flying from IF to Booty Bay is simply not fun. It might be "realistic", but it's dull.
So while I truly enjoy immersion in a game, I want my immersion stream-lined, such that the dull parts are removed or drastically shortened.
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P.S. - On the subject of EVE: I tried this game, and while I enjoyed it at first, it was the boringly long travel times and incredible lack of information that made me quit. I do not understand how you can complete quests without a lot of travel. Hell, even docking with a station can take several minutes. This is a game I thought had awesome potential, but it's emphasis on PvP, combined with a woefully short tutorial and boring travel times (20 minutes to get to a quest location) made me quit. I would love to enjoy this game more. If you know a way around these problems, please explain it to me in detail, perhaps in a pm.
Games that are fully instanced like DDO & Guildwars are perfect for leaving out travel but when you have a true massive world travel should be important otherwise how are you going to explore and adventure outside of just the standard quests? I guess in the end it just comes down to the type of player you are. If your an RPer (or atleast someone into exploration and enjoying all the world has to offer besides XP) or and old school MMOer then full immersion including having travel times (hopefully not completely obsessive ones) is part of the immersive factor. If your in it just to level and grind then you want less travel because immersiveness obviously has a completely different meaning to you.
To me Immersion isn't dead....but if you group with the wrong people it can be injured.
I know i am responding twice to this post, but i wanted to isolate this last part.
I am not saying you are wrong about a massive world and travel and certainly GW was right not bother with travel times.
What I am saying is that games like EQ1 that did have a massive world and therefore wanted to put in travel times also made other design decisions that were CONTRARY to travel times.
They combined things that seem good on their own and then said to themselves well that makes it double good, right?
Yeah sure you can make a cake with baking soda and everyone likes cake, right? And vinegar is great for salad dressing and hot sauce and other tasty things. Everyone likes tasty things, right?
Well guess what, guys?! We are gonna give you two tasty things all wrapped up in one bundle. Please ignore the fizzing and bubbling that is normal.
Yes Guild Wars and DDO are more internally consistent. That does not mean that EQ1 must have travel times. It is tempting to think that when you look at the two things in a VACUUM.
I said EQ1 was a piece of crap design because it can NEVER be as internally consistent as Eve or Guild Wars. It is trying to be both at the same time. And that is the crux of the issue.
EQ1 will always have problems. It will lack the inuitive "next step" in immersion or it will be unjustifiably punishing. Because the designers lacked the foresight and balls to make a consistent game.
And as an aside this is something you can see in other BMQ projects like Vanguard.
You want to make the leap that it makes sense to leave it out in a game like Guild Wars but when you look at the other end of the spectrum, EvE online, you see that it makes sense to have it in. So why is EQ1 screwed up? Because it is trying to be both and that is not possible.
Contradictions are a real and important part of logic. When you have designed in contradictions a game will suffer. And that is why EQ1 is and was doomed to never be fully immersive. They have a designed in dilema cause by the inherent contradictions of their own design. They must either increase immersion and drive people away with unjustifiable burdens or lack immersion and reduce the burdens.
it is not the case that immersive elements cause unjustifiable burdens. They only do this in poorly designed games that have conflicting principles like EQ1.
This is why I have posted a number of times in this thread. And why I harp on Eve and EQ1. There is nothing wrong with immersive elements you cannot allow contradictory features in your game design or you wind up with the Devil's bargain EQ1 made.
The problem is people blame the individual features and not the overall design. The individual feature are not the problem. The Developers are the problem.
Demand better designed games. Demand games that hang together better. Eve Online and Guild Wars are two of the best designed games on the market. Whether you like their gameplay or not and I do not expect anyone to like Eve's game play. But these games do not suffer these problems because they are designed well.
You will never get the immersion you desire until you demand a well designed game. Because the poor design will ruin most people's suspension of disbelief.
Wanting a game with travel times to increase your feel for the game is a fine and perfectly reasonable position. But you must realize that if that is what you want you also need a number of other things, you need a well designed game, where they did not shove in travel times with other features.
Travel times are not a standalone feature. You must demand better designed games. If you want immersion you have no choice. Not a feature list. You must demand a game that is designed well in total. Where features do not interfere with each other.
I don't disagree with what you have said about RP and exploration, although its not my thing I understand the validity of it, but what I am saying is what you want cannot fully exist in a game like EQ1.
It is tempting to beleive that the massive world logically leads to those sorts of things. Unfortunately for you they put in other things where the massive world interferes with them. They threw the kitchen sink at it. Well that is bad design.
It is truly surprising to anyone after the Vanguard debacle that a BMQ project declined to make tough and consistent decisions. It shouldn't be. Because that is the hallmark of EQ1 and Vanguard throw everything you possbily can and see if it sticks. That is classic bad and amateurish design.
Good design is elegant. Its a lot with a little. Travel times are possibly one of the most powerful examples of the power of elegant design. You can change the entire face of a game with just that.
Guild Wars and EvE show the hallmarks of elegant design. Both in what and how the yimplemented and what they choose NOT to implement.
If you fall for McQuaid like rhetoric about large worlds and no instancing etc. without examing the other side of the issue and all the other features they promise and whether or not the fit together. Then you will never get a game with good immersion.
What a designer chooses NOT to do is every bit as important as what they choose TO do. One of the best signs of an amateur schister or just incompetent designer or both is when they promise everything together all in one package. Not just because its too good to be true, but because some combinations of good things are actually bad. Like vinegar and backing soda.
Guild Wars and DDO are dungeon crawl games. That is one of the major reasons they are so heavily instanced. But it has other consequences. Travel times interfere with dungeon crawls in multiple ways.
If you make a game for which you intend 80% of player time to be dungeon crawls and you put in Eve-like travel times you have put Vinegar and baking soda together. Its bad design.
And when you get amateurish McQuiad like throw the kitchen sink at it, throw everything that SEEMS to firtwith with the individual goals, you are almost guaranteed that this happens. And then you are left with the mitigation of the features you wanted.
So demand well designed games that fit with your goals and keep on eye on what works well with what. Or else you will have problems.
I really respect all your posts on this subject. It has not only been educational but has opened the door to new creative possibilities within game play for myself and a new way of looking at a virtual world based on giving the player a purpose and how that is defined. And most importantly how it translates into game play.
... ------- P.S. - On the subject of EVE: I tried this game, and while I enjoyed it at first, it was the boringly long travel times and incredible lack of information that made me quit. I do not understand how you can complete quests without a lot of travel. Hell, even docking with a station can take several minutes. This is a game I thought had awesome potential, but it's emphasis on PvP, combined with a woefully short tutorial and boring travel times (20 minutes to get to a quest location) made me quit. I would love to enjoy this game more. If you know a way around these problems, please explain it to me in detail, perhaps in a pm.
Since they introduced warp to 0km that mostly doesn't matter as much so if you pop into a system you have the initial warp jump, which is usually about 30 seconds or so and can be docking within 10 seconds or less after the pop out of warp.
Before when you warped to 15 km I would and did agree. So covering that 15km even in frigate, at say 300 m/s took I think 1 minute at the least if I remember what my timing came out to. Even with afterburners it was significant.
I always wondered about that 15 km limit. I think they shortened it because book marks were so prevalent and such big business for selling that they did the smart thing and didn't fight it since they probably can't change the bookmark system.
I don't think they actually think the 15 km buffer was a bad idea. I can't say its bad design as it was part of the inherent restrictions of travel, but I can say it made the game tedious for me. And having it gone makes casual kill mission running actually seem like less of a pain in the ass. I always thought it was kind of a bad idea for stations, I could see for jump gates, but for stations not really.
Either way they were smart enough to realize no matter how much they liked it, it was only punishing people who hadn't paid for bookmarks. Another instance of where one person's idea of "immersion" really just was made irrelevant or unjustifiably punishing by game design. In this case the bookmark/warp to system combination. And in this case the people being punished were the lower eschalon and newbies.
But still any non warp running around is pretty slow. If you have to harvest a string of wrecks over say 50-70 km its gonna take a while without a micro warpdive and those don't work in deadspace. But that's EvE it ambles a long at a certain pace. Changing that would simply change the audience not "make it better".
If there is a portal between point A and Point B, why even have a coder develop and server space devoted to the space in between? Also, if there is no dimension of time involved in regeneration or travel, then gaming becomes nothing more than a stat and button mash. There's something not very "massive" about our massive multiplayer games. It seems like the worlds and our goals there shrank considerably, and nobody really cares anymore about exploring, or social/roleplay. 50% of Bartle's archetypes have been nerfed out of their fun, simply because the achievers and PKers want their fun faster. The worlds seem too small, and I think it's because we have become small as gamers. We keep on complaining about "wasted time," yet we waste time in a video game. But besides that, I also believe that a game without some sort of measure of time and space worked into the mechanics creates higher turnover, more burnout, and increased dissatisfaction with the game. I mean, you physically cannot put up with more than a few hours of that fast paced play, and you play sessions are shorter. Which is, ironically, what I believe the publishers really want.
Well games like Archlord have where you can do both, you can run to where you want to go, or you can pay money and teleport to various places on the map.
I don't really mind traveling as long as its interesting and fun. For example flying instead of running which you can see the scenery but you go faster. Dark and Light had some nice ideas for travel, being able to use your shield as a sled and such (to bad that game was such a bust). If there was a game in the present time or future with cars people wouldn't be complaining, its just running around that gets dull. I also think it has to do with what you see. You run from place to place and you just see mobs just standing there, then walking 5 feet and standing there. A more immersove game would have mobs attacking each other and hunting for food, there would be seasons and mobs would be migrating with the seasons. When you're in town the NPC's wouldn't just stand there, you'd have to look for them (kind of like Oblivion where you'd have to meet someone somewhere at a specific time or you can look for him in the bar or at his house. This would all be immersion.
Gestalt, your opinions on why EQ1 is crap are empty and there's no point in trying to pound it into people's heads. EQ1 was the big daddy MMO of the 3D world for a long time, and it's arguably one of the most beloved, up in the ranks with UO. The reason people loved the game was because it was engaging, immersive and new. It wouldn't be called EverCrack if people weren't addicted to the sense of immersion it gave them.
You may deem 'pointless, crappy travel' as something that brought the game down, but at the same time thousands of other players see that travel as a part of some of their fondest memories. Myself, I remember sprinting through Blackburrow as a noob to get to Halas. I remember getting high-levelled as a Bard and getting paid to run people through dangerous zones at high-speeds. I remember Druids handing out SoW at important gathering points so people could find their bodies quicker. EverQuest 1 was always buzzing with travellers zipping about on the roads, and because of this there was always something going on. There were interesting people to see. A level 2 Warrior could gape at a level 50 Warrior that was stopping by Qeynos for an actual REASON other than to talk to newbies, such as buying food and water for a run or using the bank.
Now that people bring up Kithicor Forest, I remember being nervous as all get-out when I zoned in. I was alert as possible and whenever I saw something running at me I'd jump/sprint as fast as I could the opposite direction.
All of these aspects are what made many people love EQ1, even though it had it's flaws. But just because you were more intent on the destination and not the journey doesn't make EQ1 inferior by any means.
I always wondered about that 15 km limit. I think they shortened it because book marks were so prevalent and such big business for selling that they did the smart thing and didn't fight it since they probably can't change the bookmark system.
They changed it because bookmarks were clogging up the technical side of things (most advanced players had tens of thousands of them). Bookmarks were never intended to be used that way, but CCP had tolerated their use that way for years and had balanced ship design, skill and module design, around the idea that a lot of players had bookmarks. They had a few options, and it was hotly debated among the players (and it's rumoured pretty hotly within CCP as well) as to what to do. They could have removed the bookmarks and left it at that. If they had done that, it would have made life easier for the gate campers and pirates, but even fewer players would venture into dangerous space, which is not what CCP wanted. Also it would have required a thorough review of balancing, because again previous balancing had assumed the widespread use of bookmarks. So instead they just gave the bookmarks to everyone by introducing warp to zero -- no more need to create, copy or (from CCP's perspective, importantly) store bookmarks, everyone had in effect an entire set by clicking warp to zero. This was extremely controversial when it happened, with people complaining about the impact on immersion, on the one hand, while pirates and other gate camping types complained that it would put them out of commission (not exactly, because there is still the other side of the gate...), but at the end of the day EVE lived, PvP wasn't killed by the change (almost ALL experienced PvPers used bookmarks prior to the change anyway), and it cut down on travel time a LOT.
In all, I think it was one of the better changes CCP made to EVE in the 3+ years I was playing the game.
If there is a portal between point A and Point B, why even have a coder develop and server space devoted to the space in between? Also, if there is no dimension of time involved in regeneration or travel, then gaming becomes nothing more than a stat and button mash. There's something not very "massive" about our massive multiplayer games. It seems like the worlds and our goals there shrank considerably, and nobody really cares anymore about exploring, or social/roleplay. 50% of Bartle's archetypes have been nerfed out of their fun, simply because the achievers and PKers want their fun faster. The worlds seem too small, and I think it's because we have become small as gamers. We keep on complaining about "wasted time," yet we waste time in a video game. But besides that, I also believe that a game without some sort of measure of time and space worked into the mechanics creates higher turnover, more burnout, and increased dissatisfaction with the game. I mean, you physically cannot put up with more than a few hours of that fast paced play, and you play sessions are shorter. Which is, ironically, what I believe the publishers really want.
Well games like Archlord have where you can do both, you can run to where you want to go, or you can pay money and teleport to various places on the map.
I don't really mind traveling as long as its interesting and fun. For example flying instead of running which you can see the scenery but you go faster. Dark and Light had some nice ideas for travel, being able to use your shield as a sled and such (to bad that game was such a bust). If there was a game in the present time or future with cars people wouldn't be complaining, its just running around that gets dull. I also think it has to do with what you see. You run from place to place and you just see mobs just standing there, then walking 5 feet and standing there. A more immersove game would have mobs attacking each other and hunting for food, there would be seasons and mobs would be migrating with the seasons. When you're in town the NPC's wouldn't just stand there, you'd have to look for them (kind of like Oblivion where you'd have to meet someone somewhere at a specific time or you can look for him in the bar or at his house. This would all be immersion.
The simple answer is that a game made for Explorers may have quite different feature set than a game made for Acheievers.
Its really quite simple when you think about it. An Explorer may want a huge world where distance matters. To an Achiever he most likely will view that distance as an obstruction to where ever he is going .
But keep in mind whenever you seriously thwart someones goals you will shatter their immersion. This might sound blunt or unromantic but people will not feel immersed if they are pissed off or annoyed. You don't give a girl flowers and then tell her she'd look better if she changed her outfit, it breaks the mood if you see what I am saying.
There is an implicit assumption that games must satisfy all four Bartle aspects simultaneously. This is flat out false and misleading. Trying to do so can ruin your game. Its not impossible but the types are not all nice nice happy happy lets all play together and only a game that understand that has a chance to do all four to a decent degree.
Some aspects of the four different subtypes are pretty much at loggerheads and it is in fact a very very rare game that can legitimately satisfy significant portions of all four. And these games are highly restricted in what they may and may not do. And further they will NEVER satisfy all aspects of all four because of cases like the above situation.
People would do well to realize this dynamic that is part of the Bartle types and gameplay.
Does anyone believe that EQ1 was not heavily achievement based? The progenitor of the uber raid guilds? The notion that it did not have heavy aspects of the achiever mentality is simply preposterous. They made entire expansions heavily based on raids that were not originally in the game.
Doesn't it seem not just reasonable but natural to expect achievers to want to get as much as they can as quick as they can? Whether you like that gameplay or not, I think this is pretty much a given.
So therefore if you want a game that satisfies Achievers and Explorers to an acceptable degree wouldn't it perhaps be wise to create a possbility where you can Achieve things without a lot of travel time sinks? But at the same time in order to satisfy an Explorer you need to make sure there are cool things that can not be gotten to in a trivial manner.
Now look at EQ1 if the special Explorer place is some sort of farmable grind location that gives out some very good rewards, then you have created a place for Achievers as well and suddenly mixed two of contradictory goals. The Explorers will hate that there is this big line to farm their special place and the Achievers will hate that it takes so long to get there and that they have to go over the same crap over and over just to get there.
In fact I would go so far as to say that a more complete vision of the Bartle paradigm would include various traits of each of the subtypes and which traits are incompatible. That would be a far better guide for Developers than surveys about who falls into which of the four to what percent.
For example large worlds with travel time can both be enoyed by Killers and Exploreres. Basically because a large world is what creates the "world PvP" style game some like. Also it can help create a game with long term strategy as opposed to match based tactics.
At the same time a large world with travel time can be a large barrier to Acheivers and a barrier to Socializers who want to get together with friends.
Although I do not find EvE's mission system to be all that fun I think they may be on the right track. They have kill missions, they almost never require significant travel. They have trade missions, they have medium travel and medium socializing and are enhanced by knowledge of the market and knowing people etc. They now have Exploration missions which is typical explorer stuff and can be done with no killing at all.
Whether they realize it or not the are tailoring these things to appeal to the aspects of the Bartle types and to not allow other parts of the game from another Bartle type to infringe.
It is possible to make a game that appeals to some degree to all bartle types, but its tricky and some combinations are a bad idea and most likely some compromises and work arounds will need to be made.
But its important to also realize that some game designs simply will never satisfy one or more of the four all that much. If one of their core features is an Achiever based mechanism that is not friendly with the Exploration then that is simply that. Similarly if the game is PvP based.
This is why you get all these FFA PvP endlessly getting shot down. Look at EvE, it is not full on FFA. Its regulated FFA. Why? Because FFA interefers with all other types. It can be a serious damper on all three. Its hard to explore when you are constatnly getting killed.
But some people want a full on FFA game with no restictions at all. That is fine, but if you do this you must realize that the KIller subtype has been given implicit primacy over the other the subtypes for the purposes of anything that conflicts with the Killer subtype.
You want to socialize? Fine but you gotta socialize and form a PvP group, because if you throw a foofy tea party you stand a good chance of getting massacred.
You want to explore? Fine but you better be preparedto fight and maybe bring friends to fight.
You want to Achieve? Well that means killing people not uber PvE loot, sorry.
Conversely an Achiever game make it the other way around. You want to be a Killer? Sorry you gotta do some uber raiding. How many WoW people complained of this? Many. How many raided and hated it because they wanted good PvP gear. Many. Ruin immersion? You beat when the idea of your character is about conquering others and instead you are forced into a what you consider tedium versus un-immersive PvE mob-bots that move in un-immersive predictable ways.
Is a completely FFA game therefore automatically bad? No it simply doomed to never be able to satisfy the other types all that well. People are right when they say it does not play well, because it doesn't. Therefore its not bad but it is unpopular.
Nor is FFA completely bad a concept when you restrict it to no longer interefere with the other Bartle types. However it is important to realize that restricted FFA and full on FFA are not the same thing. Rallos Zek EQ1 is not the same as EvE.
So you are right that some types have suffered at the expense of others. However this is actually the correct way to make the games. They should suffer if you are marketting certain types of games.
This is why WoW is successful they emphasized the Achiever parts and de-empahsized the other three types. I include Killers, because EQ1 had more hardcore PvP than WoW on its PvP servers. They did this because they realized they were interfering with key aspects of the Achiever type and its better to narrow the focus than ruin what is your draw.
It may be the case that a game that appeals to all types could wind up being the most successful. But I will guarantee you something; any game that allows any of the four Bartles types to be in significant conflict will be a marginal game at best. Its is ok to be LACKING a Bartle type but you cannot put two of them into conflict. The MMORPG world is littered with this and is the main reason an otherwise fun MMORPOG does not succeed.
The two most successful games show this, WoW and Guild Wars. I know Guild War is not a popular thing here but it has sold far far more boxes than any-non WoW game. Eve doesn't count because many people simply don't think its fun. Although if more people did I think it would bear the trend as well.
WoW and GW basically made it so that no Bartle types are in conflict and minmized the others to achieve this. That is why they seem smooth. Why they are said to have gotten rid of the problems of older games. If you look at talks by Rob Pardo on WoW's design, he does not talk in this way, but it is clear that everything they did had certain achivere goals in mind as the primary goal. Any other Bartle type is a side effort for extra fun. And when people play WoW that is how they view those things. What you see is what you get and Pardo and the Blizz guys were smart enough to realize you don't let a nice to have screw up the bread and butter and they kept a good focus on that.
This is in contrast to EvE which does actually make real efforts to satisfy all of them and is in fact the only true successor to the age MUDs the Bartle test was based on. But is also a game that is very generic in some aspects and could probably never have the type of dungoen crawls WoW or DDO have.
Games that want to have certain strengths are simply going to have to make the decision of which Bartle type to focus on.
This is one of the reasons WoW does not do random instances. They believe that its a strength to have quality scripted static encounters. And they play to that strength. Of course this means that a game like CoX with random instancing is a much better game for socializing and in fact does have more Socializer Bartle types in it. But the WoW people are still right their dungeon crawls are a bit higher quality than the average CoX instance, although I think CoX Instances are more fun there is not arguing that the WoW ones can throw more elaborate surprised your way.
These are the bounds of our cage. There are tradeoffs and ignoring them and trying to satisfy all of them or believe everything plays together nicely is mistaken.
My "wasted time" is doing something that is not part of my Bartle type, and it may be someone elses 'fun time'. If I am low on explorer then every time I am rerunning the same road is wasted time and it pisses me off and breaks the mood. If I am a Killer not being able to attack someone, even if its suicide, is annoying and breaks the mood.
If you try to do everything for every possible Bartle you will simply wind up breaking everyones mood. At some point you must weed things out. And the more intense you want one Bartle type to be the more you must weed out the conflicts and either get rid of one if or find a work around. And some conflicts have no work around.
Its not quite that simple as there are interactions between the types that make each both better. But there are the interactions between types that make both worse.
Gestalt, your opinions on why EQ1 is crap are empty and there's no point in trying to pound it into people's heads. EQ1 was the big daddy MMO of the 3D world for a long time, and it's arguably one of the most beloved, up in the ranks with UO. The reason people loved the game was because it was engaging, immersive and new. It wouldn't be called EverCrack if people weren't addicted to the sense of immersion it gave them. You may deem 'pointless, crappy travel' as something that brought the game down, but at the same time thousands of other players see that travel as a part of some of their fondest memories. Myself, I remember sprinting through Blackburrow as a noob to get to Halas. I remember getting high-levelled as a Bard and getting paid to run people through dangerous zones at high-speeds. I remember Druids handing out SoW at important gathering points so people could find their bodies quicker. EverQuest 1 was always buzzing with travellers zipping about on the roads, and because of this there was always something going on. There were interesting people to see. A level 2 Warrior could gape at a level 50 Warrior that was stopping by Qeynos for an actual REASON other than to talk to newbies, such as buying food and water for a run or using the bank. Now that people bring up Kithicor Forest, I remember being nervous as all get-out when I zoned in. I was alert as possible and whenever I saw something running at me I'd jump/sprint as fast as I could the opposite direction.
All of these aspects are what made many people love EQ1, even though it had it's flaws. But just because you were more intent on the destination and not the journey doesn't make EQ1 inferior by any means.
So you think its just a massive conincidence that WoW has achieved an order of magnitude more subs by essentially copying EQ1 and "streamlining" these things? Or is it just the Blizzard name?
For every person you know who loved it there were many people who tried it and thought it was not a good game. In fact derided it and are now or were playing WoW which is a game made and designed by former EQ players. This includes Blizzard's VP of design, ran Lead Designer Kaplan's guild before he passed leadership to him.
You say my posts are empty and yet missed 80% of what I said. I never said those things didn't accomplish anything. In fact I said those mechanisms are very powerful.
But the last line of your post is amazingly telling:
"you were more intent on the destination and not the journey doesn't make EQ1 inferior by any means."
It's interesting that you recognize that in order to enjoy these thing you must be intent on the hourney and not the destination.
Yet you must on some level admit that EQ1 was a highly Acheiver oriented game. It did produce uber raiding afterall.
So what we have is the admission that you need this mentality and the almost inarguable fact that EQ1 was actually heavily based on the mentality you accuse me of having, that is the destination and all its goodies are what is important. Afterall if you show up 5 minutes late at some Planes of Power raid you could be kicked fro the guild. What? Oh, hey man, its all about the journey, man, not, like the destination. You know its all real cosmic and stuff. Why are you trying harsh my mellow with your raid cockblocks and schedules and stuff?
Which is exactly my point thanks for lending proof to my thesis that EQ1 is at its heart a contradiction and all is the root of all its problems from the eventual mitigation of travel to the birth of the Peasant and Lord/Haves and Have Nots.
They jammed every kind of Bartle type feature they could possibly think of together except for the Killer type because thsoe amateurs could see the Killer type does not play nice together. And lo and hold they have contradictions.
And when they ran into an Explorer feature that messed with an Achiever feature what did they do? Erred on the side of Achievers. And why were they forced to do so, because they didn't design the Achiever stuff to play nice with the Explorer stuff. And if they erred the other way no one would play the game other than a few people.
And then you wound up with entrenched camps both demanding things for different reasons and both are screwed because EQ1 was designed to try to have it both ways but it was to late to change either one.
I always wondered about that 15 km limit. I think they shortened it because book marks were so prevalent and such big business for selling that they did the smart thing and didn't fight it since they probably can't change the bookmark system.
They changed it because bookmarks were clogging up the technical side of things (most advanced players had tens of thousands of them). Bookmarks were never intended to be used that way, but CCP had tolerated their use that way for years and had balanced ship design, skill and module design, around the idea that a lot of players had bookmarks. They had a few options, and it was hotly debated among the players (and it's rumoured pretty hotly within CCP as well) as to what to do. They could have removed the bookmarks and left it at that. If they had done that, it would have made life easier for the gate campers and pirates, but even fewer players would venture into dangerous space, which is not what CCP wanted. Also it would have required a thorough review of balancing, because again previous balancing had assumed the widespread use of bookmarks. So instead they just gave the bookmarks to everyone by introducing warp to zero -- no more need to create, copy or (from CCP's perspective, importantly) store bookmarks, everyone had in effect an entire set by clicking warp to zero. This was extremely controversial when it happened, with people complaining about the impact on immersion, on the one hand, while pirates and other gate camping types complained that it would put them out of commission (not exactly, because there is still the other side of the gate...), but at the end of the day EVE lived, PvP wasn't killed by the change (almost ALL experienced PvPers used bookmarks prior to the change anyway), and it cut down on travel time a LOT.
In all, I think it was one of the better changes CCP made to EVE in the 3+ years I was playing the game.
Yes I agree its a good change and now that you relate this I remember the stuff about space being what caused the crisis, forced them to deal with it.
I guess what I am curious about is what exactly made them so reluctant.
If it was just immersion then well that is a little off, because nobody in the know would do warping to 15 km anyway unless they were just a hardcore RPer. Theoretical immersion is all well and fine but the implementation wasn't accomplishing it.
But more to the point is even if they had a 100% implementation that forced everyone to warp to 15 km on a station and jumpgate I don't really see how that helped because frankly in empire space docking has very little danger or anything and waiting 1.5 minutes while you move through empty space is not that immersive.
Maybe fifteen seconds but 90 seconds you pretty much get up and go get a drink after the first 30 seconds. For the jumpgates I could see as that could be part of the travel calculations for how fast things should be moving around system. Still tedious but it servers a purpose.
On some level I genuinely think it was for immersion only for stations and not really anything "practical", but it seems like a very unrealistic thing to expect a majority of people to sit and watch for that long. Not if you have any appreciation for cinema. Even Bladerunner and 2001 A space Odyssey moved things a long faster. Unless they think everyone gets baked before they play EvE. Although ....
What people fail to realise is that downtime moments such as long travel times is yes boring but it's also where you meet people and start chatting. It's where the interaction takes place and etc...
Take the old SWG for example: I would log in my house and check my mails.... then leave for Coronet (2 minute drive) to catch the next transport ship. The waiting time was about 10 minutes at that time. So I would hang out around the city and just wait. Most of the time, I would meet a bunch of friends passing by for some buffs while others were here to sell some junk. I would see the occassional Imps and Rebels fighting each other or that silly jedi running around with a lightsaber while a bunch of bounty hunters are trying to find his name on the terminal. I was a master doctor and my buffs were seriously sick, so often a bunch of people that knew me would start talking to me in order to get some buffs. Then I would hear the sound of the transport ship landing and it was then time to run off... That simple 10 minute of waiting made me tons of friends during all my years playing. Take an example of WOW... Ironforge was filled with spam for groups and loots... Yes, you had the occasional friendly chat but compared to SWG, it was below good. Sure the griffon ride was fun but you were half the time alone... not alot of people to talk too heh? You had no reason to wait anywhere so you didn't actually had downtimes that allowed you to socialize...
I don't fail to realize this.
In fact I realize something more profound. I meet people from active things not downtime. So do other people. I also realize that people like you meet people during downtime.
The reason this is profound is your rule is not a rule, its just the way you do things. Therefore enforcing your way on me would cause me to meet less people not more.
So your design would cause you to meet more people and me to meet less, but of course have the ancillary effect of causing me to cancel my sub. And most likely be a net loss for the game in total.
The universality of the benefit of forced downtime is incorrect. This is easy to prove because you only need one instance to prove a universal statement wrong. So I am not stating an opinion. It is pretty darn objectively solid.
Now my opinion is that statistics wise easily 30% and posssibly as high as 60% of a population hates and finds enforced downtime counter productive to the way the do things.
This is enough to make it a bad idea, but conversely enough on the other end to somehow incorporate or encourage people to "hang out".
Wow man, you're a bit hardcore! None the less, interesting
I see your point and when I said what people fail to realise was geared towards a general approach and not to forget that I was looking at a side that other didn't look at. At the moment, all your replies are direct attacks to the opinion of others. You might want to take things less personaly and actually discuss with people. You do not have to come up with statistics and such since you don't even know if the person you're replying too is actually someone from the industry. Seriously, my post was not made to offend anyone and I don't think anyone got offended except you.
Obviously, that was based on my experience and obviously SWG was not the most popular game. However, there's something that spawns out of these downtime/Sandbox type of game and if you did actively play, you would probably agree with me. You might have played and hated it too... Reason, I said, if you actively played it. Of course, you can make friends in the heat of a high octane moment and I bet that the next time you talk to that new friend, will be during a short downtime period.
What I said was not a design made by me, it was a design made by the folks that made SWG. I took that design to point out what I appreciated of downtimes. Did I like waiting for a shuttle... of course not! Do you like waiting for the bus in the morning??? (oh and I don't go talking to everyone while waiting for the bus!)
See all I did was showing one side of the medal that I thought people were overlooking.
Originally posted by gestalt11Yes I agree its a good change and now that you relate this I remember the stuff about space being what caused the crisis, forced them to deal with it.
I guess what I am curious about is what exactly made them so reluctant. If it was just immersion then well that is a little off, because nobody in the know would do warping to 15 km anyway unless they were just a hardcore RPer. Theoretical immersion is all well and fine but the implementation wasn't accomplishing it.
But more to the point is even if they had a 100% implementation that forced everyone to warp to 15 km on a station and jumpgate I don't really see how that helped because frankly in empire space docking has very little danger or anything and waiting 1.5 minutes while you move through empty space is not that immersive. Maybe fifteen seconds but 90 seconds you pretty much get up and go get a drink after the first 30 seconds. For the jumpgates I could see as that could be part of the travel calculations for how fast things should be moving around system. Still tedious but it servers a purpose.
On some level I genuinely think it was for immersion only for stations and not really anything "practical", but it seems like a very unrealistic thing to expect a majority of people to sit and watch for that long. Not if you have any appreciation for cinema. Even Bladerunner and 2001 A space Odyssey moved things a long faster. Unless they think everyone gets baked before they play EvE. Although ....
Yeah it's basically true. I remember I had some heated discussions with the more hardcore RP types in my then corp at the time, and they refused to use bookmarks due to immersion reasons, but I tend to agree that waiting at gate after gate after gate is just not immersive, it's time consuming.
I think the main thing that made CCP reluctant was the complaints from the gate camping community that this would shut down half of the gankable traffic. It was really a hollow complaint because everyone who wasn't a noob had bookmarks for dangerous space, so basically it amounted to saying "we want to be able to easily gank noobs without bookmarks on the outbound gate". I think CCP was weighing the impact of slightly reduced risk for PvP, on the one hand, against getting rid of BMs altogether (which would have forced more players into Empire, and clogged up the system in another way). In short I think it was the gate camping lobby that made them reluctant to implement the change at the time, and the concern that it would cut down too much on PvP.
Well its interesting that a rather good discussion of gaming immersion has turned almost excuslively into a "are travel times good" discussion.
Immersion is far more then travel times. Its a game with real risk, real reward. Its the ability to have an impact on the world you are "living" in. Its an enviornment where your reputation matters-act like a clown folks will remember, act like a hero or know your class-and folks will remember that too!
Its a game where there are almost as many non-combat/quest/grind activities to do as thier are grind activities. Fishing, dancing, pubs, events, non combat clothing, robust crafting, housing, and a true player based economy.
Its a game where a sense of scale and scope is meaningful. Getting from x to y actually has some significance. I recall in Everquest meeting a barbarian for the first time as a halfling-i was SHOCKED! There are players/alliances entire wars in EVE that i know nothing about due to the vast scope of the game-that fascinates me. It feels real, epic, vibrant and dynamic.
Its a game where a sense of the "random encounter" can still happen. This encounter might be a monster, a neat river/stream/waterfall/cave, a player needing assistance on a quest or to recover a corpse, a group of roleplayers participating in an event, or just a random bunch of good folks hanging around and developing the community. (the instancing in ddo, guildwars, potbs virtually kills this entire aspect of gaming-there is no immersion at all in these games..zero).
No game can be all things to all people but I would offer that EQ1, DAOC, AO, AC, UO and to some degree WoW and LOTRO have accomplished this (EVE sorta sits in its own universe as a total sandbox). WoW only comes up short imho due to the horrific, horrific, horrific community-and LOTRO because the combat system/character system is just plain--BORING...but at least there is some immersion in each of these.
The games that have followed hellgate, fury, guildwars, ddo, shadowbane, horizons, all the asian grinds, etc have fallen commically short of getting even a small portion of it right.
What people fail to realise is that downtime moments such as long travel times is yes boring but it's also where you meet people and start chatting. It's where the interaction takes place and etc...
Take the old SWG for example: I would log in my house and check my mails.... then leave for Coronet (2 minute drive) to catch the next transport ship. The waiting time was about 10 minutes at that time. So I would hang out around the city and just wait. Most of the time, I would meet a bunch of friends passing by for some buffs while others were here to sell some junk. I would see the occassional Imps and Rebels fighting each other or that silly jedi running around with a lightsaber while a bunch of bounty hunters are trying to find his name on the terminal. I was a master doctor and my buffs were seriously sick, so often a bunch of people that knew me would start talking to me in order to get some buffs. Then I would hear the sound of the transport ship landing and it was then time to run off... That simple 10 minute of waiting made me tons of friends during all my years playing. Take an example of WOW... Ironforge was filled with spam for groups and loots... Yes, you had the occasional friendly chat but compared to SWG, it was below good. Sure the griffon ride was fun but you were half the time alone... not alot of people to talk too heh? You had no reason to wait anywhere so you didn't actually had downtimes that allowed you to socialize...
I don't fail to realize this.
In fact I realize something more profound. I meet people from active things not downtime. So do other people. I also realize that people like you meet people during downtime.
The reason this is profound is your rule is not a rule, its just the way you do things. Therefore enforcing your way on me would cause me to meet less people not more.
So your design would cause you to meet more people and me to meet less, but of course have the ancillary effect of causing me to cancel my sub. And most likely be a net loss for the game in total.
The universality of the benefit of forced downtime is incorrect. This is easy to prove because you only need one instance to prove a universal statement wrong. So I am not stating an opinion. It is pretty darn objectively solid.
Now my opinion is that statistics wise easily 30% and posssibly as high as 60% of a population hates and finds enforced downtime counter productive to the way the do things.
This is enough to make it a bad idea, but conversely enough on the other end to somehow incorporate or encourage people to "hang out".
Wow man, you're a bit hardcore! None the less, interesting
I see your point and when I said what people fail to realise was geared towards a general approach and not to forget that I was looking at a side that other didn't look at. At the moment, all your replies are direct attacks to the opinion of others. You might want to take things less personaly and actually discuss with people. You do not have to come up with statistics and such since you don't even know if the person you're replying too is actually someone from the industry. Seriously, my post was not made to offend anyone and I don't think anyone got offended except you.
Obviously, that was based on my experience and obviously SWG was not the most popular game. However, there's something that spawns out of these downtime/Sandbox type of game and if you did actively play, you would probably agree with me. You might have played and hated it too... Reason, I said, if you actively played it. Of course, you can make friends in the heat of a high octane moment and I bet that the next time you talk to that new friend, will be during a short downtime period.
What I said was not a design made by me, it was a design made by the folks that made SWG. I took that design to point out what I appreciated of downtimes. Did I like waiting for a shuttle... of course not! Do you like waiting for the bus in the morning??? (oh and I don't go talking to everyone while waiting for the bus!)
See all I did was showing one side of the medal that I thought people were overlooking.
(edited so you don't get offended a second time)
No it actually is more fundamental than it seems.
I will not meet people during downtime. Its doesn't put me in the the mood. Some people are the complete opposite.
Down time causes a "I need something to do" response in most people.
But the profound part comes in when you realize that some people like you respond socially to that response and some people respond a-socially.
Just like some people go off and solve a problem alone and them come back and discuss it with people while other people like to colloborate with others from the start.
This is why ideas like forced downtime or forced grouping for that matter cause as many problems as they solve. Because in the end they provoke a response but believe everyone handles this response the same, which is simply wrong.
Not only will I tend not to socialize during downtime I will socialize quite differently. Some people only socialize downtime and are all business otherwise. Some people are chatting all the time.
I have a friend who felt compelled to go out to a bar and spend double for beer when all we were doing was sitting with friends and drinking beer and not talking to anyone else. I used to tell him it would be cheaper if we hung out at home. But he would sit at home alone if we didn't go to a bar and wouldn't hang out at people's places. To me it didn't matter.
I had an old roomate who was the exact opposite he would only hang out at people's places and bring his own beer.
Me I don't care where I sit to socialize and generally I would rather be doing somethign fun while I socialize since being bored makes not talk much and start thinking about abstract things.
As soon as I was put in a cantina in SWG I would be trying to leave. My friend would like it and wouldn't do anything else and my old roommate would be complaining about the price of beer and saying we should have player housing instead.
I really respect all your posts on this subject. It has not only been educational but has opened the door to new creative possibilities within game play for myself and a new way of looking at a virtual world based on giving the player a purpose and how that is defined. And most importantly how it translates into game play.
Yes, there's a lot of different way to see a game. I mean, seing that you're a fellow EVE player, you obviously have alot of patience. This allow you access a certain type of game that is much slower pace then WOW, City of Heroes and such.
However, one thing I can say is that immersion comes from how you personaly dive in. However, every situation has an alternative. My way of making these boring downtime fun was to chat and make friends, it was a solid alternative. It also made the immersion much more interesting
Yes I do think time sinks are part of the process for immersion. I like how you summed that up. I think it adds to the overall quality of world design.
Edited for an example.
Say in SWG. Immersion to me would be you walk on a shuttle, sit down. It takes off and it flies across the planetary map to your destination. A droid states landing time and so forth. The shuttle lands. You walk out the door. Travel time is 3 minutes. with no download screens. Complete universal immersion.
I'll admit that this is true.
No one takes the time to truly, "immerse" themselves into a game anymore. While waiting for those shuttles, I would look down on the Tatooine sunset and just be dazzled on how beautiful it is. If the load time was long enough, I'd visit some of the iconic places in the city for FUN.
When vehicles were introduced into SWG travel times between cities were short, but then no one took the time to truly investigate what was in-between those two cities. My first log-in into SWG was before vehicles and, while I was confused half of the time, it was the most immersive night I had into a game. I met interesting aliens, ran from city to city looking for work to do, and most importantly took the time to immerse myself on Tatooine.
I'm afraid I'll never have an experience like that again..,
Gestalt, your opinions on why EQ1 is crap are empty and there's no point in trying to pound it into people's heads. EQ1 was the big daddy MMO of the 3D world for a long time, and it's arguably one of the most beloved, up in the ranks with UO. The reason people loved the game was because it was engaging, immersive and new. It wouldn't be called EverCrack if people weren't addicted to the sense of immersion it gave them. You may deem 'pointless, crappy travel' as something that brought the game down, but at the same time thousands of other players see that travel as a part of some of their fondest memories. Myself, I remember sprinting through Blackburrow as a noob to get to Halas. I remember getting high-levelled as a Bard and getting paid to run people through dangerous zones at high-speeds. I remember Druids handing out SoW at important gathering points so people could find their bodies quicker. EverQuest 1 was always buzzing with travellers zipping about on the roads, and because of this there was always something going on. There were interesting people to see. A level 2 Warrior could gape at a level 50 Warrior that was stopping by Qeynos for an actual REASON other than to talk to newbies, such as buying food and water for a run or using the bank. Now that people bring up Kithicor Forest, I remember being nervous as all get-out when I zoned in. I was alert as possible and whenever I saw something running at me I'd jump/sprint as fast as I could the opposite direction.
All of these aspects are what made many people love EQ1, even though it had it's flaws. But just because you were more intent on the destination and not the journey doesn't make EQ1 inferior by any means.
So you think its just a massive conincidence that WoW has achieved an order of magnitude more subs by essentially copying EQ1 and "streamlining" these things? Or is it just the Blizzard name?
For every person you know who loved it there were many people who tried it and thought it was not a good game. In fact derided it and are now or were playing WoW which is a game made and designed by former EQ players. This includes Blizzard's VP of design, ran Lead Designer Kaplan's guild before he passed leadership to him.
You say my posts are empty and yet missed 80% of what I said. I never said those things didn't accomplish anything. In fact I said those mechanisms are very powerful.
But the last line of your post is amazingly telling:
"you were more intent on the destination and not the journey doesn't make EQ1 inferior by any means."
It's interesting that you recognize that in order to enjoy these thing you must be intent on the hourney and not the destination.
Yet you must on some level admit that EQ1 was a highly Acheiver oriented game. It did produce uber raiding afterall.
So what we have is the admission that you need this mentality and the almost inarguable fact that EQ1 was actually heavily based on the mentality you accuse me of having, that is the destination and all its goodies are what is important. Afterall if you show up 5 minutes late at some Planes of Power raid you could be kicked fro the guild. What? Oh, hey man, its all about the journey, man, not, like the destination. You know its all real cosmic and stuff. Why are you trying harsh my mellow with your raid cockblocks and schedules and stuff?
Which is exactly my point thanks for lending proof to my thesis that EQ1 is at its heart a contradiction and all is the root of all its problems from the eventual mitigation of travel to the birth of the Peasant and Lord/Haves and Have Nots.
They jammed every kind of Bartle type feature they could possibly think of together except for the Killer type because thsoe amateurs could see the Killer type does not play nice together. And lo and hold they have contradictions.
And when they ran into an Explorer feature that messed with an Achiever feature what did they do? Erred on the side of Achievers. And why were they forced to do so, because they didn't design the Achiever stuff to play nice with the Explorer stuff. And if they erred the other way no one would play the game other than a few people.
And then you wound up with entrenched camps both demanding things for different reasons and both are screwed because EQ1 was designed to try to have it both ways but it was to late to change either one.
...What?
Is it entirely necessary to ramble on and on? If you have a point, please put it in a nice tidy thesis at the top of your post. It doesn't do much good to ramble on about the Achiever side of a game versus the Explorer side of a game, as if they are yin and yang.
'Achievement' is an entirely opinion-based thing. To one person, getting awesome gear may be an achievement while another person may see successfully sprinting across/discovering Kithicor Forest while naked an achievement.
And your point about WoW being more popular than EverQuest has little to do with EverQuest's 'immersion/achievement conflict' hoohaa. World of Warcraft came 5 years after EverQuest. 5 years. Besides, when EverQuest was made it was in 1999 and there was a very undeveloped MMO industry. The reason WoW stays on top if it's game now is because it had a lot of data to work off of and a lot of other people's trials to learn from. You might as well bash Quake 1 for not being as polished as Gears of War while you're at it.
That's all I have, due to the fact I find your logic very hard to follow and understand because of the way you lay your ideas out.
'Achievement' is an entirely opinion-based thing. To one person, getting awesome gear may be an achievement These people are termed Achievers by Bartle
while another person may see successfully sprinting across/discovering Kithicor Forest while naked an achievement. These people are terms Exploreres by Bartle
...
Maybe you don't like the Bartle types, maybe you think there should be more or less maybe think they are BS, that's cool.
But either way its not really arguable that in EQ1 the getting awesome gear/gaining levels and alternate advancement as the achievement was the pre-emenent achievement for most of the populace and most content was designed around this via placement of content in static spots in a static world.
Clearly people's ability and speed of access to those placements affects this major focus of the game.
Clearly those people who want to get as much stuff as quick as possible will not tolerate huge times to get their stuff.
Clearly many people made every effort to get as much as quick as possible. I doubt anyone seriously believes power leveling never existed in EQ1 or that people didn't grind for maximal efficiency etc etc.
And of course in the end the EQ1 devs did in fact make it easier for people to get to places to get their stuff quicker. Because they simply couldn't keep releasing content all over the place and actually expect people to get there in a timely fashion. Its simply wasn't scalable.
Well you see not everyone likes a game so easy you don't even have to try.
If there are people out there that want awesome gear and they want it NOW, they're not going to find it in any game and if they do it'll be incredibly boring. Part of the huge challenge and 'addictiveness' of EQ1 was A. Getting to the hard spots where the good loot was and then B. Conquering the holder of the said loot.
When you throw both of those aspects into the game, you get a much more challenging and therefore rewarding experience. However, I do agree with you on the Devs making EQ1 far too easy eventually. They constantly churned out expansion packs that gave freebies to everyone and now look at the game; it's barren.
I believe Bartle's Achievers and Explorers can exist together. They've done so for a long time, and a game doesn't have to suck because it attempts to serve both. It's not a conflict of interest in my eyes, it's a maintenance of equilibrium.
Well you see not everyone likes a game so easy you don't even have to try. If there are people out there that want awesome gear and they want it NOW, they're not going to find it in any game and if they do it'll be incredibly boring. Part of the huge challenge and 'addictiveness' of EQ1 was A. Getting to the hard spots where the good loot was and then B. Conquering the holder of the said loot. When you throw both of those aspects into the game, you get a much more challenging and therefore rewarding experience. However, I do agree with you on the Devs making EQ1 far too easy eventually. They constantly churned out expansion packs that gave freebies to everyone and now look at the game; it's barren. I believe Bartle's Achievers and Explorers can exist together. They've done so for a long time, and a game doesn't have to suck because it attempts to serve both. It's not a conflict of interest in my eyes, it's a maintenance of equilibrium.
I prefered AC to EQ, but in all other respects QFT
Comments
What people fail to realise is that downtime moments such as long travel times is yes boring but it's also where you meet people and start chatting. It's where the interaction takes place and etc...
Take the old SWG for example:
I would log in my house and check my mails.... then leave for Coronet (2 minute drive) to catch the next transport ship. The waiting time was about 10 minutes at that time. So I would hang out around the city and just wait. Most of the time, I would meet a bunch of friends passing by for some buffs while others were here to sell some junk. I would see the occassional Imps and Rebels fighting each other or that silly jedi running around with a lightsaber while a bunch of bounty hunters are trying to find his name on the terminal.
I was a master doctor and my buffs were seriously sick, so often a bunch of people that knew me would start talking to me in order to get some buffs. Then I would hear the sound of the transport ship landing and it was then time to run off... That simple 10 minute of waiting made me tons of friends during all my years playing.
Take an example of WOW...
Ironforge was filled with spam for groups and loots... Yes, you had the occasional friendly chat but compared to SWG, it was below good. Sure the griffon ride was fun but you were half the time alone... not alot of people to talk too heh? You had no reason to wait anywhere so you didn't actually had downtimes that allowed you to socialize...
When a feature that might otherwise be immersive becomes a burden that is at odds with other parts of the game then it BREAKS the immersion. It is also frustrating.
Given the character of EQ1 there is simply no doubt that travel times very much interfered with other KEY aspects of the game. You couldn't do jack in EQ1 without a group large travel times are a huge imposition on making a group. You had static, known places to visit and grind and sometimes were required to visit. And if you were far away from that place for some reason you were therefore punished FOR ABSOLUTELY NO REASON AND FOR NO COMMENSURATE REWARD.
Travel time is a burden. This is a fact. Anyone disagrees with this is a fool. Flat out fool. Go to Los Angeles and drive in rush hour traffic and tell me its not a burden and a barrier.
Burden's and Barriers in MMO are good when used well and are horrible when used wrong.
There must be something that alleviates this burden if you wish to keep it in to accomplish its goal. In the case of Eve travel times do a number of things but the biggest thing is they KEEP THINGS LOCAL. Therefore the entire game MUST MUST give people things to do LOCALLY. If they ever deviate from this people will inuitively understand that their design is stupid and it will manifest itself in anger and despair at the state of the game.
This is exactly what happened in EQ1. They created Eve-like travel times but did not make the game LOCAL. The game is GLOBAL; everyone must go everywhere to achieve most goals in EQ1. In Eve I could become a multi Billionaire and have tons of tech 2 stuff and never visit more than a few systems except for the once a month long trip somewhere for a special reason. I could setup my own small two system owning corporation and be virtually self-sufficient except for the occaionsal run to buy something special.
The very foundation of EQ1 makes travel time STUPID. People get thrown some requirement and then groan and say "Oh crap I can't get my spell without taking some stupid ass 1 hour long trip that might get me killed and in debt". And guess what they, correctly, blame? The stupid travel times.
Does travel have value? YES. Its huge, its an incredibly powerful and elegant mechanic. Does it always play nice with other design decision. NO. In fact it can completely ruin a game when paired with other mechanics.
I responded to another poster above about 10 minute long warp trips in Eve. He would be right if it were EQ1 because in EQ1 you will be virtually forced to do that often and that 10 minute trip will be POINTLESS. All you wanted was to meet some friends and run a dungeon, BUT NO the PUNISHES and forces you to run the same old road you have run 100 times before and avoid the same static spawns "Oh no sacry!!!!". Its BS and people know it and they feel. Its good once and never again. And if all you wanted to do was meet your friends its not even good the first time.
But as I responded before this is not the case in Eve. Because you never have to do this. Eve is LOCAL. You are never forced to regularly run ten minute long trips. You can choose to do so, but its not necessary.
Like that guy I also do not like 10 minute long snooze fests just to get some goal done. I avoid them. In Eve I CAN AVOID THEM. In EQ1 you originally COULD NOT AVOID THEM.
In EQ1 they wanted the advantages of having travel time, but they did not look at the whole picture. That is why for the most part EQ1 is a poorly designed piece of crap. Travel time is a powerful powerful mechanics you MUST take a long hard look at the advantage AND the disadvantages because if you do not properly account for both they are powerful enough to seriously hurt your game.
The Travel times of EQ1 are a classic exampe of overly greedy design and I am not talking about making change for you computer programmers out there. They tried to have their cake and eat too. Well you can't.
In fact I realize something more profound. I meet people from active things not downtime. So do other people. I also realize that people like you meet people during downtime.
The reason this is profound is your rule is not a rule, its just the way you do things. Therefore enforcing your way on me would cause me to meet less people not more.
So your design would cause you to meet more people and me to meet less, but of course have the ancillary effect of causing me to cancel my sub. And most likely be a net loss for the game in total.
The universality of the benefit of forced downtime is incorrect. This is easy to prove because you only need one instance to prove a universal statement wrong. So I am not stating an opinion. It is pretty darn objectively solid.
Now my opinion is that statistics wise easily 30% and posssibly as high as 60% of a population hates and finds enforced downtime counter productive to the way the do things.
This is enough to make it a bad idea, but conversely enough on the other end to somehow incorporate or encourage people to "hang out".
I do not think long wait times are vey immersive, however they do provide a means to meet people you would not normally meet and make new friends. To me there are many key components to make an MMO immersive.
1.) Character diversity needs to be expanded greatly. The most immersive game I ever played was SWG. To this date, I do not think an MMO has been as successful in creating a game that had as many professions and races. The reason this helps immersion for me is because it makes the world seem more real. In other words, everyone isn't walking around looking like the terminator or conan. If I wanted to go into the cantina and listen to musicians or watch dancers for a break I could and it was a great place to meet friends. Just my opininion though......
2.) The worlds, for the most part, need to be seamless and massive. The one thing I did not like about EQ2 and GW was all of the zoning and load screens. Also, the worlds also need to be less static in nature and more dynamic by adding weather elements and player developed cities.
3.) A big killer for me that breaks immersion is LAG. Guild Wars performed very well, but like I said ealier, I hated all the zoning. If a world could be developed that was seamless and virtually lag free, then to me that would be a key component. This is probably just wishful thinking.....
4.) Last but not least, and I saw this posted earlier......DANGER. With the majority of MMOs being made more solo-friendly, it takes away from alot of the danger and challenge. I think in my ideal MMO, even if I were the most powerful character on the server.....I would still want their to be creatures in the wild that could rip my head off in 5 seconds flat. If their is no fear.......there is no fun. Just my opinion though.
I think what this thread boils down to is that immersion, whether it is in a game or not, is what you make of it. A game that is totally immersive for one person maybe very shallow to another, you find your own immersion and if you can't you move on to something else. Sometimes it works for you and sometimes it don't.
One key part of immersion is simulated-reality. You want to feel as if you are really there, experiencing what the character in that world is experiencing, as if it were their "real life".
One problem is in RL, there is a lot of tedium. I do not want to watch my character take a few minutes several times a day to go to the bathroom, for instance. That's real, and technically contributes to immersion, but it's not fun.
Here's an example: in Wow, if you are crafting something as a blacksmith, you will see the character standing by the anvil dutifully pounding away to shape the item, for 10 to 60 seconds. The first time I saw this, I thought it was cool and immersive. But in RL, such an item would probably take several hours or days of work to create. That is certainly not something I want to watch my character do while I twiddle my fingers. Even that 60 seconds is way too long, when the character has to make dozens of them.
This also applies to travel times. I remember my first griffon ride, from Westfall to Stormwind. I thought this was very cool and again, immersive, in keeping with the theme of the gameworld.
However, watching my character take 10-20 minutes of real time flying from IF to Booty Bay is simply not fun. It might be "realistic", but it's dull.
So while I truly enjoy immersion in a game, I want my immersion stream-lined, such that the dull parts are removed or drastically shortened.
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P.S. - On the subject of EVE: I tried this game, and while I enjoyed it at first, it was the boringly long travel times and incredible lack of information that made me quit. I do not understand how you can complete quests without a lot of travel. Hell, even docking with a station can take several minutes. This is a game I thought had awesome potential, but it's emphasis on PvP, combined with a woefully short tutorial and boring travel times (20 minutes to get to a quest location) made me quit. I would love to enjoy this game more. If you know a way around these problems, please explain it to me in detail, perhaps in a pm.
I know i am responding twice to this post, but i wanted to isolate this last part.
I am not saying you are wrong about a massive world and travel and certainly GW was right not bother with travel times.
What I am saying is that games like EQ1 that did have a massive world and therefore wanted to put in travel times also made other design decisions that were CONTRARY to travel times.
They combined things that seem good on their own and then said to themselves well that makes it double good, right?
Yeah sure you can make a cake with baking soda and everyone likes cake, right? And vinegar is great for salad dressing and hot sauce and other tasty things. Everyone likes tasty things, right?
Well guess what, guys?! We are gonna give you two tasty things all wrapped up in one bundle. Please ignore the fizzing and bubbling that is normal.
Yes Guild Wars and DDO are more internally consistent. That does not mean that EQ1 must have travel times. It is tempting to think that when you look at the two things in a VACUUM.
I said EQ1 was a piece of crap design because it can NEVER be as internally consistent as Eve or Guild Wars. It is trying to be both at the same time. And that is the crux of the issue.
EQ1 will always have problems. It will lack the inuitive "next step" in immersion or it will be unjustifiably punishing. Because the designers lacked the foresight and balls to make a consistent game.
And as an aside this is something you can see in other BMQ projects like Vanguard.
You want to make the leap that it makes sense to leave it out in a game like Guild Wars but when you look at the other end of the spectrum, EvE online, you see that it makes sense to have it in. So why is EQ1 screwed up? Because it is trying to be both and that is not possible.
Contradictions are a real and important part of logic. When you have designed in contradictions a game will suffer. And that is why EQ1 is and was doomed to never be fully immersive. They have a designed in dilema cause by the inherent contradictions of their own design. They must either increase immersion and drive people away with unjustifiable burdens or lack immersion and reduce the burdens.
it is not the case that immersive elements cause unjustifiable burdens. They only do this in poorly designed games that have conflicting principles like EQ1.
This is why I have posted a number of times in this thread. And why I harp on Eve and EQ1. There is nothing wrong with immersive elements you cannot allow contradictory features in your game design or you wind up with the Devil's bargain EQ1 made.
The problem is people blame the individual features and not the overall design. The individual feature are not the problem. The Developers are the problem.
Demand better designed games. Demand games that hang together better. Eve Online and Guild Wars are two of the best designed games on the market. Whether you like their gameplay or not and I do not expect anyone to like Eve's game play. But these games do not suffer these problems because they are designed well.
You will never get the immersion you desire until you demand a well designed game. Because the poor design will ruin most people's suspension of disbelief.
Wanting a game with travel times to increase your feel for the game is a fine and perfectly reasonable position. But you must realize that if that is what you want you also need a number of other things, you need a well designed game, where they did not shove in travel times with other features.
Travel times are not a standalone feature. You must demand better designed games. If you want immersion you have no choice. Not a feature list. You must demand a game that is designed well in total. Where features do not interfere with each other.
I don't disagree with what you have said about RP and exploration, although its not my thing I understand the validity of it, but what I am saying is what you want cannot fully exist in a game like EQ1.
It is tempting to beleive that the massive world logically leads to those sorts of things. Unfortunately for you they put in other things where the massive world interferes with them. They threw the kitchen sink at it. Well that is bad design.
It is truly surprising to anyone after the Vanguard debacle that a BMQ project declined to make tough and consistent decisions. It shouldn't be. Because that is the hallmark of EQ1 and Vanguard throw everything you possbily can and see if it sticks. That is classic bad and amateurish design.
Good design is elegant. Its a lot with a little. Travel times are possibly one of the most powerful examples of the power of elegant design. You can change the entire face of a game with just that.
Guild Wars and EvE show the hallmarks of elegant design. Both in what and how the yimplemented and what they choose NOT to implement.
If you fall for McQuaid like rhetoric about large worlds and no instancing etc. without examing the other side of the issue and all the other features they promise and whether or not the fit together. Then you will never get a game with good immersion.
What a designer chooses NOT to do is every bit as important as what they choose TO do. One of the best signs of an amateur schister or just incompetent designer or both is when they promise everything together all in one package. Not just because its too good to be true, but because some combinations of good things are actually bad. Like vinegar and backing soda.
Guild Wars and DDO are dungeon crawl games. That is one of the major reasons they are so heavily instanced. But it has other consequences. Travel times interfere with dungeon crawls in multiple ways.
If you make a game for which you intend 80% of player time to be dungeon crawls and you put in Eve-like travel times you have put Vinegar and baking soda together. Its bad design.
And when you get amateurish McQuiad like throw the kitchen sink at it, throw everything that SEEMS to firtwith with the individual goals, you are almost guaranteed that this happens. And then you are left with the mitigation of the features you wanted.
So demand well designed games that fit with your goals and keep on eye on what works well with what. Or else you will have problems.
Before when you warped to 15 km I would and did agree. So covering that 15km even in frigate, at say 300 m/s took I think 1 minute at the least if I remember what my timing came out to. Even with afterburners it was significant.
I always wondered about that 15 km limit. I think they shortened it because book marks were so prevalent and such big business for selling that they did the smart thing and didn't fight it since they probably can't change the bookmark system.
I don't think they actually think the 15 km buffer was a bad idea. I can't say its bad design as it was part of the inherent restrictions of travel, but I can say it made the game tedious for me. And having it gone makes casual kill mission running actually seem like less of a pain in the ass. I always thought it was kind of a bad idea for stations, I could see for jump gates, but for stations not really.
Either way they were smart enough to realize no matter how much they liked it, it was only punishing people who hadn't paid for bookmarks. Another instance of where one person's idea of "immersion" really just was made irrelevant or unjustifiably punishing by game design. In this case the bookmark/warp to system combination. And in this case the people being punished were the lower eschalon and newbies.
But still any non warp running around is pretty slow. If you have to harvest a string of wrecks over say 50-70 km its gonna take a while without a micro warpdive and those don't work in deadspace. But that's EvE it ambles a long at a certain pace. Changing that would simply change the audience not "make it better".
I don't really mind traveling as long as its interesting and fun. For example flying instead of running which you can see the scenery but you go faster. Dark and Light had some nice ideas for travel, being able to use your shield as a sled and such (to bad that game was such a bust). If there was a game in the present time or future with cars people wouldn't be complaining, its just running around that gets dull. I also think it has to do with what you see. You run from place to place and you just see mobs just standing there, then walking 5 feet and standing there. A more immersove game would have mobs attacking each other and hunting for food, there would be seasons and mobs would be migrating with the seasons. When you're in town the NPC's wouldn't just stand there, you'd have to look for them (kind of like Oblivion where you'd have to meet someone somewhere at a specific time or you can look for him in the bar or at his house. This would all be immersion.
Gestalt, your opinions on why EQ1 is crap are empty and there's no point in trying to pound it into people's heads. EQ1 was the big daddy MMO of the 3D world for a long time, and it's arguably one of the most beloved, up in the ranks with UO. The reason people loved the game was because it was engaging, immersive and new. It wouldn't be called EverCrack if people weren't addicted to the sense of immersion it gave them.
You may deem 'pointless, crappy travel' as something that brought the game down, but at the same time thousands of other players see that travel as a part of some of their fondest memories. Myself, I remember sprinting through Blackburrow as a noob to get to Halas. I remember getting high-levelled as a Bard and getting paid to run people through dangerous zones at high-speeds. I remember Druids handing out SoW at important gathering points so people could find their bodies quicker. EverQuest 1 was always buzzing with travellers zipping about on the roads, and because of this there was always something going on. There were interesting people to see. A level 2 Warrior could gape at a level 50 Warrior that was stopping by Qeynos for an actual REASON other than to talk to newbies, such as buying food and water for a run or using the bank.
Now that people bring up Kithicor Forest, I remember being nervous as all get-out when I zoned in. I was alert as possible and whenever I saw something running at me I'd jump/sprint as fast as I could the opposite direction.
All of these aspects are what made many people love EQ1, even though it had it's flaws. But just because you were more intent on the destination and not the journey doesn't make EQ1 inferior by any means.
They changed it because bookmarks were clogging up the technical side of things (most advanced players had tens of thousands of them). Bookmarks were never intended to be used that way, but CCP had tolerated their use that way for years and had balanced ship design, skill and module design, around the idea that a lot of players had bookmarks. They had a few options, and it was hotly debated among the players (and it's rumoured pretty hotly within CCP as well) as to what to do. They could have removed the bookmarks and left it at that. If they had done that, it would have made life easier for the gate campers and pirates, but even fewer players would venture into dangerous space, which is not what CCP wanted. Also it would have required a thorough review of balancing, because again previous balancing had assumed the widespread use of bookmarks. So instead they just gave the bookmarks to everyone by introducing warp to zero -- no more need to create, copy or (from CCP's perspective, importantly) store bookmarks, everyone had in effect an entire set by clicking warp to zero. This was extremely controversial when it happened, with people complaining about the impact on immersion, on the one hand, while pirates and other gate camping types complained that it would put them out of commission (not exactly, because there is still the other side of the gate...), but at the end of the day EVE lived, PvP wasn't killed by the change (almost ALL experienced PvPers used bookmarks prior to the change anyway), and it cut down on travel time a LOT.
In all, I think it was one of the better changes CCP made to EVE in the 3+ years I was playing the game.
I don't really mind traveling as long as its interesting and fun. For example flying instead of running which you can see the scenery but you go faster. Dark and Light had some nice ideas for travel, being able to use your shield as a sled and such (to bad that game was such a bust). If there was a game in the present time or future with cars people wouldn't be complaining, its just running around that gets dull. I also think it has to do with what you see. You run from place to place and you just see mobs just standing there, then walking 5 feet and standing there. A more immersove game would have mobs attacking each other and hunting for food, there would be seasons and mobs would be migrating with the seasons. When you're in town the NPC's wouldn't just stand there, you'd have to look for them (kind of like Oblivion where you'd have to meet someone somewhere at a specific time or you can look for him in the bar or at his house. This would all be immersion.
The simple answer is that a game made for Explorers may have quite different feature set than a game made for Acheievers.Its really quite simple when you think about it. An Explorer may want a huge world where distance matters. To an Achiever he most likely will view that distance as an obstruction to where ever he is going .
But keep in mind whenever you seriously thwart someones goals you will shatter their immersion. This might sound blunt or unromantic but people will not feel immersed if they are pissed off or annoyed. You don't give a girl flowers and then tell her she'd look better if she changed her outfit, it breaks the mood if you see what I am saying.
There is an implicit assumption that games must satisfy all four Bartle aspects simultaneously. This is flat out false and misleading. Trying to do so can ruin your game. Its not impossible but the types are not all nice nice happy happy lets all play together and only a game that understand that has a chance to do all four to a decent degree.
Some aspects of the four different subtypes are pretty much at loggerheads and it is in fact a very very rare game that can legitimately satisfy significant portions of all four. And these games are highly restricted in what they may and may not do. And further they will NEVER satisfy all aspects of all four because of cases like the above situation.
People would do well to realize this dynamic that is part of the Bartle types and gameplay.
Does anyone believe that EQ1 was not heavily achievement based? The progenitor of the uber raid guilds? The notion that it did not have heavy aspects of the achiever mentality is simply preposterous. They made entire expansions heavily based on raids that were not originally in the game.
Doesn't it seem not just reasonable but natural to expect achievers to want to get as much as they can as quick as they can? Whether you like that gameplay or not, I think this is pretty much a given.
So therefore if you want a game that satisfies Achievers and Explorers to an acceptable degree wouldn't it perhaps be wise to create a possbility where you can Achieve things without a lot of travel time sinks? But at the same time in order to satisfy an Explorer you need to make sure there are cool things that can not be gotten to in a trivial manner.
Now look at EQ1 if the special Explorer place is some sort of farmable grind location that gives out some very good rewards, then you have created a place for Achievers as well and suddenly mixed two of contradictory goals. The Explorers will hate that there is this big line to farm their special place and the Achievers will hate that it takes so long to get there and that they have to go over the same crap over and over just to get there.
In fact I would go so far as to say that a more complete vision of the Bartle paradigm would include various traits of each of the subtypes and which traits are incompatible. That would be a far better guide for Developers than surveys about who falls into which of the four to what percent.
For example large worlds with travel time can both be enoyed by Killers and Exploreres. Basically because a large world is what creates the "world PvP" style game some like. Also it can help create a game with long term strategy as opposed to match based tactics.
At the same time a large world with travel time can be a large barrier to Acheivers and a barrier to Socializers who want to get together with friends.
Although I do not find EvE's mission system to be all that fun I think they may be on the right track. They have kill missions, they almost never require significant travel. They have trade missions, they have medium travel and medium socializing and are enhanced by knowledge of the market and knowing people etc. They now have Exploration missions which is typical explorer stuff and can be done with no killing at all.
Whether they realize it or not the are tailoring these things to appeal to the aspects of the Bartle types and to not allow other parts of the game from another Bartle type to infringe.
It is possible to make a game that appeals to some degree to all bartle types, but its tricky and some combinations are a bad idea and most likely some compromises and work arounds will need to be made.
But its important to also realize that some game designs simply will never satisfy one or more of the four all that much. If one of their core features is an Achiever based mechanism that is not friendly with the Exploration then that is simply that. Similarly if the game is PvP based.
This is why you get all these FFA PvP endlessly getting shot down. Look at EvE, it is not full on FFA. Its regulated FFA. Why? Because FFA interefers with all other types. It can be a serious damper on all three. Its hard to explore when you are constatnly getting killed.
But some people want a full on FFA game with no restictions at all. That is fine, but if you do this you must realize that the KIller subtype has been given implicit primacy over the other the subtypes for the purposes of anything that conflicts with the Killer subtype.
You want to socialize? Fine but you gotta socialize and form a PvP group, because if you throw a foofy tea party you stand a good chance of getting massacred.
You want to explore? Fine but you better be preparedto fight and maybe bring friends to fight.
You want to Achieve? Well that means killing people not uber PvE loot, sorry.
Conversely an Achiever game make it the other way around. You want to be a Killer? Sorry you gotta do some uber raiding. How many WoW people complained of this? Many. How many raided and hated it because they wanted good PvP gear. Many. Ruin immersion? You beat when the idea of your character is about conquering others and instead you are forced into a what you consider tedium versus un-immersive PvE mob-bots that move in un-immersive predictable ways.
Is a completely FFA game therefore automatically bad? No it simply doomed to never be able to satisfy the other types all that well. People are right when they say it does not play well, because it doesn't. Therefore its not bad but it is unpopular.
Nor is FFA completely bad a concept when you restrict it to no longer interefere with the other Bartle types. However it is important to realize that restricted FFA and full on FFA are not the same thing. Rallos Zek EQ1 is not the same as EvE.
So you are right that some types have suffered at the expense of others. However this is actually the correct way to make the games. They should suffer if you are marketting certain types of games.
This is why WoW is successful they emphasized the Achiever parts and de-empahsized the other three types. I include Killers, because EQ1 had more hardcore PvP than WoW on its PvP servers. They did this because they realized they were interfering with key aspects of the Achiever type and its better to narrow the focus than ruin what is your draw.
It may be the case that a game that appeals to all types could wind up being the most successful. But I will guarantee you something; any game that allows any of the four Bartles types to be in significant conflict will be a marginal game at best. Its is ok to be LACKING a Bartle type but you cannot put two of them into conflict. The MMORPG world is littered with this and is the main reason an otherwise fun MMORPOG does not succeed.
The two most successful games show this, WoW and Guild Wars. I know Guild War is not a popular thing here but it has sold far far more boxes than any-non WoW game. Eve doesn't count because many people simply don't think its fun. Although if more people did I think it would bear the trend as well.
WoW and GW basically made it so that no Bartle types are in conflict and minmized the others to achieve this. That is why they seem smooth. Why they are said to have gotten rid of the problems of older games. If you look at talks by Rob Pardo on WoW's design, he does not talk in this way, but it is clear that everything they did had certain achivere goals in mind as the primary goal. Any other Bartle type is a side effort for extra fun. And when people play WoW that is how they view those things. What you see is what you get and Pardo and the Blizz guys were smart enough to realize you don't let a nice to have screw up the bread and butter and they kept a good focus on that.
This is in contrast to EvE which does actually make real efforts to satisfy all of them and is in fact the only true successor to the age MUDs the Bartle test was based on. But is also a game that is very generic in some aspects and could probably never have the type of dungoen crawls WoW or DDO have.
Games that want to have certain strengths are simply going to have to make the decision of which Bartle type to focus on.
This is one of the reasons WoW does not do random instances. They believe that its a strength to have quality scripted static encounters. And they play to that strength. Of course this means that a game like CoX with random instancing is a much better game for socializing and in fact does have more Socializer Bartle types in it. But the WoW people are still right their dungeon crawls are a bit higher quality than the average CoX instance, although I think CoX Instances are more fun there is not arguing that the WoW ones can throw more elaborate surprised your way.
These are the bounds of our cage. There are tradeoffs and ignoring them and trying to satisfy all of them or believe everything plays together nicely is mistaken.
My "wasted time" is doing something that is not part of my Bartle type, and it may be someone elses 'fun time'. If I am low on explorer then every time I am rerunning the same road is wasted time and it pisses me off and breaks the mood. If I am a Killer not being able to attack someone, even if its suicide, is annoying and breaks the mood.
If you try to do everything for every possible Bartle you will simply wind up breaking everyones mood. At some point you must weed things out. And the more intense you want one Bartle type to be the more you must weed out the conflicts and either get rid of one if or find a work around. And some conflicts have no work around.
Its not quite that simple as there are interactions between the types that make each both better. But there are the interactions between types that make both worse.
For every person you know who loved it there were many people who tried it and thought it was not a good game. In fact derided it and are now or were playing WoW which is a game made and designed by former EQ players. This includes Blizzard's VP of design, ran Lead Designer Kaplan's guild before he passed leadership to him.
You say my posts are empty and yet missed 80% of what I said. I never said those things didn't accomplish anything. In fact I said those mechanisms are very powerful.
But the last line of your post is amazingly telling:
"you were more intent on the destination and not the journey doesn't make EQ1 inferior by any means."
It's interesting that you recognize that in order to enjoy these thing you must be intent on the hourney and not the destination.
Yet you must on some level admit that EQ1 was a highly Acheiver oriented game. It did produce uber raiding afterall.
So what we have is the admission that you need this mentality and the almost inarguable fact that EQ1 was actually heavily based on the mentality you accuse me of having, that is the destination and all its goodies are what is important. Afterall if you show up 5 minutes late at some Planes of Power raid you could be kicked fro the guild. What? Oh, hey man, its all about the journey, man, not, like the destination. You know its all real cosmic and stuff. Why are you trying harsh my mellow with your raid cockblocks and schedules and stuff?
Which is exactly my point thanks for lending proof to my thesis that EQ1 is at its heart a contradiction and all is the root of all its problems from the eventual mitigation of travel to the birth of the Peasant and Lord/Haves and Have Nots.
They jammed every kind of Bartle type feature they could possibly think of together except for the Killer type because thsoe amateurs could see the Killer type does not play nice together. And lo and hold they have contradictions.
And when they ran into an Explorer feature that messed with an Achiever feature what did they do? Erred on the side of Achievers. And why were they forced to do so, because they didn't design the Achiever stuff to play nice with the Explorer stuff. And if they erred the other way no one would play the game other than a few people.
And then you wound up with entrenched camps both demanding things for different reasons and both are screwed because EQ1 was designed to try to have it both ways but it was to late to change either one.
They changed it because bookmarks were clogging up the technical side of things (most advanced players had tens of thousands of them). Bookmarks were never intended to be used that way, but CCP had tolerated their use that way for years and had balanced ship design, skill and module design, around the idea that a lot of players had bookmarks. They had a few options, and it was hotly debated among the players (and it's rumoured pretty hotly within CCP as well) as to what to do. They could have removed the bookmarks and left it at that. If they had done that, it would have made life easier for the gate campers and pirates, but even fewer players would venture into dangerous space, which is not what CCP wanted. Also it would have required a thorough review of balancing, because again previous balancing had assumed the widespread use of bookmarks. So instead they just gave the bookmarks to everyone by introducing warp to zero -- no more need to create, copy or (from CCP's perspective, importantly) store bookmarks, everyone had in effect an entire set by clicking warp to zero. This was extremely controversial when it happened, with people complaining about the impact on immersion, on the one hand, while pirates and other gate camping types complained that it would put them out of commission (not exactly, because there is still the other side of the gate...), but at the end of the day EVE lived, PvP wasn't killed by the change (almost ALL experienced PvPers used bookmarks prior to the change anyway), and it cut down on travel time a LOT.
In all, I think it was one of the better changes CCP made to EVE in the 3+ years I was playing the game.
Yes I agree its a good change and now that you relate this I remember the stuff about space being what caused the crisis, forced them to deal with it.I guess what I am curious about is what exactly made them so reluctant.
If it was just immersion then well that is a little off, because nobody in the know would do warping to 15 km anyway unless they were just a hardcore RPer. Theoretical immersion is all well and fine but the implementation wasn't accomplishing it.
But more to the point is even if they had a 100% implementation that forced everyone to warp to 15 km on a station and jumpgate I don't really see how that helped because frankly in empire space docking has very little danger or anything and waiting 1.5 minutes while you move through empty space is not that immersive.
Maybe fifteen seconds but 90 seconds you pretty much get up and go get a drink after the first 30 seconds. For the jumpgates I could see as that could be part of the travel calculations for how fast things should be moving around system. Still tedious but it servers a purpose.
On some level I genuinely think it was for immersion only for stations and not really anything "practical", but it seems like a very unrealistic thing to expect a majority of people to sit and watch for that long. Not if you have any appreciation for cinema. Even Bladerunner and 2001 A space Odyssey moved things a long faster. Unless they think everyone gets baked before they play EvE. Although ....
I don't fail to realize this.In fact I realize something more profound. I meet people from active things not downtime. So do other people. I also realize that people like you meet people during downtime.
The reason this is profound is your rule is not a rule, its just the way you do things. Therefore enforcing your way on me would cause me to meet less people not more.
So your design would cause you to meet more people and me to meet less, but of course have the ancillary effect of causing me to cancel my sub. And most likely be a net loss for the game in total.
The universality of the benefit of forced downtime is incorrect. This is easy to prove because you only need one instance to prove a universal statement wrong. So I am not stating an opinion. It is pretty darn objectively solid.
Now my opinion is that statistics wise easily 30% and posssibly as high as 60% of a population hates and finds enforced downtime counter productive to the way the do things.
This is enough to make it a bad idea, but conversely enough on the other end to somehow incorporate or encourage people to "hang out".
Wow man, you're a bit hardcore! None the less, interesting
I see your point and when I said what people fail to realise was geared towards a general approach and not to forget that I was looking at a side that other didn't look at. At the moment, all your replies are direct attacks to the opinion of others. You might want to take things less personaly and actually discuss with people. You do not have to come up with statistics and such since you don't even know if the person you're replying too is actually someone from the industry.
Seriously, my post was not made to offend anyone and I don't think anyone got offended except you.
Obviously, that was based on my experience and obviously SWG was not the most popular game. However, there's something that spawns out of these downtime/Sandbox type of game and if you did actively play, you would probably agree with me. You might have played and hated it too... Reason, I said, if you actively played it. Of course, you can make friends in the heat of a high octane moment and I bet that the next time you talk to that new friend, will be during a short downtime period.
What I said was not a design made by me, it was a design made by the folks that made SWG. I took that design to point out what I appreciated of downtimes. Did I like waiting for a shuttle... of course not! Do you like waiting for the bus in the morning???
(oh and I don't go talking to everyone while waiting for the bus!)
See all I did was showing one side of the medal that I thought people were overlooking.
(edited so you don't get offended a second time)
Yeah it's basically true. I remember I had some heated discussions with the more hardcore RP types in my then corp at the time, and they refused to use bookmarks due to immersion reasons, but I tend to agree that waiting at gate after gate after gate is just not immersive, it's time consuming.
I think the main thing that made CCP reluctant was the complaints from the gate camping community that this would shut down half of the gankable traffic. It was really a hollow complaint because everyone who wasn't a noob had bookmarks for dangerous space, so basically it amounted to saying "we want to be able to easily gank noobs without bookmarks on the outbound gate". I think CCP was weighing the impact of slightly reduced risk for PvP, on the one hand, against getting rid of BMs altogether (which would have forced more players into Empire, and clogged up the system in another way). In short I think it was the gate camping lobby that made them reluctant to implement the change at the time, and the concern that it would cut down too much on PvP.
Well its interesting that a rather good discussion of gaming immersion has turned almost excuslively into a "are travel times good" discussion.
Immersion is far more then travel times. Its a game with real risk, real reward. Its the ability to have an impact on the world you are "living" in. Its an enviornment where your reputation matters-act like a clown folks will remember, act like a hero or know your class-and folks will remember that too!
Its a game where there are almost as many non-combat/quest/grind activities to do as thier are grind activities. Fishing, dancing, pubs, events, non combat clothing, robust crafting, housing, and a true player based economy.
Its a game where a sense of scale and scope is meaningful. Getting from x to y actually has some significance. I recall in Everquest meeting a barbarian for the first time as a halfling-i was SHOCKED! There are players/alliances entire wars in EVE that i know nothing about due to the vast scope of the game-that fascinates me. It feels real, epic, vibrant and dynamic.
Its a game where a sense of the "random encounter" can still happen. This encounter might be a monster, a neat river/stream/waterfall/cave, a player needing assistance on a quest or to recover a corpse, a group of roleplayers participating in an event, or just a random bunch of good folks hanging around and developing the community. (the instancing in ddo, guildwars, potbs virtually kills this entire aspect of gaming-there is no immersion at all in these games..zero).
No game can be all things to all people but I would offer that EQ1, DAOC, AO, AC, UO and to some degree WoW and LOTRO have accomplished this (EVE sorta sits in its own universe as a total sandbox). WoW only comes up short imho due to the horrific, horrific, horrific community-and LOTRO because the combat system/character system is just plain--BORING...but at least there is some immersion in each of these.
The games that have followed hellgate, fury, guildwars, ddo, shadowbane, horizons, all the asian grinds, etc have fallen commically short of getting even a small portion of it right.
In fact I realize something more profound. I meet people from active things not downtime. So do other people. I also realize that people like you meet people during downtime.
The reason this is profound is your rule is not a rule, its just the way you do things. Therefore enforcing your way on me would cause me to meet less people not more.
So your design would cause you to meet more people and me to meet less, but of course have the ancillary effect of causing me to cancel my sub. And most likely be a net loss for the game in total.
The universality of the benefit of forced downtime is incorrect. This is easy to prove because you only need one instance to prove a universal statement wrong. So I am not stating an opinion. It is pretty darn objectively solid.
Now my opinion is that statistics wise easily 30% and posssibly as high as 60% of a population hates and finds enforced downtime counter productive to the way the do things.
This is enough to make it a bad idea, but conversely enough on the other end to somehow incorporate or encourage people to "hang out".
Wow man, you're a bit hardcore! None the less, interesting
I see your point and when I said what people fail to realise was geared towards a general approach and not to forget that I was looking at a side that other didn't look at. At the moment, all your replies are direct attacks to the opinion of others. You might want to take things less personaly and actually discuss with people. You do not have to come up with statistics and such since you don't even know if the person you're replying too is actually someone from the industry.
Seriously, my post was not made to offend anyone and I don't think anyone got offended except you.
Obviously, that was based on my experience and obviously SWG was not the most popular game. However, there's something that spawns out of these downtime/Sandbox type of game and if you did actively play, you would probably agree with me. You might have played and hated it too... Reason, I said, if you actively played it. Of course, you can make friends in the heat of a high octane moment and I bet that the next time you talk to that new friend, will be during a short downtime period.
What I said was not a design made by me, it was a design made by the folks that made SWG. I took that design to point out what I appreciated of downtimes. Did I like waiting for a shuttle... of course not! Do you like waiting for the bus in the morning???
(oh and I don't go talking to everyone while waiting for the bus!)
See all I did was showing one side of the medal that I thought people were overlooking.
(edited so you don't get offended a second time)
No it actually is more fundamental than it seems.I will not meet people during downtime. Its doesn't put me in the the mood. Some people are the complete opposite.
Down time causes a "I need something to do" response in most people.
But the profound part comes in when you realize that some people like you respond socially to that response and some people respond a-socially.
Just like some people go off and solve a problem alone and them come back and discuss it with people while other people like to colloborate with others from the start.
This is why ideas like forced downtime or forced grouping for that matter cause as many problems as they solve. Because in the end they provoke a response but believe everyone handles this response the same, which is simply wrong.
Not only will I tend not to socialize during downtime I will socialize quite differently. Some people only socialize downtime and are all business otherwise. Some people are chatting all the time.
I have a friend who felt compelled to go out to a bar and spend double for beer when all we were doing was sitting with friends and drinking beer and not talking to anyone else. I used to tell him it would be cheaper if we hung out at home. But he would sit at home alone if we didn't go to a bar and wouldn't hang out at people's places. To me it didn't matter.
I had an old roomate who was the exact opposite he would only hang out at people's places and bring his own beer.
Me I don't care where I sit to socialize and generally I would rather be doing somethign fun while I socialize since being bored makes not talk much and start thinking about abstract things.
As soon as I was put in a cantina in SWG I would be trying to leave. My friend would like it and wouldn't do anything else and my old roommate would be complaining about the price of beer and saying we should have player housing instead.
Yes, there's a lot of different way to see a game. I mean, seing that you're a fellow EVE player, you obviously have alot of patience. This allow you access a certain type of game that is much slower pace then WOW, City of Heroes and such.
However, one thing I can say is that immersion comes from how you personaly dive in. However, every situation has an alternative. My way of making these boring downtime fun was to chat and make friends, it was a solid alternative. It also made the immersion much more interesting
No one takes the time to truly, "immerse" themselves into a game anymore. While waiting for those shuttles, I would look down on the Tatooine sunset and just be dazzled on how beautiful it is. If the load time was long enough, I'd visit some of the iconic places in the city for FUN.
When vehicles were introduced into SWG travel times between cities were short, but then no one took the time to truly investigate what was in-between those two cities. My first log-in into SWG was before vehicles and, while I was confused half of the time, it was the most immersive night I had into a game. I met interesting aliens, ran from city to city looking for work to do, and most importantly took the time to immerse myself on Tatooine.
I'm afraid I'll never have an experience like that again..,
So you think its just a massive conincidence that WoW has achieved an order of magnitude more subs by essentially copying EQ1 and "streamlining" these things? Or is it just the Blizzard name?For every person you know who loved it there were many people who tried it and thought it was not a good game. In fact derided it and are now or were playing WoW which is a game made and designed by former EQ players. This includes Blizzard's VP of design, ran Lead Designer Kaplan's guild before he passed leadership to him.
You say my posts are empty and yet missed 80% of what I said. I never said those things didn't accomplish anything. In fact I said those mechanisms are very powerful.
But the last line of your post is amazingly telling:
"you were more intent on the destination and not the journey doesn't make EQ1 inferior by any means."
It's interesting that you recognize that in order to enjoy these thing you must be intent on the hourney and not the destination.
Yet you must on some level admit that EQ1 was a highly Acheiver oriented game. It did produce uber raiding afterall.
So what we have is the admission that you need this mentality and the almost inarguable fact that EQ1 was actually heavily based on the mentality you accuse me of having, that is the destination and all its goodies are what is important. Afterall if you show up 5 minutes late at some Planes of Power raid you could be kicked fro the guild. What? Oh, hey man, its all about the journey, man, not, like the destination. You know its all real cosmic and stuff. Why are you trying harsh my mellow with your raid cockblocks and schedules and stuff?
Which is exactly my point thanks for lending proof to my thesis that EQ1 is at its heart a contradiction and all is the root of all its problems from the eventual mitigation of travel to the birth of the Peasant and Lord/Haves and Have Nots.
They jammed every kind of Bartle type feature they could possibly think of together except for the Killer type because thsoe amateurs could see the Killer type does not play nice together. And lo and hold they have contradictions.
And when they ran into an Explorer feature that messed with an Achiever feature what did they do? Erred on the side of Achievers. And why were they forced to do so, because they didn't design the Achiever stuff to play nice with the Explorer stuff. And if they erred the other way no one would play the game other than a few people.
And then you wound up with entrenched camps both demanding things for different reasons and both are screwed because EQ1 was designed to try to have it both ways but it was to late to change either one.
...What?
Is it entirely necessary to ramble on and on? If you have a point, please put it in a nice tidy thesis at the top of your post. It doesn't do much good to ramble on about the Achiever side of a game versus the Explorer side of a game, as if they are yin and yang.
'Achievement' is an entirely opinion-based thing. To one person, getting awesome gear may be an achievement while another person may see successfully sprinting across/discovering Kithicor Forest while naked an achievement.
And your point about WoW being more popular than EverQuest has little to do with EverQuest's 'immersion/achievement conflict' hoohaa. World of Warcraft came 5 years after EverQuest. 5 years. Besides, when EverQuest was made it was in 1999 and there was a very undeveloped MMO industry. The reason WoW stays on top if it's game now is because it had a lot of data to work off of and a lot of other people's trials to learn from. You might as well bash Quake 1 for not being as polished as Gears of War while you're at it.
That's all I have, due to the fact I find your logic very hard to follow and understand because of the way you lay your ideas out.
...What?
.....
'Achievement' is an entirely opinion-based thing. To one person, getting awesome gear may be an achievement These people are termed Achievers by Bartle
while another person may see successfully sprinting across/discovering Kithicor Forest while naked an achievement. These people are terms Exploreres by Bartle
...Maybe you don't like the Bartle types, maybe you think there should be more or less maybe think they are BS, that's cool.
But either way its not really arguable that in EQ1 the getting awesome gear/gaining levels and alternate advancement as the achievement was the pre-emenent achievement for most of the populace and most content was designed around this via placement of content in static spots in a static world.
Clearly people's ability and speed of access to those placements affects this major focus of the game.
Clearly those people who want to get as much stuff as quick as possible will not tolerate huge times to get their stuff.
Clearly many people made every effort to get as much as quick as possible. I doubt anyone seriously believes power leveling never existed in EQ1 or that people didn't grind for maximal efficiency etc etc.
And of course in the end the EQ1 devs did in fact make it easier for people to get to places to get their stuff quicker. Because they simply couldn't keep releasing content all over the place and actually expect people to get there in a timely fashion. Its simply wasn't scalable.
Well you see not everyone likes a game so easy you don't even have to try.
If there are people out there that want awesome gear and they want it NOW, they're not going to find it in any game and if they do it'll be incredibly boring. Part of the huge challenge and 'addictiveness' of EQ1 was A. Getting to the hard spots where the good loot was and then B. Conquering the holder of the said loot.
When you throw both of those aspects into the game, you get a much more challenging and therefore rewarding experience. However, I do agree with you on the Devs making EQ1 far too easy eventually. They constantly churned out expansion packs that gave freebies to everyone and now look at the game; it's barren.
I believe Bartle's Achievers and Explorers can exist together. They've done so for a long time, and a game doesn't have to suck because it attempts to serve both. It's not a conflict of interest in my eyes, it's a maintenance of equilibrium.
I prefered AC to EQ, but in all other respects QFT
~signed~