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A way to stop theorycrafing.
Waterlily
Member UncommonPosts: 3,105
What if you start hiding combat numbers to the client?
Only health bars will be shown.
What if MMO start hiding your combat numbers and the damage numbers are just simply not shown?
The reverse could also be done with incoming mob DPS.
It could potentially stop a good amount of DPS theorycrafting and you would still see the impact of your DPS by the mob's health bar, you would just be enable to parse DPS numbers. How would you feel about not being able to see the actual numbers? Would you be ok with that if it stopped DPS theocrafting? Would there be any downsides I didn't think about?
Thanks.
////theorycrafting: mathematically analyse or parse gameplay or data points/////
//// disclaimer: I'm very opposed to theorycrafting and the impact it has on gaming, especially MMO. Even though I did a ton of theorycrafting myself it wasn't until I realised what benefits it gave our guild that it started to become less fun because you know certain things you shouldn't know. Now you know my motive. ////
Anyway, this isn't a discussion about right or wrong, this is just an idea I had, simple.
Comments
I too wish it did not exist. I do not find it fun when games are made in a way where only certain paths do best for each class, for each character. I do not think it's fun to have to follow the "best" build for anything, PvP or PvE.
I think it would require a bit more than removing numbers, though.
I thought about this too. I got really annoyed when someone comes along uninvited and starts spouting numbers I really don't care about.
I wouldn't mind if the numbers were hidden. Infact I'd preffer it if the game showed damage some other way, perhaps by the way the enemy looks and the damage accumulating on their equipment and stuff. Perhaps add some sort of "feel" to the strikes so that ones that did more damage had some sort of staggering affect on the opponent or it would give you a nice "thud" when you hit.
I've said it before. I play my games more by feel then by math. To me all the number crunching takes away from the fun.
No required quests! And if I decide I want to be an assassin-cartographer-dancer-pastry chef who lives only to stalk and kill interior decorators, then that's who I want to be, even if it takes me four years to max all the skills and everyone else thinks I'm freaking nuts. -Madimorga-
A Tale in the Desert obscures a lot of stuff. Players just reverse-engineer it. Indeed, reverse-engineering how the game works is part of the point of the game.
Puzzle Pirates obscures enough to sometimes make it not entirely obvious what you're supposed to do. That leads to people doing things all wrong for months without ever catching on that they're doing them all wrong. Then they tell other people what to do, and tell them to do things all wrong. I really don't like that approach.
That would make it way more strategic. I remember EQ had it like this, but you could stil see the numbers in the combat chat. I don't mind seeing numbers when casting and killing a mob, its those damn damage meters and parsers that get on my nerves.
If it's possible to run some formulas to find the "best" build, then the game is rather degenerate. If you play solitaire, for example, you may get some feel for this move is better than that one, but you're not going to compute that this move gives you the greatest probability possible to win given the information you have. A game that doesn't have that degree of complexity in its combat system is not a good game, unless perhaps the game isn't really built around combat.
This should not be confused with games where a bunch of people will claim that some particular build is the best, but really don't know what they're talking about. That happens in Guild Wars a lot. Indeed, people who try to use the same build in Guild Wars everywhere are quite often using a build that isn't very good, because which skills work better varies considerably by location, with the possible exception of some of the PvE-only cheats.
I would love to see the elimination of theory crafting. Any advantage gained through formula only furthers the linear development feeling. I'd prefer the the challenge of having to use trial and error and suffer the consequences of my choices rather than have a cookie-cutter build because it's the only thing that works. I've always had the opinion that, when I've decided upon my character type, the course of it's progress has already been predetermined by someone else and thus is not truly of my creation and therefore it is not my toon. It always becomes the work of someone else despite the fact that it exists on my account and I'm the only one to have played it. I'm forced by theory crafting to just make a clone if I am to be successful. Without theory crafting there would be no template and I would be the actual creator of what I end up with for good or bad.
The solution is pretty simple, actually. Make it so that some builds are better in some places, and other builds better in other places. Then, let players freely switch builds. Guild Wars did that and it worked. No one is going to cobble together the best possible group builds for every single spot in the game, and even if they did, the classes you have available usually wouldn't match the "best" class combination, so you'd have to improvise, anyway.
Impossible.
Look at City of Heroes. In CoH Cryptic hid the numbers to how everything was calculated; damage, defense, accuracy, everything. That didnt stop the players though. The dedicated would perform hundreds even thousands of tests to find the numbers themselves. Years later Cryptic finally gave up and released the real numbers themselves and admitted that the fans were extremely close with their tests.
If you hide something people WILL discover it, no matter how well hidden it is. It's a little something we like to call "human nature".
I'm also against theorycrafting and "e-sporting" of games especially MMOs...
What I believe is that if you give the classes the ability to perform their basic role to some extent with no talents/specialisations it will vastly improve this issue.
However I can see problems for example in WoW if a druid can tank and do basic healing with no talents, then the class is seriously overpowered in PvP for example.
I tend to believe it's hard to balance a game in both PvE + PvP unless you have the same roles in both aspects...
I like what LOTRO has done with traits, as a guardian i can tank even with random traits equipped but I'm a better tank if I have tanking traits.
But I never said "can't tank I'm DPS" - Why ? Cause my archetype as a guardian enables me to tank no matter what to some extent.
Same applies to my gf's minstrel...She can dps quite nicely if she sees no healing is needed but if things start to get ugly she just switches off her War Speech and goes to healer mode.
Also Turbine prohibits the use of addons which is also a major cause for the downfall of the genre by turning everything into timing + number crunching.
Sometimes it's better not to know how efficient things are in game, it kinda keeps the magic that way I think
Nods, it took me a while to realise this myself.
My only real beef in Everquest 2 is the people who live by the friggin' parser. "Oh, you do 2% less damage than someone of your class and level should. We need someone else."
I'd actually like it if you couldn't see every little detail about damage so people might just group for the fun and challenge for a change, instead of locking out certain classes and favoring their 'dream teams".
If you take away numbers completely to try and avoid parsing and specialized builds it wouldn't stop it. There is another factor to measure success and optimal builds. That's time. If using spell A B C from skill tree 1 will take me 25 seconds to kill a random mob. But using spell A B C from skill tree 2 will take me 15 - 20 seconds then you have a formular. X player comes a long and kills it in 5 seconds flat using his spells + his pet... well you see where i am going with this. If people can't use numbers they will use other indicators.
I would like MMO's not to be about who can kill the fastest and best. Who has the superior gear. Who is allowed to raid because of said gear. The truth is. People want it that way. Atleast anybody i have ever encountered online and offfline. I started my MMORPG career in internet cafes where everybody plays the same type of games. this was before DSL became so popular. People want to brag. They want to show off and stand out. Some of them because they don't have a chance to stand out in rl. They want to be better than everybody else. Be admired. As long as those motives are there, there will be people doing whatever it takes to find the best builds and class. It's a natural competitive behavior.
The way to eliminate it is to kill off skill trees and other systems that steer you towards certain builds.I don't think numbers would do it.
You could make it like a first person shooter. No stats health bars. Just you and your group pounding on mobs until they die. I wonder how that would work.
I AGREE! It was like that in wow. It shouldn't be that at all.
Theorycrafting is really just a fancy word for learning how to play the game. The only real way to make it so that players can't learn how to play is to make it so that there isn't anything to learn. In that case, you've got no depth to the game at all, as player skill plays no role and everything is purely grinding. I guess there are players with more free time than skill, and that takes catering to such players to its logical conclusion. I really don't think it would make for interesting gameplay, though.
While I have not read any of the thread, and I really don't care what is said; based on the title I am making the assumption that you view theorycrafting as a bad thing. While that view is yours to have and I have zero desire to despute it; I would point out that no game (if it is based on mutually exclusive dynamics that aren't completely linear) can survive and thrive without either theorycrafting or completely perfect developers and designers.
While I can understand people not liking being told that they could better maximize themselves, but no matter what game you play: There will be people that play it with the intent to desire perfection in their strategy. It provides plenty of resources for people to capitalize on (literally and metaphorically) in order to greatly broaden the interest and scope of the gameplay environment.
In the end, there honestly isn't any way to get rid of theorycrafting. Yes, you might be able to get rid of "If you equip this 3.1 weaponspeed weapon in your mainhand, and use this ability rotation, at this perfect timing interval, you will achieve maximum chance for maximum output!" But in the end you'd still have guys who notice that Action A followed by Actions B, C, D, E which in turn results in "Success". One of the people that experience this will probably be sparked to question: If I did Actions C, Z, E: I could probably achieve "Success" in a more effective manner! And therefore you have mathless theorycrafting. So even if you hide numbers and such, so long as there is a goal, and multiple paths towards that goal, people will theorycraft. It's human nature to try to maximize your personal gains at the least possible cost.
Just my two cents.
Thing is, are you really learning anything by going by what other people say? I find more satisfaction from being effective by my own whiles rather then listening to the self proclaimed "experts" that usually have such a narrow idea of what "works" and what doesn't.
No required quests! And if I decide I want to be an assassin-cartographer-dancer-pastry chef who lives only to stalk and kill interior decorators, then that's who I want to be, even if it takes me four years to max all the skills and everyone else thinks I'm freaking nuts. -Madimorga-
Thing is, are you really learning anything by going by what other people say? I find more satisfaction from being effective by my own whiles rather then listening to the self proclaimed "experts" that usually have such a narrow idea of what "works" and what doesn't.
Then the solution to theorycrafting according to you is just to ignore it and play your own way. That's not what this discussion is about however. We are talking about making a game that prevents theorycrafting. Ignoring it really isn't preventing it.
Games give you 2 weapons, one with +12 points of X, and the other with +5 % of y. You naturall want to know "what is the better weapon". Is a logicall sentiment. One will go to the vendor, the other will be equiped. So you want to know, you want to answer. And you want the truth.
Thing is, are you really learning anything by going by what other people say? I find more satisfaction from being effective by my own whiles rather then listening to the self proclaimed "experts" that usually have such a narrow idea of what "works" and what doesn't.
Then the solution to theorycrafting according to you is just to ignore it and play your own way. That's not what this discission is about however. We are talking about making a game that prevents theorycrafting. Ignoring it really isn't preventing it.
If it's practical to have other people tell you everything there is to know about the game, then there's not much depth to the game, and it's not a good game. If a great chess master spends a couple hours (or months, for that matter) teaching you how to play, would you then be as good as he is?
To ignore the theorycrafting is to retain the skills of a newbie forever. That's basically saying, other people can get better at the game, but I won't. That people wouldn't want to group with someone who doesn't know how to play and wishes not to learn shouldn't be surprising.
Even though I don't want this debate to become one where we discuss the benefits of theorycrafting versus the downsides. Extreme theorycrafting, what most people do, goes way beyond just being able to play your class. This is just the parse people on my server did to determine stun power of augments: http://giline.versus.jp/shiden/stun_e.htm This isn't just gameplay anymore, this is truely making mathematics out of a game and analyse thousands of data points.
Anyway, I hope that MMO will start to consider and look at where this is going and find ways to minimize it's impact. Preventing players from gathering these data points might be a way and was just an idea I had.
I honestly wouldn't care for a game that "hides" certain info from its players no matter what the reasons were (theorycrafting or not). Furthermore, i love the aspect of theorycrafting that is made available in some games.
Theorycrafting in an MMO means there is a complex aspect to the game itself, an involved community that is passionate abt the game, a sort of "endgame" that is worth of such time-consuming calculations and reports, and a added knoweldge that is offered as "raw data" by the MMO for its players.
The information resulting from theorycrafting is not evil by itself, it is only a few people that live by it (not the whole MMO population).
Anyway, to answer the OP: i would not be comfortable, nor fine, with the hiding of combat damage numbers in favor to "ban" theorycrafting.
Played: Earth'n'Beyond-WoW-EvE-EQ2-LoTRo-PotBS-CoV-Vanguard-FFXI-DDO-L2
I think it's a good idea to try to minimize the amount it's done.
Haven't you ever begun to play a new game, got to, say level 14, and went into your first dungeon. Well, I can remember often someone of the same level being a veteran to the game, telling me what I'm doing wrong. I don't mind tips, but when you tell me I'm going the wrong way (Far as talents, feats, skills, depending on the game, goes) when this particular way looks like more fun, then how am I really going to have fun with this punk throwing numbers in my face?
"Check it out, I'm FIRST on DPS! [Insert DPS Chart]"
"Want a cookie?"
Sure, I like sandbox more because I don't like the concept of "endgame." A game should have just that, game.
Does have data points in the game include having them say it in the description of the combat ability? So like Lightning causes 14-36 damage and stuns the target.
No, that would be fine I think. Descriptions don't really do that much harm I think, since this is info that's available to everyone and doesn't require you to parse fights. There has to be some way for players to see which items are preferred.
Of course, that's just my idea, anyone is free to change on it.
Thats my favourite part about Lineage 2 PvP, you dont know your enemies class, health, level, hp, mana...it adds real skill into the game, not running around looking for people with low HP. The only way you should be able to tell a char is damaged, is by its actions and animations.