Best game mechanic of all time? Probably the Jedi system in SWG. Destroyed that game.
Fixed.
Taking them out and changing the game to suit people like you killed that game........... true story. 250,000 out of 500,000 (or so) subs lost in 4 months. To date, the biggest MMO Exodus in history.
You must have a foggy memory. Here's what the Jedi mechanic in SWG was.
You grind for months to get these really really rare drops off these really really rare mobs. These drops then tell you what profession you have to max out. You max out that profession by (guess what) grinding at your skills for another month or so, then you go back to grinding for those rare drops, then they give you the next profession you had to master, another few months of grinding.
Finally, after all this horrible grinding, you get a Jedi, yay! Oh wait... there are literally HUNDREDS of other Jedi now? Oh good, so the game is just BountyHunter vs Jedi online! Great game! Weren't Jedi supposed to be uh.. rare?
Grinding is apart of the MMO genre. Every game has it and that seems to be your issue. The fact that the Jedi took the time to get to that point was pure dedication and they deserved what they got. If that was your goal when you originally started the game, then why were you trying to play Jedi Online? That method made it to where not every SoB could be a Jedi and there really weren't that many. Even if you look into the lore of the SWG time period, Jedi really weren't all that rare and in the time period of KOTOR and before that in SW:TOR , Jedi were extremely common.
It was in no way Bounty Hunter vs Jedi online. If that's what you thought, then you probably should have tried to do something else.
Best game mechanic of all time? Probably the Jedi system in SWG. Destroyed that game.
Fixed.
Taking them out and changing the game to suit people like you killed that game........... true story. 250,000 out of 500,000 (or so) subs lost in 4 months. To date, the biggest MMO Exodus in history.
Odd, since SWG probably never had more than 300K at its height.
AoC and WAR each lost more subs than SWG in only three month's time.
But I agree, the changes to the jedi in SWG were a travesty.
It was 500k and admitted by SOE, I remember it very well. It was 300k shortly after release, maybe that's what you remember?
There is no dumb mechanics, only counter-intuitive ones, hard to understand ones, and ones people simply oppose. The latter is what everyone here has issues with, "ones they don't like, and yet work fine, and others enjoy it". For that, I thinking the dumbest mechanic is a conglomerate of functions that try to please all the wrong people at once. No example handy, but I think WAR's universal 2-second cooldown applies as something they figured everyone would like, and ended up forming all sorts of redundancy when in use.
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4 Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
I actually like achievements...just not in the way we normally see them. I think they should be tied INTO the lore. Like, killing 5 mega zombies alone unlocks an achievement associated with the local league of paladins, impressing them into opening their storehouses to sell you some of their holy-themed weapons.
Attacking a town guard and surviving the ensuing clash that comes afterward for 10 minutes opens an achievement that allows you to gain faction with enemies.
Killing 100 players while on a boat unlocks an achievement that opens a hidden cove deep in the sea granting you access to a small band of pirates that sell you ships and equipment.
There are also other ways to bring achievements into the game in a neat way. Perhaps after falling a total of 10K meters ingame, you get an achievement that grants you a passive ability that cuts falling damage by 25%
You get teh idea....I like them. I just want better ways to use them.
I like meaningful achievements, I hate titles.
Worst mmo mechanic: Content gating. Most specifically those like Vex Thal and Plane of Time in EQ. More recently like The Watcher in LOTRO.
I actually like voice chat and in some games you pretty much have to have voice chat or else its a lot harder to play the game. Like Fallen Earth, since its not auto attack you have to quit all combat and just let mobs hit you while your typing. When using vent I can continue to fight and or run while I only have to press Z and say help. If I did this without voice chat most likely Id be dead by the time I typed help and they got over to me. Just mute who you think is annoying,its as simple as that.
Now as for raiding, I like to do raids but for the fun of taking a boss down not for gear. Raiding IMO should never give you gear, money and XP is what it should only give you. WoW totally pissed me off because of they way they handled raiding. I don't want to run the same damn thing over and over again just to get some phat loot. Sorry but that is borrrrrrrriiiiinnnnnnggggg
Sitting down and waiting for your mana regen. I mean who the F*** is enjoying sitting down and doing nothing? If I wanted to relax, I'd join a granny's knitting circle!
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
In any MMO with pet classes, any other class has to work harder to beat them, since those classes are facing off against 2 people, even if one is just AI driven and a bit weaker.
I actually like voice chat and in some games you pretty much have to have voice chat or else its a lot harder to play the game. Like Fallen Earth, since its not auto attack you have to quit all combat and just let mobs hit you while your typing. When using vent I can continue to fight and or run while I only have to press Z and say help. If I did this without voice chat most likely Id be dead by the time I typed help and they got over to me. Just mute who you think is annoying,its as simple as that.
Now as for raiding, I like to do raids but for the fun of taking a boss down not for gear. Raiding IMO should never give you gear, money and XP is what it should only give you. WoW totally pissed me off because of they way they handled raiding. I don't want to run the same damn thing over and over again just to get some phat loot. Sorry but that is borrrrrrrriiiiinnnnnnggggg
I agree with the raiding bit. I would tie it into my view of achievements, making raids something that took weeks to do...and unlock achievements for doing them that open access to things elsewhere. There would be loot, but only in the form of what the enemies used against you. Uber loot is kinda silly...and most of the drops you see in raids dont even make sense to the kill
Sitting down and waiting for your mana regen. I mean who the F*** is enjoying sitting down and doing nothing? If I wanted to relax, I'd join a granny's knitting circle!
Probably my favorite part of WAR was how they solved this. A small pool of very fast regenerating mana. It was so beautiful.
Sitting down and waiting for your mana regen. I mean who the F*** is enjoying sitting down and doing nothing? If I wanted to relax, I'd join a granny's knitting circle!
MMOs need down time. Solo its annoying, but it is useful for a variety of other reasons, adding strategy to combat, giving time for groups to socialize, give incentive for people to group, lots of good stuff.
Also, nothing is wrong with good raiding. WoW does NOT have good raiding. DAoC had a great raiding system.
The "Enemies are incredibly stupid" mechanic that allows for tanks and damage dealer. An intelligent AI would never attack the tank, they would go straight for the guy that's hurting him the most.
The "Enemies are incredibly stupid" mechanic that allows for tanks and damage dealer. An intelligent AI would never attack the tank, they would go straight for the guy that's hurting him the most.
The Quest Grind.. IMO quests should be few but long, interesting and hard to complete. I would be down for a game where it like takes multiple game sessions to complete a single quest. But I guess that is just me.
Absolutely. That and Endgames which turn the entire MMO into a grind..
4.) Point and Click movement systems ( I really hate these for some reason *shrug*)
I've never really understood the whole reason why people hate this. Oh, academically I suppose I do, but there were/are many games that rely upon this type of movement.
Diablo 1 and 2
Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age just to throw it in
Dungeon Siege
older games that people may remember such as Oni, or Summoner (( think Oni was point and click).
Some of my favorite games are point and click to move (NWN, NWN2, & DA:O) but in an mmo I prefer to use the movement keys to move around. There is a larger area to cover in mmo's and I like the WASD keys to get me moving along in those environments rather than clicking over and over again so that I can get from one are to another. In the games you mentioned there are more objects for a player to interact with so travel isn't as much of an issue as it is in an mmo. I never played the BG series on the PC I had them for the PS2 and I'm pretty sure I used the WASD keys in Diablo2 as well, but it has been a while.
I think I just prefer to have my mouse available to me when I need it or relaxed when I don't have to be clicking when I can toggle auto run or steer/strafe with WASDQE rather than clicking continuously in an mmo.
Sitting down and waiting for your mana regen. I mean who the F*** is enjoying sitting down and doing nothing? If I wanted to relax, I'd join a granny's knitting circle!
You're an SWG dev who didn't get why camping was fun, aren't you?
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Dumbest MMO mechanic ever made? Hmm, the MMO's released within the last five years have offered plenty of examples that might vie for that category.
Dumbest MMO mechanic...
Well, it's a five-way tie:
Heroic Opportunity Wheel in EQ2. This basically turned combat into a gimmicky spamfest that made little sense. Example: a warrior spams a bunch of keys, sets off an Heroic Opportunity which sets off a group heal. Just how does a sword swinger set off a group heal? Magic?
Delayed class selection in early EQ2 and in DAOC. EQ2's made you go through 20 levels before you could try out a specialized class, only to find it not to your taste and to have to go through another 20 levels again with a new toon. However, they later fixed this. DAOC had you allocate some free stat points at Level 1 when your actual final class selection was at Level 5. So basically, you have to prepare for your final class selection at Level 1 anyway, if you wanted your point allocation to optimize your final class selection at Level 5. (They should have just let players receive and distribute the points at Level 5.)
AOC's Tortage tutorial area. I am not a big fan of in-game tutorials; I think it breaks the immersion and makes the player feel like a helpless actor in a linear and repetitive play. But AOC's tutorial went on for 20 LEVELS.
Angled character stance and bizarre animations. Biggest offender was EQ2, in my experience, but there have been others. Basically, the concept that a character angles his body and turns his head to look over his left shoulder in some sort of combat stance. Might be okay for combat, but is distracting when you try to situate your character to face forward. Which way is really forward? Head and shoulders facing left while feet face off to the right? Silly.
Centralized high-level character zones with portals, such as EQ's the Plane of Knowledge or WOW's Dalaran. Because of convenience of portals and such, the path of least resistance compels players to base and to hang out in such cities. However, the end result is to depopulate and marginalize the rest of the game world. WOW is fixing this with their new upcoming expansion.
Heck, I could probably go on with a lot more. Seems the last 5 or 6 years were years of wild experimentation in MMO design.
I'm not very fond of point and click, mainly because I tend to use my mouse to activate skills. Probably a fivolous issue, but I feel that the usage of my right and left hand is not balanced, and that something is off. So yes, I would tend to prefer WASD movement, because at least that would mean that I would still be able to use both hands to play.
AoC's "innovative" combat. All the directional combat did was cramp and tire my hands.
"For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed: And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!" ~Lord George Gordon Byron
Dumbest MMO mechanic? Definitely raiding as the only way to advance your character in the end game. To this day, I just don't see how having multiple douche bags whacking on the same monster for 20 minutes as being heroic.
I concur. There's nothing that annoys me more than an economy that isn't 100% player-driven. Worst of all is games where the economy is controlled and "stabilized" by the company.
Give me some risks in the economy, that's what makes it interesting!
Gear dependency. Specifically, the whole concept of "tier gear". It's essentially MMO filler as it provides no real content, just a reason to grind the same content over and over so they don't have to implement anything actually interesting or, god forbid, unique.
2nd place goes to the "talent tree" system which, while I'm sure most think its the best thing ever! It's really not that great. Chiefly because you end up with "builds" or rather the larger problem "must have builds". The level of elitism and general bullshit that surrounds something as simple as trying to customize your play style is staggering. There must be a better way to do this, but once again, it's the standard cop-out option for most MMOs.
Comments
Fixed.
Taking them out and changing the game to suit people like you killed that game........... true story. 250,000 out of 500,000 (or so) subs lost in 4 months. To date, the biggest MMO Exodus in history.
You must have a foggy memory. Here's what the Jedi mechanic in SWG was.
You grind for months to get these really really rare drops off these really really rare mobs. These drops then tell you what profession you have to max out. You max out that profession by (guess what) grinding at your skills for another month or so, then you go back to grinding for those rare drops, then they give you the next profession you had to master, another few months of grinding.
Finally, after all this horrible grinding, you get a Jedi, yay! Oh wait... there are literally HUNDREDS of other Jedi now? Oh good, so the game is just BountyHunter vs Jedi online! Great game! Weren't Jedi supposed to be uh.. rare?
Grinding is apart of the MMO genre. Every game has it and that seems to be your issue. The fact that the Jedi took the time to get to that point was pure dedication and they deserved what they got. If that was your goal when you originally started the game, then why were you trying to play Jedi Online? That method made it to where not every SoB could be a Jedi and there really weren't that many. Even if you look into the lore of the SWG time period, Jedi really weren't all that rare and in the time period of KOTOR and before that in SW:TOR , Jedi were extremely common.
It was in no way Bounty Hunter vs Jedi online. If that's what you thought, then you probably should have tried to do something else.
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This, eleventy brizilion percent
Agreed!
Fixed.
Taking them out and changing the game to suit people like you killed that game........... true story. 250,000 out of 500,000 (or so) subs lost in 4 months. To date, the biggest MMO Exodus in history.
Odd, since SWG probably never had more than 300K at its height.
AoC and WAR each lost more subs than SWG in only three month's time.
But I agree, the changes to the jedi in SWG were a travesty.
It was 500k and admitted by SOE, I remember it very well. It was 300k shortly after release, maybe that's what you remember?
AoC & War lost more though? 50% is quite a bit.
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There is no dumb mechanics, only counter-intuitive ones, hard to understand ones, and ones people simply oppose. The latter is what everyone here has issues with, "ones they don't like, and yet work fine, and others enjoy it". For that, I thinking the dumbest mechanic is a conglomerate of functions that try to please all the wrong people at once. No example handy, but I think WAR's universal 2-second cooldown applies as something they figured everyone would like, and ended up forming all sorts of redundancy when in use.
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4
Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
I actually like achievements...just not in the way we normally see them. I think they should be tied INTO the lore. Like, killing 5 mega zombies alone unlocks an achievement associated with the local league of paladins, impressing them into opening their storehouses to sell you some of their holy-themed weapons.
Attacking a town guard and surviving the ensuing clash that comes afterward for 10 minutes opens an achievement that allows you to gain faction with enemies.
Killing 100 players while on a boat unlocks an achievement that opens a hidden cove deep in the sea granting you access to a small band of pirates that sell you ships and equipment.
There are also other ways to bring achievements into the game in a neat way. Perhaps after falling a total of 10K meters ingame, you get an achievement that grants you a passive ability that cuts falling damage by 25%
You get teh idea....I like them. I just want better ways to use them.
I like meaningful achievements, I hate titles.
Worst mmo mechanic: Content gating. Most specifically those like Vex Thal and Plane of Time in EQ. More recently like The Watcher in LOTRO.
I actually like voice chat and in some games you pretty much have to have voice chat or else its a lot harder to play the game. Like Fallen Earth, since its not auto attack you have to quit all combat and just let mobs hit you while your typing. When using vent I can continue to fight and or run while I only have to press Z and say help. If I did this without voice chat most likely Id be dead by the time I typed help and they got over to me. Just mute who you think is annoying,its as simple as that.
Now as for raiding, I like to do raids but for the fun of taking a boss down not for gear. Raiding IMO should never give you gear, money and XP is what it should only give you. WoW totally pissed me off because of they way they handled raiding. I don't want to run the same damn thing over and over again just to get some phat loot. Sorry but that is borrrrrrrriiiiinnnnnnggggg
Sitting down and waiting for your mana regen. I mean who the F*** is enjoying sitting down and doing nothing? If I wanted to relax, I'd join a granny's knitting circle!
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Pet Classes.
In any MMO with pet classes, any other class has to work harder to beat them, since those classes are facing off against 2 people, even if one is just AI driven and a bit weaker.
I actually like voice chat and in some games you pretty much have to have voice chat or else its a lot harder to play the game. Like Fallen Earth, since its not auto attack you have to quit all combat and just let mobs hit you while your typing. When using vent I can continue to fight and or run while I only have to press Z and say help. If I did this without voice chat most likely Id be dead by the time I typed help and they got over to me. Just mute who you think is annoying,its as simple as that.
Now as for raiding, I like to do raids but for the fun of taking a boss down not for gear. Raiding IMO should never give you gear, money and XP is what it should only give you. WoW totally pissed me off because of they way they handled raiding. I don't want to run the same damn thing over and over again just to get some phat loot. Sorry but that is borrrrrrrriiiiinnnnnnggggg
I agree with the raiding bit. I would tie it into my view of achievements, making raids something that took weeks to do...and unlock achievements for doing them that open access to things elsewhere. There would be loot, but only in the form of what the enemies used against you. Uber loot is kinda silly...and most of the drops you see in raids dont even make sense to the kill
Probably my favorite part of WAR was how they solved this. A small pool of very fast regenerating mana. It was so beautiful.
MMOs need down time. Solo its annoying, but it is useful for a variety of other reasons, adding strategy to combat, giving time for groups to socialize, give incentive for people to group, lots of good stuff.
Also, nothing is wrong with good raiding. WoW does NOT have good raiding. DAoC had a great raiding system.
Darkfall Travelogues!
The "Enemies are incredibly stupid" mechanic that allows for tanks and damage dealer. An intelligent AI would never attack the tank, they would go straight for the guy that's hurting him the most.
Darkfall has that
Darkfall Travelogues!
Absolutely. That and Endgames which turn the entire MMO into a grind..
FFA PVP without any consequences for blatant PK'ing in "civilized" areas of a MMO world.
Games I've played/tried out:WAR, LOTRO, Tabula Rasa, AoC, EQ1, EQ2, WoW, Vangaurd, FFXI, D&DO, Lineage 2, Saga Of Ryzom, EvE Online, DAoC, Guild Wars,Star Wars Galaxies, Hell Gate London, Auto Assault, Grando Espada ( AKA SoTNW ), Archlord, CoV/H, Star Trek Online, APB, Champions Online, FFXIV, Rift Online, GW2.
Game(s) I Am Currently Playing:
GW2 (+LoL and BF3)
I've never really understood the whole reason why people hate this. Oh, academically I suppose I do, but there were/are many games that rely upon this type of movement.
Diablo 1 and 2
Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age just to throw it in
Dungeon Siege
older games that people may remember such as Oni, or Summoner (( think Oni was point and click).
Some of my favorite games are point and click to move (NWN, NWN2, & DA:O) but in an mmo I prefer to use the movement keys to move around. There is a larger area to cover in mmo's and I like the WASD keys to get me moving along in those environments rather than clicking over and over again so that I can get from one are to another. In the games you mentioned there are more objects for a player to interact with so travel isn't as much of an issue as it is in an mmo. I never played the BG series on the PC I had them for the PS2 and I'm pretty sure I used the WASD keys in Diablo2 as well, but it has been a while.
I think I just prefer to have my mouse available to me when I need it or relaxed when I don't have to be clicking when I can toggle auto run or steer/strafe with WASDQE rather than clicking continuously in an mmo.
You're an SWG dev who didn't get why camping was fun, aren't you?
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
Dumbest MMO mechanic ever made? Hmm, the MMO's released within the last five years have offered plenty of examples that might vie for that category.
Dumbest MMO mechanic...
Well, it's a five-way tie:
Heroic Opportunity Wheel in EQ2. This basically turned combat into a gimmicky spamfest that made little sense. Example: a warrior spams a bunch of keys, sets off an Heroic Opportunity which sets off a group heal. Just how does a sword swinger set off a group heal? Magic?
Delayed class selection in early EQ2 and in DAOC. EQ2's made you go through 20 levels before you could try out a specialized class, only to find it not to your taste and to have to go through another 20 levels again with a new toon. However, they later fixed this. DAOC had you allocate some free stat points at Level 1 when your actual final class selection was at Level 5. So basically, you have to prepare for your final class selection at Level 1 anyway, if you wanted your point allocation to optimize your final class selection at Level 5. (They should have just let players receive and distribute the points at Level 5.)
AOC's Tortage tutorial area. I am not a big fan of in-game tutorials; I think it breaks the immersion and makes the player feel like a helpless actor in a linear and repetitive play. But AOC's tutorial went on for 20 LEVELS.
Angled character stance and bizarre animations. Biggest offender was EQ2, in my experience, but there have been others. Basically, the concept that a character angles his body and turns his head to look over his left shoulder in some sort of combat stance. Might be okay for combat, but is distracting when you try to situate your character to face forward. Which way is really forward? Head and shoulders facing left while feet face off to the right? Silly.
Centralized high-level character zones with portals, such as EQ's the Plane of Knowledge or WOW's Dalaran. Because of convenience of portals and such, the path of least resistance compels players to base and to hang out in such cities. However, the end result is to depopulate and marginalize the rest of the game world. WOW is fixing this with their new upcoming expansion.
Heck, I could probably go on with a lot more. Seems the last 5 or 6 years were years of wild experimentation in MMO design.
Not sure it was mentioned and I didn't want to read all the pages.
EQ2 - Group XP debt (which was later removed).
Few good wipes and you'd have a nice debt built up.. really wasn't something that encouraged grouping.
definitely definitely. Awful mechanic that was- it completely discouraged grouping for fear of getting debt, and encouraged elitism or griefing.
I'm not very fond of point and click, mainly because I tend to use my mouse to activate skills. Probably a fivolous issue, but I feel that the usage of my right and left hand is not balanced, and that something is off. So yes, I would tend to prefer WASD movement, because at least that would mean that I would still be able to use both hands to play.
Main characters:
Jinn Gone Quiet (Guild Wars)
Princess Pudding (Guild Wars)
AoC's "innovative" combat. All the directional combat did was cramp and tire my hands.
"For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed:
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!"
~Lord George Gordon Byron
Dumbest MMO mechanic? Definitely raiding as the only way to advance your character in the end game. To this day, I just don't see how having multiple douche bags whacking on the same monster for 20 minutes as being heroic.
I concur. There's nothing that annoys me more than an economy that isn't 100% player-driven. Worst of all is games where the economy is controlled and "stabilized" by the company.
Give me some risks in the economy, that's what makes it interesting!
Gear dependency. Specifically, the whole concept of "tier gear". It's essentially MMO filler as it provides no real content, just a reason to grind the same content over and over so they don't have to implement anything actually interesting or, god forbid, unique.
2nd place goes to the "talent tree" system which, while I'm sure most think its the best thing ever! It's really not that great. Chiefly because you end up with "builds" or rather the larger problem "must have builds". The level of elitism and general bullshit that surrounds something as simple as trying to customize your play style is staggering. There must be a better way to do this, but once again, it's the standard cop-out option for most MMOs.
Bans a perma, but so are sigs in necro posts.
EAT ME MMORPG.com!