most of the time its not the content that mather most couldnt care less they only ask one question
where is the crowd thats where i want to be ,be it in perfect world or ultima online
thats all it is stop thinking wow is hubber its not the player are because they are there
if player wouldnt be in wow people would be playing game where the people are why so many play shooter do you honestly believe they all love those ?hell no but the community is there and thats where they are !
Harsh penalties that translate to lost time don't make the actual FIGHT any more fun or difficult. Never has, never will. If it did make it more fun, people would be dropping gold and deleting gear in WOW or LOTR when they wipe on a dungeon. They don't...hence...NOT fun. They don't choose to keep playing EQ either, hence, NOT fun ANYMORE. If you could choose instantly that in Darkfall or Eve, when you died, you didn't drop your gear and didn't lose your ship, lets take an honest guess as to how many more people would prefer to not lose anything. Who's taking bets? How many people played Dragon Age and NEVER used quick save or ONLY saved at the camp? How many played on normal or easy compared to the hardest difficulty? I played on hard, but thats because losing didn't translate to mindless LOST time. The actual fights were harder and required a lot more strategy which made it more fun. But in a MMO, penalties and time sinks don't make the fights harder. Its the same fight. Remove the corpse run and the dungeon is NOT more difficult. Its just more time consuming when you do happen to fail. And as we've seen over time, a corpse run is NOT fun for the vast majority. Penalizing a player's time does not lead to FUN gameplay. It does appeal to a select niche, but those people have long been forgotten by the higher quality developers. Thats life.
What I do not understand is that you guys keep talking about time this and time that.
MMORPGs = TIME SINKS. ALL OF THEM PERIOD. The whole point of an MMORPG is to get the player to play endlessly so that they keep paying the monthly fee.
Death Penatlies do make fights harder because players know that if they lose they lose time, they lose time that they will have to make up. Without the Death Penatlies people just throw themselfs at the encounter over and over and over again till they win, that is not how it should be. You should have to learn how to win the battle and if you do not learn quickly you should have to "pay" something and since we are playing MMORPGs, time is the logical thing to have to pay.
I do not understand the instant gradification crowd, I just do not understand it at all. Games are here for fun but I do not have fun unless I feel like I earned my victory and I cannot feel like I earned it if I risk nothing in trying to win the event/encounter/fight. That is my opinion and I know others do not share it but can you please explain why getting something with no risk or effort is rewarding?
Even older console games had Death penatlies that took time away from the player as the penatly. Look at super mario bro's, if you died you had to restart the whole level, that was the death penatly, making the player start the level over again.
You are treating instant gratification with encounter mechanics as if they are one in the same thing, which they are not.
Lets take the original dragons in everquest as an example. Specifically Vox.
When a raid wipes, there was the normal XP loss and time to rebuff, regroup, etc. Now lets pretend instead of 10% experience loss there wasn 50% experience loss.
Did the actual mechanics of the fight change? Did it become harder to kill her? Some new abilities come to life? If your group is consistantly killing her, did Lady Vox somehow become unkillable when the penalty for failure was increased?
No. It just became more time consuming. The fight didn't get longer or harder, just the time penalty BETWEEN actually playing the game got larger.
Harsh death penalties don't make the actual skill, abilities or knowledge of a fight any harder. Harsh death penalties only mean more down time. That is it.
Some people enjoy the risk associated with large death penalties, but that doesn't make the game any harder or require any more skill. It doesn't make other crave instant gratification for not enjoying extreme penalties.
Believe it or not some people enjoy playing and not being forced with excessive time sinks in between playing the game.
So back in the day of EQ - Kunark, there was a zone called Veeshans Peak. It consisted of the best gear in the game hands down, and was the hardest zone as well. Here is the kicker though.. You could not gate out. You could not die without leaving your gear behind. You HAD to make it to the end of the zone or else you lost everything. There was no other exit except after the boss dragon of the zone. The risk vs reward was immense, but to come out on top was something very few accomplished or even tried. Do you think such a place would ever fit in todays MMO world? Or would too many people attempt it, lose all their gear, and whine until the devs caved and dismembered the zone into something that can casually be completed? I miss places like that. I miss the risks. I miss the REWARDS. Man, what a feeling coming out on top from that place, knowing that one mess up and your whole raids corpses and equipment would be dragon food. The feeling was unlike anything current MMOs could ever offer. Adrenaline rush would be an understatement. I can only pray that one day, a game that follows the same concept of old school EQ is born. True risks. True rewards.
Won't work. Few players will play it and the content will be wasted. The solution is to make the raid hard, but let people try many times without big penalties.
Just take WOW. Most guilds still cannot clear ICC but they can at least try a bit.
Harsh penalties that translate to lost time don't make the actual FIGHT any more fun or difficult. Never has, never will. If it did make it more fun, people would be dropping gold and deleting gear in WOW or LOTR when they wipe on a dungeon. They don't...hence...NOT fun. They don't choose to keep playing EQ either, hence, NOT fun ANYMORE. If you could choose instantly that in Darkfall or Eve, when you died, you didn't drop your gear and didn't lose your ship, lets take an honest guess as to how many more people would prefer to not lose anything. Who's taking bets? How many people played Dragon Age and NEVER used quick save or ONLY saved at the camp? How many played on normal or easy compared to the hardest difficulty? I played on hard, but thats because losing didn't translate to mindless LOST time. The actual fights were harder and required a lot more strategy which made it more fun. But in a MMO, penalties and time sinks don't make the fights harder. Its the same fight. Remove the corpse run and the dungeon is NOT more difficult. Its just more time consuming when you do happen to fail. And as we've seen over time, a corpse run is NOT fun for the vast majority. Penalizing a player's time does not lead to FUN gameplay. It does appeal to a select niche, but those people have long been forgotten by the higher quality developers. Thats life.
What I do not understand is that you guys keep talking about time this and time that.
MMORPGs = TIME SINKS. ALL OF THEM PERIOD. The whole point of an MMORPG is to get the player to play endlessly so that they keep paying the monthly fee.
Death Penatlies do make fights harder because players know that if they lose they lose time, they lose time that they will have to make up. Without the Death Penatlies people just throw themselfs at the encounter over and over and over again till they win, that is not how it should be. You should have to learn how to win the battle and if you do not learn quickly you should have to "pay" something and since we are playing MMORPGs, time is the logical thing to have to pay.
I do not understand the instant gradification crowd, I just do not understand it at all. Games are here for fun but I do not have fun unless I feel like I earned my victory and I cannot feel like I earned it if I risk nothing in trying to win the event/encounter/fight. That is my opinion and I know others do not share it but can you please explain why getting something with no risk or effort is rewarding?
Even older console games had Death penatlies that took time away from the player as the penatly. Look at super mario bro's, if you died you had to restart the whole level, that was the death penatly, making the player start the level over again.
You are treating instant gratification with encounter mechanics as if they are one in the same thing, which they are not.
Lets take the original dragons in everquest as an example. Specifically Vox.
When a raid wipes, there was the normal XP loss and time to rebuff, regroup, etc. Now lets pretend instead of 10% experience loss there wasn 50% experience loss.
Did the actual mechanics of the fight change? Did it become harder to kill her? Some new abilities come to life? If your group is consistantly killing her, did Lady Vox somehow become unkillable when the penalty for failure was increased?
No. It just became more time consuming. The fight didn't get longer or harder, just the time penalty BETWEEN actually playing the game got larger.
Harsh death penalties don't make the actual skill, abilities or knowledge of a fight any harder. Harsh death penalties only mean more down time. That is it.
Some people enjoy the risk associated with large death penalties, but that doesn't make the game any harder or require any more skill. It doesn't make other crave instant gratification for not enjoying extreme penalties.
Believe it or not some people enjoy playing and not being forced with excessive time sinks in between playing the game.
Exactly! RISK or TIME recouping is NOT difficulty. The fight is the same. The mechanics are the same. Hard Modes vs normal modes in dungeons make the game harder because the mechanics of the fight change. Having to grind for X number of hours to make up the EXP you lost does NOT make the encounter any harder. Only more tedious.
I think the reason why VP worked is because eq1 had enough developers to have plenty of content so if you werent ready for VP there were PLENTY of other places you could do.
VP key involved trakanon--7 day spawn, dropped 2-3 teeth (hardest component for the key quest). VP took ~ 30 or so people to start downing bosses (all 32k hp dragons with XYZ AE, very boring design, but there was no scripting engine until PoP). Trakanon resulted in some of the most heated guild disputes and those servers that went rotation did not see VP until velious (by then teh gear had been largely been replaced). I think VP may have been the most exclusive dungeon in all of EQ (and maybe any mmo--i'm talking not 1% of 1% of raiders here).
Because of the keys not being soulbound (e g you left your key in). Every single raid had to have a cleric (or most often a necro using an EE rez, because pre-DoT stacking necros were absolute shit for these encounters) / CR'r (usually a rogue) who never ever got to actually fight in the dungeon. Just awful design really. Not all that hardcore for the guy who spends all that time keying and then has to remain logged out until a wipe happens.
VP was later fixed with soulbound keys, but alas, that wasn't to be realized until after the dungeon had outlived its prime-spot. VP had many lessons to be learned (such as exclusive content being bad on the subscriber base) but they were never really put into action. Things like ST keys remained throughout velious. VT and emp keys throughout luclin. When flagged progression excluded the majority of the playerbase from 80% of the expansion people began leaving in droves. When LDoN was being conceptualized it seemed like they had decided to throw a bone to teh casual playerbase. But that was not to be--people in PoTime gear (highest tier PoP gear) were given separate augs, and the 'hard' ldons were scaled towards people already in raid gear--the playerbase gave up. With the combination of the abortion that was GoD trials (people without at least aug'd PoP gear would be killed upon the first trials, repeatedly, literally 1 rounded the group geared tank) people quit for good. Something like 200k to 50k with that and WoW coming out.
So to answer your question, no, VP was shit design (eg no soulbound keys requiring camping of 2 keyed players, contest for keys causing brutal disputes and realistically only 1 guiild/server in VP, for content that was never really that hard, just exclusive), and they kept continuing shit design throughout (anyone have that quote about casuals subsidizing raiders? idolizing raiderslol?) EQ's development cycle. Games should really look to the kunark expansion (VP excluded) to see how to make a fun game with great balancing. Take the hardcore out of raiding and people, for the most part, enjoy it.
edit: One more fun fact about VP--classes who were gimp and largely unuseful or did not stack well NEVER got keyed! 1 enchanter per raid for buffing? alright! Ranger? Maybe later!
Lesson to be learned is that zones should not be keyed (WoW learned this well in WOTLK, as well as compelling single player quests 70-80 for the most part) but should be tiered on their difficulty. They've still got that aberration with the whole arena thing though (fun idea, but putting gear discrepancies in pvp, especially grandfathered gear discrepancies is rather ridiculous and its popularity shows it)
Harsh penalties that translate to lost time don't make the actual FIGHT any more fun or difficult. Never has, never will. If it did make it more fun, people would be dropping gold and deleting gear in WOW or LOTR when they wipe on a dungeon. They don't...hence...NOT fun. They don't choose to keep playing EQ either, hence, NOT fun ANYMORE. If you could choose instantly that in Darkfall or Eve, when you died, you didn't drop your gear and didn't lose your ship, lets take an honest guess as to how many more people would prefer to not lose anything. Who's taking bets? How many people played Dragon Age and NEVER used quick save or ONLY saved at the camp? How many played on normal or easy compared to the hardest difficulty? I played on hard, but thats because losing didn't translate to mindless LOST time. The actual fights were harder and required a lot more strategy which made it more fun. But in a MMO, penalties and time sinks don't make the fights harder. Its the same fight. Remove the corpse run and the dungeon is NOT more difficult. Its just more time consuming when you do happen to fail. And as we've seen over time, a corpse run is NOT fun for the vast majority. Penalizing a player's time does not lead to FUN gameplay. It does appeal to a select niche, but those people have long been forgotten by the higher quality developers. Thats life.
What I do not understand is that you guys keep talking about time this and time that.
MMORPGs = TIME SINKS. ALL OF THEM PERIOD. The whole point of an MMORPG is to get the player to play endlessly so that they keep paying the monthly fee.
Death Penatlies do make fights harder because players know that if they lose they lose time, they lose time that they will have to make up. Without the Death Penatlies people just throw themselfs at the encounter over and over and over again till they win, that is not how it should be. You should have to learn how to win the battle and if you do not learn quickly you should have to "pay" something and since we are playing MMORPGs, time is the logical thing to have to pay.
I do not understand the instant gradification crowd, I just do not understand it at all. Games are here for fun but I do not have fun unless I feel like I earned my victory and I cannot feel like I earned it if I risk nothing in trying to win the event/encounter/fight. That is my opinion and I know others do not share it but can you please explain why getting something with no risk or effort is rewarding?
Even older console games had Death penatlies that took time away from the player as the penatly. Look at super mario bro's, if you died you had to restart the whole level, that was the death penatly, making the player start the level over again.
You are treating instant gratification with encounter mechanics as if they are one in the same thing, which they are not.
Lets take the original dragons in everquest as an example. Specifically Vox.
When a raid wipes, there was the normal XP loss and time to rebuff, regroup, etc. Now lets pretend instead of 10% experience loss there wasn 50% experience loss.
Did the actual mechanics of the fight change? Did it become harder to kill her? Some new abilities come to life? If your group is consistantly killing her, did Lady Vox somehow become unkillable when the penalty for failure was increased?
No. It just became more time consuming. The fight didn't get longer or harder, just the time penalty BETWEEN actually playing the game got larger.
Harsh death penalties don't make the actual skill, abilities or knowledge of a fight any harder. Harsh death penalties only mean more down time. That is it.
Some people enjoy the risk associated with large death penalties, but that doesn't make the game any harder or require any more skill. It doesn't make other crave instant gratification for not enjoying extreme penalties.
Believe it or not some people enjoy playing and not being forced with excessive time sinks in between playing the game.
Exactly! RISK or TIME recouping is NOT difficulty. The fight is the same. The mechanics are the same. Hard Modes vs normal modes in dungeons make the game harder because the mechanics of the fight change. Having to grind for X number of hours to make up the EXP you lost does NOT make the encounter any harder. Only more tedious.
No your right it does not make the fight harder. It does make the players better. It makes the players learn faster, makes them listen to the leaders, it makes the whole event better to have a penatly that causes you to lose something valuable. (time is very valuable)
The fight does not get harder but the overall feel of the event has more of an edge if you risk losing something important which we can all agree on is time. Risk is what changes not the fight, the Risk is increased with a tough penatly. The fight stays the same, it does not get harder but to the players the event is "harder" because if they lose they lose something important to them vs the same event with no loss of anything.
This goes for all events not just raid events, if the risk to lose something is great, it makes the player better overall, makes them learn the ins and outs of their character. We can see this in the lack of PuGs now a days vs back in the old days. Today players do not have to learn their class nor are they punished if they do not learn their class. Every used pick up groups in older games because the bad player was rare and most players new one with in a few minutes of grouping.
If you think that MMORPGs are Tedious because of timesinks then you are playing the wrong kind of games, the whole point of MMORPGs is to get the player in a timesink. PERIOD. The longer the player spends playing the game, the more money you gain from said player.
Look at games today, 1 to 3 months max for most games before players get bored and move on to another game. That is a ton less money that the company could have made if they would have put risk into their games.
Look at Football. You have the NFL and the Women's lingerie league. Both games are still football. Football is football it does not get harder but with the NFL add the risk of big men and full contact. Now the NFL is harder then the other league. Football the game (the fight/event) is still football but now you added the risk to it which made it harder.
To the guy saying harsh death penalties dont make the encounter harder, sure, they dont. But what they do accomplish is creating significant risk if you overstep what you are capable of. The RISK is what needs to be put back in these games. If WoW made it so you lost the same amount of xp as well as having to get your corpse back people would not use death as a quick way to travel. Nor would they just run through zones of level 80 mobs chasing behind them because they know there is no risk even if you do die. Its pointless. Its sort of like playing bumper bowling, sure its fun, but real bowling has consequences if you bowl like an idiot, unlike bumper bowling where no matter what you hit the pins.
Too many games these days dont have the nail biting risk factor that made your heart jump out of your chest during certain encounters. When the odds are stacked against you, knowing full well the penalty for death, it made you fight harder. It may not have made the actual encounter harder, but it totally changes the game play dynamics in a positive way. When death is feared you fight harder, more carefully, and learn to work as a team to be more efficient.
I dont understand why people wouldn't want risk in a MMO. Whats the point of trying harder encounters if dying doesnt matter? Anyone can fight something thirty times and finally win.
I think it mostly has to do with todays generation of teens and young adults. I remember reading a study where kids these days getting out of college are completely overwhelmed with the real world. Its tough, and they never experienced challenges in their life. They just float on by with mommy and daddy paving the way. Then when the parents arent there any more, they hit a brick wall and whine until somebody takes them under their wing and does everything for them.
Remember the saying, "In my day, we used to walk twelve miles to school, uphill, in the snow every day."? Well, now its more like, "We got a ride to school every day, and the teacher gave us all good grades so she didnt hurt our feelings.". I say screw the feelings and bring back punishment. Something that pushes people to work harder and actually give a damn.
Look at the epics in WoW. Are they epic? Hardly. Everybody has full epics. The people these days whine and cry when a game is "unfair", and someone has something they want but cant have. It makes me feel like im teaching in a daycare again with a bunch of literal babies. Welfare epics. Sad.
Wow heallun, you brought back a lot of memories I had buried about that zone and the other aspects you brought up I think were spot on. Specifically all the nonsensical access quests required to get into certain zones and just how out of hand soe got with them. There was just to much time spent doing bullshit tasks to get to the fun parts of the game.
I really had forgotten how time I spent camping those stupid items to make VP keys, how disappointing the dungeon actually was and how quickly it became outdated with the next expansion following up so closely. It was especially rough on me, because I played a holy trinity class and there was only 2 active in my guild at the time so we were in constant demand to hold certain camps. Ugh....
That isn't to say that Veeshans Peak couldn't have been great and it really had a lot of potential, but with so many small bad choices it just added up into a list of things not to do really. There are things that could be improved on and added into some current games.
I dont understand why people wouldn't want risk in a MMO. Whats the point of trying harder encounters if dying doesnt matter? Anyone can fight something thirty times and finally win.
There are risks to dieing in almost every mmo, even wow (which dieing isn't a travel system). Just because it doesn't line match up with what gives you the feeling of risk doesn't mean it is wrong.
We are basically just talking about opinions of what makes people feel risk and what goes to far and just makes something tedious. You may feel that losing 5 gold repair bill, all your buffs and time lost setting back up for the fight isn't much risk. When you list what you think is the right amount of penalty I am sure that there is a group of people who think that isn't enough and want to take it to a level that you would find just takes away from the gameplay and makes it to tedious.
There is no right answer here. Your threshold isn't the standard by which all games should be measured.
The point of trying harder encounters is to beat them. Having more and more penalties stacked on a failure isn't what many people find fun or challenging and the bigger the penalty the more people will find it tedious instead of risky.
Do you think such a place would ever fit in todays MMO world? Or would too many people attempt it, lose all their gear, and whine until the devs caved and dismembered the zone into something that can casually be completed?
It wasn't Veeshan's Peak that was harsh, it was simply the death penalty. People have lost their corpse in many other places also, such as plane of fear, deep inside some dungeons like sebilis back in the days, etc...
And no, developers today won't make harsh penalties the way EQ had. Even EQ1 itself has changed the death penalties ingame, you can now summon corpses to guild lobby, and you no longer lose gear/items when you die.
Having high risk doesn't really make the game all that more exhilarating to the player. All it really do is make guilds be more exclusive. I used to run one of the most powerful guild on the WoW server Frostwolf with close to 100 member. When we run raid, we usually take a very casual approach and even bring a newbie or two along just so we can teach them the rope. If WoW were to say have all of these kind of penalty, all that does for my guild is for me to kick about half of them out of my guild and only take be very best player for raiding every single time.
Killing many of these raid bosses is hard enough as it is, and already required quite a big chunk of your time. The time it takes to get your entire raid battle ready every time you wipe is bad enough. Having all this high risk would do nothing more than making elite guild all that more elite by excluding any moderate, weak, or casual gamer as you might call them from those content.
From a casual point of view (which is what I am now, FU work and school) who at best could devote no more than 3 or 4 continuous hour once or twice a week to gaming. I want to spend those find working on my gear, and fighting difficult raid boss. What I don't have time for nor do I want to do is to spend 1 hours fighting and die to someone else stupid mistake and spend the next 3 or 4 hours on tedious grinding to get me back to where I was before. This is not about people wanting instant gratification, is about people not wanting to waste time on stupid stuff that act as nothing more than I time sink as a punishment for death.
So to close this all up for so many misguided people. High Risk vs Reward does not = harsh punished for death. High Risk vs Reward would be to have stupidly difficult boss for best loot in the game. The Risk would be the stupidly difficult boss that kill wipe the party as a result of a single person mistake. The reward for it would be uber loot and server wide fame of be the very few that are able to do so.
Having harsh death punishment are not risk taker, they are nothing more than sadist who get their jolly on from getting spanked.
If you want adrenalin rushes, EVE or Darkfall. Would other games have such high risk vs reward? Doesn't seem like it any time soon at least. I don't think there's valuable gear in Earthrise, so yeah, EVE and DF are and will be for quite some time the only ones with risky gameplay. If such game is made, it's gonna be again by a indie studio, that's for sure. EVE is pretty much pure efficiency and risk vs reward calculating. I recall the devs wanted to experiment survival of the fittest theory with the game.
So no, not by big studios, but indie studios will make that kind of games every now and then, if you ask me. Games are played by so big audience nowdays, that they have to be made very casual friendly. Indie studios can entertain the hardcore gamers, as they don't have resources to compete with others.
If I understood you right...
Losing your gear in Darkfall is nothing compared to what the OP is mentioning. VP was a culmination of everything you had accomplished gear wise in your life in EQ. The time it took to equip your character not to mention the key quest just to be able to enter the place was a huge accomplishment at its time.
One screw up and not only you , but your entire guild could lose all their gear. Gear that took months of hard work to obtain. In DF I just grab another PVP kit out of the bank or craft more
Wow heallun, you brought back a lot of memories I had buried about that zone and the other aspects you brought up I think were spot on. Specifically all the nonsensical access quests required to get into certain zones and just how out of hand soe got with them. There was just to much time spent doing bullshit tasks to get to the fun parts of the game. I really had forgotten how time I spent camping those stupid items to make VP keys, how disappointing the dungeon actually was and how quickly it became outdated with the next expansion following up so closely. It was especially rough on me, because I played a holy trinity class and there was only 2 active in my guild at the time so we were in constant demand to hold certain camps. Ugh....
That isn't to say that Veeshans Peak couldn't have been great and it really had a lot of potential, but with so many small bad choices it just added up into a list of things not to do really. There are things that could be improved on and added into some current games.
EQ indeed killed itself. It wasn't the 'forced grouping' (which honestly, 2 people did just fine together, and a few classes did fantastic solo) that killed EQ, it wasn't even the raiding--it was the hardcore that drove EQ into the ground--which is hard for many of the mmorpg.com community to accept. Exclusivity is bad for business (and the majority of players' satisfaction).
edit: about VP, It had beautiful architecture--but as far as content went it was basically take nagafen, mix up a few models, string him in 6-7 places around the zone, and put the best loot in the game there and call it done. The pathing of certain dragons (roaming, that is) made it interesting--especially when hoshkar would gate on you ;p but overall people went there for the same reason they raid the same target more than once in WoW--for the loot (and as such, the prestige)
If you want adrenalin rushes, EVE or Darkfall. Would other games have such high risk vs reward? Doesn't seem like it any time soon at least. I don't think there's valuable gear in Earthrise, so yeah, EVE and DF are and will be for quite some time the only ones with risky gameplay. If such game is made, it's gonna be again by a indie studio, that's for sure. EVE is pretty much pure efficiency and risk vs reward calculating. I recall the devs wanted to experiment survival of the fittest theory with the game.
So no, not by big studios, but indie studios will make that kind of games every now and then, if you ask me. Games are played by so big audience nowdays, that they have to be made very casual friendly. Indie studios can entertain the hardcore gamers, as they don't have resources to compete with others.
If I understood you right...
Losing your gear in Darkfall is nothing compared to what the OP is mentioning. VP was a culmination of everything you had accomplished gear wise in your life in EQ. The time it took to equip your character not to mention the key quest just to be able to enter the place was a huge accomplishment at its time.
One screw up and not only you , but your entire guild could lose all their gear. Gear that took months of hard work to obtain. In DF I just grab another PVP kit out of the bank or craft more
That was never a real possibility, though. There was always a necro camped out who could summon w/coffin (which was fairly economical in kunark with tiny jaid inlaid coffin spell, yay) and then rez a cleric with an EE rez. VP's mechanics were prohibitive, but easily circumvented. PoFear for the first few guilds was a more real possibility of losing the gear as there was nowhere safe to do your rezzing. You either successfully broke in, or you begged guild #2/#3 to come bail you out within a week. Casters not being gear based in the slightest--a few mages with pets out, a couple of wizard to blast mobs--enchanters being able to lock em down withotu gear--and clerics healing just fine without gear--the re-break was quite possible without tanks or melee dps (which was abysmal at this point in the game anyway). Generally speaking, though, most people again circumvented the risk of the fear-break death by having a bard kite the zone while your guild moved in and camped, then bard die -> get corpse summon -> move on to clearing zone =P ~ Bard could also DA song (immunity song ) run out if he could make it through the temple, but he had to DA before CT saw him and had to make it to the zone before his dA wore off or he'd get death touch'd
Good game--it punished people for not thinking. Punishing is bad for sales--you won't see it again. That's not the say lal the decisions VI made were golden, but they had a great base of a game up until velious.
I sometimes feel like a historian or a savant thinking about these things in detail--I just miss it quite a bit =D
Harsh penalties that translate to lost time don't make the actual FIGHT any more fun or difficult. Never has, never will. If it did make it more fun, people would be dropping gold and deleting gear in WOW or LOTR when they wipe on a dungeon. They don't...hence...NOT fun. They don't choose to keep playing EQ either, hence, NOT fun ANYMORE. If you could choose instantly that in Darkfall or Eve, when you died, you didn't drop your gear and didn't lose your ship, lets take an honest guess as to how many more people would prefer to not lose anything. Who's taking bets? How many people played Dragon Age and NEVER used quick save or ONLY saved at the camp? How many played on normal or easy compared to the hardest difficulty? I played on hard, but thats because losing didn't translate to mindless LOST time. The actual fights were harder and required a lot more strategy which made it more fun. But in a MMO, penalties and time sinks don't make the fights harder. Its the same fight. Remove the corpse run and the dungeon is NOT more difficult. Its just more time consuming when you do happen to fail. And as we've seen over time, a corpse run is NOT fun for the vast majority. Penalizing a player's time does not lead to FUN gameplay. It does appeal to a select niche, but those people have long been forgotten by the higher quality developers. Thats life.
What I do not understand is that you guys keep talking about time this and time that.
MMORPGs = TIME SINKS. ALL OF THEM PERIOD. The whole point of an MMORPG is to get the player to play endlessly so that they keep paying the monthly fee.
Death Penatlies do make fights harder because players know that if they lose they lose time, they lose time that they will have to make up. Without the Death Penatlies people just throw themselfs at the encounter over and over and over again till they win, that is not how it should be. You should have to learn how to win the battle and if you do not learn quickly you should have to "pay" something and since we are playing MMORPGs, time is the logical thing to have to pay.
I do not understand the instant gradification crowd, I just do not understand it at all. Games are here for fun but I do not have fun unless I feel like I earned my victory and I cannot feel like I earned it if I risk nothing in trying to win the event/encounter/fight. That is my opinion and I know others do not share it but can you please explain why getting something with no risk or effort is rewarding?
Even older console games had Death penatlies that took time away from the player as the penatly. Look at super mario bro's, if you died you had to restart the whole level, that was the death penatly, making the player start the level over again.
You are treating instant gratification with encounter mechanics as if they are one in the same thing, which they are not.
Lets take the original dragons in everquest as an example. Specifically Vox.
When a raid wipes, there was the normal XP loss and time to rebuff, regroup, etc. Now lets pretend instead of 10% experience loss there wasn 50% experience loss.
Did the actual mechanics of the fight change? Did it become harder to kill her? Some new abilities come to life? If your group is consistantly killing her, did Lady Vox somehow become unkillable when the penalty for failure was increased?
No. It just became more time consuming. The fight didn't get longer or harder, just the time penalty BETWEEN actually playing the game got larger.
Harsh death penalties don't make the actual skill, abilities or knowledge of a fight any harder. Harsh death penalties only mean more down time. That is it.
Some people enjoy the risk associated with large death penalties, but that doesn't make the game any harder or require any more skill. It doesn't make other crave instant gratification for not enjoying extreme penalties.
Believe it or not some people enjoy playing and not being forced with excessive time sinks in between playing the game.
Exactly! RISK or TIME recouping is NOT difficulty. The fight is the same. The mechanics are the same. Hard Modes vs normal modes in dungeons make the game harder because the mechanics of the fight change. Having to grind for X number of hours to make up the EXP you lost does NOT make the encounter any harder. Only more tedious.
No your right it does not make the fight harder. It does make the players better. It makes the players learn faster, makes them listen to the leaders, it makes the whole event better to have a penatly that causes you to lose something valuable. (time is very valuable)
The fight does not get harder but the overall feel of the event has more of an edge if you risk losing something important which we can all agree on is time. Risk is what changes not the fight, the Risk is increased with a tough penatly. The fight stays the same, it does not get harder but to the players the event is "harder" because if they lose they lose something important to them vs the same event with no loss of anything.
This goes for all events not just raid events, if the risk to lose something is great, it makes the player better overall, makes them learn the ins and outs of their character. We can see this in the lack of PuGs now a days vs back in the old days. Today players do not have to learn their class nor are they punished if they do not learn their class. Every used pick up groups in older games because the bad player was rare and most players new one with in a few minutes of grouping.
If you think that MMORPGs are Tedious because of timesinks then you are playing the wrong kind of games, the whole point of MMORPGs is to get the player in a timesink. PERIOD. The longer the player spends playing the game, the more money you gain from said player.
Look at games today, 1 to 3 months max for most games before players get bored and move on to another game. That is a ton less money that the company could have made if they would have put risk into their games.
Look at Football. You have the NFL and the Women's lingerie league. Both games are still football. Football is football it does not get harder but with the NFL add the risk of big men and full contact. Now the NFL is harder then the other league. Football the game (the fight/event) is still football but now you added the risk to it which made it harder.
No. In today's market, increased risk does not make the typical player better. It makes them find another game. Dev's know that, which is why many of the sadistic practices of the old style games have been removed. Increased risk only makes players better if they enjoy the game(and there are few alternatives that offer as much fun with decreased risk). The demographic for those types of games is rather small, and growing smaller. Thats one of the reasons why so many Asian games niche themselves in the western markets.
Having high risk doesn't really make the game all that more exhilarating to the player. All it really do is make guilds be more exclusive. I used to run one of the most powerful guild on the WoW server Frostwolf with close to 100 member. When we run raid, we usually take a very casual approach and even bring a newbie or two along just so we can teach them the rope. If WoW were to say have all of these kind of penalty, all that does for my guild is for me to kick about half of them out of my guild and only take be very best player for raiding every single time. Killing many of these raid bosses is hard enough as it is, and already required quite a big chunk of your time. The time it takes to get your entire raid battle ready every time you wipe is bad enough. Having all this high risk would do nothing more than making elite guild all that more elite by excluding any moderate, weak, or casual gamer as you might call them from those content. From a casual point of view (which is what I am now, FU work and school) who at best could devote no more than 3 or 4 continuous hour once or twice a week to gaming. I want to spend those find working on my gear, and fighting difficult raid boss. What I don't have time for nor do I want to do is to spend 1 hours fighting and die to someone else stupid mistake and spend the next 3 or 4 hours on tedious grinding to get me back to where I was before. This is not about people wanting instant gratification, is about people not wanting to waste time on stupid stuff that act as nothing more than I time sink as a punishment for death. So to close this all up for so many misguided people. High Risk vs Reward does not = harsh punished for death. High Risk vs Reward would be to have stupidly difficult boss for best loot in the game. The Risk would be the stupidly difficult boss that kill wipe the party as a result of a single person mistake. The reward for it would be uber loot and server wide fame of be the very few that are able to do so. Having harsh death punishment are not risk taker, they are nothing more than sadist who get their jolly on from getting spanked.
The issue here is that the people you are arguing with already consider you a bad player who should not be playing MMORPGs with them. You prefer to spend your time constructively and prefer not to have artificial blocks put in front of you when you try to improve yourself as a player. If you do not strive for absolute perfection all the time and punish yourself for every minor imperfection or mistake then you simply do not deserve to play a MMORPG.
So back in the day of EQ - Kunark, there was a zone called Veeshans Peak. It consisted of the best gear in the game hands down, and was the hardest zone as well. Here is the kicker though.. You could not gate out. You could not die without leaving your gear behind. You HAD to make it to the end of the zone or else you lost everything. There was no other exit except after the boss dragon of the zone. The risk vs reward was immense, but to come out on top was something very few accomplished or even tried. Do you think such a place would ever fit in todays MMO world? Or would too many people attempt it, lose all their gear, and whine until the devs caved and dismembered the zone into something that can casually be completed? I miss places like that. I miss the risks. I miss the REWARDS. Man, what a feeling coming out on top from that place, knowing that one mess up and your whole raids corpses and equipment would be dragon food. The feeling was unlike anything current MMOs could ever offer. Adrenaline rush would be an understatement. I can only pray that one day, a game that follows the same concept of old school EQ is born. True risks. True rewards.
Darkfall whole world is like that and maybe even harder in someplaces then you describe lol and for many worse part is its players you can get all your stuff lol.
So yes its implemented in todays mmo DARKFALL.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009..... In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
Well it might not change the mechanics,but there is TWO words to the equation BOTH risk AND difficulty.
The risk part is losing XP or loot or whatever else the game decides.The Difficulty part can come from the same mechanics if you lose an entire level dieing,the fight will be that much harder if you try it again a level lower.
We need to also remove ourselves from looking at simplistic SOE or Blizzards designs they are more or less cheap and not thought out much at all.Someone else eluded to ideas of perhaps injuring the player,so they lose accuracy or agility,things like that create more risk and difficulty.Perhaps you are too injured to wield a large sword,so you can only wield a dagger,lose enough agility and you can no longer use a bow or gun.Lose your agility and you become slower,head damage can cause blurred vision ect ect,there is so much you can do to create a realistic risk/difficulty battle.
My opinion is that games should completely remove the ridiculous FAKE dying mechanic.Instead you should become a fallen/injured,your group members can take on the hate to allow your player to recover and be able to fight again,however with the added penalties suffered from injuries,this is a far more realistic design that offers both risk and difficulty.Injuries should incur time to recover from,so eventually if all members are fallen/ko'd or others leave the area,the mob ignores you and moves on and also recovers over time just as the players do.
It is of course a design that does not work in solo mode as it should not,you are suppose to be fighting an epic battle,one that requires team work.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
the way you described it and from other posts on EQ I would say that it would be far too long to do and cause too much of a problem to be worth implementing. Now if you turned a castle inside of a zone into a hardcore dungeon/open world dungeon then I would support it as the players can avoid said castle if needed. A whole zone with such high risk/reward factors is just a waste of the devs time
MMO wish list:
-Changeable worlds -Solid non level based game -Sharks with lasers attached to their heads
Having high risk doesn't really make the game all that more exhilarating to the player. All it really do is make guilds be more exclusive. I used to run one of the most powerful guild on the WoW server Frostwolf with close to 100 member. When we run raid, we usually take a very casual approach and even bring a newbie or two along just so we can teach them the rope. If WoW were to say have all of these kind of penalty, all that does for my guild is for me to kick about half of them out of my guild and only take be very best player for raiding every single time. Killing many of these raid bosses is hard enough as it is, and already required quite a big chunk of your time. The time it takes to get your entire raid battle ready every time you wipe is bad enough. Having all this high risk would do nothing more than making elite guild all that more elite by excluding any moderate, weak, or casual gamer as you might call them from those content. From a casual point of view (which is what I am now, FU work and school) who at best could devote no more than 3 or 4 continuous hour once or twice a week to gaming. I want to spend those find working on my gear, and fighting difficult raid boss. What I don't have time for nor do I want to do is to spend 1 hours fighting and die to someone else stupid mistake and spend the next 3 or 4 hours on tedious grinding to get me back to where I was before. This is not about people wanting instant gratification, is about people not wanting to waste time on stupid stuff that act as nothing more than I time sink as a punishment for death. So to close this all up for so many misguided people. High Risk vs Reward does not = harsh punished for death. High Risk vs Reward would be to have stupidly difficult boss for best loot in the game. The Risk would be the stupidly difficult boss that kill wipe the party as a result of a single person mistake. The reward for it would be uber loot and server wide fame of be the very few that are able to do so. Having harsh death punishment are not risk taker, they are nothing more than sadist who get their jolly on from getting spanked.
The issue here is that the people you are arguing with already consider you a bad player who should not be playing MMORPGs with them. You prefer to spend your time constructively and prefer not to have artificial blocks put in front of you when you try to improve yourself as a player. If you do not strive for absolute perfection all the time and punish yourself for every minor imperfection or mistake then you simply do not deserve to play a MMORPG.
Thank you sir! May I have another?...
That type of mentality speaks for itself. Learning from ones mistakes doesn't require punishment. Sadistic design practices are typical of those who do not understand player motivation and are stuck in the punishment feed back loop. Such games have rather limited appeal in today's market.
Originally posted by TdogSkal No your right it does not make the fight harder. It does make the players better. It makes the players learn faster, makes them listen to the leaders, it makes the whole event better to have a penatly that causes you to lose something valuable. (time is very valuable)
The fight does not get harder but the overall feel of the event has more of an edge if you risk losing something important which we can all agree on is time. Risk is what changes not the fight, the Risk is increased with a tough penatly. The fight stays the same, it does not get harder but to the players the event is "harder" because if they lose they lose something important to them vs the same event with no loss of anything. This goes for all events not just raid events, if the risk to lose something is great, it makes the player better overall, makes them learn the ins and outs of their character. We can see this in the lack of PuGs now a days vs back in the old days. Today players do not have to learn their class nor are they punished if they do not learn their class. Every used pick up groups in older games because the bad player was rare and most players new one with in a few minutes of grouping. If you think that MMORPGs are Tedious because of timesinks then you are playing the wrong kind of games, the whole point of MMORPGs is to get the player in a timesink. PERIOD. The longer the player spends playing the game, the more money you gain from said player. Look at games today, 1 to 3 months max for most games before players get bored and move on to another game. That is a ton less money that the company could have made if they would have put risk into their games. Look at Football. You have the NFL and the Women's lingerie league. Both games are still football. Football is football it does not get harder but with the NFL add the risk of big men and full contact. Now the NFL is harder then the other league. Football the game (the fight/event) is still football but now you added the risk to it which made it harder.
I have to disagree with you again.
Perhaps a higher risk makes YOU feel the game is more edgy, but that doesn't make it so for everyone. There is a huge variance between what many people find acceptable in terms of risk and what makes an mmo unenjoyable. You are taking your view of what defines risk and placing it as the standard of what mmos should be. In the end all we are talking about is how
As for times sinks being the sole point of mmos you are most certainly wrong. The point of games is to entertain players. Timesinks are often a part of mmos, but they certainly are not the goal of the game. Just because time sinks are associated with mmos, doesn't mean they need to be extreme, pointless or non-entertaining. That is one of the reasons EQ was toppled as the market leader, because they lost focus on making things fun and went overboard with pointless time sinks. Much of the time sinks served no purpose other than to punish players instead of challenge or entertain. The purpose of mmos in not to suck time aimlessly, it is to offer enjoyment and entertainment. In the end we are still talking about a game and games need to be entertaining above all else.
Lastly, punishing players doesn't give them the ability to learn faster. The worse the penalties get the more people that will just leave, the less tolerance leaders will show to players and the less attempts can be made on learning encounters before the penalties stack up so high that further attempts cannot be made without working off the penalties. Just because another game doesn't punish failure as stiffly doesn't mean people try to fail or somehow care less about learning. No one wants to lose to encounters, spend gold needlessly or waste their night not trying to learn from their mistakes so they can beat encounters.
If a math teacher beats students with a stick will they suddenly be able to learn faster or will students just stop showing up to class?
Your football example is comparing paid professionals that earn tens of millions dollars a year in a multibillion dollar industry to that of a novelty league that draws on sexual content as the centerpiece attraction. So I don't think that is an realistic comparison.
As far as I'm concerned, gaming companies have focused end game content towards hardcore elitests for far too long. I don't want future games to make 90% of their end game for 10% of the gaming population. I'm sick to death of the majority funding the content of the minority. The problem is that there are too many hardcore developers who don't give a rat's ass about the regular gamer. They create low level casual content to draw in the money from the majority, then spend it on their hardcore raiding buddies. Even World of Warcraft rips off it's casual gamers in preferential treatment of raiders. I'm waiting for these hardcore friendly developers to finally make a 100% hardcore game and see if it can really succeed financially without us carebears there to support it.
The issue here is that the people you are arguing with already consider you a bad player who should not be playing MMORPGs with them. You prefer to spend your time constructively and prefer not to have artificial blocks put in front of you when you try to improve yourself as a player. If you do not strive for absolute perfection all the time and punish yourself for every minor imperfection or mistake then you simply do not deserve to play a MMORPG.
LOL .. this is silly. ".. deserve to play ..." .. ha ha ha.
I have news to you. MMORPGs are GAMES .. ENTERTAINMENT PRODUCTS. Companies try to attract players, not give them SATs and boot them if they don't measure up.
And you think people care about what other think they should or should not play? So what are you going to do? Lecture people who cannot learn how to down a boss?
And there is a good reason why you are the kind of people where the market is trending AWAY from.
As far as I'm concerned, gaming companies have focused end game content towards hardcore elitests for far too long. I don't want future games to make 90% of their end game for 10% of the gaming population. I'm sick to death of the majority funding the content of the minority. The problem is that there are too many hardcore developers who don't give a rat's ass about the regular gamer. They create low level casual content to draw in the money from the majority, then spend it on their hardcore raiding buddies. Even World of Warcraft rips off it's casual gamers in preferential treatment of raiders. I'm waiting for these hardcore friendly developers to finally make a 100% hardcore game and see if it can really succeed financially without us carebears there to support it.
I think if you really look at certain games and compare the casual content to the end game raiding content you will see that the majority of the games are made up of solo/casual friendly content and raid content makes up very little of the actual game. It just happens to be where current mmo game design leads to when solo/casual gameplay ends.
Comments
most of the time its not the content that mather most couldnt care less they only ask one question
where is the crowd thats where i want to be ,be it in perfect world or ultima online
thats all it is stop thinking wow is hubber its not the player are because they are there
if player wouldnt be in wow people would be playing game where the people are why so many play shooter do you honestly believe they all love those ?hell no but the community is there and thats where they are !
What I do not understand is that you guys keep talking about time this and time that.
MMORPGs = TIME SINKS. ALL OF THEM PERIOD. The whole point of an MMORPG is to get the player to play endlessly so that they keep paying the monthly fee.
Death Penatlies do make fights harder because players know that if they lose they lose time, they lose time that they will have to make up. Without the Death Penatlies people just throw themselfs at the encounter over and over and over again till they win, that is not how it should be. You should have to learn how to win the battle and if you do not learn quickly you should have to "pay" something and since we are playing MMORPGs, time is the logical thing to have to pay.
I do not understand the instant gradification crowd, I just do not understand it at all. Games are here for fun but I do not have fun unless I feel like I earned my victory and I cannot feel like I earned it if I risk nothing in trying to win the event/encounter/fight. That is my opinion and I know others do not share it but can you please explain why getting something with no risk or effort is rewarding?
Even older console games had Death penatlies that took time away from the player as the penatly. Look at super mario bro's, if you died you had to restart the whole level, that was the death penatly, making the player start the level over again.
You are treating instant gratification with encounter mechanics as if they are one in the same thing, which they are not.
Lets take the original dragons in everquest as an example. Specifically Vox.
When a raid wipes, there was the normal XP loss and time to rebuff, regroup, etc. Now lets pretend instead of 10% experience loss there wasn 50% experience loss.
Did the actual mechanics of the fight change? Did it become harder to kill her? Some new abilities come to life? If your group is consistantly killing her, did Lady Vox somehow become unkillable when the penalty for failure was increased?
No. It just became more time consuming. The fight didn't get longer or harder, just the time penalty BETWEEN actually playing the game got larger.
Harsh death penalties don't make the actual skill, abilities or knowledge of a fight any harder. Harsh death penalties only mean more down time. That is it.
Some people enjoy the risk associated with large death penalties, but that doesn't make the game any harder or require any more skill. It doesn't make other crave instant gratification for not enjoying extreme penalties.
Believe it or not some people enjoy playing and not being forced with excessive time sinks in between playing the game.
Won't work. Few players will play it and the content will be wasted. The solution is to make the raid hard, but let people try many times without big penalties.
Just take WOW. Most guilds still cannot clear ICC but they can at least try a bit.
What I do not understand is that you guys keep talking about time this and time that.
MMORPGs = TIME SINKS. ALL OF THEM PERIOD. The whole point of an MMORPG is to get the player to play endlessly so that they keep paying the monthly fee.
Death Penatlies do make fights harder because players know that if they lose they lose time, they lose time that they will have to make up. Without the Death Penatlies people just throw themselfs at the encounter over and over and over again till they win, that is not how it should be. You should have to learn how to win the battle and if you do not learn quickly you should have to "pay" something and since we are playing MMORPGs, time is the logical thing to have to pay.
I do not understand the instant gradification crowd, I just do not understand it at all. Games are here for fun but I do not have fun unless I feel like I earned my victory and I cannot feel like I earned it if I risk nothing in trying to win the event/encounter/fight. That is my opinion and I know others do not share it but can you please explain why getting something with no risk or effort is rewarding?
Even older console games had Death penatlies that took time away from the player as the penatly. Look at super mario bro's, if you died you had to restart the whole level, that was the death penatly, making the player start the level over again.
You are treating instant gratification with encounter mechanics as if they are one in the same thing, which they are not.
Lets take the original dragons in everquest as an example. Specifically Vox.
When a raid wipes, there was the normal XP loss and time to rebuff, regroup, etc. Now lets pretend instead of 10% experience loss there wasn 50% experience loss.
Did the actual mechanics of the fight change? Did it become harder to kill her? Some new abilities come to life? If your group is consistantly killing her, did Lady Vox somehow become unkillable when the penalty for failure was increased?
No. It just became more time consuming. The fight didn't get longer or harder, just the time penalty BETWEEN actually playing the game got larger.
Harsh death penalties don't make the actual skill, abilities or knowledge of a fight any harder. Harsh death penalties only mean more down time. That is it.
Some people enjoy the risk associated with large death penalties, but that doesn't make the game any harder or require any more skill. It doesn't make other crave instant gratification for not enjoying extreme penalties.
Believe it or not some people enjoy playing and not being forced with excessive time sinks in between playing the game.
Exactly! RISK or TIME recouping is NOT difficulty. The fight is the same. The mechanics are the same. Hard Modes vs normal modes in dungeons make the game harder because the mechanics of the fight change. Having to grind for X number of hours to make up the EXP you lost does NOT make the encounter any harder. Only more tedious.
I think the reason why VP worked is because eq1 had enough developers to have plenty of content so if you werent ready for VP there were PLENTY of other places you could do.
VP key involved trakanon--7 day spawn, dropped 2-3 teeth (hardest component for the key quest). VP took ~ 30 or so people to start downing bosses (all 32k hp dragons with XYZ AE, very boring design, but there was no scripting engine until PoP). Trakanon resulted in some of the most heated guild disputes and those servers that went rotation did not see VP until velious (by then teh gear had been largely been replaced). I think VP may have been the most exclusive dungeon in all of EQ (and maybe any mmo--i'm talking not 1% of 1% of raiders here).
Because of the keys not being soulbound (e g you left your key in). Every single raid had to have a cleric (or most often a necro using an EE rez, because pre-DoT stacking necros were absolute shit for these encounters) / CR'r (usually a rogue) who never ever got to actually fight in the dungeon. Just awful design really. Not all that hardcore for the guy who spends all that time keying and then has to remain logged out until a wipe happens.
VP was later fixed with soulbound keys, but alas, that wasn't to be realized until after the dungeon had outlived its prime-spot. VP had many lessons to be learned (such as exclusive content being bad on the subscriber base) but they were never really put into action. Things like ST keys remained throughout velious. VT and emp keys throughout luclin. When flagged progression excluded the majority of the playerbase from 80% of the expansion people began leaving in droves. When LDoN was being conceptualized it seemed like they had decided to throw a bone to teh casual playerbase. But that was not to be--people in PoTime gear (highest tier PoP gear) were given separate augs, and the 'hard' ldons were scaled towards people already in raid gear--the playerbase gave up. With the combination of the abortion that was GoD trials (people without at least aug'd PoP gear would be killed upon the first trials, repeatedly, literally 1 rounded the group geared tank) people quit for good. Something like 200k to 50k with that and WoW coming out.
So to answer your question, no, VP was shit design (eg no soulbound keys requiring camping of 2 keyed players, contest for keys causing brutal disputes and realistically only 1 guiild/server in VP, for content that was never really that hard, just exclusive), and they kept continuing shit design throughout (anyone have that quote about casuals subsidizing raiders? idolizing raiderslol?) EQ's development cycle. Games should really look to the kunark expansion (VP excluded) to see how to make a fun game with great balancing. Take the hardcore out of raiding and people, for the most part, enjoy it.
edit: One more fun fact about VP--classes who were gimp and largely unuseful or did not stack well NEVER got keyed! 1 enchanter per raid for buffing? alright! Ranger? Maybe later!
Lesson to be learned is that zones should not be keyed (WoW learned this well in WOTLK, as well as compelling single player quests 70-80 for the most part) but should be tiered on their difficulty. They've still got that aberration with the whole arena thing though (fun idea, but putting gear discrepancies in pvp, especially grandfathered gear discrepancies is rather ridiculous and its popularity shows it)
What I do not understand is that you guys keep talking about time this and time that.
MMORPGs = TIME SINKS. ALL OF THEM PERIOD. The whole point of an MMORPG is to get the player to play endlessly so that they keep paying the monthly fee.
Death Penatlies do make fights harder because players know that if they lose they lose time, they lose time that they will have to make up. Without the Death Penatlies people just throw themselfs at the encounter over and over and over again till they win, that is not how it should be. You should have to learn how to win the battle and if you do not learn quickly you should have to "pay" something and since we are playing MMORPGs, time is the logical thing to have to pay.
I do not understand the instant gradification crowd, I just do not understand it at all. Games are here for fun but I do not have fun unless I feel like I earned my victory and I cannot feel like I earned it if I risk nothing in trying to win the event/encounter/fight. That is my opinion and I know others do not share it but can you please explain why getting something with no risk or effort is rewarding?
Even older console games had Death penatlies that took time away from the player as the penatly. Look at super mario bro's, if you died you had to restart the whole level, that was the death penatly, making the player start the level over again.
You are treating instant gratification with encounter mechanics as if they are one in the same thing, which they are not.
Lets take the original dragons in everquest as an example. Specifically Vox.
When a raid wipes, there was the normal XP loss and time to rebuff, regroup, etc. Now lets pretend instead of 10% experience loss there wasn 50% experience loss.
Did the actual mechanics of the fight change? Did it become harder to kill her? Some new abilities come to life? If your group is consistantly killing her, did Lady Vox somehow become unkillable when the penalty for failure was increased?
No. It just became more time consuming. The fight didn't get longer or harder, just the time penalty BETWEEN actually playing the game got larger.
Harsh death penalties don't make the actual skill, abilities or knowledge of a fight any harder. Harsh death penalties only mean more down time. That is it.
Some people enjoy the risk associated with large death penalties, but that doesn't make the game any harder or require any more skill. It doesn't make other crave instant gratification for not enjoying extreme penalties.
Believe it or not some people enjoy playing and not being forced with excessive time sinks in between playing the game.
Exactly! RISK or TIME recouping is NOT difficulty. The fight is the same. The mechanics are the same. Hard Modes vs normal modes in dungeons make the game harder because the mechanics of the fight change. Having to grind for X number of hours to make up the EXP you lost does NOT make the encounter any harder. Only more tedious.
No your right it does not make the fight harder. It does make the players better. It makes the players learn faster, makes them listen to the leaders, it makes the whole event better to have a penatly that causes you to lose something valuable. (time is very valuable)
The fight does not get harder but the overall feel of the event has more of an edge if you risk losing something important which we can all agree on is time. Risk is what changes not the fight, the Risk is increased with a tough penatly. The fight stays the same, it does not get harder but to the players the event is "harder" because if they lose they lose something important to them vs the same event with no loss of anything.
This goes for all events not just raid events, if the risk to lose something is great, it makes the player better overall, makes them learn the ins and outs of their character. We can see this in the lack of PuGs now a days vs back in the old days. Today players do not have to learn their class nor are they punished if they do not learn their class. Every used pick up groups in older games because the bad player was rare and most players new one with in a few minutes of grouping.
If you think that MMORPGs are Tedious because of timesinks then you are playing the wrong kind of games, the whole point of MMORPGs is to get the player in a timesink. PERIOD. The longer the player spends playing the game, the more money you gain from said player.
Look at games today, 1 to 3 months max for most games before players get bored and move on to another game. That is a ton less money that the company could have made if they would have put risk into their games.
Look at Football. You have the NFL and the Women's lingerie league. Both games are still football. Football is football it does not get harder but with the NFL add the risk of big men and full contact. Now the NFL is harder then the other league. Football the game (the fight/event) is still football but now you added the risk to it which made it harder.
Sooner or Later
To the guy saying harsh death penalties dont make the encounter harder, sure, they dont. But what they do accomplish is creating significant risk if you overstep what you are capable of. The RISK is what needs to be put back in these games. If WoW made it so you lost the same amount of xp as well as having to get your corpse back people would not use death as a quick way to travel. Nor would they just run through zones of level 80 mobs chasing behind them because they know there is no risk even if you do die. Its pointless. Its sort of like playing bumper bowling, sure its fun, but real bowling has consequences if you bowl like an idiot, unlike bumper bowling where no matter what you hit the pins.
Too many games these days dont have the nail biting risk factor that made your heart jump out of your chest during certain encounters. When the odds are stacked against you, knowing full well the penalty for death, it made you fight harder. It may not have made the actual encounter harder, but it totally changes the game play dynamics in a positive way. When death is feared you fight harder, more carefully, and learn to work as a team to be more efficient.
I dont understand why people wouldn't want risk in a MMO. Whats the point of trying harder encounters if dying doesnt matter? Anyone can fight something thirty times and finally win.
I think it mostly has to do with todays generation of teens and young adults. I remember reading a study where kids these days getting out of college are completely overwhelmed with the real world. Its tough, and they never experienced challenges in their life. They just float on by with mommy and daddy paving the way. Then when the parents arent there any more, they hit a brick wall and whine until somebody takes them under their wing and does everything for them.
Remember the saying, "In my day, we used to walk twelve miles to school, uphill, in the snow every day."? Well, now its more like, "We got a ride to school every day, and the teacher gave us all good grades so she didnt hurt our feelings.". I say screw the feelings and bring back punishment. Something that pushes people to work harder and actually give a damn.
Look at the epics in WoW. Are they epic? Hardly. Everybody has full epics. The people these days whine and cry when a game is "unfair", and someone has something they want but cant have. It makes me feel like im teaching in a daycare again with a bunch of literal babies. Welfare epics. Sad.
Wow heallun, you brought back a lot of memories I had buried about that zone and the other aspects you brought up I think were spot on. Specifically all the nonsensical access quests required to get into certain zones and just how out of hand soe got with them. There was just to much time spent doing bullshit tasks to get to the fun parts of the game.
I really had forgotten how time I spent camping those stupid items to make VP keys, how disappointing the dungeon actually was and how quickly it became outdated with the next expansion following up so closely. It was especially rough on me, because I played a holy trinity class and there was only 2 active in my guild at the time so we were in constant demand to hold certain camps. Ugh....
That isn't to say that Veeshans Peak couldn't have been great and it really had a lot of potential, but with so many small bad choices it just added up into a list of things not to do really. There are things that could be improved on and added into some current games.
There are risks to dieing in almost every mmo, even wow (which dieing isn't a travel system). Just because it doesn't line match up with what gives you the feeling of risk doesn't mean it is wrong.
We are basically just talking about opinions of what makes people feel risk and what goes to far and just makes something tedious. You may feel that losing 5 gold repair bill, all your buffs and time lost setting back up for the fight isn't much risk. When you list what you think is the right amount of penalty I am sure that there is a group of people who think that isn't enough and want to take it to a level that you would find just takes away from the gameplay and makes it to tedious.
There is no right answer here. Your threshold isn't the standard by which all games should be measured.
The point of trying harder encounters is to beat them. Having more and more penalties stacked on a failure isn't what many people find fun or challenging and the bigger the penalty the more people will find it tedious instead of risky.
It wasn't Veeshan's Peak that was harsh, it was simply the death penalty. People have lost their corpse in many other places also, such as plane of fear, deep inside some dungeons like sebilis back in the days, etc...
And no, developers today won't make harsh penalties the way EQ had. Even EQ1 itself has changed the death penalties ingame, you can now summon corpses to guild lobby, and you no longer lose gear/items when you die.
EQ1-AC1-DAOC-FFXI-L2-EQ2-WoW-DDO-GW-LoTR-VG-WAR-GW2-ESO
Having high risk doesn't really make the game all that more exhilarating to the player. All it really do is make guilds be more exclusive. I used to run one of the most powerful guild on the WoW server Frostwolf with close to 100 member. When we run raid, we usually take a very casual approach and even bring a newbie or two along just so we can teach them the rope. If WoW were to say have all of these kind of penalty, all that does for my guild is for me to kick about half of them out of my guild and only take be very best player for raiding every single time.
Killing many of these raid bosses is hard enough as it is, and already required quite a big chunk of your time. The time it takes to get your entire raid battle ready every time you wipe is bad enough. Having all this high risk would do nothing more than making elite guild all that more elite by excluding any moderate, weak, or casual gamer as you might call them from those content.
From a casual point of view (which is what I am now, FU work and school) who at best could devote no more than 3 or 4 continuous hour once or twice a week to gaming. I want to spend those find working on my gear, and fighting difficult raid boss. What I don't have time for nor do I want to do is to spend 1 hours fighting and die to someone else stupid mistake and spend the next 3 or 4 hours on tedious grinding to get me back to where I was before. This is not about people wanting instant gratification, is about people not wanting to waste time on stupid stuff that act as nothing more than I time sink as a punishment for death.
So to close this all up for so many misguided people. High Risk vs Reward does not = harsh punished for death. High Risk vs Reward would be to have stupidly difficult boss for best loot in the game. The Risk would be the stupidly difficult boss that kill wipe the party as a result of a single person mistake. The reward for it would be uber loot and server wide fame of be the very few that are able to do so.
Having harsh death punishment are not risk taker, they are nothing more than sadist who get their jolly on from getting spanked.
Losing your gear in Darkfall is nothing compared to what the OP is mentioning. VP was a culmination of everything you had accomplished gear wise in your life in EQ. The time it took to equip your character not to mention the key quest just to be able to enter the place was a huge accomplishment at its time.
One screw up and not only you , but your entire guild could lose all their gear. Gear that took months of hard work to obtain. In DF I just grab another PVP kit out of the bank or craft more
EQ indeed killed itself. It wasn't the 'forced grouping' (which honestly, 2 people did just fine together, and a few classes did fantastic solo) that killed EQ, it wasn't even the raiding--it was the hardcore that drove EQ into the ground--which is hard for many of the mmorpg.com community to accept. Exclusivity is bad for business (and the majority of players' satisfaction).
edit: about VP, It had beautiful architecture--but as far as content went it was basically take nagafen, mix up a few models, string him in 6-7 places around the zone, and put the best loot in the game there and call it done. The pathing of certain dragons (roaming, that is) made it interesting--especially when hoshkar would gate on you ;p but overall people went there for the same reason they raid the same target more than once in WoW--for the loot (and as such, the prestige)
Losing your gear in Darkfall is nothing compared to what the OP is mentioning. VP was a culmination of everything you had accomplished gear wise in your life in EQ. The time it took to equip your character not to mention the key quest just to be able to enter the place was a huge accomplishment at its time.
One screw up and not only you , but your entire guild could lose all their gear. Gear that took months of hard work to obtain. In DF I just grab another PVP kit out of the bank or craft more
That was never a real possibility, though. There was always a necro camped out who could summon w/coffin (which was fairly economical in kunark with tiny jaid inlaid coffin spell, yay) and then rez a cleric with an EE rez. VP's mechanics were prohibitive, but easily circumvented. PoFear for the first few guilds was a more real possibility of losing the gear as there was nowhere safe to do your rezzing. You either successfully broke in, or you begged guild #2/#3 to come bail you out within a week. Casters not being gear based in the slightest--a few mages with pets out, a couple of wizard to blast mobs--enchanters being able to lock em down withotu gear--and clerics healing just fine without gear--the re-break was quite possible without tanks or melee dps (which was abysmal at this point in the game anyway). Generally speaking, though, most people again circumvented the risk of the fear-break death by having a bard kite the zone while your guild moved in and camped, then bard die -> get corpse summon -> move on to clearing zone =P ~ Bard could also DA song (immunity song
) run out if he could make it through the temple, but he had to DA before CT saw him and had to make it to the zone before his dA wore off or he'd get death touch'd 
Good game--it punished people for not thinking. Punishing is bad for sales--you won't see it again. That's not the say lal the decisions VI made were golden, but they had a great base of a game up until velious.
I sometimes feel like a historian or a savant thinking about these things in detail--I just miss it quite a bit =D
What I do not understand is that you guys keep talking about time this and time that.
MMORPGs = TIME SINKS. ALL OF THEM PERIOD. The whole point of an MMORPG is to get the player to play endlessly so that they keep paying the monthly fee.
Death Penatlies do make fights harder because players know that if they lose they lose time, they lose time that they will have to make up. Without the Death Penatlies people just throw themselfs at the encounter over and over and over again till they win, that is not how it should be. You should have to learn how to win the battle and if you do not learn quickly you should have to "pay" something and since we are playing MMORPGs, time is the logical thing to have to pay.
I do not understand the instant gradification crowd, I just do not understand it at all. Games are here for fun but I do not have fun unless I feel like I earned my victory and I cannot feel like I earned it if I risk nothing in trying to win the event/encounter/fight. That is my opinion and I know others do not share it but can you please explain why getting something with no risk or effort is rewarding?
Even older console games had Death penatlies that took time away from the player as the penatly. Look at super mario bro's, if you died you had to restart the whole level, that was the death penatly, making the player start the level over again.
You are treating instant gratification with encounter mechanics as if they are one in the same thing, which they are not.
Lets take the original dragons in everquest as an example. Specifically Vox.
When a raid wipes, there was the normal XP loss and time to rebuff, regroup, etc. Now lets pretend instead of 10% experience loss there wasn 50% experience loss.
Did the actual mechanics of the fight change? Did it become harder to kill her? Some new abilities come to life? If your group is consistantly killing her, did Lady Vox somehow become unkillable when the penalty for failure was increased?
No. It just became more time consuming. The fight didn't get longer or harder, just the time penalty BETWEEN actually playing the game got larger.
Harsh death penalties don't make the actual skill, abilities or knowledge of a fight any harder. Harsh death penalties only mean more down time. That is it.
Some people enjoy the risk associated with large death penalties, but that doesn't make the game any harder or require any more skill. It doesn't make other crave instant gratification for not enjoying extreme penalties.
Believe it or not some people enjoy playing and not being forced with excessive time sinks in between playing the game.
Exactly! RISK or TIME recouping is NOT difficulty. The fight is the same. The mechanics are the same. Hard Modes vs normal modes in dungeons make the game harder because the mechanics of the fight change. Having to grind for X number of hours to make up the EXP you lost does NOT make the encounter any harder. Only more tedious.
No your right it does not make the fight harder. It does make the players better. It makes the players learn faster, makes them listen to the leaders, it makes the whole event better to have a penatly that causes you to lose something valuable. (time is very valuable)
The fight does not get harder but the overall feel of the event has more of an edge if you risk losing something important which we can all agree on is time. Risk is what changes not the fight, the Risk is increased with a tough penatly. The fight stays the same, it does not get harder but to the players the event is "harder" because if they lose they lose something important to them vs the same event with no loss of anything.
This goes for all events not just raid events, if the risk to lose something is great, it makes the player better overall, makes them learn the ins and outs of their character. We can see this in the lack of PuGs now a days vs back in the old days. Today players do not have to learn their class nor are they punished if they do not learn their class. Every used pick up groups in older games because the bad player was rare and most players new one with in a few minutes of grouping.
If you think that MMORPGs are Tedious because of timesinks then you are playing the wrong kind of games, the whole point of MMORPGs is to get the player in a timesink. PERIOD. The longer the player spends playing the game, the more money you gain from said player.
Look at games today, 1 to 3 months max for most games before players get bored and move on to another game. That is a ton less money that the company could have made if they would have put risk into their games.
Look at Football. You have the NFL and the Women's lingerie league. Both games are still football. Football is football it does not get harder but with the NFL add the risk of big men and full contact. Now the NFL is harder then the other league. Football the game (the fight/event) is still football but now you added the risk to it which made it harder.
No. In today's market, increased risk does not make the typical player better. It makes them find another game. Dev's know that, which is why many of the sadistic practices of the old style games have been removed. Increased risk only makes players better if they enjoy the game(and there are few alternatives that offer as much fun with decreased risk). The demographic for those types of games is rather small, and growing smaller. Thats one of the reasons why so many Asian games niche themselves in the western markets.
The issue here is that the people you are arguing with already consider you a bad player who should not be playing MMORPGs with them. You prefer to spend your time constructively and prefer not to have artificial blocks put in front of you when you try to improve yourself as a player. If you do not strive for absolute perfection all the time and punish yourself for every minor imperfection or mistake then you simply do not deserve to play a MMORPG.
Darkfall whole world is like that and maybe even harder in someplaces then you describe lol and for many worse part is its players you can get all your stuff lol.
So yes its implemented in todays mmo DARKFALL.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
Well it might not change the mechanics,but there is TWO words to the equation BOTH risk AND difficulty.
The risk part is losing XP or loot or whatever else the game decides.The Difficulty part can come from the same mechanics if you lose an entire level dieing,the fight will be that much harder if you try it again a level lower.
We need to also remove ourselves from looking at simplistic SOE or Blizzards designs they are more or less cheap and not thought out much at all.Someone else eluded to ideas of perhaps injuring the player,so they lose accuracy or agility,things like that create more risk and difficulty.Perhaps you are too injured to wield a large sword,so you can only wield a dagger,lose enough agility and you can no longer use a bow or gun.Lose your agility and you become slower,head damage can cause blurred vision ect ect,there is so much you can do to create a realistic risk/difficulty battle.
My opinion is that games should completely remove the ridiculous FAKE dying mechanic.Instead you should become a fallen/injured,your group members can take on the hate to allow your player to recover and be able to fight again,however with the added penalties suffered from injuries,this is a far more realistic design that offers both risk and difficulty.Injuries should incur time to recover from,so eventually if all members are fallen/ko'd or others leave the area,the mob ignores you and moves on and also recovers over time just as the players do.
It is of course a design that does not work in solo mode as it should not,you are suppose to be fighting an epic battle,one that requires team work.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
the way you described it and from other posts on EQ I would say that it would be far too long to do and cause too much of a problem to be worth implementing. Now if you turned a castle inside of a zone into a hardcore dungeon/open world dungeon then I would support it as the players can avoid said castle if needed. A whole zone with such high risk/reward factors is just a waste of the devs time
MMO wish list:
-Changeable worlds
-Solid non level based game
-Sharks with lasers attached to their heads
The issue here is that the people you are arguing with already consider you a bad player who should not be playing MMORPGs with them. You prefer to spend your time constructively and prefer not to have artificial blocks put in front of you when you try to improve yourself as a player. If you do not strive for absolute perfection all the time and punish yourself for every minor imperfection or mistake then you simply do not deserve to play a MMORPG.
Thank you sir! May I have another?...
That type of mentality speaks for itself. Learning from ones mistakes doesn't require punishment. Sadistic design practices are typical of those who do not understand player motivation and are stuck in the punishment feed back loop. Such games have rather limited appeal in today's market.
I have to disagree with you again.
Perhaps a higher risk makes YOU feel the game is more edgy, but that doesn't make it so for everyone. There is a huge variance between what many people find acceptable in terms of risk and what makes an mmo unenjoyable. You are taking your view of what defines risk and placing it as the standard of what mmos should be. In the end all we are talking about is how
As for times sinks being the sole point of mmos you are most certainly wrong. The point of games is to entertain players. Timesinks are often a part of mmos, but they certainly are not the goal of the game. Just because time sinks are associated with mmos, doesn't mean they need to be extreme, pointless or non-entertaining. That is one of the reasons EQ was toppled as the market leader, because they lost focus on making things fun and went overboard with pointless time sinks. Much of the time sinks served no purpose other than to punish players instead of challenge or entertain. The purpose of mmos in not to suck time aimlessly, it is to offer enjoyment and entertainment. In the end we are still talking about a game and games need to be entertaining above all else.
Lastly, punishing players doesn't give them the ability to learn faster. The worse the penalties get the more people that will just leave, the less tolerance leaders will show to players and the less attempts can be made on learning encounters before the penalties stack up so high that further attempts cannot be made without working off the penalties. Just because another game doesn't punish failure as stiffly doesn't mean people try to fail or somehow care less about learning. No one wants to lose to encounters, spend gold needlessly or waste their night not trying to learn from their mistakes so they can beat encounters.
If a math teacher beats students with a stick will they suddenly be able to learn faster or will students just stop showing up to class?
Your football example is comparing paid professionals that earn tens of millions dollars a year in a multibillion dollar industry to that of a novelty league that draws on sexual content as the centerpiece attraction. So I don't think that is an realistic comparison.
As far as I'm concerned, gaming companies have focused end game content towards hardcore elitests for far too long. I don't want future games to make 90% of their end game for 10% of the gaming population. I'm sick to death of the majority funding the content of the minority. The problem is that there are too many hardcore developers who don't give a rat's ass about the regular gamer. They create low level casual content to draw in the money from the majority, then spend it on their hardcore raiding buddies. Even World of Warcraft rips off it's casual gamers in preferential treatment of raiders. I'm waiting for these hardcore friendly developers to finally make a 100% hardcore game and see if it can really succeed financially without us carebears there to support it.
The issue here is that the people you are arguing with already consider you a bad player who should not be playing MMORPGs with them. You prefer to spend your time constructively and prefer not to have artificial blocks put in front of you when you try to improve yourself as a player. If you do not strive for absolute perfection all the time and punish yourself for every minor imperfection or mistake then you simply do not deserve to play a MMORPG.
LOL .. this is silly. ".. deserve to play ..." .. ha ha ha.
I have news to you. MMORPGs are GAMES .. ENTERTAINMENT PRODUCTS. Companies try to attract players, not give them SATs and boot them if they don't measure up.
And you think people care about what other think they should or should not play? So what are you going to do? Lecture people who cannot learn how to down a boss?
And there is a good reason why you are the kind of people where the market is trending AWAY from.
I think if you really look at certain games and compare the casual content to the end game raiding content you will see that the majority of the games are made up of solo/casual friendly content and raid content makes up very little of the actual game. It just happens to be where current mmo game design leads to when solo/casual gameplay ends.