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The massive power gap has to go
Creslin321
Member Posts: 5,359
I really believe that the massive gap in power currently seen between low level and high level players in most popular MMORPGs is not a good game mechanic for MMORPGs. An MMORPG, in contrast to a single player RPG, typically features a persistent world where thousands of players can interact and play together. It is natural to think that the interaction of players is of paramount importance to such a game. However, the way that most MMORPGs stratify levels with a massive power gap between lower and higher levels is extremely harmful to this interaction.
First, it is harmful to PvE because you can only (productively) group with players in close proximity to your level. This severely limits your options. I am sure all of us have experienced waiting for 2 hours before we could even find a group to play with. Imagine how much easier it would be to find a group if you could draw upon the entire population of the server to group with instead of just people who happen to be within your level range. In my opinion this leads many people to want to solo because finding a group is such a hassle and game designers have responded by making it easier/possible to solo. But this is like fixing the symptom and not the problem...why would you play an MMORPG if you're only interested in soloing.
Second, it is harmful to PvP because it causes any open-world PvP to almost always be extremely unfair and leads to excessive griefing. Once again, I am sure we've all experienced getting ganked by someone 30 levels above you. It's ridiculous, you have zero chance of winning, how is that fun? To remedy this, game developers have tried a variety of solutions, PvE only servers, PvP zones, instanced PvP...but once again, these are all like band-aids trying to cure the symptom, but ignoring the problem.
Okay, so now that we've looked at the problems that the massive power gap causes, let's examine the (perceived) benefits it provides. My understanding is that game developers believe by allowing players to advance from basically a noodle-armed peon to eventually become a demigod, players will feel like they have something to work towards and feel that they are truly progressing. In other words, the power-gap is necessary to provide addictive, achievement-based gameplay. After all, if you don't become more powerful, then why would you even level?
I would argue against this point. There was a recent thread on these boards by Pencilrick that pointed out that, even though you become more numerically powerful, your game experience doesn't really change (or even gets harder). This is due to the "treadmill" that games with a huge power gap need to have. In order to provide a challenge for increasingly powerful players, the game must provide increasingly powerful enemies. So whenever you become powerful enough to "dominate" your current enemies, they cease to yield rewards and you are forced to start the process over again with a more powerful enemy ad infinitum. Is this really advancement?
I would argue that the only feeling of advancement comes from learning NEW skills, not simply making already existing ones more powerful. So why not design the game so that players will always be a similar "power-level," but will be able to advance by acquiring a wide VARIETY of skills. Essentially, advancement of breadth as opposed to advancement of depth. The only modern game with a system resembling this is Guild Wars where you reach max level relatively quickly but then can spend months trying to get all of the different skills. I feel that this would still provide the same addicitive, achievement-based gameplay without the terrible side effects of having a huge power gap.
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But you run into the same problem. Only, instead of a lvl20 and a lvl50 guy being horribly mismatched, you have two lvl50 guys, but one with 5 skills and the other with 30 skills. One of them is still the first choice to fill a party, and one of them still stomps the other in PvP.
The solution might be to limit how powerful the skills are, but then that leaves you with less room to improve, and less to achieve. Nevermind how hard it is to make a large number of unique skills - practically speaking, there are only so many things a skill can do. Eventually, they just start becoming variations and increments of each other. And the only way to fix that is to introduce more aspects to combat, whcih allows for a wider variety of effects. But that requires revamping the combat system, along with all the balancing and server-load that brings with it.
...it's a giant can of worms, basically.
A Modest Proposal for MMORPGs:
That the means of progression would not be mutually exclusive from the means of enjoyment.
I don't really agree. If you look at FPS games with "RPG" elements in multiplayer like Modern Warfare 2, it doesn't matter if player A has played for 3 months and has a mega powerful weapon at his disposal if player B sees him first and shoots him in the face. The skills should not be so powerful as to make the other ones obsolete. They should simply offer new ways to play and new strategies.
You could also compare it to a CCG like Magic the Gathering. Someone may own thousands of cards and would indeed have many resources at their disposal, but a player with 100 cards that made an awesome deck may still beat him.
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While I agree, in a theme park it is necessary. Without it players could jump right into higher level areas. In sandboxes it is necessary for low levels to have a use in all content. In my experiences that is how it is anyway. It does/did not take long in Eve, SWG, or UO to have some use to a group tackling higher end content. Sure they don't replace someone who is maxed out their skill trees, but it doesn't punish friendships where people come into the game at different times or uneven playing times.
In a themepark, if you do not play with someone it is hard to keep up and play as a group. Which drives me crazy since I am playing an MMO to play with others. When people I enjoy playing with shoot past me or lag behind it just ruins a bit of the game for me.
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The "power gap" is not the problem. It's the maturity gap.
The maturity gap is when someone logs on to a new game and expects their character to be as powerful as one that someone else has been improving on for 6 months to a year or more. Or else that they should be able to do in 3 days what took that guy six months.
Instead of settling in and improving their character the same way as that other guy did, the player with the maturity deficit demands the game be made easier and the whole playing field leveled so that the guy who has been playing for a year or more has nothing to show for it.
Now there are "buddy systems' and similar devices whereby players many levels apart can group together. That's fine. But suggesting that newbies should be on par with veterans of a game is just the latest iteration of "I don't want to play I just want everything handed to me now."
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No, I think it's more of the fact that progression is always more fun to do while everyone else is doing it. If a player comes into the game months after launch or after the release of a new expansion, he's just playing catch up to 99% of the game's population, which isn't always fun or all that easy.
I would be for a game that had your basic leveling grind, but I don't believe that the endgame should be such a grind. As such, I would enjoy an endgame where players participated in raids, dungeons, or PvP for the sake of the content and not the reward. From what I understand, old school DAoC was very much like that. I always thought basic Guild Wars was very easy to pick up and play as well.
"Open world PvP" is probably the most questioned and dismissed mechanic ever in MMOs - the only player category that supports it is pretty much grievers. So, in my opinion, we should be questioning the flawed mechanic first, and not why another mechanic like the power gap (which has a lot more supporters) isn't compatible with the flawed one.
Then, about PvEing, i think you made a very wrong assumption. Personally i recognize the grouping problem into the fact that a game is designed so that the real content is somewhere near max level - somewhere that a new player has to rush in order to reach. And that rush is through uninteresting content which is somehow beautified by the use of quests which in turn also benefit the player with the best possible speed in that rush he's doing cause of their rewards (high XP, better gear which leads to faster kills/less downtime).
And these quests, are probably the most group unfriendly mechanic ever created on MMOs: You have to kill 10 bears for example, you go onto the right spot, meet someone killing bears but he is already at 9/10 bears. So he won't group with you. Or let's say he was at 1/10 bears and he groups with you. 30 seconds pass and you finish the remaining bears and now you split, cause he has done your quests and you have done his quests, or anyway it takes far too long to tell which quests you two guys have in common so it's not worth it.
Personally, every time some guy posts some LFG message, i find myself doing one of these quests. Taking that as a hint, i know very well why i can't find people when i LFG myself...
"Traditionally, massively multiplier online games have been about three basic gameplay pillars combat, exploration and character progression. In Alganon, in addition to these we've added the fourth pillar to the equation: Copy & Paste."
MMORPGs are not difficult, they cannot be made easier. They are just tedious. Tedious does not equal difficult. Playing Starcraft multiplayer against an equally skilled player is difficult. Computer programming can be difficult. Grinding orcs for 2 months is not difficult it is tedious.
You are literally doing the same thing over and over again. You are basically an assembly line worker. I do not think that asking that a game be made "fun" is immature.
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Why does "theme park" imply forcing the players onto a grinding treadmill in order to access the content of the game? In a real world theme park they don't make you ride the spinning cups 5000 times before you can ride the roller coaster. I know I may be just arguing about the analogy, but "theme park" games do not seem very similar to real world theme parks to me. They seem more like treadmills.
The whole idea behind level stratification is to stretch the content that the developers created out by more or less forcing players to experience it all to advance. But I don't think that you need to do this in order to stretch the content out. You could do something like having a whole bunch of skills that players can acquire, but to acquire these skills they would need to collect some kind of resource from different areas of the game, or complete different quests. You don't need to hard enforcement of large power gaps to do this...
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You're not asking for games to be made more fun. You want to step into a game people have been playing and enjoying for a long time and have it all be about you lol.
We already have the type of game you want. Try Super Mario Cart. MMOs are not those kinds of games. They are persistent worlds. You don't show up as a noob on day 1 and expect to be as powerful as someone who has played for years. And if you do, you're going to be dissappointed.
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<Sigh>...I have been playing MMORPGs since text based MUDs, first graphical MMORPG I played was Ultima Online. You clearly do not understand what I am trying to convey. I don't think its "inexperience" or "laziness" that makes me feel the way I do, I think it's that I'm jaded after walking the treadmill in EQ, then DAoC, then WoW, then AoC. They are all the same (in terms of the leveling treadmill).
I do not want to play the game and have everything that a high level player would have. That would be stupid, what would I work for? That's like playing an RPG and just entering a cheat code to get max level. The whole point of these games is achievement.
I DO want to be at least moderately comparable with a higher level character so that I can group with my friends and actually accomplish something useful. The buddy system doesn't work for this because you are never eligible for the quests that the higher level people are working on. It's just a "band-aid" solution.
I also want to have a slight chance of winning in a fight against a higher level person, based on skill/strategy.
Finally, just to clarify the type of system I would want...I would want a system where the BASE STATS of a high level and low level character are not that different, maybe the high level character has double what the low level has. BUT the low level guy would have like 8 abilities, whereas the high level guy would have 100 or so.
How is this "getting something without working for it?"
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It's worth noting that, in the case of an FPS, you CAN one-shot someone, which is what makes that "balance" between pro and newcomer possible. Whereas we generally consider a one-shot in an MMO indicative of gross imbalance.
Furthermore, in the case of an FPS, you actually have very few "Skills" - just different weapons, really, many of which are just variations on the same thing - point, shoot, with possible AOE effects. What makes it so fun is that you have a full 3D world to use them in, using everything from stealth, flanking, surprise attacks, altitude, covering fire, decoys, feints, etc. This is a case of a combat system allowing for player to use a relatively small variety of weapons in a huge variety of ways. It's a system with a lot of room for player creativity, you could say.
And then we have MMO's, which is are largely devoid of such aspects. Target acquisition is often done simply by using the tab key or mouse click in a general area. A combination of a third-person perspective, limited draw distances, and lack of techniques with beyond-field-of-view range eliminates a huge percentage of blind spots and the associated options they could offer. Lines of sight are equal and rarely take obstacles into account. There just isn't very much room for creativity in your standard MMO. Coordination, preparation, experience, even some reflexes - absolutely. But not creativity.
Anyway, I think it's one thing to complain about the massive power gap - fair enough, and I actually somewhat agree. I just don't think it's feasible to fix it by introducing a skill-based system like you say. And shrinking the power gap effectively reduces a huge measurement of accomplishment for many people - a player's increasing ability to kill stuff.
(I'm actually looking forward to FFXIV for this reason - it's sounding like you'll have to pick what skills you equip with some care, offering a chance for a good player to come out ahead. Maybe, anyway.)
A Modest Proposal for MMORPGs:
That the means of progression would not be mutually exclusive from the means of enjoyment.
I just didn't want to use the term WoW-clone. I suppose a theme-park could be done in a way for all players of any level to participate in the content. However, in a wow/aion/WAR/etc level 10's skipping over 10-80 content and going into raids would not work well. Understand what I am saying?
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Bad idea. No power gap = no meaningful progression, which is the KEY feature of many MMOs.
And you don't need to wait 2 hrs to group up. Dungeon Finder on WOW solves that problem.
Ok, I haven't read everything.
But I agree with the power gap issue. Lorewise it makes no sense that someone is 10 or 100 times more powerful as someone else.
It's totally weird how person A is dying to a rat and person B is able to kill a dragon. It makes no sense at all.
The problem is that virtually all MMO players are programmed by the progression mechanic to focus on their characters, instead of the game. This is deliberate on the part of the developers, since they can't really make enough of a game world for people to keep playing just for the sake of what they're doing in said world.
The only game I've ever seen that focused the player on changing the game world ("moving the map" in the parlance) was old-school Planetside. The character progression was very very limited compared to the whole leveling system, but it didn't matter because the spotlight was what you accomplished for your entire side during your play session, not what you personally got for your character, be it items or levels.
So I think that's the answer to everyone's problem - gameplay that rewards your accomplishments for others, not just your character. I'm looking at you, Guild Wars 2!
This is possibly one of the most ignorant statements I have read on these forums (indeed any forum). You must not have much experience with the changes in MMOs over time if you believe this. Most people here have seen games become much easier, much much easier.
This is not about removing grind, as spending countless hours to achieve a task is not difficult, we all agree. However if you just look at one established game - WoW, they not only removed some of the grind (though added different grinds) but their policy for the last 3 years has to make the game increasingly easy to play. The difficulty level of encounters has been made easier and easier. Their reasoning is that they wanted more of their playerbase to experience more of their game (how many raiders had even entered Naxx prior to BC being released?).
WoW is not the only established game that has made content easier to complete over time. And it is not only existing MMOs where this happens, new MMOs are developed with the same mindset of "everyone must be able to achieve everything no matter their individual skill level". It is a symptom of society in general where the possibility of failure is to be removed for fear of damage to the self-esteem of the young - what happened to learning from your mistakes to become better? The result is that we have the difficulty setting on MMOs dropped to easy for everyone, alienating those players who were happy enough with the difficulty setting where it was, providing some challenges and providing something to strive towards, other than filling up progress bars.
No one is saying that MMOs were ever super difficult and that only the elite could play them, but there are definitely skill curves as anyone who plays an MMO will know (it is not always about someone having better gear, some people simply know more about the game or have better reflexes).
Whether or not the lowering of the difficulty level of MMOs (some refer to the process as "dumbing down", you may have heard of it) is a good or bad thing for an individual game or the genre as a whole is irrelevant to this discussion. The fact that it exists isn't really open for debate.
Well I will admit, I've never done a raid. I usually burn out when I hit, or approach, max level and lose interest. The coordination overhead in getting in or organizing a raid just seemed too much of a hassle. So I can't really speak as to if those encounters are difficult or not.
But as for solo or non-raid group play, I never really found any MMORPG difficult. Especially since in group play you usually have just one role to fulfill. The only thing I ever found difficult about an MMORPG was trying to get a bunch of different people to do something, but that has nothing to do with the game mechanics.
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I don't know your background with MMOs but it seems to be limited (based solely off what you say). The open world experience in many games has become easier over time as well, much easier. This has been due to the increasingly popular demand to structure gameplay towards a solo player.
Many open world areas used to be quite dangerous to adventure in if you were a solo player. Not impossible but difficult and this is what made those zones so much fun. Due to the outcry of solo players wishing to do everything by themselves these zones were made much easier for solo players to navigate, trivialising the content and alienating those people who enjoyed a challenge.
This removed the necessity for people to group up or help one another, even for short times, and was one of the most important aspects in eroding the community structure of modern MMOs to the dismal state we see today.
Of course it makes sense.
Could you step in the ring with a heavyweight champion and expect to win? Can you debate a nobel prize winning physicist and expect to win a debate on physics.
Training, experience and knowledge count massively in the real world, as they must in an MMO. These things are demonstrated in an MMO through the artificial mechanic of either levels or skills.
If you think everyone in real life is equal then sha la la la.
Could you step in the ring with a heavyweight champion and expect to win? Can you debate a nobel prize winning physicist and expect to win a debate on physics.
Training, experience and knowledge count massively in the real world, as they must in an MMO. These things are demonstrated in an MMO through the artificial mechanic of either levels or skills.
If you think everyone in real life is equal then sha la la la.
What he is saying here is that for example, in Eve, it takes little time to be an asset to a group. IE Tackling. However, lets say in WoW, no matter what unless you are at everyone elses level with similar gear you would be a liability.
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In a single-player RPG, the character power advancement is largely a device necessary to shove the player through the storyline. But in a persistent world, that's not really necessary. In an MMORPG, you should be able to go back and forth at will or else it's not like a real world at all, is it?
It would be great if MMORPG advancement could be "broad" rather than "tall." When I play, what I care about is not more power, or killing differently-skinned rats, but rather what new things I can do.
Most MMORPG's try to encourage replayability by forcing players to spend many hours re-treading the same content, zones, quests, etc., so that they can get a new class up to the point where their frinends are. But, if you think about it, that's really not necessary. If one character got a new suite of skills, he could go back to zones he'd already been to before, but it would be a totally new experience.
This could work great in grouping as well. A new player could join in with more advanced players, but he would simply have a more limited ROLE. If his character only had one or two abilities, he'd have to do one small task in the encounter or raid, while the more advanced characters could do more complicated tasks, or switch roles as needed.
Likewise in PvP, it wouldn't work like boxing with mis-matched weight classes. It would work more like the Magic card game, where a lucky or clever player with a small selection of cards could beat someone with a huge collection of cards - albeit the odds would be against him.
The difference is that if in real life you shove your finger in that boxer's eye, then he will be blind. In an MMORPG, if you shove your finger in that boxer's eye, you will have a broken finger.
We were never saying that there should be no difference between high and low level players, just that the power gap, as is, is ridiculous. It is like the difference between a rabbit and a mack truck.
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I think it's just our definition of "difficult" that is different. I don't think a game becomes "easier" when you level up in 20 kills as opposed to 40, it just gets "shorter." On the same token, I don't think that the presence of "grief NPCs," I'm looking at you Sand Giants, would make a game "difficult," just annoying.
To me, difficult means that something has to be challenging. Dress it up any way you want, grinding is not challenging. The only thing that may be "difficult" is to grind for 2 months straight without quitting the game. But that's not the kind of "difficulty" I would be looking for.
I do concede the point on raiding though. I don't raid so I'm not sure how those encounters go. But if it's similar to a group boss, then I don't think it's difficult, except for the person who has to lead everyone. Because as a player, my only job is to heal, or to damage, or to tank, but never more than one of those. Really, it's pretty easy.
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I understand the initial premise of the argument but the spin that bastionix added was patently wrong.
Different games are structured in different ways. Some games decide the level mechanic is how they wish to display character progression. I do agree that this is a little outdated and can be done much better (maybe TSW with its no classes and no levels will be able to provide another alternative to EVE, which is not a lot of people's cup of tea).
However I don't really see a problem with a level mechanic. It displays the disparity of experience and knowledge between characters as they journey through the world and grow in power - just like people do in real life. Of course the level mechanic has been used as a rather arbitrary way of slowing players down and parcelling out content but that is a flaw of implementation not the mechanic itself.
My only problem is that in a game such as WoW a level 10 character has ZERO chance of doing anything to a level 80. Hell fifty level 10s don't have a chance, but WoW is a game where the level mechanic got out of hand - like most other things that changed over the course of its five years. But WoW solved that problem by allowing you to reach level cap in about 5 days so no big deal really.