Items are essentially what make a mmo a mmo as far as video games are conerned. without items you have no progression, and very little reason to get people to pay $15/mo. Might as well just sell story expansion packs.
But items, they're what gives us the MOTIVATION to keep playing. They are both the key to mmo existance and the bane of mmo existance. To me, the problem is that in-game items are handled so terribly in modern mmos. Heck, maybe items are just handled poorly in most mmos.
My first online rpg was D2 and since then the only game that has come even close to meeting that itemization bar has been swg of all games, a game that didn't even drop phat lootz!!! But you could craft marvelous items with large variance, thus creating a very limited supply of the best stuff, and in the end a limited supply of the best stuff is what keeps people playin until 3 am when they have to work at 7 saying to themselves "just one more dungeon crawl".
Until itemization and treasure hunting is put back to its proper glory, and the overly destructive bind on pickup mechanic cast back into the bowels of hell from whence it came, mmos will continue to remain boring and stagnant.
I like a great story as much as anybody else, but it's still the items in the end that will keep me playing hardcore for years.
Have to say that I agree with the article wholeheartedly.
It also doesn't surprise me that such an article - and others like it - are written by people whose gaming experience precedes the WoW era, or even MMOs overall. I also got started in table-top AD&D roleplaying. Every Sunday... all day long, outside on the picnic table when it was nice. Inside on the dining room table when it wasn't. We all chipped in for pizzas and soda. Great adventures. Great laughs. Great times. Gear was *never* the focus. Adventuring with a band of other players through treacherous terrain, dangerous dungeons and surviving surprise encounters created great memories and great times, many of which I remember to this day. And I'm talking things that happened 25+ years ago.
Fast-forward to the 1st and 2nd gen of MMORPGs. FFXI got me hooked and, similarly, the best, most stand-out memories I have of that game have nothing to do with obtaining items. They were of experiences I had. Difficult encounters or situations encountered with a group of people that we somehow survived. Random incidents that took place just while traveling around. I can't tell you when I earned any given piece of gear in FFXI, but I can tell you plenty of the fun experiences I had while trying to get them.
In the generations of MMOs after that there's been a definite change in the way the games are designed. However, there's also been a change in the expectations of players. Back in the EQ1, FFXI, UO, AC1 days, players valued and enjoyed their time simply playing the game. Even though the gameplay was, perhaps more grindy and not as flashy as newer MMOs are... those who played them still enjoyed themselves, enough to stick with them for *years* - even after WoW and its spin-offs hit the scene.
There are people who will argue that the old-school MMOs were crap, and those who enjoyed them only did so because there was nothing better on the scene. They further argue that people who say they were fun are only seeing them through rose-colored lenses of nostalgia.
I politely disagree and assert that those people are barking up the wrong tree and jumping to the wrong conclusions.
So why is it, then? It's because they offered an experience that newer MMOs have moved away from. They provided a world, set the stage for the players, and then got out of the way. They didn't guide players around by the hand, telling them what to do next, where to go next, etc.
Old-school MMOs, like table-top pen and paper RPGs dropped the players into an alternate world and said "Here ya are... Enjoy your journey". And we did.
They encouraged and even required player interaction - something else newer MMOs are moving away from. The gameplay became as much about player interaction as it did about what quest you were doing or what raid boss you were out to kill or, indeed, what item you were after. It wasn't about some far off goal that everyone was racing toward.. it was about what you and others were doing at that moment.
People typically didn't mind taking time to help you achieve something because, for the most part, no one was in a hurry. They weren't racing frantically toward level cap and end-game like is typical in newer MMOs. They weren't going out of their way, they were helping someone else with something in a world they enjoyed inhabiting.
Death penalties didn't bother people because, again, no hurry. It wasn't a "punishment to make the game miserable for the player" as it's so often characterized these days. It was just part of the game. You die, you lose xp, or gear or whatever... you work to get it back, most likely with the help of friends you had in-game. More opportunity for fun times to be had and something to look back on and laugh about down the road.
There's something to be said for the fact that while many MMO players these days seem to measure their time in any given MMO in months, the older MMOs kept subscribers happily playing for years... and some still are to this day.
Instead of a long-term adventure - or series of adventures - MMOs these days are all about "short term entertainment".
Instead of setting long term goals and then setting out to achieve them, people want their rewards faster, easier and more frequent.
Instead of cooperation and interaction with other players and a sense of community, MMOs have turned to an ever more solo experience where players want as little interaction with others as possible.... up to and including content that's always been group centric, such as raids.
Once upon a time, each new MMO to come out tried to create and provide a unique experience, in a unique setting that was unlike anything else on the market. Developers of new MMOs are trying as hard as they can to copy other MMOs with very little effort to set themselves apart, to try and "get a piece of the action'.
Sad as it is, it's no surprise to me at all that players are growing bored and disillusioned with MMOs. They're a mere shadow of what they once were. The entire genre has degraded to an over-saturated mess of "me-too" bandwagon clones.
If this article, some of the responses I've read so far, along with other posts and articles I've been seeing are any indication... looks like we might be witnessing the beginning of a sea change...hopefully for the better.
"If you just step away for a sec you will clearly see all the pot holes in the road, and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
I am not too sure about older games not being ruled by loot. My first game was Everquest. I had no preconceived ideas but starting with Unrest all the way to the Planes of Fear all I remember was camping for items. Granted we helped others and had the dkp system but it was all about loot. I spent three months trying to get the Shining Metalic Robe from magi in Guk. I recall camping the Flowing Black Sash thing for a friend in the guild and our guild even had full loot fights that split the guild up. I don't know about Asheron's Call but Everquest had loot concerns.
Because games should be fun - chasing forever after the next Tier xyz set isn't.
My WoW Guild and i were playing from Vanilla to Burning Crusade (and a bit of Frozen Throne) and we didn't HAVE to have the best items there were. We were having fun when we were doing Karazhan with some guildmates, they didn't need to have a complete Tier 4 Set already - they just had to have fun like the rest of us.
It didn't matter if they were new to the instances, because we learned and got better TOGETHER.
Yes - we wiped often because someone stood at the wrong spot (Onyxia or Magtheridon anyone? *g*) - but it was FUN and we laughed nevertheless and teased the guy who got hit by Onyxias Tail ;-)
It was fun just playing a 40, 20 or 10 man instance with people we liked. That was then...
A few years went by and all we hear now is: "You have to have Gearscore xyz or get lost!"
"We won't take you in our group, you definitely suck, BECAUSE YOUR ITEMS ARE TOO LOW."
Since when have items been the scale to measure a player's capability of being good at playing?
That is not what games and communities should be all about - it should be the fun in playing and having nice people around you.
I seriously am getting sick of the new breed of "mmo" players. I hesitate to even call them MMO's players.
MMORPG's were developed so you could have an expansive world where YOU MAKE YOUR OWN STORY. The WHOLE point was not to hold your hand and guide you along a path. Now, we have this influx of console tards and single player RPG's fans who are trying to turn the genre into something it never was. Its like trying to take a porsche and convert it into a f*cking minivan, its going to fail horribly at being a minivan and a sports car.
Why it has become that "casual friendly" has to equal "solo friendly" is beyond me. You can still incentivize grouping and make the game casual friendly. Instead you have companies who are pandering and catering to this crowd of gimme gimme gimme instant gratifcation players who are literally driving the genre into a hulking pile of wrecked trash. If the trend continues in 5-10 years it will have devolved into over glorified farmville style "games", and the casuals will have ruined what was possibly the coolest innovation in gaming in the 20th century.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
Actually I love really badass items - but not for every game.
In the early days you didnt need to go Raid for High quality items soulbound by pick up - they just werent as important as in todays MMORPGS.
Thats because in the older MMO`s ( like T4C) you had limited stats points ( like 5 points a level) to divide between different attributes like Str,Con,Dex,Wis, int and items had their stat requierements - so it was actually more important to have a Unique character build then a fancy OnlyOneOnTheRealm! weapon or armor.
Many MMO`s have either taken other paths and removed this system or made it less importantent by adding gear that requieres nothing but a decent level instead of carefull planing and stating.
I feel the same way about this, when I started playing World of Warcraft I didn't quite understand this wierd concept (talkin when I finally got to endgame), coming from a much simpler game where items were just more of a fun thing rather than a focus: Graal. But it kills me now that I find myself telling my poor dear little brother so often that his gear isn't shiny enough to do what he wants to do...
Like Isabelle, I too started in the dim dark days, when for a good adventure pen and paper were necessary (and my PC had a million times less RAM than my current one).
I could not agree more with the article ... the endless-loop of raiding is not my cuppa ... and this is why I have rezed my WoW account in anticipation of Cataclysm's new old-world.
And even in WoW's lifetime I have seen the effect that endlessly "needing" new items has had. My (ageing) memory may be failing but I could swear that vanilla WoW did not emphasize phat lootz as much as now (maybe because the world was still fresh?). Also I remember vanilla's community to be more helpful and friendly, and far less elitist.
I think the idea that this is somehow consumerism from the real world taking over is a bit silly. It has a lot more to do with trying to get people to keep paying that monthly sub, hencing having to justify grinding to make content last long. Items as little carrots are the easiest way to do that. People shouldn't read too much into it.
I love LOOT,but I love a good STORY just as much if not more. Thats why im eager to get my hands on GW2,SWtor and some of the other mmos coming out that have a more story driven aspect to them. Im getting board because very mmo may have a different skin/graphical style,game play,background etc etc..but they all boil down to one of things items,end game,and rep grind'N. But again as some people have stated its also the player (s)/friends that make the game too.
Your not odd at all you where just part of us older group of gamer's where we played to met people group and have fun.
The MMO's of today tossed us that enjoy grouping with random's and friend's to beat hard mob's and lvl and have fun away.
It's all about the item grind now and the funny part is there to stupid to see it and call us old gamer's who enjoy forced grouping with random and friend to beat hard mob's unkillable solo unless there blue or green yellow if careful to lvl that take's months the grinder's .
But it's just the generation's of to day are selfish and want it now now now and don't want to wait week's for a chance at the mobs to spawn to earn the item. feeling the wounderful feeling of I got it I got now time to go put it to use and show off my hard work. The item camp was a glance over to see if anyone was there if not get a group going fast.
I like your thread, but don't find it offensive for me saying this "This is exactly why first person shooters have more players."
You don't deal with the BS of "You want X, pay an arm and a leg in time or money (or both) to obtain that Item"
Its also because of a lack of items why a team oriented deathmatch with class based gameplay goes farther in actual roleplaying than your typical item-spamming, skill-spamming gameplay...Not to mention the repetition of the great five quests. ^^
MMO's are expensive to make and it is hard to keep the journey interesting for enough time for the company to make a buck out of it. Items can help to prolongue the life of the game.
That being said, games that manage to make the search for items interesting, and community strengthening rather than an egoistic selfish fight, will be more sucessful.
Currently playing browser games. Waiting for Albion Online, Citadel of Sorcery and Camelot Unchained. Played: almost all MMO pre 2007
"This is exactly why first person shooters have more players."
I am not sure they do, but that aside I think gamers need to wake up to the fact that anything that does well in one gaming genre can end up in another. Loot, achievments, crafting, kills, power ups, skill trees, equipment trees (e.g. BF) and so on could end up in any type of game. What we need to watch out for is that the gaming that comes down the line is not structured by how much money they can squezze out of you.
FPS do not generate much revenue after the box is sold. While we are conversing software houses are looking at ways to change that as surely as night follows day.
thus the reason why I quit wow, the item craze and then its epic fail later. I liked playing it because of friends that played the same game, when they started going item crazy and yelling at eachother because so and so rolled on it and got it made the game pretty much unbarable to play. in fact broke up a "Planetside" guild pretty much to peices.
Actually waaay back when MMOs started items weren't that important ...
... then came Diablo with it's crazy itemization system, and people loved it, so MMO devs followed suit. IIRC in 2001 UO switched to a totaly new itemisation system, based on the ideas in diablo. Items suddenly got properties, bonuses, magic... Items became more important by a few orders of magnitude (and full-loot pvp had to go)
Anyway, it's not something that evil devs force down your throats, it's something the player base clearly asked for and loves.
Wierdly enough I actually blame Diablo2 for this state of affairs. When it first came out and was all the rage, remember how people went about trading for item sets online? You were considered incredibly epic if you did manage to get a full Cow King's Leather armour set for instance. ALthough not an online game perse, it did receive significant support over battle.net (I remember logging in quite a few times despite the annoyingly slow dial-up internet I had at the time). Other game developers latched onto this idea and it has since perpetrated the market, being visible in nearly every modern game.
Is it odd that DnD has gone the same way, just imagine your old games in 3.5ed where everything was numbers, stats, and more numbers. You would wield a specific weapon for its bonuses etc and I think a large amount of that design has also made its way into MMO's. 4th ed is just as bad - but now is this because 4th ed derives its system form online games, vice versa, or a more analogous relationship with both feeding off each other.
At the same time, it is awesome to kit your character out as significantly as possible, especially in PvP where every tiny bonus might count (aka power gaming) good equipment and well planned skills can mean the edge in an online fight, but this argument is self-defeating as of course such gaming leads us to the opposite side from "role-players"
Basically being all nostalgic for the "olde daies" is not going to help matters. First of all a pen and paper role-playing game automatically relies more upon locale and environment (the GM has to describe everything to the players, whereas in online gaming it is already supplied for you to notice or not, at your discretion), describing past events in a campaign is great but that is not to say that gamers of 'now' can't talk about the epic fights and quests they went on to obtain such and such an armour piece, (kinda like Arthur encountering Nimue to receive Excalibur).
It's nice to have fancy looking items, and even nicer to have powerful items that have useful stats. But one problem I have noticed with most MMO's is that there is a very finite amount of storage. Between your character's inventory and the "bank" or warehouse, most games don't let you keep very many items in general. Is this because they want to reduce server space required per player? The only game I am aware of that does not scrimp of storage (at least not carried storage) is EVE Online. Are there any others?
Yes developers cottened on verry quickly that it would take more of a players time to fill their bags up with useless random trash and go back to a vendor and sell it all to then continiue questing, rather than just having the mobs you were killing just drop an equal amout of gaming currency. This is known as a time sink. Remember that even in eve your ship has a limited cargo capacity. But yes it is handy that your equivelent bank space (station) has no such limits.
Isabelle, THANK YOU for writing this article! I've had this issue with the MMO's i've played for quite a long time! While I like nice shiny gear as the next person my enjoyment has always come from playing the game with fun people, people i've met and even become good friends with in real life. Very interesting how the gaming atmosphere has translated into real life for me here and there. While this may be limited to myself I thought i'd share some perspectives across a few MMO's i've played and the feelings they gave me.
Star Wars Galaxies
this was the first mmo I had ever played and it was huge in world space. I couldn't believe i'd been running for literally an hour (this was all prior to mounts and ships and what have you and not the exact time it took i'm sure) just to get to Jabba's palace. I was rather dissappointed that the game had very few interesting things to do with the content at the time but most of that was driven by the players themselves. What stuck out in my mind the most with this game was purely the item crafting.
This had nothing to do with the items themselves but because they were all made by players i was really enjoying the social web which came about as a result of only being able to get items from players. Sorta like how enchanting is in WoW they had slicing in SWG. Or was it splicing? Been a while, anyway. I had met a very friend in game player and he was proficient at this trade and I found myself constanting going back to him or trying to link up with him in order to jack up the items i had. I loved the social connection that this 'player made items only' created within the game. Sadly there wasn't enough content for me to continue so after a short period i stopped playing.
Final Fantasy 11 (online)
Okay now i know many people had issues with this game and I had my share manifest themselves while playing but WOW this game took a good portion of my time. I really enjoyed how just about every aspect of this game had a purpose. Nowadays games throw things in because they are neat, cool, sometimes silly and just interesting. But i felt like anything in final fantasy no matter what it was always had a secondary and more significant purpose to it.
Mog house - ok at first it just seemed like your place where you dumped stuff and neat furniture for the sake of seeing neat things but as i played i realized that the furniture depending on what it was gave you more and more 'bank space' if you will. So yeah while they looked neat they also served practical purpose. Loved that.
2 hr abilities - this was a love hate for me. these were the type of abilities that saved your @ss in a fight. I loved how if i was low on health and almost going to die i could (as a monk) hit my hundred fists or was it thousand fists, and end up pulling through a fight. Great feeling of pulling out the win but sad when you had to wait another 2hrs to use it.
Missions - this was the cream of the crop in FFonline. In classic FF style the story driven mission quests were indeed epic. and scaled in epicness the further you got in them. The feeling of fighting your way to the dragons lair where in classic FF style you get the awesome and different mind you, big boss fight music, big scary creature to take on with your group. This stuff completely made downing a boss worth it. The feelings i got even before the fight began where the edge of your seat feeling was sooooo amped up. Truly final fantasy brought to MMO's. The rewards here were also EPIC and NOT always items.
How many remember first time you completed the quest line to gain airship access? *show of hands?* After hours and days of watching others walk into the 'gates of heaven' airship access area and finally getting to myself this was one of the most gratifying experiences above items i've had in an MMO. They could have improved this by making airships live and allowing you to see characters below you in the world etc. I can dream.
Skill chaining - Absolutely fun mechanic in combat! This really should be re-looked at via games like WoW or WAR or whoever! Severely ups the ante for combat where most games now just let you point and click and auto wack away while you hit abilities in succession. The skill chaining aspect of FFonline helped to created an organization to combat and while adding to your damage and of course the awe inspiring extra damage affects which got applied. It was very gratifying for the, 'wait for it! wait for it! NOW!' hit your skill and wait for the special affect signifying you made the chain. Awesome!
Sub jobs - really neat way of having you play ONE character while being able to try other classes. Essentially alleviating the need to roll another toon if it weren't for the fact that your character never really had enough space in the mog house for all your dang items! Later on this becomes a drawback too as I found myself not invited to groups when my subjob wasn't up to the 'half your main job lvl' as maybe another character was. Great concept that works mechanically but fails socially.
In the end I stopped playing because finding a group was extremely difficult especially if you were not a specific class. Nobody wants to feel aliennated completely due to class and when the hardcore gamers found the perfect group combo, if you weren't part of that class combo well take a walk. Square Enix, it ISN'T fun waiting hours just to get a group that might fail in the first 5 min. Later content required you group where as WoW or WAR there is still tons to do that is satisfying solo.
WORLD OF WARCRAT
The king, the reigning champ but not everything there is.
From the start of playing WoW i was completely mystified. Not by the loot, but by the world, by the details placed all over, the music, the easy grouping, the fun of questing for the sake of the quest story. DEADMINES QUEST LINE ANYONE? *show of hands?* Yeah that instance run and quest line was so nicely done that it was mesmerizing. I'll never forget playing from late afternoon with my friend jay all the way till 10 am the next day lol. That is how engrossed we were.
Sure the silly turn in 5 claws was nothing special but it had purpose and wasn't over bothersome as compared to what you did. I loved exploring just to find new quests and wasn't all about the gear then. Even when i lvl capped I enjoyed running instances with the right group of people. When you find that niche guild and people who you just enjoy being social with the rest of the gear just comes in time. I just enjoyed getting those first boss kills and all the glory that came with everyone shouting when we downed him. Would have been nice to get a server first but hell notice nothing about gear? All about the experience.
I wished WoW didn't make flight paths all such a freebie. I think questing to unlock flight paths would be neat. Not all of them but some special hidden ones would be SWEET! I loved that first flight over to menthil harbor and all the cool things you could look at going on down on the ground. Epic persistent world BLIZZARD! That's how you make it feel real baby! Will always love that aspect.
After years of WoW playing there is still a lingering desire to play at times but if i log in i'm not sure i'd know what i want to do. The quests don't do it for me anymore. The raids seem all like gear whoring, the experience has less showmanship than i remember and most importantly i don't have that awesome guild IMPLICIT which i loved playing with. I stopped shortly after burning crusade when in my efforts to enjoy my questing in the new expansion all my guild friends blew past me all the way to the lvl cap and started raiding without me. I would have liked to experience those raids but I was DEFINITELY NOT HAPPY WITH HOW THE EXPANSION STARTED. Don't get me wrong the expansion was awesome BUT, everyone knew exactly what to do and where to go when they started!!! WTH?! Doesn't anyone like to enjoy things as they happen? It partly killed it for me. I was having a hard time enjoying without thinking man everyone is way ahead of me i need to catch up. Maybe cataclysm won't be that way. Very interesting content coming but still undecided if i'll pick it up.
WarHammer Online
OK this game in my humble opinion improved upon everything WoW, for the most part. They stuck with same easy to use interface, controls, schemes as wow but improved on some that were just ho hum. I think a lot of games lose sight of having an excellent user interface. IT'S IMPORTANT PEOPLE! NOBODY WANTS A SLOPPY CHINSY FEELING INTERFACE THEY CANNOT USE EASILY. We wanna fight enemies, mobs, bosses, not our interface!
Map - how many of you got people constantly asking where to find certain people in WoW? *hands?* Yeah i ignored them.
WAR had an amazing map which showed you just about everything you needed and wanted to know in a great interface! The lake pools on the maps were just amazing and not just for show to guide you but you could click them to bring up the quests they were. AMAZING!
Public Quests - the next gen of questing imho. These were awesome and so undervalued because of the PVP. There are SO MANY and they sometimes feel so epic that i wished my friends were still playing so we could try so much more of them. Some were so off the beaten path and so cool and story driven that i really wanted to try them all. Not only that but they told you (on the map no less) how many players needed to do a PQ. AWESOME! To me this stuff is the content of legend.
Guild levels, city level?!
Say what?! Yeah that's right how awesome that your guild can level up and your city too! the higher your city got the more lil areas opened up and delivered more content to you. I think that is one for innovation personally. Not a freebie and it adds depth to a non character?! Yeah really cool. Sorta like the stockades in WoW WAR took the instancing idea there to a higher level.
Wait guild levels too?! yeah you unlocked these tactics which could be applied to a guild banner for combat use. Different tactics produced different effects for your group. Man waving that flag around to turn the tide was pretty sick imho.
Gear and items was pretty WoW'esq but i loved the addition of trophies to further customize your character. While certainly just cosmetic (although doesn't need to be) nothing says i'm a BADASS than toting around some nasty looking knives and badges like you're a christmas tree. Was very neat. but in the end static and looses its luster like all items do.
TOME OF KNOWLEDGE
this thing is the balls out coolest thing ever. Tracks...well everything, quests you've done or not, creatures you've killed OR not, how many, what they are, what type, hidden lairs you've found (I LOVE JUST WANDERING AROUND FINDING THESE! AND THEY ARE VERY HIDDEN), not to mention you can get tome tactics from your tome, all sorts of cool lore, noteworthy persons? yeah a little xp and cool factor just for FINDING a noteworthy person that plays a part in the story somehow. Very cool! You might even get something neat for finding enough of them like a title or tome unlock or whatever.
Gawd so much you can say about the tome. It's UBER. Plain and simple. So much so that I think WoW is adding like a compendium in Cataclysm or something. YEAH RIP OFF!!! When other games are copying you, you KNOW you've got gold with that feature.
Wow i could say so much more of this game but suffice it to say i stopped playing for a while because my friends weren't playing. MMO's are social that's why i enjoy them but i'd like to with my friends too. I think if WAR was PVE instead of PVP it would have done much better. So many neat PVE features that seem forgotten. The pvp is nice too but I would have dropped the WoW'esq scenarios for the open RVR personally. Much more fun and engrossing.
Welcome any and all comments. Enjoy folks keep playing!
Isabelle, I could hardly have said it better myself!
I am probably more loot-oriented than you are, which is one reason I've long argued for more options in acquiring gear and more different types of gear. You mentioned Asheron's Call - it's a game I point out as an example of one that far better handles gear than WoW. There simply is more option is what gear you can wear without gimping yourself, better variety in artwork, and for my tastes better looking gear to be had. Customization is also far better in terms of looks, though WoW devs have stepped it up in terms of function.
You and I play MMORPGs for the RPG aspect (regardless of whether we play on an RP server), we play to adventure in a fantasy world. I won't speak for you farther than that, but my progression in to it is easy enough to follow, and I think it accounts for many of us - we enjoyed fantasy novels and books, we got in to D&D style RPGs because of that, and we got in to MMORPGs because of that.
I think there are a number of reasons that we have the MMOGs of today, and they are in large part due to devs not coming from the world I cam from, but from the world of games first, supplemented by movies, graphic novels, and other novels and books. Most of them also learned from how the first commercially successful games were made - and those games gave up a lot to be commercially successful when they were created because technology forced them to be more "MMO" oriented.
I've read WoW devs talk about 2 philosophies that I think fundamentally cripple the game. The first is, they talk about how hard it is to create things like quest lines for specific classes. Well, sure, it takes a lot of effort - but why wouldn't you spend the effort?? Sure, if you are in development and have no money coming in you need to get it out and can't do all you would like, but after the game is successful, you can expand and create all that you left out that makes the game rich and deeply satisfying. The second is a similar concept in that it is so self-limiting - "We want X class to look like X class". This is a guaranteed route to failure, because most of the players aren't going to agree with your taste in armor and pretty much everyone wants to be able to express some individuality. What "X class" should look like to you is usually not what "X class" should look like to the next guy. WoW devs, as good as they have been in the areas they are good, are blind in areas that allow players to be individuals and allow them to express themselves as continuing heroes in the game.
The self-limitation extends to how gear is acquired. WoW devs may be figuring this out, they are making 10-man and 25-man raids the same with the same rewards in Catacysm (as I understand it), but the fact is you don't have to make everyone join a large group to keep them paying a subscription fee. You can make dungeons and quest lines that are rich in story that also offer rich reward that individuals can do - and guess what, just as many people will do them, they will just do them individually rather than in groups. Or, make them scalable as the WoW devs are doing to a limited degree.
There is also this concept that drops have to be scarce to keep people playing. I kept my Asheron's Call subscriptions for 4 years, and most of the drops they had were ones everyone in the group got when the Boss that dropped the item was killed. We didn't need the excuse that we had to run X dungeon 50 times to get that rare dropped trinket (that every melee-type in the guild wanted) to keep running dungeons, and the AC devs also added another feature that was awesome - a kind of "treasure room" where you could select an item each time you completed the dungeon, so that you were rewarded with a nice item if you wanted every time you went in for awhile.
Asheron's Call and my experience of it shows there is more to doing dungeons than raiding for loot, but WoW has turned doing dungeons in to being such a one-sided affair in terms of getting decent gear that it is difficult to avoid the trap. And, it is a trap that can change the way you think about and how you play the game - I was in it for a year and a half and am glad to say am out and can enjoy the game my way again. Hopefully, when I start going for that upper-end gear again (if I keep playing WoW that long), I'll remember my lessons.
Have played: Everquest, Asheron's Call, Horizons, Everquest2, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, Warhammer, Age of Conan, Darkfall
Very good article and a pleasure to read , my typing might be off today , so will ad my 2 cents why its done that way .
The majority of MMORPG or RPG games , no longer take a game over .
Thats a change from the past when I played D&D a session could be over in 1 month or 1 week , never did a campagain last longer then 3 months in my RP time (yes i do know the people who played years , but i am speaking from my experience)
Now comes MMO gaming you got a persistent world , where people dont want a game over .
Infact in modern times no matter how much or how little you play , you NEED progress , now the easiest way is items.
Or stats increase infact , the items itself aren´t important its the stats increase , and like you said Isabella , 0.005% stats increase. totally worthless but people want that feeling of progress .
I would say go make a new toon relevel and do other things , but also a change in nowadays RP games or Online gaming.
Is that people hardly read others lines anymore , they all pretend to listen , but infact half of them are AFK during briefings , roleplay sessions , meetings , or just chatting in whispers .
Understanding for eachother is lower , while in the past , people took time to entertain eachother have a common respect for eachotehr as gamers freaks nerds , nowadays people all think they are the center of the universe online .
Cause they pay so there time spent must be worthwhile .
Game industry takes the easy way out , in making items , achievements rewards , anything to keep you paying .
They infact reuse same contents over and over again , a FED EX mission is still a fed ex mission .
A escort mission is stil a escort , a Kill X is still a Kill X , there aint many new innovative way of doing the stuff .
Some companies try but majority of the gamers dont even notice it .
If a story is beautifull or gruelsome or brings a tear to your eye but gives lousy rewards . most people wont even bother .
"WTF why should i spent time doing stupid stuff for no reward ", emotions are considered no longer a reward .
So thats why the tyranny of items , atleast people see the 0.00001% stats increase .
We seem to think of loot, especially end-game loot, as just that- shiny shit that's marginally/significantly better than what we were wearing before we downed that boss or completed that chain. I look at loot, especially end-game loot a little differently. I look at it as an extension of my level. So, when I'm galavanting around IC killing mobs that my level 80 blued-out (or even t7 epic'd out) toon has no business killing, its because I'm effectively a higher level? Why not make higher levels or more character specialization points or whatever? Well, that's exactly what loot is- a way of progressing once you've hit max level.
As for taking under geared players into my raids? It depends on how under geared they are. Just like leveling, loot is a marker for what content you can handle.
Would you take a tank or healer (or even a dps) that was too low level into an instance with?
I think the article's author (and the industry as a whole) has overlooked motivating factors for playing a game.
Generally speaking, "grind" or menial content should hve an easily quantifiable reward (i.e. bigger loot). If you're being asked to do some meaningless "kill x" quest, it's a safe bet to have "y" as a reward. This is what the author misses: a lot of that gear is there because of the content being a grind (not the other way around as she supposes).
If the content involves more complex problem solving, loot really doesn't quantify the experience. Does solving a complex puzzle (like the moon phasses in Ultima) really necessitate a +1 axe? No. This is where the industry has failed to adapt properly. Any rewards for this should feel unqiue or "one of a kind" as opposed to continuing the trend of "oh, it's like your current thing but does +1 whatsitcalled vs. themguys"
Just as punishments should fit crimes, rewards should fit actions in-game.
I agree with the proposition that games tend to focus too much on the items themselves these days, much like the level-up itself is also a major goal of many games.
I don't agree that things were so much better in games of old though, I found those even more ungratifying and boring than the current implementations which use the skinner mechanics heavily, those games just used other things like social pressure and hierarchy while often severely lacking content.
In my opinion, it's a testimony to how difficult it is to get a 'massive' group of people to cooperate and get along in a seperate online space. Developers are constantly struggling how to make content actually available in that space without destroying its purpose in the process; the early games did not succeed in that much at all imo, while games now might be too focused on simple tasks and Skinner processes.
It's up to the games coming out in the near future to show that they can successfully make a richer host of content available to community than was done before.
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
Comments
Items are essentially what make a mmo a mmo as far as video games are conerned. without items you have no progression, and very little reason to get people to pay $15/mo. Might as well just sell story expansion packs.
But items, they're what gives us the MOTIVATION to keep playing. They are both the key to mmo existance and the bane of mmo existance. To me, the problem is that in-game items are handled so terribly in modern mmos. Heck, maybe items are just handled poorly in most mmos.
My first online rpg was D2 and since then the only game that has come even close to meeting that itemization bar has been swg of all games, a game that didn't even drop phat lootz!!! But you could craft marvelous items with large variance, thus creating a very limited supply of the best stuff, and in the end a limited supply of the best stuff is what keeps people playin until 3 am when they have to work at 7 saying to themselves "just one more dungeon crawl".
Until itemization and treasure hunting is put back to its proper glory, and the overly destructive bind on pickup mechanic cast back into the bowels of hell from whence it came, mmos will continue to remain boring and stagnant.
I like a great story as much as anybody else, but it's still the items in the end that will keep me playing hardcore for years.
Have to say that I agree with the article wholeheartedly.
It also doesn't surprise me that such an article - and others like it - are written by people whose gaming experience precedes the WoW era, or even MMOs overall. I also got started in table-top AD&D roleplaying. Every Sunday... all day long, outside on the picnic table when it was nice. Inside on the dining room table when it wasn't. We all chipped in for pizzas and soda. Great adventures. Great laughs. Great times. Gear was *never* the focus. Adventuring with a band of other players through treacherous terrain, dangerous dungeons and surviving surprise encounters created great memories and great times, many of which I remember to this day. And I'm talking things that happened 25+ years ago.
Fast-forward to the 1st and 2nd gen of MMORPGs. FFXI got me hooked and, similarly, the best, most stand-out memories I have of that game have nothing to do with obtaining items. They were of experiences I had. Difficult encounters or situations encountered with a group of people that we somehow survived. Random incidents that took place just while traveling around. I can't tell you when I earned any given piece of gear in FFXI, but I can tell you plenty of the fun experiences I had while trying to get them.
In the generations of MMOs after that there's been a definite change in the way the games are designed. However, there's also been a change in the expectations of players. Back in the EQ1, FFXI, UO, AC1 days, players valued and enjoyed their time simply playing the game. Even though the gameplay was, perhaps more grindy and not as flashy as newer MMOs are... those who played them still enjoyed themselves, enough to stick with them for *years* - even after WoW and its spin-offs hit the scene.
There are people who will argue that the old-school MMOs were crap, and those who enjoyed them only did so because there was nothing better on the scene. They further argue that people who say they were fun are only seeing them through rose-colored lenses of nostalgia.
I politely disagree and assert that those people are barking up the wrong tree and jumping to the wrong conclusions.
So why is it, then? It's because they offered an experience that newer MMOs have moved away from. They provided a world, set the stage for the players, and then got out of the way. They didn't guide players around by the hand, telling them what to do next, where to go next, etc.
Old-school MMOs, like table-top pen and paper RPGs dropped the players into an alternate world and said "Here ya are... Enjoy your journey". And we did.
They encouraged and even required player interaction - something else newer MMOs are moving away from. The gameplay became as much about player interaction as it did about what quest you were doing or what raid boss you were out to kill or, indeed, what item you were after. It wasn't about some far off goal that everyone was racing toward.. it was about what you and others were doing at that moment.
People typically didn't mind taking time to help you achieve something because, for the most part, no one was in a hurry. They weren't racing frantically toward level cap and end-game like is typical in newer MMOs. They weren't going out of their way, they were helping someone else with something in a world they enjoyed inhabiting.
Death penalties didn't bother people because, again, no hurry. It wasn't a "punishment to make the game miserable for the player" as it's so often characterized these days. It was just part of the game. You die, you lose xp, or gear or whatever... you work to get it back, most likely with the help of friends you had in-game. More opportunity for fun times to be had and something to look back on and laugh about down the road.
There's something to be said for the fact that while many MMO players these days seem to measure their time in any given MMO in months, the older MMOs kept subscribers happily playing for years... and some still are to this day.
Instead of a long-term adventure - or series of adventures - MMOs these days are all about "short term entertainment".
Instead of setting long term goals and then setting out to achieve them, people want their rewards faster, easier and more frequent.
Instead of cooperation and interaction with other players and a sense of community, MMOs have turned to an ever more solo experience where players want as little interaction with others as possible.... up to and including content that's always been group centric, such as raids.
Once upon a time, each new MMO to come out tried to create and provide a unique experience, in a unique setting that was unlike anything else on the market. Developers of new MMOs are trying as hard as they can to copy other MMOs with very little effort to set themselves apart, to try and "get a piece of the action'.
Sad as it is, it's no surprise to me at all that players are growing bored and disillusioned with MMOs. They're a mere shadow of what they once were. The entire genre has degraded to an over-saturated mess of "me-too" bandwagon clones.
If this article, some of the responses I've read so far, along with other posts and articles I've been seeing are any indication... looks like we might be witnessing the beginning of a sea change...hopefully for the better.
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
I am not too sure about older games not being ruled by loot. My first game was Everquest. I had no preconceived ideas but starting with Unrest all the way to the Planes of Fear all I remember was camping for items. Granted we helped others and had the dkp system but it was all about loot. I spent three months trying to get the Shining Metalic Robe from magi in Guk. I recall camping the Flowing Black Sash thing for a friend in the guild and our guild even had full loot fights that split the guild up. I don't know about Asheron's Call but Everquest had loot concerns.
I totally agree on that article. Why?
Because games should be fun - chasing forever after the next Tier xyz set isn't.
My WoW Guild and i were playing from Vanilla to Burning Crusade (and a bit of Frozen Throne) and we didn't HAVE to have the best items there were. We were having fun when we were doing Karazhan with some guildmates, they didn't need to have a complete Tier 4 Set already - they just had to have fun like the rest of us.
It didn't matter if they were new to the instances, because we learned and got better TOGETHER.
Yes - we wiped often because someone stood at the wrong spot (Onyxia or Magtheridon anyone? *g*) - but it was FUN and we laughed nevertheless and teased the guy who got hit by Onyxias Tail ;-)
It was fun just playing a 40, 20 or 10 man instance with people we liked. That was then...
A few years went by and all we hear now is: "You have to have Gearscore xyz or get lost!"
"We won't take you in our group, you definitely suck, BECAUSE YOUR ITEMS ARE TOO LOW."
Since when have items been the scale to measure a player's capability of being good at playing?
That is not what games and communities should be all about - it should be the fun in playing and having nice people around you.
I seriously am getting sick of the new breed of "mmo" players. I hesitate to even call them MMO's players.
MMORPG's were developed so you could have an expansive world where YOU MAKE YOUR OWN STORY. The WHOLE point was not to hold your hand and guide you along a path. Now, we have this influx of console tards and single player RPG's fans who are trying to turn the genre into something it never was. Its like trying to take a porsche and convert it into a f*cking minivan, its going to fail horribly at being a minivan and a sports car.
Why it has become that "casual friendly" has to equal "solo friendly" is beyond me. You can still incentivize grouping and make the game casual friendly. Instead you have companies who are pandering and catering to this crowd of gimme gimme gimme instant gratifcation players who are literally driving the genre into a hulking pile of wrecked trash. If the trend continues in 5-10 years it will have devolved into over glorified farmville style "games", and the casuals will have ruined what was possibly the coolest innovation in gaming in the 20th century.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Actually I love really badass items - but not for every game.
In the early days you didnt need to go Raid for High quality items soulbound by pick up - they just werent as important as in todays MMORPGS.
Thats because in the older MMO`s ( like T4C) you had limited stats points ( like 5 points a level) to divide between different attributes like Str,Con,Dex,Wis, int and items had their stat requierements - so it was actually more important to have a Unique character build then a fancy OnlyOneOnTheRealm! weapon or armor.
Many MMO`s have either taken other paths and removed this system or made it less importantent by adding gear that requieres nothing but a decent level instead of carefull planing and stating.
I love MMO`s - why dont they love me?
I feel the same way about this, when I started playing World of Warcraft I didn't quite understand this wierd concept (talkin when I finally got to endgame), coming from a much simpler game where items were just more of a fun thing rather than a focus: Graal. But it kills me now that I find myself telling my poor dear little brother so often that his gear isn't shiny enough to do what he wants to do...
Sorcereo's Arts! http://sorcereo.deviantart.com/
Like Isabelle, I too started in the dim dark days, when for a good adventure pen and paper were necessary (and my PC had a million times less RAM than my current one).
I could not agree more with the article ... the endless-loop of raiding is not my cuppa ... and this is why I have rezed my WoW account in anticipation of Cataclysm's new old-world.
And even in WoW's lifetime I have seen the effect that endlessly "needing" new items has had. My (ageing) memory may be failing but I could swear that vanilla WoW did not emphasize phat lootz as much as now (maybe because the world was still fresh?). Also I remember vanilla's community to be more helpful and friendly, and far less elitist.
Just my two pennies....
I think the idea that this is somehow consumerism from the real world taking over is a bit silly. It has a lot more to do with trying to get people to keep paying that monthly sub, hencing having to justify grinding to make content last long. Items as little carrots are the easiest way to do that. People shouldn't read too much into it.
For what it is worth, it's still awful.
I love LOOT,but I love a good STORY just as much if not more. Thats why im eager to get my hands on GW2,SWtor and some of the other mmos coming out that have a more story driven aspect to them. Im getting board because very mmo may have a different skin/graphical style,game play,background etc etc..but they all boil down to one of things items,end game,and rep grind'N. But again as some people have stated its also the player (s)/friends that make the game too.
I won't waste the my fingers, and just say "Agreed"
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
"Love can be innocent and can be sweet, but sometimes about as nice as rotting meat."
Your not odd at all you where just part of us older group of gamer's where we played to met people group and have fun.
The MMO's of today tossed us that enjoy grouping with random's and friend's to beat hard mob's and lvl and have fun away.
It's all about the item grind now and the funny part is there to stupid to see it and call us old gamer's who enjoy forced grouping with random and friend to beat hard mob's unkillable solo unless there blue or green yellow if careful to lvl that take's months the grinder's .
But it's just the generation's of to day are selfish and want it now now now and don't want to wait week's for a chance at the mobs to spawn to earn the item. feeling the wounderful feeling of I got it I got now time to go put it to use and show off my hard work. The item camp was a glance over to see if anyone was there if not get a group going fast.
I like your thread, but don't find it offensive for me saying this "This is exactly why first person shooters have more players."
You don't deal with the BS of "You want X, pay an arm and a leg in time or money (or both) to obtain that Item"
Its also because of a lack of items why a team oriented deathmatch with class based gameplay goes farther in actual roleplaying than your typical item-spamming, skill-spamming gameplay...Not to mention the repetition of the great five quests. ^^
MMO's are expensive to make and it is hard to keep the journey interesting for enough time for the company to make a buck out of it. Items can help to prolongue the life of the game.
That being said, games that manage to make the search for items interesting, and community strengthening rather than an egoistic selfish fight, will be more sucessful.
Currently playing browser games. Waiting for Albion Online, Citadel of Sorcery and Camelot Unchained.
Played: almost all MMO pre 2007
"This is exactly why first person shooters have more players."
I am not sure they do, but that aside I think gamers need to wake up to the fact that anything that does well in one gaming genre can end up in another. Loot, achievments, crafting, kills, power ups, skill trees, equipment trees (e.g. BF) and so on could end up in any type of game. What we need to watch out for is that the gaming that comes down the line is not structured by how much money they can squezze out of you.
FPS do not generate much revenue after the box is sold. While we are conversing software houses are looking at ways to change that as surely as night follows day.
thus the reason why I quit wow, the item craze and then its epic fail later. I liked playing it because of friends that played the same game, when they started going item crazy and yelling at eachother because so and so rolled on it and got it made the game pretty much unbarable to play. in fact broke up a "Planetside" guild pretty much to peices.
Actually waaay back when MMOs started items weren't that important ...
... then came Diablo with it's crazy itemization system, and people loved it, so MMO devs followed suit. IIRC in 2001 UO switched to a totaly new itemisation system, based on the ideas in diablo. Items suddenly got properties, bonuses, magic... Items became more important by a few orders of magnitude (and full-loot pvp had to go)
Anyway, it's not something that evil devs force down your throats, it's something the player base clearly asked for and loves.
Wierdly enough I actually blame Diablo2 for this state of affairs. When it first came out and was all the rage, remember how people went about trading for item sets online? You were considered incredibly epic if you did manage to get a full Cow King's Leather armour set for instance. ALthough not an online game perse, it did receive significant support over battle.net (I remember logging in quite a few times despite the annoyingly slow dial-up internet I had at the time). Other game developers latched onto this idea and it has since perpetrated the market, being visible in nearly every modern game.
Is it odd that DnD has gone the same way, just imagine your old games in 3.5ed where everything was numbers, stats, and more numbers. You would wield a specific weapon for its bonuses etc and I think a large amount of that design has also made its way into MMO's. 4th ed is just as bad - but now is this because 4th ed derives its system form online games, vice versa, or a more analogous relationship with both feeding off each other.
At the same time, it is awesome to kit your character out as significantly as possible, especially in PvP where every tiny bonus might count (aka power gaming) good equipment and well planned skills can mean the edge in an online fight, but this argument is self-defeating as of course such gaming leads us to the opposite side from "role-players"
Basically being all nostalgic for the "olde daies" is not going to help matters. First of all a pen and paper role-playing game automatically relies more upon locale and environment (the GM has to describe everything to the players, whereas in online gaming it is already supplied for you to notice or not, at your discretion), describing past events in a campaign is great but that is not to say that gamers of 'now' can't talk about the epic fights and quests they went on to obtain such and such an armour piece, (kinda like Arthur encountering Nimue to receive Excalibur).
Cogito Ergo Sum
Yes developers cottened on verry quickly that it would take more of a players time to fill their bags up with useless random trash and go back to a vendor and sell it all to then continiue questing, rather than just having the mobs you were killing just drop an equal amout of gaming currency. This is known as a time sink. Remember that even in eve your ship has a limited cargo capacity. But yes it is handy that your equivelent bank space (station) has no such limits.
Isabelle, THANK YOU for writing this article! I've had this issue with the MMO's i've played for quite a long time! While I like nice shiny gear as the next person my enjoyment has always come from playing the game with fun people, people i've met and even become good friends with in real life. Very interesting how the gaming atmosphere has translated into real life for me here and there. While this may be limited to myself I thought i'd share some perspectives across a few MMO's i've played and the feelings they gave me.
Star Wars Galaxies
this was the first mmo I had ever played and it was huge in world space. I couldn't believe i'd been running for literally an hour (this was all prior to mounts and ships and what have you and not the exact time it took i'm sure) just to get to Jabba's palace. I was rather dissappointed that the game had very few interesting things to do with the content at the time but most of that was driven by the players themselves. What stuck out in my mind the most with this game was purely the item crafting.
This had nothing to do with the items themselves but because they were all made by players i was really enjoying the social web which came about as a result of only being able to get items from players. Sorta like how enchanting is in WoW they had slicing in SWG. Or was it splicing? Been a while, anyway. I had met a very friend in game player and he was proficient at this trade and I found myself constanting going back to him or trying to link up with him in order to jack up the items i had. I loved the social connection that this 'player made items only' created within the game. Sadly there wasn't enough content for me to continue so after a short period i stopped playing.
Final Fantasy 11 (online)
Okay now i know many people had issues with this game and I had my share manifest themselves while playing but WOW this game took a good portion of my time. I really enjoyed how just about every aspect of this game had a purpose. Nowadays games throw things in because they are neat, cool, sometimes silly and just interesting. But i felt like anything in final fantasy no matter what it was always had a secondary and more significant purpose to it.
Mog house - ok at first it just seemed like your place where you dumped stuff and neat furniture for the sake of seeing neat things but as i played i realized that the furniture depending on what it was gave you more and more 'bank space' if you will. So yeah while they looked neat they also served practical purpose. Loved that.
2 hr abilities - this was a love hate for me. these were the type of abilities that saved your @ss in a fight. I loved how if i was low on health and almost going to die i could (as a monk) hit my hundred fists or was it thousand fists, and end up pulling through a fight. Great feeling of pulling out the win but sad when you had to wait another 2hrs to use it.
Missions - this was the cream of the crop in FFonline. In classic FF style the story driven mission quests were indeed epic. and scaled in epicness the further you got in them. The feeling of fighting your way to the dragons lair where in classic FF style you get the awesome and different mind you, big boss fight music, big scary creature to take on with your group. This stuff completely made downing a boss worth it. The feelings i got even before the fight began where the edge of your seat feeling was sooooo amped up. Truly final fantasy brought to MMO's. The rewards here were also EPIC and NOT always items.
How many remember first time you completed the quest line to gain airship access? *show of hands?* After hours and days of watching others walk into the 'gates of heaven' airship access area and finally getting to myself this was one of the most gratifying experiences above items i've had in an MMO. They could have improved this by making airships live and allowing you to see characters below you in the world etc. I can dream.
Skill chaining - Absolutely fun mechanic in combat! This really should be re-looked at via games like WoW or WAR or whoever! Severely ups the ante for combat where most games now just let you point and click and auto wack away while you hit abilities in succession. The skill chaining aspect of FFonline helped to created an organization to combat and while adding to your damage and of course the awe inspiring extra damage affects which got applied. It was very gratifying for the, 'wait for it! wait for it! NOW!' hit your skill and wait for the special affect signifying you made the chain. Awesome!
Sub jobs - really neat way of having you play ONE character while being able to try other classes. Essentially alleviating the need to roll another toon if it weren't for the fact that your character never really had enough space in the mog house for all your dang items! Later on this becomes a drawback too as I found myself not invited to groups when my subjob wasn't up to the 'half your main job lvl' as maybe another character was. Great concept that works mechanically but fails socially.
In the end I stopped playing because finding a group was extremely difficult especially if you were not a specific class. Nobody wants to feel aliennated completely due to class and when the hardcore gamers found the perfect group combo, if you weren't part of that class combo well take a walk. Square Enix, it ISN'T fun waiting hours just to get a group that might fail in the first 5 min. Later content required you group where as WoW or WAR there is still tons to do that is satisfying solo.
WORLD OF WARCRAT
The king, the reigning champ but not everything there is.
From the start of playing WoW i was completely mystified. Not by the loot, but by the world, by the details placed all over, the music, the easy grouping, the fun of questing for the sake of the quest story. DEADMINES QUEST LINE ANYONE? *show of hands?* Yeah that instance run and quest line was so nicely done that it was mesmerizing. I'll never forget playing from late afternoon with my friend jay all the way till 10 am the next day lol. That is how engrossed we were.
Sure the silly turn in 5 claws was nothing special but it had purpose and wasn't over bothersome as compared to what you did. I loved exploring just to find new quests and wasn't all about the gear then. Even when i lvl capped I enjoyed running instances with the right group of people. When you find that niche guild and people who you just enjoy being social with the rest of the gear just comes in time. I just enjoyed getting those first boss kills and all the glory that came with everyone shouting when we downed him. Would have been nice to get a server first but hell notice nothing about gear? All about the experience.
I wished WoW didn't make flight paths all such a freebie. I think questing to unlock flight paths would be neat. Not all of them but some special hidden ones would be SWEET! I loved that first flight over to menthil harbor and all the cool things you could look at going on down on the ground. Epic persistent world BLIZZARD! That's how you make it feel real baby! Will always love that aspect.
After years of WoW playing there is still a lingering desire to play at times but if i log in i'm not sure i'd know what i want to do. The quests don't do it for me anymore. The raids seem all like gear whoring, the experience has less showmanship than i remember and most importantly i don't have that awesome guild IMPLICIT which i loved playing with. I stopped shortly after burning crusade when in my efforts to enjoy my questing in the new expansion all my guild friends blew past me all the way to the lvl cap and started raiding without me. I would have liked to experience those raids but I was DEFINITELY NOT HAPPY WITH HOW THE EXPANSION STARTED. Don't get me wrong the expansion was awesome BUT, everyone knew exactly what to do and where to go when they started!!! WTH?! Doesn't anyone like to enjoy things as they happen? It partly killed it for me. I was having a hard time enjoying without thinking man everyone is way ahead of me i need to catch up. Maybe cataclysm won't be that way. Very interesting content coming but still undecided if i'll pick it up.
WarHammer Online
OK this game in my humble opinion improved upon everything WoW, for the most part. They stuck with same easy to use interface, controls, schemes as wow but improved on some that were just ho hum. I think a lot of games lose sight of having an excellent user interface. IT'S IMPORTANT PEOPLE! NOBODY WANTS A SLOPPY CHINSY FEELING INTERFACE THEY CANNOT USE EASILY. We wanna fight enemies, mobs, bosses, not our interface!
Map - how many of you got people constantly asking where to find certain people in WoW? *hands?* Yeah i ignored them.
WAR had an amazing map which showed you just about everything you needed and wanted to know in a great interface! The lake pools on the maps were just amazing and not just for show to guide you but you could click them to bring up the quests they were. AMAZING!
Public Quests - the next gen of questing imho. These were awesome and so undervalued because of the PVP. There are SO MANY and they sometimes feel so epic that i wished my friends were still playing so we could try so much more of them. Some were so off the beaten path and so cool and story driven that i really wanted to try them all. Not only that but they told you (on the map no less) how many players needed to do a PQ. AWESOME! To me this stuff is the content of legend.
Guild levels, city level?!
Say what?! Yeah that's right how awesome that your guild can level up and your city too! the higher your city got the more lil areas opened up and delivered more content to you. I think that is one for innovation personally. Not a freebie and it adds depth to a non character?! Yeah really cool. Sorta like the stockades in WoW WAR took the instancing idea there to a higher level.
Wait guild levels too?! yeah you unlocked these tactics which could be applied to a guild banner for combat use. Different tactics produced different effects for your group. Man waving that flag around to turn the tide was pretty sick imho.
Gear and items was pretty WoW'esq but i loved the addition of trophies to further customize your character. While certainly just cosmetic (although doesn't need to be) nothing says i'm a BADASS than toting around some nasty looking knives and badges like you're a christmas tree. Was very neat. but in the end static and looses its luster like all items do.
TOME OF KNOWLEDGE
this thing is the balls out coolest thing ever. Tracks...well everything, quests you've done or not, creatures you've killed OR not, how many, what they are, what type, hidden lairs you've found (I LOVE JUST WANDERING AROUND FINDING THESE! AND THEY ARE VERY HIDDEN), not to mention you can get tome tactics from your tome, all sorts of cool lore, noteworthy persons? yeah a little xp and cool factor just for FINDING a noteworthy person that plays a part in the story somehow. Very cool! You might even get something neat for finding enough of them like a title or tome unlock or whatever.
Gawd so much you can say about the tome. It's UBER. Plain and simple. So much so that I think WoW is adding like a compendium in Cataclysm or something. YEAH RIP OFF!!! When other games are copying you, you KNOW you've got gold with that feature.
Wow i could say so much more of this game but suffice it to say i stopped playing for a while because my friends weren't playing. MMO's are social that's why i enjoy them but i'd like to with my friends too. I think if WAR was PVE instead of PVP it would have done much better. So many neat PVE features that seem forgotten. The pvp is nice too but I would have dropped the WoW'esq scenarios for the open RVR personally. Much more fun and engrossing.
Welcome any and all comments. Enjoy folks keep playing!
Isabelle, I could hardly have said it better myself!
I am probably more loot-oriented than you are, which is one reason I've long argued for more options in acquiring gear and more different types of gear. You mentioned Asheron's Call - it's a game I point out as an example of one that far better handles gear than WoW. There simply is more option is what gear you can wear without gimping yourself, better variety in artwork, and for my tastes better looking gear to be had. Customization is also far better in terms of looks, though WoW devs have stepped it up in terms of function.
You and I play MMORPGs for the RPG aspect (regardless of whether we play on an RP server), we play to adventure in a fantasy world. I won't speak for you farther than that, but my progression in to it is easy enough to follow, and I think it accounts for many of us - we enjoyed fantasy novels and books, we got in to D&D style RPGs because of that, and we got in to MMORPGs because of that.
I think there are a number of reasons that we have the MMOGs of today, and they are in large part due to devs not coming from the world I cam from, but from the world of games first, supplemented by movies, graphic novels, and other novels and books. Most of them also learned from how the first commercially successful games were made - and those games gave up a lot to be commercially successful when they were created because technology forced them to be more "MMO" oriented.
I've read WoW devs talk about 2 philosophies that I think fundamentally cripple the game. The first is, they talk about how hard it is to create things like quest lines for specific classes. Well, sure, it takes a lot of effort - but why wouldn't you spend the effort?? Sure, if you are in development and have no money coming in you need to get it out and can't do all you would like, but after the game is successful, you can expand and create all that you left out that makes the game rich and deeply satisfying. The second is a similar concept in that it is so self-limiting - "We want X class to look like X class". This is a guaranteed route to failure, because most of the players aren't going to agree with your taste in armor and pretty much everyone wants to be able to express some individuality. What "X class" should look like to you is usually not what "X class" should look like to the next guy. WoW devs, as good as they have been in the areas they are good, are blind in areas that allow players to be individuals and allow them to express themselves as continuing heroes in the game.
The self-limitation extends to how gear is acquired. WoW devs may be figuring this out, they are making 10-man and 25-man raids the same with the same rewards in Catacysm (as I understand it), but the fact is you don't have to make everyone join a large group to keep them paying a subscription fee. You can make dungeons and quest lines that are rich in story that also offer rich reward that individuals can do - and guess what, just as many people will do them, they will just do them individually rather than in groups. Or, make them scalable as the WoW devs are doing to a limited degree.
There is also this concept that drops have to be scarce to keep people playing. I kept my Asheron's Call subscriptions for 4 years, and most of the drops they had were ones everyone in the group got when the Boss that dropped the item was killed. We didn't need the excuse that we had to run X dungeon 50 times to get that rare dropped trinket (that every melee-type in the guild wanted) to keep running dungeons, and the AC devs also added another feature that was awesome - a kind of "treasure room" where you could select an item each time you completed the dungeon, so that you were rewarded with a nice item if you wanted every time you went in for awhile.
Asheron's Call and my experience of it shows there is more to doing dungeons than raiding for loot, but WoW has turned doing dungeons in to being such a one-sided affair in terms of getting decent gear that it is difficult to avoid the trap. And, it is a trap that can change the way you think about and how you play the game - I was in it for a year and a half and am glad to say am out and can enjoy the game my way again. Hopefully, when I start going for that upper-end gear again (if I keep playing WoW that long), I'll remember my lessons.
Have played: Everquest, Asheron's Call, Horizons, Everquest2, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, Warhammer, Age of Conan, Darkfall
Very good article and a pleasure to read , my typing might be off today , so will ad my 2 cents why its done that way .
The majority of MMORPG or RPG games , no longer take a game over .
Thats a change from the past when I played D&D a session could be over in 1 month or 1 week , never did a campagain last longer then 3 months in my RP time (yes i do know the people who played years , but i am speaking from my experience)
Now comes MMO gaming you got a persistent world , where people dont want a game over .
Infact in modern times no matter how much or how little you play , you NEED progress , now the easiest way is items.
Or stats increase infact , the items itself aren´t important its the stats increase , and like you said Isabella , 0.005% stats increase. totally worthless but people want that feeling of progress .
I would say go make a new toon relevel and do other things , but also a change in nowadays RP games or Online gaming.
Is that people hardly read others lines anymore , they all pretend to listen , but infact half of them are AFK during briefings , roleplay sessions , meetings , or just chatting in whispers .
Understanding for eachother is lower , while in the past , people took time to entertain eachother have a common respect for eachotehr as gamers freaks nerds , nowadays people all think they are the center of the universe online .
Cause they pay so there time spent must be worthwhile .
Game industry takes the easy way out , in making items , achievements rewards , anything to keep you paying .
They infact reuse same contents over and over again , a FED EX mission is still a fed ex mission .
A escort mission is stil a escort , a Kill X is still a Kill X , there aint many new innovative way of doing the stuff .
Some companies try but majority of the gamers dont even notice it .
If a story is beautifull or gruelsome or brings a tear to your eye but gives lousy rewards . most people wont even bother .
"WTF why should i spent time doing stupid stuff for no reward ", emotions are considered no longer a reward .
So thats why the tyranny of items , atleast people see the 0.00001% stats increase .
We seem to think of loot, especially end-game loot, as just that- shiny shit that's marginally/significantly better than what we were wearing before we downed that boss or completed that chain. I look at loot, especially end-game loot a little differently. I look at it as an extension of my level. So, when I'm galavanting around IC killing mobs that my level 80 blued-out (or even t7 epic'd out) toon has no business killing, its because I'm effectively a higher level? Why not make higher levels or more character specialization points or whatever? Well, that's exactly what loot is- a way of progressing once you've hit max level.
As for taking under geared players into my raids? It depends on how under geared they are. Just like leveling, loot is a marker for what content you can handle.
Would you take a tank or healer (or even a dps) that was too low level into an instance with?
A witty saying proves nothing.
-Voltaire
I think the article's author (and the industry as a whole) has overlooked motivating factors for playing a game.
Generally speaking, "grind" or menial content should hve an easily quantifiable reward (i.e. bigger loot). If you're being asked to do some meaningless "kill x" quest, it's a safe bet to have "y" as a reward. This is what the author misses: a lot of that gear is there because of the content being a grind (not the other way around as she supposes).
If the content involves more complex problem solving, loot really doesn't quantify the experience. Does solving a complex puzzle (like the moon phasses in Ultima) really necessitate a +1 axe? No. This is where the industry has failed to adapt properly. Any rewards for this should feel unqiue or "one of a kind" as opposed to continuing the trend of "oh, it's like your current thing but does +1 whatsitcalled vs. themguys"
Just as punishments should fit crimes, rewards should fit actions in-game.
I agree with the proposition that games tend to focus too much on the items themselves these days, much like the level-up itself is also a major goal of many games.
I don't agree that things were so much better in games of old though, I found those even more ungratifying and boring than the current implementations which use the skinner mechanics heavily, those games just used other things like social pressure and hierarchy while often severely lacking content.
In my opinion, it's a testimony to how difficult it is to get a 'massive' group of people to cooperate and get along in a seperate online space. Developers are constantly struggling how to make content actually available in that space without destroying its purpose in the process; the early games did not succeed in that much at all imo, while games now might be too focused on simple tasks and Skinner processes.
It's up to the games coming out in the near future to show that they can successfully make a richer host of content available to community than was done before.
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!