Greed and desire only lead to suffering. If that is what motivates your gameplay then you will never be satisfied. No game mechanic will ever change this.
Okay that is your lesson in Buddhism for the day.
That's right, it does, but the design of WoW puts you up to it, the greed and desire, which then leads to suffering.
I withdraw what I said about all games more or less using this model, as I haven't played every MMO game on the market, but I've played my fair share of both pay to play and free to play games over the years and most if not all of those has had a RNG loot type, need / greed type gear system.
No game mechanic might change that, how people are, but a game mechanic can most certainly try to prevent it / lessen it.
The people and the friends that we have lost, and the dreams that have faded, never forget them~
I've only played a free trial of the original Guild Wars, but it was described to me that loot was not all that special or hard to come by (the big difference in what was acquired in the high end was more looks than anything) and when the importance of that is taken away, then you don't have a community like the seagulls from Finding Nemo.
It goes further than that, it also automatically shares the loot, so if someone else than the people it drops for want it he have to trade it.
That also helps to keep the ninjas away. Once or twice someone I didn't know demanded or whined on me to give them my loot without trading the stuff they got earlier (my friends don't have to ask if it is stuff they need more) and I said no, end of discussion.
But an broker or auction house would probably help in GW, in the old days were the regular chat filled with people trying to sell stuff, it is better now but it still happens occasionally.
Putting too much focus on items leads to a rather crappy community. And it doesn't help when people doing a raid have to share 4 items on 24 or 40 people, particularly not if it takes hours.
To me, the only rewarding Loot is when after a PvP fight I get to loot everything that my opponent was wearing.
When I see someone in shiny armor I want to be able to kill him and take it.
Nothing comes close to the thrill and adrenaline rush in games where this is possible.
All the discussions that OP mentions can be solved easily in some games, just duke it out!
This kind of full loot game is currently only offered by Eve Online and Darkfall Online, both outstanding PvP Games.
Mortal online as well, and UO. But in itself does it not help the problem. Starting killing your group memebers if you rolled badly does not improve the community (OP talked about PvE loot).
It is true that full loot games often have very little focus on gear and that helps.
But those games (besides Eve) should really have a more realistic system for carrying stuff, killing a few knights and carrying 200 pounds or armor with you is just silly. It is realistic that you can rob someone blind after you killed him but a single person can realistically not carry everything he finds.
A knights armor and weapons is actually not so heavy that some people think, you can move really fast in one. But it is very bulky and you can't carry a full armor in a backpack, already my chainmail armor gives me backpains if I have it in the backpack an walks too far.
Being realistic about one loot thing but not the other seems odd to me.
The problem is that the grouping systems in most MMORPGs make grouping with random strangers essentially mandatory. While one can try to group with friends as available, to group only with friends would take such tremendous effort as to be completely game breaking in itself. Well, maybe people who don't have anything else to do and can schedule their lives around a game could manage that, but it's not a practical option for people with other real-life responsibilities. Thus, if a game's grouping system doesn't work well for grouping with random strangers, then it doesn't work well at all. Period.
The problem, I think, is not so much with randomness being involved in raid rewards as it is that a given character is expected to do extremely repetitive things many times to get those raid rewards. If you know ahead of time that you'd have to run a raid ten times to get a given reward, is that really any better than knowing that the number of times you'll have to run it is a poisson random variable with expected value 10? Or if that's too narrow of a distribution for you, having a 10% chance of getting it each time, so it's kind of a discrete version of an exponential random variable? (I'm sure that distribution has a name, but I don't know what it is off hand and don't care to look it up.)
If the randomness were completely removed from raid loot, and each character had to run a raid a fixed ten times to gear up for the next, then run the next raid ten times to gear up for the one after that, and so forth, that wouldn't fix the problem. It would make the problem of raid gear a little different, but not a lot different.
RTSs handle like RPGs on the unit level. So, that's completely out of the window. RTSs are more like Poker, than Chess. The best and most realistic series of RTSs ever released, would even have your unit randomly run off screaming out of fear when faced with an enemy. (Close Combat)
FPS incorporate recoil, which is a controlled randomness. It may not seem like it, but I'm a pretty strong CoD player and I have been killed because I recoiled completely around an opponent.
As well as quite a few other factors, even in simple games like CoD (as far as shooting is concerned) where there is no bullet drop or wind resistance. Mostly deterministic, possibly. Completely, not so much. Not to mention in the more advanced games you have random strikes called into general areas by players, or in the CoD series with the Helicopters that randomly go around.
Fighting.... not too sure about that, you're probably right there. But, then again. I'm sure there are quite a bit of randomness at it's lowest level. Haven't been into fighting games since Mortal Kombat 3 and Tekken 3, so it's been a while. However, against a computer there is a bit of controlled randomness.
Actually in most RTSes (and certainly all the big multiplayer ones), gameplay is almost completely deterministic.
FPSes like Quake and UT are completely deterministic. In the FPSes with random elements (like recoil) they tend to be so tightly controlled that -- if they're not a preset bullet pattern -- the influence of the randomness is virtually nonexistant. The influence of these random factors is so small that they almost never decide a fight one way or another.
Lack of skill or knowledge about a game doesn't make it less deterministic. It only means that those players haven't learned to be perceptive or skilled enough to manipulate the game in their favor.
Or to put it another way: bad Chess players who make "random" moves are still playing a deterministic game. They're just playing it badly until (through trial and error) they gradually discover which choices produce the best outcomes.
All of the best multiplayer games are strongly deterministic, and if random elements exist at all they have a minor impact or players are strongly able to manipulate those elements (which makes them strongly deterministic.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
RTSes that I've played had randomly generated maps, and that's a huge amount of randomness right there. It's been a long time since I've picked up a new one of those, though.
Comments
That's right, it does, but the design of WoW puts you up to it, the greed and desire, which then leads to suffering.
I withdraw what I said about all games more or less using this model, as I haven't played every MMO game on the market, but I've played my fair share of both pay to play and free to play games over the years and most if not all of those has had a RNG loot type, need / greed type gear system.
No game mechanic might change that, how people are, but a game mechanic can most certainly try to prevent it / lessen it.
The people and the friends that we have lost, and the dreams that have faded, never forget them~
Spot on Loke666, well put with few words. Not something I'm all that good at
The people and the friends that we have lost, and the dreams that have faded, never forget them~
To me, the only rewarding Loot is when after a PvP fight I get to loot everything that my opponent was wearing.
When I see someone in shiny armor I want to be able to kill him and take it.
Nothing comes close to the thrill and adrenaline rush in games where this is possible.
All the discussions that OP mentions can be solved easily in some games, just duke it out!
This kind of full loot game is currently only offered by Eve Online and Darkfall Online, both outstanding PvP Games.
It goes further than that, it also automatically shares the loot, so if someone else than the people it drops for want it he have to trade it.
That also helps to keep the ninjas away. Once or twice someone I didn't know demanded or whined on me to give them my loot without trading the stuff they got earlier (my friends don't have to ask if it is stuff they need more) and I said no, end of discussion.
But an broker or auction house would probably help in GW, in the old days were the regular chat filled with people trying to sell stuff, it is better now but it still happens occasionally.
Putting too much focus on items leads to a rather crappy community. And it doesn't help when people doing a raid have to share 4 items on 24 or 40 people, particularly not if it takes hours.
Mortal online as well, and UO. But in itself does it not help the problem. Starting killing your group memebers if you rolled badly does not improve the community (OP talked about PvE loot).
It is true that full loot games often have very little focus on gear and that helps.
But those games (besides Eve) should really have a more realistic system for carrying stuff, killing a few knights and carrying 200 pounds or armor with you is just silly. It is realistic that you can rob someone blind after you killed him but a single person can realistically not carry everything he finds.
A knights armor and weapons is actually not so heavy that some people think, you can move really fast in one. But it is very bulky and you can't carry a full armor in a backpack, already my chainmail armor gives me backpains if I have it in the backpack an walks too far.
Being realistic about one loot thing but not the other seems odd to me.
The problem is that the grouping systems in most MMORPGs make grouping with random strangers essentially mandatory. While one can try to group with friends as available, to group only with friends would take such tremendous effort as to be completely game breaking in itself. Well, maybe people who don't have anything else to do and can schedule their lives around a game could manage that, but it's not a practical option for people with other real-life responsibilities. Thus, if a game's grouping system doesn't work well for grouping with random strangers, then it doesn't work well at all. Period.
The problem, I think, is not so much with randomness being involved in raid rewards as it is that a given character is expected to do extremely repetitive things many times to get those raid rewards. If you know ahead of time that you'd have to run a raid ten times to get a given reward, is that really any better than knowing that the number of times you'll have to run it is a poisson random variable with expected value 10? Or if that's too narrow of a distribution for you, having a 10% chance of getting it each time, so it's kind of a discrete version of an exponential random variable? (I'm sure that distribution has a name, but I don't know what it is off hand and don't care to look it up.)
If the randomness were completely removed from raid loot, and each character had to run a raid a fixed ten times to gear up for the next, then run the next raid ten times to gear up for the one after that, and so forth, that wouldn't fix the problem. It would make the problem of raid gear a little different, but not a lot different.
Actually in most RTSes (and certainly all the big multiplayer ones), gameplay is almost completely deterministic.
FPSes like Quake and UT are completely deterministic. In the FPSes with random elements (like recoil) they tend to be so tightly controlled that -- if they're not a preset bullet pattern -- the influence of the randomness is virtually nonexistant. The influence of these random factors is so small that they almost never decide a fight one way or another.
Lack of skill or knowledge about a game doesn't make it less deterministic. It only means that those players haven't learned to be perceptive or skilled enough to manipulate the game in their favor.
Or to put it another way: bad Chess players who make "random" moves are still playing a deterministic game. They're just playing it badly until (through trial and error) they gradually discover which choices produce the best outcomes.
All of the best multiplayer games are strongly deterministic, and if random elements exist at all they have a minor impact or players are strongly able to manipulate those elements (which makes them strongly deterministic.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
RTSes that I've played had randomly generated maps, and that's a huge amount of randomness right there. It's been a long time since I've picked up a new one of those, though.