The answer is really fairly simple, pure themepark for those that want it aka wow/swtor. And a modern sandbox with a developer focus on sandbox elements, with themepark elements layered on top (a lot of themepark stuff is good). Look at what Jake song is creating, why would anyone think this is a bad thing? And it ain't focused on low time commitment/fast reward.
If Jake Song spawned Lineage 2, people are correct to be cautious about whether Archeage will be fun.
A good sandbox involves frequent interesting decisions (Minecraft/Terraria/H&H). Lineage 2 had perhaps the least frequent interesting decisions of any MMORPG out there, and some of the most excessive repetition.
A good sandbox doesn't need to hide behind excessive timesink and slow rewards, because it has enough gameplay to remain fun despite giving players rewards frequently and without much timesink.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
For me old school games were more fun. I know some people can't wrap their head around but the feeling of accomplishment when you comepleted your epic weapon questline or earned 100 aa points, raised your fishing and drinking skill or the multitude of things you do in those worlds was way higher than getting 4 pieces of token equipment. I know ever company do their games different so its like having different DM's, but the DM's nowadays are doing what we call candy-giving.
on a sidenote for axehilt, what is your axe to grind with old school. I mean honestly those kinda games are not even really around anymore so why are you on this crusade? Im not saying don't have a opinion but i do notice through your post history that you are very quick to attack threads that talk about old school games or mechanics.
anyways not trying to derail myself but if they could really bring back an updated oldschool game then you would probably never see me back on here again. I do feel its unfair that people who like the current system have easily 4 choices of newer games but if i want to play an old school type system everything has really dated graphics.
(I'm not counting vanguard as an old school game anymore since they upped the exp rate and changed several of the things to make it more in line with games today)
on a sidenote for axehilt, what is your axe to grind with old school. I mean honestly those kinda games are not even really around anymore so why are you on this crusade? Im not saying don't have a opinion but i do notice through your post history that you are very quick to attack threads that talk about old school games or mechanics.
anyways not trying to derail myself but if they could really bring back an updated oldschool game then you would probably never see me back on here again. I do feel its unfair that people who like the current system have easily 4 choices of newer games but if i want to play an old school type system everything has really dated graphics.
(I'm not counting vanguard as an old school game anymore since they upped the exp rate and changed several of the things to make it more in line with games today)
Eh? I'm not on any particular crusade against old school. It's just important people remember them for the gameplay-lite timesinks they were; it's bad if we develop rose-colored glasses towards the design mistakes of the past.
Granted, it's also fair to say we shouldn't completely forget the past either. There are a few good design elements to the older games (the entire concept of sandbox gaming) which could be utilized by newer games.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
on a sidenote for axehilt, what is your axe to grind with old school. I mean honestly those kinda games are not even really around anymore so why are you on this crusade? Im not saying don't have a opinion but i do notice through your post history that you are very quick to attack threads that talk about old school games or mechanics.
anyways not trying to derail myself but if they could really bring back an updated oldschool game then you would probably never see me back on here again. I do feel its unfair that people who like the current system have easily 4 choices of newer games but if i want to play an old school type system everything has really dated graphics.
(I'm not counting vanguard as an old school game anymore since they upped the exp rate and changed several of the things to make it more in line with games today)
Eh? I'm not on any particular crusade against old school. It's just important people remember them for the gameplay-lite timesinks they were; it's bad if we develop rose-colored glasses towards the design mistakes of the past.
Granted, it's also fair to say we shouldn't completely forget the past either. There are a few good design elements to the older games (the entire concept of sandbox gaming) which could be utilized by newer games.
Thats the problem axe, you keep trying to refer to timesinks as bad things. For many they are fun and good things. You regularly insult old school players by inferring they cant possible enjoy timesinks (e.g rose tinted glasses) Time sinks can be well designed and there are theories to support virtual worlds as well as themepark play (including raph and Jake).
You also already aknowlege everyone likes some timesinks just not them all, so you cannot cherry pick, thats selfish behaviour by a player. As for Archeage, well at the moment all feedback comming back is that it is on the money, and that it is full of 'time sinks' People are absolutely loving it, an example of a game that may not bve suited to a themepark fan but will be to a sandbox fan, just like SWTOR in referse which is all good.
I agree with your understanding of the mechanics of reward and fast achievments etc (and find some of your args thought provoking), and i enjoy this stuff, but I also love time sinks. Both can be well designed and badly designed. Re WOW, much of this game is severly broken and badly designed (almost everything not related to raiding,instances and pvp) Example? well every 3 months the rewards you previously get are devalued through stat inflation - that goes against many modern design principles, look at GW1 for a loot design that elegantly side steps this issue (no stat inflartion)
It is ok to like time sinks, and it is ok to like themepark stuff, it is not ok to say someone else is wrong in liking something. It is good to offer both as options, it is misguided to suppress 1 over the other, unless the game is explicitly designed to support one over the other, e.g my previous comment.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
I can try to explain why I love extreme time sinks here- long term goals and complexity. I love playing a game where I have many overlapping time sinks, it is satisfying for humans to be working towards many goals at the same time, and for me having a 6 month timesink complete is Hugely satisfying.
Btw there are also long term time sinks in themeparks- instances that are repeated daily and rep grinds, the only difference is that you get lots of rewards instead of less but bigger over a longer time period. I prefer the latter ( like tbc rep rewards) and I do nor understand why themeparks don't offer mirror the latter, unless it is truly because of the complaining by those who do not like long time sinks, which is also selfish solo player type behaviour ( I want what he gas now, I demand it!)
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
So it is morally wrong that short term time sink fans try to get rid of long term sinks even though some love it, just as it it morally wrong for long term sink lovers to try and get rid of short term sinks. So why do some themeparks pander to the former complainers unless it is purely about greed and satisfying the biggest audience group- even if it is morally wrong and impacts the enjoyment if other groups.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
boil it down to the "im right, you're wrong" mentality.
Tell someone "But i like this!" they will continue to tell you "No! You dont like it!"
I spent 6 hours in a row farming wood from the same 12 trees to 20000 wood at 73 wood a minute to get the wood for basic charcoal production done in a tale in the desert. And I would still be playing 8 hours a day if I didn't have to quit to work on my game. But according to most posters here no one likes to do that and I am lying to myself that it is fun.
They are all like, but its a second job! Well maybe, but its a job I do for reasons other than the inherent wage slavery of a capitalist system. So yeah, people with a spouse and young kids and a 60 hour a week job might not want to play a game that requires effort or work, but so what? Does every game have to be for them?
Could I get my feeling of setting long term goals and working towards them and achieving them from real life? Maybe. But it has worse gameplay than any mmo :P
Anything that a typical normal 14 year old can do.. isn't challenging to a 42 year old adult, whom has tackled much harder raids in their day.
Not even sure if some of you are aware that some olden raids took 6~8 hours before you even got to the main mob.. and then you can totoally wipe and spend the next 2 days getting corpses out. Doing this is not hard (to sit @ keyboard and press buttons), but it takes perserverence & goal setting with like minded individuals to accoimplish things.
Now (today) it^ is all given away in armor sets, because those developers don't want to hurt the fragile egoes of the children growing up today.
Or maybe it's not character flaws on the partof developers and today's gamers. Maybe the people who had 6-8 hours to do nothing other than wait for one mob to appear and then another 3-4 hours to fight that one mob simply enjoyed a different type of perseverence in the face of adversity than most of the gamers do today.
This isn't an age thing. It's not a laziness thing. It's not an instant gratification thing. The truth is, for most people, waiting in line isn't a challenge or a hardcore experience. It's simply waiting in line - and there are many more entertaining things that people feel they could be doing with their leisure activitry, espeicially people that don't have 4 hours to do any one activity, let alone stand in line for four hours to go do it.
"Anything that a typical normal 14 year old can do.. isn't challenging to a 42 year old adult, whom has tackled much harder raids in their day."
I'm a 42-year old adult, as well, but I'm not about to waggle my cane at today's gamers when I can put just as much effort into trying to understand them.. Feel free to keep on about fragile egos and 14-year olds, though.
derp....
Nobody said anyone waited 6~8 hours for a mob... (lol)
Dungeon crawls took that long (or longer) to get to the main mob, etc. And raiding was not something you just did, your entire party had to prepare for it weeks in advance. Good guilds spent weeks finding rare herbs for rare potions, etc.
Secondly, making things up (ie: "waiting in line" for a mob?) and then argueing that irrelevant point, doesn't rebuttal anything I've said. Sorry!
Not sure your point. EQ was 3 years old by then & 40+ servers. Crowding is crowding.. has no relivence to my comments, or game mechanics.
I am sure that johnny come l8tly who got caught up in the "flagging" and bravado within EQ had to wait for BOSS mobs to kill. But then-again, that wasn't the point of EQ.. it was turned into that, by people who couldn't raid.. so SOE flagged everything, so even people who do not want to commit to 4+ hours of adventuring, could use crutches and get flagged for parts of dungeons, so SOE could soft-serve a raid to them.
It was the fall of EQ. (flagging & instancing)
I sold my 1st EQ character around 2002 for $2,800.
Because the game got that stupid and that upward. Nothing in EQ after Velious & Kunark was outward content. So, for Sandboxers, there was little point in playing EQ anymore, the challenge was gone. I was solo flaggin dungeons, incredibly dumb and unfullfilling.
But noobs who wanted rare gear loved it.. they wanted to be Me, without a challenge. So these kids bought accounts to be kewl.
A truly amazing reply, as many EQers would find absolutely nothing odd about what you said there, despite it being an incredible example of everything that is wrong with the 'old school' MMO gamer.
Why would it be odd..?
That was the reality and chronology and the history of how oldschool MMORPG's have been turning into newschool MMORPG since WoW.
Everquest the game (itself) is no longer an oldschool game. That is why every time SOE starts an EQ Progression Server, it's in que for months..... BECAUSE THE OLDSCHOOL EQ EXPERIENCE CANNOT BE HAD ANYMORE....!
I fail to see any points your making about Everquest, other than interjecting because You misunderstood a concept of raiding and dungeon crawling.
Oldschool rpg games go back to Wizardry, Zork, Bard's Tale, etc.. and of coarse Dungeons & Dragons. If u don't have the many years of playing those game under your belt, without no rules, no forums, no help, just personal problem solving skills... left to fend all for yourself... then you have no way to frame the dochotomy between oldschool vs newschool...
Problem is, there are very little oldschoolers vs the overbearing newschoolers. But, if these kids had a chance to play these olden games (Meridain59, EQ, Ashron's Call, DOAC, SWG, ShadowBane, Lineage, etc..) when they were months new, they would've been hooked.
The points you are trying to make, are irrelevent. Simply because what you think oldschool is, isn't. You are trying to imagine an oldschool game and then base an arguement off of something you have little experience discussing.
Again, if/when people mention Everquest as "oldschool"... they only mean EQ back then, not now! So playing an oldschool game now.. today. Yields very little gameplay experience within that game, as opposed to how it was played back then.. with more challenging content, etc.
I remember being on a Raid for 3 days strait & calling off of work because our Guild wiped 9H into a raid. We then spent the next 2 days getting corpse out of that dungeon. Playing an adventure game back then wasn't about equipment, it was about doing things and pushing the limits. (circa 2000)
Today.. there is no risk, thus no challenge.
Understand, sometimes the battle is in your mind.. do you, or don't you(?).. can be a challenging decision. But the developers have forgotten to let those decision stick.
Because newschool MMO's are carebear and typically meant for children, offering many re-do's to every decision. Adults want the risk of choice.
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
boil it down to the "im right, you're wrong" mentality.
Tell someone "But i like this!" they will continue to tell you "No! You dont like it!"
No it does not.. it comes down to knowledge and lack of it. Oldschool players know the draw/lust for open worlds. That is why we hang on... waiting!
The problem lies with being called a "newcomer" N00b", "newschooler".. etc.
New Commers though, don't understrand that these are not NAMES people are calling teh noobs, it is a fact. They are indeed a novice. The unrest on these forums lies in the fledging gamers ego.. whom are often times too fragile to understand that n00b is not a derogatory term. So there is no need to defend your lack of knowledge (newness)
But when the term "newbie / newschooler" fits the bill, often times these kids feel angry, slighted or embarrased for whatever fragile reason, instead of newbies just accepting the fact that they are indeed a newcommer. (Even if you've played for 4 years.. Your still have much less knowledge, than someone who been RPG'ing for 30 years.)
And Role-Playing is a BIG part of MMORPG's and how they are developed now... and back then!
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
For me, the difference of old vs new doesn't apply. Rather, it is the difference of sandbox vs themepark. When MMOs were first gaining popularity, they had 2 choices in games with which to emulate: UO or EQ. Tbh, I will always feel like the majority of mainstream MMOs chose incorrectly.
Themepark MMOs, to me, feel like they have abandoned the concept of sandbox, do whatever you want when you want because it seems fun, mentality to instead focus on the themepark "grind for the sake of grinding" mentality. I hate that. In sandbox games like UO, Shadowbane and EVE, any grinding you do is to help you further some other, completely unrelated, task. That task may be PvP, it may be exploration, it may to build something in the middle of nowhere cause you think it would be a good idea! But grinding is not the focus of the game- it's a journey to what you want to do.
Now enter current themepark MMOs (Rift, WoW, EQ/2, SWTOR, etc): you hit max level and do what? You grind. Why? For better gear. To what end? So that you can more easily do the next grind for better gear. The gameplay has suddenly stopped- the exploration, the adventure... all gone. Instead you are grinding for the sake of grinding. I grind the next 2 months out so that I'll be better off when the next patch containing the newest grind comes out. Every patch brings 1 or 2 new instances, which I will basically live in for every moment of my time in this game, doing it over... and over... to no end other than do just that.
MMOs used to feel... magical. They used to have a feeling like games similar to Skyrim have- awe and wonder at the things that happen. Worlds shaped by the players within them. Some games, like EVE, still have that. Others lost it long, long ago.
boil it down to the "im right, you're wrong" mentality.
Tell someone "But i like this!" they will continue to tell you "No! You dont like it!"
No it does not.. it comes down to knowledge and lack of it. Oldschool players know the draw/lust for open worlds. That is why we hang on... waiting!
The problem lies with being called a "newcomer" N00b", "newschooler".. etc.
New Commers though, don't understrand that these are not NAMES people are calling teh noobs, it is a fact. They are indeed a novice. The unrest on these forums lies in the fledging gamers ego.. whom are often times too fragile to understand that n00b is not a derogatory term. So there is no need to defend your lack of knowledge (newness)
But when the term "newbie / newschooler" fits the bill, often times these kids feel angry, slighted or embarrased for whatever fragile reason, instead of newbies just accepting the fact that they are indeed a newcommer. (Even if you've played for 4 years.. Your still have much less knowledge, than someone who been RPG'ing for 30 years.)
And Role-Playing is a BIG part of MMORPG's and how they are developed now... and back then!
Phelcher it is not that way at all. Many many many of us did play those games, and we liked them but we like new games better. Many many of those that played the old school like them better. Yes there are a great many new people in the MMO scene. But the oldschool crowed was not a monolithic group.
I would even venture to say that most of the people that played old school games like new school better, becaues 1. There is not very much difference in gameplay, people are still by and large playing the same way. 2. There is much less tedium involved.
Some oldschoolers new the lust/draw, many just viewed them as entertainment and find new ones just as entertaining. Only on this site is there a majority of players who played those games and who like/want those type of games.
Role playing has never been a big part - only for the pnp crowd. For those who started with UO, M59 and EQ, the actual Rping was always a minority. Yes the developers wanted it, but no they didn't put in a lot of tools for it, and no most of the playerbase didn't do it.
I stand by my statement, most of the people that played those games felt the tedium and like new games better.
I remember reading a post on these boards when WoW first releasedof someoene basically they are done with old school design, I think he stated basically never again would he stick a fork in his eye in order to play a game, referring to just how tedous and monotonous many games were.
Venge
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is bad.
boil it down to the "im right, you're wrong" mentality.
Tell someone "But i like this!" they will continue to tell you "No! You dont like it!"
No it does not.. it comes down to knowledge and lack of it. Oldschool players know the draw/lust for open worlds. That is why we hang on... waiting!
The problem lies with being called a "newcomer" N00b", "newschooler".. etc.
New Commers though, don't understrand that these are not NAMES people are calling teh noobs, it is a fact. They are indeed a novice. The unrest on these forums lies in the fledging gamers ego.. whom are often times too fragile to understand that n00b is not a derogatory term. So there is no need to defend your lack of knowledge (newness)
But when the term "newbie / newschooler" fits the bill, often times these kids feel angry, slighted or embarrased for whatever fragile reason, instead of newbies just accepting the fact that they are indeed a newcommer. (Even if you've played for 4 years.. Your still have much less knowledge, than someone who been RPG'ing for 30 years.)
And Role-Playing is a BIG part of MMORPG's and how they are developed now... and back then!
Phelcher it is not that way at all. Many many many of us did play those games, and we liked them but we like new games better. Many many of those that played the old school like them better. Yes there are a great many new people in the MMO scene. But the oldschool crowed was not a monolithic group.
I would even venture to say that most of the people that played old school games like new school better, becaues 1. There is not very much difference in gameplay, people are still by and large playing the same way. 2. There is much less tedium involved.
Some oldschoolers new the lust/draw, many just viewed them as entertainment and find new ones just as entertaining. Only on this site is there a majority of players who played those games and who like/want those type of games.
Role playing has never been a big part - only for the pnp crowd. For those who started with UO, M59 and EQ, the actual Rping was always a minority. Yes the developers wanted it, but no they didn't put in a lot of tools for it, and no most of the playerbase didn't do it.
I stand by my statement, most of the people that played those games felt the tedium and like new games better.
I remember reading a post on these boards when WoW first releasedof someoene basically they are done with old school design, I think he stated basically never again would he stick a fork in his eye in order to play a game, referring to just how tedous and monotonous many games were.
Venge
You could make the argument that WoW added somethings of undeniable benefit like UI and that is why people liked it. I am playing LR which I think is a UO clone and the main problem is the UI. Inventory and spell book are so annoying and skill list. But otherwise I would like it.
Its true devs then didn't put in the RP tools, but that doesn't mean we can't now either.
A new sandbox is going to have to update the UI, that would solve 50% of problems with old games.
As for being on rails, its pretty common for humans to like being on rails. I hate to get into evo psych but when our back end was evolving it was trained to complete very concrete tasks. Get food, get shelter, protect from animals. That took up say 99% of our resources. Now it would take like 20% of our resources for basic needs. Just a stable reliable shelter, average nutritious food and we killed off all the predators really, aside from human ones.
So obviously most people prefer to be on rails, because thats what our life was like for 95% of human existence. I would note that given a good guild leader or a player in a leadership position who can function as a DM instead of a few employees at the company, you could provide players a perfectly good on rails experience without hardcoding it into the game. We are assuming some PvP controls here obviously. The only problem I see is on rails people whining that sandboxers get to do stuff they don't, to which my answer is, why not? Just go off rails and do what you want if there is a part you think you are missing out on.
Thats the problem axe, you keep trying to refer to timesinks as bad things. For many they are fun and good things. You regularly insult old school players by inferring they cant possible enjoy timesinks (e.g rose tinted glasses) Time sinks can be well designed and there are theories to support virtual worlds as well as themepark play (including raph and Jake).
You also already aknowlege everyone likes some timesinks just not them all, so you cannot cherry pick, thats selfish behaviour by a player. As for Archeage, well at the moment all feedback comming back is that it is on the money, and that it is full of 'time sinks' People are absolutely loving it, an example of a game that may not bve suited to a themepark fan but will be to a sandbox fan, just like SWTOR in referse which is all good.
I agree with your understanding of the mechanics of reward and fast achievments etc (and find some of your args thought provoking), and i enjoy this stuff, but I also love time sinks. Both can be well designed and badly designed. Re WOW, much of this game is severly broken and badly designed (almost everything not related to raiding,instances and pvp) Example? well every 3 months the rewards you previously get are devalued through stat inflation - that goes against many modern design principles, look at GW1 for a loot design that elegantly side steps this issue (no stat inflartion)
It is ok to like time sinks, and it is ok to like themepark stuff, it is not ok to say someone else is wrong in liking something. It is good to offer both as options, it is misguided to suppress 1 over the other, unless the game is explicitly designed to support one over the other, e.g my previous comment.
Nobody calls gameplay a timesink. It's gameplay!
The term timesink only gets mentioned if it takes a lot of time without a lot of gameplay.
So when I say timesink, I mean timesink.
WOW obsoleting loot is actually a very smartly-intentioned design. Without making the prior tier easy to achieve, the game would be substantially less social because you'd have a huge difference between the people at the forefront of progression and the new players trickling in. Which ends up being disasterous in the longrun; group-centric games can't ever let the the gap between new player and veteran become too large.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Wow tier model is a mess, and why the game has constant balancing issues, and why anything below tier x becomes redundant. I cannot believe you are arguing that loot is a social boon. You say timesink as an insult to activities YOU consider dull. I and many on this thread you choose to ignore blindly refer to those same said timesinks as fun gameplay.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Thats the problem axe, you keep trying to refer to timesinks as bad things. For many they are fun and good things. You regularly insult old school players by inferring they cant possible enjoy timesinks (e.g rose tinted glasses) Time sinks can be well designed and there are theories to support virtual worlds as well as themepark play (including raph and Jake).
You also already aknowlege everyone likes some timesinks just not them all, so you cannot cherry pick, thats selfish behaviour by a player. As for Archeage, well at the moment all feedback comming back is that it is on the money, and that it is full of 'time sinks' People are absolutely loving it, an example of a game that may not bve suited to a themepark fan but will be to a sandbox fan, just like SWTOR in referse which is all good.
I agree with your understanding of the mechanics of reward and fast achievments etc (and find some of your args thought provoking), and i enjoy this stuff, but I also love time sinks. Both can be well designed and badly designed. Re WOW, much of this game is severly broken and badly designed (almost everything not related to raiding,instances and pvp) Example? well every 3 months the rewards you previously get are devalued through stat inflation - that goes against many modern design principles, look at GW1 for a loot design that elegantly side steps this issue (no stat inflartion)
It is ok to like time sinks, and it is ok to like themepark stuff, it is not ok to say someone else is wrong in liking something. It is good to offer both as options, it is misguided to suppress 1 over the other, unless the game is explicitly designed to support one over the other, e.g my previous comment.
Nobody calls gameplay a timesink. It's gameplay!
The term timesink only gets mentioned if it takes a lot of time without a lot of gameplay.
So when I say timesink, I mean timesink.
WOW obsoleting loot is actually a very smartly-intentioned design. Without making the prior tier easy to achieve, the game would be substantially less social because you'd have a huge difference between the people at the forefront of progression and the new players trickling in. Which ends up being disasterous in the longrun; group-centric games can't ever let the the gap between new player and veteran become too large.
Thats not precisely true. I recognize that games are all time sinks. I can sink a lot of my time into it and never be done. "Timesink" is sort of game jargon, but it also means something that sucks up lots of time, like a heat sink sucks up lots of heat. In the non jargon context we can use time sink to describe a game aspect that sucks up a lot of time, and could potentially be removed, because some people don't like it. In the sense that a lot of what one person calls a timesink or grind is another person's gameplay the player can meta out from the game, because the game isn't the world you actually live in, and understand that even fun gameplay can specifically be chose over another type of fun gameplay because it sucks up more time, thus generating subscriptions. I consider repetative raids to gind gear for the next set of raids ad infinitum to be a timesink while I can recognize that many enjoy it and that in limited quantities I like it too.
In a meta discussion of designing a game designers will discuss whether certain gameplay that has similar levels of fun to similar playerbases can be more time intensive than another type of gameplay.
You could say, it can take up more play time because its more fun, but I would say, some types of fun require longer time scales to be effective. There are different kinds of rewards and achievements. In ATITD farming wood for BCP might seem boring, or if you only have a few hours to play there may be other more rewarding things to do, but I farmed nearly all the 20k wood myself and at the end I felt good for getting it done, for doing it myself, and because other players were happy and appreciated that I had done this thing for the group. Further I was given sheepsies by other players because they believed that it was to their benefit to give me sheepsies because I fucking love breeding sheepsies after I demonstrated commitment to the goals of the group. I did not consider constantly running around the world trying to find wild sheepsies to be fun given the small chances if it happening but other players who were just doing their business and happened to be there unintentionally when they spawned and who were interested in doing something else picked them up and gave them to me by putting them in my pen because they knew I wanted them. So there was one definite timesink, and one thing that could be a timesink if you are only one person trying to make lots of sheepsies but there was an interaction in the game that allowed both for me to produce oodles of wood for the technology we were researching and to also get sheeps because for whatever reason sheep breeding just made me happy.
Instead of other players being forced to find 10 optimal wood routes and farm them for an hour which they considered not fun, I could farm one wood route and in return I could get way more sheepsies than I would have gotten for a similar amount of time searching for them by myself.
The trick here was that running for 6 hours was boring but it didn't harm the players' experience to spend 5 or 10 minutes carrying a sheep to my base in a small group, an Altar Sheep Run you could call it. I know I didn't explain the psychological background here, but there are certain tricks based on the way humans perceive time and work that allow a game designer to get players to spend just as much time at a task, without thinking its a time sink. It took just as long, for the same rewards but because of some brain tricks and like 2 interactions between mechanics there was no perception of a time sink.
Agree cuathon. This is about perception we perceive things that sink/take time in a game as fun, others don't. The sole issue is where someone cant accept that a thing they don't understand is fun is actually fun for others. Interesting that in real life we hope that humanity allows and supports minority views and good sandboxes attempt the same is it not
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
what it really comes down to is I feel sorry for the new school people who will never get a chance to experience the grandure and sense of accomplishment that old school was able to offer. old school has been proven it's not profitable so no game will ever be developed to cater to the old school style gameplay anymore.
it's unfortunate that younger gamers are punished by never being able to see the large scale cooperation that old school is able to offer. new gamers simply have to deal with the bad players who is entirely me myself and I oriented. w/o the old school game style of extreme challange, people dont really LEARN how to maximize their toon. if they fail, just reroll the flavor of the month and use the OP/broken skill that dev's are too lazy to patch. there is little investment in their toon, so rerolling a toon doesn't really hurt or matter much. if they dont know how to properly use a skill, complain and fake rage quit till dev's dumb down the content enough so that skill works the way they understand it. there isnt any months spent trying to figure out how to use the skill or tackle the encounter, just keep complaining till it's dumbed down.
old school players actually took weeks of parses to PROVE an encounter / skill is broken, new school complain till they get enough people to complain with them and dev's finally give in:D
either way, I feel bad for the serious gamers of this generation who will always feel something is missing in their MMO experience because there isnt any kind of large scale insanely hard challenges for them to overcome.
what it really comes down to is I feel sorry for the new school people who will never get a chance to experience the grandure and sense of accomplishment that old school was able to offer. old school has been proven it's not profitable so no game will ever be developed to cater to the old school style gameplay anymore.
it's unfortunate that younger gamers are punished by never being able to see the large scale cooperation that old school is able to offer. new gamers simply have to deal with the bad players who is entirely me myself and I oriented. w/o the old school game style of extreme challange, people dont really LEARN how to maximize their toon. if they fail, just reroll the flavor of the month and use the OP/broken skill that dev's are too lazy to patch. there is little investment in their toon, so rerolling a toon doesn't really hurt or matter much. if they dont know how to properly use a skill, complain and fake rage quit till dev's dumb down the content enough so that skill works the way they understand it. there isnt any months spent trying to figure out how to use the skill or tackle the encounter, just keep complaining till it's dumbed down.
old school players actually took weeks of parses to PROVE an encounter / skill is broken, new school complain till they get enough people to complain with them and dev's finally give in:D
either way, I feel bad for the serious gamers of this generation who will always feel something is missing in their MMO experience because there isnt any kind of large scale insanely hard challenges for them to overcome.
I really like this post, but to head off axehilt and loktofeit I would like to add the stipulation that only a minority, could be small medium or large, of modern gamers and oldschool games actually prefer oldschool games to newschool ones. I think the sad thing is that they don't really get to make that choice for themselves, free of obfuscating factors like fancy graphics and physics and superior UIs. Also themeparks are simply easier to manage graphically in general.
I also think that modern UIs are objectively more fun than some of the old ones. I despise the way LinkRealms, essentially a UO close type thing if I understand correctly, handles several aspects of the UI, especially movement. You cannot move with keyboard and you can't even click to move, you have to keep right clicking until you reach your desired part of the environment. The spell book also annoys me in the way it is structured.
what it really comes down to is I feel sorry for the new school people who will never get a chance to experience the grandure and sense of accomplishment that old school was able to offer. old school has been proven it's not profitable so no game will ever be developed to cater to the old school style gameplay anymore.
it's unfortunate that younger gamers are punished by never being able to see the large scale cooperation that old school is able to offer. new gamers simply have to deal with the bad players who is entirely me myself and I oriented. w/o the old school game style of extreme challange, people dont really LEARN how to maximize their toon. if they fail, just reroll the flavor of the month and use the OP/broken skill that dev's are too lazy to patch. there is little investment in their toon, so rerolling a toon doesn't really hurt or matter much. if they dont know how to properly use a skill, complain and fake rage quit till dev's dumb down the content enough so that skill works the way they understand it. there isnt any months spent trying to figure out how to use the skill or tackle the encounter, just keep complaining till it's dumbed down.
old school players actually took weeks of parses to PROVE an encounter / skill is broken, new school complain till they get enough people to complain with them and dev's finally give in:D
either way, I feel bad for the serious gamers of this generation who will always feel something is missing in their MMO experience because there isnt any kind of large scale insanely hard challenges for them to overcome.
I really like this post, but to head off axehilt and loktofeit I would like to add the stipulation that only a minority, could be small medium or large, of modern gamers and oldschool games actually prefer oldschool games to newschool ones. I think the sad thing is that they don't really get to make that choice for themselves, free of obfuscating factors like fancy graphics and physics and superior UIs. Also themeparks are simply easier to manage graphically in general.
I also think that modern UIs are objectively more fun than some of the old ones. I despise the way LinkRealms, essentially a UO close type thing if I understand correctly, handles several aspects of the UI, especially movement. You cannot move with keyboard and you can't even click to move, you have to keep right clicking until you reach your desired part of the environment. The spell book also annoys me in the way it is structured.
Pretty much what Cuathon said/.
"it's unfortunate that younger gamers are punished by never being able to see the large scale cooperation that old school is able to offer."
Not every game is WOW, psy. You and Phelcher have this aloof, subjective (and in many ways, false) view of how older gamers appreciate some kind of fine wine gaming that existed ten years ago while the lazy devs and today's whippersnappers like to race through Mickey D's content. I mean, really take an open-minded look at the posts you two have written so far in this thread. I think you're a bit too busy lamenting how others can't experience your level of greatness, and you aren't really looking at this objectively.
Wasn't it just the other side of this past weekend that this very site had an article about 'large scale cooperation' in a 'large scale insanely hard challenge'. Many MMOs still offer large group encounters in both PvE and PvP. The gameplay is out there and available. It's not that it's bette ror worse, just that it's different and caters only to a smaller group of people.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
boil it down to the "im right, you're wrong" mentality.
Tell someone "But i like this!" they will continue to tell you "No! You dont like it!"
No it does not.. it comes down to knowledge and lack of it. Oldschool players know the draw/lust for open worlds. That is why we hang on... waiting!
The problem lies with being called a "newcomer" N00b", "newschooler".. etc.
New Commers though, don't understrand that these are not NAMES people are calling teh noobs, it is a fact. They are indeed a novice. The unrest on these forums lies in the fledging gamers ego.. whom are often times too fragile to understand that n00b is not a derogatory term. So there is no need to defend your lack of knowledge (newness)
But when the term "newbie / newschooler" fits the bill, often times these kids feel angry, slighted or embarrased for whatever fragile reason, instead of newbies just accepting the fact that they are indeed a newcommer. (Even if you've played for 4 years.. Your still have much less knowledge, than someone who been RPG'ing for 30 years.)
And Role-Playing is a BIG part of MMORPG's and how they are developed now... and back then!
Phelcher it is not that way at all. Many many many of us did play those games, and we liked them but we like new games better. Many many of those that played the old school like them better. Yes there are a great many new people in the MMO scene. But the oldschool crowed was not a monolithic group.
I would even venture to say that most of the people that played old school games like new school better, becaues 1. There is not very much difference in gameplay, people are still by and large playing the same way. 2. There is much less tedium involved.
Some oldschoolers new the lust/draw, many just viewed them as entertainment and find new ones just as entertaining. Only on this site is there a majority of players who played those games and who like/want those type of games.
Role playing has never been a big part - only for the pnp crowd. For those who started with UO, M59 and EQ, the actual Rping was always a minority. Yes the developers wanted it, but no they didn't put in a lot of tools for it, and no most of the playerbase didn't do it.
I stand by my statement, most of the people that played those games felt the tedium and like new games better.
I remember reading a post on these boards when WoW first releasedof someoene basically they are done with old school design, I think he stated basically never again would he stick a fork in his eye in order to play a game, referring to just how tedous and monotonous many games were.
Venge
I don't know (or have heard) of anyone, suggesting their game experience in Aion, AoC, Rusty Hearts, Warhammer, Rift, Dragon Soul, etc.. was better than the Original Everquest.
Have you..?
These games arew GRAPHICALLY better, but half of them don't even have as many character hooks (abiliities tied into the game engine), nor the complexity of combat. You are trying to suggest that 12 year olds, who played EQ back in 1999, got happier... when they found something less demanding and allowed them to start playing games as ENTERTAINMENT & SOCIAL CIRCLES..? (I agree..)
Most oldschool MMO players play those game for the adventure & the challenge it provides ... as do many of the people who played MMORPG back in the mid 90. Any D&D player who had internet access was playing Everquest, Ashron's call or UO. Role-playing was an enormous part of all these games sucess. If it wasn't for the roleplayers, EverQuest's beta community wouldn't even have existed, nor would Everquest. Same for Ultima Online.
The oldschool mentality was about adventure & mystery.... and the reward was living to tell about them.
Newschool games are all about rewards... because the adolecent mind needs rewards (ie: dangling carrot) to feel good about themselves and as an incentive to keep playing. Or lately, ... JUST PLAY OUR GAME.. (type marketing), we give the easiest rewards and make your character the baddest-ast player in just 3 easy months.
Sorry... that^ is the only thing newschool games provide, is "ease" of adventuring.
Lastly (again) , who do u think Brad McQuaid was making an online Dungeons & Dragons for... children who could afford $2.50/h telephone bills for being online? It was the adults who were heavily into roleplaying... (ie: elven forest in UO, etc)
Obviously, as time went on (~2005) nearly everyone had internet, that allowed more access to children and youth and forced a major dochotomy within the online space. But the formula was open-ended'ness (ie:roleplaying) didn't last long as hand-holding, carrot-dangling, mechanics slowly crept into every game to move people past having to create an online identity or role and just shoves them into what they envisioned each class, or character should be. Most games already have every piece of armor your class can wear (in Armor Sets) all the way to max level. So why even start such a game, if in the end the developer want u to be like the other Rangers on the server?
Even in World of Warcraft's beta, most of the people testing were upset with the games "dumbed down" gameplay and shallow content. That is when the term "carebear" was coined (on the WoW beta forums in 2003). Because the character hooks were not enough, stifled how/what you could roleplay & do, because the game's theme park design took precidence over the ability for adventuring out on your own as roleplayers.
But WoW is not an oldschool game.... thus 12 million players will eventually have to graduate to a game with more character hooks (engine abilities... think levitation for example), for harder & more dynamic gameplay.
Oldschool games are more challenging, because they offer 360 degree content. They do not point newbies down a path.. you have to be brave enough to follow your own.
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
Not every game is WOW, psy. You and Phelcher have this aloof, subjective (and in many ways, false) view of how older gamers appreciate some kind of fine wine gaming that existed ten years ago while the lazy devs and today's whippersnappers like to race through Mickey D's content. I mean, really take an open-minded look at the posts you two have written so far in this thread. I think you're a bit too busy lamenting how others can't experience your level of greatness, and you aren't really looking at this objectively.
That attitude is why I just cannot respect many of the 'old school' posters here. They act like a bunch of snobs who drink vinegar and insist it is the finest vintage wine and anyone who disagrees is an uncultured hillbily. It's an attitude I expect from a teenager yet they want to portray themselves as mature adults. They don't even understand how offensive they are.
what it really comes down to is I feel sorry for the new school people who will never get a chance to experience the grandure and sense of accomplishment that old school was able to offer. old school has been proven it's not profitable so no game will ever be developed to cater to the old school style gameplay anymore.
it's unfortunate that younger gamers are punished by never being able to see the large scale cooperation that old school is able to offer. new gamers simply have to deal with the bad players who is entirely me myself and I oriented. w/o the old school game style of extreme challange, people dont really LEARN how to maximize their toon. if they fail, just reroll the flavor of the month and use the OP/broken skill that dev's are too lazy to patch. there is little investment in their toon, so rerolling a toon doesn't really hurt or matter much. if they dont know how to properly use a skill, complain and fake rage quit till dev's dumb down the content enough so that skill works the way they understand it. there isnt any months spent trying to figure out how to use the skill or tackle the encounter, just keep complaining till it's dumbed down.
old school players actually took weeks of parses to PROVE an encounter / skill is broken, new school complain till they get enough people to complain with them and dev's finally give in:D
either way, I feel bad for the serious gamers of this generation who will always feel something is missing in their MMO experience because there isnt any kind of large scale insanely hard challenges for them to overcome.
I really like this post, but to head off axehilt and loktofeit I would like to add the stipulation that only a minority, could be small medium or large, of modern gamers and oldschool games actually prefer oldschool games to newschool ones. I think the sad thing is that they don't really get to make that choice for themselves, free of obfuscating factors like fancy graphics and physics and superior UIs. Also themeparks are simply easier to manage graphically in general.
I also think that modern UIs are objectively more fun than some of the old ones. I despise the way LinkRealms, essentially a UO close type thing if I understand correctly, handles several aspects of the UI, especially movement. You cannot move with keyboard and you can't even click to move, you have to keep right clicking until you reach your desired part of the environment. The spell book also annoys me in the way it is structured.
Pretty much what Cuathon said/.
"it's unfortunate that younger gamers are punished by never being able to see the large scale cooperation that old school is able to offer."
Not every game is WOW, psy. You and Phelcher have this aloof, subjective (and in many ways, false) view of how older gamers appreciate some kind of fine wine gaming that existed ten years ago while the lazy devs and today's whippersnappers like to race through Mickey D's content. I mean, really take an open-minded look at the posts you two have written so far in this thread. I think you're a bit too busy lamenting how others can't experience your level of greatness, and you aren't really looking at this objectively.
Wasn't it just the other side of this past weekend that this very site had an article about 'large scale cooperation' in a 'large scale insanely hard challenge'. Many MMOs still offer large group encounters in both PvE and PvP. The gameplay is out there and available. It's not that it's bette ror worse, just that it's different and caters only to a smaller group of people.
Not sure your point here.
I gave EQ a break after WoW came out. Within 6 months we had already blown threw all of WoW and killed the dragons. Yet, after 5 years of EQ... there was still dragons our Guild were still trying to get to.
WTF are you talking about Lok..?
You keep THINKING you understand what Oldschoolers are talking about, yet in every instance you "infer" something that is not fact.
Understand, nobody is suggesting that there isn't some challenging content within todays games, but on a whole, they are much... much easier and less challenging as before. Heck, you were not even guarenteed that a planned evening with friends might not even unfold, because leaving a city and heading out to a Dungeon.. doesn't mean everyone will even get there. Getting places was (& should) be part of the adventure.
Now a dungeon is just something you beam into... spend 3 hours dps'ing and everyone gets intended loot deposited into their bags... derpity-derp!
Lastly, "My greatness " could not be acheived unless the path I followed was was difficult. On-the-other-hand, If it was easy (like today's games).. then you can only ever acheive mediorcrity!
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
Even in World of Warcraft's beta, most of the people testing were upset with the games "dumbed down" gameplay and shallow content. That is when the term "carebear" was coined (on the WoW beta forums in 2003). Because the character hooks were not enough, stifled how/what you could roleplay & do, because the game's theme park design took precidence over the ability for adventuring out on your own as roleplayers.
Phelch, I'm sorry but throughout this thread you have repeatedly replaced reality with what you want to believe and this paragraph is a perfect example of it.
Most of the people testing felt that way? I don't doubt that most of the people in your particular circle may have felt that way, but your circle, as history has shown, obviously isn't 'most people'.
And it was carebear because there wasn't enough support for roleplaying?
You make wild claims in each post with absolutely nothing to support them, yet you will not accept any fact or data (particularly answers 1 and 5) to the contrary of what you desperately want to believe.
Now, I don't doubt there are people who want the old school style of play. I also don't claim it to be any worse or any better than the current MMO offerings. My contention is with your false assignment of age to each category and your presentation that somehow the previous MMO and their players are somehow superior to the present ones. That is neither factually correct nor conducive to constructive conversation.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Now a dungeon is just something you beam into... spend 3 hours dps'ing and everyone gets intended loot deposited into their bags... derpity-derp!
Lastly, "My greatness " could not be acheived unless the path I followed was was difficult. On-the-other-hand, If it was easy (like today's games).. then you can only ever acheive mediorcrity!
Seriously man... you really don't see how this repeated elitist and 'derp' defense comes across? If not, you winz da internetz, yo. I'm not going to bother trying to explain it any further.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Comments
If Jake Song spawned Lineage 2, people are correct to be cautious about whether Archeage will be fun.
A good sandbox involves frequent interesting decisions (Minecraft/Terraria/H&H). Lineage 2 had perhaps the least frequent interesting decisions of any MMORPG out there, and some of the most excessive repetition.
A good sandbox doesn't need to hide behind excessive timesink and slow rewards, because it has enough gameplay to remain fun despite giving players rewards frequently and without much timesink.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
For me old school games were more fun. I know some people can't wrap their head around but the feeling of accomplishment when you comepleted your epic weapon questline or earned 100 aa points, raised your fishing and drinking skill or the multitude of things you do in those worlds was way higher than getting 4 pieces of token equipment. I know ever company do their games different so its like having different DM's, but the DM's nowadays are doing what we call candy-giving.
on a sidenote for axehilt, what is your axe to grind with old school. I mean honestly those kinda games are not even really around anymore so why are you on this crusade? Im not saying don't have a opinion but i do notice through your post history that you are very quick to attack threads that talk about old school games or mechanics.
anyways not trying to derail myself but if they could really bring back an updated oldschool game then you would probably never see me back on here again. I do feel its unfair that people who like the current system have easily 4 choices of newer games but if i want to play an old school type system everything has really dated graphics.
(I'm not counting vanguard as an old school game anymore since they upped the exp rate and changed several of the things to make it more in line with games today)
Eh? I'm not on any particular crusade against old school. It's just important people remember them for the gameplay-lite timesinks they were; it's bad if we develop rose-colored glasses towards the design mistakes of the past.
Granted, it's also fair to say we shouldn't completely forget the past either. There are a few good design elements to the older games (the entire concept of sandbox gaming) which could be utilized by newer games.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Thats the problem axe, you keep trying to refer to timesinks as bad things. For many they are fun and good things. You regularly insult old school players by inferring they cant possible enjoy timesinks (e.g rose tinted glasses) Time sinks can be well designed and there are theories to support virtual worlds as well as themepark play (including raph and Jake).
You also already aknowlege everyone likes some timesinks just not them all, so you cannot cherry pick, thats selfish behaviour by a player. As for Archeage, well at the moment all feedback comming back is that it is on the money, and that it is full of 'time sinks' People are absolutely loving it, an example of a game that may not bve suited to a themepark fan but will be to a sandbox fan, just like SWTOR in referse which is all good.
I agree with your understanding of the mechanics of reward and fast achievments etc (and find some of your args thought provoking), and i enjoy this stuff, but I also love time sinks. Both can be well designed and badly designed. Re WOW, much of this game is severly broken and badly designed (almost everything not related to raiding,instances and pvp) Example? well every 3 months the rewards you previously get are devalued through stat inflation - that goes against many modern design principles, look at GW1 for a loot design that elegantly side steps this issue (no stat inflartion)
It is ok to like time sinks, and it is ok to like themepark stuff, it is not ok to say someone else is wrong in liking something. It is good to offer both as options, it is misguided to suppress 1 over the other, unless the game is explicitly designed to support one over the other, e.g my previous comment.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
Btw there are also long term time sinks in themeparks- instances that are repeated daily and rep grinds, the only difference is that you get lots of rewards instead of less but bigger over a longer time period. I prefer the latter ( like tbc rep rewards) and I do nor understand why themeparks don't offer mirror the latter, unless it is truly because of the complaining by those who do not like long time sinks, which is also selfish solo player type behaviour ( I want what he gas now, I demand it!)
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
boil it down to the "im right, you're wrong" mentality.
Tell someone "But i like this!" they will continue to tell you "No! You dont like it!"
I spent 6 hours in a row farming wood from the same 12 trees to 20000 wood at 73 wood a minute to get the wood for basic charcoal production done in a tale in the desert. And I would still be playing 8 hours a day if I didn't have to quit to work on my game. But according to most posters here no one likes to do that and I am lying to myself that it is fun.
They are all like, but its a second job! Well maybe, but its a job I do for reasons other than the inherent wage slavery of a capitalist system. So yeah, people with a spouse and young kids and a 60 hour a week job might not want to play a game that requires effort or work, but so what? Does every game have to be for them?
Could I get my feeling of setting long term goals and working towards them and achieving them from real life? Maybe. But it has worse gameplay than any mmo :P
Why would it be odd..?
That was the reality and chronology and the history of how oldschool MMORPG's have been turning into newschool MMORPG since WoW.
Everquest the game (itself) is no longer an oldschool game. That is why every time SOE starts an EQ Progression Server, it's in que for months..... BECAUSE THE OLDSCHOOL EQ EXPERIENCE CANNOT BE HAD ANYMORE....!
I fail to see any points your making about Everquest, other than interjecting because You misunderstood a concept of raiding and dungeon crawling.
Oldschool rpg games go back to Wizardry, Zork, Bard's Tale, etc.. and of coarse Dungeons & Dragons. If u don't have the many years of playing those game under your belt, without no rules, no forums, no help, just personal problem solving skills... left to fend all for yourself... then you have no way to frame the dochotomy between oldschool vs newschool...
Problem is, there are very little oldschoolers vs the overbearing newschoolers. But, if these kids had a chance to play these olden games (Meridain59, EQ, Ashron's Call, DOAC, SWG, ShadowBane, Lineage, etc..) when they were months new, they would've been hooked.
The points you are trying to make, are irrelevent. Simply because what you think oldschool is, isn't. You are trying to imagine an oldschool game and then base an arguement off of something you have little experience discussing.
Again, if/when people mention Everquest as "oldschool"... they only mean EQ back then, not now! So playing an oldschool game now.. today. Yields very little gameplay experience within that game, as opposed to how it was played back then.. with more challenging content, etc.
I remember being on a Raid for 3 days strait & calling off of work because our Guild wiped 9H into a raid. We then spent the next 2 days getting corpse out of that dungeon. Playing an adventure game back then wasn't about equipment, it was about doing things and pushing the limits. (circa 2000)
Today.. there is no risk, thus no challenge.
Understand, sometimes the battle is in your mind.. do you, or don't you(?).. can be a challenging decision. But the developers have forgotten to let those decision stick.
Because newschool MMO's are carebear and typically meant for children, offering many re-do's to every decision. Adults want the risk of choice.
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
-Nariusseldon
No it does not.. it comes down to knowledge and lack of it. Oldschool players know the draw/lust for open worlds. That is why we hang on... waiting!
The problem lies with being called a "newcomer" N00b", "newschooler".. etc.
New Commers though, don't understrand that these are not NAMES people are calling teh noobs, it is a fact. They are indeed a novice. The unrest on these forums lies in the fledging gamers ego.. whom are often times too fragile to understand that n00b is not a derogatory term. So there is no need to defend your lack of knowledge (newness)
But when the term "newbie / newschooler" fits the bill, often times these kids feel angry, slighted or embarrased for whatever fragile reason, instead of newbies just accepting the fact that they are indeed a newcommer. (Even if you've played for 4 years.. Your still have much less knowledge, than someone who been RPG'ing for 30 years.)
And Role-Playing is a BIG part of MMORPG's and how they are developed now... and back then!
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
-Nariusseldon
For me, the difference of old vs new doesn't apply. Rather, it is the difference of sandbox vs themepark. When MMOs were first gaining popularity, they had 2 choices in games with which to emulate: UO or EQ. Tbh, I will always feel like the majority of mainstream MMOs chose incorrectly.
Themepark MMOs, to me, feel like they have abandoned the concept of sandbox, do whatever you want when you want because it seems fun, mentality to instead focus on the themepark "grind for the sake of grinding" mentality. I hate that. In sandbox games like UO, Shadowbane and EVE, any grinding you do is to help you further some other, completely unrelated, task. That task may be PvP, it may be exploration, it may to build something in the middle of nowhere cause you think it would be a good idea! But grinding is not the focus of the game- it's a journey to what you want to do.
Now enter current themepark MMOs (Rift, WoW, EQ/2, SWTOR, etc): you hit max level and do what? You grind. Why? For better gear. To what end? So that you can more easily do the next grind for better gear. The gameplay has suddenly stopped- the exploration, the adventure... all gone. Instead you are grinding for the sake of grinding. I grind the next 2 months out so that I'll be better off when the next patch containing the newest grind comes out. Every patch brings 1 or 2 new instances, which I will basically live in for every moment of my time in this game, doing it over... and over... to no end other than do just that.
MMOs used to feel... magical. They used to have a feeling like games similar to Skyrim have- awe and wonder at the things that happen. Worlds shaped by the players within them. Some games, like EVE, still have that. Others lost it long, long ago.
Phelcher it is not that way at all. Many many many of us did play those games, and we liked them but we like new games better. Many many of those that played the old school like them better. Yes there are a great many new people in the MMO scene. But the oldschool crowed was not a monolithic group.
I would even venture to say that most of the people that played old school games like new school better, becaues 1. There is not very much difference in gameplay, people are still by and large playing the same way. 2. There is much less tedium involved.
Some oldschoolers new the lust/draw, many just viewed them as entertainment and find new ones just as entertaining. Only on this site is there a majority of players who played those games and who like/want those type of games.
Role playing has never been a big part - only for the pnp crowd. For those who started with UO, M59 and EQ, the actual Rping was always a minority. Yes the developers wanted it, but no they didn't put in a lot of tools for it, and no most of the playerbase didn't do it.
I stand by my statement, most of the people that played those games felt the tedium and like new games better.
I remember reading a post on these boards when WoW first releasedof someoene basically they are done with old school design, I think he stated basically never again would he stick a fork in his eye in order to play a game, referring to just how tedous and monotonous many games were.
Venge
You could make the argument that WoW added somethings of undeniable benefit like UI and that is why people liked it. I am playing LR which I think is a UO clone and the main problem is the UI. Inventory and spell book are so annoying and skill list. But otherwise I would like it.
Its true devs then didn't put in the RP tools, but that doesn't mean we can't now either.
A new sandbox is going to have to update the UI, that would solve 50% of problems with old games.
As for being on rails, its pretty common for humans to like being on rails. I hate to get into evo psych but when our back end was evolving it was trained to complete very concrete tasks. Get food, get shelter, protect from animals. That took up say 99% of our resources. Now it would take like 20% of our resources for basic needs. Just a stable reliable shelter, average nutritious food and we killed off all the predators really, aside from human ones.
So obviously most people prefer to be on rails, because thats what our life was like for 95% of human existence. I would note that given a good guild leader or a player in a leadership position who can function as a DM instead of a few employees at the company, you could provide players a perfectly good on rails experience without hardcoding it into the game. We are assuming some PvP controls here obviously. The only problem I see is on rails people whining that sandboxers get to do stuff they don't, to which my answer is, why not? Just go off rails and do what you want if there is a part you think you are missing out on.
Nobody calls gameplay a timesink. It's gameplay!
The term timesink only gets mentioned if it takes a lot of time without a lot of gameplay.
So when I say timesink, I mean timesink.
WOW obsoleting loot is actually a very smartly-intentioned design. Without making the prior tier easy to achieve, the game would be substantially less social because you'd have a huge difference between the people at the forefront of progression and the new players trickling in. Which ends up being disasterous in the longrun; group-centric games can't ever let the the gap between new player and veteran become too large.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
Thats not precisely true. I recognize that games are all time sinks. I can sink a lot of my time into it and never be done. "Timesink" is sort of game jargon, but it also means something that sucks up lots of time, like a heat sink sucks up lots of heat. In the non jargon context we can use time sink to describe a game aspect that sucks up a lot of time, and could potentially be removed, because some people don't like it. In the sense that a lot of what one person calls a timesink or grind is another person's gameplay the player can meta out from the game, because the game isn't the world you actually live in, and understand that even fun gameplay can specifically be chose over another type of fun gameplay because it sucks up more time, thus generating subscriptions. I consider repetative raids to gind gear for the next set of raids ad infinitum to be a timesink while I can recognize that many enjoy it and that in limited quantities I like it too.
In a meta discussion of designing a game designers will discuss whether certain gameplay that has similar levels of fun to similar playerbases can be more time intensive than another type of gameplay.
You could say, it can take up more play time because its more fun, but I would say, some types of fun require longer time scales to be effective. There are different kinds of rewards and achievements. In ATITD farming wood for BCP might seem boring, or if you only have a few hours to play there may be other more rewarding things to do, but I farmed nearly all the 20k wood myself and at the end I felt good for getting it done, for doing it myself, and because other players were happy and appreciated that I had done this thing for the group. Further I was given sheepsies by other players because they believed that it was to their benefit to give me sheepsies because I fucking love breeding sheepsies after I demonstrated commitment to the goals of the group. I did not consider constantly running around the world trying to find wild sheepsies to be fun given the small chances if it happening but other players who were just doing their business and happened to be there unintentionally when they spawned and who were interested in doing something else picked them up and gave them to me by putting them in my pen because they knew I wanted them. So there was one definite timesink, and one thing that could be a timesink if you are only one person trying to make lots of sheepsies but there was an interaction in the game that allowed both for me to produce oodles of wood for the technology we were researching and to also get sheeps because for whatever reason sheep breeding just made me happy.
Instead of other players being forced to find 10 optimal wood routes and farm them for an hour which they considered not fun, I could farm one wood route and in return I could get way more sheepsies than I would have gotten for a similar amount of time searching for them by myself.
The trick here was that running for 6 hours was boring but it didn't harm the players' experience to spend 5 or 10 minutes carrying a sheep to my base in a small group, an Altar Sheep Run you could call it. I know I didn't explain the psychological background here, but there are certain tricks based on the way humans perceive time and work that allow a game designer to get players to spend just as much time at a task, without thinking its a time sink. It took just as long, for the same rewards but because of some brain tricks and like 2 interactions between mechanics there was no perception of a time sink.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
what it really comes down to is I feel sorry for the new school people who will never get a chance to experience the grandure and sense of accomplishment that old school was able to offer. old school has been proven it's not profitable so no game will ever be developed to cater to the old school style gameplay anymore.
it's unfortunate that younger gamers are punished by never being able to see the large scale cooperation that old school is able to offer. new gamers simply have to deal with the bad players who is entirely me myself and I oriented. w/o the old school game style of extreme challange, people dont really LEARN how to maximize their toon. if they fail, just reroll the flavor of the month and use the OP/broken skill that dev's are too lazy to patch. there is little investment in their toon, so rerolling a toon doesn't really hurt or matter much. if they dont know how to properly use a skill, complain and fake rage quit till dev's dumb down the content enough so that skill works the way they understand it. there isnt any months spent trying to figure out how to use the skill or tackle the encounter, just keep complaining till it's dumbed down.
old school players actually took weeks of parses to PROVE an encounter / skill is broken, new school complain till they get enough people to complain with them and dev's finally give in:D
either way, I feel bad for the serious gamers of this generation who will always feel something is missing in their MMO experience because there isnt any kind of large scale insanely hard challenges for them to overcome.
I really like this post, but to head off axehilt and loktofeit I would like to add the stipulation that only a minority, could be small medium or large, of modern gamers and oldschool games actually prefer oldschool games to newschool ones. I think the sad thing is that they don't really get to make that choice for themselves, free of obfuscating factors like fancy graphics and physics and superior UIs. Also themeparks are simply easier to manage graphically in general.
I also think that modern UIs are objectively more fun than some of the old ones. I despise the way LinkRealms, essentially a UO close type thing if I understand correctly, handles several aspects of the UI, especially movement. You cannot move with keyboard and you can't even click to move, you have to keep right clicking until you reach your desired part of the environment. The spell book also annoys me in the way it is structured.
Pretty much what Cuathon said/.
"it's unfortunate that younger gamers are punished by never being able to see the large scale cooperation that old school is able to offer."
Not every game is WOW, psy. You and Phelcher have this aloof, subjective (and in many ways, false) view of how older gamers appreciate some kind of fine wine gaming that existed ten years ago while the lazy devs and today's whippersnappers like to race through Mickey D's content. I mean, really take an open-minded look at the posts you two have written so far in this thread. I think you're a bit too busy lamenting how others can't experience your level of greatness, and you aren't really looking at this objectively.
Wasn't it just the other side of this past weekend that this very site had an article about 'large scale cooperation' in a 'large scale insanely hard challenge'. Many MMOs still offer large group encounters in both PvE and PvP. The gameplay is out there and available. It's not that it's bette ror worse, just that it's different and caters only to a smaller group of people.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I don't know (or have heard) of anyone, suggesting their game experience in Aion, AoC, Rusty Hearts, Warhammer, Rift, Dragon Soul, etc.. was better than the Original Everquest.
Have you..?
These games arew GRAPHICALLY better, but half of them don't even have as many character hooks (abiliities tied into the game engine), nor the complexity of combat. You are trying to suggest that 12 year olds, who played EQ back in 1999, got happier... when they found something less demanding and allowed them to start playing games as ENTERTAINMENT & SOCIAL CIRCLES..? (I agree..)
Most oldschool MMO players play those game for the adventure & the challenge it provides ... as do many of the people who played MMORPG back in the mid 90. Any D&D player who had internet access was playing Everquest, Ashron's call or UO. Role-playing was an enormous part of all these games sucess. If it wasn't for the roleplayers, EverQuest's beta community wouldn't even have existed, nor would Everquest. Same for Ultima Online.
The oldschool mentality was about adventure & mystery.... and the reward was living to tell about them.
Newschool games are all about rewards... because the adolecent mind needs rewards (ie: dangling carrot) to feel good about themselves and as an incentive to keep playing. Or lately, ... JUST PLAY OUR GAME.. (type marketing), we give the easiest rewards and make your character the baddest-ast player in just 3 easy months.
Sorry... that^ is the only thing newschool games provide, is "ease" of adventuring.
Lastly (again) , who do u think Brad McQuaid was making an online Dungeons & Dragons for... children who could afford $2.50/h telephone bills for being online? It was the adults who were heavily into roleplaying... (ie: elven forest in UO, etc)
Obviously, as time went on (~2005) nearly everyone had internet, that allowed more access to children and youth and forced a major dochotomy within the online space. But the formula was open-ended'ness (ie:roleplaying) didn't last long as hand-holding, carrot-dangling, mechanics slowly crept into every game to move people past having to create an online identity or role and just shoves them into what they envisioned each class, or character should be. Most games already have every piece of armor your class can wear (in Armor Sets) all the way to max level. So why even start such a game, if in the end the developer want u to be like the other Rangers on the server?
Even in World of Warcraft's beta, most of the people testing were upset with the games "dumbed down" gameplay and shallow content. That is when the term "carebear" was coined (on the WoW beta forums in 2003). Because the character hooks were not enough, stifled how/what you could roleplay & do, because the game's theme park design took precidence over the ability for adventuring out on your own as roleplayers.
But WoW is not an oldschool game.... thus 12 million players will eventually have to graduate to a game with more character hooks (engine abilities... think levitation for example), for harder & more dynamic gameplay.
Oldschool games are more challenging, because they offer 360 degree content. They do not point newbies down a path.. you have to be brave enough to follow your own.
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
-Nariusseldon
That attitude is why I just cannot respect many of the 'old school' posters here. They act like a bunch of snobs who drink vinegar and insist it is the finest vintage wine and anyone who disagrees is an uncultured hillbily. It's an attitude I expect from a teenager yet they want to portray themselves as mature adults. They don't even understand how offensive they are.
Not sure your point here.
I gave EQ a break after WoW came out. Within 6 months we had already blown threw all of WoW and killed the dragons. Yet, after 5 years of EQ... there was still dragons our Guild were still trying to get to.
WTF are you talking about Lok..?
You keep THINKING you understand what Oldschoolers are talking about, yet in every instance you "infer" something that is not fact.
Understand, nobody is suggesting that there isn't some challenging content within todays games, but on a whole, they are much... much easier and less challenging as before. Heck, you were not even guarenteed that a planned evening with friends might not even unfold, because leaving a city and heading out to a Dungeon.. doesn't mean everyone will even get there. Getting places was (& should) be part of the adventure.
Now a dungeon is just something you beam into... spend 3 hours dps'ing and everyone gets intended loot deposited into their bags... derpity-derp!
Lastly, "My greatness " could not be acheived unless the path I followed was was difficult. On-the-other-hand, If it was easy (like today's games).. then you can only ever acheive mediorcrity!
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
-Nariusseldon
Phelch, I'm sorry but throughout this thread you have repeatedly replaced reality with what you want to believe and this paragraph is a perfect example of it.
Most of the people testing felt that way? I don't doubt that most of the people in your particular circle may have felt that way, but your circle, as history has shown, obviously isn't 'most people'.
The term Carebear came from WOW? It was not only present for years prior but prolific enough to prompt Raph Koster to reply to the big concern on the SWG forums at the time - Is SWG going to be a carebear game?
And it was carebear because there wasn't enough support for roleplaying?
You make wild claims in each post with absolutely nothing to support them, yet you will not accept any fact or data (particularly answers 1 and 5) to the contrary of what you desperately want to believe.
Now, I don't doubt there are people who want the old school style of play. I also don't claim it to be any worse or any better than the current MMO offerings. My contention is with your false assignment of age to each category and your presentation that somehow the previous MMO and their players are somehow superior to the present ones. That is neither factually correct nor conducive to constructive conversation.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Seriously man... you really don't see how this repeated elitist and 'derp' defense comes across? If not, you winz da internetz, yo. I'm not going to bother trying to explain it any further.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre