Nobody is held back in current mmorpg anymore than they were held back in past mmorpg. Or, more accurately said, nobody is held back anymore than anyone else in mmorpg, past or present.
There are no professional or amateur mmorpg leagues. Nobody competes professionally playing mmorpg (unless you count WoW's arenas). MMORPG aren't like hobbies...they are hobbies. Implying that older mmorpg are in any way a sport or even a competitive endeavor is just silly. Checkers is more of a sport than mmorpg. Poker is more of a sport. MMORPG are not sports at all.
Checkers is a game, just like MMORPG's. In checkers A good checker player will destroy a novice checker player, it takesa while to get really good at checkers. Checkers is more of a mental game and there is a hierarchy of players. Just like chess. You just dont flop out a checker board and beat someone whos been playing years.
The current MMO community is the most communistic community I have ever seen. The games are designed to hold people back and abolish any hierachy of players. They do this by removing teir's of content. Making everything easy mode and instant gratification. Which the top teir content in the old games did not do. You had to put time in to get stuff, it just wasnt handed to you.
I think another disconnect in these sort of analogies are that you are developing the checkers playing skill when you are practicing checkers. That's different than grinding out statistics that cap what you can do with skill in a game.
Best example I have to explain this is when my level 50 brother and I killed level 205 mobs for experience in Horizons (now Istaria). That not only took quick gameplay reflexes, but very in-depth planning in our character builds, spell modifications (so I've added crafting too), and contingency plans. No one ever believed we could do it until we showed them, and I don't know anyone that ever replicated the feat.
Name me one AAA title that would let you do that on the basis of skill. They won't, because the games are designed around artificial skill caps that may only be raised via in game statistical rewards (gear, skill points, levels, whatever the case may be) that require logging hours but not necessarily developing gameplay skill during those hours. If we tried that in WoW, the hit formulas would've artificially precluded us from doing even a scrap of damage to the mob we were fighting that outleveled us by a factor of 4, whereas in Horizons, we killed the mobs using only a very involved plan to deliver the death of 1000 cuts (or static shocks from my puny lightning bolts, as the case was there).
That's why there are players that will argue so vehemently against the notion that you HAVE to log 2000 hours to be good at a game. See my previous post debunking the Jordan/basketball example.
Because I think everyone should have a game new game to play every now and then, nowhere in any of my posts will you ever see me say that the over simplified theme parks should stop being made.
Well that is not how the captial market works. While you think everyone "should" have a new game to play, no one is obligated to provide that to you.
Developers react to market forces, pure and simple.
I like themepark games but i wont cry if the market trend changes and there are none. I will simply move to other entertainment options i like.
And all of the players know that developers react to those market forces (even if only instinctively), which is why you find them arguing with each other on forums, instead of just agreeing to disagree
WoW opened the door for casuals and for devs to take shortcuts and shortcommings to please the new croud that had no former demands or sense of mmo quality.
Thus why alot of us here at mmorpg.com find WoW the big downfall of quality in mmorpgs.
WoW made the new market but also set the quality standard of the gaming quality to a all new low.
I've only played EQ and AO out of the list you gave, but I find Anarchy Online (AO) in particular to be an entirely different monster compared to any other game, and out of the 20-odd games I played, I liked it best (I quit because a server crash ate us in the middle of me turning in the final stage of a quest chain that took me 100 hours to finish, and the GMs wouldn't fix this for me).
That game was hard in the same way chess was hard, not in the way EQ was hard. You had to be able to hold and sift through a fairly large and diverse body of knowledge in your head all at once in order to build a good character in that game, at least prior to the expansions when all the additional bonuses made it easier to hit critical skill threshold. That's an entirely different expectation than what is placed on people today. Beyond building your character well, the gameplay was largely the same as any other MMORPG, but just having that one key difference made the game feel entirely different to me.
We use the word hard and can't agree on what we want in place to make a game hard. Could we possibly say we want the game to be complicated instead of hard? Would that get us any closer to agreement?
The analogies people use like chess and basketball would fit much better if we were talking about the timesink in the game being based on your capability to understand its complexity instead of turn around in circles 1,000,000 times whlie we wait for magic numbers to go up.
WoW opened the door for casuals and for devs to take shortcuts and shortcommings to please the new croud that had no former demands or sense of mmo quality.
Thus why alot of us here at mmorpg.com find WoW the big downfall of quality in mmorpgs.
WoW made the new market but also set the quality standard of the gaming quality to a all new low.
I've only played EQ and AO out of the list you gave, but I find Anarchy Online (AO) in particular to be an entirely different monster compared to any other game, and out of the 20-odd games I played, I liked it best (I quit because a server crash ate us in the middle of me turning in the final stage of a quest chain that took me 100 hours to finish, and the GMs wouldn't fix this for me).
That game was hard in the same way chess was hard, not in the way EQ was hard. You had to be able to hold and sift through a fairly large and diverse body of knowledge in your head all at once in order to build a good character in that game, at least prior to the expansions when all the additional bonuses made it easier to hit critical skill threshold. That's an entirely different expectation than what is placed on people today. Beyond building your character well, the gameplay was largely the same as any other MMORPG, but just having that one key difference made the game feel entirely different to me.
We use the word hard and can't agree on what we want in place to make a game hard. Could we possibly say we want the game to be complicated instead of hard? Would that get us any closer to agreement?
The analogies people use like chess and basketball would fit much better if we were talking about the timesink in the game being based on your capability to understand its complexity instead of turn around in circles 1,000,000 times whlie we wait for magic numbers to go up.
+1
This.
For me it does not really matter HOW it will be called. "hard" , "complicated", does not matter. It is all semantics.
Just mmorpg's nowadays especially in open world feel bland and boring. There is no thrill , no sense of danger, thinking not required, being careful not required. Just click damn button enough for mob to die.
You know i always wonder why my fondest memories of games in the past are always trivilized by the phrase "rose-colored glasses". I doesnt really seem correct. I knew what the games i played had problems with and what things were fun or interesting to me, and other people probably feel the same even if it was eq, uo, swg, ff11 etc. I dont particularly agree that it should be dimissed that easily that we were tricked. we knew what we were getting into. I think some changes that need to be made is:
1. Stop making hybrid classes equal to pure. Simply put a hybrid dps/heals class shouldn't be equal to both dps and heals.
2. Stop making too few classes or too many.
3. Playstyles of the classes shouldnt overlap too much.
4. give the classes a wide variety of abilities. It just seems that classes have fewer and fewer lines of focus, ie enchanter had stuns, mezzes, buffs, debuffs, illuions, pets, charms, dd, dots, and i guess what you called general mage spells. warlocks on the other hand dots ,dots, pets, buffs, debuffs, and dd. the weird thing was eq had like15+ classes and wow started with 9?
5. take away instant travel againa dn give it to a few classes. Having a reason to make a druid or wizard or make a druid or wizard friends was a quick way to make things faster.
6. make buffs last longer im not sure what the reasoning was behind going from a game where buffs could last 4 or 5 hours to 1 hour tops but it never made sense to me.
and finally
7. bring back support classes and the 6th group spot. going form 6 to 5 to now 4? For games that claim they want grouping it seems strange the both reduce the need for roles and make group size smaller.
Warning: the following is only my opinion and doesnt reflect anyone else, should you agree with any of it great if not great.
The analogies people use like chess and basketball would fit much better if we were talking about the timesink in the game being based on your capability to understand its complexity instead of turn around in circles 1,000,000 times whlie we wait for magic numbers to go up.
So you think the way to improve Chess is to add a super complicated UI in front of it where 30+ keystrokes are required to make each of your moves?
Well you're entitlted to that opinion, but most players (and myself) see through that unnecessary complexity. Complications, bad UI, and inconveniences do not improve a game. Only true depth improves a game.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
The analogies people use like chess and basketball would fit much better if we were talking about the timesink in the game being based on your capability to understand its complexity instead of turn around in circles 1,000,000 times whlie we wait for magic numbers to go up.
So you think the way to improve Chess is to add a super complicated UI in front of it where 30+ keystrokes are required to make each of your moves?
Well you're entitlted to that opinion, but most players (and myself) see through that unnecessary complexity. Complications, bad UI, and inconveniences do not improve a game. Only true depth improves a game.
balance:
when I come home from work I dont want to have to study my game all the time, sometimes I just want to do and do something that I dont have to relearn so doing the same thing more than once is not all that bad.
Then again, if I do the same thing every week for 6 months it can get rather old.
so...balance
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
1. Stop making hybrid classes equal to pure. Simply put a hybrid dps/heals class shouldn't be equal to both dps and heals.
2. Stop making too few classes or too many.
3. Playstyles of the classes shouldnt overlap too much.
4. give the classes a wide variety of abilities. It just seems that classes have fewer and fewer lines of focus, ie enchanter had stuns, mezzes, buffs, debuffs, illuions, pets, charms, dd, dots, and i guess what you called general mage spells. warlocks on the other hand dots ,dots, pets, buffs, debuffs, and dd. the weird thing was eq had like15+ classes and wow started with 9?
5. take away instant travel againa dn give it to a few classes. Having a reason to make a druid or wizard or make a druid or wizard friends was a quick way to make things faster.
6. make buffs last longer im not sure what the reasoning was behind going from a game where buffs could last 4 or 5 hours to 1 hour tops but it never made sense to me.
and finally
7. bring back support classes and the 6th group spot. going form 6 to 5 to now 4? For games that claim they want grouping it seems strange the both reduce the need for roles and make group size smaller.
Warning: the following is only my opinion and doesnt reflect anyone else, should you agree with any of it great if not great.
1. So I make a pure DPS class, and you spec DPS in a hybrid class. You can't do anything but DPS in your current spec. By what rationale should you be incapable of doing as much DPS as me, if you've focused on DPS?
2. This is a particularly arbitrary line to draw, and conveniently ignores the fact that if EQ had "15+ classes", then how is that more variety than WOW's 30 playstyles? Playstyle variety is what matters; nobody seriously cares about the number of literal classes.
3. This reads as "players should always be pigeonholed into one specific playstyle with zero variance". What if you choose a class and don't like it? Why should you be forced to re-roll and replay content you've already done before?
4. WOW Warlocks have stun, charm, fears, buffs, debuffs, pets, dd, DOTs, DOTs, general mage spells, drains, and demon mind control. So if your enchanter had 10 discrete abilities*, a WOW Warlock has 12.
* Since you separated out various forms of CC/mezzes/stuns, I did the same with the warlock listing.
This is why you're accused of rose-colored glasses, btw.
5. So you enjoy wasting time traveling more than spending it in meatier gameplay? Well, you're entitled to waste your own time, but most players feel like games are about gameplay and find travel to be empty and meaningless. It's just a pointless waste of time.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
1. yes a pure class dps shoudl outdo a hybrid. because in thegame i played you dont have specs. so hybrids have the ability to fill multiple roles while the pure class doesnt
2. yes too few class make people not interest while too many spreads it too thin and to be direct EQ had too many. if there is one thing i could have fixed i would have combine a few classes to keep each a unique experience.
3 im still with 3 because it has been shown it can be down wither you use different sources of power or tank or heals or pull or support or cc or dps it sorta goes hand in hand with point 2
4 yes lock had those things since i played one but you didnt have them avail at the same time and some of those line of spells didnt have upgrades so they dont really count as lines
5 i wont budge on either making the right friends or being the classes that can move a nation does an mmo good.
so this is why i dont have the glasses on i know what weakness eq had but the weaknesses todays games have is by year 1 they are f2p and the masses have moved on to another games so that seems like a big weakness of "oh your game has a low poulation"
also with number why stop at th current system just port everywhere you in front of the boss why do dungoens just do bosses only
1. yes a pure class dps shoudl outdo a hybrid. because in thegame i played you dont have specs. so hybrids have the ability to fill multiple roles while the pure class doesnt
2. yes too few class make people not interest while too many spreads it too thin and to be direct EQ had too many. if there is one thing i could have fixed i would have combine a few classes to keep each a unique experience.
3 im still with 3 because it has been shown it can be down wither you use different sources of power or tank or heals or pull or support or cc or dps it sorta goes hand in hand with point 2
4 yes lock had those things since i played one but you didnt have them avail at the same time and some of those line of spells didnt have upgrades so they dont really count as lines
5 i wont budge on either making the right friends or being the classes that can move a nation does an mmo good.
so this is why i dont have the glasses on i know what weakness eq had but the weaknesses todays games have is by year 1 they are f2p and the masses have moved on to another games so that seems like a big weakness of "oh your game has a low poulation"
also with number why stop at th current system just port everywhere you in front of the boss why do dungoens just do bosses only
1. C'mon guy, your last post just finished saying how many more benefits a given class in EQ1 brought to the group. If I bring 10 things and you bring 10 things (one of which happens to be offheals), then we can be balanced in team value even if our DPS outputs are the same (because the value of the non-DPS benefits we bring to a group would also be balanced.)
2. So people are less interested in WOW's 10 classes than EQ's 15+. Subscriber count may be a poor measure of the subjective fun of a game, but it's certainly a measure of the interest in a game.
(And again, class count is irrelevant. Playstyle count is everything.)
(And the quickest way to make a game objectively less interesting is to force players to repeat the same content -- like what happens when players are forced to re-roll rather than re-spec.)
4. Of course you can't cast everything at the same time, but you have the majority of them in any given spec (although actually I think a spec has all 12.) What would it matter if they have upgrades? An ability is an ability, and WOW's warlock sounds like it beats Enchanter out for ability variety.
Stuff in front of a boss is fine -- it's essentially an extension of the boss itself. And in a well-designed game (like almost all the earlier WOW raids I was on), those mobs require just as much skill as the boss itself (and sometimes they're criticized for requiring more skill.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
2. yes too few class make people not interest while too many spreads it too thin and to be direct EQ had too many. if there is one thing i could have fixed i would have combine a few classes to keep each a unique experience.
To clarify, having "too many" classes spreads what too thin? What is the "it" you're speaking of? Personally I think EQ had a great number of classes. It gave people plenty of choices of play styles, which, at least in my opinion, is something recent MMOs lack terrible...choices.
Far as hybrids vs pure classes go, I dont see a problem with a hybrid DPS, for example, doing the same damage as a pure DPS. There's no reason the pure class couldn't have advantages in other areas instead. Going back to EQ, as an example, hybrids leveld more slowly than pures. Maybe pures could have more utility abilities, or an affinity towards a certain type of enemy.
The key is to make sure both classes are a valid choice for their primary role.
The analogies people use like chess and basketball would fit much better if we were talking about the timesink in the game being based on your capability to understand its complexity instead of turn around in circles 1,000,000 times whlie we wait for magic numbers to go up.
So you think the way to improve Chess is to add a super complicated UI in front of it where 30+ keystrokes are required to make each of your moves?
Well you're entitlted to that opinion, but most players (and myself) see through that unnecessary complexity. Complications, bad UI, and inconveniences do not improve a game. Only true depth improves a game.
You're putting words in my mouth. Don't do that
Complexity can come in many forms. One form is to make performing actions in the game a juggling act of dexterity. Another is to have a deeply layered strategy like chess. Still another is to make gameplay involve understanding a wide body of data that's hard to keep assimilated in your mind all at once.
No, I do not advocate the dexterity check as the proper complexity to add. I also don't advocate time logged as the complexity to add. I would love for someone to develop an MMORPG in which combat felt more like Chess feels, but someone else may not share the same opinion, which is just fine.
If could make an equally ridiculous statement as your assertion that what I said means we should turn MMORPGs into juggling games, I could say we can throw Chess out as a "complicated" game model because the game has a provably finite game tree. If we had a computer of sufficient resources, we could map it out and defeat the game of chess forever. Any idiot would simply be able to follow the prescribed move for a given board set up and guarantee either a win or a tie if they are sitting in the correct position (of having either gone first or second, depending on how the game tree mapped out).
Does the fact that the game is mathematically defeatable make it uncomplicated? I think most players that weren't masters who sat down at the table to play would probably still say it is until the day comes when we have a computer program with the game map.
I think the problem veteran players have with MMORPGs is that we do have the game map, and most of us are good enough at juggling to execute it. Unfortunately, it's easier for programmers to make the juggling more complex than to make the game mechanics themselves more nuanced (does that word perhaps fit better)?
So you think the way to improve Chess is to add a super complicated UI in front of it where 30+ keystrokes are required to make each of your moves?
Well you're entitlted to that opinion, but most players (and myself) see through that unnecessary complexity. Complications, bad UI, and inconveniences do not improve a game. Only true depth improves a game.
You're putting words in my mouth. Don't do that
...
Incidentally Axehilt, I didn't mean what I said about the Chess analogy to be in any way trolling against what you've said about it. You can find another post here I've made in this same thread that I think your "play 100+ hours to get a queen" is the single most brilliant analogy with what I think is wrong with the games we like to play. Of anyone on the boards here I've seen in the few weeks I've been here, you're by far my favorite poster, and most of the time when I'm reading your posts, I feel like you've seen inside my head.
The post I wrote about the fact that there are still some issues the chess and basketball analogies was designed to point out a flaw in using those to justify making us play 100+ hours for the queen under the excuse that we need that much practice first. The genre is developed enough that this excuse is ridiculous in the way that saying chess practice you had on a cardboard chessboard doesn't apply to playing on a wooden chessboard.
However, I don't think any of the analogies you've made between chess and MMORPGs are flawed at all; they're quite illuminating instead.
Dunno, depends on perspective, i dont think of my character really "getting" skills, even if i use that word in conversations, but more in terms of "uncovering" skills.
Withing that chess analogy it would be close to the number of turns which you need to move other pieces to unblock the queens path, so that the queen is able to do something meaningful.
How many turns it should take is ofcourse open for discussion (especially in regards of replayability), but i dont think even 100+ turns is such a horrendous problem if you can use those to carve up extra pieces, booze up your oponent or other things which can be beneficial in the future.
And lets be realistic here, chess is not about the queen, we need to think ouside fail single purpose mmos.
Dunno, depends on perspective, i dont think of my character really "getting" skills, even if i use that word in conversations, but more in terms of "uncovering" skills.
Withing that chess analogy it would be close to the number of turns which you need to move other pieces to unblock the queens path, so that the queen is able to do something meaningful.
How many turns it should take is ofcourse open for discussion (especially in regards of replayability), but i dont think even 100+ turns is such a horrendous problem if you can use those to carve up extra pieces, booze up your oponent or other things which can be beneficial in the future.
And lets be realistic here, chess is not about the queen, we need to think ouside fail single purpose mmos.
I think the gist of your message is spot on, but I think the implementation you suggest is the wrong one is actually the right one. I don't think we'll all ever agree on one MMORPG to rule them all. As about 20 pages in this thread have already said, what we really need is a niche game for every gamer, and there are several niches going ignored right now.
I think the gist of your message is spot on, but I think the implementation you suggest is the wrong one is actually the right one. I don't think we'll all ever agree on one MMORPG to rule them all. As about 20 pages in this thread have already said, what we really need is a niche game for every gamer, and there are several niches going ignored right now.
It is pretty obviously that many niche game for many segments of gamers do not make sense economically. The development cost of a MMO is so high that you have to go for a large enough segment just to break even.
We have seen lots of small development like Dark Fall and it is pretty obvious that for that kind of hard core audience, it is not big enough to warrant a WOW or a TOR treatment.
2. yes too few class make people not interest while too many spreads it too thin and to be direct EQ had too many. if there is one thing i could have fixed i would have combine a few classes to keep each a unique experience.
To clarify, having "too many" classes spreads what too thin? What is the "it" you're speaking of? Personally I think EQ had a great number of classes. It gave people plenty of choices of play styles, which, at least in my opinion, is something recent MMOs lack terrible...choices.
Far as hybrids vs pure classes go, I dont see a problem with a hybrid DPS, for example, doing the same damage as a pure DPS. There's no reason the pure class couldn't have advantages in other areas instead. Going back to EQ, as an example, hybrids leveld more slowly than pures. Maybe pures could have more utility abilities, or an affinity towards a certain type of enemy.
The key is to make sure both classes are a valid choice for their primary role.
And classes are NOT the only design that matters. Zones, mobs, dungeons, boss fights, all add to the game. Fewer class choices are not necessarily bad if the other part of the game is great.
I think the gist of your message is spot on, but I think the implementation you suggest is the wrong one is actually the right one. I don't think we'll all ever agree on one MMORPG to rule them all. As about 20 pages in this thread have already said, what we really need is a niche game for every gamer, and there are several niches going ignored right now.
Which implementation? You lost me there
That not everyone will be happy is a given, even if somehow someone creates the most accessible, varied, intricate, meaningful, immersive, fun game, there will always be a vocal group which finds the rules and the system stupid an unfair, and even if not, a new one will pop into existence over the course of the games existence.
I think the gist of your message is spot on, but I think the implementation you suggest is the wrong one is actually the right one. I don't think we'll all ever agree on one MMORPG to rule them all. As about 20 pages in this thread have already said, what we really need is a niche game for every gamer, and there are several niches going ignored right now.
It is pretty obviously that many niche game for many segments of gamers do not make sense economically. The development cost of a MMO is so high that you have to go for a large enough segment just to break even.
We have seen lots of small development like Dark Fall and it is pretty obvious that for that kind of hard core audience, it is not big enough to warrant a WOW or a TOR treatment.
I agree. It might mean those niches get ignored forever. For example, the mechanics of Fantasy Earth Zero's combat is pretty much exactly what I would love to see out of a PVP game. The production quality was just so poor that it died, and the quality was bad because it didn't have the playerbase that would grant the resources to improve production quality.
I think the gist of your message is spot on, but I think the implementation you suggest is the wrong one is actually the right one. I don't think we'll all ever agree on one MMORPG to rule them all. As about 20 pages in this thread have already said, what we really need is a niche game for every gamer, and there are several niches going ignored right now.
It is pretty obviously that many niche game for many segments of gamers do not make sense economically. The development cost of a MMO is so high that you have to go for a large enough segment just to break even.
We have seen lots of small development like Dark Fall and it is pretty obvious that for that kind of hard core audience, it is not big enough to warrant a WOW or a TOR treatment.
Darkfall Online provide type of gameplay that is niche even in niches - if you catch my meaning.
Since DFO devs never delivered what they promised they delivered product that is attractive almost exclusively to hardcore ffa full loot pvp only players.
This game is more of a free roaming big deatchmatch than mmorpg.
Bad example.
EvE Online being very complicated for average user game, + that provide 'hardcore' gameplay + very specific gameplay (spaceship...) have actually quite a bit of subs.
I am sure that making more accessible than EvE sandbox that also don't have indie disadvantages would gain quite sizeable audience.
Well not in size of WoW or even ToR ,but still imo could be bigger than many other AAA themeparks.
I think the gist of your message is spot on, but I think the implementation you suggest is the wrong one is actually the right one. I don't think we'll all ever agree on one MMORPG to rule them all. As about 20 pages in this thread have already said, what we really need is a niche game for every gamer, and there are several niches going ignored right now.
Which implementation? You lost me there
That not everyone will be happy is a given, even if somehow someone creates the most accessible, varied, intricate, meaningful, immersive, fun game, there will always be a vocal group which finds the rules and the system stupid an unfair, and even if not, a new one will pop into existence over the course of the games existence.
Sorry about that! I was going off the implication of your statement of "we need to think ouside fail single purpose mmos". My mistake if I misinterpreted!
It's not really the lack of difficulty, but the lack of todays playerbases patience, they want it yesterday, thus developers don't put anything challenging or time consuming in MMO's anymore.
It's not really the lack of difficulty, but the lack of todays playerbases patience, they want it yesterday, thus developers don't put anything challenging or time consuming in MMO's anymore.
Money talks and bullshit walks.
Do you think this is because we've been abused too much by game companies with regards to their Skinner-box time sinks?
After you've played Call of Duty/Battlefield version X, then you don't need much training on how to reload your gun and pull the trigger when you move on to CoD/BF version X+1. However, when every new MMORPG comes out, we have to do the equivalent of a drill where we're forced to reload our gun 1000 times before we can move on.
Most of the players don't have to be taught how to play anymore. The games should be designed recognizing that, and they would stop trying our patience. This is why you find so many players saying "the game doesn't start till endgame". That's because it's true. The nuances of play that require practice don't show up until deep into the endgame of almost every major MMORPG on the market right now, and the analogies people have made here with other skills requiring practice only fit after you've advanced to a portion of the game that require practice to be good at it. There's a pretty wide time gap trying players' patience right now in games prior to when they reach that point.
Originally posted by Angier2758 When I was in highschool back in 2000 I was playing Everquest fairly hardcore (I slept through classes and my gpa was LOLworthy... but don't worry I do great now). I also played football... why do I mention this? Well anyone who's played football will tell you 2-a-days and 3-a-days (fairly intense practices) are not only tedious and difficult, but they also build a team... a community. Why? Shared suffering and shared effort brings people together. If you talk to people (or even remember it yourself if you're like me) some of the best memories of these older games were when things went bad. We all have corpse run stories and how teams of people came to help; friends were made this way. People spent hours carefully crawling through dungeons; and succeeding or failing TOGETHER. Today's MMORPGs lack the difficulty. I think because there's that lack of shared effort and shared suffering (don't get caught up on that word.. think shared bad stuff) therefore it stops or impedes a strong community from forming. Without that shared experience people find it harder to relate to eachother. I'm not going to sit here and tell you the community back in the day was perfect, but people did find it easier to relate to eachother. That made the games better in the end.
Your thoughts?
Back in the 90's and early 2000 there were less derps who criticized every inch of the game, did they exist? sure, however it wasn't nearly as bad as how much it happens today, the community of players were far better then today's a little of it has to do with the lack of mmo's that existed there weren't as many also the game community might have been closer, the mmo's back then such as neverwinter nights online, meridian 59, tibia, ultima online weren't capable of handling thousands of players on a server until everquest, players just had to deal with what they had, that was to play level/skill up talk with friends adventure for a little and have fun,
Today's genre of kids or grown-ups who still act as kids are spoiled and immature, no matter what mmo gets released today there will be a derp complaining why his/her game is better comparing this to that and why they cloned stuff out of the game he/she is currently playing and made it identical to the new hyped game that was just released.
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Oh my got!!! i neber see a graphic of this before, i neber p2p any game before, but this game i must! ________________________________
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I think another disconnect in these sort of analogies are that you are developing the checkers playing skill when you are practicing checkers. That's different than grinding out statistics that cap what you can do with skill in a game.
Best example I have to explain this is when my level 50 brother and I killed level 205 mobs for experience in Horizons (now Istaria). That not only took quick gameplay reflexes, but very in-depth planning in our character builds, spell modifications (so I've added crafting too), and contingency plans. No one ever believed we could do it until we showed them, and I don't know anyone that ever replicated the feat.
Name me one AAA title that would let you do that on the basis of skill. They won't, because the games are designed around artificial skill caps that may only be raised via in game statistical rewards (gear, skill points, levels, whatever the case may be) that require logging hours but not necessarily developing gameplay skill during those hours. If we tried that in WoW, the hit formulas would've artificially precluded us from doing even a scrap of damage to the mob we were fighting that outleveled us by a factor of 4, whereas in Horizons, we killed the mobs using only a very involved plan to deliver the death of 1000 cuts (or static shocks from my puny lightning bolts, as the case was there).
That's why there are players that will argue so vehemently against the notion that you HAVE to log 2000 hours to be good at a game. See my previous post debunking the Jordan/basketball example.
And all of the players know that developers react to those market forces (even if only instinctively), which is why you find them arguing with each other on forums, instead of just agreeing to disagree
You didn't realize that already? Sorry, I know that's slightly trollish, but I mean that as a kind of joke on how all forums are.
Isn't pretty much every post on every forum everywhere about turf war? :P
I've only played EQ and AO out of the list you gave, but I find Anarchy Online (AO) in particular to be an entirely different monster compared to any other game, and out of the 20-odd games I played, I liked it best (I quit because a server crash ate us in the middle of me turning in the final stage of a quest chain that took me 100 hours to finish, and the GMs wouldn't fix this for me).
That game was hard in the same way chess was hard, not in the way EQ was hard. You had to be able to hold and sift through a fairly large and diverse body of knowledge in your head all at once in order to build a good character in that game, at least prior to the expansions when all the additional bonuses made it easier to hit critical skill threshold. That's an entirely different expectation than what is placed on people today. Beyond building your character well, the gameplay was largely the same as any other MMORPG, but just having that one key difference made the game feel entirely different to me.
We use the word hard and can't agree on what we want in place to make a game hard. Could we possibly say we want the game to be complicated instead of hard? Would that get us any closer to agreement?
The analogies people use like chess and basketball would fit much better if we were talking about the timesink in the game being based on your capability to understand its complexity instead of turn around in circles 1,000,000 times whlie we wait for magic numbers to go up.
+1
This.
For me it does not really matter HOW it will be called. "hard" , "complicated", does not matter. It is all semantics.
Just mmorpg's nowadays especially in open world feel bland and boring. There is no thrill , no sense of danger, thinking not required, being careful not required. Just click damn button enough for mob to die.
This just has to change imo.
You know i always wonder why my fondest memories of games in the past are always trivilized by the phrase "rose-colored glasses". I doesnt really seem correct. I knew what the games i played had problems with and what things were fun or interesting to me, and other people probably feel the same even if it was eq, uo, swg, ff11 etc. I dont particularly agree that it should be dimissed that easily that we were tricked. we knew what we were getting into. I think some changes that need to be made is:
1. Stop making hybrid classes equal to pure. Simply put a hybrid dps/heals class shouldn't be equal to both dps and heals.
2. Stop making too few classes or too many.
3. Playstyles of the classes shouldnt overlap too much.
4. give the classes a wide variety of abilities. It just seems that classes have fewer and fewer lines of focus, ie enchanter had stuns, mezzes, buffs, debuffs, illuions, pets, charms, dd, dots, and i guess what you called general mage spells. warlocks on the other hand dots ,dots, pets, buffs, debuffs, and dd. the weird thing was eq had like15+ classes and wow started with 9?
5. take away instant travel againa dn give it to a few classes. Having a reason to make a druid or wizard or make a druid or wizard friends was a quick way to make things faster.
6. make buffs last longer im not sure what the reasoning was behind going from a game where buffs could last 4 or 5 hours to 1 hour tops but it never made sense to me.
and finally
7. bring back support classes and the 6th group spot. going form 6 to 5 to now 4? For games that claim they want grouping it seems strange the both reduce the need for roles and make group size smaller.
Warning: the following is only my opinion and doesnt reflect anyone else, should you agree with any of it great if not great.
So you think the way to improve Chess is to add a super complicated UI in front of it where 30+ keystrokes are required to make each of your moves?
Well you're entitlted to that opinion, but most players (and myself) see through that unnecessary complexity. Complications, bad UI, and inconveniences do not improve a game. Only true depth improves a game.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
balance:
when I come home from work I dont want to have to study my game all the time, sometimes I just want to do and do something that I dont have to relearn so doing the same thing more than once is not all that bad.
Then again, if I do the same thing every week for 6 months it can get rather old.
so...balance
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
1. So I make a pure DPS class, and you spec DPS in a hybrid class. You can't do anything but DPS in your current spec. By what rationale should you be incapable of doing as much DPS as me, if you've focused on DPS?
2. This is a particularly arbitrary line to draw, and conveniently ignores the fact that if EQ had "15+ classes", then how is that more variety than WOW's 30 playstyles? Playstyle variety is what matters; nobody seriously cares about the number of literal classes.
3. This reads as "players should always be pigeonholed into one specific playstyle with zero variance". What if you choose a class and don't like it? Why should you be forced to re-roll and replay content you've already done before?
4. WOW Warlocks have stun, charm, fears, buffs, debuffs, pets, dd, DOTs, DOTs, general mage spells, drains, and demon mind control. So if your enchanter had 10 discrete abilities*, a WOW Warlock has 12.
* Since you separated out various forms of CC/mezzes/stuns, I did the same with the warlock listing.
This is why you're accused of rose-colored glasses, btw.
5. So you enjoy wasting time traveling more than spending it in meatier gameplay? Well, you're entitled to waste your own time, but most players feel like games are about gameplay and find travel to be empty and meaningless. It's just a pointless waste of time.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
It's good to see you responded so lets get to it
1. yes a pure class dps shoudl outdo a hybrid. because in thegame i played you dont have specs. so hybrids have the ability to fill multiple roles while the pure class doesnt
2. yes too few class make people not interest while too many spreads it too thin and to be direct EQ had too many. if there is one thing i could have fixed i would have combine a few classes to keep each a unique experience.
3 im still with 3 because it has been shown it can be down wither you use different sources of power or tank or heals or pull or support or cc or dps it sorta goes hand in hand with point 2
4 yes lock had those things since i played one but you didnt have them avail at the same time and some of those line of spells didnt have upgrades so they dont really count as lines
5 i wont budge on either making the right friends or being the classes that can move a nation does an mmo good.
so this is why i dont have the glasses on i know what weakness eq had but the weaknesses todays games have is by year 1 they are f2p and the masses have moved on to another games so that seems like a big weakness of "oh your game has a low poulation"
also with number why stop at th current system just port everywhere you in front of the boss why do dungoens just do bosses only
1. C'mon guy, your last post just finished saying how many more benefits a given class in EQ1 brought to the group. If I bring 10 things and you bring 10 things (one of which happens to be offheals), then we can be balanced in team value even if our DPS outputs are the same (because the value of the non-DPS benefits we bring to a group would also be balanced.)
2. So people are less interested in WOW's 10 classes than EQ's 15+. Subscriber count may be a poor measure of the subjective fun of a game, but it's certainly a measure of the interest in a game.
(And again, class count is irrelevant. Playstyle count is everything.)
(And the quickest way to make a game objectively less interesting is to force players to repeat the same content -- like what happens when players are forced to re-roll rather than re-spec.)
4. Of course you can't cast everything at the same time, but you have the majority of them in any given spec (although actually I think a spec has all 12.) What would it matter if they have upgrades? An ability is an ability, and WOW's warlock sounds like it beats Enchanter out for ability variety.
Stuff in front of a boss is fine -- it's essentially an extension of the boss itself. And in a well-designed game (like almost all the earlier WOW raids I was on), those mobs require just as much skill as the boss itself (and sometimes they're criticized for requiring more skill.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
To clarify, having "too many" classes spreads what too thin? What is the "it" you're speaking of? Personally I think EQ had a great number of classes. It gave people plenty of choices of play styles, which, at least in my opinion, is something recent MMOs lack terrible...choices.
Far as hybrids vs pure classes go, I dont see a problem with a hybrid DPS, for example, doing the same damage as a pure DPS. There's no reason the pure class couldn't have advantages in other areas instead. Going back to EQ, as an example, hybrids leveld more slowly than pures. Maybe pures could have more utility abilities, or an affinity towards a certain type of enemy.
The key is to make sure both classes are a valid choice for their primary role.
You're putting words in my mouth. Don't do that
Complexity can come in many forms. One form is to make performing actions in the game a juggling act of dexterity. Another is to have a deeply layered strategy like chess. Still another is to make gameplay involve understanding a wide body of data that's hard to keep assimilated in your mind all at once.
No, I do not advocate the dexterity check as the proper complexity to add. I also don't advocate time logged as the complexity to add. I would love for someone to develop an MMORPG in which combat felt more like Chess feels, but someone else may not share the same opinion, which is just fine.
If could make an equally ridiculous statement as your assertion that what I said means we should turn MMORPGs into juggling games, I could say we can throw Chess out as a "complicated" game model because the game has a provably finite game tree. If we had a computer of sufficient resources, we could map it out and defeat the game of chess forever. Any idiot would simply be able to follow the prescribed move for a given board set up and guarantee either a win or a tie if they are sitting in the correct position (of having either gone first or second, depending on how the game tree mapped out).
Does the fact that the game is mathematically defeatable make it uncomplicated? I think most players that weren't masters who sat down at the table to play would probably still say it is until the day comes when we have a computer program with the game map.
I think the problem veteran players have with MMORPGs is that we do have the game map, and most of us are good enough at juggling to execute it. Unfortunately, it's easier for programmers to make the juggling more complex than to make the game mechanics themselves more nuanced (does that word perhaps fit better)?
Incidentally Axehilt, I didn't mean what I said about the Chess analogy to be in any way trolling against what you've said about it. You can find another post here I've made in this same thread that I think your "play 100+ hours to get a queen" is the single most brilliant analogy with what I think is wrong with the games we like to play. Of anyone on the boards here I've seen in the few weeks I've been here, you're by far my favorite poster, and most of the time when I'm reading your posts, I feel like you've seen inside my head.
The post I wrote about the fact that there are still some issues the chess and basketball analogies was designed to point out a flaw in using those to justify making us play 100+ hours for the queen under the excuse that we need that much practice first. The genre is developed enough that this excuse is ridiculous in the way that saying chess practice you had on a cardboard chessboard doesn't apply to playing on a wooden chessboard.
However, I don't think any of the analogies you've made between chess and MMORPGs are flawed at all; they're quite illuminating instead.
"play 100+ hours to get a queen"
Dunno, depends on perspective, i dont think of my character really "getting" skills, even if i use that word in conversations, but more in terms of "uncovering" skills.
Withing that chess analogy it would be close to the number of turns which you need to move other pieces to unblock the queens path, so that the queen is able to do something meaningful.
How many turns it should take is ofcourse open for discussion (especially in regards of replayability), but i dont think even 100+ turns is such a horrendous problem if you can use those to carve up extra pieces, booze up your oponent or other things which can be beneficial in the future.
And lets be realistic here, chess is not about the queen, we need to think ouside fail single purpose mmos.
I think the gist of your message is spot on, but I think the implementation you suggest is the wrong one is actually the right one. I don't think we'll all ever agree on one MMORPG to rule them all. As about 20 pages in this thread have already said, what we really need is a niche game for every gamer, and there are several niches going ignored right now.
It is pretty obviously that many niche game for many segments of gamers do not make sense economically. The development cost of a MMO is so high that you have to go for a large enough segment just to break even.
We have seen lots of small development like Dark Fall and it is pretty obvious that for that kind of hard core audience, it is not big enough to warrant a WOW or a TOR treatment.
And classes are NOT the only design that matters. Zones, mobs, dungeons, boss fights, all add to the game. Fewer class choices are not necessarily bad if the other part of the game is great.
Which implementation? You lost me there
That not everyone will be happy is a given, even if somehow someone creates the most accessible, varied, intricate, meaningful, immersive, fun game, there will always be a vocal group which finds the rules and the system stupid an unfair, and even if not, a new one will pop into existence over the course of the games existence.
I agree. It might mean those niches get ignored forever. For example, the mechanics of Fantasy Earth Zero's combat is pretty much exactly what I would love to see out of a PVP game. The production quality was just so poor that it died, and the quality was bad because it didn't have the playerbase that would grant the resources to improve production quality.
Viscious cycle, that
Darkfall Online provide type of gameplay that is niche even in niches - if you catch my meaning.
Since DFO devs never delivered what they promised they delivered product that is attractive almost exclusively to hardcore ffa full loot pvp only players.
This game is more of a free roaming big deatchmatch than mmorpg.
Bad example.
EvE Online being very complicated for average user game, + that provide 'hardcore' gameplay + very specific gameplay (spaceship...) have actually quite a bit of subs.
I am sure that making more accessible than EvE sandbox that also don't have indie disadvantages would gain quite sizeable audience.
Well not in size of WoW or even ToR ,but still imo could be bigger than many other AAA themeparks.
Sorry about that! I was going off the implication of your statement of "we need to think ouside fail single purpose mmos". My mistake if I misinterpreted!
It's not really the lack of difficulty, but the lack of todays playerbases patience, they want it yesterday, thus developers don't put anything challenging or time consuming in MMO's anymore.
Money talks and bullshit walks.
Do you think this is because we've been abused too much by game companies with regards to their Skinner-box time sinks?
After you've played Call of Duty/Battlefield version X, then you don't need much training on how to reload your gun and pull the trigger when you move on to CoD/BF version X+1. However, when every new MMORPG comes out, we have to do the equivalent of a drill where we're forced to reload our gun 1000 times before we can move on.
Most of the players don't have to be taught how to play anymore. The games should be designed recognizing that, and they would stop trying our patience. This is why you find so many players saying "the game doesn't start till endgame". That's because it's true. The nuances of play that require practice don't show up until deep into the endgame of almost every major MMORPG on the market right now, and the analogies people have made here with other skills requiring practice only fit after you've advanced to a portion of the game that require practice to be good at it. There's a pretty wide time gap trying players' patience right now in games prior to when they reach that point.
Back in the 90's and early 2000 there were less derps who criticized every inch of the game, did they exist? sure, however it wasn't nearly as bad as how much it happens today, the community of players were far better then today's a little of it has to do with the lack of mmo's that existed there weren't as many also the game community might have been closer, the mmo's back then such as neverwinter nights online, meridian 59, tibia, ultima online weren't capable of handling thousands of players on a server until everquest, players just had to deal with what they had, that was to play level/skill up talk with friends adventure for a little and have fun,
Today's genre of kids or grown-ups who still act as kids are spoiled and immature, no matter what mmo gets released today there will be a derp complaining why his/her game is better comparing this to that and why they cloned stuff out of the game he/she is currently playing and made it identical to the new hyped game that was just released.
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Oh my got!!!
i neber see a graphic of this before,
i neber p2p any game before, but this game i must!
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