If 90% of the population can accomplish it, was it really that difficult for the top 60% of the population though? You still sound, as you always have, like you want to play a coop RPG, most likely with content scaling.
The point of social games is to use social skills. MMORPGs were supposed to be social games. When one poster said that the main difficulty was the player interaction, and then he acted like that was bad, I shit several boulders in rage, and still the pain did not drown out my rage. Of course the hard part is in the social interaction, thats the god damn point.
I am generally not social. I do not like people that much, for many reasons. But I am capable of organizing large groups of players to accomplish a goal. I once ruined the beta for Dungeon Inquisitor by having such a large group of well organized followers that before I quit to do other things, I had completed 100% of the content in beta. Those players who were the most helpful to me received both my strategy for success and a portion of my resources as well as many really powerful creatures, which is the most important part of the game. The top 5 most powerful and most followed players currently in the game are those people. They are still friends and they work together. The remnants of my power block, which is only half as good as it would be if I hadn't quit, are still the dominant power in the game months after I left. Its called leadership. If you suck at it, learn to take orders. Take them really well and demonstrate the value that good organization produces to the rest of the guild, then go on the hardest raid in WoW with your boring cookie cutter specs and your lame hotbar macros and the raid strategy you got off genericwowfansite.com and lol as you complete the raid with no difficulties at all for your guild.
There are many kinds of challenge. Perservering against the odds, when you are angry and frustrated and you need to focus to control your emotions IS a challenge. One that Axehilt apparently fails at. Skills of all kinds are gained through time consumption. You think chess masters are born winners? No they fucking practice every day and they study previous games and openings and play by themselves. You think athletes or people with twitch were born winners? Maybe they had a leg up on 90% of the population but they are competing against the 10% that did also. You know what even highschool sports teams do? 2 a days for months before school starts and practice on weekeneds and also every day after school lets out. You think that is fun? Hell no. And even then sometimes you got unlucky with the talent at your school.
How can you say that you want games to be about skill and not boring time consumption when thats where every god damn skill in the world really comes from? Repeating the same raid over and over till your guild gets it right is perservering through time consumption.
The most purely skill based esports in existence require players to play thousands and thousands of games to be really good. Time consumption. In esports.
Most players in games do not focus on difficulty at all. How could they when games are designed so any random 12 year old can play it? The majority of WoW or any other themepark game contains little to no difficulty. Especially when people look up the ideal specs for their character online instead of figuring it out themselves. You get on people all the time for wanting long travel and exploring, but you are just as much as a niche as any of us. People play farmville in the millions, and there is 0 challenge there. You don't even need real friends to play, people just friend each other randomly as long as both play farmville. You are the minority just as much as sanshi44 but you had to use italics as if he was too dumb to understand your point.
If 90% of people can pass the skill check, then obviously the skill check isn't that hard. But MMORPGs have skill-checks where 90% of people aren't passing them (like how less than 1% of players beat WOW's Sunwell content.)
Nothing of what I said was specific to a CORPG vs. MMORPG. Skill checks can occur in either format.
I persevere against odds all the time in games. But I, like most players, don't want my time wasted. Persevering against odds is great -- that's challenge.
Persevering against time is another matter entirely. Because it (a) doesn't involve player choice and so it lacks the #1 reason players play games (to interact with them) and (b) by the same token it doesn't involve skill because no choice was involved.
I have no clue how you can read me saying that I want skill to matter in games, and then assume I don't want practice to matter -- you make it sound like you think that I'd be happy with a game where everyone was a complete master of the game with no time investment whatsoever. Games are about player skill. They're about player decisions. They're about interaction. These require inherent timesinks (practice), but not arbitrary timesinks.
Of course the Chess player who practices a lot is better. That's skill-centric gaming. Nothing happens in Chess which wasn't a decision by one player or the other, and no unnecessary time-consumption is present.
The fastest way to ruin Chess as a game would be to introduce arbitrary rules like having to play 100+ hours of Chess games before you get to start with a Queen. Yet this is how MMORPGs, and it's one of the ways they can slip down the slope of adding arbitrary timesinks to everything, which undermines player decisions.
MMORPGs do not become harder or more skill-intensive just by doubling the XP required to level. That does nothing except add an arbitrary, unnecessary, fun-reducing timesink.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
The fastest way to ruin Chess as a game would be to introduce arbitrary rules like having to play 100+ hours of Chess games before you get to start with a Queen.
The rewards system for challenges is actually backwards - you are rewarding the people who can best use their gear with gear that puts them further ahead of the rest of the player base. What you really need to do is have a challenge system that encourages them to strip away gear. To use the chess analogy, a person who wins 100+ times should be challenged to play without a Queen.
The fastest way to ruin Chess as a game would be to introduce arbitrary rules like having to play 100+ hours of Chess games before you get to start with a Queen.
The rewards system for challenges is actually backwards - you are rewarding the people who can best use their gear with gear that puts them further ahead of the rest of the player base. What you really need to do is have a challenge system that encourages them to strip away gear. To use the chess analogy, a person who wins 100+ times should be challenged to play without a Queen.
Sure, but in reality we're talking about MMORPGs which will always include an element of time investment for power.
I'm not suggesting we remove this inherent trait of RPGs, but rather that games shouldn't do it in a ham-fisted way where time investment is the only thing rewarded. Player decisions need to feel worthwhile and meaningful -- in other words, skill needs to matter.
This is why in a discussion about the tedium and timesinks of early MMORPGs, I point out that those elements don't actually make things harder. Only genuinely challenging skill-checks make things harder.
(And it's also important for games to pursue the fun challenges, because some things are genuinely challenging skill-checks but just aren't fun -- like if you had to press some complicated sequence of buttons just to make your character walk forward.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Easier isnt the word here, alot of people like to have a sense of achivment when there playing a game in Everquest case the slower lvling case made the player feel like they achived something everytime they leveled. The older games ahd a sense of achivment when you finished something like Everquest epic weapon quest it could take months to finish and was one of the greatest achivment for somone to accomlish, The large zone and no instant travel made playerer feel that they accomplkished somthing simply by traveling from one side of the map to the other, one of my fondest memery was traveling from qeynos to kelethin because i felt like i accompished somthing. Anyways back to the point older games amde you feel you accomplished something while the newers games not so much.
I guess for some players, like myself, my sense of achievement comes predominantly from having accomplished something difficult not having persevered through time-consumption.
Yeah people ARE diffrent and diffrent persons perceive things diffrently and their sense of accomplishement also come from diffrent sources.
Besides while I know your definition of "difficult" there are players / people that have their own definition of "difficulty" and even if you don't agree with them and even if you can argument that they are wrong, still it is their right to feel the way they want.
There are rarely ultimate theories that explain everything that relate to spoken matter. Well there are many 'theoretic ideal models' but there is theory and reality.
Anyway conclusion is that diffrent people take pleasure and accomplishent from diffrent things and one man pleasure may be second man torture
The problem with EQ is not that it is hard, is that it is a time-sink, frustrating and punish unnessarily. (I was there since the beginning so i know).
Today's WOW hard mode raid is NOT easier than many of the encounters in EQ. In fact, many EQ pre-raid dungeons are way easier, particularly if you factor in 50 people camping a spot and helping u kill the boss.
The only difference is that you suffer through wait-times, and non-essential road blocks like corpse runs which make EQ a very boring game and luckily, that kind of days is over.
All games are a time-sink. Comparing WoW hard modes to EQ pre0raid dungeons is laughable, ahrd mode in WoW is still easy, with a couple add-ons and 2 macros i can Watch TV and still be in the top 5 in dps hard mode. Lets not forget that unlike WoW, where you only need around 30 people to raid, EQ required twice as many people and you had to actually have certain classes for every raid since some bosses would emote that only say rogues could damage them for a certain amount of time or monk, etc, etc. Raiding is EQ isn't just about going in and spanking a boss, you had to be paying attention or 1 dumb person could wipe the whole raid, not so with WoW and all these others games since WoW, we have dumbed down the games today for instant gratification people. The WoW generation has destroyed gaming, now it is just let me get end-game in a month so i can bitch about nothing to do and then move on to the next piece of garbabe i can finish in a month.
The fastest way to ruin Chess as a game would be to introduce arbitrary rules like having to play 100+ hours of Chess games before you get to start with a Queen.
Axehilt, this is the best analogy I have ever heard for this problem anywhere. It perfectly describes how ridiculous the game mechanics in MMORPGs have become.
This is why in a discussion about the tedium and timesinks of early MMORPGs, I point out that those elements don't actually make things harder. Only genuinely challenging skill-checks make things harder.
(And it's also important for games to pursue the fun challenges, because some things are genuinely challenging skill-checks but just aren't fun -- like if you had to press some complicated sequence of buttons just to make your character walk forward.)
Here's another way of looking at it: all systems are time sinks. In the end, the game has to consume all the time you have budgetted for it and no more. They question is, which texture of progress and setback do you want to experience during this time? Some people prefer a slow, steady tick of progress and actively avoid the risk of failure. Other people want to reach for the stars right away, pick themselves up after falling and try again. Fun is subjective, both types play and different people (of both personality extremes) have a different number of hours a week budgetted for play.
If 90% of the population can accomplish it, was it really that difficult for the top 60% of the population though? You still sound, as you always have, like you want to play a coop RPG, most likely with content scaling.
The point of social games is to use social skills. MMORPGs were supposed to be social games. When one poster said that the main difficulty was the player interaction, and then he acted like that was bad, I shit several boulders in rage, and still the pain did not drown out my rage. Of course the hard part is in the social interaction, thats the god damn point.
I am generally not social. I do not like people that much, for many reasons. But I am capable of organizing large groups of players to accomplish a goal. I once ruined the beta for Dungeon Inquisitor by having such a large group of well organized followers that before I quit to do other things, I had completed 100% of the content in beta. Those players who were the most helpful to me received both my strategy for success and a portion of my resources as well as many really powerful creatures, which is the most important part of the game. The top 5 most powerful and most followed players currently in the game are those people. They are still friends and they work together. The remnants of my power block, which is only half as good as it would be if I hadn't quit, are still the dominant power in the game months after I left. Its called leadership. If you suck at it, learn to take orders. Take them really well and demonstrate the value that good organization produces to the rest of the guild, then go on the hardest raid in WoW with your boring cookie cutter specs and your lame hotbar macros and the raid strategy you got off genericwowfansite.com and lol as you complete the raid with no difficulties at all for your guild.
There are many kinds of challenge. Perservering against the odds, when you are angry and frustrated and you need to focus to control your emotions IS a challenge. One that Axehilt apparently fails at. Skills of all kinds are gained through time consumption. You think chess masters are born winners? No they fucking practice every day and they study previous games and openings and play by themselves. You think athletes or people with twitch were born winners? Maybe they had a leg up on 90% of the population but they are competing against the 10% that did also. You know what even highschool sports teams do? 2 a days for months before school starts and practice on weekeneds and also every day after school lets out. You think that is fun? Hell no. And even then sometimes you got unlucky with the talent at your school.
How can you say that you want games to be about skill and not boring time consumption when thats where every god damn skill in the world really comes from? Repeating the same raid over and over till your guild gets it right is perservering through time consumption.
The most purely skill based esports in existence require players to play thousands and thousands of games to be really good. Time consumption. In esports.
Most players in games do not focus on difficulty at all. How could they when games are designed so any random 12 year old can play it? The majority of WoW or any other themepark game contains little to no difficulty. Especially when people look up the ideal specs for their character online instead of figuring it out themselves. You get on people all the time for wanting long travel and exploring, but you are just as much as a niche as any of us. People play farmville in the millions, and there is 0 challenge there. You don't even need real friends to play, people just friend each other randomly as long as both play farmville. You are the minority just as much as sanshi44 but you had to use italics as if he was too dumb to understand your point.
If 90% of people can pass the skill check, then obviously the skill check isn't that hard. But MMORPGs have skill-checks where 90% of people aren't passing them (like how less than 1% of players beat WOW's Sunwell content.)
Nothing of what I said was specific to a CORPG vs. MMORPG. Skill checks can occur in either format.
I persevere against odds all the time in games. But I, like most players, don't want my time wasted. Persevering against odds is great -- that's challenge.
Persevering against time is another matter entirely. Because it (a) doesn't involve player choice and so it lacks the #1 reason players play games (to interact with them) and (b) by the same token it doesn't involve skill because no choice was involved.
I have no clue how you can read me saying that I want skill to matter in games, and then assume I don't want practice to matter -- you make it sound like you think that I'd be happy with a game where everyone was a complete master of the game with no time investment whatsoever. Games are about player skill. They're about player decisions. They're about interaction. These require inherent timesinks (practice), but not arbitrary timesinks.
Of course the Chess player who practices a lot is better. That's skill-centric gaming. Nothing happens in Chess which wasn't a decision by one player or the other, and no unnecessary time-consumption is present.
The fastest way to ruin Chess as a game would be to introduce arbitrary rules like having to play 100+ hours of Chess games before you get to start with a Queen. Yet this is how MMORPGs, and it's one of the ways they can slip down the slope of adding arbitrary timesinks to everything, which undermines player decisions.
MMORPGs do not become harder or more skill-intensive just by doubling the XP required to level. That does nothing except add an arbitrary, unnecessary, fun-reducing timesink.
You specifically complained about time consumption. I'm sorry if there were a dozen points that your forgot to mention. I can only respond to what you actually posted.
Also you keep using the phrase arbitrary timesink. But that term is relative to the person.
RPGs are about the character, thats why its role playing, because you don't actually cast magic or craft items. The character is gaining skills over time by practice, not you. The timesink appears arbitrary to you because you don't seem to understand how RPGs work.
Maybe when the mainstream got in that changed, or maybe RPGs are not even fun for the majority of people. Still there are clearly a large chunk of players who like them.
I don't know if you understand what social colonization means but that is what the mainstream does to niche activities, be they dancing, music, games, movies, or books. And then the mainstream wonders why those niche cultures get pissed off when the mainstream does that. A nd just because some of the minority group gives in to social pressure, doesn't make it okay.
Maybe you started in the niche but you prefer the mainstream, its fine. The niche and the mainstream will never agree.
In any case, there are some skill checks that most people don't pass, but 90% of the game is not about that.
Another example of easy mode in games is this:
In ATITD you and also your guild choose a staging point for your activities. And sometimes people fuck it up. And then they have so much time invested in a poorly chose spot. Consequences. You keep harping on choice. But there is no choice in casual friendly games. You just respec and bam, choices don't matter. The analogy here is players choosing a build, then realizing another build is better that they found on website. In ATITD if you fuck up you have to own that and decide, better to move and rebuild my capital or deal with the timesink of carrying resources to far a way places because I picked a poor location. In WoW you just pop a respec button and thats it. Consequences. We will never agree about this.
Here are a list of arguments that will never be resolved:
Casual vs Hardcore
Time vs Money
Sandbox vs Themepark
Character vs Player Skill
Athiesm vs Theism
Socialism vs Capitalism
Catholic vs Protestant
Democracy vs Autocracy
Free Will vs Determism
Those arguments all have one thing in common, there is no objectively correct answer and people will never agree.
Yeah people ARE diffrent and diffrent persons perceive things diffrently and their sense of accomplishement also come from diffrent sources.
Besides while I know your definition of "difficult" there are players / people that have their own definition of "difficulty" and even if you don't agree with them and even if you can argument that they are wrong, still it is their right to feel the way they want.
There are rarely ultimate theories that explain everything that relate to spoken matter. Well there are many 'theoretic ideal models' but there is theory and reality.
Anyway conclusion is that diffrent people take pleasure and accomplishent from diffrent things and one man pleasure may be second man torture
Fun is subjective.
What players feel is a worthwhile accomplishment is subjective.
But what is actually difficult in a game isn't subjective. It either takes skill or it doesn't. And it can take a little skill or a lot.
Doubling the XP required to level doesn't actually make a game harder. It doesn't matter whether someone calls that "difficult" or not, because it isn't.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
The fastest way to ruin Chess as a game would be to introduce arbitrary rules like having to play 100+ hours of Chess games before you get to start with a Queen.
Axehilt, this is the best analogy I have ever heard for this problem anywhere. It perfectly describes how ridiculous the game mechanics in MMORPGs have become.
Except its a strawman. The argument isn't timesink vs player skill.
Its character skill vs player skill.
RPGs are about character skill. Or they were, honestly there are 10000 different opinions on what constitutes an RPG on this website and some of them are barely recognizable.
That analogy is powerfully illuminating, but instead of shining a light on the cave to see if there are bears in it, its shining a light into the grove we just came from where we have killed all the wolves already.
Yeah people ARE diffrent and diffrent persons perceive things diffrently and their sense of accomplishement also come from diffrent sources.
Besides while I know your definition of "difficult" there are players / people that have their own definition of "difficulty" and even if you don't agree with them and even if you can argument that they are wrong, still it is their right to feel the way they want.
There are rarely ultimate theories that explain everything that relate to spoken matter. Well there are many 'theoretic ideal models' but there is theory and reality.
Anyway conclusion is that diffrent people take pleasure and accomplishent from diffrent things and one man pleasure may be second man torture
Fun is subjective.
What players feel is a worthwhile accomplishment is subjective.
But what is actually difficult in a game isn't subjective. It either takes skill or it doesn't. And it can take a little skill or a lot.
Doubling the XP required to level doesn't actually make a game harder. It doesn't matter whether someone calls that "difficult" or not, because it isn't.
Yeah I am not going to argue with that.
Still that does not change outcome. If person THINK that something is hard but it actually is not hard - is irrelevant. For this person this is one and same thing, even if in reality it may not be.
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?
Agreed. But that's not all.
People relied on fellow members of their community due to the difficulty of accomplishing anything worthwhile solo. That, coupled with the fact that this was a time when characters were not disposable and reputations *really* mattered (of course now name changes and easy server transfers also help people hide from past shame), meant that behaving like an idiot limited how far you could hope to go, no proper high end raid guild tolerated that crap and earning a bad reputation on your server stuck, it meant missing out on raiding and being shunned from pickup groups.
I made decade long friends thanks to difficulties and challenges no longer present in modern disposable MMOs. Losing a corpse (with ALL of your gear on it) somewhere challenging was a pretty big deal and having ten to twenty people show up to help retrieve it was an amazing feeling. Sure, part of that was due to the fact they knew they'd be relying on the kindness of strangers at some point as well, but that was what those worlds were before WoW nerfed the MMO landscape.
They were a truly awesome place to be and an experience I'll never forget, unlike the more recent games which require about a two week commitment to be fully geared up in the best there is in a forgiving linear world with no risk, no sense of danger and communities I originally came to gaming to escape.
I have more exciting tales and memories of those adventures, which required no script or cutscene, than I do from anything developers tried to cram down my throat in the post-WoW world of disposable MMO emulators. Those events are as clear today as they were a decade ago, while by comparison, I'm currently playing Swtor (knowing full well what it is and with no delusions of longevity), and playing mainly to see how the story system works out. It's pretty good. I played through every cutscene to 50, and to late 20s on other characters. It was a nice little story, and I recall enjoying it, but I don't remember any of it. Zero lasting impression, aside from 'That Czerka bit was pretty neat...'.
By limiting and disposing of all the ways in which players can be negatively affected by the denizens, players and hazards of online virtual world, they've created self serving communities in game worlds with a sickeningly narrow spectrum of experiences and completely remove the ways and means for players to positively affect eachother.
Sure people can't be a villains now that everyone has their own little instances and multiple mechanics to ensure no one can negatively have any effect on you, but those safety nets also block out opportunities to be a hero. How many times have I added a friend to the list after their group worked with ours in a deep open world dungeon or planar corpse retrieval?
I absolutely want a dangerous, exciting world to explore again, as I know how that's brought me friendships that lasted years. I definitely want a broad spectrum of experiences in my online gaming world, rather than click 10 vases, walk 5 minutes, collect reward, repeat - solo.
That's so much more appealing to me than these instant gratification, safe, personal online worlds in which death is simply a faster form of travel.
I figured after WoW introduced people to MMOs, they'd have a taste of it, get the idea, and then be ready to have the training wheels taken off. Instead developers left them on and are now suffocating us with excessive padding and will not let go of the handlebars.
In any case, there are some skill checks that most people don't pass, but 90% of the game is not about that.
Another example of easy mode in games is this:
In ATITD you and also your guild choose a staging point for your activities. And sometimes people fuck it up. And then they have so much time invested in a poorly chose spot. Consequences. You keep harping on choice. But there is no choice in casual friendly games. You just respec and bam, choices don't matter. The analogy here is players choosing a build, then realizing another build is better that they found on website. In ATITD if you fuck up you have to own that and decide, better to move and rebuild my capital or deal with the timesink of carrying resources to far a way places because I picked a poor location. In WoW you just pop a respec button and thats it. Consequences. We will never agree about this.
And if 90% of the game isn't tightly balanced, then that's an issue with the game's design. It's one of my chief criticisms of the MMORPG genre, actually. (And sort of silly since CoX's difficulty settings completely solved the problem years ago, and strongly rewarded players who tackled harder difficulty settings.)
But it's also not like this criticism is unique to modern MMORPGs, so I'm not even sure what your point is...
Talent decisions aren't 100% of the choices in a MMORPG. Not even close. So respeccing barely impacts any of the decisionmaking. Nor would it be an interesting/fun choice if you were locked into a bad choice forever.
Unless progression was extremely short in a game, forcing you to re-roll just to play a different playstyle is just bad game design.
Similarly, it would be good game design if ATITD provided tools to relocate virtually all of a settlement to a new location (except perhaps the largest and most permanent of structures.) You'd still have plenty of consequence (it would take time to cart everything away) but it would reduce the magnitude of consequence to a fun level (in addition to adding gameplay.)
Similarly, in MMORPGs it makes perfect sense for players to be able to respec -- though perhaps not everywhere on-demand. (Though honestly I'm not even against that idea; a MMORPG where grouping is similar to TF2 would be quite fun, with players able to change roles fairly frequently to adapt to changing game conditions.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
In any case, there are some skill checks that most people don't pass, but 90% of the game is not about that.
Another example of easy mode in games is this:
In ATITD you and also your guild choose a staging point for your activities. And sometimes people fuck it up. And then they have so much time invested in a poorly chose spot. Consequences. You keep harping on choice. But there is no choice in casual friendly games. You just respec and bam, choices don't matter. The analogy here is players choosing a build, then realizing another build is better that they found on website. In ATITD if you fuck up you have to own that and decide, better to move and rebuild my capital or deal with the timesink of carrying resources to far a way places because I picked a poor location. In WoW you just pop a respec button and thats it. Consequences. We will never agree about this.
And if 90% of the game isn't tightly balanced, then that's an issue with the game's design. It's one of my chief criticisms of the MMORPG genre, actually. (And sort of silly since CoX's difficulty settings completely solved the problem years ago, and strongly rewarded players who tackled harder difficulty settings.)
But it's also not like this criticism is unique to modern MMORPGs, so I'm not even sure what your point is...
Talent decisions aren't 100% of the choices in a MMORPG. Not even close. So respeccing barely impacts any of the decisionmaking. Nor would it be an interesting/fun choice if you were locked into a bad choice forever.
Unless progression was extremely short in a game, forcing you to re-roll just to play a different playstyle is just bad game design.
Similarly, it would be good game design if ATITD provided tools to relocate virtually all of a settlement to a new location (except perhaps the largest and most permanent of structures.) You'd still have plenty of consequence (it would take time to cart everything away) but it would reduce the magnitude of consequence to a fun level (in addition to adding gameplay.)
Similarly, in MMORPGs it makes perfect sense for players to be able to respec -- though perhaps not everywhere on-demand. (Though honestly I'm not even against that idea; a MMORPG where grouping is similar to TF2 would be quite fun, with players able to change roles fairly frequently to adapt to changing game conditions.)
Maybe you don't think it would be fun. But I notice you didn't argue about consequences. Do you find long term consequences to be unfun?
When I designed my game I had the skill system set up so that you didn't have to reroll. The skill system is infinite and its just as easy to raise the skill you decided would be better than the one you had been raising on your original character as it is to roll a new alt, and you don't even lose out on all the other skills that you raised that you still wanted to have, since you are still on that char instead of rerolling you still have that training.
You do lose out in a way, because likely you will never be the best at the new crafting skill you switched to, but then there are diminishing returns so you will slowly catch up over time.
As x->infinity even trillions of exp doesn't matter.
I just feel like making lots of poor choices should set you back at least a little bit, whereas in WoW it really doesn't. Even with hardcore raids if you don't continue to make errors you can probably finish before the next expansion comes out, and end game raid grind is so dumb anyways.
I suppose my belief in consequences comes from my RTS backgroud. But then conequnces there aren't such a big deal because games aren't persistant. Even Ogame eventually resets unis.
Perhaps the problem here has more to do with the persistant world than anything else. Any system with progression of objects eventually becomes unbalanced over time, as we can see both from OGame and the real world. Resources are slowly being focused within smaller and smaller groups of people. A specific example is the widening wealth gap in America. The majority of games do no exist in a persistant world and that is why MMORPGs have such unique problems.
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?
Agreed. But that's not all.
People relied on fellow members of their community due to the difficulty of accomplishing anything worthwhile solo. That, coupled with the fact that this was a time when characters were not disposable and reputations *really* mattered (of course now name changes and easy server transfers also help people hide from past shame), meant that behaving like an idiot limited how far you could hope to go, no proper high end raid guild tolerated that crap and earning a bad reputation on your server stuck, it meant missing out on raiding and being shunned from pickup groups.
I made decade long friends thanks to difficulties and challenges no longer present in modern disposable MMOs. Losing a corpse (with ALL of your gear on it) somewhere challenging was a pretty big deal and having ten to twenty people show up to help retrieve it was an amazing feeling. Sure, part of that was due to the fact they knew they'd be relying on the kindness of strangers at some point as well, but that was what those worlds were before WoW nerfed the MMO landscape.
They were a truly awesome place to be and an experience I'll never forget, unlike the more recent games which require about a two week commitment to be fully geared up in the best there is in a forgiving linear world with no risk, no sense of danger and communities I originally came to gaming to escape.
I have more exciting tales and memories of those adventures, which required no script or cutscene, than I do from anything developers tried to cram down my throat in the post-WoW world of disposable MMO emulators. Those events are as clear today as they were a decade ago, while by comparison, I'm currently playing Swtor (knowing full well what it is and with no delusions of longevity), and playing mainly to see how the story system works out. It's pretty good. I played through every cutscene to 50, and to late 20s on other characters. It was a nice little story, and I recall enjoying it, but I don't remember any of it. Zero lasting impression, aside from 'That Czerka bit was pretty neat...'.
By limiting and disposing of all the ways in which players can be negatively affected by the denizens, players and hazards of online virtual world, they've created self serving communities in game worlds with a sickeningly narrow spectrum of experiences and completely remove the ways and means for players to positively affect eachother.
Sure people can't be a villains now that everyone has their own little instances and multiple mechanics to ensure no one can negatively have any effect on you, but those safety nets also block out opportunities to be a hero. How many times have I added a friend to the list after their group worked with ours in a deep open world dungeon or planar corpse retrieval?
I absolutely want a dangerous, exciting world to explore again, as I know how that's brought me friendships that lasted years. I definitely want a broad spectrum of experiences in my online gaming world, rather than click 10 vases, walk 5 minutes, collect reward, repeat - solo.
That's so much more appealing to me than these instant gratification, safe, personal online worlds in which death is simply a faster form of travel.
I figured after WoW introduced people to MMOs, they'd have a taste of it, get the idea, and then be ready to have the training wheels taken off. Instead developers left them on and are now suffocating us with excessive padding and will not let go of the handlebars.
Well we know that the memory of the majority of humanity is affected more spectacularly by intense experiences. Its not suprising that we don't have clear beautiful memories of most games, after all they don't engage the correct parts of the brain. Generic time wasting fun, which is what modern MMOs are really pushing on us have no neurological reason to stand out the way that the play of oldschool MMOs had. I think that even EvE has the majority of the experience fading into the background with a few bright shining memories sticking out.
LOL you EQers are such masochist. You think EQ was the golden age I think EQ was the beginning of the end. UO was so much more then EQ could ever dream of being.
The problem with EQ is not that it is hard, is that it is a time-sink, frustrating and punish unnessarily. (I was there since the beginning so i know).
Today's WOW hard mode raid is NOT easier than many of the encounters in EQ. In fact, many EQ pre-raid dungeons are way easier, particularly if you factor in 50 people camping a spot and helping u kill the boss.
The only difference is that you suffer through wait-times, and non-essential road blocks like corpse runs which make EQ a very boring game and luckily, that kind of days is over.
All games are a time-sink. Comparing WoW hard modes to EQ pre0raid dungeons is laughable, ahrd mode in WoW is still easy, with a couple add-ons and 2 macros i can Watch TV and still be in the top 5 in dps hard mode. Lets not forget that unlike WoW, where you only need around 30 people to raid, EQ required twice as many people and you had to actually have certain classes for every raid since some bosses would emote that only say rogues could damage them for a certain amount of time or monk, etc, etc. Raiding is EQ isn't just about going in and spanking a boss, you had to be paying attention or 1 dumb person could wipe the whole raid, not so with WoW and all these others games since WoW, we have dumbed down the games today for instant gratification people. The WoW generation has destroyed gaming, now it is just let me get end-game in a month so i can bitch about nothing to do and then move on to the next piece of garbabe i can finish in a month.
LOL .. i do not believe you.
As of 2-3 weeks ago (check mmo-champion.com), there are less than 10 guilds in THE WORLD who has finished DS 25 man hard mode and NONE has finished 10 man hard mode.
Are you one of them?
And saying something like "Raiding is EQ isn't just about going in and spanking a boss, you had to be paying attention or 1 dumb person could wipe the whole raid" shows that you don't know anything about WOW raiding hard mode.
There are PLENTY of examples of 1 man can wipe the raid, EVEN IN NORMAL MODE. In fact, you don't even need to use Deathwing as an example. Back in the LICH KING FIGHT, a person who did not get out of the black stuff on ground will grow it and kill the raid. YOu have NO credibility if you say things like this that is totally untrue.
The fastest way to ruin Chess as a game would be to introduce arbitrary rules like having to play 100+ hours of Chess games before you get to start with a Queen.
Axehilt, this is the best analogy I have ever heard for this problem anywhere. It perfectly describes how ridiculous the game mechanics in MMORPGs have become.
This ^^^^^
When i was back playing EQ, it never seems hard. Just a lot of unnecessarily time sink. Camping bosses was the worst. No challenge. A lot of dead time. Boring. The only thing keep people going is the shiny loot at the end.
Having too many players in worlds that are much too small for that many people isn't EQs fault. Instancing may solve the problem but it means that you are not playing mmorpgs.
I like solo-ing missions because I don't have to deal with the motherfucking idiots and trolls and assholes in the god damn world. the only time I want to hang out with mature people in a mmo is when I either do dungeons or a raid, as long as people know what the hell they are doing and is not an fucking asshole.
Another issue is group quests, I don't like to do group quest where the population in that little area is only me or 4 other people doing nothing but solo quests... Sorry bout i group quest does not work well unless there is shitloads of people on the server WILLING to help out, and wish that these group quests are optional.
I like solo-ing missions because I don't have to deal with the motherfucking idiots and trolls and assholes in the god damn world. the only time I want to hang out with mature people in a mmo is when I either do dungeons or a raid, as long as people know what the hell they are doing and is not an fucking asshole.
Another issue is group quests, I don't like to do group quest where the population in that little area is only me or 4 other people doing nothing but solo quests... Sorry bout i group quest does not work well unless there is shitloads of people on the server WILLING to help out, and wish that these group quests are optional.
all that rage. all that hate. all that belief that everyone but "me" is an idiot and doesn't know how to play. yeah, this is why i don't join raiding guilds. they're full of beliefs like this.
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?
First thing first, I would welcome difficult in MMO, instead of the stupid timesink thats just plain dumb.
But one problem in this analogy with football, Training for sport is actually good fory our health, playing MMORPG for an extend period of time isn't.
How much WoW could a WoWhater hate, if a WoWhater could hate WoW? As much WoW as a WoWhater would, if a WoWhater could hate WoW.
You sound entirely like an adolecent who wants things, but doesn't feel he has to put in the neccessary time, effort, energy, determination, perserverence, etc.. to accomplish, or even attempt anything, because of the possibility of failing and not recieving an award!
In an entertainment product? Sure it is reasonable to expect a person to spend months & years to accomplish his career, but a GAME?
A few hours of learning the mechanics is probably the right balance for most busy people. Surely you need to spend weeks to learn hard mode fights, but that is probably the extreme end of what people want in a GAME.
There it is^^... you play MMORPG's like you watch television, you want to be entertained!
The premis and ideology of roleplaying games is that your dropped off into an unknown world and have to fend for yourself (ie: solve the problems & mysteries). If I want to play something for entertainment, I would play an arcade game, where nothing matters.
(Does one play chess for fun, for entertainment, or for sport..?)
"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."
You sound entirely like an adolecent who wants things, but doesn't feel he has to put in the neccessary time, effort, energy, determination, perserverence, etc.. to accomplish, or even attempt anything, because of the possibility of failing and not recieving an award!
In an entertainment product? Sure it is reasonable to expect a person to spend months & years to accomplish his career, but a GAME?
A few hours of learning the mechanics is probably the right balance for most busy people. Surely you need to spend weeks to learn hard mode fights, but that is probably the extreme end of what people want in a GAME.
There it is^^... you play MMORPG's like you watch television, you want to be entertained!
The premis and ideology of roleplaying games is that your dropped off into an unknown world and have to fend for yourself (ie: solve the problems & mysteries). If I want to play something for entertainment, I would play an arcade game, where nothing matters.
(Does one play chess for fun, for entertainment, or for sport..?)
So many people just don't understand the purpose of RPGs. They claim that we are trying to drag MMORPGs and define them our way, but we wouldn't have to if they didn't try to change it first.
MMORPGs are not games or toys, they are worlds and you have to put in time to train your character. Thats another thing, RPGs are about the character's skill, not the players.
Comments
If 90% of people can pass the skill check, then obviously the skill check isn't that hard. But MMORPGs have skill-checks where 90% of people aren't passing them (like how less than 1% of players beat WOW's Sunwell content.)
Nothing of what I said was specific to a CORPG vs. MMORPG. Skill checks can occur in either format.
I persevere against odds all the time in games. But I, like most players, don't want my time wasted. Persevering against odds is great -- that's challenge.
Persevering against time is another matter entirely. Because it (a) doesn't involve player choice and so it lacks the #1 reason players play games (to interact with them) and (b) by the same token it doesn't involve skill because no choice was involved.
I have no clue how you can read me saying that I want skill to matter in games, and then assume I don't want practice to matter -- you make it sound like you think that I'd be happy with a game where everyone was a complete master of the game with no time investment whatsoever. Games are about player skill. They're about player decisions. They're about interaction. These require inherent timesinks (practice), but not arbitrary timesinks.
Of course the Chess player who practices a lot is better. That's skill-centric gaming. Nothing happens in Chess which wasn't a decision by one player or the other, and no unnecessary time-consumption is present.
The fastest way to ruin Chess as a game would be to introduce arbitrary rules like having to play 100+ hours of Chess games before you get to start with a Queen. Yet this is how MMORPGs, and it's one of the ways they can slip down the slope of adding arbitrary timesinks to everything, which undermines player decisions.
MMORPGs do not become harder or more skill-intensive just by doubling the XP required to level. That does nothing except add an arbitrary, unnecessary, fun-reducing timesink.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
The rewards system for challenges is actually backwards - you are rewarding the people who can best use their gear with gear that puts them further ahead of the rest of the player base. What you really need to do is have a challenge system that encourages them to strip away gear. To use the chess analogy, a person who wins 100+ times should be challenged to play without a Queen.
because they are masochists
they also have the belief that the more punishment they suffer the more fun the game is
often mention difficult games and how good they are and if you do not believe them you are the problem not the game
they also like telling others of difficult games they completed and occassinally slip in how they liked to get whipped
Sure, but in reality we're talking about MMORPGs which will always include an element of time investment for power.
I'm not suggesting we remove this inherent trait of RPGs, but rather that games shouldn't do it in a ham-fisted way where time investment is the only thing rewarded. Player decisions need to feel worthwhile and meaningful -- in other words, skill needs to matter.
This is why in a discussion about the tedium and timesinks of early MMORPGs, I point out that those elements don't actually make things harder. Only genuinely challenging skill-checks make things harder.
(And it's also important for games to pursue the fun challenges, because some things are genuinely challenging skill-checks but just aren't fun -- like if you had to press some complicated sequence of buttons just to make your character walk forward.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Yeah people ARE diffrent and diffrent persons perceive things diffrently and their sense of accomplishement also come from diffrent sources.
Besides while I know your definition of "difficult" there are players / people that have their own definition of "difficulty" and even if you don't agree with them and even if you can argument that they are wrong, still it is their right to feel the way they want.
There are rarely ultimate theories that explain everything that relate to spoken matter. Well there are many 'theoretic ideal models' but there is theory and reality.
Anyway conclusion is that diffrent people take pleasure and accomplishent from diffrent things and one man pleasure may be second man torture
All games are a time-sink. Comparing WoW hard modes to EQ pre0raid dungeons is laughable, ahrd mode in WoW is still easy, with a couple add-ons and 2 macros i can Watch TV and still be in the top 5 in dps hard mode. Lets not forget that unlike WoW, where you only need around 30 people to raid, EQ required twice as many people and you had to actually have certain classes for every raid since some bosses would emote that only say rogues could damage them for a certain amount of time or monk, etc, etc. Raiding is EQ isn't just about going in and spanking a boss, you had to be paying attention or 1 dumb person could wipe the whole raid, not so with WoW and all these others games since WoW, we have dumbed down the games today for instant gratification people. The WoW generation has destroyed gaming, now it is just let me get end-game in a month so i can bitch about nothing to do and then move on to the next piece of garbabe i can finish in a month.
Axehilt, this is the best analogy I have ever heard for this problem anywhere. It perfectly describes how ridiculous the game mechanics in MMORPGs have become.
Here's another way of looking at it: all systems are time sinks. In the end, the game has to consume all the time you have budgetted for it and no more. They question is, which texture of progress and setback do you want to experience during this time? Some people prefer a slow, steady tick of progress and actively avoid the risk of failure. Other people want to reach for the stars right away, pick themselves up after falling and try again. Fun is subjective, both types play and different people (of both personality extremes) have a different number of hours a week budgetted for play.
You specifically complained about time consumption. I'm sorry if there were a dozen points that your forgot to mention. I can only respond to what you actually posted.
Also you keep using the phrase arbitrary timesink. But that term is relative to the person.
RPGs are about the character, thats why its role playing, because you don't actually cast magic or craft items. The character is gaining skills over time by practice, not you. The timesink appears arbitrary to you because you don't seem to understand how RPGs work.
Maybe when the mainstream got in that changed, or maybe RPGs are not even fun for the majority of people. Still there are clearly a large chunk of players who like them.
I don't know if you understand what social colonization means but that is what the mainstream does to niche activities, be they dancing, music, games, movies, or books. And then the mainstream wonders why those niche cultures get pissed off when the mainstream does that. A nd just because some of the minority group gives in to social pressure, doesn't make it okay.
Maybe you started in the niche but you prefer the mainstream, its fine. The niche and the mainstream will never agree.
In any case, there are some skill checks that most people don't pass, but 90% of the game is not about that.
Another example of easy mode in games is this:
In ATITD you and also your guild choose a staging point for your activities. And sometimes people fuck it up. And then they have so much time invested in a poorly chose spot. Consequences. You keep harping on choice. But there is no choice in casual friendly games. You just respec and bam, choices don't matter. The analogy here is players choosing a build, then realizing another build is better that they found on website. In ATITD if you fuck up you have to own that and decide, better to move and rebuild my capital or deal with the timesink of carrying resources to far a way places because I picked a poor location. In WoW you just pop a respec button and thats it. Consequences. We will never agree about this.
Here are a list of arguments that will never be resolved:
Casual vs Hardcore
Time vs Money
Sandbox vs Themepark
Character vs Player Skill
Athiesm vs Theism
Socialism vs Capitalism
Catholic vs Protestant
Democracy vs Autocracy
Free Will vs Determism
Those arguments all have one thing in common, there is no objectively correct answer and people will never agree.
Fun is subjective.
What players feel is a worthwhile accomplishment is subjective.
But what is actually difficult in a game isn't subjective. It either takes skill or it doesn't. And it can take a little skill or a lot.
Doubling the XP required to level doesn't actually make a game harder. It doesn't matter whether someone calls that "difficult" or not, because it isn't.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Except its a strawman. The argument isn't timesink vs player skill.
Its character skill vs player skill.
RPGs are about character skill. Or they were, honestly there are 10000 different opinions on what constitutes an RPG on this website and some of them are barely recognizable.
That analogy is powerfully illuminating, but instead of shining a light on the cave to see if there are bears in it, its shining a light into the grove we just came from where we have killed all the wolves already.
Yeah I am not going to argue with that.
Still that does not change outcome. If person THINK that something is hard but it actually is not hard - is irrelevant. For this person this is one and same thing, even if in reality it may not be.
Agreed. But that's not all.
People relied on fellow members of their community due to the difficulty of accomplishing anything worthwhile solo. That, coupled with the fact that this was a time when characters were not disposable and reputations *really* mattered (of course now name changes and easy server transfers also help people hide from past shame), meant that behaving like an idiot limited how far you could hope to go, no proper high end raid guild tolerated that crap and earning a bad reputation on your server stuck, it meant missing out on raiding and being shunned from pickup groups.
I made decade long friends thanks to difficulties and challenges no longer present in modern disposable MMOs. Losing a corpse (with ALL of your gear on it) somewhere challenging was a pretty big deal and having ten to twenty people show up to help retrieve it was an amazing feeling. Sure, part of that was due to the fact they knew they'd be relying on the kindness of strangers at some point as well, but that was what those worlds were before WoW nerfed the MMO landscape.
They were a truly awesome place to be and an experience I'll never forget, unlike the more recent games which require about a two week commitment to be fully geared up in the best there is in a forgiving linear world with no risk, no sense of danger and communities I originally came to gaming to escape.
I have more exciting tales and memories of those adventures, which required no script or cutscene, than I do from anything developers tried to cram down my throat in the post-WoW world of disposable MMO emulators. Those events are as clear today as they were a decade ago, while by comparison, I'm currently playing Swtor (knowing full well what it is and with no delusions of longevity), and playing mainly to see how the story system works out. It's pretty good. I played through every cutscene to 50, and to late 20s on other characters. It was a nice little story, and I recall enjoying it, but I don't remember any of it. Zero lasting impression, aside from 'That Czerka bit was pretty neat...'.
By limiting and disposing of all the ways in which players can be negatively affected by the denizens, players and hazards of online virtual world, they've created self serving communities in game worlds with a sickeningly narrow spectrum of experiences and completely remove the ways and means for players to positively affect eachother.
Sure people can't be a villains now that everyone has their own little instances and multiple mechanics to ensure no one can negatively have any effect on you, but those safety nets also block out opportunities to be a hero. How many times have I added a friend to the list after their group worked with ours in a deep open world dungeon or planar corpse retrieval?
I absolutely want a dangerous, exciting world to explore again, as I know how that's brought me friendships that lasted years. I definitely want a broad spectrum of experiences in my online gaming world, rather than click 10 vases, walk 5 minutes, collect reward, repeat - solo.
That's so much more appealing to me than these instant gratification, safe, personal online worlds in which death is simply a faster form of travel.
I figured after WoW introduced people to MMOs, they'd have a taste of it, get the idea, and then be ready to have the training wheels taken off. Instead developers left them on and are now suffocating us with excessive padding and will not let go of the handlebars.
And if 90% of the game isn't tightly balanced, then that's an issue with the game's design. It's one of my chief criticisms of the MMORPG genre, actually. (And sort of silly since CoX's difficulty settings completely solved the problem years ago, and strongly rewarded players who tackled harder difficulty settings.)
But it's also not like this criticism is unique to modern MMORPGs, so I'm not even sure what your point is...
Talent decisions aren't 100% of the choices in a MMORPG. Not even close. So respeccing barely impacts any of the decisionmaking. Nor would it be an interesting/fun choice if you were locked into a bad choice forever.
Unless progression was extremely short in a game, forcing you to re-roll just to play a different playstyle is just bad game design.
Similarly, it would be good game design if ATITD provided tools to relocate virtually all of a settlement to a new location (except perhaps the largest and most permanent of structures.) You'd still have plenty of consequence (it would take time to cart everything away) but it would reduce the magnitude of consequence to a fun level (in addition to adding gameplay.)
Similarly, in MMORPGs it makes perfect sense for players to be able to respec -- though perhaps not everywhere on-demand. (Though honestly I'm not even against that idea; a MMORPG where grouping is similar to TF2 would be quite fun, with players able to change roles fairly frequently to adapt to changing game conditions.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Maybe you don't think it would be fun. But I notice you didn't argue about consequences. Do you find long term consequences to be unfun?
When I designed my game I had the skill system set up so that you didn't have to reroll. The skill system is infinite and its just as easy to raise the skill you decided would be better than the one you had been raising on your original character as it is to roll a new alt, and you don't even lose out on all the other skills that you raised that you still wanted to have, since you are still on that char instead of rerolling you still have that training.
You do lose out in a way, because likely you will never be the best at the new crafting skill you switched to, but then there are diminishing returns so you will slowly catch up over time.
As x->infinity even trillions of exp doesn't matter.
I just feel like making lots of poor choices should set you back at least a little bit, whereas in WoW it really doesn't. Even with hardcore raids if you don't continue to make errors you can probably finish before the next expansion comes out, and end game raid grind is so dumb anyways.
I suppose my belief in consequences comes from my RTS backgroud. But then conequnces there aren't such a big deal because games aren't persistant. Even Ogame eventually resets unis.
Perhaps the problem here has more to do with the persistant world than anything else. Any system with progression of objects eventually becomes unbalanced over time, as we can see both from OGame and the real world. Resources are slowly being focused within smaller and smaller groups of people. A specific example is the widening wealth gap in America. The majority of games do no exist in a persistant world and that is why MMORPGs have such unique problems.
Well we know that the memory of the majority of humanity is affected more spectacularly by intense experiences. Its not suprising that we don't have clear beautiful memories of most games, after all they don't engage the correct parts of the brain. Generic time wasting fun, which is what modern MMOs are really pushing on us have no neurological reason to stand out the way that the play of oldschool MMOs had. I think that even EvE has the majority of the experience fading into the background with a few bright shining memories sticking out.
LOL you EQers are such masochist. You think EQ was the golden age I think EQ was the beginning of the end. UO was so much more then EQ could ever dream of being.
LOL .. i do not believe you.
As of 2-3 weeks ago (check mmo-champion.com), there are less than 10 guilds in THE WORLD who has finished DS 25 man hard mode and NONE has finished 10 man hard mode.
Are you one of them?
And saying something like "Raiding is EQ isn't just about going in and spanking a boss, you had to be paying attention or 1 dumb person could wipe the whole raid" shows that you don't know anything about WOW raiding hard mode.
There are PLENTY of examples of 1 man can wipe the raid, EVEN IN NORMAL MODE. In fact, you don't even need to use Deathwing as an example. Back in the LICH KING FIGHT, a person who did not get out of the black stuff on ground will grow it and kill the raid. YOu have NO credibility if you say things like this that is totally untrue.
This ^^^^^
When i was back playing EQ, it never seems hard. Just a lot of unnecessarily time sink. Camping bosses was the worst. No challenge. A lot of dead time. Boring. The only thing keep people going is the shiny loot at the end.
I am very glad those days will never come back.
Having too many players in worlds that are much too small for that many people isn't EQs fault. Instancing may solve the problem but it means that you are not playing mmorpgs.
I like solo-ing missions because I don't have to deal with the motherfucking idiots and trolls and assholes in the god damn world. the only time I want to hang out with mature people in a mmo is when I either do dungeons or a raid, as long as people know what the hell they are doing and is not an fucking asshole.
Another issue is group quests, I don't like to do group quest where the population in that little area is only me or 4 other people doing nothing but solo quests... Sorry bout i group quest does not work well unless there is shitloads of people on the server WILLING to help out, and wish that these group quests are optional.
all that rage. all that hate. all that belief that everyone but "me" is an idiot and doesn't know how to play. yeah, this is why i don't join raiding guilds. they're full of beliefs like this.
First thing first, I would welcome difficult in MMO, instead of the stupid timesink thats just plain dumb.
But one problem in this analogy with football, Training for sport is actually good fory our health, playing MMORPG for an extend period of time isn't.
How much WoW could a WoWhater hate, if a WoWhater could hate WoW?
As much WoW as a WoWhater would, if a WoWhater could hate WoW.
There it is^^... you play MMORPG's like you watch television, you want to be entertained!
The premis and ideology of roleplaying games is that your dropped off into an unknown world and have to fend for yourself (ie: solve the problems & mysteries). If I want to play something for entertainment, I would play an arcade game, where nothing matters.
(Does one play chess for fun, for entertainment, or for sport..?)
"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
So many people just don't understand the purpose of RPGs. They claim that we are trying to drag MMORPGs and define them our way, but we wouldn't have to if they didn't try to change it first.
MMORPGs are not games or toys, they are worlds and you have to put in time to train your character. Thats another thing, RPGs are about the character's skill, not the players.